A NORTH Yorkshire butcher accused of raping and murdering a 21-year-old student was guilty of “utterly disgusting” sexual offences and could be hated, but there was no evidence he had killed her, his barrister told a jury.

Pawel Relowicz, 26, who worked as a butcher at Karro Foods in Malton, is on trial accused of the murder of Hull University student Libby Squire, who disappeared during a night out in February 2019 and whose body was found in the Humber estuary weeks later.

Sheffield Crown Court has been told he picked up Ms Squire, who was drunk and distressed after she had been turned away from a nightclub, while he was “prowling around the student area” looking for an opportunity to commit a sexual offence against a vulnerable young woman.

The prosecution have said that he drove her in his car to the remote Oak Road playing fields, where he raped and murdered her, before putting her body into the River Hull.

He will claim they had consensual sex at the playing fields and he does not know how she died, the court has heard.

York Press: A court sketch of Pawel Relowicz

Relowicz began giving evidence in the trial on Monday.

When asked by Oliver Saxby QC, defending, why he spent the evening of Ms Squire’s disappearance driving around Hull, he said he “was looking for a woman to have easy sex”.

The jury has been told that Relowicz has previously admitted committing a number of sexually motivated offences – including voyeurism, outraging public decency and burglaries.

They heard that, after the police arrested the Polish-born defendant, a married father-of-two of Raglan Street, Hull, they found sex toys and women’s underwear that he had stolen after breaking into homes in the city.

Mr Saxby said: “To say he has a problem barely scratches the surface.

“How he has behaved, what he has done – it is utterly disgusting."

He added: “What he did I don’t doubt will have been extremely frightening.

“And you will hate him for it. That’s the reality, being frank.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

Speaking through an interpreter, Relowicz, who moved to Hull eight years ago for work, told the court that there was “something sexy” about watching couples having sex and described it as a “fetish”.

He said he had never assaulted a woman and told the court that violent or rough sexual intercourse, rape and the idea of causing pain in sex did not excite him sexually.

Mr Saxby said the defendant found it difficult to accept he had a problem and had lied to his wife, and to himself.

“Why? Because his behaviour is so gross; and, perhaps, we would say, because – in the context of this case – he feared that if he admitted it, it would count against him,” Mr Saxby said.

Relowicz told the court he now accepted he had a “problem” and said he originally denied his sexually motivated offences because of his wife and children.

The defence barrister said Relowicz’s sexual offences were his only previous convictions.

In his opening defence speech, Mr Saxby said he will call two witnesses, both students, who heard screams in the early hours of February 1, 2019.

Mr Saxby said Relowicz had already returned home at the time the witnesses said they heard the screams, and so he “cannot be guilty of killing Libby Squire”.

The barrister said “desperate” screams heard by a previous witness could be explained as Ms Squire being “lost, and disorientated, and confused, and desperate”.

This was the type of case where the defendant “is left simply saying: ‘I didn’t do it, I don’t know what happened, I wasn’t there, I cannot say,'” Mr Saxby said.

The trial continues.