A 26-year-old man accused of raping and murdering student Libby Squire “only wanted to help”, a jury has heard.
Pawel Relowicz told Sheffield crown court that he had consensual sex with Squire on the evening she disappeared, but said she was not “a target”.
He denies raping and murdering the 21-year-old in Hull, east Yorkshire, on 1 February 2019.
The court had earlier heard that he drove her to Oak Road playing fields, where he raped and murdered her before putting her into the River Hull. Her body was recovered about seven weeks later in the Humber estuary.
Speaking through an interpreter, Relowicz told the court that he was “looking for a woman to have easy sex” on the night of 31 January but said he just wanted to help Squire, whom he had found drunk and distressed in the street after being refused entry to a nightclub.
In cross-examination on Tuesday, Richard Wright QC for the prosecution asked Relowicz: “And though you told us yesterday that you were looking for easy sex, this drunk, hypothermic, lost girl was not the easy sex you were looking for?”
Relowicz, who worked as a butcher in Malton, North Yorkshire, replied: “She wanted my help and I only wanted to help her.”
He told the jury that he offered Squire, a philosophy student at the University of Hull, a lift home. After describing how he could not get an address out of Squire, Relowicz told the court he stopped near Oak Road as he thought she was going to be sick.
Relowicz said she asked for a hug and they ended up kissing before they had sex on the ground near his car. The defendant said she tried to kiss him again but he turned away and she scratched his face.
He told the court that he then drove away and saw her behind his car shouting at him not to leave her. Wright asked Relowicz why he did not say this to the police when he was arrested five days after Squire disappeared.
He said: “it was not a deliberate decision. I had two children and a wife and I didn’t want her to find out I had cheated on her.
“I didn’t do anything to Libby. I didn’t kill her, I didn’t rape her and I left her where I said I left her.”
The trial continues.
