A house which was the former home of a child killer on a Scottish island is struggling to sell as no one wants to buy it. Aaron Campbell murdered six-year-old Alesha MacPhail in 2018 after snatching her from her home on the Isle of Bute.
He killed her in nearby woods and then returned to his family home in the dark, but was caught on camera when he arrived at the house. Thousands of pounds have been knocked off the price of the property in recent days as it's struggling to sell.
Sources told the Daily Record that local residents don’t want anything to do with the property due to its dark history. It was even later target by Alesha's bereft dad following her murder.
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The Port Bannatyne villa is understood to have been marketed discreetly, with many residents of the island unaware it was even up for sale. It’s now on offer for a fixed price of £230,000 through a Glasgow estate agent.
A source told the Daily Record : “I will be amazed if anyone on the island buys it. Most properties like this sell more or less instantly here. I think the fact it hasn’t tells you all you need to know about people’s attitudes towards the property. I think it will be aimed at people off the island who might not know the history attached to it.”
Campbell was just 16 when he abducted Alesha from her grandparents’ house, where she had been staying with her dad for the summer holidays. He raped and murdered her, leaving her naked body lying in woods in July 2018.
Alesha, from Airdrie, had suffered 117 different injuries and was found the next morning after a major search operation by locals and police. Detectives began to suspect Campbell when his mother reviewed CCTV footage of their home and found him coming and going during the night of Alesha’s death.
The images of Campbell jumping a wall at the front of the house and creeping back in through the garden after murdering the schoolgirl were central to the case against him. His trial heard the schoolboy, who had previously bought cannabis from Alesha’s dad, crept back into his house after killing Alesha and took a shower before disposing of clothing on the shoreline, returning in just his boxer shorts.
He later leaves again with a torch, when he is understood to have returned to the scene where Alesha’s body lay to retrieve his dropped mobile phone. Campbell denied the crimes and tried to pin Alesha’s murder on her dad’s girlfriend, Toni McLachlan, but the jury took just three hours to find him guilty of the charges against him in February 2019.
He later confessed fully to social workers what he had done, telling them he had to “zip his mouth shut” during the trial to stop from laughing. He was initially given 27 years behind bars but appealed the sentence and it was reduced to 24 years.
Presiding judge Lord Matthews said at his trial that he “could not think of a crime in recent times that has attracted such revulsion” and described Campbell as “cold, callous, calculating, remorseless and dangerous”.
The judge took the rare action of allowing Campbell to be identified in the media despite being under the age of 18 - when such offenders are usually given anonymity until adulthood. Campbell, now 20, spends much of his day incarcerated in a maximum-security cell at Polmont Young Offenders’ Institute and is kept separate from others lags, but was hospitalised following an alleged attack earlier this year.
The Campbell family bought the Bute property for £170,000 in 2010. It’s understood only Campbell’s mother Janette has lived there recently. A marketing brochure for the one-time family home shows the now-bare bedroom where the killer slept after murdering Alesha.
Sources revealed after Campbell’s conviction that he would spend his time playing violent computer games, watching horror movies and filming YouTube videos, which he shared online. The room has been stripped of all possessions with just the empty desk where he sat at his computer left, along with his chest of drawers. A trampoline where Campbell also filmed videos lies in the garden, which is now overgrown.
A source said: “A lot of the property on the island is being snapped up to use as holiday rentals. This is the type of property which would normally be bought up very quickly. Who lived there previously is obviously having a major part in it not shifting.
“The house has been targeted and vandalised. I’m sure prospective buyers would be worried of that happening again. What happened there is still very raw for people here. It’s one of those topics no one wants to talk about on the island.”
Robert MacPhail, Alesha's father, recently admitted smashing the window of a parked and empty car belonging to Campbell’s mother by throwing a rock at it in July last year.
Greenock Sheriff Court heard he was “overcome by an overwhelming sense of anger and trauma” at the time. Defence solicitor Gerry Keenan said: “It is difficult to envisage something that would engender greater unhappiness than the death of a child, and the way in which the child died.”
Sentence was deferred for MacPhail to be of good behaviour.
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