‘I don’t hate my daughter, Libby Squire’s killer, I just want to know how she died’ – Lisa Squire says
The mother of a university student who was brutally killed after becoming separated from friends on a night out is steeling herself to come face to face with the man who took her daughter’s life.
Lisa Squire is preparing to meet the sexual predator who raped and murdered her eldest daughter Libby, 21, in Hull in 2019. Polish butcher Pawel Relowicz, 26, was convicted of killing the philosophy student when he chanced upon her after she had been out with friends.
Relowicz has agreed to see Mrs Squire, which feels like an inversion of the natural order.
Surely it should be she, the bereaved parent, who determines whether the meeting takes place?
‘I get that he has to know he has some control over it,’ she says. ‘He has committed the worst offences imaginable and the prospect of seeing the mother of the person he killed must be quite difficult.
‘He may be a bit nervous,’ she concedes both with understatement and astounding magnanimity. ‘It’s quite a brave thing for him to do.
‘I don’t hate him, I really don’t. I find anger and hatred incredibly draining, so I choose not to go down that route. Just trying to muddle through life without Libby is hard enough and there are days when I don’t even want to mother my other three children, or go to work, or walk the dog. I just want to wallow in my Libby world.
‘Grief can be all-consuming. So if I had hatred to contend with on top of all that it would just be an extra layer of s***; too much to cope with.’
What she wants, she says, are answers about how her daughter died. Relowicz, a Polish butcher who is now serving 27 years for his heinous crimes, has always denied his guilt.
He was 24 and a married father of two when he killed Libby — then 21, and a second-year philosophy student at Hull University. The fact that he had also committed a string of sexual offences — eight crimes in the preceding 19 months including voyeurism, outraging public decency and burglary (he stole intimate items from women’s homes) — before he murdered Libby should have been a red flag.
But he did not have a criminal record and police did not apprehend him. Could he have been prevented from killing Libby if they had? It is a question that haunts Lisa: ‘Such offences are known as ‘low-level’ sex crimes. Let’s just call them what they are: sex crimes. And people who commit them should be tagged for five years, then maybe their offences would be taken seriously.’