CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses sexual assault.
He was a popular boy from Salisbury who grew up to be a police officer — and a serial rapist. Here, we speak to his mother, friends, colleagues and victims, and reveal for the first time that Carrick is being investigated for crimes he may have committed at the age of 13.
David Carrick was 15 when he first heard his mother being attacked in his childhood home. He grew to dread the sound of screaming and shouting coming from the room down the hallway. His mother, Jean, was being regularly beaten by her new partner, Alex Man-Clarke, and the teenage Carrick faced a choice — either let it happen or square up to an older and more physically powerful man.
“A couple of times when he was hitting me, David would come into the bedroom and shout, ‘Leave my mum alone,’ " says Jean, 67, speaking to me in her kitchen in Salisbury as she washes the dishes. Occasionally she glances out of the window to a view of grey blocks of flats and children playing football on scrub grass. “I felt proud of him when he did that,” she says. “Of course I did. He’s my son.”
Man-Clarke died from cancer aged 56 in 2011, while Carrick, an armed police officer, has finally been brought to justice as one of the country’s most prolific sex offenders. At Southwark crown court in February, Carrick, 48, looked a shadow of his former self as he stood in the dock, his gym-built muscles now deflated, his hairline receded and his skin blanched. His crimes were so serious that the judge considered the sentence of last resort, the whole life tariff — unprecedented for a sex offender who had not taken a life or attacked children — before handing down a minimum 30-year sentence for rape and sexual offences involving 12 women in attacks spanning two decades.
His victims were female police officers, partners and friends, as well as strangers he met on the dating sites Badoo and Tinder, often using his position as a police officer to earn their trust. Many of the women were humiliated and degraded over long periods of time by a man who essentially told them: “I am the law.” One woman, a mental health nurse, was repeatedly raped, whipped, urinated on and locked in a small cupboard under his stairs during the course of their three-year relationship.
Along with Wayne Couzens, the Metropolitan Police officer who kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021, Carrick’s crimes have scarred the public’s view of the institution of policing. Both men worked for the Met’s Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection unit, where victims claimed Carrick’s ego was “inflated” protecting VIPs, carrying a semi-automatic rifle and posing for pictures with tourists. According to police who investigated Carrick, the men knew each other as colleagues but didn’t socialise due to the size of the unit, based at a number of locations across the capital.
A review by Baroness Casey has accused the Met of fostering a “boys’ club culture”, with racism, misogyny and homophobia at its heart, as politicians clamour for an overhaul of the UK’s largest force. The police officers who caught Carrick, nicknamed “Bastard Dave” by those in his unit, said they were staggered at the enormity of his offending, as their investigation into his crime spree continues.
Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire police’s major crime unit continues to receive calls from new victims since he was sentenced. The Sunday Times Magazine reveals today that detectives are also investigating an alleged sex attack committed when Carrick was 13, significantly extending the known timeline of his offending.
How could a police officer get away with systematic rape over two decades without being caught? And how did a popular schoolboy turn into one of the country’s worst rapists? Neither question has a straightforward answer, but I tracked down those who know him best to ask how a police constable could become a monster.
The charmer
“Was he normal? I don’t know … what is normal?” his mother, Jean, asks. “To me he was normal. He was a good boy.” Carrick was born in Salisbury and brought up in Durrington, a large village in Wiltshire, with hundreds of military families in the area serving at a nearby army garrison. He grew up in a three-bedroom terraced house a short walk from his school, Durrington Comprehensive, the same one his mother had attended. His father, a former soldier, was a bus driver, his mother a cleaner at Debenhams. His sister, younger by two years, completed the family. Up until his mid-teens Carrick’s childhood appears to have been relatively carefree. He joined the French exchange scheme at school. “David loved going to France,” Jean says. “He didn’t speak much French but he always managed to get by.”
The family went on regular holidays — trips every couple of years to Salou, a resort on the Catalan coast. Closer to home, Carrick enjoyed skateboarding in a local park with friends, listening to Iron Maiden and Guns N’ Roses full blast in his bedroom and practising taekwondo in the village hall. Jean remembers taking him to competitions as he progressed to black belt. “He could have ending up teaching it,” she says.
His interest in martial arts and cross-country running made the curly-haired, blue-eyed schoolboy “stand out” at school, according to his former classmates. They regarded him as cocky but also charming and academically able.
“He was definitely popular, 100 per cent,” says Carrick’s friend, a classmate from the same year, who knew him for two decades. “He had plenty of girlfriends. He was a lovely lad at school. I can’t say he wasn’t, because he was. Everybody loved him.” The friend remembers no playground fights, no drugs, no excessive drinking — a pupil who enjoyed learning. “He treated girls nicely back then,” he adds.
Things changed in the late 1980s when Carrick’s father moved out and Man-Clarke, a local painter and decorator, moved in. Carrick became quieter and more brooding. “He didn’t talk about it much,” says his former school friend. “But we knew their break-up had upset him.”
Carrick blamed his mother for the divorce and for falling into an abusive relationship. “Alex was abusive towards me for 12 years,” Jean says. “In those days you didn’t have anywhere to go. You didn’t have any of the help you get in this day and age. I used to drink to keep sane then — just to keep my sanity. I still find it difficult now, with what is happening with David.”
Jean and Man-Clarke had a son and a daughter together. Carrick and his half-brother never gelled and he became more distant. “He didn’t want to know, basically,” Jean says. “Me and his dad were divorced, and I was with somebody else. He didn’t like that. He wanted me to stay with his dad, but life doesn’t work that way.”
According to Jean, Carrick was a child who knew his own mind and “liked to get his own way”. Earlier this year the court heard how Carrick had told a probation officer about his “childhood trauma”, claiming it had affected his personality. He said he grew up with parents who “drank to excess” and “neglected” him. “You became the target of abuse by a stepfather in your teens,” said Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb during her sentencing remarks. “Like any child, you should have been nurtured and taught moral strength and you were not.”
Jean says she drank to cope with domestic abuse but never witnessed that abuse extend to Carrick. “Not that I saw,” she says. In fact, when Carrick did his work experience placement while at school, he chose to work with Man-Clarke.
Leaving home
Aged 16, Carrick left home and moved to Amesbury, a town in Wiltshire on the River Avon, with two female friends. He worked as a shop assistant at the Co-op before joining the army in 1996. Based largely at Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire, he served on tours to Cyprus and the Falklands.
“He used to call me up at four in the morning when he was drunk,” Jean says. “He would tell me stupid things, really. One time he called and said, ‘Mum, I’ve just had my nipple pierced.’ " By then Carrick’s dislike of his stepfather and half-siblings had caused a divide in the family. After a short period of time he left the army but stayed in Yorkshire and rarely went back home.
In 2000 Carrick was investigated on suspicion of burglary and theft after he had a row with an ex-girlfriend and broke into her home, stealing perfume and underwear. The matter was reported to the Met but the case was dropped when he agreed to return the items and pay for the damage to the victim’s home. Later that year the same woman reported that he was making malicious phone calls to her. Again he was not arrested and the matter went no further, but the separate incidents created two Met crime reports against his name.
Carrick the copper
Despite his earlier brushes with police and two crime reports on the system, Carrick passed vetting and was accepted into the Met in August 2001. The checks at the time should have taken into account financial information, criminal convictions and references from former employers. During his probation he was accused of harassment and actual bodily harm following an attack on a girlfriend who wanted to end their relationship. She reported the matter to Scotland Yard but no action was taken and although the Met spoke to Carrick about his behaviour, the matter was not referred to the professional standards team. The allegations registered a third crime report on the system under his name.
Carrick’s first posting was as a response officer based in Merton, southwest London. Between 2002 and 2008 he was the subject of five complaints from members of the public relating to his behaviour as a police officer. These ranged from a complaint about using CS spray unnecessarily to an accusation that Carrick and a second officer assaulted someone while arresting them, a matter that was apparently cleared up locally with the complainant. Other complaints were about being unprofessional or rude and, in a 2008 complaint, aggressive and abusive during a stop and search. No further action was taken on any of them and many officers serving on the front line receive similar complaints.
However, Carrick’s closest friends believe the power of being a police officer “went straight to his head”. “He looked the same as the boy I knew from school but there was something different about him,” says his school friend. “We met up at school reunions. He had become really cocky. He was still a good-looking guy — the ladies really went for him.”
Carrick’s favourite trick was to flash his warrant card in front of friends on a night out. “There were times when he’d see people rowing in the pub or being too loud and he would flash his card, tell them he’s an off-duty officer and to calm it down or they’ll be arrested. It was a power thing to him. Almost like — ‘Look at me. See what I can do.’ "
Carrick the rapist
Carrick’s first known rape took place in 2003, just over a year after he joined the police. He met a 20-year-old woman in a bar and invited her to a house-warming party, which he said was taking place at his flat. He told the woman that he was the safest person she could be with because he was a police officer. She arrived at his flat to find no party. Instead Carrick held her against her will for hours, raping her vaginally and anally. He put a handgun to her head, bit her and bruised her, and made her believe she was about to be killed. It would be almost 20 years until she felt able to come forward and report the rape to police, after his name was publicised in the media in relation to another rape.
In the spring of 2004 Carrick was assigned to a traffic patrol set up to snare motorists without insurance, which is where he met his next known victim, a female police officer. Six officers worked in pairs on the “laser team” — which involved spending long periods of time in a van on the side of the road. Carrick was paired with “M”, a 38-year-old female officer and his senior on the team.
“He was only just out of probation,” says M when we meet at a London restaurant. Now 57, she has remained in the Met and is an experienced detective on a specialist unit. Her first impressions of Carrick? “He wasn’t bad-looking,” she says. “He was 10 years younger than me. My biological clock was ticking and I guess I was flattered that he was interested.”
Their relationship was casual, like a holiday romance — not girlfriend and boyfriend, but flirty. At police stations he would put his arm around her if she was talking to another male officer. “He was quite controlling and possessive in that way,” she says. “Looking back it was a weird thing to do, because we weren’t even in a relationship.” Carrick was a womaniser, she says, with the ability to listen and be attentive. He knew many of the female officers at his Wimbledon police station. “He would slap their backsides in the station, that sort of thing,” M says.
Carrick was protective of her on the job, often dealing with aggressive motorists. “He was strong and physical,” she says. “You need coppers like that. He wouldn’t be afraid to roll about on the pavements and get the cuffs on. He wasn’t lazy. He was proactive — happy to work the hours. Dedicated.”
The night she was raped, she went back to his shared house in south London. She arrived to find a messy bedroom decorated with photographs of him in the army holding a gun. “If anybody asked me what I was intending to do, it was straightforward, lay-on-your-back sex,” she says. “But what happened was anal sex. And that’s where the rape bit came in. Because I didn’t consent to that. He threw me over onto my stomach and said, ‘We do it this way,’ and I said, ‘No, we don’t.’ Then he forced it and I just felt it was going to get violent.”
In her job as a police officer M was trained in sexual offences and had dealt with many rape victims. “I’d taken enough statements to know that most women don’t fight,” she says. “I always thought — no, I would fight. I wouldn’t let it happen. I would kick off. But then it happened … and I didn’t fight. He was in control, he was very strong and I felt like he might get violent.”
Alcohol played a part in some of Carrick’s rapes, but that night he was sober. M has never viewed herself as a victim but in all the years since that moment she has not had a long-term relationship. She says she wanted to get married and have a family, but it never happened.
M didn’t report the rape until 2021 and experienced shame for not reporting it sooner. “I felt guilty towards the other victims because I hadn’t done anything,” she says. “But that was the culture at the time. You didn’t complain because nobody would want to work with you again in the police. I didn’t know he was a serial rapist. But I should have foreseen it because he did it to me so easily, and I’m a police officer.”
In February, after Carrick’s sentencing, M was taken to a room inside the court building to meet the other victims. “I told them, ‘I’m a police officer and I’m sorry that I didn’t report him.’ They all said, ‘Don’t be stupid, we don’t blame you.’ That was an important moment for me.”
In the years that followed Carrick’s attack on M, his crimes escalated:
- In 2008 Carrick met a 21-year-old woman who worked as a barmaid. She joined the police force and the pair bought a house together. He was 12 years older than her and her first sexual partner. He would go on to rape her multiple times over the course of their abusive relationship.
- In 2009 Carrick moved into the Diplomatic Protection Group, later renamed the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection (PaDP) unit. The PaDP is a specialist command responsible for protecting the Houses of Parliament, Downing Street and embassy estates, as well as government ministers, among other duties. This required checks on his DPS (Directorate of Professional Standards) record, as well as further vetting. Either this process missed the three crime reports and five complaints on his record, or it concluded that they were not serious enough to prevent the move. He routinely carried a firearm and boasted to friends about “protecting Boris Johnson” when Johnson became prime minister in 2019. Within months of being given a weapon he was accused of abusing a girlfriend. Hertfordshire police investigated the matter — they took statements from the victim and a third party who reported the offence but neither wished to proceed and, once again, the case was dropped.
- The same year Carrick became an armed police officer he attempted to rape a married school friend whom he met at a school reunion. He dragged her into a bed, held her arms behind her back and told her it would be their “little secret”. Carrick met two more of his victims at a martial arts club he joined.
- In 2015 Carrick brutally raped another old school friend. The following year he met a woman on a dating app and they saw each other for six months. She moved into his house and he raped her on numerous occasions, often within earshot of her 10-year-old daughter.
- In 2017 Carrick was vetted again and underwent an enhanced counter-terrorist check. He declared only one incident on his vetting forms — that he had been given three points on his driving licence for speeding. By now he had numerous crime reports and public complaints against his name, and the same year he was thrown out of nightclubs for swearing and being drunk. It is unclear if any of this was checked by the Met and he once again passed the vetting process.
Carrick was free to continue as a policeman and a rapist. From March 2017 to January 2019 he was in a relationship with a mental health nurse whom he raped and abused systematically, calling her a “whore” and a “prostitute”. He threatened her with a police baton and sent her a photograph of his firearm with the message “Remember I am the boss”. On a camping holiday he violently raped her while her parents were in an adjacent tent. When her father came to ask if she was OK, she was so scared she felt unable to cry for help, she later told police officers. Carrick would whip her and shut her naked in a small cupboard under the stairs as a punishment, which would give her panic attacks.
- He raped a cleaner in 2018 and over the next two years raped two more women he met on dating websites. One of those women reported him to Hertfordshire police. Carrick was arrested over the allegation in July 2021, but no further action was taken after she withdrew the complaint. The Met’s professional standards team was made aware and at last he was placed on restricted duties. He never returned to full duties but avoided misconduct proceedings because, once again, the allegations were withdrawn.
- On October 1, 2021, a woman made a complaint of rape against Carrick dating back to August 2020, after reading a victim impact statement from Sarah Everard’s mother. “After that I could not ignore what Carrick did,” she said later in an interview. “I was worried he would kill someone next time.” Hertfordshire police’s sexual offences team charged him with the offence and in the week following his naming in the media five more women came forward to report that they had also been his victims.
The road to justice
As the scale of Carrick’s crimes began to emerge, Hertfordshire’s sexual offences team handed the case over to Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire’s major crime unit. The task of bringing Carrick to justice fell to Detective Chief Inspector Iain Moor. “We didn’t know how big it was going to get,” Moor, 49, tells me. “I thought, ‘Jesus, where do we start with this?’ " An obvious difficulty facing Moor and his team was how to convince victims to trust them after being raped by a police officer. “It was about saying, look, we’re not the same as him,” he says. “These are dedicated investigators who are going to support you. That was definitely one of the challenges.”
Moor made his 40-strong team sign confidentiality agreements to provide an “extra security blanket” as they investigated a fellow officer, one with friends across a number of forces, and based their inquiries at police headquarters in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.
Each of the rape survivors felt traumatised by their experiences. Denial, anger, shame and self-blame were common emotions described to Moor’s team. Some of the women had tried to get back control by behaving in dangerous ways — sabotaging relationships and careers and, in some cases, self-harming. One woman felt she had been lost for 19 years after “encountering evil” in the form of Carrick.
After being charged, he was placed on remand in Belmarsh prison, southeast London, as the allegations against him built up. More and more women came forward and he was indicted in court in several “batches” between December 2021 and December 2022. Moor sent two female detectives to interview him in prison. Was it part of the strategy to send two female police officers to interview Carrick?
“You do think about things like that but they also happened to be my two best interviewing officers,” he says. “They found Carrick had a very charming persona but they noticed that his controlling side came across as the interviews progressed.”
The detectives were faced with either silence or denials from Carrick. For a long time it looked as though he would plead not guilty to all charges and police were preparing for a trial.
Then came the afternoon of December 13, 2022, at the Old Bailey in London. Carrick was supposed to be turning up for yet another indictment hearing when word spread that he was going to plead guilty. The courtroom fell silent as the court clerk read each of the 44 charges against him, needing more than an hour to get through the list. Carrick answered “guilty” to 43 of the 44 charges.
“It was a bit of a hold-your-breath moment,” Moor says. “Until the word guilty is actually said 43 times, you still question whether he is going to plead guilty or not. All the way along there hadn’t been that acceptance of guilt, so you’re thinking, what will happen?”
Carrick’s guilty pleas meant no arduous trial and no cross-examination for his victims. Only on count 44, concerning the first rape for which he was charged and which led to all the other victims coming forward, did he maintain his innocence. Why admit to offences against 12 women, but not the 13th? “To this day I don’t know,” Moor says. “Unless he genuinely believes he’s innocent of that particular offence, I don’t really know the answer.” The CPS offered no evidence on the 44th count and a not guilty verdict was recorded.
Not over yet
Up to five more women have come forward since Carrick was sentenced to 30 years in February to accuse him of further sex crimes. Others have come forward to provide the investigation team with new information, and the police continue to work with the CPS to explore fresh charges. “There are more than 13 victims,” Moor says. “I think there are more women out there.” Police are now investigating a possible sex attack that Carrick allegedly committed when he was just 13, potentially stretching the timeline of his offending back to his childhood.
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb summed up Carrick’s impact on society in her sentencing remarks, saying the “malign influence of men like him” stands in the way of a “revolution of women’s dignity”. “Even today, courage calls to courage everywhere,” she told the courtroom, “and its voice cannot be denied.” It took 13 women and 20 years to bring him down, and the police show no signs of closing their inquiries any time soon.
More victims could yet be identified. The handling of police complaints about Carrick throughout his career is now subject to a review by the Independent Office for Police Conduct. What is clear is that individual incidents reported to five different police forces were not linked and a pattern of behaviour was not identified, raising serious questions about the effectiveness of professional standards departments across the Met, which in her report Casey stressed were under-resourced and underfunded.
The Met says that cases where no further action was taken are now likely to be looked at again. Sir Mark Rowley, who was appointed Met commissioner in July last year, has said the sustained employment of Carrick was a “spectacular failure” by his force. He told the BBC: “This is about weak decision-making in professional standards, not joining the dots between related incidents.”
It is more than 10 years since Jean has seen her son, she tells me. Carrick was visiting Salisbury with a friend and the pair bumped into her in a shop. The three of them arranged to meet at Carwardine’s café in the town centre the next day. “[Carrick’s half-brother] was giving me a hard time over the phone when we were having breakfast,” Jean says. “David took the phone off me and shouted at him. ‘Listen, mate, I’m Mr Plod. And you’d better leave my mum alone.’ " Carrick stormed out of the café.
Jean has no plans to visit him in prison. She admits she still loves him. “He’s still my boy, still my son,” she says. “I just don’t know why he has done it. He should have been caught a long time ago. I know he has let himself down but the Met didn’t support him very well. They gave him a gun and put him in that position. Why would they do that? Now he has lost everything.”
The true extent of Carrick’s crimes is still being explored. There is more to come.
Where to get help:
If it’s an emergency and you feel that you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
If you’ve ever experienced sexual assault, are struggling with your mental health or feel like your life is at risk, help is available:
- Safe to Talk confidentially, any time 24/7. Call 0800 044 334, Text 4334, For more info or to web chat visit safetotalk.nz
- Lifeline: 0800 543 354 (available 24/7)
- Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO (available 24/7)
- Youth services: (06) 3555 906
- Youthline: 0800 376 633
- What’s Up: 0800 942 8787 (11am to11pm)
- Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155
Alternatively, contact your local police station - click here for a list.
Written by: David Collins
© The Times of London