LISA SQUIRE is preparing to meet the man who raped and murdered her eldest daughter Libby.
Sex predator Pawel Relowicz has agreed to see her – which feels like an inversion of the natural order.
Surely she, as the bereaved parent, should be the one who decides whether the meeting takes place?
But Lisa says: “I get that he has to know he has some control over it.
“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. 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.
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“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**t, 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 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.
It should have raised a red flag that in the 19 months before he murdered Libby, Relowicz had committed a string of sexual offences, including voyeurism, outraging public decency and burglary — involving theft of intimate items from women’s homes.
But he did not have a criminal record, and police did not catch him.
Whether Libby’s murder could have been prevented if they had is a question that haunts Lisa, who says: “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.”
Libby disappeared during a night out with university friends in Hull in January 2019. She had gone to a nightclub but doormen considered her too drunk to be admitted.
Her friends put her into a taxi, paid the fare and gave instructions for her to be taken home.
But after the driver had dropped her at her shared student house, she wandered off into the cold, snowy night, perhaps to clear her head, and became hypothermic, confused and tearful. She was in this vulnerable state when Relowicz pounced.
It was seven weeks before her body was dredged from the Humber Estuary, submerged for so long that pathologists could not determine the cause of her death. The puzzle of how Libby spent her last hours has never been solved, and that plagues her mum.
Lisa, 52, says: “The questions I have are simple — what happened to Libby? Was she scared? Did she ask for me? I want her to know, and I have a sense that she does know, that I did everything I could to find out what happened.
“There’s no question of forgiveness, but I can try and get something positive out of this horrendous situation.
“And as soon as he has answered one question, another will take its place. I’ll always want to know more.
“I’m not interested in hearing he is sorry, or that he has a problem or that it was a lapse of judgment. I want to know how Libby died.
“It will be hard, but not harder than living without her. The worst has happened. There is nothing he can say or do that will be worse.
“But at the moment, my mind fills in the blanks and it goes down some dark paths. I wonder, ‘Did he torture her?’ I thought at the start, ‘Maybe she wasn’t dead when she went into the water’. But we know she was, because of the post-mortem.
“There were none of the signs of drowning. And before I saw her body I thought, ‘Did he stab her?’ I had to look to satisfy myself that he didn’t.
“He said in court that when he first came across her, she was crying and cold and by then disorientated by hypothermia, asking for him to take her home to her mummy.
“I knew she’d ask for me, and I’m grateful he confirmed that. She knows that she is never far from my thoughts, that although I wasn’t with her physically that night, my love was there with her.”
Lisa still speaks of Libby in the present tense, as if she were still living. She says: “I still feel the bond.
“I talk to her every day — ‘I’ve really missed you. Why did you die? What happened?’
“I hear her voice replying, ‘Mum, it doesn’t matter’, and there is a real sense that she is at peace now, happy and never far from us.
“I know we will be together again when I die — not that I want to hasten my death.
“How lovely it is that I’ll see her again. That is a gift from her. And I try not to sink into the depths of grief because I know she’d feel guilty if I did, that it’s her fault.
“That’s another reason to keep myself going. I’m not nervous about meeting him at all. It doesn’t make my stomach churn. It fills me with hope that I might put a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together.”
Lisa, a nurse on a postnatal hospital ward, is married to engineer Russell, 56, and they have three other children — Beth, 21, Maisy, 16, and Joe, 15. She believes, unequivocally, that Relowicz should have been handed a full-life tariff.
She says: “If you kill someone you should forfeit your freedom for the rest of your life. He is due for release in 27 years, but Libby will not come back to us then.
“If he is released, he will do it again, there is no doubt in my mind. So as long as I have breath in my body I will make sure he never comes out of prison.”
Lisa met then-PM Boris Johnson to petition him on the issue, and says: “When he said, ‘There aren’t enough spaces in prison’, I said, ‘Then build more prisons’.
She casts her mind back to the awful night when Libby went missing. She was working a night shift at the hospital when a friend of her daughter rang in the early hours saying: “We can’t find Libby.” Lisa, from High Wycombe, Bucks, recalls: “I felt immediate panic. I did my work, continued my observations and phoned her friends.
“There was still no news. I rang the police and university security and did some more work.
“Then I finished my shift at 8am with this sense of dread. I had the strangest feeling — an emptiness along my left-hand side where she always sat. I knew she was dead.
“I knew she wasn’t coming back because she hadn’t contacted me, and she’d text me three times a day.”
These messages reflected their relationship. Libby would text, saying: “I love you,” and Lisa would reply: “I love you more.”
Back would come: “I think you’ll find I love you more,” and Lisa would counter: “I’m your mother. I think you’ll find I do.”
Lisa continues: “I’m terrified of the day when I feel she’s dead. I always think she’ll walk through the door, that I’ll wake up from this really horrible dream, that she’ll be there saying, ‘Oh my god, Mum. They said I was dead but I’m not’. I still cling to that.”
But after seven weeks, police called to say they had found her body in the Humber. Lisa recalls: “You think you’ll fall on the floor and scream, but I was really quiet.
“I said to Russell, ‘They’ve found her. Does that mean she is dead?’ I still didn’t want to believe it.
“And after that, I couldn’t wait to see her. The coroner said I couldn’t. [Forensic investigations were continuing] But I said, ‘I’m coming’. For me, it was a primal need.”
The fact that Libby’s body had been submerged for so long delayed its decomposition. Lisa says: “She looked absolutely beautiful. Her body was just a vessel. I felt her presence in the room.”
It was in the September, nine months after Libby’s death, before Lisa could again see her daughter’s body, this time at the funeral home.
She says: “I chatted to her as if she was still alive. I stroked her head and kissed her face and hands, sat with her.
“I was desperate to lie next to her and give her a hug, and if I could have picked her up and taken her home I would have done.
“It seemed fitting, a privilege in fact, that I’d been the first person to see her when she was born and the last to see her after she died.”
Hull MP Dame Diana Johnson is now backing Lisa’s call for offences such as indecent exposure to be reported and treated with more gravity by police.
She told Parliament last year: “What we do know is that this sort of behaviour often escalates to far more serious offending and murders, as happened in the case of Libby Squire in Hull and Sarah Everard in London.” Baroness Casey of Blackstock, who will publish her final report into failings at the Metropolitan Police in February, is also expected to focus on this point.
The report was commissioned after the murder last year of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, who is alleged to have previously exposed himself to women four times.
Every year, on January 1, Libby’s family mark her birthday, and Lisa says: “We have a cake and a celebration for her.
“I buy her a present. A place is set for her at the table whenever we sit down for a family meal.”
She adds: “I’m not brave, it’s Libby who gives me strength. She’s an amazing person. I still think of her in the present tense.
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“She got an incredibly dangerous man off the streets and stopped him from killing other women, saving countless lives.
“I’m so proud of her — but for that she paid the ultimate price.”
