Five years ago today, on March 3, 2021, Sarah Everard set out to walk home to her London flat after visiting a friend. She never made it. Instead, she encountered the man who would end her life.

A week later, the body of the 33-year-old marketing executive was found in woodland in Kent. She had been raped, strangled and burned. The brutality of what had unfolded transfixed and horrified the country.

And the shock only deepened when it emerged that Wayne Couzens, the man arrested in connection with Sarah’s murder, was not a stranger lurking in the shadows, but a serving Metropolitan Police firearms officer – a man entrusted with public safety.

In September 2021, he received a whole life sentence for what Lord Justice Fulford described as his ‘devastating, tragic and wholly brutal’ actions.

By then, Sarah’s desperate story had grown darker still. Revelations of allegations against Couzens that had been ignored, of missed warnings, exposed the way a serial sex offender had not only gone unchecked by three police forces but had continued to wear their uniform. 

Five years on, Sarah’s murder continues to generate grief and fury not just for a life stolen, but for the catastrophic lapses that allowed it to happen.

Here, laid out in full for the first time, is the haunting timeline of missed opportunities leading to a crime that shook Britain to its core.

1995: Couzens, aged 23 and working as a mechanic at his father’s garage, is alleged to have committed a ‘very serious sexual assault against a child barely into her teens’ in his home town of Dover.

The incident was reported to police but the perpetrator was never caught. Twenty-six years later, the complainant comes forward in the wake of Couzens’ arrest for Sarah’s murder. It later emerges that, also in 1995, Couzens allegedly also tried to kidnap a woman at knifepoint in north London. Again, she identified him in the wake of news of his arrest.

2002: Still working full-time at his father’s garage, Couzens enlists as a private in the Territorial Army. Over the following four years he unsuccessfully applies three times to become a police officer, failing the vetting each time.

2003: Couzens allegedly blocks a young woman’s path in a deserted corridor at a Territorial Army event and demands her telephone number. She does not report it to the police, but following his arrest comes forward, describing the encounter as ‘intimidating’.

2004: Couzens allegedly exposes himself to a teenage girl while driving past her in south London. She does not report it, but comes forward after recognising him in the wake of Sarah’s murder.

2006: Couzens is alleged to have raped a young woman during a singles event linked to a dating website at a bar in east London. Again, the woman comes forward in the wake of Sarah’s murder. 

That same year, Couzens joins Kent Police as a special constable. He also marries Olena Obukhova, a Ukrainian national ten years his junior, whom he met online. They settle in Deal, where Olena starts work as a laboratory manager.

February 2007: Couzens’ mounting debts lead him to enter into an individual voluntary arrangement (IVA) to pay back creditors.

April 2008: He is discharged from the Territorial Army for failing to meet training obligations. His failure to return equipment and kit leads to a £526 fine.

November 2008: He performs a sex act in front of a woman pushing a pram who had responded to his call of ‘hello’. She reports it to the Met Police, but no suspect is identified until Couzens’ arrest.

February 2011: Couzens joins the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), a specialist police force dedicated to protecting British civil nuclear sites and materials. He had been vetted the previous year by Thames Valley Police, which recommended against his recruitment after revealing he had tried to conceal the fact he had entered into an IVA. Its recommendation was ignored.

2am, June 2013: Couzens is reported missing by Olena after failing to return from a late-night visit to the gym. A missing person report is created, but closed around 3am when Couzens arrives home, claiming he had crashed a hire car.

June 2015: Kent Police receive a call reporting the sighting of a man naked from the waist down in the Dover area. The caller labels it ‘revolting’. The report is linked to a car registered to Couzens, who is still with the CNC, yet no action is taken by officers.

September 2018: Couzens, by now a father of two children, joins the Metropolitan Police, and is posted to a Safer Neighbourhood Team in Bromley. A check of the Police National Database prior to his move records ‘no trace’ of incidents, despite the 2013 missing person report and 2015 indecent exposure allegation.

October 2019: Couzens allegedly commits a second rape under a bridge in London. The accusation is made by a victim who comes forward in the wake of reports of Couzens’ arrest in 2021. 

Following news of Sarah’s murder, a man also comes forward to say he had been sexually assaulted by Couzens in a bar in Kent in the summer of 2019 while dressed in drag – the only allegation recorded by a male victim.

February 2020: Couzens is moved to the Met’s elite and prestigious Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command.

November 2020: A naked Couzens engages in a sex act in front of a passing female cyclist while standing on a bank overlooking a narrow country lane near his home in Deal. 

The victim reports him, describing a black car parked nearby and giving a partial description of the registration, but again nothing comes of it. She will later state she had always feared someone who could behave in such a way could go on to commit more serious acts.

December 2020: Couzens allegedly sends an unsolicited photograph of his erect penis to a woman selling clothing online. In the previous two months, he had made several sexual requests to other female online retailers.

February 2021: In the space of a fortnight – on the 14th and the 27th – Couzens twice exposes himself to female staff members at a McDonald’s drive-through in Swanley, Kent.

The branch’s manager, Sam Taylor, reports the incidents to police, but they are classed as ‘low risk’, and it is not until March 3 – the day of Sarah’s abduction – that PC Samantha Lee is dispatched to the restaurant to take statements. 

Later, Taylor will testify that he had shown PC Lee CCTV footage of Couzens’ black Seat Exeo, and provided receipts that clearly displayed his registration plate and credit card details, but no further action was taken.

In 2023, PC Lee will be found guilty of gross misconduct and fired from the force. She claims she has been ‘thrown under the bus’ to help the Met save face.

9.30pm, March 3: Nine and a half hours after PC Lee arrives at McDonald’s in Swanley, Sarah Everard is in the middle of a 50-minute walk home from a friend’s house near Clapham Common to Brixton Hill.

She calls her boyfriend Josh Lowth en route, ending the call at 9.28pm. Two minutes later she is stopped by Couzens, who identifies himself as a police officer and pretends to arrest her for breaching Covid guidelines.

Bus CCTV captures the moment Couzens stands speaking to Sarah on the side of the road.

Within four minutes she is handcuffed and placed in the rear of the white Vauxhall Crossland that Couzens had rented from a vehicle hire company in Dover three days earlier. She is then driven to Dover, where he transfers her to his own car and takes her to a remote rural area, where he rapes and strangles her.

2.31am, March 4: CCTV captures Couzens buying drinks at a service station, almost certainly in the aftermath of Sarah’s murder. 

It emerges he twice revisits the place where he has dumped Sarah’s body, before finally leaving the area. At 8.15am, he visits a Costa Coffee, where he calmly buys coffee and a bakewell slice.

8pm, March 4: Sarah is reported missing by Josh after she fails to answer her phone and cannot be raised at her flat. Her family – mum Susan, dad Jeremy and siblings Katie and Jamie – say her disappearance is ‘totally out of character’ and that she is always in regular contact. Sarah’s friends mount a passionate campaign to find her, retracing her steps and placing missing posters around Clapham.

March 5: As the search for Everard escalates, Couzens is sighted filling a jerry can at a petrol station, which he later uses to burn Sarah’s body, and buying two green rubble bags, which he uses to dump her remains in a woodland pond near Ashford. 

He then blithely returns to normal life, including taking his family on a trip to the same woods, where he allows his children to play close to where Sarah’s body has been dumped.

Olena subsequently tells the Daily Mail of her incomprehension that the husband, who had ‘never once’ shown any hint of violence, was capable of what he had unleashed. ‘I saw nothing wrong. He had a beautiful family, a good house… what else did he need? I’m constantly asking myself: where did I miss the signs?’

March 6: Couzens calls in sick and does not return to work.

March 9: He is arrested in Deal, initially on suspicion of Sarah’s kidnapping. He claims to have been threatened by an Eastern European gang into delivering ‘another girl’ after he had previously underpaid a prostitute, before subsequently changing his story, saying he had handed her – alive and uninjured – to three men in a van in a Kent layby.

Following his arrest, violent pornography is found across all his electronic devices, including a deleted file containing a film referencing a rape and murder by an impotent police officer. Forensic analysis also reveals 19 indecent images of children. Couzens denies having ever downloaded or viewed them.

March 10: Sarah’s remains are discovered. Two days later, Couzens is charged with her murder.

March 13: Across the country, a series of vigils are held for Sarah, with a large number gathering by the bandstand on Clapham Common, near where she had been kidnapped. The vigil ends in drama when a heavy police presence results in four arrests for breaches of Covid regulations.

Among them is Patsy Stevenson, then a 28-year-old physics student, whose arrest photo, showing her wrestled to the ground by police officers, causes nationwide outrage at what is seen as police heavy-handedness.

‘I went there to be part of a collective, for solidarity,’ Patsy recalls now. ‘It was a mournful event: people were really devastated, and they wanted to show it wasn’t just something to brush under the carpet. No one was shouting, no one was aggressive. It was all just very solemn, but it turned very quickly from a vigil into police manhandling women.’

The fallout from the arrest – which included death threats – led to Patsy failing her degree. She is now a full-time campaigner.

‘I’m just a person who became a picture – it is a difficult position to be thrown into overnight, but I have tried to do something positive with that because that level of public attention comes with responsibility,’ she adds.

July 9: Couzens appears by video link from Belmarsh high-security prison and pleads guilty to Sarah’s murder.

September 30: Couzens is given a whole life sentence for a crime Lord Justice Fulford stresses had been weeks in the planning.

‘What she [Sarah] had to endure for the final hours of her life were as bleak and agonising as it is possible to imagine,’ he tells him.

Couzens is currently serving his sentence at HM Prison Frankland in County Durham, nicknamed Monster Mansion due to the large number of murderers, rapists and terrorists who are imprisoned there, including Soham killer Ian Huntley – who was recently violently attacked by a fellow inmate – and the London nail bomber David Copeland.

July 2022: Couzens appeals against his whole-life sentence. His appeal is rejected.

February 2023: Couzens pleads guilty to three incidents of indecent exposure, among them the November 2020 flashing incident. A further three counts are ordered to lie on file.

February 2024: The Angiolini report is published as a result of an inquiry established to investigate how an off-duty police officer was able to abduct, rape and murder a member of the public.

Lady (Elish) Angiolini reveals that evidence of Couzens’ preference for extreme and violent pornography, and history of alleged sexual offending stretching back nearly 20 years, illuminates critical failures in vetting, and warns that ‘there may be more victims of his sexual offending who have not as yet come forward’.

She issues 16 recommendations focusing on officer recruitment, vetting and handling allegations of indecent exposure.

They all come too late for the Everard family, who are left to grieve the unfathomable loss of a precious daughter and sister who was just walking home.

‘The mornings and evenings are particularly painful,’ her mother Susan recalled in her victim impact statement.

‘At the time she was abducted, I let out a silent scream: ‘Don’t get in the car, Sarah. Don’t believe him. Run!’

‘I yearn for her. I remember all the lovely things about her.

‘She was caring, she was funny. She was clever, but she was good at practical things, too. She was a beautiful dancer.

‘She was a wonderful daughter.’

Five years ago today, on March 3, 2021, Sarah Everard set out to walk home to her London flat after visiting a friend. She never made it. Instead, she encountered the man who would end her life.

Sitting opposite me, looking me dead in the eye, my patient swore blind that he had stopped drinking. Very convincing he was, too, as he detailed how he hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol in months.

The only problem was that his blood tests told a rather different story. His liver function was through the roof. When I gently pointed this out, he paused, before saying: ‘Well, maybe the odd glass of wine with dinner.’

After further probing, it transpired that the ‘odd glass’ was a bottle and a half. Every night.

I wasn’t shocked. Not because I’m cynical but because I know, from experience, that patients lie to their doctors all the time.

Research by online pharmacy MedExpress in 2024 revealed that 73 per cent of Britons said they had lied to medical professionals. 

It’s a staggering figure, especially once you consider that 45 per cent of those surveyed believed that their dishonesty had delayed their diagnosis or treatment. .

And it’s not just alcohol people lie about, although that’s certainly the big one.

People also mislead about taking their medication, how much they exercise (or rather, don’t), what they eat, whether they smoke and about their sex lives and sexual health.

Bowel habits are another topic people often gloss over. Although I don’t condone it, I understand why. These are personal, sometimes embarrassing subjects.

Nobody wants to confess that they haven’t been to the gym since 2019, that they’ve been skipping their blood pressure tablets or suffer frequent bouts of constipation.

The reality is that we doctors nearly always know, or at least have our suspicions that our patients are not being entirely honest. We are trained to pick up on inconsistencies.

If someone tells me they barely drink but their blood results suggest otherwise, that’s a red flag. If someone claims to be taking their medication religiously but their condition isn’t improving in the way it should, I have questions. 

I see diabetic patients who swear they never touch anything sweet, then their HbA1c blood test comes back revealing that can’t possibly be true.

Some then admit they only followed the diet in the week before the blood test, not realising that HbA1c measures the damage done to red blood cells by sugar over the previous three months. 

If a patient tells me they exercise regularly but they’re breathless walking from the waiting room to my consulting room, something doesn’t add up.

Sometimes it’s body language. A slight hesitation, a glance away, a vague answer where a specific one was needed. We are not interrogators, but years of clinical experience teach you to read people.

What concerns me far more than the lying itself, though, is why people do it and how damaging it can be.

I might attribute symptoms to one cause when the real culprit is something the patient hasn’t told me about. I might prescribe a medication that interacts badly with something they’re secretly taking, or fail to screen for a condition because I’ve been given false reassurances.

In the worst cases, a lie can delay a diagnosis.

So why do people do it? Fear of judgment is a big factor. Many patients assume their doctor will think less of them, lecture them or write them off if they admit to bad habits, especially if they’ve been warned about them in the past. I promise you, we won’t.

We genuinely do not have the time or inclination to judge. We’ve seen and heard it all before and very little surprises us.

There’s something deeper going on, too. As a psychiatrist, I recognise that much of this dishonesty is driven by denial, one of the most powerful and primitive defence mechanisms we have. 

Denial isn’t simply about deceiving your doctor, it’s about deceiving yourself, too. If you don’t say something out loud, if you avoid it altogether, then on some level it feels less real.

The obese patient who insists they eat healthily and never snack isn’t just lying to me, they’ve told themselves that story so many times they half believe it. The heavy drinker who says it’s ‘only a couple’ has re-framed reality to make it tolerable. This is entirely human and we all do versions of this in our daily lives.

But in a medical setting, it can be dangerous. Denial keeps people from confronting problems that need confronting. It delays treatment. It can, in extreme situations, even cost lives.

So, next time you see your doctor, I implore you to be honest. Not because lying is wrong but because your health will depend on it. We are on your side and we want to help. But we can only do that if we know what we’re actually dealing with.

The consulting room should be the one place where you don’t have to put on an act. So please take advantage of that and tell us the truth.

My fears for Bea and Eugenie

I can’t help feeling sorry for the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie as the Epstein files continue to reveal the true extent of their parents’ appalling behaviour.

The sisters are said to be ‘aghast’ and ‘mortified’. Beyond the shock, there is the shame. And shame is one of the most corrosive emotions there is.

It is not the same as guilt. Guilt says ‘I did something bad’. Shame says ‘I am bad’. 

What makes this so psychologically cruel is that Beatrice and Eugenie have done nothing wrong, yet they are carrying the shame of their parents.

This is something I see regularly at work: Children absorbing a sense of disgrace that belongs to a parent. 

It can be damaging to identity and self-worth. 

But nobody should maintain a relationship purely because of a blood tie, especially if doing so causes real pain. Loyalty has its limits. 

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is walk away.

Have we been failing to spot autism in girls? A landmark study suggests we have. 

By tracking 2.7million people born between 1985 and 2022, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that while boys were far more likely to be diagnosed with autism in childhood, girls caught up during adolescence. 

By the age of 20, the diagnostic rate between the sexes was almost equal. 

Girls tend to be better at ‘masking’, mimicking their peers in social situations to fit in, which can conceal the very traits clinicians look for. 

As a result, many girls and women are misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression or personality disorders. 

I have seen women in their 20s, 30s, sometimes older, finally getting an autism diagnosis after years of feeling that something was different about them. 

A new study analysing 19million cancer cases in nearly 200 countries has found that 38 per cent of cancers are attributable to 30 lifestyle factors. 

Smoking is the biggest preventable cause but infections, such as HPV, account for one in ten. 

Dr Max Prescribes… The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz 

This beautifully written book by psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws on his 25 years of clinical practice to explore the stories we tell ourselves and, crucially, the ones we hide from. 

Through short case studies, he reveals how self-deception shapes our lives in ways we rarely acknowledge. It’s very relevant to my main piece: the lies we tell our doctors are often the same lies we tell ourselves. This will make you consider your own blind spots.