Cold-blooded murder is always a heinous crime, but there’s a special sense of horror when the killer turns out to be a police officer. Here are three examples of lawmen who have murdered people.
1. Wayne Couzens
The seismic outrage that met the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 wasn’t just down to the fact she’d been brazenly abducted while walking down a busy street in south London. And it wasn’t just that the young woman’s killer, Wayne Couzens, was a serving member of the Metropolitan Police. What made it so shocking was that he’d weaponised his status as a police officer to commit the crime.
Stopping Sarah in the street and showing his police warrant card, Couzens carried out a false arrest for breach of Covid-19 lockdown regulations. Trusting that he was simply going about his duties, Sarah allowed herself to be handcuffed and driven from the scene in his car. But instead of taking her to a police station, Couzens drove her from London to a remote location in Dover. He raped her and strangled her to death with his police issue belt before setting fire to her body.
CCTV footage helped snare Couzens, though he initially claimed he’d been forced to go out and abduct a woman on the orders of an Eastern European gang. It was a flimsy lie that couldn’t conceal the dreadful truth of what he’d done. He was handed a whole life order, meaning he will die behind bars.
2. Karl Bluestone
One of the most horrific crimes ever carried out by a British police officer took place in Gravesend in August 2001. The alert was raised when six-year-old Jessica Bluestone ran to a neighbour’s home, saying ‘Daddy banged my head on the wooden floor. I cannot get mummy out of my mind. She had blood coming out of her neck. I don't want daddy to kill mummy.’
Her father was Karl Bluestone, a local PC who had been known in his own police station for having affairs. Yet, despite the fact it was he who was cheating, Bluestone was aggressively paranoid that his wife Jill was the one playing away. As in so many cases of partner murder, the killing had been preceded by episodes of domestic violence. He’d punched her, threatened her with a meat cleaver, and even throttled her till she passed out. Just months before, Bluestone had bluntly told her: ‘There is no divorce, the only way out is death.’
It all culminated in a savage bloodbath, with Bluestone murdering not only his wife but two of their children: three-year-old Henry and eighteen-month-old Chandler. Two of their other kids, Jessica and seven-year-old Jack, survived. Bluestone himself never faced justice as he had hanged himself in the garage.
3. Steven Jones
Back in 1993, Steven Jones – a police sergeant stationed in Clwyd in north Wales – was quickly caught after committing a murder.
Jones had been having an affair with a teenage barmaid and decided things would be easier if his wife, Madallin, the mother of his two children, was out of the way. He ruled out divorce because it would be too costly. Plus, there was the matter of a £60,000 life insurance policy he’d taken out on Madallin a few months earlier. Jones decided the best course of action was to kill his wife, so he concocted an elaborate plan which utilised his police equipment.
The murder weapon was his truncheon, which he used to bludgeon Madallin before bundling her body into a car. He then drove to a remote wood and rammed the vehicle into a tree, while wearing his police riot helmet to protect himself from injury. Positioning Madallin’s corpse near the car, Jones made his way back home, satisfied that he’d made it look like an ordinary car accident.
But things didn’t work out well for Jones. For one thing, the driver’s seat was set too far back for someone of Madallin’s height, implying someone else had been at the wheel. The car had also been found by passers-by more quickly than Jones had reckoned. Before he knew it, his police colleagues were at his house, preventing him from disposing of evidence including the helmet and truncheon. Jones, who just days before his arrest had been hailed as a hero for saving a woman from a freezing lake, was eventually handed a life sentence for the cold and calculating crime.
