A HUSBAND and wife who were subjected to a lengthy extortion campaign by two thugs from Ayr have described the "years of torture" they went through after being threatened with rape, child abduction and more.

Scott Colville, 43, and 39-year-old David McCallum told a business owner that his wife would be raped and his children abducted if he did not pay them £20,000.

As part of the intimidation campaign, the now-jailed pair also obtained photographs of the couple's children and contacted a funeral director to seek to falsely arrange the collection of a child’s body from the family’s home.

The couple's daughter still suffers emotionally from the tirade, and according to her father, has to phone him when she's walking home in the dark so that she feels safe.

And now the couple have spoken of their horror at the calls which went on over many years and at all hours of night and day.

The husband said: "We were basically lying in bed and we started getting phone calls in the early hours of the morning.

"It was different voices. One of the accents was quite fast and hard to make out, ranting and raving and shouting.

"My wee boy was crying so they said 'tell him to shut the f*** up' and they would rant and rave even more saying, 'We're going to f*****g kill you, you'll give me 20 grand or I'll rape your wife and take your children.'

"I'd tell tell them 'I don’t know what you're on about', and they'd keep saying 'you owe me money, you’ve an outstanding debt'.

"That was their first call. I was bewildered. I recorded it off my house phone. The police came out a few hours later and we let them hear it.

"We started getting more and more phone calls, so the police put a tap on the phone so they could hear too."

The couple even moved away from their home for a while to stay with a family member after the police told them there was a 'viable threat' to their safety.

"We didn’t feel safe," the man, who lives in Dunfermline, continued. 

""They made click, click sounds, like the noise of a gun, it was dangerous.

"The police knew something that we didn’t know. They gave us poles to jam our doors, and stuff to seal our letterbox.

"Once we got them in place we still got the calls, but we felt a bit safer.

"We put our children to my wife's sister's.

"My wife's family were even too scared to visit in case someone followed them back home.

"The police gave my wife a rape alarm, and also, with the amount of phone calls we were getting, they gave us a phone password.

"It went on, them phoning ten times a day.

"One day the house phone went and and it was the local funeral director, who my wife knows.

"They had been called and the funeral director said 'they're trying to send a hearse to your house'.

"They phoned my brother in law, they threatened him for money, threatened him to come get my money.

“It was three and a half years of looking over our shoulder."

McCallum, of Inkerman Court, was jailed for three years, while Colville, of Churchill Towers, received a prison term of two years and nine months, after the duo were found guilty of two charges of extortion following a trial at Dunfermline Sheriff Court.

"When the jury found them guilty it took the weight off a bit," the man continued.

"It told us that we weren’t all imagining this. It was surreal - it felt like torture.

"For me that was a small victory. The sentencing is obviously a bonus, but I hate to think that they’d get off lightly.

“Our daughter still suffers. She had been looking over her shoulder; when it got dark she wouldn't go out.

"She found it hard to socialise.

"She's started going to college, but every night if she's out she phones us to let us know 'oh I'm just walking down the road the now'.

"If its dark, she phones and talks to us on the phone."