A 26-year-old butcher will be sentenced today for the rape and murder of university student Libby Squire.

Married father-of-two Pawel Relowicz raped Ms Squire on a playing field in Hull before dumping her in the River Hull on February 1, 2019.

Relowicz showed no emotion as he was convicted by a jury at Sheffield Crown Court on Thursday after 28 hours of deliberations.

Ms Squire’s parents, Lisa and Russ, cried and held hands in the public gallery after waiting a week for the jury to return its verdicts.

During a four-week long trial, they heard how Relowicz picked up the second year Hull University philosophy student as she wandered around the Beverley Road area of Hull in a confused, upset and drunken state in freezing conditions.

The jury heard a mass of circumstantial evidence linking Relowicz to Ms Squire’s disappearance, despite pathologists being unable to determine how she died due to the time her body had been in the water before it was was found in the Humber Estuary almost seven weeks after she went missing.

The court was told Ms Squire had been out with friends on the evening of January 31 2019, but was so drunk she was refused entry to a club.

Her friends paid a taxi driver to take her home but, instead of going into her shared student house, Ms Squire wandered in a drunken state, falling over in the snow and refusing offers of help from passers-by, until she encountered Relowicz.

He told the jury he did not kill her and said he had consensual sex with her in Oak Road.

The defendant admitted a series of what his barrister called “utterly disgusting” sexual offences in the months before that night, and he admitted he watched porn and masturbated in the street in the hours after he said he had sex with the student.

Giving evidence through an interpreter, Polish-born Relowicz, of Raglan Street, Hull, told the court he was driving around the city on the evening of Ms Squire’s disappearance because he was “looking for a woman to have easy sex”.

Relowicz was found guilty of rape unanimously by a jury of five men and seven women and guilty of murder by a majority of 11 to one.

Speaking outside court on Thursday, with her husband by her side, Mrs Squire said: “As a family, today’s verdict changes nothing for us.

“There is no closure. We don’t get to have Libby back. Our lives don’t revert back to normal.

“Libby will always be with us and we are all so proud of our beautiful, caring, wonderful girl.

“And although she has been physically taken from us, the memories we have and the love we share will never be taken.”