Will Mellor is asking a very difficult question in his new documentary – “If you can’t trust the police, who can you trust?”
Cops Who Kill With Will Mellor examines what happens when those who are sworn to protect us become predators and use their authority and knowledge of the law to commit sickening crimes, including murder.
The series kicks off with the harrowing case of Sarah Everard, the 33-year-old abducted, raped and murdered by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens in 2021.
Couzens, now serving a whole-life term, tried to burn her body to destroy the evidence of his heinous crime.
The episode airs on 6 March, the same day Couzens, 50, is due to be sentenced for three counts of indecent exposure he committed in the months before he killed Sarah.
“Sarah did everything right,” says Will. “She’d been to get a bottle of wine, she’d been to her friend’s house, she let her boyfriend know how long she was going to be, it was a busy road. Then a policeman asked her to get in the back of his car…
“There’s no way she could have protected herself once she was in that car, in handcuffs. That’s what made me feel sick about that case more than anything else, was her sat in the back of that car, realising, ‘This is wrong.’”
As an actor, Will has played many police roles.
The 46-year-old appeared as an armed officer in Line Of Duty and as DC Spike Tanner in No Offence.
But none of his dramatic work could have prepared him for the real-life horror of watching the grainy footage of Sarah meekly getting into her killer’s car – or of Couzens sitting in his flat in handcuffs and brazenly lying to the police about his involvement in her violent death.
Officers put in painstaking work to piece together Sarah’s last minutes from CCTV footage.
And it was fleeting images from a camera inside a bus that showed the seconds in which she lost her freedom.
“The work that went into catching him was fantastic,” says Will. “That camera on that bus and finding that he’d hired a car hundreds of miles away – the police can be commended for that. It prevented him from doing it again. But on the flip side, he should never have been in the police.”
While it’s hard to look at Sarah’s last moments, Will admits he enjoyed watching footage of Couzens realising that he’d been caught and was going to jail.
“There’s a great moment where he’s chilling but at the same time you see him panicking. The police have him in handcuffs, he’s in his house and they’re asking him questions about Sarah, who at first he says he doesn’t know.
“You see the cogs turning. I loved watching him squirm, because I was like, ‘Yeah, you know they’ve got you.’ And I think anyone in the public will be the same. You see his chest pounding. And I’m thinking, ‘Now you imagine what Sarah felt like sat in the back of your car. Now you’re on the seat, handcuffed. How does it feel?’
“He’s a vile, vile person. Watching it angered me. The fact he tried to lie his way out of it, blame somebody else. But at the same time, they had him.”
In an attempt to understand the mentality of a man like Couzens, Will talks to psychologist Serena Simmons, who believes it’s likely more women would have been raped and murdered by the fiend.
“She has no doubt in her mind that he would have been a serial killer and rapist,” says Will. “He thought, ‘I’ve got away with this,’ and even more sickening, after he then burned her body, he went and got himself a coffee and a donut from the garage. That was nothing to him.
“This was just a scratch that needed itching and he would have done it again and again.”
Will is hoping that his documentary will make our crime commissioners realise they must never again ignore warning signs about a police officer when they are raised.
“He had so many red flags,” says Will. “He was known as ‘the rapist’ in a WhatsApp group chat. They obviously saw it in him but didn’t think it was important. He’d been caught exposing himself before and he never even lost his job. He actually got a better job – and that in itself is sick.”
Will, who is dad to 18-year-old Jayden and 14-year-old Renee, admits he’s put a tracker app on his youngest’s phone because of concerns over their safety.
“It’s so important,” he says. “I said to her, ‘I’m not spying on you but if anything happens, I know where you are.’ I am protective of people but my kids are my world and you just want to protect innocence.”
Cops Who Kill With Will Mellor also examines killer cops Steve Jones, Darren McKie, Keith Farquharson and Karl Bluestone.
And stressing the need for police leaders to root out those in their ranks who are there for the wrong reasons, Will adds, “Narcissists are very attracted to being a policeman or a police woman because it gives them power and it’s the ultimate power.
“They can stop anybody and ask anybody anything they want in the street, and we have to make sure we’re not letting these people slip through the net and get that badge and that power, because they can abuse it like we see in this series.”
Cops Who Kill With Will Mellor airs on Crime + Investigation on Monday, 6 March at 10pm
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