The case caused grief and anger nationwide: Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and killed on her way home. The confessed perpetrator is a police officer. Shocking details are now coming to light.
London – Trapped and murdered: According to the charges, a police officer staged an arrest to rape and kill Londoner Sarah Everard.
The 48-year-old pretended to be controlling the young woman in March for a violation of the Corona rules at the time, said prosecutor Tom Little on Wednesday before the Old Bailey Criminal Court in London. There are as yet unknown details with which the prosecutor in the high-profile case raises serious allegations against the confessing man.
Flashback: London, March 3, 2021. Sarah Everard is walking home from a friend when she disappears. The sympathy across the country is tremendous, and a large search campaign has started. The outcome causes grief and anger: days later, Sarah Everard’s body is found in a wooded area in the southeastern English county of Kent. Around the same time, it was revealed that a member of the London Police Department was an urgent suspect.
Prosecutor Little is certain that the accused – married, two children – stopped the young woman and introduced himself as a police officer. The fact that Everard was on her way back from dinner during the relatively strict corona lockdown increased the likelihood that she saw a violation of corona restrictions, the prosecutor said. Because he had previously participated in corona patrols, the police officer knew how to address suspected rule breakers.
Handcuffed
In England in March it was not allowed to visit each other at home. The 48-year-old had handcuffed Everard and then drove to Kent in a rental car. There he raped the young woman and strangled her with his belt.
In court, Little minutely traced how the policeman presumably prepared for the crime and how he tried to cover his tracks over the following days. How the 48-year-old got gasoline to burn the corpse, bought garbage bags to dispose of Everard’s cell phone, drove to the crime scene again and again – and spent time with his family a few days later in the immediate vicinity: everything supported by camera recordings and Cell monitoring. It becomes clear that Sarah Everard was a random victim.
1800 hours of images had been evaluated, Little reported. The investigators also tracked down the policeman through surveillance images – a bus camera recorded the moment he stopped Everard. The suspect car was a rental car for which the defendant used his name and contact details.
Weak excuse
The policeman quickly admitted to having kidnapped the young woman. But he only did this because he was forced by a gang of Eastern European criminals, he said. He owed them to them, they threatened his family. The excuse soon broke down. This Thursday, the 48-year-old will most likely be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder.
It is the legal end to a case that has kept the country in suspense. The murder of Sarah Everard caused anger and horror nationwide, and a new debate about violence against women began. Duchess Kate publicly laid flowers. The hashtag “shewasjustwalkinghome” – she just went home – became the catchphrase for numerous reports of harassment and sexual assault. The London police chief Cressida Dick came under pressure because her emergency services forcibly dissolved a vigil of hundreds of women for Everard with reference to Corona rules.
But not much has changed. The murder of a young woman in London is currently causing horror across the country. The 28-year-old Sabina Nessa disappeared on the short way from her apartment to a pub, her body was found the next day, a 36-year-old is now charged. Dozens of women have been allegedly killed by men in Britain since the murder of Sarah Everard. dpa
