A grieving mother has described allowing her 15-year-old daughter to go out on the night she was murdered by her controlling ex-boyfriend as the “biggest mistake of her life”.
On the day she was killed, Holly Newton’s parents had scheduled a meeting with police over Logan MacPhail’s disturbing and obsessive behaviour.
But Holly had begged to be allowed to go out with her friends in Hexham, Northumberland after MacPhail lied about being away in Newcastle.
“They’d [police] agreed to come out at four o’clock on the Friday so I told Holly and she said ‘I was supposed to be going out with my friends tonight’. She begged me,” her mother Micala Trussler told the BBC.
“She said ‘He ruins everything for me, I want to go out’.
“The biggest mistake of my life, I agreed.”
Later that night, Ms Trussler got a call to say Holly had been stabbed. She instantly knew who was behind the attack, which was so frenzied the knife had snapped.
MacPhail, now 17, had been obsessed with Holly during their 18-month on-off relationship, her mother said.
“He didn’t like her having other friends, he didn’t like her going out without him, he needed to know where she was at all times,” she explained.
“It was all just control, everything was controlling and when he couldn’t control her there was a problem.”
The night before MacPhail murdered Holly last January, he waited outside her family home in Haltwhistle claiming he wanted to get his games console back before police took him home.
Consumed by jealousy after she ended their relationship, he secretly followed her after she left school the following day before attacking her with a kitchen knife in an alleyway.
MacPhail, who had met Holly at army cadets, was this week unmasked by a judge as Holly’s killer after he was convicted of her murder in August. He is due to be sentenced in a two-day hearing at Newcastle Crown Court later this month.
However, because Holly is too young to be classed as a victim of domestic violence, her death will be recorded as a knife crime.
Ms Trussler fears this means valuable lessons to save young people from abusive relationships will be missed.
“I think he would have killed her just so she couldn’t be with anybody else because it was all about control, obsession and passion,” she told the BBC.
“We need to realise now that young people are having relationships a lot younger.
“You can almost guarantee that Holly is not the only one in that situation.
“We spend a lot of time in schools talking about abuse at home, being abused by your parent or other family members, but there’s not really any discussion of being abused by a partner, being abused when you are in a relationship yourself.”
