The married sex offender who raped student Libby Squire before murdering her and throwing her body in a freezing river received £110,000 in Legal Aid to help him fight his case, MailOnline can reveal.
Butcher Pawel Relowicz, 28, who laughed as he was arrested, pocketed £109,563.35 to pay for his defence.
Disclosure of his legal aid bill comes after the killer changed his mind and refused to meet with his 21-year-old victim’s grieving mother.
Relowicz was supposed to meet Lisa Squire as part of a restorative justice programme but cancelled the appointment, claiming that he is appealing his life sentence.
Butcher Pawel Relowicz, 28, who laughed as he was arrested, pocketed £109,563.35 to pay for his defence
Libby Squire (pictured), a 21-year-old philosophy student at Hull University, had been out with friends when the killer chanced on her
The Polish butcher dumped tragic Libby’s body in the River Hull after raping her on a playing field in the early hours of February 1, 2019.
Libby, a philosophy student at Hull University, had been out with friends when the killer chanced on her.
She caught a taxi home, which dropped her outside her house, but she didn’t go inside.
Drunk and dressed in party clothes, she had wandered in the wrong direction and laid down in the snow.
CCTV footage showed Libby, disoriented and possibly hypothermic, being ushered into a silver Vauxhall Astra which belonged to Relowicz, who lived half a mile from her house.
Her body was found seven weeks later in the Humber Estuary. The married father-of-two was jailed for a minimum of 27 years at Sheffield Crown Court in February 2021.
Before he killed Libby, Relowicz had been carrying out a campaign of chilling, sexually motivated crimes in the student area of Hull.
This included peering through windows to watch young women, breaking into their homes to steal intimate items and masturbating in the street.
In the hours after raping and murdering her, he returned home and watched pornography before going out again in apparent search of another victim.
Libby’s mother, Lisa Squire (pictured), who was 200 miles away on a shift the moment she discovered her daughter was missing, said: ‘It was like one side of me was numb, I couldn’t feel her’
Speaking of the moment she knew her daughter was dead, her mother Lisa said she was 200 miles away on a shift as a nursery nurse when she discovered she was missing.
She said: ‘I was doing all the things you should do but there was something in the back of my mind saying, ‘This is a waste of time. She’s dead. She’s gone.
‘It was like one side of me was numb, I couldn’t feel her.’
And she added: ‘Every day that passes is another day of not seeing Libby. ‘The longing to see her, the yearning for her – the word missing doesn’t cover it.
‘It’s so much more than that. It was a senseless murder. Libby should not have died.’
The Legal Aid Agency, a department of the Ministry of Justice, said: ‘Legal aid is not paid directly to Defendants.
‘Legal aid is paid to solicitors and barristers for the provision of legal representation to ensure a fair trial.
‘Anyone facing a Crown Court trial is eligible for legal aid, subject to a strict means test.
‘Depending on their means, applicants for criminal legal aid can be required to pay contributions up to the entire cost of the defence, if they are convicted of at least one offence with which they are charged.’
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
