Murder of Libby Squire

Libby Squire (born Liberty Anna Squire on 1 January 1998) was a philosophy student at the University of Hull who had grown up in West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. On the evening of 31 January 2019, the 21-year-old was on a night out with friends in central Hull. At around 11:20 pm she was refused entry to The Welly, a nightclub in the city centre, after door staff judged her too intoxicated. Her friends put her in a taxi that dropped her at her home on Wellesley Avenue at around 11:30 pm, but she did not go inside. Ten minutes later she was seen roughly half a mile away on Beverley Road, where passersby saw her crying and distressed; some tried to help but found her incoherent, and she was not seen again that night.

Humberside Police, alongside a public appeal from Squire's parents, carried out the largest missing-person search in the force's history, with more than 100 officers and staff searching the area, including the River Hull and the Beverley and Barmston Drain. On 6 February 2019, 24-year-old Pawel Relowicz was arrested on suspicion of Squire's abduction after CCTV placed his car in the area on the night she disappeared. He was not charged at that time in connection with Squire; on 10 February he was instead charged with unrelated voyeurism, outraging-public-decency, and burglary offences. He pleaded guilty to nine of these unrelated offences on 13 August 2019 and was sentenced on 16 August to eight and a half years' imprisonment. On 20 March 2019, almost two months after Squire disappeared, a fisherman found a woman's body in the Humber Estuary near Grimsby docks; it was identified as Squire the next day. Because of how long the body had been in the water, police were unable to determine a cause of death. On 24 October 2019, while already in prison, Relowicz was charged with Squire's rape and murder.

Relowicz's trial for rape and murder opened at Sheffield Crown Court on 12 January 2021 and lasted four and a half weeks. The prosecution contended that Relowicz had been looking for an opportunity in central Hull that night, that he invited or forced the intoxicated Squire into his car, drove her to Oak Road playing fields, raped and killed her there, and disposed of her body in the River Hull, pointing to scratches on his face as evidence she had tried to defend herself. The defence argued Relowicz had stopped only to help Squire, that the two had consensual sex at the playing fields, and that she scratched his face when he pulled away from a kiss, after which he left her there unharmed. Jurors also heard extracts from Squire's medical records describing earlier suicidal thoughts, including thoughts of drowning in a river. On 11 February 2021, after six days of deliberation, the jury convicted Relowicz of rape unanimously and of murder by a majority of eleven to one.

Relowicz was sentenced the next day, 12 February 2021, to life imprisonment for murder, with a minimum term of 27 years before he is eligible for parole, and a concurrent 18 years for rape. The sentencing judge described his offending as a 'perverted campaign of sexually deviant behaviour' and called him a 'very dangerous individual.' The Attorney General's Office reviewed the sentence under the unduly-lenient-sentence scheme and concluded in March 2021 that it was not unduly lenient. Following the case, Squire's mother began publicly campaigning for tougher sentencing and mandatory therapy for people convicted of non-contact sexual offences such as voyeurism, arguing this could help prevent escalation to more serious violence.