| The Dream Solution
- Articles |
25/07/92
- Slip-ups that trapped sisters
Today
DETECTIVES were frustrated. Weeks had gone by, and they seemed
no closer to finding the killer of young bride Alison O'Shaughnessy.
But then came the break. The girls had made three crucial slip-ups.
And now the first one came to light. Senior fingerprint identification
officer Derek Miln was discussing the laboratory report on 40
sets of "dabs" he had found in the O'Shaughnessy flat.
Among them, he told colleagues, were Michelle Taylor's. That was
hardly a surprise: she was a friend of Alison O'Shaughnessy and
often visited the flat in Vardens Road, Battersea.
She had even been with him when the body was found. "I just
nodded," says a detective closely involved in the case. 'But
then he just casually said, 'And we found Lisa's left forefinger
and thumb print on the inside of the front door.' "I started
to nod. But something wasn't quite right. "And then I remembered.
When we questioned Michelle, she definitely told us Lisa had never
been to the fiat.
Never. Alarm bells began to ring and we started to look very closely
at the two of them." The lie was slip-up No. 2. The alarm
bells rang even louder when it was found that the prints were
only 72 hours old when they were found. Neither Michelle nor her
sister had mentioned being anywhere near the flat, in the days
before the murder. Now, the police began going into Michelle's
alibi all over again, Finally the pressure showed up slip-up No.
3 - relying on friend Jeannette Tapp not to crack and admit she
had lied to give them an alibi.
Jeannette broke down under the threat of a murder charge and admitted
the alibi was false. Six weeks after the murder, detectives discovered
the most crucial point of all: Michelle's affair with Alison's
husband. Neither lover admitted to it without prompting. Michelle
had claimed she and Lisa were shopping for a party dress in Bromley,
far from the murder scene, on the afternoon of the killing.
But detectives found that her TSB Speedbank card had been used
at a NatWest bank just a few miles from the flat at 3.20pm that
day. Again, nurses at the Churchill Clinic in Lambeth Road, where
Michelle worked, told of seeing her there when she said she was
somewhere else. Nurse Carol Healey also said she saw Michelle
and "a ponytailed girl" drive away from the clinic that
day, at around 4pm, in Michelle's distinctive white Ford Sierra
estate. Another two weeks later, the police moved.
In dawn swoops they arrested Michelle, Lisa and friend Jeannette
simultaneously. There was more back-up evidence. There were the
"Diaries of Hate", found in Michelle's room at the Churchill
Clinic. In two shorthand notebooks, she had recorded her obsession
for O'Shaughnessy.
And her "Dream Solution" of making Alison disappear.
At last, the police had a murder motive. But when the two sisters
finally stood in the dock, the evidence against them was still
circumstantial. The closest anyone could come to placing either
girl at the O'Shaughnessy flat at the time of the murder was the
evidence of Dr Michael Unsworthwhite.
He was cycling past when two blonde girls in tracksuits ran out,
carrying a bulky bag. As Mr Justice Blofeld warned the jury: "There
is no eyewitness account that either of these two defendants killed
Alison. "There is no eyewitness account that puts them at
the flat at the relevant time. "There is no evidence that
puts them in the street at the relevant time. "This is a
case that depends on weighing individual pieces of evidence and
putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle."
The prosecution relied on what seemed Michelle's obvious motive:
jealousy. They pointed out that both girls had sought desperately
to establish an alibi between 7pm and 8pm. An alibi to cover a
period when only the killer or killers would have known that Alison
was dead - because the body had not yet been found. And, of course,
there were the Diaries of Hate, for Michelle to explain away.
There were loose ends to the Crown story. Murder weapon? Never
found. Bloodstains? Only on Michelle — who had taken care
to acquire them when the body was first found. But in the end,
the jury looked at the jigsaw. . . and decided it fitted. The
killer sisters shared the same school at Brockley, South-east
London. Another sister, Tracy, 12, lives in the family home at
Forest Hill. Michelle and Lisa were both injured at ju-jitsu.
When Michelle had a knee operation in the Churchill Clinic, O'Shaughnessy
visited her.
It was a fateful visit. For Michelle. For John O'Shaughnessy.
And for poor Alison. |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
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