1991 high profile murder case in London, England
On 3 June 1991, 21-year-old Alison Shaughnessy ("née" Blackmore; born 7 November 1969) was stabbed to death in the stairwell of her flat near Clapham Junction station. Shaughnessy was newly married, but her husband was having an affair with a 20-year-old woman, Michelle Taylor. A witness reported seeing two women running from Shaughnessy's building after the murder, and fingerprints found at the scene matched those of Michelle and her sister Lisa Taylor, who claimed never to have been there. Michelle's diary included an entry that read: "My dream solution would be for Alison to disappear, as if she never existed."
The Taylor sisters were found guilty of the murder in 1992, but one year later their convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal because the prosecution had failed to turn evidence over to the defence, and because the sensationalist media coverage may have influenced jurors. Reinvestigations by the Metropolitan Police did not identify any other suspects, and in 2002 it was decided to no longer formally investigate the case.
Filmmaker Bernard O'Mahoney, a man who had originally campaigned for the release of the Taylors and who then had an affair with Michelle, has since claimed that she confessed to the murder to him and has campaigned for the sisters to be re-convicted. The case led to discussions about the role of press and media in relation to criminal cases.
Background.
Shaughnessy was born Alison Blackmore in London in 1969, and was raised in the city as part of a large Irish family. She spent a large amount of time going to Piltown, County Kilkenny, Ireland as a child. In 1986, she was working as a clerk at a Barclays bank in London, and met her future husband, John Shaughnessy. He worked at the Churchill Clinic in Lambeth and had recently emigrated from Ireland. The couple became engaged in April 1989 and married on 23 June 1990 in Piltown. 
Among the guests at the wedding was Michelle Taylor, a work friend of John Shaughnessy, recorded on video being kissed by him on the cheek. Michelle and John lived in the same staff accommodation at the Churchill Clinic, two rooms apart from each other. After their wedding, Alison moved into her husband's staff accommodation. John and Michelle spent more and more time together after the wedding and this started to be noticed by others. In January 1991, John and Alison Shaughnessy moved to 41 Vardens Road in Battersea (about 400 metres/440 yards from Clapham Junction station).
Murder.
On Monday 3 June 1991, Alison finished work at 5:00 p.m. as usual, and made her way home to Vardens Road. She had told colleagues that she was planning to soon have children with John. She wanted to move away with John to Ireland to start a family there. 
Later that evening, John was given a lift home from the Churchill Clinic to the flat in Vardens Road by Michelle Taylor. Michelle came in with him, supposedly because she "wanted to say hello to Alison", and at 8:30 p.m. they entered, revealing Alison lying in a pool of blood at the top of the stairs. She was dead and had been stabbed 54 times.
Murder inquiry.
Initial investigations.
It was immediately clear that Alison had been the victim of a frenzied attack. She was lying fully-clothed on her front in the landing with visible stab wounds on her hands and her legs. Only three of the wounds were considerably deep, while the others were mostly "pin-prick" type wounds. The pathologist described these wounds, and the number of them, as unnecessary, since it would not have taken 54 stabs to kill her. He said that it was a clear case of rage, and said it was clear that someone was "venting strong emotions that had been bottled up for a long time". 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. The attack would not have taken any longer than 2-3 minutes. It appeared Alison had fought with her assailant after being attacked, and was still conscious when the killer inflicted another 24 wounds to the front of her body, cutting her neck and windpipe. Her murderer had continued to stab her even after she fell to the floor. 
Alison had arrived home at 5:37 p.m., and police believed that she had been killed minutes after entering the flat. However, there was no sign of a break-in, and she had taken time to pick up the post as she came in, suggesting to police that she felt comfortable with her killer(s) as they came in with her. The police therefore concluded that she likely knew her attacker. Examinations were made of the windows of the flat, the drainpipe outside and the exterior roof, and these proved that no one had attempted forced entry. Had an intruder climbed the drainpipe or climbed onto the flat roof they almost certainly would have left fingerprints, shoemarks or scuffing by hands or feet, but experts found no such evidence.
John was found to have a cast-iron alibi for the murder (having been at work at the time) and so was eliminated from inquiries.
Taylor sisters become suspects.
Police inquiries quickly established that John and Michelle Taylor were having an affair at the time of the murder. It emerged that Michelle saw John as her lover and believed that they would have a long-term relationship together. A virgin before she met John, she was even asked by him to go on the pill so they could maintain a long-term relationship. Michelle later said he was her first true love. Alison had not been aware of the affair, although she strongly disliked Michelle. It was discovered that John had spent the night before his wedding to Alison having sex with Michelle, and Michelle later claimed that they had also had sex on the morning of the wedding. Michelle had even organised and paid for John's stag night, and John paid for her flight and hotel when she came for the wedding. 
On 24 July 1991, police searched Michelle's room at the Churchill Clinic, where they found a diary in which she recorded her daily thoughts about John and their secret relationship together. She also recorded her feelings towards Alison, and a soon-to-be infamous passage was found that read "my dream solution would be for Alison to disappear as if she never existed". This indicated to police that she had a clear motive to kill Alison. In her first three statements to police, she made no mention of the affair. When asked if she knew if John had any extra-marital affairs, she did not disclose hers and instead claimed he had affairs with other women. She claimed that she did not really know John or Alison, and had certainly never been to the Vardens Road flat before. This was later found to be a lie.
When she entered the flat with John, Michelle picked up the dead woman, meaning that any forensic evidence on the body that linked Alison to Michelle could now be explained by this action. Police believed that this was intentional. However, fingerprints from Michelle and her 18-year-old sister Lisa were found on the inside of the front door. This was despite the fact Lisa claimed to have never been to the flat, which further incriminated the sisters, who had supposedly been together all that afternoon. 
A resident on Vardens Road named Dr Unsworth-White had also come forward to inform police that he had seen two young women hurriedly coming out of the flat at 5:45 p.m. while he was cycling past. One had a ponytail, a hairstyle favoured by Lisa Taylor, and he had never seen them in Vardens Road before. The sighting was significant evidence as police believed that this was the time Alison was murdered. White then picked out Lisa Taylor at an identity parade. However, a friend of the Taylors named Jeanette Tapp came forward to tell police that she had been with the sisters at Churchill Clinic from 5:15 p.m. onwards, apparently giving them an alibi.
Arrests and alibi disproved.
On 7 August 1991, the Taylor sisters and Tapp were arrested on suspicion of the murder of Shaughnessy. Michelle initially complied in interviews and discussed her relationship with John openly. When asked how she felt about Alison, she responded "When you see a person and you don't see the other person with them, it doesn't really enter your head. So you still feel like you're boyfriend and girlfriend and there's no-one else there." Police believed Michelle had killed Alison as she knew she and John were about to move to Ireland to start a family together, and she wanted John to herself. Lisa Taylor answered "no comment" to every question asked of her in interviews.
Having given two statements providing the Taylors with an alibi, Tapp admitted in her police interview that her story was false and she had provided them with an alibi to cover for her friends. She revealed that she had actually been out shopping with her mother that afternoon and had not returned to her flat until 7:15 p.m., where she found the Taylors waiting claiming that they had been there since "just after five". After detectives revealed to the Taylors that their alibi had been destroyed, the pair's lawyers got together and agreed that both their clients should answer "no comment" from then on. On 6 September, the Taylors' father was charged with possession of an offensive weapon, having been found to possess a 10-inch knife when the family home was searched on his daughters' arrest on 7 August.
Police believed that the Taylor sisters had left the Churchill Clinic at 4:00 p.m., before driving to Vardens Road and waiting for Alison to return home. They then claimed they had to collect something from the flat for John, and Alison obligingly let them in. After picking up the mail on the doormat, she would have been followed by the sisters upstairs before they attacked her. As they ran out, they were seen by Dr Unsworth-White. They then sped off in their car, driving the 10 or 11-minute journey back to the Churchill Clinic, where they were sighted arriving at 6:00 p.m.
Trial.
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"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."
—Passage found in Michelle Taylor's diary
Michelle and Lisa Taylor were brought to trial at the Old Bailey in 1992. The rarity of two young sisters being tried for the murder of a love rival brought the case huge public attention, and the trial was subject to heavy, and sensational, coverage in the press. 
The jury were told about Tapp's creation of a false alibi for the sisters when she claimed that they were with her at the time of the murder, only to change her story when arrested and reveal that she didn't see them till she arrived back at her flat at 7:15 p.m. Tapp testified that Michelle seemed to be incredibly calm during the stresses of the investigations. It was pointed out in court that, when the Taylor sisters claimed to Tapp to have been waiting for her there since "just after five" that they were already creating an alibi for themselves before the murder had even been discovered at 8:30 p.m., and they were already trying to cover their tracks for the period around 5-6 p.m. when it was not yet known that was when Shaughnessy died. The prosecution said that only the murderers would have done this, as only they would have known by that stage what specific period of time they needed to cover their tracks for. Lisa Taylor had also testified that they had been shopping in Bromley that afternoon and had not taken any credit cards, but her card had actually been used (for unknown reasons) at 3:20 p.m. at a bank near the Churchill Clinic in Lambeth, close to the murder site.
Michelle Taylor, who claimed to police previously that she and her sister had never been to the Vardens Road flat, suddenly claimed at trial that the reason her and Lisa's fingerprints were