The block of flats in Brechin where a young Lithuanian woman was brutally murdered could be demolished to rid the burgh of an unwanted reminder of one of the most gruesome episodes in its history.
Earlsdon House in Southesk Street was home to Jolanta Bledaite (35) when she was murdered and dismembered by two of her countrymen for her money.
The killers, Vitas Plytnykas and Aleksandras Skirda, were brought to justice and are now serving long jail sentences.
But the four-storey block of flats remains a bleak reminder to the people of Brechin of an atrocity that put the Angus town on the world map for all the wrong reasons.
Locals have called for the building to be razed to try and help them blot out what happened there. While it was occupied, mostly by migrant workers, that seemed unlikely to happen. But now it has become a ghost tenement, left in eerie silence. All but one of the seven flats is empty.
The building was owned by Magnus Properties, which had Jolanta’s flat gutted and redecorated, leaving no trace of what happened there.
But the firm’s property leasing side went into administration last August.
Administrators PricewaterhouseCooper could not say what would happen to the building. However it was indicated it might be difficult to find a buyer.
Barmaid Donna Guthrie and her two teenage sons were the last locals to live there. They fled after the dreadful events of two years ago.
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the local community who would want to live there after what happened,” said a woman across the street. “Who could blame them?”DecayingThe building is rapidly decaying. Angus Provost and Brechin councillor Ruth Leslie Melville said, “It is not the most beautiful of buildings.”
In recent years, because most inhabitants were migrant workers from Eastern Europe, the building was dubbed Poles’ Palace, but now it is known as Brechin’s house of horrors.
The block was built for the families of key workers at the Coventry and Gauge Company, which was established in the town during the second world war.
However, since the early days of the migrant worker influx into Angus, its inhabitants have been mainly Poles and Lithuanians.
Graffiti is daubed on doorways, the concrete stairways are filthy and broken and rubbish is left lying.
Its three remaining residents are a Latvian woman and two Poles sharing a flat. They speak little English, open the door fearfully to strangers and work in a potato store at Unthank on the town’s outskirts.
However, a local gangmaster said the exodus from the building had little to do with the grim events there and more to do with the recession.
He said, “Most of the people who rented the flats worked in construction. There is no work any more for them and even on the farms, it’s getting harder to find work.”
He said the numbers of migrant workers coming to the area had noticeably dropped during the recession.
There were still considerable numbers — Latvian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian. But significantly, there are fewer Lithuanians.