Kids who kill kids
Aaron Campbell was 16 when he murdered six-yearold Alesha MacPhail - but what drives...
‘Born evil’; ‘a monster’; ‘as bad as a human can be’. These aren’t the kind of phrases you’d associate with a teenage boy. Yet, Aaron Campbell was not your typical teenage boy.
At just 13, he’d tortured and skinned two cats. He spent hours playing a disturbing video game where the main character ‘Slender Man’ abducts children and takes them to the woods to kill them, and he’d already confessed to a friend that he’d like to kill someone, just for ‘the lifetime experience’.
And, on 2 July 2018, this was exactly what he did. The details of the case – the subject of the first episode of Crime+Investigation’s new series, Kids Who Kill: Evil Close Up – are chilling. Alesha, from Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, was staying with her father, Robert, in her grandparents’ house on the Isle of Bute. A picturesque island with close communities, the crime rate was
minimal. The last place you’d expect such horrors to unfold.
So when Alesha’s grandfather, Calum, awoke at 6am and found her bed empty, he presumed she’d gone in to her father’s bed for a cuddle. It was only when her grandmother, Angela King, checked that it was discovered she wasn’t in the house. She was reported missing and, soon, every emergency service on the island was searching for her.
Unbeknownst to them, earlier that morning, Campbell, who’d been partying with friends the night before, had messaged Toni McLachlan, Robert’s girlfriend. He’d bought drugs from the couple before and wanted cannabis.
When he didn’t hear back, he armed himself with a knife and went to their house. The front door wasn’t locked – it wasn’t an area where you had to be particularly security-conscious.
However, once he entered the house and found Alesha, lying in bed, his thoughts became far more dark. He told a psychologist later, it was ‘a moment of opportunity, all I thought about was killing her once I saw her’.
Abandoning his knife, he picked up the small girl and carried her out of the house. When she awoke and sleepily asked him what was happening, he said he was a friend of her father’s and was taking her home.
‘That is so manipulative,’ says Emma Kenny, a psychological therapist. ‘Because what he is doing is making her trust him. Because as far as she is concerned, she is in safe hands.’
Yet she was far from safe with the schoolboy. Because he took her to the grounds of an abandoned hotel and tortured, raped and killed her.
The next morning, dozens of people – including Campbell’s mother, Janette – joined the search. When Toni saw the messages from Aaron, she replied and asked him to keep an eye out for Alesha. ‘I’m sure she’s not gone far,’ he answered ominously.
And indeed, she hadn’t. At 8.54am, her body was discovered just a 15-minute walk from her grandparents’ house. Battered and brutalised, she’d suffered 117 separate wounds and sexual abuse, the cause of death put down to pressure on her face and throat. The pathologist described the injuries as ‘catastrophic’.
‘It’s clear from Alesha’s injuries that Campbell really enjoyed harming her and that’s what makes him a different type of killer,’ Emma explains. ‘The gratuitous violence and rage involved in those moments for that little, defenceless child is incomprehensible.’
Tragically, word had spread on Facebook and that was how Alesha’s mum, Georgina, who lived on the mainland, found out her daughter was dead.
It was Janette who initially brought her son to the attention of the police. She’d checked the CCTV camera she’d had installed in case her mother – who suffered from dementia – wandered off.
The footage showed her son entering and leaving the house twice during the hours when Alesha was suspected to have disappeared. He denied having anything to do with it, so she handed over the video to the police.
And when they interviewed him as a witness, police checked Campbell’s phone and discovered a Snapchat message he’d sent to friends after Alesha’s body was found, with a picture of himself in the mirror, saying, ‘Found the guy who did it’ and a search for ‘how do police find DNA?’
On 5 July, he was charged with abduction, rape and murder. Despite overwhelming DNA evidence, Campbell pleaded not guilty and forced Alesha’s parents to endure a nine-day trial in January 2019. He attempted to blame Toni, but the jury were not fooled. Within three hours, he was found unanimously guilty.
Unusually, after the verdict, the judge lifted a ban on naming him, after a legal bid by media outlets.
It was only then that he made a full confession to a clinical psychologist and social worker, admitting he had to zip his mouth shut to stop himself laughing during the trial and that he found it mildly amusing it took the police two days to arrest him.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 27 years, later reduced to 24 years on appeal. The judge, Lord Matthews, described Campbell as a ‘cold, calculating, remorseless and dangerous individual… completely lacking in victim empathy’ and said it was clear that ‘reintegration or rehabilitation are remote possibilities’.
Since being imprisoned in Polmont Prison, near Falkirk, in Scotland, he hasn’t received a single visitor.
So what caused the 16-year-old, a child himself, to commit such a heinous crime? Was he simply born evil? Emma doesn’t think so, despite believing Campbell has what is known as a dark triad personality, having high levels of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. ‘These are people you don’t want to meet,’ she says. ‘Of course, they aren’t all serial killers, but they’re very manipulative, cruel people. Like very hostile and aggressive trolls on the internet.’
Did playing violent video games have an effect? ‘Most studies show that if people are raised to a state of elevated violence after playing such games, it is only temporary. We should be more interested in the choice of game Campbell was drawn to – that speaks to us about the darker side of his personality.’
The truth is, we’ll never know what caused Campbell to take and torture Alesha. Some things are simply too evil to be explained.
Kids Who Kill: Evil Up Close airs on Crime+Investigation® on Mondays at 9pm. The full series is available on all catch up and on demand services.
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