The plush farmhouse at the centre of one of Scotland’s most notorious murders is up for rent.

Secluded five-bedroom West Cairnbeg has been upgraded to 
stunning effect and is being marketed for £1700 a month.

But almost 50 years ago, the house in the farming heartland of the Mearns in Kincardineshire was revealed as the centre of a tangled web of love and lust.

On May 14, 1968, its owner, 
flamboyant millionaire farmer Maxwell Garvie, was bludgeoned and shot dead as he slept by his wife Sheila’s lover.

Sheila, 33, helped Brian Tevendale, 20, get the body out of the house and dump it and the pair were both convicted of murder.

Sheila Garvie and Brian Tevendale murdered Sheila's husband

All the people at the centre of the lurid trial, at which Sheila claimed she had been forced into sordid 
swinging parties by her husband, are now dead.

But the house, near Fordoun village, which failed to find a buyer for offers over £749,000, is still owned by Garvie and Sheila’s son Lloyd.

Sheila, who was released from her life sentence in 1978, passed away in a nursing home in November 2014, weeks after turning 80.

Until she was stricken with Alzheimer’s she had been running a seafront B&B in her hometown of Stonehaven.

Aside from her book Marriage to Murder, in which she made the case for her innocence, Sheila never uttered another word publicly about her role in the killing of Garvie, 35.

Crowds gather outside the courthouse for the trial

She and Tevendale, who became a village pub landlord in 
Perthshire on his release, turned on each other at 
the trial and never spoke 


afterwards. He died in 2003, aged 58, as he prepared to leave Scotland for a new life in Gambia.

On the night of the murder, the lovers dumped Garvie’s body in an underground tunnel at Lauriston Castle, near St Cyrus village.

For more than three months, Sheila, who had three children with Garvie, kept up the pretence that her husband had simply vanished into thin air.

She told police she woke up on the morning of May 15 to find her husband had gone.

She claimed to have no idea of his whereabouts.

The Garvies in a Rolls Royce
Maxwell Garvie with Trudi Birse

Garvie, notorious locally as a fun-loving, free-spending playboy who loved fast cars and even had his own plane, was treated as a missing person and there were 
no suspicions of anything more sinister.

But by August 1968, Sheila was struggling to hold on to her guilty secret and confided in her mum Edith Watson, who lived in 
Stonehaven, that she suspected Tevendale had killed Garvie.

Law-abiding Edith went straight to the police sergeant at Laurencekirk and on August 17, Garvie’s body was discovered where it had lain for 94 days.

Police charged Garvie and 
Tevendale with murder and Sheila made her first appearance at Stonehaven Sheriff Court.

A third man, Alan Peters, was also charged with the murder, but later acquitted.

The case captured the public imagination with long queues outside the High Court in Aberdeen when the trio went on trial.

The house at the time of the murder

Lurid details emerged of Garvie’s sexual habits during the 10-day proceedings.

Sheila claimed in her evidence that her husband held regular swingers’ parties in a remote house near Alford dubbed Kinky Cottage.

She claimed her husband urged her to take Tevendale – the
brother of his mistress Trudi Birse, a policeman’s wife – as her lover.

But Garvie did not bargain on Sheila and Tevendale falling in
love.

He jealously tried to come between the two but he was too late. Tevendale was besotted with Sheila – and it was an obsession that led to murder.

In court, Sheila claimed she’d been with her husband when she had been pulled out of bed by Tevendale, armed with a gun, and another man.

She said her lover dragged her to the bathroom and ordered her to stay there.

Sheila Garvie was found guilty of murder

She heard thumping noises before Tevendale came back and ordered her to stand guard outside the children’s bedroom.

As she stood by the door, she said, the two men dragged Garvie’s body into the hall.

But the prosecution claimed Sheila must have unbolted the back door to let Tevendale and Peters in – making her a central figure in the murder plot.

In turn, Tevendale claimed Sheila called him to the house where he found Garvie dead.

He said Sheila claimed her husband had died after the gun went off during a struggle.

Sheila Garvie leaves court

He added that he only helped her to get rid of Garvie’s body.

The case stoked such interest across Scotland that hundreds of people queued outside the court every day in a bid to secure seats in the public gallery.

At one point, there were 
gasps in the courtroom when Garvie’s skull was pulled from a cardboard box.

A pathologist held it towards the jurors and used a finger to show where the fatal bullet had entered and the track it took through the victim’s brain.

After 10 days the jury returned a guilty verdict for both Garvie – by a majority – and Tevendale – 
unanimously – and both were jailed for life.

Brian Tevendale after his release from prison

The case against Peters was found not proven.

After her release, Sheila first ran a guesthouse in Aberdeen. Just a year later, in 1979, she married a welder from Zimbabwe named David McLellan. The marriage did not last.

Sheila went on to marry drilling engineer Charles Mitchell while running a bed-and-breakfast back in Stonehaven.

But Charles Mitchell dropped dead from a heart attack outside a pub across the road from their home in December 1992.