02/07/00
- When the guilty go free
Sunday Tribune
A FEW WEEKS ago, a young woman from Piltown in Co Kilkenny
walked up to the counter of a McDonalds branch in the west
of Ireland and found herself looking into a familiar face.
The man who took her order was John Shaughnessy, and she had
not laid eyes on him in almost nine years. She had been a
friend of his young wife, Alison, whose parents came from
Piltown and who had been savagely murdered in London a few
weeks before her first wedding anniversary in 1991.
Alison's friend had comforted John Shaughnessy in the weeks
after his wife's death and, like the rest of Alison's friends
and family, it was not until the trial for her murder began
a year later that she learned John Shaughnessy's secret -
he had been having an affair with the young woman accused
of stabbing Alison 54 times in a jealous and frenzied attack.
The revelation made John Shaughnessy a reviled tabloid villain
throughout the summer of 1992 and the papers made hay with
stills from his wedding video which showed him kissing the
accused woman, Michelle Taylor, as he left the church with
his bride.
But it was just such sensational images that played a major
part in the release of Michelle Taylor and her sister Lisa
from prison a year after they had been convicted of Alison's
murder. Along with the prejudicial publicity, the Appeal Court
was also influenced by some new evidence that came to light
as a result of the efforts of a London man who led the campaign
to free the Taylor Two. He discovered a down-and-out man who
claimed to have committed the crime, he tracked down two social
workers to whom the real killer made his confession and he
timed the journey that the sisters were said to have made
on the fateful June evening.discovering that it wasn't possible
in the time claimed.
The Taylors were released Alison's family were devastated
thinking that any chance of real justice had disappeared into
a distant past along with John Shaughnessy, who had lost all
contact with Alison's family after the trial. The sight of
him in the McDonalds restaurant in the town where he has built
himself a new life with a wife and child, brought back to
the dead woman's friend and to her family memories of a chapter
that was anguished and inconclusive but, as they thought,
over and done. They could not have imagined that the matter
was shortly to resurface in their lives again in a far more
dramatic manner. After a lengthy legal battle against the
sisters' efforts to silence him, Bernard O'Mahoney - the hero
of the campaign to free them - has spoken out to say that
he fabricated the evidence which swayed the Appeal Court and
that he has fresh evidence pointing to their guilt.
O'Mahoney was a London gangster who was killing time during
his brother's trial on assault charges when he strayed into
the Old Bailey courtroom where the Shaughnessy murder case
was at hearing in the summer of 1992. "I saw these two
little girls in the dock, they're both five foot nothing,
and I became convinced they weren't guilty - they weren't
career criminals. Michelle was sitting there clutching rosary
beads, they radiated innocence," he told The Sunday Tribune
last week. "I have a criminal background for gangland
crimes, I know that police can be bent and dishonest, and
I thought they were trying to fit these girls up.
So I got chatting to the family and built up a relationship
with them and after they were convicted I started the campaign
to get them out." He had, he says, no qualms about coaxing
or conning' witnesses to change their testimony or to invent
new recollections, no more than he was suspicious of the supposedly
innocent Michelle Taylor's assiduous attempts to manipulate
the evidence for her appeal in more than 500 smuggled prison
letters to him: "I believed they were innocent, I reckoned
that if the police could lie, so could we, and I had no problem
using dishonest means to achieve a fair result." A friend
of the Taylors', whose evidence had been damning, was threatened
and intimidated into changing her story.
The police had estimated that the journey from the Churchill
Clinic, where Michelle Taylor and John Shaughnessy both worked,
to Alison's home and back again had to be completed in 11
minutes if Taylor was guilty - attempting to prove, with a
video and a stop watch, that it couldn t have been done so
quickly, O'Mahoney found it was easy to do the run in as little
as eight minutes, so he destroyed the inconvenient footage
and kept trying until he notched up a time that contradicted
the police reconstructions. And he was, he says, shrewdly
tuned to the media imperatives of the time: "You have
to remember," he says now, "that this was a time
when the papers had turned miscarriages of justice into an
industry - it was just after the Birmingham Six and the Guildford
Four.
So the papers were more than willing to ignore evidence that
didn't tie in with the view that these were two girls wrongly
convicted." Nobody bothered to find out, for example,
that the homeless man who had 'confessed' had actually been
in Spain at the time of the killing, nor that the two 'social
workers' to whom he unburdened himself were both down-and-outs
squared up by O'Mahoney - the claims were solemnly reproduced
in a BBC documentary that added weight to the campaign for
the girls' release. "It turned into a war between the
serious broadsheets and the tabloids, and the Taylors were
the broadsheet babes," says O'Mahoney. Once they were
freed, Michelle Taylor and Bernard O'Mahoney began a relationship,
and he left his wife and children to live with her. In the
course of their three months together, he says, he saw a side
of her that didn't quite tally with the innocent victim of
his imaginings. "
I discovered that she could be violent with a weapon - I don't
want to go too much into that now -and that she was, given
to Fatal Attraction type behaviour. She festered with silent
rage and she could work herself up into a frightening state
at the smallest trigger. I'm a big fella but I found it unnerving
at times."
They had begun to work on a book together
about the Taylors experiences - O'Mahoney is an accomplished
writer whose most recent book about his criminal exploits,
The Essex Boys, has just been filmed starring Sean Bean -
and it was the research for this project that finally uncovered
the truth. In a set of files, O'Mahoney came across a letter
to the Taylors from their solicitor, in which he made reference
to an 'admission' that Michelle had made and advising that,
since Lisa had no part in the actual killing, she should strike
a deal with the Crown prosecution service, testify against
her sister and save herself from a murder conviction.
When Michelle returned home that evening, O'Mahoney confronted
her with his findings: "She denied it initially,"
he says, "she flew into a rage but eventually, she told
me everything." She described sharpening a metal ruler
to a lethal point and taking it with her when she and Lisa
- who was genuinely unaware of her plans - went to meet Alison
outside her flat on the evening of 3 June, 1991. She told
Alison that she had to collect some flower pots for the Churchill
Clinic and take them back to John for flower arranging. Once
inside, she grabbed Alison from behind and stabbed her repeatedly
- she described the details of the attack to O'Mahoney with
horrific precision. Later that evening, she had accompanied
John Shaughnessy back to the flat and 'found' Alison's body.
She touched her and washed the dead girl's face and then washed
her hands in the family bathroom, a clever move which ensured
that forensic traces, blood stains and fibres, which could
otherwise have linked her to the murder scene were entirely
worthless.
She had forgotten, though, that there could have been no innocent
explanation for why her sister Lisa had left a fresh fingerprint
inside Alison's home, and yet this was one of the many damning
facts that became obliterated in the media breastbeating about
the conviction of the 'innocent' girls. The Taylors had instigated
a compensation claim, against the police after they were freed,
but quietly abandoned it when the civil case investigation
began to turn up evidence of nobbled witnesses. They remain
the only victims of a miscarriage of justice to have been
denied any compensation. "And that was when the police
first came to me because all these people were telling them
that Bernard O'Mahoney had persuaded them to lie, so if you
think that I'm just making these claims to get back at Michelle,
you want to look at who is really getting at who." Silent
calls to the house he shared with his new partner and child
were traced to the Taylors, while they took him to court to
prevent him publicising the information he had gathered.
They lost the case and the book Dream Solutions - named after
the diary entry in which Michelle confided her incriminating
wish that Alison would disappear from John Shaughnessy's life
- will appear next summer. "They can't be tried again
for murder," says O'Mahoney, "but Michelle could
be tried for perjury because I have all the prison letters
which prove she lied on oath." He has been in regular
contact with Alison's family in Kilkenny and Dublin. "I
appreciate it must have been hard for her aunt Frances Morris
to ring me, I regret what I did and I'm now going to dedicate
myself to undoing that wrong." Breda Blackmore, Alison's
mother who has now moved back to Piltown, says that the publication
of O'Mahoney's claims that the Taylors got away with murder,
"is almost as good as the day they were first convicted.
It is public confirmation that they were guilty all along.
If the convictions had stood they'd be out by now, they'd
be able to hold their heads up and say they'd paid their debts
to society but they can never do that now.
People keep asking 'where do we go from here?' But for now
I feel that some measure of justice has finally been done."
She doesn't want to talk to Bernard O'Mahoney, nor to hear
of Taylor's account of the murder. "I've never dwelt
on that, and if I find my mind straying to her final minutes
and what she must have suffered, I say a Hail Mary to myself."
And John Shaughnessy, with his new life and his new job a
lifetime away from London and the humid summer of 1991, would
only say, "It's good news, it's good news. Those two
should never have walked in the first place. This should have
happened a long time ago." |
