CONFESSION OF A BOY MONSTER
AMONSTER of breathtaking arrogance; a calculating manchild utterly devoid of empathy; the smirking embodiment of evil. Words scarcely do justice to the overwhelming wickedness of Aaron Campbell.
Almost a month may have passed since this dangerous young maniac was found guilty of the abduction, rape and murder of an innocent little girl, yet any flicker of contrition for his heinous crimes stayed buried deep beneath that now familiar air of insouciance.
As he returned to the dock for sentencing at the High Court in Glasgow, Campbell remained as serene as when he was denying the ‘mountain of evidence’ which prosecutors said proved beyond any reasonable doubt he took the life of sixyear-old Alesha MacPhail in the most shocking of circumstances.
And yet, something had changed. Campbell had one final cruel trick up his sleeve to play on the family of his young victim.
Having put Alesha’s distraught parents and grieving grandparents through the torment of a trial, Campbell had a secret to share. He did it. He actually did it all. He had waited until he had been found guilty and then coughed to the lot – just to show how clever he had been and how little he cared for the consequences.
It all seemed to be one big joke to Campbell, who even admitted when interviewed by a clinical psychologist, Dr Gary Macpherson, there were points during the trial when it had taken all his strength to stop him laughing and he had had to ‘zip’ his mouth. He also volunteered that he was ‘quite satisfied with the murder’.
He broke into Alesha’s grandparents’ house, he told Dr Macpherson, went to her bedroom and stole her away. He saw it as a ‘moment of opportunity’ and ‘all I thought about was killing her once I saw her’. Lord Matthews, a judge of long experience, looked shaken as he read out details from the doctor’s report.
Campbell carried the girl – just 3ft 9in and 3st – outside, where the drowsy child became more awake.
‘At one point she asked who you were and where you were going,’ the judge continued. ‘You said you were a friend of her father’s and you were taking her home. You gave her your top because she was cold…’ The matter-of-fact description of a teenager carrying a child to her death was chilling. Sobs could be heard in court.
SUCH unsettling insights into a 16-year-old’s burgeoning psychopathy will leave those who have watched this most disturbing of cases unfold fearing what further abominations this savage schoolboy might have committed had he slipped through the police net.
Had his own mother’s troubled conscience not alerted the authorities to her son’s suspicious behaviour the night Alesha MacPhail was murdered, Campbell might have got away with it.
And who knows where his dark impulses might have led him next.
Unexpectedly, some of the answers emerged during the course of yesterday’s court hearing.
Lord Matthews, for one, seemed in little doubt that the teenager staring blankly back at him in courtroom six was most probably a serial killer in the making.
Sentencing him to a minimum of 27 years behind bars, he told Campbell: ‘The nature of these appalling offences and what I have read in the reports make it clear to me that reintegration and rehabilitation… are remote possibilities and neither your best interests nor anyone else’s will be served by a speedy return to the community.’
Alesha’s brutal killing on a sultry summer’s night on a quiet Scottish island had so repulsed the judge he had stripped the former Rothesay Academy pupil of his cloak of anonymity so the world should know such evil by its name.
Explaining the unusual step, Lord Matthews admitted that in all his long years on the bench dealing with the worst elements of human depravity, he had rarely encountered such wickedness. ‘Children don’t usually commit offences of this nature,’ he had said baldly.
The pathologist who examined his victim found 117 ‘catastrophic’ injuries on her small body, which was found dumped in woodland near her grandparents’ home on the Isle of Bute where she was spending the school holidays.
A policeman who gave evidence came close to breaking down in the stand. It was hard at times to square the accused’s smooth-cheeked, boy-next-door good looks, neatly packaged in smart checked suit and crisp white shirt, with this emerging portrait of a stone-cold child killer.
Campbell’s homicidal behaviour may have been fed by cheap booze, copious drugs and violent video games shackled to the hormonal implosion of adolescence, but it is clear something unknown and unstoppable had corroded his soul in a devastating way.
Campbell’s mother, Janette has insisted her son is not a monster, but was maternal love blinded? After all, it was she who moved him from Shropshire to the Isle of Bute when he reached school age because, ironically, she thought it would provide him with a secure upbringing.
Unlike many of his friends, who lived on the council scheme above Rothesay, Campbell was brought up in a fine Victorian house, on the coastal road out of the town, with stunning views of the Firth of Clyde and the hills beyond. As it had extensive grounds, with trampolines and a gazebo, his friends would congregate there.
He was never short of female attention, was doing well at school and was strong and sporty. He had installed a punchbag in his house, strove to strengthen his wiry frame with weightlifting sessions and got an adrenalin rush from daredevil stunts such as jumping into the firth from rocks and piers and scaling trees and buildings.
YET, something was rotten at the core. Neighbours described Campbell as an ‘oddball’, a ‘weirdo’ with a reputation as a school bully. A confrontational element developed in his stare. He would hold his gaze far longer than many considered polite, making them highly
Judge tells of shock as killer admitted to psychologist: ‘When I saw Alesha, all I thought about was killing her’ ++ ‘I had been thinking about doing something excessive’ ++ ‘I was quite satisfied with the murder’ ++ ‘I had to stop myself laughing in the courtroom. It took all of my strength to zip my mouth’ ++
uncomfortable. One local in Rothesay said: ‘He would always sit at the front of the bus and eyeball the whole bus.
‘He would be looking at people’s shoes, what they were wearing, taking everything in. If you caught his eye, he would stare right back and hold your gaze.’
Defence QC Brian McConnachie said the psychologist’s report found 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’.
Only one incident from his early years on Bute hints at the cruelty which would develop. While swimming with a small girl at a leisure centre aged seven or eight, he is said to have held her head under the water for such a long time that she feared she would drown. Her mother was so upset, a friend said, that she later reported the incident to his mother.
But it was in his early teens that truly worrying signs came thick and fast. One neighbour claimed he had been caught trying to set fire to buildings – and another that he had taken compromising mobile phone pictures of a teenage girl and shown them to his friends.
Drink and drugs came into his life and there are claims he started carrying a knife, even at school, and that he had used it to torture and kill cats. Psychiatrists who treat psychopathic killers say animal torture is not a stage they go through, but a rehearsal. With his father Christopher often working offshore, Campbell began to push the boundaries, ultimately becoming a law unto himself.
He was 14 when he started buying cannabis regularly from, among others, Alesha’s father Robert, while his relationship with his 54-year-old mother was becoming increasingly volatile. Campbell’s copious cannabis use, developing a liking for a super-strength strain which he and his friends called ‘pollen’, was another signal to his mother that her son was going completely off the rails.
‘I knew he was buying [cannabis],’ his mother told the Mail, ‘but what could I do? If I went to the police my son would be in trouble. I just hoped it was a phase and he’d grow out of it.’
He would regularly post selfindulgent vlogs of himself on YouTube, using the menacing signon Poison3dApp13, and was addicted to gaming. His mother said: ‘He would lock himself away until about 2am on Fridays and Saturdays. He’d be up all night on the computer and sleep all day.’
According to one well-placed source, he developed a fascination for a sinister internet character called ‘Slender Man’ about whom a Hollywood film was made. In one film sequence, this faceless, spidery-limbed monster stalks little children and drags them off into the woodland.
Campbell told Dr Macpherson that in the 12 months before the murder he entertained thoughts of ‘doing something excessive’, including rape. The night he abducted Alesha, he drank one and a half bottles of wine in just 30 minutes at a party with friends at his home and was looking for drugs when he broke into Alesha’s grandparents’ home. Dr Macpherson noted that after he murdered Alesha he threw his bloodstained clothing into the sea, had a shower and calmly went back to retrieve his phone from near her body. Amid the police hunt, Campbell remained ‘totally unconcerned’ other than to be ‘mildly amused’ he had not yet been arrested. It was his mother who would lead police to their suspect. A CCTV camera installed at their home to keep an eye on an elderly relative captured Campbell’s furtive comings and goings from the house around the time Alesha disappeared. His mother admitted her heart ‘sank a bit’ when she saw the images, but insisted she only handed it to police because she thought it might help clear her son’s name. The damning footage and thorough police work proved Campbell’s undoing. Police found a Google search on his phone, asking: ‘How do police find DNA?’ He had opened the first link: a website explaining how DNA can be transferred by ‘a used condom’.
There would be other haunting CCTV footage, however. It showed a ‘shadowy figure’ walking along the coast apparently carrying a child. Swabs revealed DNA matching Campbell’s on 14 places spread across Alesha’s body.
As the most harrowing evidence was shown, in the public gallery, people held their heads in their hands. At times, Alesha’s mother, Georgina Lochrane, wept. Sometimes she walked out.
Yet, Campbell’s self-confidence appeared unwavering.
HE did not have to take the stand but wanted to. His outlandish defence almost seemed designed to torment Alesha’s parents further. He blamed Alesha’s father’s girlfriend, Toni-Louise McLachlan, 18, for the child’s death, claiming she had taken a condom they had used to plant his DNA at the scene. She denied they had ever had a sexual relationship.
He tried to win the jury’s sympathy. His QC suggested his client had a history of self-harm, anxiety and depression. In the dock, Campbell said his father was away ‘more often than not’ and claimed his mother had a drink problem and liked to pick arguments with him when she was drunk.
Yet the only time he seemed to display any feeling was when he felt he was not believed. He claimed he would never kill someone, adding rather oddly: ‘It would ruin your life if you ever killed someone, it’s a stupid thing to do.’ They proved to be the only honest words he uttered to the court.
His risk-taking seemed crazy, yet background reports were clear that Campbell was not suffering from any mental health disorder.
He will be 43 before he is eligible for parole, but Lord Matthews doubts he should ever be released.
As he was taken down to begin his sentence, there was one last smirk for Alesha’s stricken family.