Libby Squire murder trial: Student 'raped and dumped in river'

A man raped and murdered a student before dumping her body in a river, a court has heard.

Libby Squire, 21, went missing after a night out in Hull on 31 January 2019. A lifeboat crew found her remains in the Humber Estuary almost seven weeks later.

Prosecutors say she was picked up by Pawel Relowicz, 26, whom they accuse of "cruising around the student area in his car" in search of a victim.

Mr Relowicz denies rape and murder.

On the night of her disappearance, Sheffield Crown Court heard, Ms Squire's friends had put her in a taxi after she was refused entry to the city's Welly nightclub.

It dropped her outside her student home on Wellesley Avenue, but instead of entering the house Ms Squire, from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, walked away towards nearby Beverley Road.

Prosecutor Richard Wright QC said temperatures would have been "freezing" that night and Ms Squire, who dropped her keys in a neighbour's garden, would have been "extremely vulnerable".

"She was drunk, she was likely hypothermic, and she was in deep distress," he said.

"She had lost her house keys, she was crying, she had fallen repeatedly to the floor as she tried to walk."

Ms Squire was spotted by a number of people, the court heard, including two men in a car who had seen her on a roadside lying down in the snow.

The pair "recalled her knees were bloodied", Mr Wright said.

"The men were unable to understand what Libby was saying and, in her drunken state she started to become verbally aggressive," he said.

"In the end the men decided to give up on her and drove away."

The court heard she eventually got into Mr Relowicz's car and he had driven to nearby Oak Road playing fields, where he raped and killed her.

Mr Wright said the "act of sexual violence" had "culminated in his putting her, dead or dying, into the cold waters of the River Hull".

"It was from there that Libby's body travelled into the Humber and then out to sea to be recovered by the lifeboat on the 20th March," he said.

Mr Wright told the court the defendant, a married father-of-two who worked as a butcher for Karro Foods in Malton, North Yorkshire, was "for some reason... cruising around the student area in his car", despite being signed off sick from work.

"We suggest that he was effectively on patrol, looking for an opportunity to present itself," Mr Wright said.

The jury of five men and seven women were shown CCTV clips of Relowicz's car "patrolling the streets", as well as footage of the student's movements while her parents - Lisa and Russ - watched proceedings from the public gallery above.

The trial continues.

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