MISSING homeowner John Piotrzkowski has been tracked down by the Oxford Mail after a futile search for him by the city council.

Labelled a love rat by his former lover and chased by the city council over a derelict home, we got on to the case and found Mr Piotrzkowski.

The city council this week appealed to Oxford Mail readers to help track Mr Piotrzkowski down.

The council wants to serve a compulsory purchase order on a house in Shelley Road, Oxford, which was owned by his mother until her death in 1988 and then passed to him.

The derelict house, empty for almost ten years, has been severely vandalised. It was boarded up by the council and cleared out at a cost of thousands of pounds.

Today Mr Piotrzkowski's ex-partner Jacqueline Greer, of Windsor Crescent, East Hagbourne, who contacted the Oxford Mail after seeing the story, said: "As usual he's walked away and left the responsibility to someone else."

She claimed she was left to bring up their son, Connor, alone after Mr Piotrzkowski left them in July 1996, three months after he was born.

Ms Greer claims Mr Piotrzkowski owes her more than £3,000 in child support and she has reported him to the Child Support Agency. She said: "We met in August 1995. We split up the following July but we saw each other off and on just for the sake of Connor.

"In June last year, I got a letter saying he'd be going away and I assumed he'd gone to Germany, because that's where he'd been before."

But Mr Piotrzkowski apparently did not leave the area and now Ms Greer is anxious that he should help pay for Connor's support.

"He's left it to me and my parents, who are pensioners, to do the work for the last two years."

Postman Mr Piotrzkowski, now living in The Avenue, Kennington, admitted he had abandoned Ms Greer.

He said: "I'm afraid I did turn my back on her - not through wanting to, but because there was no reasoning with her at that time."

He said the last he heard from Ms Greer was when she took out an injunction to stop him seeing his son.

He added: "She wanted me to pay £100 a week when I was unemployed. If I can't see the child, it's difficult for me to come to terms with actually paying for him."

Mr Piotrzkowski said he had lived in the three-bedroomed house in Shelley Road for a while but moved out because it kept getting vandalised.

He welcomed the news that the city council wanted to compulsorily purchase it.

"That will be the end of my trouble once and for all. It will be ideal. I'm going to deal with it now."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.