Photograph: BBC/Everard family and friends/PA
We begin with Sarah Everard’s last moments in London. A CCTV video of the shop she went into on the way to a friend’s house for dinner. Doorbell camera footage of her walking home down a residential street. Finally, grainy film from a bus showing her in conversation with Wayne Couzens, the man who subsequently kidnapped, raped and killed her.
Some of the circumstances surrounding Everard’s murder were highly unusual: it is believed that Couzens, then a serving officer in the Metropolitan police, tricked the 33-year-old into getting into his car by convincing her she was being arrested due to a breach of lockdown-related restrictions. Yet, as this footage emphasises, many of them were also dreadfully ordinary. And which woman doesn’t walk the streets after dark, worrying – sometimes only theoretically, sometimes with heart-rattling urgency – that they might be under threat from a man? Everard’s case struck such a terrible chord because so many women reacted to her death in exactly the same way: it could have been me.
