remove a person from middle of photo

I was looking at photoshop 9 to see if recompose tool would do this..

Oh, then I misunderstood your question. I thought you wanted to know what can be done in Aperture without an external editor.

From the PSE9-manual:

I have not used the recompose lately, but in some cases it will suffice to do your task - if the persons do not overlap, and if the background has a uniform structure, so that you will not notice the effect of scaling or patching. Outdoor scenes are better suited for this tool than indoor sceenes. If the persons in your group do occlude each other partially, you will need the retouch and clone brushes in addition to the recompose tool - to recreate structures that become visible when the occluding person is removed.

Use the "Retouch" brush. You can clone a neutral background (or some other object, like furniture or flowers) from another part of the image, then stamp that onto the person you want to remove. Then use the repair brush to soften the contours of your patch and the dodge and burn brushes to adjust the lighting.