The two-part factual series The Killing of Claire Leveque has arrived on Disney+, recounting the murder of a Canadian woman in Scotland’s Shetland Islands. The programme follows the brutal 2024 killing of Claire Leveque, a 24-year-old from Alberta, Canada, who had travelled to Shetland to visit her boyfriend, fellow Canadian Aren Pearson.
What happened to Claire Leveque
Leveque and Pearson, 41, met in Canada and travelled to Scotland together in 2023, where they stayed with his elderly mother at her home on mainland Shetland. On February 11, 2023, Leveque was found dead in a hot tub at the remote property in Sandness. She had been stabbed multiple times, choked and submerged underwater.
At the time of the murder, Pearson told a 999 operator, police officers and attending paramedics that he had killed Leveque. He also drove his sports car into the sea.
Trial and conviction
According to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, Pearson subjected Leveque to a “prolonged period of domestic abuse and controlling behaviour” and physically assaulted her on several occasions, the High Court in Edinburgh heard. The documentary covers the trial in October 2025, where Pearson denied murder, claiming Leveque had stabbed herself, but was found guilty of murder.
Leveque’s friend Hope Saunders told CBC: “It feels like a bad dream.” She added: “It’s sickening that someone so bright and so young and so beautiful could have her life taken away from her in the flash of the moment like that.” Saunders also said: “When it comes to thinking of Claire, I’m trying to remember her as the person she was, not how she was taken from this world.”
The series previously aired on Channel 5 and on Prime Video, and is now streaming on Disney+.
