Wayne Couzens is serving a whole life-term at HMP Frankland for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard, whose body was burned and disposed of in a pond near Ashford, Kent
Wayne Couzens lives with “a bounty on his head” and is at risk of gruesome attacks in jail, it is said.
The Metropolitan Police officer kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard, a marketing executive living in south London. He was sentenced to a whole life-term in September 2021 after a judge said the killing happened in “wholly brutal circumstances”.
The horrific offences happened four years ago this month after Couzens, 52, abducted Sarah, 33, in a hire car as she walked home from a friend’s house in Clapham, south London. Since he admitted the crimes, the former police officer has been held at HMP Frankland, nicknamed “Monster Mansion” due to the amount of murderers, rapists and terrorists imprisoned there.
And Ricky Killeen, a reformed prisoner who served five years at Frankland for his involvement in a machete attack, believes Couzens, a married dad of two, is at grave risk of attack. He said: “Obviously they become number one targets because people in prison don’t like police officers anyway, and if they get incarcerated with officers they are going to come under attack.
“If it is a high-security prison the violence is likely to be extreme. They will either get slashed, they will get stabbed in the neck, they will try to take their eyes out, they will chuck boiling hot oil over them or use a boiling hot kettle full of sugar.”
An inmate’s head was badly burned after having boiling water mixed with melted butter thrown at him at the jail recently. The fat in the butter made the liquid adhere to the victim’s skin, deepening the burns – a practice known as “swilling”.
Couzens’ crimes were so shocking they sparked protests and demonstrations around the country in 2021. When the thug eventually admitted what he had done, the judge told him he had abused his position to kill.
But the punishment will be far from lifelong imprisonment – as Mr Killeen believes Couzens will spend every minute of the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. The source told the Daily Mail: “He will have a bounty on his head. Couzens will be serving out his life sentence in segregation. His is a face that everyone knows – and his notoriety won’t diminish over time. He will be on a small, vulnerable prisoners’ wing, kept far from the main population at all times, where there are lower levels of association.”
After Couzens was transferred to Frankland, it was reported that he had become friends with David Fuller – who was dubbed the Morgue Monster for defiling the bodies of more than 100 dead women at a hospital where he worked. A source told the Mirror how the pair, both from Kent, bonded after being locked up on the same wing.
Mr Killeen, who has his own YouTube channel Behind the Bars TV, added: “We call them The Odd Couple. They know some of the same areas from back in the day. The idea of them swapping stories turns my stomach.”
A parliamentary report in 2023 revealed that some prisoners at the jail had been offered bounties of up to £10,000 to carry out attacks on other inmates. One took up a contract to fund his “dependency on vapes”.
Last year, an unannounced inspection found that while the establishment was rated as safer than other jails holding similar prisoners, there had been 147 assaults in the past six months, which was a third higher than in the same period before the previous inspection.
To reduce risk, Couzens has food brought to his cell, where he spends up to 20 hours a day. While he could visit the gym or attend education classes with people on the same wing, the source says that they would be more likely to take place in his cell. Like others at Frankland in County Durham, that cell is equipped with its own telephone.
