| The Dream Solution
- Articles |
??/01/02 - So what is the truth about these two sisters
Words by Andy Darling
FHM
It was in a cramped flat, above a TV repair shop in South
London, that Bernard O'Mahoney claims his life was turned
upside down. His lover Michelle Taylor the woman he devoted
a year of his life to freeing from jail, and then left his
partner and young children for - was, according to O'Mahoney,
now confessing to murder.
He claims she had no choice. While Michelle was out, he'd
discovered a Letter, in which reference was made to her
privately admitting to murdering Alison Shaughnessy, the
wife of a man she'd previously had an affair with. In court
and ever since, Taylor has repeatedly sworn her innocence,
claiming that O'Mahoney fabricated his story and that the
letter never existed.
"She came into the Living room, O'Mahoney tells FHM,
"and I was holding the Letter. I was a bit sarcastic
at first, I said something Like, 'You'd better get rid of
this, hadn't you?' but then I just kept saying 'Explain
it. Explain it.' She went from initial shock, into real
anger, like a lot of people when they're caught out, as
if it's someone else's fault".
O'Mahoney claims that after storming off, and much swearing
and slamming of doors, she finally confessed, saying, "I
only meant to scare her, I only meant to scare her. I grabbed
her from behind, I stabbed her, and everything else is a
blur." "As she told me what had really happened,
I was feeling light-headed," he says.
"It was all just a blur, really. The whole row Lasted
maybe 10 minutes. It ended with her just crying, me saying
nothing and walking out, just feeling so disgusted. It was
such a wicked, wicked, wicked crime. And I'd been conned."
Bernard O'Mahoney's association with Michelle Taylor had
begun 15 months earlier, in July l992, when his brother
Paul, who'd been charged with wounding and assaulting a
former friend, was applying for bail at the Old Bailey.
Bernard went along, only to discover that the hearing had
been adjourned for seven days.
On a whim, he decided to go into the public gallery to watch
the trial that was taking place. He already knew a bit about
the case, as did most people who'd read a newspaper in the
previous weeks Michelle Taylor, 21, and her 18 year old
sister Lisa, were charged with murdering Alison Shaughnessy,
21, the wife of John Shaughnessy.
A year earlier, Alison had died after being stabbed 54 times,
apparently by someone she knew there was no sign of forced
entry at the Battersea flat where she was found. The prosecution
case, though apparently lacking hard evidence, was simple:
Michelle Taylor was the spurned mistress, and, accompanied
by her sister, Lisa, she'd killed Alison.
John Shaughnessy worked as an assistant purchasing manager
and gardener at The Churchill Clinic, a private hospital
in Lambeth, South London. Michelle also worked there, as
a part-time domestic assistant, and lived in staff accommodation.
She'd been carrying on with John both before and after his
marriage to Alison, although from his point of view it was
hardly the romance of the century. They would occasionally
have sex in her room on Monday nights, when he worked late,
arranging flowers at the clinic.
He'd then go home to Alison. To Michelle, it was much more
meaningful. She kept a secret diary, unearthed by the prosecution,
in which she wrote, seven months before the murder, "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 i want to the man i love."
In public, though, none of this simmering fury was apparent.
She'd attempted to befriend Alison, and had been to the
pub with her. She'd attended the couple's wedding, and,
astonishingly, had even paid for John's stag night. But
when John told her that he and Alison were returning to
their native Ireland to live, the prosecution claimed that
Michelle had snapped, and Alison's days were numbered.
When John found Alison's body, Michelle was with him, having
given him a lift home from the clinic. She handled the body,
stroked the hair, and tried to lift it up. Her discovery
of the body made it impossible for the police to place her
at the crime scene during the attack, as any forensic evidence
linking her to Alison Shaughnessy's body may have come from
her discovery of the corpse.
She'd then run into a nearby pub shouting hysterically,
"Call the police, my friend has been killed."
Bernard O'Mahoney wasn't convinced by the prosecution. He
believed Michelle's version of events: she'd been winding
the affair down, it had been John who did the running, and
it was him she hated, since she reckoned he actually didn't
love her or Alison.
Her defence barrister said that the case against her consisted
of flights of fancy". Beyond all this, though, O'Mahoney
simply didn't believe that a woman had committed the murder.
"I could just about imagine a woman defending herself
in such a frenzied way against a potential rapist or an
unfaithful lover, but 54 times? No way. Only a man could
do something like that."
And if there was one subject at which Bernard O'Mahoney
was an expert, it was violence. "I grew up with an
extremely violent father. My dad was born a bastard in a
Southern Irish workhouse. Being born out of wedlock back
then was like being Satan's son, and that probably excuses
him a bit.
I'm not exaggerating, the bastard was ridiculous; he'd smash
plates in my mother's face, he was a complete bastard, and
you get used to that sort of violence." Three years
in the army, and a spell in jail for glassing a man, was
followed by periods working abroad, including running the
door at a club on Johannesburg's "Murder Mile"
at the height of apartheid.
When he entered the world of the Taylor sisters, he was
head of security at Raquel's nightclub in Basildon, Essex.
This was where, two years later, the ecstasy tablet that
led to the death of Leah Betts was sold. Shortly after that,
three of O'Mahoney's associates were found dead in a Range
Rover, killed by a shotgun.
He was eventually cleared of any involvement, and wrote
about it in his book Essex Boys, later made into the movie
of the same name starring Sean Bean. Trouble and Bernard
O'Mahoney were neverfar apart. "I've done bad things
to people, I admit that, but it's always for a good reason.
If i see something wrong, I try to do something about it.
Most people don't, they just walk away, or Leave it to someone
else." At the Old Bailey, as the "guilty"
verdict was announced, and Michelle and Lisa were sentenced
to life imprisonment, O'Mahoney decided not to walk away,
believing he was seeing a huge miscarriage of justice.
I prided myself on my ability to size people up quickly,
and I just didn't believe they'd done it," he says.
It was more than that, though. Because of my father, I'd
been in trouble with authority from a very early age. I
always felt quite hard done by. I was a 13-year-old boy
standing in front of adults, and I started resenting authority
from day one.
When I attended the Old Bailey and I read about the Taylors,
they struck me as naive, stupid people, who'd already been
found guilty by the press, even though there was little
hard evidence. I felt that old sense of injustice. I wanted
to help them." Spurred on, O'Mahoney started writing
to Michelle, and began wondering how he could help the appeal.
By now the case was a tabloid sensation, with lurid headlines
like "Alison's Killer Hated Being Love Rat's Tart"
appearing alongside pictures from the Shaughnessys' wedding,
including a shot from a home video freeze-framed to make
it look as though Michelle and John were kissing intimately
during the reception.
Convinced that the sisters were innocent and had been stitched
up by both the media and the police, O'Mahoney had no qualms
about using dodgy methods in response, and so set about
"misrepresenting facts" of his own. Key to the
prosecution's case was a 23 minute "window of opportunity",
in which the sisters had supposedly killed Alison and returned
to the clinic.
Alison had Left work at Barclays Bank in The Strand at 5.02pm,
and would have reached the flat around 35 minutes later
Michelle had been seen at the clinic at almost exactly 6pm,
Leaving a period of about 23 minutes for them to commit
the murder, clean up, and drive back.
The police had allowed 11 minutes for the return trip but
O'Mahoney reckoned it wasn't possible, at rush hour, to
get from Battersea back to the clinic in Lambeth. He reasoned
that when the police had timed the distance, they'd have
been in a car with a flashing Light, which obviously would
have been quicker than the girls' 10-year-old Ford Sierra.
To prove it, he acquired a video camera with an on-screen
timer, and did the exact journey several times over a three-month
period. Unfortunately, the journey was usually of precisely
the duration the police had suggested. Once or twice he
did it in under nine minutes.
Undeterred, O'Mahoney worked out when traffic Lights would
be against him, when there would be roadworks and other
delays, and he eventually managed to come up with a few
taped journeys that did indeed take longer than 11 minutes.
Leaning on witnesses was next.
Jeanette Tapp, known as JJ, was a friend and colleague at
the clinic, and had made a statement saying that Michelle
and Lisa had been watching TV with her in her room at the
clinic at the time when Alison was being murdered. The police
later arrested her, threatening her with a charge of conspiracy
to murder, at which point she changed her story.
Now she said that she hadn't actually seen the sisters until
much later that evening, and had only made her onginal claim
because they'd asked her to, and because she didn't believe
the girls could have committed the murder. JJ's involvement
went further.
Michelle and Lisa claimed that they'd been shopping in Bromley,
far from Battersea, during the afternoon, before returning
to watch TV in JJ's room. There was a problem, though. Michelle's
cashpoint card had been used to make a withdrawal from a
machine near the clinic at the time they were supposed to
be in Bromley.
The sisters explained this by claiming that JJ had known
Michelle's PIN number, and had made the withdrawal. JJ had
denied this in court, and there was proof that she'd actually
made a withdrawal from her own bank, several miles away,
with her own card, just 24 minutes later.
O'Mahoney now admits that he found this hard to explain
away, but he was a man on a mission, determined to do what
he could to strengthen the appeal. I had no doubt that the
police had bullied JJ into telling lies," he says.
"She'd only changed her story after they'd threatened
to charge her with conspiracy to murder.
I wanted her to go back to telling the truth. If we could
get her to make a fourth statement, then at the very Least
she'd be shown to be totally unreliable" she'd be of
no use to either side, prosecution or defence." JJ
had left The Churchill Clinic, but someone managed to find
her new phone number.
To soften her up, the late night, silent phone calls began.
Then O'Mahoney called her, friendly at first, suggesting
he meet up with her to discuss what she'd said in court.
He was on her side, and he wanted the truth to come out,
it was only fair. She could bring her boyfriend along if
she wanted. JJ refused.
O'Mahoney became more aggressive, but still she stuck to
her story. She refused to meet up with O'Mahoney and hung
up. sobbing. How to explain away the cashpoint withdrawal?
A few months after the trial and after the failure with
JJ.
O'Mahoney read a newspaper feature about a solicitor in
Liverpool who'd gathered 400 instances of "phantom
cash withdrawals", when money had apparently been withdrawn
from accounts via cash points, without the account-holders'
knowledge or permission. O'Mahoney travelled up to Liverpool,
and was given dozens of cuttings relating to the phenomenon,
all of which he handed over to the appeal team.
But O'Mahoney's final concoction was his most audacious:
he decided to point the finger of blame at someone other
than the Taylors. A few days after the murder, the police
had been tipped off that a homeless man had been bragging
about stabbing a woman to death.
The suspect was an unstable character; he carried a knife,
he sometimes slept rough in The Strand where Alison had
worked, and had also squatted in Battersea where she lived.
As O'Mahoney quickly worked out, he was also most definitely
not guilty. No matter, he could be used to throw doubt into
people's minds.
This was achieved by befriending journalists who specialised
in writing about miscarriages of justice. There'd been the
Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four; next up were the
Taylor Two. O'Mahoney convinced several newspapermen that
he was a credible suspect, and as the appeal approached,
various artides appeared referring to him, and pointing
out that he couldn't be tracked down, such was his vagrant
lifestyle.
As it turned out, O'Mahoney's efforts weren't required as
the Taylor appeal was won, and the sisters' sentences were
quashed, for two different reasons. One was that the Press
coverage before the trial was deemed prejudicial as O'Mahoney
had felt, the tab[oids had judged the sisters guilty Long
before the official verdict, and this was bound to have
affected the jury.
Secondly, it was decided that the police had withheld important
evidence. A neighbour of the Shaughnessys, Dr Michael Unsworth-White,
had been a prosecution witness at the original trial. He
said he'd seen two white girls, one with a pony-tail, running
down the steps of Alison's flat at around the time of the
murder.
When he first spoke to the police, he'd said that one of
the girls "may have been black. He immediately corrected
himself, though, and said they were definitely both white.
When a full statement was taken the next day, he repeated
that they were both white.
The suggestion that one of the girls may have been black
wasn't presented to the court, because it was retracted
so swiftly that it wasn't deemed relevant. At the appeal,
though. it was seen as highly significant. The Taylors were
free. By now, Bernard O'Mahoney's partner, Debra, was sick
to death of his involvement with the Taylors.
Now that they were out, though, his work still wasn't over.
He was going to publish a book about the case, outlining
just how bent the police were, how there was no justice
within the legal system. Debra gave him a stark choice:
it's me or the book. "I walked out on my family because
of that book," he says.
It became important to me to do it, because of my stubbornness
and stupidity." If a Low-volume alarm bell had started
ringing during the conversation with JJ about the cashpoint
card, it became Louder on the day that he helped Michelle
move to the flat above the TV repair shop.
Among her possessions was a box containing restaurant menus,
Valentine's cards, birthday cards, bus tickets, till receipts
and a plastic rose. They were all mementoes of her time
with John Shaughnessy, the man she claimed to have finished
with months before Alison's murder, the man she couldn't
stand.
When they were working on the book, she was able to recall
what John had been wearing when they'd been together, and
rather than criticise him, she was fiercely protective.
She recalled the night when they were at a Harvester, when
he announced, "I'm getting engaged".
She fully expected him to then say, and you're the lucky
girl!" but instead he announced it was to someone called
Alison. She'd burst into tears and fled the restaurant.
Worse for O'Mahoney, though, was the possessiveness she
displayed towards him after they started sleeping together.
Their first night was in Wales, where they'd gone after
she'd complained about feeling cooped up in London. They
were both drunk. "I woke up before Michelle the next
morning. As she lay beside me, snoring fitfully, fanning
her beery breath towards me, I felt like a condemned man
waiting for the sun to rise. I knew I'd crossed a line,
and I just wished I hadn't."
O'Mahoney swore it wouldn't happen again, that he'd tell
her they should just be friends. "But I didn't. I'd
never seen her so happy - she was almost cooing with delight.
Most worryingly, from almost her first sentence that morning,
she was talking as if we were a married couple of long-standing."
Rather than nip the relationship in the bud, O'Mahoney tried
to keep his distance, working late as often as he could,
making excuses to avoid the fLat at night. He began to wonder
if this was what John Shaughnessy had gone through. She
constantly rang him when he was working, and she wouldn't
let him out of her sight when he was in the flat, in case
he contacted anyone.
She started ringing his former partner, Debra, pretending
to be someone called Sharon and made lewd comments about
what he was up to. At least there was no direct physical
threat: O'Mahoney later learned that Michelle greeted the
wife of another man she fancied with the words, "I'll
kill you, you fucking cunt."
He also discovered that she and Lisa had been asked to Leave
a martialarts club in South London. after "a number
of incidents on and off the mats". "I felt exasperated
by the workings of a mind that could create such a romantic
fantasy out of the dull reality of our relationship. The
atmosphere in the flat was very uncomfortable, basically.
If the phone rang and you wanted a private conversation,
she'd be listening. I was made to feel guilty going to work."
It was three months after the Taylors were freed that O'Mahoney
claims to have found the Letter; a letter which made him
believe that he'd been taken for a mug.
Since he'd attempted to pervert the course of justice on
their behalf, and since they couldn't be tried for murder
a second time, he saw no point in telling anyone, apart
from Debra. As a symbolic gesture, he ripped up the manuscript
of the partly-finished book. And that would have been that,
had it not been for the Taylors filing a complaint against
the police a year later.
They alleged that the police had intimidated witnesses at
the original trial, and had "established improper relationships
with journalists". The Police Complaints Commission
were obliged to interview all witnesses, several of whom
said that O'Mahoney had done some leaning on them.
Although the Taylors never applied for compensation, which
they would have been entitled to, O'Mahoney believed that
Michelle was making the complaint for one reason only: to
make money. Having a complaint upheld, would be, he thought,
the first step towards getting compensation for their miscarriage
of justice".
O'Mahoney saw red. The man who hated the police decided
to tell them everything he'd done in the run-up to the appeal.
While the case was being investigated, O'Mahoney and Debra,
who were now together again, began receiving silent phone
calls. He traced them to the Taylors and associates.
"Did you enjoy stabbing her 54 times, you bitch?"
he asked the anonymous caller one night. With Debra's agreement,
a story about the phone calls was published in the News
Of The World. The headline was "Twisted Sisters Made
My Life Hell: Cheated Wife Tells Of Taunt After Murder Case
Girt Stole Her Husband".
Following the News Of The Wortd story the Taylors sued him
and the next two years were spent arguing whether or not
the letter O'Mahoney claims to have seen existed. This has
never been resolved. But now, eight years after O'Mahoney
claims to have discovered the letter, he's published his
side of the tale in his book, The Dream Solution.
He's no Longer a doorman; the events followiny the Leah
Betts case caused him to quit, and he now runs a haulage
company in Peterborough. To this day, both Michelle and
Lisa deny any involvement in the murder of Alison Shaughnessy.
Whether the Taylor sisters were innocent or guilty, Shaughnessy's
killer is still free and O'Mahoney's book will once again
draw fresh attention to this high-profile unsolved murder.
O'Mahoney hopes that the true killers will eventually be
brought to justice - whoever they are -if only for the sake
of Alison Shaughnessy's family."Every time those girls
appear on TV, it tears Alison's mother's heart out,"
he says. "She wants the truth. That's what this is
all about."
FHM
The Dream Solution by Bernard O'Mahoney with Mick McGovern
is published by Mainstreom Publishing (£9.99). |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
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