When an American fighter pilot accused of strangling a British woman escaped trial in an English court, the question for the public was not merely one of legal technicality. It was whether people living in this country can expect serious crimes committed against them to be investigated and prosecuted by British authorities. Internal Ministry of Defence documents, obtained by the Guardian through the Freedom of Information Act, show that officials believe the answer in this case was no.
The case concerns Sarah Steele, who was attacked by Capt Jacob Wulfson in his Cambridge flat in December 2023 after the pair spoke on the Tinder dating app. He was off-duty at the time. Cambridgeshire police allowed US military police to take control of the investigation shortly after the assault was reported, with the result that Wulfson never faced an English criminal court. Instead, he was prosecuted at a military tribunal on an American airbase in neighbouring Suffolk.
The documents reveal that MoD officials, whose department manages the military relationship with the United States, privately concluded that this handover was wrong. In a memo written on 8 July, officials based in Washington stated that “the Steele case does not, on the surface, appear to meet the bar for a visiting force to be awarded jurisdiction,” the visiting force being the formal term for the US military under the relevant agreement. Four days earlier, in an email to colleagues, the same officials said decision-making on the case “seemed at odds with what is very clear” in that agreement. Another official agreed that, as far as the facts were understood, the matter “should absolutely have been for the UK courts”. Officials described the agreement as “pretty unambiguous” and said it permitted American jurisdiction only in a narrow set of circumstances: when offences were committed on duty, or against another member of the US armed forces or their property. None of those conditions applied here.
That agreement, signed by the two countries decades ago, gives UK police the primary right to investigate alleged crimes by Americans stationed in Britain. An unidentified Greater Manchester police officer made the same point in an email to MoD officials on 6 July, writing that Cambridgeshire police had “wrongly, in my view” transferred the Wulfson investigation to the US military.
Meanwhile, the wider stakes became public. When the Guardian disclosed the case in June, Downing Street responded with immediate criticism, calling it “deeply distressing” and “very concerning” that UK authorities had not been involved in the prosecution. The government then established a high-level cross-government inquiry, involving the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Foreign Office and police chiefs, to examine how and why investigations into serious crimes have been transferred to US military police. The inquiry is scrutinising a series of cases uncovered by the Guardian this year in which off-duty American personnel, accused of harming British victims with no connection to the armed forces, were tried in US courts martial on American bases.
For the victims concerned, those proceedings have carried a heavy burden. British victims must give evidence within an unfamiliar American military legal system that does not always provide the protections available in UK courts. Steele testified at Wulfson’s court martial, held at his airbase at Lakenheath in Suffolk in April, that her experience was “degrading and distressing”. The verdict was decided by an all-male jury of his fellow air force officers, every lawyer involved was American, and Steele faced invasive and aggressive questioning from Wulfson’s defence lawyer. He was convicted of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted of sexual assault, dismissed from the US Air Force and confined to a military jail at Lakenheath for six months.
Other cases under inquiry follow a similar pattern. Tyrion Davis, accused of raping two women in Suffolk, was convicted of one charge of sexual assault and cleared of ten further counts. Hannes Marschalek, accused of exposing himself to a 16-year-old girl and four young women in Littleport, Cambridgeshire, negotiated a plea bargain and admitted indecent conduct, before winning an appeal in a US military court that quashed his conviction on technical grounds, a ruling now being challenged.
Cambridgeshire police say they are reviewing the case with what they describe as the assistance of material provided by US Air Force lawyers, and that they remain engaged with the victim. “We are working with government, wider policing and criminal justice partners to ensure greater clarity of jurisdictional decision making,” the force said. The US military, for its part, aims to prosecute as many of its personnel as possible under the agreement, and frequently asks UK police to hand over prosecutions, requests the police agree to even when they hold primary investigative responsibility.
With more than 12,000 American military personnel stationed at at least 15 bases and facilities in the UK, the two largest being Lakenheath and Mildenhall in Suffolk, and significant numbers living in East Anglia, the inquiry’s conclusions will matter well beyond a single case. For the communities living alongside these bases, the central question is whether their access to British justice is being quietly surrendered, and whether the inquiry now under way will restore it.