‘I instantly knew my daughter’s ex had killed her’

In January last year 15-year-old Holly Newton was stalked and then murdered by her teenage ex-boyfriend. She was too young to be classed as a victim of domestic violence but her family believes her death should be recognised as such in order to help save young lives in the future.

When Holly’s mum, Micala Trussler, got the call on a Friday night to say her daughter had been stabbed in Hexham, Northumberland, she instantly knew who the attacker was.

Logan MacPhail, now 17, had been obsessed with Holly during their 18-month, on-off relationship and was determined to control her, Micala says.

“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.

“It was all just control, everything was controlling and when he couldn’t control her there was a problem.”

Micala and her partner Lee had not realised there was an issue until Holly’s friends pointed out how “toxic” MacPhail’s behaviour was.

“At first that was a bit of a shock to Holly,” she says.

“I don’t think she understood it was happening to her until the very last few days.”

Holly met MacPhail at army cadets, where he learned how to covertly follow targets and had expressed an interest in becoming a sniper.

They had broken up on multiple occasions but he would often then threaten to kill himself, making her feel guilty.

The night before MacPhail murdered Holly, he waited for hours outside her family home in Haltwhistle claiming he just wanted to get his games console back.

He messaged a sibling of Holly’s asking if they could help him “sneak in” but the sibling refused.

Eventually he was taken home by the police after they were alerted to his whereabouts by his mother.

“I think if [MacPhail had] somehow managed to get into the house it could have been a whole different story – we could have been looking at maybe more than one murder,” Micala says.

So concerned was she about MacPhail’s appearance at her family’s home that Micala arranged a meeting with Northumbria Police to discuss her fears.

It was scheduled for 27 January, the day Holly was killed.

“They’d 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,” Micala recalls.

“She said ‘He ruins everything for me, I want to go out’.

“The biggest mistake of my life, I agreed.”

The police meeting was pushed back to the evening, Holly was stabbed to death hours before it was due to take place.

MacPhail secretly followed her after she left school, having lied about being in Newcastle to put her at ease.

He went on to stab her multiple times in an alleyway during an attack that was so frenzied that the kitchen knife snapped.

When people intervened he told them Holly had been “horrible” to him.

He also told jurors Holly had hugged him and said she loved him and he thought he was stabbing himself “but it went too far”.

They did not believe him.

It took 18 months for the case to get to court because MacPhail’s legal team had argued his learning difficulties and autism diagnosis made him unfit to plead.

This would have meant he was unable to fully comprehend the criminal proceedings, but after hearing evidence from various experts the judge ruled that he was capable of following the process.

Throughout the trial the defence team suggested that his various issues meant he did not understand the consequences of his actions.

But jurors did not agree.

For Micala, Holly’s murder raises important questions about the classification of the crime.

Because her daughter was too young to be classed as a victim of domestic violence her death will instead be filed for statistical reasons as a knife crime.

That has connotations of gang violence and may give a misleading impression of the issues in Holly’s case, Micala says.

It also means the focus is on the weapon used rather than the build up, which had all the warning signs of domestic abuse.

Micala fears this means valuable lessons to save young people from abusive relationships in the future could 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 says.

“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.”

And then there is understanding what abuse actually looks like, Micala says.

“Certain levels of abuse are taken more seriously than others, like the controlling side of things and is it stalking, constantly texting people and ringing?

“Holly was never physically abused, but she was definitely abused in other forms.”