MoD Documents Expose Police Error in US Pilot Case

By Grace Kim

Ministry of Defence officials privately concluded that Cambridgeshire police should never have handed the investigation of an American fighter pilot to the US military, documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act show. Capt Jacob Wulfson strangled British woman Sarah Steele in his Cambridge flat in December 2023. He was never tried in an English criminal court.

Instead, the US military prosecuted Wulfson at a court martial on the Lakenheath airbase in Suffolk in April. He was convicted of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted of sexual assault. The Air Force dismissed him and confined him to a military jail at Lakenheath for six months.

What do the MoD documents actually say?

The documents, obtained by the Guardian, reveal the private views of MoD officials about the Steele case. In a memo written on 8 July, MoD officials based in Washington stated: "The Steele case does not, on the surface, appear to meet the bar for a visiting force to be awarded jurisdiction."

Four days earlier, officials had written to colleagues that the decision-making "seemed at odds with what is very clear" in the long-standing UK-US agreement. Another MoD official agreed that "as best as we understand the facts, this should absolutely have been for the UK courts."

The agreement itself, signed decades ago, gives UK police the primary right to investigate alleged crimes by Americans stationed in the country. MoD officials described its terms as "pretty unambiguous." It permits the US military to acquire jurisdiction in only a narrow set of circumstances: when offences are committed on duty, or against another member of the US armed forces or their property.

Wulfson was off-duty when he assaulted Steele after the pair talked on the Tinder dating app. Steele had no connection to the armed forces. Neither exception applied.

An unidentified Greater Manchester police officer went further in a 6 July email to MoD officials, writing that Cambridgeshire police had "wrongly, in my view" handed over the Wulfson investigation to the US military.

The takeaway: the ministry responsible for the US military relationship believed from the outset that jurisdiction belonged in UK courts.

How did the case reach a US court martial?

Cambridgeshire police allowed US military police to take control of the investigation quickly after Wulfson was accused of sexually assaulting Steele. That decision removed the case from the English criminal justice system entirely.

Steele testified at the court martial, telling the panel her experience was "degrading and distressing." The verdict and sentence were decided by an all-male jury of Wulfson's fellow air force officers. All the lawyers were American. Steele faced invasive and aggressive questioning from Wulfson's lawyer.

Cambridgeshire police said they are conducting a review of the case with "the assistance of material provided" by US Air Force lawyers. The force said it "remained engaged with the victim." It added: "We are working with government, wider policing and criminal justice partners to ensure greater clarity of jurisdictional decision making."

What does the government inquiry cover?

The Guardian's disclosure of the case in June provoked immediate criticism from Downing Street, which called it "deeply distressing" and "very concerning." The government then set up a high-level cross-departmental inquiry. It includes officials from the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Foreign Office, the MoD and police chiefs.

The inquiry is examining how and why police forces have transferred investigations into serious crimes to the US military police, and why US personnel are not being brought to justice in British courts. It is scrutinising a series of cases uncovered by the Guardian this year. In each, police handed investigations to US military police even though the American perpetrators were off-duty and the British victims had no connection to the armed forces.

The pattern is broader than Wulfson:

• Tyrion Davis allegedly raped two women in Suffolk. A court martial convicted him of one charge of sexual assault but cleared him of 10 further counts of sexual assault and abusive sexual contact.
• Hannes Marschalek allegedly exposed himself to a 16-year-old girl and four young women in Littleport, Cambridgeshire. He negotiated a plea bargain, admitting indecent conduct. A US military court later quashed his conviction on technical grounds. That ruling is now being challenged.

The US has more than 12,000 military personnel stationed in the UK across at least 15 bases and facilities. The two largest are at Lakenheath and Mildenhall in Suffolk, and significant numbers of American personnel live in East Anglia. The US military aims to prosecute as many of its personnel as possible within the boundaries of its agreement with the UK, and often asks UK police to take over prosecutions — requests police agree to even when they hold primary investigative responsibility.

What is the practical consequence?

For practitioners, the disclosure sharpens the jurisdictional question in cases involving visiting forces. The MoD's own reading of the agreement sets a clear baseline: off-duty offences against civilian victims belong in UK courts. Victims of such offences may find themselves testifying in US courts martial — an unfamiliar system that often does not afford the same protections as a UK court. The inquiry's findings will likely determine whether police forces face binding new rules on when they can decline jurisdiction.

In plain terms: the ministry thought UK law was clear, the police gave the case away anyway, and the inquiry must now decide whether it happens again.