UK police officer Wayne Couzens pleads guilty to Sarah Everard’s murder
- Couzens had previously admitted rape and kidnap
- The 33-year-old was abducted as she walked home from a friend’s house in south London in March
Wayne Couzens, 48, a London officer who guarded diplomatic premises, had previously admitted rape and kidnap.
Everard, 33, was abducted as she walked home from a friend’s house in south London on March 3 and her body was later found in woodland around 80km away in southeast England.
A postmortem last month concluded she had died as a result of compression of the neck.
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Appearing by video link from prison for a hearing at London’s Old Bailey Court, Couzens, bearded and wearing a blue sweatshirt sat head bowed and said “guilty ma’am” when asked how he pleaded to the charge of murder.
Prosecutor Tom Little said the officer had never met Everard before kidnapping her from London’s South Circular road and were “total strangers”.
Little said it might not be possible to determine exactly what had happened, and the judge Adrian Fulford said Couzens had previously only given an entirely false account of events.
“This has been a mammoth investigation which has produced some very significant results in terms of being able to understand what happened,” Fulford said.
Couzens’ lawyer James Sturman said his client’s pleas represented “truly genuine guilt and remorse for what he did.”
“As he put it to us this morning he will bear this burden for the rest of his life, and he deserves to – his words ‘and I deserve to’. He accepts the victims in this case are the Everard family and friends, not him,” Sturman told the court.
A two-day sentencing hearing, which will consider psychiatric reports, will begin on September 29.