My daughter was a 'crime scene', says mother of girl stabbed 36 times by her ex

The heartbroken mother of a 15-year-old girl who was murdered by her obsessed ex-boyfriend said she was unable to touch her in hospital because “my daughter was a crime scene”.

- AMY-CLARE MARTIN

Logan MacPhail, now 17, stabbed Holly Newton 36 times in an alleyway after he stalked her for an hour through the town centre of Hexham, Northumberland, in January 2023. He was convicted following a trial at Newcastle Crown Court, and earlier this month the judge lifted a reporting restriction that had prevented the media from identifying him.

In a moving victim impact statement read to the court yesterday while her daughter’s killer watched remotely via videolink, Micala Trussler said Holly “died not knowing her mam was by her side”.

Ms Trussler, a mother of four, said she raced to the scene of the tea-time attack only to be met with a more horrific scenario than she had imagined. “The enormity and severity cannot be put into words,” she said. “I was stopped from seeing my daughter in the alleyway and the ambulance due to the horrifying condition she was in.