Court / ‘Crime of exceptional depravity’: Judge tells Sandness murderer he committed ‘feral butchery’

THE MURDER of Claire Leveque has been described as “feral butchery” and a “crime of exceptional depravity” by the judge overseeing the case.

Aren Pearson, 41, was found guilty of 24-year-old Leveque’s murder in Sandness on 11 February last year on Wednesday, following a six-day trial at the Edinburgh High Court.

Leveque died after sustaining 55 injuries during the attack – which occurred in Pearson’s mother’s hot tub – with 26 of those stab wounds.

However Pearson tried to claim it was Leveque herself who had repeatedly stabbed herself during the incident.

Judge Lord Arthurson said Pearson’s defence was a “grave insult to her memory and to her bereaved family”.

Aren Pearson.

Aren Pearson.

He told Pearson that he had subjected Leveque to a “cruel campaign of violence and coercive control.”

And the judge said the woman, who had been “isolated and vulnerable” in Sandness, had sustained “significant defensive injuries” during the attack.

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Lord Arthurson said Leveque’s right nostril had been sliced by a knife during the assault, and that Pearson had submerged her body in the hot tub water as a “final attempt to finish her off”.

Pearson also took a video of her lifeless body, the judge said.

“Ms Leveque died a squalid death of quite unimaginable multifaceted violence, including in particular severe and frenzied instrumental violence, all at your hands,” Lord Arthurson said.

“This was a sustained episode of feral butchery.

“You have sought to blame Ms Leveque for your own assaults against her, and you have, in a grave insult to her memory and to her bereaved family, put forward a defence that Ms Leveque inflicted these catastrophic injuries upon herself, a defence that the jury have unanimously rejected.”

Lord Arthurson paid tribute to Leveque’s family, who sat through the trial, adding they had “conducted themselves impeccably at all times”.

This was “in the face of what they have had to hear about your disgraceful crimes against their loved one.”

“One cannot imagine how her father has found the courage to do so, each day reliving the trauma of his daughter’s violent death so vividly in this courtroom,” Lord Arthurson said.

“It cannot be doubted that the family of your victim will forever live in the shadow of her absence.”