Butcher guilty of raping and murdering student Libby Squire
Butcher Pawel Relowicz has been found guilty of raping and murdering Hull University Student Libby Squire.
The 21-year-old’s body was found in the Humber Estuary almost seven weeks after she went missing on February 1 2019, following a night out in Hull.
Prosecutors said Relowicz, 26, found the philosophy student on Beverley Road ‘drunk’ and ‘distressed’ and drove her to the nearby Oak Road playing fields.
The married father-of-two raped her before dumping her in the River Hull, a jury at Sheffield Crown Court heard.
Relowicz, who has a history of strange and frightening sex offences, had denied the charges.
He showed no emotion as the jury foreman read out the verdicts at Sheffield Crown Court.
Libby’s parents Lisa and Russ held hands and cried as they sat in the public gallery overlooking the courtroom waiting for the announcement.
In a statement they said Libby was at ‘the best place in her life she had ever been’ at the time of her death.
The 21-year-old had to deal with a number of mental health challenges as a teenager but her family said she was loving being at university and looking forward to the future.
She had dreams of becoming a writer or journalist after graduating university.
The court heard that Libby was in ‘good spirits’ on the evening of January 31 2019 while on a night out with friends.
But she was refused entry to the Welly nightclub at about 11pm because she appeared too drunk.
Her friends paid a taxi driver to take her home but, instead of going into her shared student house, Ms Squire wandered around, falling over in the snow and refusing offers of help from passers-by, until she encountered Relowicz.
Relowicz told the jury he did not kill Libby and said he had consensual sex with her on Oak Road.
The defendant has admitted a series of what his barrister called ‘utterly disgusting’ sexual offences in the months before that night, and he admitted he watched porn and masturbated in the street in the hours after he said he had sex with the student.
Giving evidence through an interpreter, Polish-born Relowicz told the court he was driving around Hull on the evening of Libby’s disappearance because he was ‘looking for a woman to have easy sex’.
The defendant – who has convictions for outraging public decency, voyeurism and sexually motivated burglaries – said he parked on Haworth Street with the intention of looking through windows and masturbating.
He told the court he left Libby on Oak Road to walk home and she was alive.
A pathologist told jurors he could not determine the cause of the student’s death due to the amount of time she had been in the water.
Oliver Saxby QC, defending, said there was no evidence that Relowicz had killed her.
Gerry Wareham, from the CPS, released a statement minutes after the verdict came in.
He said: ‘Relowicz robbed a young and vibrant woman of her life and her future. His actions have left her family and friends devastated.
‘Relowicz invented a web of lies to explain his actions that night, insisting throughout that he had tried to help Libby find her way home. Nothing could be further from the truth.
‘Far from being a good Samaritan, Relowicz preyed upon her, he took advantage of her vulnerable and distressed state and then he raped and murdered her.
‘I cannot begin to imagine the suffering Libby’s family are enduring. I can only hope that today’s verdict can bring them some measure of comfort. Our thoughts remain with them.’
Libby grew up in the High Wycombe area of Buckinghamshire and was the eldest of four children – being particularly close to her mother and to her brother.
In her statement to police her mother, Lisa Squire, said Libby would joke that she was her favourite child but conceded that they did have a ‘special bond’.
She described how her daughter was badly affected by a bout of glandular fever when she was about 11 years old and later developed an eating disorder and then depression.
Mrs Squire said her daughter self-harmed from the age of 14 and later developed suicidal thoughts.
But she was in a really ‘good place’ by the time she went to university, after taking a gap year to travel to Paris.
‘She was planning her future and was in the best place in her life she had ever been,’ Mrs Squire said.
The neo-natal nurse said that she normally talked to her daughter every day but they did not speak on the day before she disappeared due to her working.
She described Libby as a ‘girly girl’ and a ‘real people person’ who had a ‘wicked sense of humour’.
Libby met long-term boyfriend Connor James-Pye when they were in their teens in High Wycombe.
He said Libby ‘thrived’ at university, which amazed him after her troubles as a teenager.
In his statement to police, he described how they stayed close even when Libby went away, saying there were ‘not many moments of the day we were not in contact with each other’.
He said she was doing well on her course with one of her lecturers saying they had never seen someone with such a passion for learning’/
Mr James-Pye said she had not wanted to go out on January 31 2019 because she had a lecture the next day but ‘she didn’t want to let the girls down’.
‘In the last couple of weeks, Libby has been really happy,’ he said.
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