25/07/92 - Love, lust and a deadly obsession
Report by Richard Kay, Peter Rose, Tony Gallagher and David Jack
Daily Mail

IT WAS a story of three women, a cheating husband and an affair that ended in savage murder. The young bride was homeloving, shy, devoted to her husband. The mistress was scheming, possessive and cruel. The man they both loved was an Irish charmer, weak, unable to control his emotions and incapable of ending an affair that spun horribly out of control.

Into this deadly triangle came the mistress's sister, calculating, ruthless and driven by a warped sense of injustice. What Michelle and Lisa Taylor did in the name of love was a vile distortion of the word. Their corruption was complete when they carried their charade to the extreme of helping John Shaughnessy mourn his wife Alison's death.

'I can't believe Alison is gone,' Michelle told a friend. 'This kind of thing can only happen in London. John needs help from us all. I don't think he will ever get over it.' For her, what began as a cheap affair conducted as an 'open secret' at the clinic where both worked became all-consuming.

She wrote in her diary: I hate Alison, the unwashed bitch. My dream solution would be for Alison to disappear as if she never existed and then maybe I could give everything to the man I loved.' By the following summer, dream and reality were on fatal collision course. The affair was still on, the longing and desire undimmed.

Alison, a soft Irish beauty with beguiling looks and a bride for less than a year, began to suspect that the man she had adored for five years was doing the unthinkable, and deceiving her. Perhaps she was too loyal or too devoted to confront her husband. She hoped he would end the liaison to avoid a family scandal.

Hours before the Taylor sisters slashed her 54 times with a knife, Alison spent her lunchbreak at work writing to a relative. 'I could give you pages on Michelle but I would rather not until I see you.' She recounted a family engagement when Michelle had been described as a nice girl. 'I felt like shouting out "no she isn't - you don't know her at all".'

The letter was never finished. Alison had intended to complete it when she got home from work. But the Taylor sisters were lying in wait for her, instead. The shadow of Michelle Taylor had hung low over her marriage and long before it. She and her family were inextricably wound up with that of the newly-wed Shaughnessys.

Alison was just 16, a virgin with little experience of life when she met Mr Shaughnessy at the Archway Tavern, a pub in North London popular with the capital's big Irish community. Here was a charmer, a former altar boy who had come to Britain seeking riches, a new life and, of course, love.

He had once joined other parishioners in the tiny village of Ballintubber, County Roscommon, on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. On another, he had shaken hands with Pope John Paul II. In Castlerea, Tom Flynn, who briefly employed him in his grocer's shop, remembered: 'We christenened him "the charmer".

He was very popular with everyone, especially the girls.' Mr Shaughnessy ran a mobile disco called Zodiac, perfect coyer for meeting and chatting up girls. 'I was not a saint, but I was not a womaniser,' he now says. But a cousin, Joe, claims Mr Shaughnessy was engaged four times.

It was in his North London flat that Mr Shaughnessy first settled on leaving Ireland. 'All the girls seemed to fall for him. He would have them eating out of his hands.' Alison found his handsome profile, twinkling eyes and amusing conversation devastating. They quickly became lovers. He was her first. She was the latest in a long line for him.

Her mother Mrs Breda Blackmore said: "They were together from that day on and she was in love with him.' Family approval was instant. Here was a clean cut, ambitious young man from the old country determined to make something of his life. He had toyed with entering the priesthood, worked at a series of jobs in Ireland and then found work as a porter at the Churchill Clinic, a private hospital in South London.

There, he rapidly moved up the ladder to secure a promising job as the assistant purchasing manager. But there, too, was Michelle Taylor, a pretty young assistant in the accounts department. They were already friends - but not lovers - when he announced his engagement. Michelle baked a cake for a celebration party.

But within months, they too were lovers. Mondays were their special nights. They would meet for sex in his room or hers after flower arranging sessions. The affair may have been an open secret at work. At home, with Alison, it was shrouded in lies and Irish blarney. However, illicit sex is one thing. Obsessive love is another.

Michelle Taylor could not have the undivided attention of the man she loved. It led her to pay for her lover's stag night - a favour rewarded by Alison with an invitation to the wedding. The two women had even become friends. Though it is hard to imagine the black thoughts that must have swarmed through Taylor's mind in those days running up the wedding.

Certainly those around them were aware of her slavish devotion to her rival's fiance. 'She hung on everything John said - it was clear she saw herself as John's close friend. She would try to monopolise the conversation with John and she laughed louder than anyone else at his jokes.'

These perceptive remarks from a family friend and Mr Shaughnessy's niece Edel Slattery. Edel had shared a hotel room with Taylor at a hen night in the Irish city of Waterford. 'It seemed a bit funny but it's only looking back that it falls into place. We never really got beneath her character. I suppose we only saw her good side.'

But surely that good side could not have manifested itself when she agreed to share Mr Shaughnessy's room in Piltown, County Kilkenny, the night before his wedding in June 1990. Mr Shaughnessy says they did not make love. Police believe Taylor made one last desperate attempt to get her lover to call off the wedding.

The following day, as that damning video showed, Taylor did her best to control her jealousy. She kissed the bride. She kissed the bridegroom. She was just one of the happy guests who also included Natalie McGuinness, now a 19-year-old student at University College, Dublin and then a 'close friend' of Mr Shaughnessy.

By rights, that should have been the end of the affair. Within weeks Mr Shaughnessy and Taylor joined weight training and aerobic classes at a college, near the Churchill. And they resumed their lovemaking. It was now that Taylor's sister Lisa entered the fray. Younger but more dominant and more self-assured, police believe she propelled Michelle's dream into terrifying reality.

But even now, neither police nor social workers really know why. Michelle wore a locket around her neck with a picture of them both in One detective said: 'Lisa is much harder and calculating than her sister and in the end probably said if you want to get rid of her let's just get on with it.' She had also worked at the Churchill Clinic and would have seen the effect Mr Shaughnessy had on her sister.

Certainly Michelle had hidden the affair from her own parents. Alison is now buried in the church here she married, beneath a head-stone which carries a simple poem she wrote as a 14-year old. Her mother, Breda Blackmore, who suspected from the outset that her daughter knew her killer, said: 'She is with friends and relatives now and hopefully at peace. 'It has been a terrible time, still unbelievable, still unreal.

We still have the feeling she will walk back through the door. 'Alison was very much in love with John and they were planning for the future and we going to move back to Ireland and start a family. She wanted the children to have Irish accents. 'She was very much a devoted wife and so sensible for her age.

She never told us whether she had any suspicion of an affair and when I asked "are you happy?" she replied "yes".' They met Taylor at the wedding, of course, and then again in the weeks after Alison's death. 'She came to our home with her mother to see John and at one of the memorials both sisters came and commiserated with us.

'When we think about it now it's quite chilling.' Michelle had even engineered it to be with her lover when Alison's mutilated body was found. She told Edel Slattery about it. 'She kept saying: "It was horrible". 'She told me how she had gone with John to buy some flower pots, came home with him and found Alison.

Michelle said he ran out and screamed for help in a pub. 'She kept crying - we were both in a state of shock. She was as upset as I was.' There are only losers in this ghastly crime but while Michelle Taylor, the twisted lover, and Lisa, the enigma of a sister, are in jail another figure has to live with the terrible consequences of his folly and fragility.

John Shaughnessy now expresses enormous self-reproach for his contribution to the tragic events in Vardens Road, Battersea, South West London. He describes the Taylor sisters as 'the angels of death' adding: 'I just can't believe that they could have done this. Never in a million years could I drag my brother into committing a murder with me.

It is beyond comprehension. 'I would hang them myself if I could. They are evil.' Mr Shaughnessy says he never gave Michelle Taylor the impression that the death of his wife would lead to a life for them together. 'I didn't love her. I just hoped it would dwindle to the friendship that I wanted,' he said.

But he claimed his suspicions grew and were confirmed after seeing Taylor's diary entries. 'My life is finished now,' he said. 'I just wish that Alison was alive. The image of her face is constantly with me and I still break down every day. 'I never thought I was doing anything which would wreck what Alison and I had between us.

I wasn't chasing Michelle. It was she who pestered me. And I know Alison would have forgiven me for having the affair — she was that kind of girl. 'People may say that I should have told Michelle to go away but she wouldn't. She was like a leech. 'I am guilty of one mistake. But these two are guilty of much more.

Lots of men have affairs but they don't finish up with dead wives.' He can claim some solace, if not yet forgiveness from his in-laws. Far from rejecting him, Alison's parents, Bob and Breda Blackmore, have embraced Mr Shaughnessy.

Mrs Blackmore said: 'He is still our son-in-law and we will have to wait and see what happens. It is too early to say if we can forgive him.'