| The Dream Solution
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21/07/92
- Mistress 'slept with husband' on wedding eve
The Guardian
ONE of the women accused of murdering the bank clerk Alison Shaughnessy
told an Old Bailey jury yesterday that she slept with Mrs Shaughnessy's
husband John the night before their wedding.
Michelle Taylor said her trip to Ireland for the wedding was paid
for by the couple, although she went "more as John's guest".
She stayed in bed-and-breakfast accommodation, then at Mr Shaughnessy's
hotel at his suggestion.
After a party the night before the wedding, Mr Shaughnessy rang
her from his room and asked her to bring some tea bags along for
a drink. "I stayed there the night," Michelle told the
jury.
Asked what happened, she replied: "We slept together."
Mr Shaughnessy previously told the jury he spent the night before
the wedding with Miss Taylor, but in separate beds.
Miss Taylor, aged 21, and her sister Lisa, aged 18, of Forest
Hill, south London, deny murdering Mrs Shaughnessy at her Battersea
flat on June 3 last year. Before calling Miss Taylor to the witness
box, her counsel, Richard Ferguson QC, said the prosecution case
was "an empty shell".
He maintained she would have had only six to nine minutes to overpower
Mrs Shaughnessy stab her repeatedly, escape to her car, make sure
she had no blood on her and get back to the Churchill clinic in
Lambeth, where she worked.
Mr Ferguson told the jury: "One could understand Michelle
turning against the man who had seduced her and who callously
used her love for his own sexual gratification," but her
feelings for Mrs Shaughnessy were friendship, tinged with sympathy.
She said she was upset when she first learned of Mr Shaughnessy's
engagement, and avoided him for a couple of months. Asked why
she returned to her former relationship with him, she replied:
"Because I still loved him, still cared for him."
When she saw evidence that he had gone out with other girls, "I
realised I was just being used along with Alison and the other
girls. I did not want a relationship with him any more."
Miss Taylor was asked by her counsel, Richard Ferguson QC, about
the diary entry in which she referred to her hatred for Mrs Shaughnessy,
and the "dream solution" of her disappearing from the
scene. "I just meant for her not to have been there from
the beginning," Miss Taylor said.
Miss Taylor said that by the time of Mrs Shaughnessy's murder
she and Mr Shaughnessy had not made love for months and she considered
their affair over. On the day Alison died, Michelle and Lisa Taylor
went shopping in Bromley, arriving between 3.15 and 3.20pm.
They returned to the clinic at about 5.20pm and watched Neighbours
on television. She gave Mr Shaughnessy a lift home after he asked
her to pick up some heavy pots from his flat.
When they went in he started shouting 'Alison, Alison'. "I
could seeing Alison lying there. I went up to her and tried to
pick her up. When I could not I went to feel her pulse and there
was no pulse. She was really cold.
I cannot remember how I reacted." Michelle claimed that only
three weeks after Alison's death, Mr Shaughnessy tried to have
sex with her again. "I was totally disgusted at him,"
she said.
He had lied when he claimed it was she who tried to resume their
sexual relationship after the murder.
The trial continues today. |
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