I’d hoped right up until I had to identify her body that it was a terrible mistake...
Alesha’s mother on learning her beloved little girl’s horrific fate over Facebook... and how she is still haunted by questions only killer can answer
THE news was delivered, not humanely with a knock on Georgina Lochrane’s door but cruelly through the tactlessness of social media. First, she learned from Facebook that her daughter Alesha was missing – then, shortly afterwards, that a little girl’s body had been found.
There were strangers typing out Facebook condolences for the family of whoever the little girl was, before Police Scotland had even informed Miss Lochrane that there were concerns for her child’s safety.
Little wonder, perhaps, that nine months on there is an air of unreality, a sense of disbelief about the events of July 2, 2018, the day that ripped this 24-year-old mother’s world apart.
Little wonder her emotions are still all over the place, that she both wants her daughter’s killer dead for what he did to Alesha – and alive so she can confront him and hear why he did it.
But yesterday, as 16-year-old Aaron Campbell from the Isle of Bute was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years behind bars, a measure of justice – if not comprehension – attended his singularly wicked crime.
The punishment, understandably, will not be severe enough to satisfy Miss Lochrane, from Airdrie, Lanarkshire.
How could it be? Campbell killed her firstborn, snuffing out a precious six-year-old life on a whim, discarding her like litter then smirking at his victim’s family even as he was led from the dock, the guilty verdict ringing in his ears.
He put her through a two-week court trial with all the tension and dread attached to it – and yet, as judge Lord Matthews revealed from the reports on Campbell yesterday, it was all the teenager could do to stop himself bursting out laughing in the dock.
Then, to top it all, he confessed his guilt, admitting that the court defence led by his QC Brian McConnachie – including the incrimination of an innocent teenage girl as the murderer – was built on a tissue of lies: Campbell’s lies.
And yet that is perhaps not even the worst of it. His unspeakable deed leaves Miss Lochrane haunted by memories – memories of Alesha’s infectious smile, obliterated for ever by evil; memories of the excitement on Alesha’s face as she set off for her three-week summer holiday on Bute to stay with the family of her father, Rab MacPhail.
She and her little sister Courtney had hugged and hugged before Alesha set off and said they were ‘best sisters for life’, Miss Lochrane recalls, tearfully, for the two would never see each other again.
And, of course, there are memories of the funeral – of the moment it was all the mother could do to stop herself jumping into that grave to be with her daughter.
Were it not for Courtney, she swears that is exactly what she would have done. In an interview with the Daily Record, she said: ‘The day we lowered her coffin into the ground, I had to run because, if I didn’t, I would have been jumping in beside her.
‘Every day I wanted to be with her. If I didn’t have Courtney, I wouldn’t be here. I would have been with Alesha in a heartbeat. But Courtney needs protected now.’
From the beginning – the moment when she saw the Facebook post shared by her cousin – Miss Lochrane had clung to the faint hope a mistake had been made, that there was an innocent explanation for Alesha’s disappearance and that some other little girl’s body had been found.
She said: ‘I hoped right up until I identified her that it was a mistake, that it was just someone who looked like her and matched her description. But there were no other reports of a wee girl matching that description on the island.’
Adding to Miss Lochrane’s torture was the fact Alesha had been back on the mainland only hours before she was taken.
She had returned to Airdrie with her grandfather, Calum MacPhail, to attend a friend’s party but, when they arrived, they realised they had mixed up the dates. Coincidentally, they spotted another friend of Alesha’s who was going to a different party and the six-year-old was invited along.
So it was that the final photos of Alesha, smiling in her pink dress with her newly made friends, came to be taken. But, straight afterwards, it was back on the ferry to Rothesay on Bute. How her mother wishes she had insisted Alesha stayed the night with her.
‘If she had come back home she would still be alive,’ she said.
But she added: ‘If it wasn’t Alesha, it would have been another child, and if he wasn’t caught, we would have had more kids killed by that monster.’
Just hours after stepping off the ferry, Alesha was dead.
It was her grandmother Angela King who, early on July 2, had originally used Facebook to spread the word the six-year-old had disappeared. ‘Alesha has gone missing from our house, please help look for her,’ she wrote.
Others shared the post, offering support in searching for her or suggesting where she might be – and it was this social media activity which caught Miss Lochrane’s attention as she logged on.
AT her home in Airdrie, she wrote increasingly frantic messages in the comments section of Miss King’s post. ‘Someone tell me what’s happened, that’s my daughter.’ And, a little later: ‘Angela answer me now. That is my f ****** daughter.’ Then, devastatingly, another post appeared. It said a child’s body had been found in the grounds of a former hotel.
Naturally, Miss Lochrane’s first instinct was to go to her daughter, but police said no, she must remain at home and await the arrival of family liaison officers.
Five agonising hours passed before they arrived. ‘The family liaison officers didn’t give us any indication of what happened,’ Miss Lochrane told the newspaper. ‘They said a formal identification had to take place but they were positive it was Alesha.
‘I didn’t like that. I knew deep down it was her but my body just didn’t want to accept it yet.’
Only when she formally identified her daughter did the terrible reality begin to sink in.
Miss Lochrane said: ‘They took us into a wee room. There was a wee TV in black and white. I briefly remember seeing her wee face. I wanted to jump through the doors and grab her and hold her. I had to wait another four days until I could get in and touch her. You could see the pain and fear on her face.’
The agony grew with the next shattering news, delivered by detectives: Alesha had been raped before she was murdered. Indeed, Miss Lochrane would come to learn, there were 117 injuries on her daughter’s body.
‘I can’t even think about it now. I choose not to,’ she said. ‘When I do think about it, I imagine how she felt and what she would have been going through. She shouldn’t have had to go through that.’
It was not just what had happened to her daughter that tore her apart, it was her absence. In troubled times, Alesha had been her mother’s strength. ‘When I had bad days and was upset, Alesha would always be the one to cuddle me and tell me, “Mummy, it’s OK”,’ she said.
There was also the heartbreaking task of telling four-year-old Courtney that her big sister would not be coming home. Miss Lochrane said she and her partner George Horn, 34, had tried telling her Alesha had closed her eyes and hadn’t woken up. But she added: ‘I don’t think it will be long before she starts asking what happened. How can you explain that to her?’
The only small consolation was, within days, police had a suspect in custody – astonishingly, a boy of only 16. ‘It never crossed my mind it could be a 16-year-old,’ said Miss Lochrane. ‘I was his age when I had Alesha. He had his school, his friends, he clearly had a life ahead of him. I just don’t get it.’
Inevitably, many questions arose in Miss Lochrane’s head as she waited for the court hearing that would determine the fate of the teenager accused of murdering Alesha. Why Alesha? How could she have been stolen from a house with four adults in it? Why had no one heard a commotion?
‘If someone went into her room who she didn’t know, she would have screamed and tried to hide,’ she said. If she couldn’t find anywhere to hide, she would have tried to run. If she was awake, she would have got out of his grip and tried everything she could.
The court heard yesterday that Alesha was drowsy when lifted out of her bed but that she came to her senses minutes later when they were outside. By then, with no one to hear her, it was too late.
Many more of Miss Lochrane’s questions remain unanswered. Indeed, she said, in some ways, the trial only added to the confusion.
Not until the day it began did she learn Campbell intended to incriminate Toni-Louise McLachlan, the 18-year-old girlfriend of Alesha’s father. To Miss Lochrane, the idea that Toni could have had something to do with it seemed preposterous. ‘I wasn’t shocked he tried to blame someone else but I was shocked by who,’ she said. ‘For those charges, I presumed it was going to be a male – it would have to be.’
It was also only on day one of the trial that Miss Lochrane saw the indictment and read the full description of what Campbell was accused of doing to Alesha.
‘It killed me,’ she said. ‘It absolutely destroyed me. They gave me five minutes’ notice and then expected me to go into that courtroom with him. I wanted to rip his face off.’ It was Campbell’s own testimony in court that convinced his victim’s mother beyond doubt he had murdered Alesha.
SHE said: ‘When he took the stand, everything completely changed. The way he was talking, it was like he was describing what he’d done to Alesha but through Toni. He said she must have thought about it and really planned it. There was no emotion from him. That’s when I thought, “No, it’s you”.’
There appeared little doubt in the jury’s minds either. They took less than three hours to convict him unanimously of murder. But even then there was no trace of shame in the killer’s demeanour.
‘When the verdict was read out and he was walking down the stairs, he smiled at us, at our full family,’ said Miss Lochrane.
Some crimes, she believes, are too monstrous for prison sentences – and the abduction and murder of her daughter was one. ‘They should bring back the death penalty,’ she told the newspaper. ‘They make it far too easy for people like him… My family are broken. We just don’t know how to pick ourselves up.’
And yet, she seems to have convinced herself in her wretchedness, meeting her daughter’s murderer could help. ‘I do want to go and see him,’ she said. ‘He has to approve the visitation but I’m more than happy to go face to face with him. I want him to look me in the eyes and I want to know why.
‘I just want to know, why her? Why Alesha? I have questions that need answered and he is the only one who can answer them.’
Who knows if Miss Lochrane will ever recover from the loss of Alesha. For now, the thought of bringing another child into the world simply scares her too much. Even protecting Courtney, in the light of what happened to her older sister, suddenly seems a daunting task.
‘How can I bring another child into this world when it isn’t safe?’ she said. ‘I think everything is going to happen to my four-yearold. I get up in the night to check she is still breathing. I’m so paranoid and that’s all down to him.’
Nine months on, little, if anything, may seem easier, but Campbell’s guilt is established and society’s revulsion with what he did to Alesha reflected in his sentence.
‘Mummy, it’s OK,’ the six-yearold used to tell her, and it would be. Some day, perhaps, it will be again.