Just weeks before Libby Squire was raped, murdered and dumped in a river, a stranger exposed himself to her on her way home.
Her mother, Lisa Squire, said the assault left the 21-year-old University of Hull student feeling “absolutely furious”. “But I never thought to say to her, you need to report that, you need to ring the police, and she didn’t report it either,” said Squire. “We’re almost conditioned to ignore indecent exposure. I didn’t know better then, but I know better now.”
She believes the flasher was the same man who went on to murder Libby in the early hours of 1 February 2019. In the months before her death, serial sex offender Pawel Relowicz, 26, prowled the streets of Hull, masturbating in public, watching women through windows, and breaking into students’ bedrooms to steal sex toys and underwear.
“As likely as not, it was Relowicz who flashed Libby because he was doing that in the area at the time. I’ll never be able to prove that but the coincidence is there, isn’t it?” said Squire.
Just hours after murdering Libby, Relowicz was back out on the streets exposing himself. That is why Squire, a nurse on a postnatal hospital ward who lives in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, has been campaigning for earlier intervention and tougher measures in lower-level sex crimes.
“Not every non-contact sexual offender will go on and become a rapist, but every rapist was a non-contact sexual offender at one point. So I think we need to take them for the red flags that they really are. We need to understand that this is not normal behaviour and it’s not OK,” she said.
The 52-year-old now goes into schools, teaching pupils about the importance of reporting non-contact sexual offences. So far, alongside Humberside police, she’s already reached 17,000 young people in the area. She has also worked with the force on the Libby Campaign, which urges women to report low-level sex offences, and with Thames Valley police and the Met to urge them to take the crimes seriously.
Squire has been campaigning with the Labour chair of the home affairs select committee, Diana Johnson, who raised Libby’s murder in the Commons on Thursday, saying indecent exposure is a gateway crime. She said that since 2018, almost 250 men found guilty of indecent exposure have subsequently been found guilty of rape.
The Hull North MP, who has proposed amendments to Home Office bills to tackle indecent exposure, added to the Guardian: “I don’t think it is taken seriously enough. Part of the problem is that sometimes it’s seen as a jokey thing so women have perhaps shied away from reporting it to the police. I’ve had people in Hull say to me they wouldn’t report it because they thought they would be laughed at by the police.”
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Relowicz murdered Libby after committing a string of increasingly serious sex crimes. When he was arrested for the abduction of the philosophy student, whose body was found in the Humber 48 days after she went missing on a night out, police were able to link his fingerprints and DNA to other crimes in the area. By the time he stood trial for murder in January 2021, he had already been convicted of nine sexual offences, including voyeurism, outraging public decency and burglary, carried out between July 2017 and 20 January 2019.
In the weeks before Libby’s murder, Relowicz had followed a woman home and masturbated on her front door. “He became more and more emboldened every time and wouldn’t run away when people saw him so his pattern of behaviour was escalating each time,” said Squire. “I wish more could have been done to stop him,” she adds, while acknowledging that she believes that police did everything they could with the evidence they had at the time.
She said the sentencing of the Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens for three indecent exposure offences this week shows how low-level sex offenders can escalate to more serious crimes. She said she was “absolutely horrified” when she found out the details of Sarah Everard’s murder in March 2021 because it was “an identical crime” to her daughter’s.
“Both men had non-contact sexual offences. Relowicz had actually been sentenced for his by that point, while Couzens had pending offences. Both perpetrators scoped out the area that they were going to take the girls to before they went, they both got them into their cars under false pretences. Both girls were taken to a remote place where they were raped and murdered, and both were inhumanely disposed of,” she said.
Squire is also calling for tougher sentences for those who rape and murder, saying Relowicz, who was jailed for life with a minimum of 27 years, deserves a rare whole life tariff like Couzens. “Relowicz is a very dangerous man,” she said. “He’s going to be in his early 50s when he gets out so he is more than capable of doing it again. I do not believe that rapists and murderers can be rehabilitated.”
She thinks early intervention for indecent exposure offences is key to preventing more serious crimes. “If there was some service that men who have this compulsion could refer themselves to, we could actually halt that behaviour. We could undo the thinking behind what makes them do what they do before they get to the rape stage,” she said. “I’m not saying they don’t deserve punishment. If they are arrested for that particular offence, I don’t think they should go to prison but I think they should be tagged for a really long time, like five years or something.”
Squire, who spoke to the Guardian as she was getting ready for a night shift at a local hospital, said she gets the strength for her campaign work from Libby. “We’ve lost a daughter and there’s nothing that will bring her back. But I’ve got to try and make her death seem less senseless. There has to be something positive come out of it,” she said.
“I think the judicial system needs overhauling because I think it’s still swayed in the favour of men than women. Sentencing I think needs to be re-looked at as well. I’ve got so many things I want to change I should run for prime minister,” she said, smiling.
