“Him and I actually share a birthday. So I said, "maybe we could get together on our birthdays and talk about what you did to my daughter”, Lisa Squires tells me whilst sitting with a cup of tea.
I’m sitting in Lisa’s living room, cup of tea in hand. I first heard Lisa speak on a radio programme, I was sent it by a friend who thought I might be interested in her campaign work.
In February 2019, the unthinkable happened. 21-years-old Libby was on a night out with friends, she was refused entry into a bar f and left to make her way home. She was alone.
Lisa says they were more like friends: “she was incredible and i know a lot of people say their children were incredible but she really was.” She did “everything in extremes” so was “absolutely lovely or absolutely horrible”.
When she first went missing Lisa tells me one of her friends summed it up, “she said Libby could be an absolute bitch, but she was the nicest bitch I’ve ever met”.
Knowing Relowicz was the last person to see her first born child alive clearly still haunts Lisa. She has a “need to know, to be in the same space as the person who was last with Libby.”
She started the process of meeting him around two years ago. At first he agreed, then hesitated and later went on to cancel their meeting.
“I haven’t given up. And I will keep going. Even if I have to apply every year. And he says no every year, you know. I’m not going anywhere, he’s not going anywhere”.
For Lisa it’s knowing she did everything she could to find out what happened that night and “take some power back”.
By meeting him she says he’ll know she’s still there and “Libby’s legacy still goes on. And she is much better than him. And she will change the world for women because of him.”
Since Libby’s death, Lisa has turned to campaign work to keep other women and girls safe. “I was just empowered by this devastation in our family. And I can’t do anything more for her in life. But this is what I can do for her in death.”
She used to campaign for life sentences for anyone that rapes and murders. But now she thinks it should be for anyone that murders.
“The victim doesn't get to come back in 24 years time, 25 years time, you know, Libby doesn't get to come back and 27 years and say, Oh, I'm here now Mum, you know, because if she did, he could come out tomorrow.”
She spoke to Boris Johnson, the then Prime Minister about it last year. She told him “if it had been one of your daughters that was raped and murdered, you would change the law tomorrow.”
Lisa thinks if it happened to someone who was “higher up the levels of power than I certainly am they would change the law tomorrow.”
Well what did Boris Johnson say?
“Well, he said that we didn't have enough prison space. So I said we'll build more prisons. That seems quite simple…But it was all very, you know, there isn't the money there isn't like” But Lisa says he was “genuinely quite concerned about it.”
I met with Lisa the day Baroness Casey released her damning report into the Met police. It details how the violence against women and girls strategy was “hollow” - basically meaningless.
She states how the Met has been externally saying they took these crimes seriously when behind closed doors, the fridges which kept forensic rape kits were kept in were broken - and a lunchbox was even found in one, spoiling the evidence.
Lisa says she heard the report on the radio this morning. Details of how violence against women and girls (VAWG) was being deprioritised and defunded must be hard to listen to?
Lisa works closely with some parts of the Met and speaks highly of their VAWG units and officers. But after hearing the news this morning she’s frustrated: “how they can defund violence against women, I do not know. I think the whole police service needs an overhaul. It is underfunded in every single area.”
She says it’s tough “but it almost needs to stop, have a reset and start again”. Lisa pauses and gently laughs, “I don't want to sound like a man hater. But is it a man that's taken that decision to defund it?”
Considering 82% of the force are male, it seems likely.
One of the many unbelievable things about Lisa is her determination for change but doing work in both preventive and reactive areas. She works with the Met in helping how to deal with families who have lost loved ones. But she also talks to young men about behaviour that isn’t ok and helps spread awareness around indecent exposure.
Even the term ‘flashing’ normalises what it is. It’s a sexual offence, a non-contact sexual offence, but still one.
Lisa describes these as “red flags” and can be used to help identify patterns of sexual offence. Libby’s killer had committed a number of other sexually-motivated crimes in the city’s student area. Peering through windows, breaking into their homes and stealing intimate objects.
It was only when he was arrested for suspicion of Libby’s disappearance that it became known he had a history of sexual offences.
It sounds all too familiar to Wayne Couzens, the police officer who raped and murdered Sarah Everard. He had been exposing himself weeks before he murdered Sarah. And it’s these “red flags” Lisa details that can potentially stop perpetrators.
She thinks men who expose themselves should be tagged and have no choice but to receive “treatment”. This means education and help unpicking why they are exposing themselves but with the hope their behaviour doesn’t escalate.
She says it shouldn’t be down to her to fight for change but that’s the situation. “And maybe women are going to get their day…but women do seem to be fighting. There’s that mothering instinct, you know that protective, mothering instinct that we have for all of our children. And for me, I feel even more protective of her. And maybe once they go, that instinct becomes an instinct to change it and to make everybody else safer.”