The Dream Solution: The Murder of Alison Shaughnessy - and the Fight to Name Her Killer

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There was some speculation after the trial that the killing could have been influenced by the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, in which a married man has a weekend affair with a woman who refuses to allow it to end and becomes obsessed with him. Michelle Taylor addresses reporters outside the court following the quashing on appeal of her and her sister Lisa Taylor’s convictions for the murder of bank clerk Alison Shaughnessy.

It emerged that Michelle saw John as her lover and believed that they would have a long-term relationship together. The pathologist also concluded from the shallow depths of the wounds that the attacker was a woman, since they had not been made by someone of great strength.There was also evidence from Michele’s diary where she had written “my dream solution would be for Alison to disappear, as if she never existed. Eric Milne, one of two professional witnesses, indicated in the witness-box that Lisa’s fingerprint on the Shaughnessys’ front door was recent, and Professor Rufus Crompton, the pathologist, said that the violence suffered by Alison was probably inflicted by a woman: ‘it would suggest the capability of a female. In the opinion of Detective Superintendent Chris Burke, who had led the investigation, the verdict was ‘brilliant’.

The sister whose card it was said that it was not the first time that money had been taken out of her account without her knowing, however, it was noted that the sister had never reported her card lost or stolen or complained before about money being taken out of her account by anyone other than herself before. At that stage they were the only victims of a miscarriage of justice in the UK to have ever been denied any compensation. The defence, however, claimed that this showed that the Taylors could not have been the two women who carried out the murder and said this should have been presented at the trial.Bob Woffinden, an investigative journalist who campaigned to free prisoners he thought were wrongly imprisoned, such as James Hanratty (posthumously proven to have been guilty) and the killer of Helen McCourt, claimed they must be innocent because he posited that it was a highly unusual case and two women could not have carried out the murder. alison shaughnessy murder: taylor sisters appeal; b)c4n: england: london: peckham: int seq taylor family including michella and lisa taylor in. As soon as Lisa and Michelle were led away in tears to begin their life sentence in prison, their parents, Ann and Del, decided to fight. Alison Shaughnessy had met her husband in a pub in London in 1986 when he was a purchasing manager for the Churchill Clinic in Lambeth.

Michelle and Lisa Taylor had led fairly uneventful lives in Forest Hill, south London - until Michelle got her first job at the Churchill Clinic, in south London, and met and fell in love with John Shaughnessy. The police officer instantly saw a significance in this: two days earlier, a 21-year-old woman named Alison Shaughnessy had been found stabbed to death in the hallway of her flat in Vardens Road, Battersea. At their sensational trial the prosecution alleged that 21-year-old Michelle Taylor who had been having an affair with Alison's husband - had murdered Alison in a jealous rage and that she was aided in her brutal attack by her 18-year-old sister Lisa. This claim was discredited by the fingerprint expert, who insisted that the fingerprints were no older than 72 hours old and certainly not as old as two or three weeks, meaning that Michelle's account did not explain the presence of the fingerprints. Though it was claimed by the defence that this was another occasion when small sums of money had disappeared from Michelle’s account without her knowing about it.Others such as Judith Ward, Stefan Kiszko, members of the Maguire family, the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six had spent periods of between 10 and 17 years in jail before having their names cleared. The quotation marks were employed on that occasion but were not always used, as ‘Wedding Day Love Cheats’ and similar dominated the news pages. He had omitted to mention this before, he said, because he had not, at the time, connected two girls with the crime.