Sarah Everard’s family have published never-before-seen photos of the young woman who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a Met Police officer.
The new pictures show the marketing executive smiling at her graduation, enjoying a warm day next to a swimming pool, drinking a glass of wine and looking pensive.
They were released ahead of a new BBC documentary called Sarah Everard: The Search for Justice, which airs at 9pm on Tuesday.
In one photo, Ms Everard can be seen beaming on the day she graduated from Durham University, in the summer of 2008, after studying geography.
In another, she was pictured at Brockwell Lido, near to where she lived in Brixton, southwest London.
The third shows the young woman, who was 33 years old when she was killed, smiling in a dress while holding a glass of rosé.Ms Everard was also captured looking away, with a contemplative face, in a candid photograph.
The film, which comes out days after the anniversary of Ms Everard’s death, also features several revelations from the detective who led the investigation into her murder.
Detective Chief Inspector Katherine Goodwin told how murderer Wayne Couzens had “planned a day off” to commit his horrific violence on March 3, 2021.
She said: “We discovered that he told his wife he was working overtime on that night, when actually he was due to be on a day off and that he had marked it on their family calendar, clearly indicating that he was planning to do something, and he didn't want to be found out.”
Ms Goodwin also told the camera how Couzens stopped at Costa to get a hot chocolate on his way back to London, after he had kidnapped Mr Everard, driven her to a rural area near Dover in Kent, raped and strangled her with his police belt and then hidden her body in an industrial fridge.
“He then went home, spending the day at home as if he had been on a night shift, so his family would know no different, before going out to buy petrol in a small jerry can,” Ms Goodwin added.
Couzens, a serving police officer at the time, is believed to have called the vet to book an appointment for his dog while he was standing over Ms Everard’s burning body.
“The fact that he was able to do things that were so horrific and thing that were so mundane and normal at the same time is really chilling,” Ms Goodard said.
She, and other officers involved, also opened up about what it felt like to find out that Couzens was part of the force and that he had been suspected of indecent exposure just days before.
Ms Goodard said the latter discovery “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”.
The officer sent a team to Couzens’ house in Kent to question him and, while officers were en route, a detective ran into Miss Goodwin’s office, shut the door, and told her “you need to hear this”.
A researcher on the phone then revealed that Couzens was a serving Met officer.
Miss Goodwin 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?’.”
In the year after Miss Everard’s murder, 138 women were killed by men in the UK or a man was the chief suspect. In the same year in England and Wales, an estimated 798,000 women experienced sexual assault and more than 100,000 were were raped or were a victim of attempted rape.
The documentary will be shown days after a report released by Lady Elish Angiolini found the police repeatedly ignored and missed chances to stop Couzens.
The inquiry branded him a “predatory sex offender and murderer” who should have never been a police officer, and laid bare a history of alleged sexual offending dating back nearly 20 years before he murdered Miss Everard.
Sarah Everard: The Search For Justice will air on Tuesday from 6am on BBC iPlayer and at 9pm on BBC One.
