A former officer who botched an inquiry into Wayne Couzens hours before he kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard has said she has been made a scapegoat for the crisis engulfing the Metropolitan police.
Samantha Lee was found guilty of gross misconduct and barred from policing for life by a disciplinary panel on Tuesday.
The 29-year-old said the Met had thrown her under the bus rather than tackling the institutional and vetting failures that allowed Couzens to commit a series of sex crimes before murdering Everard. She said the force needed to respond to sexual offences reports more quickly and offer officers training on indecent exposure to prevent future scandals.
“I think it’s completely unfair that this case has been put on me when there was a chance to stop Couzens so much earlier,” Lee said. “They’ve thrown me under the bus so the Met can say ‘we’ve done something now’ and they’ll move on.”
Couzens, 50, was reported to police on 28 February 2021 after twice exposing himself to female staff at a drive-through McDonald’s in Kent. But there was a three-day delay in assigning Lee to the case because of the Met’s crime triaging process which assessed the offence as low-risk.
Lee carried out a “sloppy” investigation when she visited the restaurant at midday on 3 March, nine hours before Couzens abducted Everard, 33, in Clapham, south-west London. The panel concluded she lied when she claimed she had been told there was no CCTV of Couzens’s car.
Lee has become the first officer publicly taken to task over Couzens, who was first reported to Kent police for indecent exposure in June 2015. He escaped being identified as a sex offender despite police having the registration of a car he had allegedly used to flash a pedestrian, as well as his name and address.
Lee said: “Everyone’s just coming down on me – ‘Oh, this is on you.’ But it’s not me that went to the McDonald’s four days later, that’s the triaging system that organises that. It’s not me that vetted Couzens and let him into the police in the first place when he’d already been known for [allegedly] committing that sort of offence.
“Everyone’s dropping it down on me as a young female PC, and [not] all the top brass and men who are higher up who have put the rules in place for this to all happen as it did, regarding the appointments, and the actual policies and the processes.”
While under investigation for the failings, Lee set up an OnlyFans account called Officer Naughty and quit the force. She now earns up to £7,000 a month posting pornographic videos and images on the site.
Lee maintains that she did not lie or know she was in charge of the case until after Couzens’s arrest for murder.
She said the force needed to streamline its systems for tracking cases, introduce computer checks to find out if a suspect was a police officer, and change the way it triaged 999 calls. “I don’t think an appointment should be made for sexual offences because as we all know, generally, sexual offences escalate,” she said. “This could have all been avoided I think if someone had been sent out that day on the 28th when the call was originally made.”
She said she had never received training on indecent exposure and had only responded to three cases in five years of frontline policing. “I think they should hire more police and put more time into training sexual offences, definitely, because I’ve had no input ever on how to deal with indecent exposure,” she said.
She said her lack of training meant she did not realise the importance of Couzens’s meal receipts and written statements from the McDonald’s witnesses, which she did not log. Lee described this failure as a “genuine mistake”, saying: “I wish that I had done a better job.”
But Lee said she did not feel guilty because even if she had conducted a more thorough investigation there would not have been grounds to arrest Couzens immediately. “I’ve gone over it so many times in my head, I can assure you, and there’s nothing that I could have done that would have changed the horrendous outcome,” she said.
“I do feel like Sarah was let down by the police massively because Couzens should never have been in a position where he was able to use who he was to do what he did. And I think what Sarah’s family has gone through is absolutely awful and I would not wish that on anybody.”
Lee grew up in Bromley, south-east London, and was educated at home after primary school and obtained no GCSEs. She joined the Met as a constable in April 2016 after undertaking a Certificate in Knowledge of Policing.
In July 2020 she transferred to an emergency response team in Bromley where Couzens had been based until February that year. Lee said had the case been allocated to a different officer they might have known him.
In fact, a chief superintendent who gave evidence at Lee’s tribunal had conducted Couzens’s exit interview in January 2020. Lee said the officer’s statement – which was not read at her tribunal – included what she described as a “bizarre” almost “character reference” for Couzens.
She claimed the officer described the interview in which Couzens spoke about wanting to transfer to a firearms unit, saying: “He did not come across to me as weird or a gun nut but was interesting, keen and engaged. I generally had good instincts around people and he seemed like an amiable, interesting individual.”
Lee said: “I’m one of the only people that didn’t know who he was, and I’m the one that’s been stuck on for it.”
The Met’s deputy assistant commissioner Stuart Cundy said: “The purpose of the gross misconduct hearing was not to decide whether Wayne Couzens’s future offending could have been prevented … Fundamentally, I am sorry that Couzens was not arrested before he went on to murder Sarah Everard and we continue to think of her loved ones.”
