The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Movie maker under fire for copycat murder tale
Former Angus provost criticises film for using Brechin murder plot Flatmate turned into killer
A former Angus provost has launched a stinging attack on the makers of a horror film said to be “influenced” by the brutal murder of a Brechin woman.
Speaking after Graders “re-emerged” and went “on demand” in America, Ruth Leslie-Melville said it was disappointing that Jolanta Bledaite’s horrific murder in 2008 was still being used “as a money spinner”.
David Hutchison’s Graders was originally released to criticism from the Angus community in 2012 and tells the story of a woman’s search for her sister who has gone missing while working in a fish factory in the Scottish Highlands.
The movie has re-emerged and is now available on Vimeo On Demand where users can rent or buy movies and it will shortly be available again on Amazon.
Mrs Leslie-Melville said: “What a very sad reflection on human nature that this director should want to resurrect this shameful story.
“It is vile that the tragedy of Jolanta should be turned into a spectacle to be ogled by sick people.
“The callousness of trying to make money out of the tragic death of that blameless lassie, Jolanta, horrifies me.
“Jolanta did not deserve to be tortured and mutilated. It was a tragedy for her grandmother and appalling for the Brechin community.
“I am incredibly disappointed to learn that Jolanta’s appalling death should be used as a money spinner by someone who, in my opinion, is a heartless and greedy sensationalist.”
Mr Hutchison previously told how he recalled the murders of Jolanta Bledaite and serial killer Peter Tobin’s Polish victim Angelika Kluk while writing the screenplay.
Jolanta’s head and hands were found on the seafront at Arbroath in 2008, days after the farm worker had been suffocated and dismembered by fellow Lithuanians Vitas Plytnykas and Aleksandras Skirda in her Brechin flat.
Miss Kluk, 23, a student from Skoczow near Krakow, was murdered and buried under the floorboards of a Catholic chapel in 2006 by serial killer Peter Tobin.
Responding to Mrs Leslie-Melville’s criticism, Mr Hutchison told The Courier: “Graders is a work of fiction.
“Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
“Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.” After a short stay in a caravan near Brechin following her arrival in Angus from Cornwall, a comfortable, simply furnished flat in a tenement in Brechin’s Southesk Street was where Jolanta Bledaite called home.
Tragically, it was to become the setting for a nightmarish chapter in the criminal history of not just the rural county of Angus, but the whole of Scotland.
She shared it with Aleksandras Skirda, a young man Ms Bledaite believed to be her friend, but who would become one of the two men to end her life.
For the last few weeks before her death, only Jolanta and Skirda had been living in the flat.
A week prior to the fateful events, a Polish worker moved in, and there were also plans for a further man to come in to live at Earlsdon.
The young woman’s killing was a callous, pre-planned crime hatched by her so-called young friend and the older Vitas Plytnykas.