Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Wayne Couzens - Killer in Plain Sight

Transcript

Wayne Couzens - Killer in Plain Sight · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the deep dive. Today we are we're
0:03
taking on one of the most difficult and frankly, most
0:06
necessary deep dives we've ever faced.
0:08
Speaker 2: It's a topic that didn't just shock a nation, it
0:10
really did trigger a global conversation and I think exposed
0:14
a deep systemic rot within an institution that's meant to
0:18
protect people.
0:19
Speaker 1: We are, of course, talking about the murder of Sarah Everard,
0:22
and to really understand this you have to picture the scene.
0:25
It's a chilly evening March twenty twenty one in Clapham,
0:29
South London, right.
0:31
Speaker 2: And Sarah, who is a thirty three year old marketing executive.
0:34
She was just walking home. It was a completely routine walk,
0:36
you know, maybe fifteen minutes after visiting a friend. She'd
0:39
even texted her boyfriend said she was on her way.
0:42
Speaker 1: It's that mundane detail that's so horrifying, an everyday moment,
0:46
something we all do, just instantly becoming a nightmare.
0:49
Speaker 2: And the reason this case just cuts so deeply into
0:52
the public consciousness was the identity of the man who
0:54
took her life, Wayne Cousins, a forty eight year old
0:58
and a serving police officer. And that's the crucial point.
1:01
He wasn't just any officer. He was part of the
1:03
Metropolitan Police's elite parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command.
1:07
Speaker 1: So he was armed, he was armed.
1:09
Speaker 2: He was vetted or supposed to be, and he was
1:11
entrusted with guarding some of the most sensitive locations in
1:14
the entire country. That uniform, that badge, that was the
1:18
real weapon.
1:18
Speaker 1: He used the ultimate betrayal of trust.
1:21
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it was an insidious, calculated betrayal.
1:24
Speaker 1: So our mission today in this deep dive is to
1:27
really unpack the sources that detail his hidden life, the
1:32
method of the crime, but maybe most critically, that trail
1:35
of systemic failures. The sources point to eight major missed opportunities, eight.
1:42
Speaker 2: Yes, eight moments that allowed this this predator in uniform
1:47
as he was called to, just keep operating inside law
1:49
enforcement for years, decades even.
1:51
Speaker 1: And the initial fallout was just seismic, wasn't it. Her
1:54
body was found a week later and there was this
1:56
explosion of national fury of grief, and.
1:59
Speaker 2: The institutional response just made everything worse. The Met's decision
2:02
to go in and arrest women at a peaceful vigil
2:05
on Clapham.
2:05
Speaker 1: Common for breaking lockdown rules.
2:07
Speaker 2: Exactly women who are there to mourn Sarah, to memorialize her.
2:11
He is seen as well as blatant institutional insensitivity. It
2:15
was just a staggering failure to read the room.
2:17
Speaker 1: So you have this collision of intense public grief and
2:20
this incredible institutional failure. But the real story, the one
2:23
we need to unpack, is in the details of the
2:26
crime itself, because it was all based on this brazen
2:29
abuse of state authority.
2:31
Speaker 2: Indeed, the uniform and the badge where the entire foundation
2:34
of the crime. Okay, okay, So let's get into that.
2:36
This is part one the crime, the abuse of authority
2:38
and the calculated abduction. The deception he used was it
2:42
was chillingly simple and so effective. He was off duty
2:46
technically he was, but he had his met warrant card
2:49
and his handcuffs. He stopped Sarah Everard on Pointer's Road
2:52
at about nine three four PM. And the crudal thing
2:55
to understand here is the psychological leverage he had.
2:58
Speaker 1: He didn't need to use violence right.
2:59
Speaker 2: Away now, not at all. He had something far more powerful,
3:02
which was his perceived authority. He flashed his police ID
3:05
and then he used the specific climate of that moment
3:08
early twenty twenty one, and he falsely cited COVID nineteen
3:11
regulations as the reason for an arrest.
3:13
Speaker 1: And looking back, you realize just how insidious that specific
3:18
lie was. Oh completely during that period, I mean, we
3:21
were all told compliance with police was non negotiable. Those
3:25
rules were being enforced, sometimes very harshly, And.
3:28
Speaker 2: The sources detailed this tragic reality that Sarah Everard was compliant.
3:33
She did exactly what she'd been trained her whole life
3:36
to do, what we're all trained to do.
3:37
Speaker 1: She trusted the police.
3:38
Speaker 2: She trusted the police. She allowed him to handcuff her
3:41
behind her back, and then he bundled her into a
3:43
rental car, a white Vauxhall Astra.
3:46
Speaker 1: And that right there, that moment is where so much
3:49
of the public trauma lies. Isn't it uniform? The thing
3:52
that's supposed to mean safety, It.
3:54
Speaker 2: Became the most dangerous tool imaginable for cousins. It was
3:57
a tool of absolute confidence. He knew it would be.
4:00
Speaker 1: What's both fascinating and just utterly horrific is the premeditation.
4:04
It was clearly planned, yet he seemed almost audaciously careless
4:08
about the trail he was leaving. How did the sources
4:11
make sense of that, this duality of meticulous planning but
4:14
leaving these obvious breadcrumbs.
4:16
Speaker 2: It really points to two things. One an escalation in
4:19
his own pathology, and two, this deep seated, arrogant belief
4:24
in his own impunity.
4:25
Speaker 1: He thought he'd get away with it.
4:27
Speaker 2: He thought the system would either protect him or at
4:29
the very least just fail to connect the dots. I mean,
4:32
think about it. He rented that Vauxhall Astra on February
4:36
twenty eight, three days before the abduction, and he used
4:39
his real name, his real name, his own name and address.
4:42
That detail alone made him instantly traceable, So he wasn't
4:46
relying on being anonymous. He was relying on the system's
4:49
incompetence to screen out one of its own.
4:51
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just the car. The planning went further
4:54
into clean up and concealment. The sources highlight some very
4:57
specific purchases he made.
4:59
Speaker 2: Yes, he bought a huge, industrial sized roll of carpet
5:03
protector from Amazon, the kind you'd use for moving house.
5:06
It was clearly intended to line the car to conceal
5:09
any forensic evidence.
5:10
Speaker 1: He also bought a handcuff key, right, so he's preparing for.
5:13
Speaker 2: The aftermath of a murder before he's even committed the abduction.
5:17
That shows you the level of cold, calculating thought that
5:20
went into this. He wasn't just looking for a victim,
5:23
he was planning the entire sequence of events.
5:26
Speaker 1: The timeline immediately after the abduction is just it's brutal.
5:30
He drove eighty miles from Clapham down to Hoades Wood
5:34
in Kent. That's near land he actually owned.
5:37
Speaker 2: It took him about two hours and even stopped for
5:39
fuel along the way, which again just shows this bizarrely
5:42
functional state he was in while committing this horrific act.
5:46
Speaker 1: And it was in that remote woodland that the crime unfolded.
5:49
Speaker 2: Rapidly and viciously. He raped her in the boot of
5:52
the car, then he murdered her. The cause of death
5:55
was strangulation with his police belt. The evidence showed she
5:58
fought for her life two am, just four hours after
6:01
you'd taken her off the street. He was already back
6:04
at his own.
6:04
Speaker 1: Home, presumably acting completely normal for.
6:06
Speaker 2: His family, resending that normal front.
6:08
Speaker 1: Yes, and then we get to what the sources call
6:10
his unbelievable cover up. His actions in the hours and
6:14
days that followed they show a level of cold blooded
6:17
calculation that is just staggering.
6:20
Speaker 2: It's the normalization of his own monstrous acts that really
6:23
stands out. He went back to that murder site twice
6:26
before dawn. He disposed of her body by burning it
6:29
with fuel he brought from his garage, and then he
6:31
submerged her remains in a builder's bag in a nearby pond.
6:34
Speaker 1: And by the next morning, by morning.
6:36
Speaker 2: He'd driven to Sandwich and thrown her phone into a stream.
6:39
He'd returned the rental car, and then the detail that
6:44
justifies all comprehension. He took his wife and his two
6:47
daughters on a.
6:47
Speaker 1: Picnic, and not just any picnic, a picnic to Hoadeswood,
6:51
to the murder.
6:51
Speaker 2: Site, to the exact area. The psychological audacity of that
6:55
of bringing your family to the scene of your own
6:57
horrific crime under this guise of a normal day out,
7:01
it speaks to a profound pathology a man who believed
7:03
he could sustain that mask forever.
7:05
Speaker 1: It almost suggests he got some kind of perverse thrill
7:07
from it, operating under that level of stress of deception.
7:10
Speaker 2: That audacity is a very common theme with offenders who
7:13
believe their authority gives them a shield. But as you said,
7:18
he left breadcrumbs. That redel car booked in his own
7:21
name meant the net closed in pretty quickly. Cousins was
7:24
arrested on March ninth at his home in Deal, initially
7:28
just for kidnapping.
7:29
Speaker 1: I remember the lead detective Catherine Goodwin talking about the
7:32
moment they made the action, they traced the car and
7:34
the name came back as a met officer.
7:37
Speaker 2: She said her team's reaction was just sheer, overwhelming shock.
7:41
She quoted them as saying, you're not going to believe this.
7:43
The idea that the perpetrator wasn't a stranger, a random attacker,
7:47
but one of their own, it had this immediate, devastating impact.
7:51
Speaker 1: And even then, with the evidence piling up, Cousins tried
7:54
to lie his way out of it.
7:55
Speaker 2: Oh, he spun this bizarre, self serving fantasy. He initially
7:59
claimed that yeah, he had abducted Sarah Everard, but not
8:02
for himself. He said he was forced to do it
8:04
by an Eastern European gang.
8:06
Speaker 1: What was this supposed motive?
8:07
Speaker 2: His story was that he cheated a call girl who
8:09
was connected to this gang, and to pay off his debt.
8:12
They forced him to to deliver a new girl to them.
8:15
Speaker 1: It was such a desperate, transparent attempt to shift blame,
8:19
to make himself seem like a victim, almost exactly to
8:22
externalize this monstrous pathology that was clearly his and his alone.
8:27
But that specific narrative he shows it really speaks volumes
8:31
about the level of compartmentalization he was capable of, and
8:34
that brings us to the next critical part of this
8:37
the dual life he was leading. They need to explore
8:40
part two, the man behind the badge, because you can't
8:43
understand the crime without understanding the man.
8:45
Speaker 2: Absolutely. If we want to understand how a man could
8:48
maintain that completely functional facade while harboring these predatory urges,
8:52
we have to look at his history, his finances, and
8:54
the dark internal life he was building.
8:56
Speaker 1: So where did Wane Kikedaz come from? What was his background?
8:59
Speaker 2: He was born on December twentieth, nineteen seventy two in Dover,
9:02
in Kent, and his early life was on paper pretty stable, unremarkable.
9:07
Even His father was a mechanic, and after leaving school
9:10
he followed him into the family garage business.
9:12
Speaker 1: But there were signs even back then that something.
9:14
Speaker 2: Was off there were friends from his youth. When they
9:17
were interviewed later, they used words like odd, unstable, or
9:22
said he was prone to being bad tempered. So there
9:24
were these little hints of an underlying instability, and.
9:27
Speaker 1: He seemed to seek out structure, which is a pretty
9:30
common trait for people who were trying to control some
9:32
kind of internal chaos. He joined the Territorial Army in
9:35
his early twenties.
9:36
Speaker 2: He did, and his instructors there noted his competence in
9:39
discipline tasks like driving military vehicles, but they also noted
9:43
his peculiar, sometimes overly aggressive mannerisms. But this dry for
9:49
stability and more importantly for authority. It all culminated in
9:53
his decision to go into.
9:54
Speaker 1: Policing, starting as a volunteer, yes.
9:56
Speaker 2: A volunteer special constable with Kent Police back in two
9:59
thousand and two.
10:00
Speaker 1: But behind this mask of stability he was building, there
10:03
was this huge vulnerability that should have been a screaming
10:05
red flag during any competent vetting process, and that was
10:09
his finances.
10:10
Speaker 2: This is a core component of the institutional failure we're
10:13
going to discuss. It's so important. By two thousand and eight,
10:17
when he applied for a full time role with Kent Police,
10:20
he was in profound debt over thirty thousand pounds from
10:24
loans and credit cards.
10:25
Speaker 1: Okay, So for anyone not familiar with police vetting, why
10:28
is that level of debt such a critical red flag,
10:32
especially for an officer who wants to be in an
10:33
armed command.
10:35
Speaker 2: Well, it represents two massive risks. First, it just speaks
10:38
to poor judgment and instability, which you don't want in
10:41
anyone who holds course of state power. But second, and
10:44
this is far more critical in the security context, it
10:47
creates extreme vulnerability to blackmail and corruption.
10:50
Speaker 1: Right, someone in that much financial distress is susceptible.
10:52
Speaker 2: To pressure exactly. And the fact that this wasn't just
10:55
noted but then actively ignored is it's just inexcusable.
10:59
Speaker 1: And it wasn't a one off. The debt wasn't just
11:01
a phase. By twenty twenty one, the year of the murder,
11:04
he'd racked up another twenty nine thousand pounds in debt.
11:06
He was even actively disputing his met pay grade. It
11:09
was a chronic.
11:10
Speaker 2: Problem, it was, Yet he kept moving up through increasingly
11:14
sensitive roles, and he managed it by constructing this flawless
11:19
personal facade. In two thousand and six, he married Elena,
11:23
Ukrainian scientist. They had two daughters. They settled in deal.
11:26
Speaker 1: Kent and to the outside world.
11:28
Speaker 2: To his neighbors, to the community, he was the devoted dad.
11:30
He coached kids football, he volunteered. The mask wasn't just convincing,
11:35
it was his sanctuary. It shielded him from any real scrutiny.
11:38
Speaker 1: So let's tear down that facade. Let's expose the hidden
11:41
life of Devians.
11:42
Speaker 2: That the source is uncovered, the evidence of his escalating
11:45
dark side is just overwhelming. The official inquiries revealed that
11:49
he frequently solicited and used prostitutes. And this isn't just
11:53
about infidelity. It's about him seeking out these transactional relationships
11:56
where vulnerability and control are baked in from the start.
12:00
Speaker 1: How was the calculated online predation.
12:01
Speaker 2: Yes, he created a fakematch dot com profile and he
12:06
meticulously crafted this whole persona. He was single, no kids.
12:10
This wasn't a dating profile in the normal sense. As
12:12
one criminologist put it, it was a hunting ground for vulnerability.
12:15
Speaker 1: She was testing his ability to deceive.
12:17
Speaker 2: To deceive, and to lure women who might be susceptible
12:21
to this image he'd constructed.
12:23
Speaker 1: And maybe the most visceral evidence of his pathology was
12:25
found on his own phone and computer. What did those
12:29
searches reveal about his state of mind in the run
12:32
up to the crime.
12:33
Speaker 2: They revealed an intense, escalating fixation on brutal sexual pornography,
12:38
specifically violent rape fantasies. By twenty twenty one, the year
12:42
he murdered Sarah, he was viewing this material daily, daily, daily.
12:47
It's a clear internal timeline that shows the normalization and
12:50
the increasing intensity of his predatory thoughts. That viewing schedule
12:54
alone should have raised alarms if he'd been under any
12:56
kind of proactive psychological review.
12:58
Speaker 1: Which brings us right into the expert analysis from the
13:00
criminologists and the sources. How did they synthesize this? The
13:03
man coaching football on a Saturday, with the man viewing
13:06
violent reap fantasies every single day.
13:08
Speaker 2: The unanimous diagnosis was compartmentalization. Cozens was a textbook classic case.
13:14
It's a cognitive strategy that lets an individual wall off
13:17
completely contradictory beliefs or behaviors for him. He successfully kept
13:21
the functional persona the officer, the husband, the coach in
13:25
one sealed off mental box while he was nurturing these
13:28
deeply predatory violent urges in another.
13:31
Speaker 1: So the uniform wasn't just a disguise for him, it
13:34
was it was integral to the compartmentalization itself.
13:37
Speaker 2: Absolutely, the structure and the authority of the police provided
13:41
a perfect framework for his mask. It gave him unquestioned access,
13:45
deference from the public power, and all of that in
13:49
turn fueled his confidence.
13:50
Speaker 1: The criminologists said that the thrill for offenders like Cosins
13:53
often comes from blurring that line right between protector and abuser.
13:57
Speaker 2: Yes, leveraging the very symbol of state power for your
13:59
own craditfication. And there was a prominent criminologist, David Wilson,
14:03
who offered a truly chilling theory after the arrest regarding
14:06
Cozen's history. What was that? Wilson suggested that cousins profile,
14:10
the confidence, the meticulous planning with the car rental and
14:13
evidence disposal, the total lack of panic, all of that
14:17
indicated he had likely killed before.
14:19
Speaker 1: So possible prior killings.
14:22
Speaker 2: Specifically of sex workers or other vulnerable individuals. He argued
14:26
that the murder of Sarah Everard was probably not his
14:29
first act of extreme violence, but was more likely the
14:32
culmination of a long, unchecked history of predatory behavior.
14:36
Speaker 1: That idea alone, just it transforms him from a lone
14:39
aberration into something far more dangerous, a serial offender who
14:43
was actively being protected and nurtured by the system he
14:46
worked for.
14:46
Speaker 2: And the sources overwhelmingly support that view. Cousins wasn't a
14:50
sudden monster. He was, and I'm quoting here, a slow
14:53
building monster. His pathology nurtured in the shadows of unchecked privilege.
14:57
Speaker 1: The years of debt, the early sexual allegation, the escalating
15:01
indecent exposures. They were all steps.
15:03
Speaker 2: On a path, a path that should have been interrupted years,
15:07
even decades earlier. And that brings us to the most
15:10
danning part of this deep dive. Let's move into Part three,
15:13
which documents exactly how that unchecked privilege was reinforced by
15:17
institutional failure, a trail of red flags, eight missed chances
15:24
across three different police forces. It is genuinely staggering. When
15:28
you map it all out, you see his professional timeline,
15:31
and you realize how the system just gave him continuous
15:33
opportunities to escalate while ignoring multiple explicit warnings.
15:37
Speaker 1: Okay, let's start with that career timeline. Where did he work.
15:41
Speaker 2: He starts as a volunteer Special constable with Kent Fleece
15:43
in two thousand and two. Then in twenty eleven he
15:46
moves to the Civil Nuclear Constabulary the CNC.
15:49
Speaker 1: We should probably explain what the CNC is, because the
15:51
failure there is critical.
15:52
Speaker 2: It is. The CNC is a national armed police force.
15:56
They're responsible for guarding the UK's civil nuclear sites. We're
15:59
talking websites, requiring the absolute highest level of security clearance
16:03
in trust. And from there, in twenty eighteen he transferred
16:06
to the Metropolitan Police into that elite command we mentioned.
16:09
Speaker 1: So he goes from a volunteer to an armed guard
16:12
at nuclear facilities to guarding diplomats in London. That career path,
16:17
given the trail of evidence were about to lay out,
16:19
it's just incomprehensible.
16:21
Speaker 2: It is.
16:22
Speaker 1: Let's start with the earliest known offenses, the ones that
16:25
were filed but just never pursued.
16:27
Speaker 2: The twenty twenty four Angelini Inquiry, which was the comprehensive
16:31
government ordered investigation into all this. It unearthed these deep
16:35
troubling histories. One allegation was the rape of a teenage
16:39
girl in two thousand and seven. He was a special
16:42
constable with Kent Police at the time. This was his
16:45
first known violently criminal offense.
16:47
Speaker 1: And what was the institutional response to an allegation that serious?
16:51
Speaker 2: It just wasn't pursued at the time it was dropped. Furthermore,
16:54
the Angelini report also noted a two thousand and six
16:56
allegation of rape, again while he was a special constable,
16:59
which only surface during the inquiry itself.
17:01
Speaker 1: So these weren't minor disciplinary issues. These were allegations of
17:05
major violent crimes that, if they had been investigated properly,
17:08
would have ended his police and career almost before it began,
17:11
without question. Okay, so beyond the violence, let's go back
17:14
to those vetting failures the finances. How did these different
17:18
forces handle the clear risk from his crippling debt.
17:21
Speaker 2: Well, we look first at Kent Police back in two
17:23
thousand and eight. They officially flagged his debt over thirty
17:26
thousand pounds as a significant risk, put it on his file,
17:30
a risk to his integrity and suitability, and yet, and
17:33
yet they allowed him to continue volunteering as a special constable.
17:37
The system documented the risk, but then it just chose
17:39
to bypass the necessary protective action, it filed it.
17:42
Speaker 1: Away, and then the failure at the CNC in twenty
17:44
eleven is it's arguably even worse given the national security implication.
17:49
Speaker 2: Precisely, the CNC failure is astonishing. During his application to them,
17:54
Thames Valley Police, who were assisting with the vetting process
17:56
explicitly advised the CNC against hiring him, specifically because of
18:01
the sheer magnitude of his financial red flags.
18:03
Speaker 1: They put it in writing, don't hire this man, yes,
18:07
And in twenty twenty four the CENC had to publicly
18:09
admit that they actively ignored that formal vetting recommendation, so
18:13
he was given a gun and acces to nuclear facilities
18:16
despite documented severe instability. The sources are clear this was
18:21
one of the most egregious examples of institutional negligence, and
18:24
it's not just the formal processes that broke down. There
18:26
was a cultural rot, wasn't there. The sources mentioned that
18:30
chilling nickname his colleagues at the CNC gave him yes.
18:33
Speaker 2: While he was serving in the CNC, his colleagues reportedly
18:36
nicknamed him the rapist as a joke as a joke
18:39
because of his crude, sexually aggressive jokes and his general demeanor,
18:44
and that points to a truly toxic environment, a place
18:48
where that kind of behavior is so normalized it becomes
18:50
workplace banter. Yeah, but the culture of silence meant no
18:53
formal complaints were ever lodged. The privilege of the uniform
18:56
just shielded him.
18:57
Speaker 1: So if the early violence was ignored, the pattern of
18:59
escalation which it was flashing in neon lights, through the
19:02
documented instances of indecent exposure what profilers call a testing behavior,
19:07
This is crucial.
19:08
Speaker 2: The Angelini inquiry uncovered at least eight unreported indecent exposures
19:13
dating all the way back to nineteen ninety five. This
19:16
behavior is a form of boundary testing. The predator is gauging,
19:20
you know, how much can I get away with? And
19:22
with each failure to catch him, he was emboldened. He
19:25
concluded he was untouchable. Each non action was a green light.
19:28
Speaker 1: Can you detail some of the specific reported instances that
19:31
were just ignored.
19:32
Speaker 2: Let's start with a really shocking one from the nineteen nineties.
19:36
The inquiry found that Cousins allegedly assaulted a man who
19:39
was in drag at a camp bar, and then he
19:42
used his police badge to actively silence the victim. He
19:45
flashed his ID to intimidate them into dropping the whole matter.
19:48
Speaker 1: So he was weaponizing his police status long before the.
19:51
Speaker 2: Murder, decades before. And then you have the formal reports
19:53
that were filed but just went nowhere. In two thousand
19:56
and eight, a woman reported a man who was later
19:58
linked to Cousins car Registrate, driving completely naked from the
20:02
waist down in Dover.
20:03
Speaker 1: And Kent Police.
20:05
Speaker 2: They logged the incident and they did nothing, No action
20:08
was taken.
20:08
Speaker 1: He moves to the CNC and the behavior just continues.
20:11
Speaker 2: Yes, in twenty fifteen, another indecent exposure allegation, again while
20:16
he was at the CNC, again tied to his vehicle,
20:20
and this unbelievably was completely overlooked during his twenty eighteen
20:24
transfer vetting into the Metropolitan Police.
20:27
Speaker 1: How is that even possible?
20:28
Speaker 2: You have a case file documenting sexual deviance and yet
20:31
it is simply missed or ignored during the vetting for
20:34
the biggest police force in the UK. The systems just
20:37
weren't talking to each other and.
20:38
Speaker 1: The escalation continued even when he was in the met
20:41
The Angelini inquiry details in October twenty nineteen, allegation of
20:46
rape of another woman while he was a serving met officer.
20:49
Speaker 2: The predatory cycle was just accelerating, and the system kept
20:52
absorbing and ignoring the signals. The man they were entrusting
20:56
to protect Parliament was allegedly committing rape and sexual assaults
20:58
on his days off, which brings us to the final
21:01
critical warning, the moment the system had one last chance
21:04
to intervene, just three days before Sarah Everarge murder. The
21:07
McDonald's drive through incident. On Saturday February twenty seventh, twenty
21:11
twenty one, Cousins exposed himself at a McDonald's drive through
21:15
in Kent. He drove up to the payment window completely
21:18
naked from the waist down and paid the female.
21:19
Speaker 1: Staff, and this was reported.
21:21
Speaker 2: It was the Metropolitan Police received the complaint about this
21:25
severe instance of indecent exposure.
21:27
Speaker 1: And their response was disastrous.
21:29
Speaker 2: They failed to promptly and effectively link the complaint to
21:32
Wayne Cousins. They allowed him to remain on active duty,
21:35
so he was able to walk into his shift armed
21:38
with his warrant card and proceed with the abduction just
21:40
a few days later.
21:41
Speaker 1: Psychological profilers argue that failure was the final validation he needed.
21:46
It confirmed his belief he was untouchable. The criminologist's point
21:51
that nobody moves into this type of behavior overnight is
21:54
just underscored by this relentless ignored history. So this overwhelming
21:59
trail evidence, the eight miss chances, the ignored debts, the
22:03
unpursued assaults, the numerous exposures, all long across three different forces,
22:07
it paints a picture of a systemic failure that actively
22:10
protected a predator.
22:11
Speaker 2: The pathology was nurtured and the system failed to prune it.
22:15
And when the forces were asked why, they often cited
22:17
things like resource constraints, high turnover and vetting departments. A
22:21
lot of it are results of austerity cuts, but.
22:23
Speaker 1: The Angelini inquiry dismissed those as just insufficient excuses for
22:27
ignoring repeated criminal behavior completely, and that devastating trail of
22:32
warnings it finally forced a reckoning. Let's dedicate Part four
22:36
to the legal consequences that finally brought this man to justice,
22:40
although tragically it came far too late for Sarah Everard
22:43
and her family.
22:44
Speaker 2: The legal proceeding at the Old Bailey in September twenty
22:47
twenty one was it was devastating. Cousins pleaded guilty to murder,
22:51
rape and kidnapping, and prosecutors detailed the extreme, significant planning
22:56
that was involved, which really cemented the necessary severity of
22:59
the sentence.
23:00
Speaker 1: The focus, though, it quickly shifted from the legal mechanics
23:03
to the powerful, agonizing statements delivered by Sarah's family. Those
23:07
victim impact statements, they provided the human weight to this
23:10
national horror.
23:11
Speaker 2: They really did. Sarah's mother, Susan Everard, she confronted Cousins
23:16
directly in court. She called him a monster who has
23:19
taken everything from us. She spoke of the constant trauma
23:23
of knowing her daughter's last moments were spent with the
23:25
very person she should have been able to trust. And
23:27
her father, Jeremy, delivered an equally devastating blow. He just
23:32
looked at Cousins and said, simply and powerfully, I will
23:35
never forgive you. The collective suffering of that family became
23:39
the focal point, and it demanded a sentence that recognized
23:42
the unique violation of trust that had happened here, and
23:44
the sentencing delivered on that demand, Lord Justice Fulford imposed
23:48
a whole life order. It's the most severe penalty possible
23:51
under UK law, it means life in prison without any
23:55
possibility of parole.
23:56
Speaker 1: Could you just elaborate on why a whole life order
23:58
was chosen? Because, as it is a reserve for the
24:00
absolute gravest offenses, it.
24:03
Speaker 2: Was imposed specifically because the crime involved the profound abuse
24:06
of state power. Lord Justice Fulford made a point of
24:09
equating the societal damage that Cousins caused to that of terrorism. Yes,
24:14
because by using his badge, his warrant card, and his
24:17
handcuffs to commit murder, Cousins had attacked the very foundations
24:21
of public trust and the rule of law itself. The
24:25
judge recognized that the gravity lay not just in the murder,
24:28
but in the institutional betrayal.
24:30
Speaker 1: The sources note that Cousins was visibly shaking during the sentencing,
24:34
but he showed no genuine remorse and he's still trying
24:38
to manipulate the system afterwards, didn't he He did.
24:40
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty two, he tried to appeal his whole
24:43
life order. He argued that he should have received a
24:45
more lenient sentence because he'd eventually pleaded guilty.
24:48
Speaker 1: That appeal was rejected firmly rejected.
24:51
Speaker 2: The judges upheld the necessity of the sentence given the
24:53
unique institutional context of the crime, and his.
24:56
Speaker 1: Full rapsheet was completed later on.
24:58
Speaker 2: Yes, in March twenty twenty twenty three, he pleaded guilty
25:01
to three of the indecent exposures that happened before the murder.
25:04
He got a concurrent sentence of nineteen months.
25:07
Speaker 1: For those, which is legally meaningless.
25:09
Speaker 2: Completely meaningless, as he's already serving a whole life term,
25:12
but it did complete the legal record of his predatory behavior.
25:15
Speaker 1: So today Cozens is fifty two. He's serving a sentence
25:19
in HMP Franklin, a high security prison in Durham. It's
25:22
often called Monster Mansion because of the number of high
25:25
profile violent offenders it houses.
25:27
Speaker 2: And his confinement still makes headlines. There was a documentary
25:31
in twenty twenty four that showed footage of him after
25:33
a self harm attempt. He was bandaged and reportedly complaining
25:37
of mental anguish. It's a dark irony, isn't it. The
25:40
man who showed absolutely no mercy to his victim now
25:43
experiences his own form of isolated suffering. Though it pales
25:47
in comparison to the trauma he inflicted.
25:49
Speaker 1: The legal reckoning closed the individual case of Wayne Curzons.
25:52
But it immediately opened this massive, devastating can of worms
25:56
about institutional failure. So let's dedicate Part five to the
25:59
system dedemic rot that allowed this to happen and the
26:02
legacy of this case.
26:03
Speaker 2: The official verdict on that systemic failure came from two
26:06
major independent inquiries. First, there was the Angelini Inquiry, published
26:10
in February twenty twenty four. It was a damning three
26:13
hundred and forty seven page report and its central conclusion
26:15
was completely unambiguous. It said Cozens should never have been
26:18
a police officer.
26:19
Speaker 1: Let's just clarify the scope here. What exactly did the
26:22
Angelini inquiry focus on.
26:24
Speaker 2: It focused specifically on Cousins himself. It cataloged those eight
26:28
mischances across the three forces, KENT, the CNC, and the MET.
26:33
It reviewed all the vetting procedures, the handling of the
26:36
sexual allegations, and the organizational culture that protected.
26:39
Speaker 1: Him, and it pointed to austerity cuts as a factor.
26:43
Speaker 2: It did it cited them as a contributing factor, noting
26:46
that vetting had become largely an online box ticking exercise
26:51
rather than the necessary, face to face intensive probes that
26:54
might have flagged his instability in his dark psychological.
26:58
Speaker 1: Profile, and what was the wider warning from the Angelini inquiry.
27:01
Speaker 2: It issued a stark warning to the UK public that
27:04
just resonated everywhere. It said there was nothing to stop
27:07
another Wayne Cousins. It suggested that serial offenders were potentially
27:10
still embedded within the ranks, sheltered by the exact same
27:13
systemic failures.
27:14
Speaker 1: And that warning was tragically confirmed by another major parallel
27:18
scandal because Cousins's case became the entry point into this
27:21
broader cultural crisis in UK policing. He wasn't, as it
27:25
turned out, an isolated incident in the MET exactly.
27:28
Speaker 2: The sources repeatedly cite the case of David Carrick, another
27:32
serving MET officer, who was eventually found to have raped
27:35
twelve different women over a seventeen year period.
27:38
Speaker 1: Kerk was sentenced to over thirty years in twenty twenty three.
27:41
Speaker 2: He was and these two cases back to back, just
27:43
exposed this fundamental, pervasive cultural and disciplinary crisis.
27:48
Speaker 1: And the official judgment on that wider crisis came from
27:51
the Casey Review. We need to distinguish this from Angelini right.
27:55
Speaker 2: The Casey Review, led by Baroness Louise Casey and published
27:59
in twenty twenty three, was a broad organizational and cultural
28:02
assessment of the entire Metropolitan Police, and its conclusion was
28:07
just devastating. It branded the met institutionally misogynist and added
28:11
that it was also institutionally racist and homophobic.
28:14
Speaker 1: So it confirmed that the issues weren't just a few
28:16
bad apples, but a cultural sickness that permeated the entire organization. Yes,
28:20
a rotten orchard, and the immediate erosion of public trust
28:23
was quantifiable, and it's a chilling legacy.
28:25
Speaker 2: It really is. A U GIVE poll that was conducted
28:28
right after Sarah's murder found that forty seven percent of
28:30
women reported distrusting the police, more nearly half, and that
28:34
damage persists. Sources indicate that as of twenty twenty five,
28:38
ten percent of women are less likely to report assaults
28:42
because of the fear that the police can't be trusted,
28:45
or even the fear that they might encounter an offender
28:47
in uniform. It has this profound chilling effect on justice.
28:51
Speaker 1: The government was forced to react. They allocated one hundred
28:54
and twenty five million for women's safety in twenty twenty one,
28:57
for things like more CCTV and plain close patrols, but
29:01
the mets' own internal efforts at reform they often fell flat.
29:05
Speaker 2: The sources highlight one specific failure of the met's internal overhaul.
29:08
They launched their own vetting review in twenty twenty four,
29:11
which was meant to be this comprehensive cleanup of their
29:14
hiring and disciplinary practices, but that review was subsequently ruled
29:18
unlawful because of its inadequacy. The legal system found that
29:21
the force was still failing to properly identify and perse
29:23
officers who should have been dismissed years.
29:25
Speaker 1: Ago, and campaigners who recognize the inadequacy of these internal
29:28
responses are still demanding concrete changes. What are the key
29:32
systemic reforms being pushed for now? Based on the Cousin's case, The.
29:36
Speaker 2: Big ones are mandatory reporting of officer misconduct, so if
29:40
a colleague hears something or sees something, they must report
29:43
it and have protected whistleblower status. They are also warning
29:46
that there are these profound issues that remain unresolved in vetting,
29:50
especially with officers who move between forces, which allows their
29:53
bad records to just disappear into bureaucratic gaps.
29:56
Speaker 1: Despite all the blakness, Sarah Everard's death did create what
29:59
the sources all call a watershed moment. Her legacy demanded
30:03
action on a societal level.
30:05
Speaker 2: It did. The case sparked the Reclaim these Streets protests
30:08
across the UK. It intensely fueled a national and global
30:12
discourse on violence against women and Girls, or VWG. The
30:16
government's own VWG consultation received over one hundred and sixty
30:20
thousand responses. It just showed the depth of public frustration
30:23
and the demand for change, but the tragedy also highlighted
30:26
the scale of the ongoing crisis. The statistics that followed
30:29
were just horrifying. Eighty women were killed by men in
30:32
the six months immediately after Sarah's murder, which underscores the point.
30:36
While Cousins was an institutional failure, the underlying societal problem
30:39
of male violence against women remains rampant.
30:42
Speaker 1: The campaigners and the Everard family themselves in a really
30:45
powerful statement in twenty twenty four, they summarized the reality.
30:49
They said Cousins was a serial sex offender who was
30:53
actively enabled by institutional oversight, and they stressed that any
30:57
legislative change has to be accompanied like a profound cultural
31:00
shift in policing, a shift that prioritizes integrity over institutional protection.
31:06
So what does all of this mean for you, the listener?
31:08
What's the core insight to take away from this incredibly
31:10
difficult deep dive.
31:12
Speaker 2: I think it's that Wayne Kazine's story is the definitive
31:15
cautionary tale. Power without accountability breeds monsters. He was a
31:20
slow building monster, as the criminologist said, and the system
31:23
repeatedly validated his impunity by ignoring this overwhelming trail of
31:27
red flags flights that stretch back nearly three decades. The
31:30
story of Sarah Everard is a devastating demand for a
31:33
police force that's worthy of public trust.
31:35
Speaker 1: A force that vets and regulates itself with the same
31:37
scrutiny it applies to the citizens it's meant to serve.
31:40
And as Lady Angelini urgently concluded in her inquiry, now
31:44
is the time for change for Sarah, whose life was
31:47
stolen so needlessly. That change has to be a systemic commitment,
31:51
well beyond just superficial measures.
31:53
Speaker 2: And we have to conclude by building on that demand
31:55
for systemic overhaul. The IOPC, the Independent Office for Police
31:59
Common Conduct, they recognized one major structural weakness. In twenty
32:04
twenty three, they recommended creating a national database for all
32:08
officer allegations. Why is this so important because they specifically
32:11
recognized that the movement of officers like cousins between forces
32:15
allowed serious red flags to just disappear. He could essentially
32:18
restart his career in a new location with.
32:21
Speaker 1: A clean slight, Which brings us to our final provocative
32:23
thought for you to take away. The failure here was
32:25
rooted not just in one bad individual, but in decades
32:28
of systemic negligence that ignored blatant criminal evidence. So, if
32:32
the goal is to restore institutional integrity, what practical step
32:36
beyond creating a national database for allegations is the most
32:39
critical for preventing the next waying cousins?
32:41
Speaker 2: And you have to consider the culture itself. Does that
32:44
integrity start with better internal whistleblower protection, something that actively
32:48
encourages colleiues to report misconduct without any fear of reprisal,
32:53
or does it require something more drastic, like regular mandatory
32:56
psychological profiling and review for all armed off officers who
33:00
hold the authority to deprive citizens of their liberty. The
33:04
answers to those questions will determine whether public trust in
33:06
policing can ever truly be rebuilt.
33:08
Speaker 1: A profound question for a case that revealed a profound
33:12
institutional failure. Thank you for joining us on this deep
33:15
dive into the tragic legacy of Sarah Everard's murder.