Libby’s 7 minutes of ‘desperate screams’
Student murder trial hears of midnight cries from park
screams of ‘desperation’ continued for up to seven minutes at a park where student Libby squire was allegedly murdered, a court heard yesterday.
a witness living nearby told a jury he heard the cries before looking out of his bedroom window and seeing a man walking with ‘urgency’ from the park.
sam alford said that although it was night-time there was a full moon with snow on the ground so he ‘could see quite a lot’.
Father-of-two Pawel relowicz, 26, is accused of raping and murdering the 21-year-old student at the playing fields in Hull before dumping her ‘dead or dying’ into a river that borders them.
ccTV showed the drunken student getting into relowicz’s car at 12.08am on February 1, 2019 before he drove a short distance to the park.
mr alford, whose home overlooks the park, said he woke up at 12.14am and checked the time on his phone. He told sheffield crown court that the screams began a minute or two later.
‘The screams were coming from about 150 metres away,’ he said. ‘They were loud enough to reach my bedroom window.
‘The first two screams were intermittent, with maybe 30 seconds to a minute between them.’
The park was in a student residential area and he often heard partying noises including girls screaming, so he ignored the first cries.
But then mr alford heard the noises again. He said he could tell they were ‘female screams’, adding: ‘The screams were enough to make me think, “What could that be?” It was not constant but intermittent, that’s what stood out for me.’
richard Wright Qc, prosecuting, asked what the cries conveyed to him. mr alford replied: ‘Like, desThe
‘Loud enough to reach my bedroom’
peration.’ They carried on for between ‘four and seven minutes’.
Then the figure of a man caught his eye. mr alford said he was walking, not running, but looked like he ‘wanted to get off the park’. ‘He didn’t look back once, he was looking forward and moving with urgency to get off the park,’ he said.
Libby, from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, was studying philosophy at Hull University and lived in a shared student house.
The jury heard that she returned from a night out after being refused entry to a nightclub for being too drunk. Libby staggered up the road, falling over and rejecting offers of help from concerned passers-by.
relowicz, a married Polish butcher living in Hull, was allegedly patrolling the area in his car ‘looking for an opportunity’ and moved in on the helpless student. she was never seen alive again after getting into his car.
He told police he left her at the park unharmed and returned home. court heard that his DNa was found on Libby’s body after it was recovered from the Humber estuary about seven weeks later. relowicz is expected to claim she instigated sex with him in the park.
Home Office pathologist Dr matthew Lyall said there was ‘no sign of overt violence’ on Libby’s body and the cause of death is ‘unascertained’ because her body had been in the water for seven weeks.
He said there was no ‘positive’ evidence of asphyxiation but it was a possibility. His findings did not exclude the possibility of strangulation. But Dr Lyall agreed that the pathological evidence did not prove Libby was killed.
The court has heard that during the 18 months leading up to Libby’s disappearance relowicz committed nine sexually motivated offences in the student area of Hull.
He has admitted watching women through windows in a state of undress, having sex or showering.
relowicz denies rape and murder. The case continues.