Micala Trussler regularly demanded that her 15-year-old daughter submit to what she calls a ‘phone check’. Holly never objected.
‘We’d look at her phone to make sure the location tracking was on – so that we knew where she was, that her social media was safe, and that there weren’t any funny messages from strange men,’ Micala says.
What she didn’t do – ‘because I didn’t feel I needed to, and because it would have been an invasion of her privacy’ – was to check the messages that had been pinging back and forth between Holly and her boyfriend Logan MacPhail, 16. How she now wishes she had.
‘I still haven’t had her phone back from the police. After she died, it was taken as evidence.
‘But we know from the court case about some of the messages from Logan on there, the ones that showed how obsessive and controlling he was. I don’t think I’d want to read them all now. I would feel it was disloyal to Holly. I also think it would break my heart.’
To be able to see, too late, what had been going on in that relationship? ‘Yes. If we had known…’
It is two years last week since Holly Newton – the eldest of Micala’s four children – was fatally stabbed just two hours after leaving school on Friday January 27.
The attack happened in the quiet market town of Hexham, Northumberland. Holly, who wanted to be a dance teacher and was ‘the kindest, gentlest girl’, was still in her school uniform.
Holly Newton was fatally stabbed in Hexham, Northumberland, in January 2023
With her mother Micala Trussler, 35, who was held back from seeing her when she died
Her injuries were so catastrophic that her mum, who rushed to the scene, was held back from seeing her.
Holly suffered 36 injuries in total, including 12 stab wounds and 19 slash wounds. Five stab wounds were so deep they penetrated bone; in her jaw, skull, shoulder blade and back.
Such was the force of the blows that the blade broke – something that happens so rarely that the pathologist made special mention of it.
A male friend who rushed to Holly’s aid was also stabbed, and suffered serious injuries.
Her killer? Logan MacPhail, the lad her mum thought a ‘lovely boy’, if a little messed-up and immature.
Unable to accept it when she broke up with him, he had bombarded Holly with calls, stalked her, and finally killed her.
‘He decided that if he couldn’t have her, no one else would,’ says Micala, 35.
Today, MacPhail is behind bars. In November he was sentenced to life for Holly’s murder, with a minimum term of 17 years.
Officially, Holly’s death has been recorded as a knife crime, though, which is akin to another wound for her grieving mother.
‘Knife crime? When you say that you think of gangs. I don’t think the knife is relevant in her death. He would have killed her any way he could,’ she says.
‘Holly died because she was in an abusive relationship. She died at the hands of someone who was obsessive and controlling, and who thought she belonged to him.
‘We want the law changed so that other families know what to look out for, because we just didn’t see it coming. We put everything down to just immature behaviour. It was so much more than that.’
Since Holly’s murder, her mother, who runs a dog walking business, has been campaigning for the introduction of Holly’s Law – an adjustment to existing legislation to allow those under 16 to be considered victims of domestic abuse. Under current legislation in England and Wales they cannot be.
Last month, their efforts got a boost when, during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, Sir Keir Starmer agreed to look at the issue as a matter of urgency.
He said: ‘We’ve seen an increase in violence in teenage relationships in the last decade and I’ve been continually shocked by research that shows that at a younger and younger age, there’s abuse in relationships. So we do need to look at this at the earliest opportunity to how we properly protect girls’.
A recent survey from the Youth Endowment Fund showed that 49 per cent of teenagers have experienced violent or controlling behaviour from a partner and, anecdotally, Micala reports an epidemic.
Micala says the bond between her daughter and her killer, who dated, seemed sweet at first
‘Since Holly died, we’ve been going into schools to raise awareness, and so many teachers have said “We are worried about this”. Parents need to be aware too because these teenagers have no points of reference. When you haven’t been in a relationship before, you don’t know what is “normal”.’
What is particularly shocking about Holly’s death is that, outwardly, there didn’t seem to be any red flags that she was in serious danger.
In retrospect, all the signs of coercive control were there, on her phone – MacPhail’s possessiveness, his trying to distance Holly from her friends, his use of bribery to stop her ending their relationship, then threats.
‘There were messages that if I’d seen I would have gone, “Woah! That is too much!”’ Micala says. The issue was, as she admits: ‘I didn’t know about them. I don’t even think Holly was deliberately hiding them. I just think she didn’t realise the implications.
‘The trouble is that technology makes it easy to hide these things. Teenagers are living on their phones and through social media, but these things are making it hard to spot problems.
‘One of the most shocking things we discovered – and even then we didn’t find out about until the trial – was that he was making her phone him at night, up until 4am.
‘We did not have a clue because she was getting up and going to school normally. But her phone records showed that she was calling him every couple of hours and from what the police have told us, he was making her do it. That is not normal behaviour.
‘He sent her messages saying that he would kill himself if she ended it.
‘Our son – Holly’s brother – was drawn into it. When Logan wanted to know where Holly was, and couldn’t get hold of her, he would message our son saying, “Is Holly in her bedroom?”. He didn’t tell us, because he didn’t understand the implications either.’
Until Holly died, her mum had taken some comfort from the ‘location services’ feature on Holly’s phone, which meant she always knew where her daughter was.
Too late she realised that it also gave Logan the ‘right’ to know where she was too, at every minute of the day.
‘One of the things I say to teenage girls now is “turn the maps off on your Snapchat”. Why would you have such a thing? It’s a licence to stalk. It makes people think it is normal. It is not normal.’
Too late, Micala discovered that even teenage love can be perilous.
‘I knew Logan had issues,’ she says. ‘I knew he was a self-harmer. I knew he had a difficult home life. I worried that he would hurt himself, but I never for one minute thought he would hurt Holly.’
Holly was Micala’s eldest child, born when she was just 18.
‘We grew up together, really,’ she says.
In November Logan MacPhail, 16, was sentenced to life for Holly’s murder
She was a sensible, sensitive child, known for her kindness to others. That included MacPhail, whom she met at an Army cadet camp (where, horrifically, he learned some of the skills that would help him kill her). Holly’s step-father Lee helped run the local group.
That MacPhail was ‘different’ was obvious. Something of a loner, he had a noticeable speech impediment and was autistic. He struggled to read and write.
At first, Micala was a little shocked to discover that they had become boyfriend and girlfriend.
‘I wasn’t very pleased – because of her age,’ she reveals. ‘His family weren’t either. I remember we met up and had the “what are we going to do here, then?” conversation. But my feeling was that if we tried to stop it, then they might sneak around behind our backs.’
So Micala embraced MacPhail, including him in everything. ‘He’d have meals with us, come on holiday with us. We took him to Center Parcs and he had great fun on a zipwire. He didn’t seem to have done stuff like that.’
The bond between Holly and Logan seemed sweet at first. ‘They’d cook together, and she was so keen to help him with his reading. She’d get children’s books out of the library for him.’
There was an innocence to it all, she suggests, certain there was no sexual relationship.
‘Those are the things you worry about – teenage pregnancy,’ she nods. ‘But I honestly don’t think there was anything like that. I don’t think either of them was mature enough.’
Micala recalls he was always playing computer games.
‘A lot of the games he played were really violent ones – and they were on his phone. We only realised after Holly was gone that he didn’t really have friends in the real world, apart from Holly.’
Indeed when he was arrested, chillingly Logan told police officers that he had seen people ‘respawn’ – come back to life – after being killed in video games.
About a year into their relationship, cracks started to form. Micala says Holly and MacPhail started to ‘bicker about small things, like whose turn it was to go to the shop’.
A point of contention was that MacPhail didn’t like Holly spending time with her friends. Micala noticed changes in her.
‘She became quite snappy,’ she says. ‘She started refusing to go to school. We were worried. I gently told her it might be best if she split up with Logan, but at that point she didn’t want to. I assumed she wasn’t ready.
‘I attempted to limit their contact and hoped the relationship would run its natural course. I didn’t feel there was much else I could do.’
But Holly’s friends were also becoming concerned about Logan’s behaviour. Supported by them, and her mother, Holly tried to end the relationship.
Holly had met boyfriend MacPhail at an Army cadet camp
‘She actually tried several times, but he’d plead with her. He’d say, “Come on, I’ll take you out for crepes” or “I’ll buy you a kitten”,’ Micala says.
Then came a lurch into darker territory.
‘She came downstairs one night, in a state, because he’d changed the passwords on all her social media,’ she recalls. With the intervention of Holly’s stepfather Lee, MacPhail reinstated them, but Micala says she was concerned.
Just one week before Holly died, the pair had a final row after Holly decided to go out with friends instead of staying at home with MacPhail.
He flew into a rage, recalls Micala ‘and Holly decided enough was enough’.
Micala was alarmed at the way he took the news – for MacPhail’s wellbeing as well as her daughter’s.
‘He was inconsolable,’ she recalls. ‘He was saying he couldn’t live without Holly. I was so worried then. That day, his mum came to pick him up and once he’d gone, I told Holly she needed to cut ties with him for good, block him on all social media.
‘For the last week of her life – when she’d blocked him on everything – she was happier than I’d seen her in a long time.’
Yet MacPhail was not out of her daughter’s life. Far from it. The night before the murder MacPhail travelled by bus from his home in Gateshead to Haltwhistle, a journey of 40 miles.
He lurked in a park near Holly’s house for hours, and sent texts to her younger brother, asking to be let in to get his games console. The youngster refused.
Micala recalls a heated exchange with MacPhail’s mother, who ‘phoned at midnight, yelling down the phone to me saying I would have to let him in, or let Holly go and meet him. I refused, but I lay there thinking, “This has got really creepy now. Is he outside, watching the house?”’
MacPhail was finally picked up by police after his mum reported him missing, but the next morning Micala called the police too.
‘I remember saying, “This is stalking, now.”’ It was arranged that an officer would come to talk to the family at 4pm the following day.
When Micala told Holly this, though, she was upset.
‘She’d arranged to meet her friends after school and she begged me to rearrange it. She said “he ruins everything”, and I was so desperate for her to just have some fun that I did call the police to see if we could do the meeting later, so the time was switched until 8pm. I will regret that until the day I die.’
Because the following day was that fateful Friday. After lessons, Holly stayed in Hexham, meeting friends – including a male one.
She was with him at a pizza shop, waiting outside while he ordered. Unbeknown to anyone MacPhail was there too, having left his school early.
Police were later able to work out, from CCTV footage around the town, that he had stalked Holly for 45 minutes, hiding behind cars, his face covered, a kitchen knife in his bag.
Micala wept when she watched the footage that showed him finally approaching Holly and her friend outside the pizza shop. She doesn’t know what he said to convince her to follow him down an alley, but what followed was beyond comprehension.
Afterwards, MacPhail was entirely calm, which she finds utterly chilling.
‘One of the first things he said to officers, after his arrest, was “she was horrible to me.”’
Micala received the news when she was in a car with Lee and two of Holly’s siblings.
‘The woman from the pizza shop phoned me, from Holly’s phone. I thought it was her, wanting us to pick her up. She said, “I have your daughter’s phone.” I said, “Oh, where has she left it now?” Then she said, “She’s been stabbed.”’
Micala weeps reliving the mad dash to the scene, during which Lee ‘crashed the car. The tyre was wrecked. We were driving like mad people. The children in the back were screaming’.
There were sirens wailing as they approached, ambulances and police everywhere. Lee leapt out. Micala remembers sitting.
‘It must only have been for a few seconds but I remember thinking, “I can’t leave the kids in the car in the middle of the road.”’
When she finally got out Lee was coming back towards her, hysterical.
She did not see MacPhail at the scene, but she says she knew instantly what had happened. ‘I phoned his mum. I was screaming, “He’s stabbed her. He’s stabbed her. And she was saying “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”’
At the hospital, Micala was allowed to see her daughter’s body, but told she could not touch her ‘because she was evidence’.
The disbelief is still palpable.
‘I remember when the consultant said “she’s gone”, I said, “But she’s not dead, though?” When I saw her, she still looked like Holly. I think you could accept it more if death had a more deathly look. She looked as if she was asleep.’
There is utter despair that she was not able to join the dots, earlier, and save her daughter. Hence this interview.
‘I want other parents to look out for the things I did not see.’
To mark the second anniversary of Holly’s death last week, Micala tied over 200 purple ribbons to the gates of Hexham Park, representing the number of women who have die at the hands of violent partners each year.
Nestled among them was one white ribbon.
‘Which represents Holly. We think she should be part of those numbers, and she is not.’
