Libby Squire may have been flashed by her killer, mother claims

Libby Squire may have been flashed by her killer just weeks before her death, her mother has said as she called for victims of so-called “minor” sexual offences to report them.

The 21-year-old university student was raped and murdered by a serial sex offender who targeted her while she was alone and vulnerable on a night out in Hull in 2019.

It was the culmination of an 18-month crime spree which saw Pawel Relowicz sexually terrorise young women around the city’s student area.

His previous offences - which were not linked by police until after Ms Squire’s murder - included several occasions when Relowicz exposed himself to women in the street.

Now, Ms Squire’s mother, Lisa, has decided to speak out to encourage women to report any sexual offences committed against them, no matter how minor they consider them to be.

She said she had been “haunted” by the fact her daughter had been flashed in Hull towards the end of 2018, but did contact the police.

Instead, Ms Squire was said to have “berated” the offender and told him to go away.

“I said to her ‘you should really report it’ and she said ‘Oh mum, I gave him a mouthful and told him what a pathetic human being he was’. But she didn’t report it,” she told the Daily Mirror.

“And that absolutely haunts me now because likely or not that was him.”

She said she had recently stressed to her daughter Beth, 19, the importance of reporting such crimes, ahead of the teenager's departure for university in September.

An offender, she warned, could gradually escalate his behaviour if he was not held to account for his crimes.

“By reporting it, you are hopefully stopping the next person being attacked by this man,” she said.

The mother, from High Wycombe, Bucks, said she wanted to see children being taught about the subject in school.

It comes after previous victims of Relowicz claimed they were not taken seriously by police when they reported crimes including voyeurism, indecent exposure and sexually motivated burglaries.

One victim, who spoke to The Telegraph on the day of Relowicz’s conviction, said detectives “needed a bit of a push” to act on her report of voyeurism.

“It was considered a relatively minor offence in isolation, but as we’ve seen his crimes have escalated to the point where they’ve had the most tragic of consequences,” she said.