The teenager accused of murdering six-year-old Alesha MacPhail sent a video of himself to friends with the message “found the guy who’s done it” the afternoon after her body was found, a court has heard.

The 16-year-old, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, denies abducting, raping and murdering the child on the Isle of Bute last July.

Giving evidence to the high court in Glasgow from behind a screen, a 16-year-old girl, who described herself as a good friend of the accused, said: “At the time I thought: ‘It’s a joke. It’s a bad joke, but it’s a joke.’” She later informed the police.

Alesha, from Airdrie in Lanarkshire, was found dead in the grounds of a disused hotel near her grandparents’ seafront home, close to Rothesay, where she had arrived a few days earlier for a three-week summer break.

She was last seen by her family at about 11pm on 1 July. Her grandmother Angela King reported the child missing at 6.23am on Monday and appealed for help on Facebook. A member of the public found Alesha’s body approximately half a mile away at about 9am.

The teenage girl explained to the prosecutor Iain McSporran that the Snapchat group of about 25 teenagers had been discussing Alesha’s disappearance throughout the day, with individuals putting forward theories and exchanging gossip.

Under cross-examination, she accepted that other people in the group were also making comments that were “not in particularly good taste”. Asked by the accused’s lawyer, Brian McConnachie QC, if she would have continued to think his video was a bad joke if he had not been arrested, she replied: “Yes.”



On Friday, the jury heard from a total of five friends of the accused, who offered some insight into the state of mind of the teenager during the days leading up to and after Alesha’s death.

One boy described finding the accused in tears and talking about suicide after a drunken argument with his mother. The boy, also 16, had attended a party at the accused’s house the evening before Alesha disappeared, but returned after midnight to collect his bag. He told the court that he found the accused in a distressed state: “He said he was depressed and thinking of harming himself. That’s when I started to get really worried.” The friend offered to stay with the accused, but he told him that he was planning to “get stoned and go to bed”.

Another friend, a different 16-year-old girl, told the court that on the day Alesha’s body was found, the accused “started to get anxious and said that the police were going to blame it on him”.

Asked by the defence if she was “in tune” with the teenager’s emotional state, she responded: “Yes, we’d both experienced anxiety and depression.”

She was also questioned about a different, earlier Snapchat conversation, which she showed to the police after the boy was arrested.

The “darkly humorous discussion”, as the prosecution described it, had begun more than 18 months before Alesha’s death, when the girl asked the accused if it was possible to get away with murder “if you had a good plan”. During the exchange, which was peppered with laughing emojis, the accused said he “might kill 1day for the lifetime experience”.

A number of the young witnesses referred to the accused having a “dark sense of humour”, with one boy adding: “A lot of us do.”

Earlier on Friday, the court heard that a key piece of evidence was initially discarded in a skip by a police officer who deemed it not relevant to the murder inquiry.

A black Nike top, which was found on the shoreline by a member of the public on 6 July, was identified on Thursday by the accused’s mother as being similar to one belonging to her son, and possibly one he was wearing when he left home in the early hours of the day that Alesha went missing, and was apparently not wearing when he returned.

Asked by McConnachie if it was reckless to have discarded an item that may have been relevant to the inquiry, Sgt Anthony Hannah, of Rothesay police, said the item had been found in an area popular with young people for swimming and clothing would often end up on the shore by accident. He also said the location was a mile outside the search area. It was subsequently retrieved from the skip by a member of the inquiry team.

Earlier in the week, Toni McLachlan, the girlfriend of Alesha’s father, denied any involvement in Alesha’s death. McLachlan was named by the accused in a special defence as the person responsible for the killing. She told the court she found the accusations horrible, “but [Alesha] knew that I loved her and that’s what I’m trying to keep in my head”.

The trial continues.