She was six years old. Her favourite things were gymnastics, cake baking and writing. Her headteacher remembered her as smiley and happy, a girl who loved school. On 28 June 2018, Alesha Sarah MacPhail travelled from her home in Airdrie to her grandparents' seafront house in Rothesay for what was meant to be three weeks of the school summer holiday. She had just finished Primary Two. Three nights into the visit, she was put to bed with a Peppa Pig DVD playing. Sometime after 11pm a stranger walked into the unlocked house. By morning she was missing, and by morning she was already dead. This is a story about a child, and about the family and the small island community left to grieve her.
Alesha lived in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, with her mother Georgina Lochrane. Her parents had separated when she was three months old, and she visited her father Robert, his parents Calum and Angela, and his girlfriend Toni McLachlan in Rothesay every other weekend. The Isle of Bute, twenty miles down the Firth of Clyde from Glasgow, has been a destination for generations of Scottish holidaymakers, the kind of small place where children leave bikes in the garden and front doors stay unlocked. Alesha attended Chapelside Primary School. She had just finished Primary Two when she went to Bute that summer. Her teachers remembered a child who loved books and writing, who took to literacy with particular enthusiasm, and who arrived at school each morning happy to be there.
On 1 July 2018, Alesha was put to bed at her grandparents' house with the cartoon playing. Toni McLachlan checked on her around 11pm and found her asleep. Sometime in the early hours, a 16-year-old who lived a short walk away entered the unlocked house. Aaron Campbell had previously bought cannabis from Alesha's father and reportedly came to steal the drug. When he found the sleeping child, he picked her up and carried her to the grounds of a demolished hotel a few minutes' walk away. There he raped her and killed her. At 6am her grandfather Calum awoke for work, found her bed empty and her bike still in the garden. Her grandmother Angela phoned the police at 6:23am. A member of the public discovered her body at 8:54am. Georgina, 70 miles away in Airdrie, learned of her daughter's death from a Facebook post before officers reached her.
Police Scotland mobilised every available resource, with a helicopter overhead and house-to-house enquiries across the small island. Janette Campbell, the killer's mother, joined the search early on. When the police asked locally for CCTV, she went home and checked the security cameras outside her own house. The recordings showed her son leaving at 1:54am and returning at 3:35am, then making two further short trips before 4:07am. She asked him directly. He told her he had been buying cannabis. She believed him. The footage she handed over led directly to his arrest on 4 July. He was charged the following day. At trial he was tied to the crime by his mother's CCTV, by DNA, by fibres from his clothing, and by a Google search on his phone for how police find DNA. The jury reached a guilty verdict in three hours.
Alesha's funeral was held in Coatbridge on 21 July 2018. Hundreds of mourners came. The service was themed in pink. She was buried at Coltswood Cemetery. Her mother told reporters afterwards: you've taken the wrong wee girl from the wrong family. The presiding judge, Lord Matthews, said he could not think of a crime in recent times that had attracted such revulsion. He sentenced the killer to life with a minimum of 27 years, later reduced on appeal to 24 years on the grounds of his age, though the appeal judges did not dispute that he might never be released. In the weeks after the murder, in a moment that has not been easy to forget, the right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins implied without evidence that the killer was one of the Syrian refugees housed on Bute since 2015. She was widely condemned. The killer was a local boy.
On 25 May 2019, a pink memorial bench was unveiled on the Rothesay promenade. The following month, on what would have been close to a year since her death, Alesha's primary school in Airdrie opened a playhouse built in her memory, decorated with artwork her classmates had designed, funded with £22,000 raised by the public. A memorial service at the school included a song and a poem written for her. None of this brings her back. The Guardian's Libby Brooks, writing during the trial, observed that the case had pulled back the picture postcard view of Bute and shown a small island where deprivation was growing and the population declining. That picture too is part of the story, but it is not the whole of it. The whole of it is a child of six and the family who loved her, who continue to live with what was done.
The crime took place on the Isle of Bute, in the Firth of Clyde, with the memorial bench unveiled on Rothesay promenade at approximately 55.83 N, 5.05 W. Alesha's home town of Airdrie, North Lanarkshire (approximately 55.87 N, 4.03 W), is where her funeral took place at Coltswood Cemetery in Coatbridge and where her primary school memorial playhouse stands. Best viewed from low altitude over the populated Clyde Valley. Glasgow Airport (EGPF) is approximately 10 nm northwest of Airdrie; Glasgow Prestwick (EGPK) about 28 nm south.