Arbroath beach murder trial: Photos of body parts shown to jury

Published on Tuesday 3 February 2009 17:53

A MURDER trial jury was today shown "distressing" photographs of a woman's head and two hands lying on a beach.

The body parts were found wrapped in plastic bags at Arbroath, Angus, on April 1 last year, the High Court in Edinburgh heard.

Their discovery sparked a major police inquiry.

The jury was shown the photographs at the start of the trial of 41-year-old Vitas Plytnykas, who denies killing and mutilating 35-year-old Lithuanian woman Jolanta Bledaite in her flat in Brechin, Angus, and dumping her body parts in the sea.

Plytnykas has lodged a special defence of alibi and one of incrimination, blaming another man, 20-year-old Lithuanian Aleksandras Skirda.

The jury also heard how Skirda, who has already admitted murdering Ms Bledaite, said in the days after Ms Bledaite's disappearance that she had left the flat they shared and gone off with some Polish people to Montrose.

The trial's first witness, constable Lynsey Bovill, told the court she went to a beach at South Street, Arbroath, on the morning of April 1 last year after being told that a human head had been found.

It followed a meeting with a woman and her daughters in an Arbroath house, the jury heard.

The Tayside Police officer said she found a black bin liner on the beach, containing a supermarket carrier bag.

"There was a small tear about an inch-wide where I could see some flesh," she said.

"Did it become apparent this was the head of a woman?" prosecutor Alex Prentice QC asked later. The witness agreed.

Photographs showing close-ups of part of the head and some hair were shown to the jury after Mr Prentice warned that he will be showing pictures of a "distressing nature".

Ms Bovill, 29, described how she then found two other plastic bags on the same beach, which contained two human hands.

Pictures of the hands were also shown to the jurors.

The witness agreed with the prosecutor that steps were then taken to preserve the scene and a "major incident inquiry team" was put together after the discovery.