| The Dream Solution
- Articles |
25/07/92
- 3 mistakes that ruined perfect crime of passion
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 slipups.
And now the first one came to light. Senior fingerprint identification
officer Eric Milne 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 flat.
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. As Mr Justice Blofeld warned the jury: "There
is no eyewitness account that either of these two defendants killed
Alison. "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. 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. |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
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