Polish butcher Pawel Relowicz prowled the area where he lived. The married father of two would target female undergraduates by performing indecent acts and peering through bedroom windows. He would also break into student’s homes and steal sex toys and underwear before his activity allegedly escalated on the night of January 31, 2019, when he spotted “highly vulnerable” Libby slumped on a street corner.
Relowicz, 26, denies driving Libby, 21, to fields where he raped and murdered her, dumping her “dead or dying” into the freezing River Hull. A pathologist could not establish what caused her death.
Libby, in her second year studying philosophy at the University of Hull, was on a night out with friends. But she returned home alone after being refused admission to a nightclub because she was drunk.
Her body was recovered from the Humber estuary in Grimsby almost seven weeks later. Relowicz was arrested after his car was identified from footage driving Libby away.
Richard Wright, prosecuting, said stashed in the car was a pink holdall containing trophies “taken in sexually motivated burglaries”, including sex toys, photos of young women and underwear.
The meat plant butcher told police two face scratches and a mark to his chest had been caused by his son, before admitting he offered Libby a lift home but dropped her by the fields because he thought she was going to be sick.
However Mr Wright says that after DNA found on Libby’s body proved a billion to one match, Relowicz’s defence will now be they had consensual sex before he left her safe on the snowy fields.
CCTV cameras show Relowicz spent seven and a half minutes at the remote spot. A nearby resident was woken by a series of screams at 12.14am.
Mr Wright said: “Libby’s screams, and the scratches she managed to land on the face of the defendant as she fought him, establishes she was raped by a man whose entire motivation for contact with her was to take her to a remote area and to subject her to his uncontrollable sexual urges.
“His very purpose in prowling the streets was in order to commit opportunistic sexual offences and the rape of Libby was just such an offence.
“His sole purpose was to rape her and to use whatever force was necessary to achieve that, to silence her screams and escape detection.”
The jury at Sheffield Crown Court had seen CCTV video showing the last time Libby was seen alive at around midnight as Relowicz “identified her as a target” and walked her back towards his car.
Cameras showed him returning home at 12:23am. He left again at 2.22am to return to the playing fields and minutes later performed a sex act while crouched in a nearby street.
The court heard he had pleaded guilty to nine sexually motivated offences committed before Libby’s death, including voyeurism, outraging public decency and burglary.
Mr Wright described the defendant as a man “driven to commit sexually motivated offences against young women and who was undeterred by them seeing him or challenging
him”. He added: “In Libby Squire he found the opportunity he was looking for and went further than he had done before, driving her away, raping her and killing her.”
Libby’s mother Lisa, from High Wycombe, Bucks, said her daughter was a “girly girl” who feared water and darkness.
But she said Libby suffered with mental health and feared she would find her dead, adding: “I never thought I would have her for the rest of our lives”. The trial continues.
