The detective who led the investigation into the murder of Sarah Everard has revealed the chilling moment she found out the chief suspect was a police officer.
Detective Chief Inspector Katherine Goodwin spoke on camera for the first time in Sarah Everard: The Search For Justice, a BBC documentary two years in the making.
The 33-year-old marketing executive was kidnapped in March 2021 while walking home from a friend’s house in south London.
Metropolitan Police constable Wayne Couzens drove her near to Dover where he raped and killed her before burning her body and throwing her remains in a pond.
Goodwin had sent a team to question Couzens at his home in Kent when a detective ran into her office, shut the door and said: “You need to hear this”, telling her he was a serving officer.
She said: “I knew that I had to tell my boss and I can just remember the shock of having to just sit on the floor of the office and say to her, ‘You’re not going to believe this, that he’s a police officer’. And then the same questions went through her head as went through my head, ‘Are you sure?’.”
The Detective Chief Inspector added that they discovered Couzens was suspected of incident exposure in Kent after he and Miss Everard were spotted on CCTV footage next to a car, which led to his identification.
She said: “At that time, Wayne Couzens was a name that meant nothing to any of us. So immediately we start researching the name, also the phone number and the address that had been given when he’d hired the car.”
The detective added that when it was discovered he was suspected of indecent exposure, it “suddenly changed everything, because whilst I might have hoped that Sarah had got into the car with someone she knew, suddenly it was clear to me that she’d got into the car of an alleged sex offender”.
Former detective Nick Harvey, who was the first to question Couzens and find out he was a serving officer, said: “The gravity of the whole situation then became incredibly clear. You know, the moment I told the team, it just went silent.”
Mr Harvey knocked on Couzens’ door and said that when he showed his warrant card “he just went grey. Just… all the colour just ran out of his face.”
Sarah Everard: The Search For Justice will air tomorrow evening (March 5) on BBC One, days after the third anniversary of her death.
