Drug addict Inside me is
THE teenager who raped and murdered six-year-old Alesha MacPhail once claimed there was a monster inside him, it emerged, as calls grew for a crackdown on cannabis use.
Alesha was carried into woods by Aaron Campbell, who killed her on the Isle of Bute last July.
Campbell, 16, had a YouTube channel and used it to explore his fixations with violent computer games, drugs and horror films.
He also posted a video of him playing a computer game in which he creeps around a house while a girl screams and cries for her mother. In one video he says: “There’s a monster inside of me.”
The schoolboy, convicted of Alesha’s murder last week, was fixated with a game called Slender Man about a faceless monster who abducts children.
His mother Janette, father Christopher and sister moved from Shrewsbury to Rothesay on Bute because they thought it would provide their son with a secure upbringing. But by 14 he was regularly buying drugs.
Detectives are at a loss to explain the teenager’s motives, but experts say cannabis has been one constant through a string of crimes. Campaigner Ross Grainger has compiled a “catalogue of suicide and psychopathic violence committed by cannabis smokers in the UK and Ireland” over the past two decades including 200 murders, rapes and savage assaults.
He said: “In this case, as in all such cases, I do not say that cannabis ‘caused’ the perpetrator to do what he did, but rather that it would not have happened if he had not smoked cannabis.
“There is copious evidence of the immense harm cannabis can do to an adolescent mind, and it is, in my view, the only possible explanation for this young man’s depravity and savagery.”