SMIRK OF A SCHOOLBOY PSYCHOPATH
Teenager grins in the dock as sentence is passed live on TV Family forced to hear agonising new details of his crime
Teenager to serve at least 27 years for murder of Alesha MacPhail
Judge damns the ‘cold, calculating, remorseless and dangerous’ killer
Campbell smiles at victim’s family after admitting horrific crime
SMIRKING killer Aaron Campbell finally admitted the ‘depraved’ rape and murder of six-yearold Alesha MacPhail as he was jailed for at least 27 years yesterday.
A judge described the 16-yearold psychopath as a ‘cold, callous, calculating, remorseless and dangerous individual’.
Campbell was told he may never be freed from prison for abducting, raping and killing Alesha on the Isle of Bute last July. Her naked body was found defiled with 117 injuries.
The teenager had denied the charges and tried to blame an innocent woman. But yesterday, a court heard he had admitted the crime to a psychologist, even calling it ‘satisfying’.
The sentencing at the High Court in Glasgow – which was broadcast live – gave a chilling insight into the child killer’s twisted mind.
Smug Campbell sat grinning during Lord Matthews’s excoriating tenminute sentencing statement – before smiling at Alesha’s family as he was
led from the dock. Alesha’s heartbroken mother, Georgina Lochrane, 24, screamed at Campbell as he was taken, handcuffed, to the cells, shouting at him: ‘You dirty vile f ****** rat.’
Miss Lochrane and Alesha’s father, Robert MacPhail, 26, along with other devastated family members, sat in the public gallery and listened to new details about his crime – and how Campbell had thought about raping someone in the 12 months before the killing.
The teenager told psychiatrists he found the murder ‘satisfying’, the court heard.
He told social workers he had to ‘zip his mouth shut’ during the trial to stop himself laughing, and described the killing as ‘a moment of opportunity’.
Outside court yesterday, Anne Marie Cocozza from support charity FAMS – which has been helping Miss Lochrane and her partner, George Horn – said: ‘I don’t know how she [Miss Lochrane] held herself together today. She is a broken woman.
‘He [Campbell] is a very clever, manipulative young man. Why would you put them [Alesha’s family] through that trial?
‘Then to say he had to stop himself laughing throughout, and to say it [the murder] was a moment of opportunity, that is just shattering for any family to hear.
‘For the MacPhail family and Georgina’s family, it’s not a 27-year sentence, it’s a life sentence – life will never ever be the same.’
The court heard details of a report by forensic psychologist Dr Gary Macpherson.
Brian McConnachie, QC, representing Campbell, said the report found that the teenager ‘presents with a range of traits on the psychopathy checklist and also has a wide range of factors present in relation to potential sexually harmful behaviour’.
Campbell had ‘brutalised’ Alesha, the jury at his nine-day trial heard last month.
The six-year-old had been visiting her father and grandparents, Calum MacPhail and Angela King, when she was snatched from her bed in the early hours of July 2 last year. Alesha’s naked body was discovered later that morning in the grounds of a former hotel. An experienced pathologist said the child’s injuries were some of the worst they had ever seen.
Yesterday, new details about the horrific crime and Campbell’s admission of guilt emerged from interviews the killer gave to social workers and Dr Macpherson.
Campbell told them he had gone to the MacPhail home to try to steal cannabis. He told Dr Macpherson he had taken a knife
‘Psychopathic traits’ ‘Remorseless and dangerous’
to ‘protect’ himself’ but, having gained entry to the property, he disposed of the blade then returned to the flat and went into Alesha’s room.
Campbell described his crime as a ‘moment of opportunity’, telling Dr Macpherson: ‘At another time in life, murder would not have been the conclusion. If I was a year younger, I don’t think I would have done it. All I thought about was killing her once I saw her.’
He said Alesha had been ‘drowsy’ and had asked who he was and where they were going.
He told the child he was a friend of her father and was ‘taking her home’, adding that he gave her his top because she was ‘cold’.
Yesterday, Lord Matthews said: ‘I will not go into the horrific and cold-blooded details of what you said you did to her, but you explained that after you murdered Alesha, you threw your blood-stained clothing in the sea, had a shower, then went back where you left her to retrieve your phone.’
Suspicion fell on Campbell two days after Alesha’s body was found, after his mother spotted him on CCTV leaving their home.
Lord Matthews said Campbell had been ‘totally unconcerned in the days after [the killing] and mildly amused that the police had not arrested you’.
He added: ‘You stated at points in the trial it took everything to stop you laughing and you had to zip your mouth. You volunteered that you are quite satisfied with the murder.’
During Campbell’s trial, he tried to incriminate Toni-Louise McLachlan, 18, the girlfriend of Alesha’s father.
Yesterday, as Lord Matthews read his statement, she fled the court in tears, accompanied by Mr MacPhail. But jurors saw through Campbell’s lies as prosecutors laid out a ‘mountain’ of evidence against him – including his DNA being found on his tiny, helpless victim.
The jury of eight men and seven women took less than three hours to deliver an unanimous guilty verdict on February 21. Yesterday, Lord Matthews described how he was ‘shocked’ when he read the ‘cold-blooded and horrific’ account given by Campbell.
The killer’s defence solicitor had earlier told the hearing that what was in the reports was ‘possibly worse than the evidence’.
Mr McConnachie said: ‘It is set out in significant detail. I do not propose going into the circumstances described by him. I do not think it is for public consumption, frankly. I cannot recall of circumstances where I have been involved in a trial and, in the course of reports, the accused has accepted responsibility.’
Lord Matthews said he had never experienced it either.
Addressing Campbell, the judge said: ‘According to all of the reports, you are not suffering from any mental health disorder – you are not suffering from any syndrome or disorder of any kind. You are completely lacking in victim empathy, the social worker noting your cold, calculating manner. The only sentence I can impose is detention without limit of time.
‘In addition, you will be subject to the notification provisions of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 for an indefinite period.’
The judge said it was clear Campbell was a ‘cold, calculated, remorseless and dangerous individual’, telling him: ‘A lot of work will have to be done to change you. It may be impossible.’
Lord Matthews concluded: ‘The nature of these appalling offences and what I have read in the reports make it clear that reintegration and rehabilitation, while these are important considerations, are remote possibilities and neither your best interests nor anyone else’s will be served by a speedy return to the community.
‘Nonetheless, the punishment part will not be as long as it would have been had you been an adult.
‘Your sentence will run from July 6, 2018. You will be detained without limit of time and I fix the punishment part at 27 years.’
IHAVE never believed in the death sentence but thinking about Alesha MacPhail shakes my confidence in that judgment to its foundations.
Even as Aaron Campbell carried the six-year-old away to an ending I cannot bear to contemplate, it was not too late to take Alesha back to her grandparents’ house. He could have let her go. But he pressed on.
We tell ourselves a just society rises above the depravity of its most despicable criminals. We do not repay evil with evil. In this maxim our humanity resides.
Yet there he sat yesterday in the dock of the High Court in Glasgow, smirking even as judge Lord Matthews noted that he had detected not a flicker of emotion from Campbell during his ten-day trial.
Would the knowledge that he was going to spend a minimum of 27 years behind bars finally wipe the smile off his face? Not a bit of it. He was led away still grinning, still laughing at his victim’s family, still apparently ‘quite satisfied’ with his deed.
In the production and consumption of news, words such as ‘evil’ and ‘wicked’ can come to lose their potency. Journalists can become accustomed to describing murderers as evil and wicked just as those reading or watching their reports can grow used to hearing that these are the characteristics of murderers.
Year in, year out, a handful of murder cases call in Scottish courts, juries deliberate on the culpability of the accused, those guilty as charged are taken away to begin life sentences and words such as ‘evil’ and ‘wicked’ pepper the next day’s newspaper headlines.
Until a killer such as Aaron Campbell comes along and words seem somehow no longer fit for purpose. Yesterday as I watched the live feed of Lord Matthews sentencing Campbell, I stood alongside colleagues with decades of court reporting experience.
Murderer
Between us we had witnessed the sentencing of serial killers Angus Sinclair and Peter Tobin, teen murderer Luke Mitchell and John Leathem who dumped 15year-old Paige Doherty’s body, riddled with 150 stab wounds, at a roadside.
I had seen Britain’s biggest mass murderer, the Lockerbie bomber, convicted of an act of terrorism beyond comparison in these islands and given the most severe sentence ever handed down in modern times.
And yet the only reaction among us following Lord Matthews’s sentencing was speechlessness. Stunned silence.
On the other side of the world, a distraught but dignified New Zealand Prime Minister vows never to say the name of the gunman who murdered 50 people last week in a Christchurch mosque. Here there is a temptation not even to try to characterise Aaron Campbell’s abominable act on Bute last July. He appears to enjoy the notoriety.
‘This is a terrible thing to say of one so young,’ Lord Matthews told him yesterday, but background reports he had before him ‘paint a clear picture of a cold, callous, calculating, remorseless and dangerous individual’.
And while all of those words are true, they still barely scratch the surface of society’s outrage for this smug killer. Few who followed the Alesha MacPhail case from day one could be in any doubt that her killer was a monster and her murder among the most disturbing anyone could remember. The best that could be thought of whoever had done this was that he was in that moment overcome with barbarous intent, that he now bitterly regretted it and would forever hang his head in shame.
What left people utterly dumbfounded about the bequiffed 16-year-old sitting in the dock is none of the above was true. He was proud of what he had done. Indeed, most damningly, he had told those employed to prepare background reports on him that he was ‘quite satisfied’ with the murder.
Satisfied
That a teenager can look back on what he did to a happy little girl – into Peppa Pig and party dresses and the colour pink – and declare himself satisfied with the way he raped her and ended her life chills me to the marrow.
Is a cell with a computer games console and TV and access to books and further education really the place for him? Or is it the gallows? Campbell’s particular brand of baseness will make many of us wonder.
And still we have not considered the full breadth of his offence to Alesha, her family and our society. This is a teenager who instructs his lawyer that he is innocent of the charges as libelled but that he can tell the court who the guilty party was.
He names 18-year-old ToniLouise McLachlan, the girlfriend of Alesha’s father, as the killer, thereby forcing her to take the witness stand and convince a jury that she is not a murderer. Little wonder she was in floods of tears yesterday.
His defence of incrimination, said the judge, ‘left her open to suspicion at the very least and quite possibly hatred, all of which was due to your perverted machination’. But Lord Matthews said something else as well. He said Campbell had told clinical forensic psychologist Gary Macpherson that ‘it took everything’ for the killer to stop himself bursting out laughing as the trial unfolded.
Dr Macpherson was also struck by Campbell’s total lack of concern for his actions – and his mild amusement in the days following her murder that police had not arrested him yet.
Thirdly, we learn the killer who put Alesha’s family through the trial and an innocent teenager through a horrific witness box ordeal blithely admitted to Dr Macpherson that, yes, it was his handiwork after all. He was just trying to see if he could get off with it.
Defence QC Mr Brian McConnachie said he had never known an admission of guilt to follow so swiftly after trial. Neither had the judge.
It is revelations like these which bring home the enormity of the gulf not just between this ordinary looking teenager and his contemporaries, however gobby or full of themselves – but also between Campbell and the vast majority of people serving life sentences.
And yet, until a hearing convened last month following an application to the court by this newspaper, Campbell’s anonymity was guaranteed until the day he turned 18.
Extraordinary, isn’t it, that a teenage girl can find herself publicly accused of a heinous crime she did not commit while the cynical savage behind the murder could also hide behind the cloak of anonymity.
Despair
I congratulate the judge on lifting the ban on naming this 16-year-old. Although he may still be a boy, he exists in a realm of criminality quite distinct from others of his age who, through whatever misadventure, find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
This killer not only broke hearts with what he destroyed, he brought despair to our souls with his insouciant inhumanity. It is right we know his name even if some of us would prefer never to say it.
‘Who are you?’ Alesha had asked him as she came to her senses shortly after he abducted her. ‘Where are we going?’
He told her he was a friend of her father’s. The truth is he is no one’s friend. He is society’s worst nightmare. He deserves to die but will live in a cell as a monument to his own atrocity because we are civilised respecters of life, however wretched.
Release, Lord Matthews told him, may never be possible.
Nor, from where I am standing, would it ever be appropriate.