Woman strangled; tried by US military

Dr Sarah Steele woke in a bathtub of cold water in her own city, strangled by a US fighter pilot, and Britain never got to try him.

A jury of his own squadron

Steele, a University of Cambridge researcher, had met US Air Force Captain Jacob Wulfson through a dating app. She woke on the morning of 2 December 2023 naked and in cold water in his Cambridge flat. Wulfson, an F-35 pilot with the 495th Fighter Squadron at RAF Lakenheath, was never questioned by Cambridgeshire Police in any meaningful sense that led anywhere. US military police took the investigation. The case never reached the Crown Prosecution Service.

His court martial was held in April 2026, at RAF Lakenheath, the same base where he was stationed. The panel that decided his fate was eight US Air Force officers, all male, all posted at that base. The public could not attend. Wulfson was convicted of strangulation, an aggravated assault on an intimate partner. He was acquitted of sexual assault and “aggravated sexual contact.” He chose not to testify. He was sentenced to six months’ confinement and dismissed from the service.

During sentencing, his defence raised his combat record, how many people he had killed, to argue for a lighter punishment. Steele told BBC Radio 4’s *Today*: “They were raising in his mitigation how many people he’d killed, supposedly to get him a lower sentence for committing a serious violent crime against me.” She has said she felt “on trial” herself, treated “incredibly aggressively,” and railroaded into a jurisdiction handover she was never properly consulted on.

Eight American officers, in American uniforms, at the American base where he flew, decided an American pilot’s fate for a crime committed against a British woman in a British city. Britain was not in the room.

The treaty that hands him over

The mechanism is the 1951 NATO Status of Forces Agreement, folded into UK law through the Visiting Forces Act 1952. The treaty gives the US primary jurisdiction over its personnel when an offence happens on duty, or involves US property or dependants. Everything else is meant to stay with British authorities first. But the treaty only requires British courts to give “sympathetic consideration” to a US request to take a case anyway, and in practice that consideration is rarely refused.

Wulfson’s alleged assault happened off duty and off base, in an English city, against a British citizen. By the treaty’s own wording, this was Britain’s case to try. It ended up in an American courtroom on an American base, decided by an American jury, because the US claimed jurisdiction it was not straightforwardly owed and British authorities let it stand.

That distinction matters, because the Wulfson case is not proof that Britain has no power here. Six years ago, when a US airwoman based at Lakenheath, Mikayla Hayes, was involved in a fatal road crash on the A10, the CPS rebutted the US jurisdiction certificate and a district judge ruled she would face trial at Norwich Crown Court. It happened. So the failure in the Wulfson case is not that Britain lacks the legal tool. It is that ministers, police and prosecutors chose not to use it.

Not the first, and no one is counting

Harry Dunn was 19 when he was killed outside RAF Croughton in August 2019 by Anne Sacoolas, an American who claimed diplomatic immunity and left the country before she could be arrested. She eventually received an eight-month suspended sentence at the Old Bailey, more than three years later, for careless driving. That case forced a review and a new Exchange of Notes. It did not fix the underlying imbalance.

The Guardian has identified scores of UK courts martial over the past decade, including cases of child sexual abuse, violent attacks and drink-driving, several with British victims and involving conduct off base. The US military publishes a bare docket of charges and convictions with no further detail. There is no central UK record of these cases, how many there have been, or what happened to the people on the receiving end of them. Steele has called for police to record victims’ views before handing a case away, and for a public register of every such handover. Neither exists.

A garrison, not an alliance of equals

More than 12,000 US personnel sit on at least 15 UK bases and facilities. Declassified UK’s research puts the true figure at 24 sites, worth an estimated £11.4bn, larger than what governments have told parliament. Keir Starmer’s government is refusing to tell MPs how many American forces are stationed at each base, citing “a new era of threat,” and says the make-up of US forces here “is a matter for the US.”

These are not idle bases. RAF Fairford, part of the same network, launched the US bombers that struck Iranian targets this spring after Starmer authorised American use of British soil for the operation. The country that flies bombing runs from Suffolk and Gloucestershire without needing to ask twice is the same country whose courts decide what happens when one of its own strangles a British woman in Cambridge.

Washington decides, London asks nicely

Justice Secretary David Lammy told the Commons this month that his officials are “raising this case with the US government to establish the full facts.” Justice minister Jake Richards has said the Ministry of Justice will look into it. Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy has demanded an urgent review. Each of these is a British minister asking an American government for permission to understand what happened on British soil.

Sarah Steele was strangled in her own city. The people who judged the man who did it wore the same uniform he did, worked at the same base, and answered to Washington. Britain got a statement at the despatch box.