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Sarah Everard’s mother said her daughter “added to the beauty of the world” as she paid tribute to her humour and principled nature on the five-year anniversary of her murder.
Writing for British Vogue, alongside a picture of Sarah taken at V festival for an online street style series in 2010, Susan Everard said she “loved clothes and fashion” and had “her whole life ahead of her” when the photo was taken.
“It was a golden time when she had recently graduated and was back home from travels to south-east Asia and already making plans for future adventures” she said. “Although it is bittersweet, I love to see her, happy and beautiful, with her whole life ahead of her.”
Susan Everard recounted some of the ways she missed her daughter, including swapping recipes, asking for her advice and hearing her laugh. She described Sarah as “thoughtful, dependable and highly principled”, and said she “appreciated the absurd but could also be outraged at injustice and bad behaviour.”
Susan said she had only seen her daughter’s home in Brixton Hill, where she was returning to on the night she was abducted on 3 March 2021, on video due to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.
When she cleared it after Sarah’s death, along with Sarah’s father, Jeremy, they could “see how cleverly she had styled it and how welcoming she had made her home”, she said.
“Sarah had many talents but, in particular, I like to think of her dancing – she was a beautiful dancer,” she wrote. “Most of all, she was a loving and caring young woman; her many friendships are a testament to her lovely nature.”
The Everard family remained a “close family” of four, Susan said, who were navigating the future together while celebrating Sarah and meeting up with her friends.
Sarah Everard, 33, was kidnapped, raped and murdered by an off-duty Metropolitan police constable, Wayne Couzens, who is serving a whole-life order in prison. It later emerged he had a history of alleged sexual offending and failings in the vetting process had allowed him to become a police officer.
Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the force, told the BBC that five years on from the murder, he understood that some women would still not trust the police, although they were doing more to “root out” potentially dangerous officers.
“We haven’t got to the point where every woman is going to say ‘I completely, without question, trust the Met police’. This was a horrific incident, of course that’s going to live longer in memory,” he said. “I can see that we’re making progress, and people are noticing that. But they should expect more of us.”
Last year, an official report founda quarter of police forces in England and Wales were yet to implement “basic policies for investigating sexual offences”, and women’s charities have said more needs to be done.
Farah Nazeer, the chief executive of Women’s Aid, said Sarah’s murder “exposed the entrenched misogyny within the police force, leaving countless women fearful of those who are meant to protect them”.
“Since that day, while some action has been taken to improve the police response to violence against women and girls, significantly more must be done, as the misogyny remains rooted and systemic,” she said.
