Shattering of island idyll
How Alesha’s innocence lay in stark contrast to murky world of cannabis smokers and their shadowy dealers
Shambolic lives of those around her
ON her last night alive, six-yearold Alesha MacPhail fell asleep to a Peppa Pig DVD. In the next room her father and his teenage girlfriend settled down to some porn.
Earlier that evening, the little girl who loved bubbles and the colour pink had bounced on her grandfather’s bed as she said goodnight to him.
Later, as she slept, her drug dealer father started receiving messages from two school pupils looking for cannabis. One of them was his daughter’s killer.
These were the disturbing contrasts inside the top-floor flat in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute in the hours before Alesha was snatched from her bed, raped and murdered: an innocent, fun-loving little girl cheek by jowl with the feckless, dysfunctional lives of those supposed to have been caring for her.
‘Did it ever cross your mind,’ asked defence counsel Brian McConnachie, QC, during the trial of the little girl’s killer, ‘that your drug dealing might have some relevance to Alesha being taken?’
‘It did not,’ came 26-year-old Robert MacPhail’s reply. Alesha’s father and his 18-year-old girlfriend Toni Louise McLachlan – who also dealt drugs – were not the ones on trial for her murder.
But, whether they realised it or not, their evidence in the trial of the teenager who did kill her described a lifestyle wholly incompatible with responsible parenting.
It was not just the crime which shocked Scotland. It was the shambolic lives of those around her, the dearth of honest values, the dark side of Bute, hitherto seldom reported.
Initial accounts had suggested that Alesha was taken during an idyllic summer holiday, staying with her father on an island free from crime and filled with adventure for youngsters of Alesha’s age.
Her father, some locals had told the Press after Alesha’s body was found, was ‘just a brilliant guy’ who ‘worshipped the ground she walked on’.
The reality, as the trial brought home, was chillingly different.
In fact, Alesha was staying at the home of a cannabis dealer parent who supplied the drug to schoolchildren, among others, to finance his own use of the drug. She was staying in a place where people wanting to buy drugs from her father would, on occasion, come knocking on the front door.
Typically, the trial heard, the drug changed hands in a bus shelter across the road from the three-bedroom flat where Robert MacPhail lived with his unmarried parents, Calum MacPhail and Angela King.
Then there was his tempestuous and allegedly abusive relationship with his girlfriend. A neighbour told the trial Alesha’s father routinely beat up Miss McLachlan during the summer of 2017.
It may have seemed to an innocent sixyear-old that a dreamy, three-and-a-halfweek summer holiday of donkey rides and playing on the beach lay ahead.
The truth is it was time spent in her father’s orbit – an environment far removed from the family-friendly ‘doon the watter’ destination of popular repute.
‘You won’t see weed being smoked in the town centre because the kids know where the CCTV cameras are,’ one Rothesay mother told the Mail. ‘But they find somewhere to do it. It’s everywhere now.’
Meanwhile, the man in charge of policing Bute, area commander Chief Inspector Douglas Wilson, said it was a ‘common misconception’ among outsiders the place remained a crime-free utopia.
Where once it took years for mainland trends to reach the Scottish islands, now, thanks to mobile phones and high-speed broadband, it was instantaneous.
‘If you think that kids on Bute aren’t looking at the same things that kids are looking at everywhere else, you are living in fairyland,’ he said. ‘The whole idea that they are living on an island that is cut off, a backwater, is totally outdated.’
In an effort to stop drugs being smuggled on to Bute, he said, police sniffer dogs were now deployed on ferries.
It was in the Bute village of Port Bannatyne that a tenement was raided four years ago and a huge cannabis cultivation, stretching to more than 2,000 plants with a street value of £900,000, was found.
Here in this squalid underbelly, rarely seen by visitors to the island, lurked a teenage cannabis fiend who fantasised about killing.
Here Facebook was used not as a social networking tool but as a communication tool for buying and selling cannabis. Indeed, it was through this medium that Mr MacPhail and the teen fantasist had fallen out some months previously over a £10 drug debt.
According to Mr MacPhail, he had stopped supplying drugs to the boy after the teenager’s mother requested via a friend that he desist. Yet, in the early hours of the morning that Alesha disappeared from her father’s home, he received messages both from the 16-yearold and from a girl of 14 to whom he had previously sold drugs.
Mr MacPhail said he did not pick up these messages. As a result, it is thought the 16-year-old decided to set off in the early hours to the flat where his supplier lived. There it seems he was able to let himself in because, said Alesha’s grandfather, ‘in Rothesay a lot of people leave their door unlocked’.
Then, for reasons only he can fathom, the teenager who came to the flat looking for cannabis left with a little girl instead.
Getting no answer at the flat’s main door, the boy is thought to have let himself in and found the bedroom where Alesha was sleeping. He left with the little girl and, minutes later, was picked up on CCTV carrying her along a beach to the spot where he murdered her.
The nightmarish footage played to the jury in court appeared to show Alesha’s legs swinging as she was carried by the teenager around 2.30am. Was she afraid? Did she scream for help? Again, only her killer knows.
What is clear is the boy had told a friend that one day he might kill, just for the life experience. Now this small girl, plucked from her bedroom in the middle of the night,
was about to be murdered in service to that grotesque aspiration.
Although Alesha was undoubtedly loved by her parents and doted on by her grandparents, there was a chaotic element to her brief life.
Her mother, Georgina Lochrane, 23, had just turned 16 when she became pregnant with her and her relationship with Mr MacPhail lasted barely three months beyond the birth. Nor did her relationship with the father of her other, younger child, last.
Alesha’s father, meanwhile, was long-term jobless and without apparent ambition beyond keeping himself in cannabis. His new girlfriend, Toni, was only 16 when she started seeing him. She had dropped out of college and, according to her own evidence, had also sold cannabis to the boy who would later abduct and murder Alesha.
She denied claims by Alesha’s killer that they had often met for sex behind Mr MacPhail’s back – indeed, that they had done so hours before Alesha was taken – but left jurors in little doubt her relationship with Mr MacPhail could be stormy.
It was amidst this cast of young and, in some cases, feckless characters that Alesha made her early way in life – in the circumstances doing rather well.
She won praise from her teachers for her conscientious approach at school.
Wendy Davie, headteacher of Chapelside Primary School in Airdrie, said: ‘She loved being at school and enjoyed all aspects of literacy, in particular writing.
‘She was such a perfectionist in her handwriting and was very proud of her work.
‘Alesha was very friendly and she welcomed everyone first thing in the morning at breakfast club. She was a very considerate child who loved being part of a group and she was popular with all the other children and was a smiley and happy young girl.’
By all appearances she had been no less smiley and happy when she was visiting her father on Bute.
Photographs posted on their social media profiles suggest that Alesha was comfortable in his father’s girlfriend’s presence who, according to her evidence, loved Alesha ‘to bits’.
Alesha was just a few days into her summer holiday on Bute when her life was cut cruelly short.
Although the manner of her death could never have been predicted, the unavoidable truth is that it was through her father’s drug dealing that she was exposed to danger on an island everyone had supposed was safe.
A shadow now hangs over the town of Rothesay, a holiday spot at the centre of national attention for reasons which would once have seemed incredible.
But the worst was true. The seaside resort was home to a teenage murderer – and to an underbelly more commonly associated with inner city ghettoes.
Alesha died in this place. And, with her, a measure of innocence did too.