One evening in the early summer of 1991, a police constable named Sean Oxley received an unusual phone call in his office in Bow Street police station. Oxley was then working with an undercover unit, mixing with homeless people to gather intelligence about street crime and he was well known among the social workers in the soup kitchens and hostels of central London. It was one of these social workers, an unpaid volunteer, who now called him.
The man was nervous and refused to give his name, and Oxley started to tape the call. The social worker soon came to the point. “There’s this guy,” he said. “Derek Williams. I’m worried about him. He’s been making all sorts of allegations… This guy is weird. He’s told me a lot of things over the months. He doesn’t brag about it. He’s very calm and matter of fact… He says he’s done an armed robbery… He carries a knife and he’s told me he’s done a girl.”
Oxley stopped him. “What do you mean?”
“Killed her, stabbed her. He’s very calm about it. That’s what’s so frightening. His character has changed. He’s worse than he used to be.”
“When was it done?”
“Very recent. He told me yesterday.”
The social worker explained that he had often seen Derek Williams sleeping rough around the Strand and that more recently he had come across him in a squat in Battersea. 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. He started to push the social worker for more information.
“Do you know what’s just happened in Battersea?”
“I don’t, no.”
“A girl got murdered by a madman. Didn’t you know?”
“No, I had no idea.”
“The victim worked at Barclays on the Strand.”
“God, is that right?”
“Yes, it makes you think, doesn’t it? Right area, right time.”
The nervous social worker gave Oxley a few more details about Derek Williams and when he called back later that night to ask if the police were taking action, he was assured by one of Oxley’s colleagues that all of his information had been passed on to the Incident Room which was dealing with the murder of Alison Shaughnessy.
That was June 5 1991. The next day, the social worker spoke to a colleague whose wife, it turned out, had been threatened by Derek Williams. They agreed that he was an unstable character with some unpleasant obsessions about women. They also discovered that apart from sleeping rough in the Strand, where Alison Shaughnessy worked, he also drank in a pub in Clapham which she had often used. For all they knew, he had been following her for weeks. They called the police again to share their suspicions.
Over the next few days, the social worker uncovered more and more clues which seemed to suggest that the homeless man could indeed be guilty of the murder: he carried a long knife; he no longer had the black leather jacket that he normally lived in; he had also got rid of a new pair of training shoes; he was moody and tearful; he was talking about leaving London and going up north. And he had boasted about stabbing a woman. The social worker called the police again. On the night that Derek Williams planned to go up north, he called twice and waited for the police cars to arrive, but none came. Williams disappeared.
Two months later, in the early hours of August 7, detectives who had been investigating the murder of Alison Shaughnessy knocked on the door of a terraced house in Forest Hill, south London and arrested their prime suspect. Not Derek Williams, but Michelle Taylor, a 20-year-old accounts clerk who had known the dead woman for two years. They also arrested her younger sister, Lisa, then aged 18. Both girls were charged with murder and, eleven months later, in July 1992, they were convicted at the Old Bailey and sent to prison for life.
Next week, lawyers for the Taylor sisters are due to go to the Court of Appeal to try and quash their convictions. They hope to raise a series of questions about the case. Was the trial prejudiced by unfair press coverage? Did a crucial witness lie? Was it physically possible for the girls to have committed the murder? And whatever happened to Derek Williams?
Lisa and Michelle Taylor grew up in Forest Hill in south east London in a stable family in a quiet street. They went to school, went out dancing, went to work, planned to get married one day and never threatened for a moment to break out of the obvious course which life had planned for them.
In the summer of 1987, when she was 16, Michelle got her first job, as a clerk in the accounts department of a private health clinic in Lambeth Road, south London. There she met and eventually fell for one of the gardeners, a good-looking young Irishman called John Shaughnessy, ten years her senior and a full-time flirt. They were together for most of 1989 and there were times when Michelle felt she really loved him but, in September of that year, he took her out to a Harvester restaurant and told her that he had been seeing someone else, a bank clerk called Alison, whom he wanted to marry. Michelle walked out and refused to speak to him for months.
A year and a half passed. Michelle calmed down. John announced his engagement to Alison. Michelle made friends again with both of them and when they were married in Ireland in the summer of 1990, she went to the wedding. Michelle still worked with John at the clinic and, occasionally, when Alison was not around, she slept with him, until the autumn of 1990 when she decided that this was only going to hurt her and she stopped the relationship for good. She stayed friends with John and Alison, started going out with a theatre nurse called Tim and put the whole affair behind her.
Monday, June 3 1991 was an apparently ordinary day in the clinic. At six that evening, Michelle went with John, as she often did, to arrange flowers in the patients’ rooms. She stopped to chat with one of the porters about his income tax return until about eight o’clock when John asked her to give him a lift home so that they could pick up two large flower pots which were too heavy for him to bring to work on the train. It was about half past eight when they pushed open the door of John’s flat in Battersea and discovered the body of his young wife on the floor. She had been stabbed 54 times. It was Michelle who ran screaming into the road to call the police.
That evening, detectives took a statement from Michelle and when they asked her if John Shaughnessy had any girlfriends, she shrugged and said no. She thought they meant now, not last year, so she never told them about herself. And the police were not interested in her: the pathologist estimated that Alison had been killed at six o’clock and there were plenty of people who had seen Michelle in the clinic then, arranging the flowers with John.
But at some point in the next few weeks, the police began to wonder about Michelle Taylor. They heard rumours in the clinic about her and John and they worried that she had not mentioned the relationship. The pathologist said he could not be exact about the time of Alison’s death; she might have died two hours either side of six o’clock. The police knew that Alison had left work in the Strand at two minutes past five; they retraced her steps and reckoned she might have got home as early as twenty to six. If Michelle were jealous of her marriage to John, they speculated, perhaps she had waited for her, stabbed her to death and sped back to the clinic before six o’clock.
There was, however, one big obstacle to the emerging police theory. One of the other girls who worked in the clinic, Jeanette Tapp – known as JJ – said that Michelle and her younger sister, Lisa, had been in her room next door to the clinic from a quarter past five that afternoon until Michelle went to arrange the flowers with John. If that was right, both JJ and Lisa could prove that Michelle could not possibly have been waiting to attack Alison at twenty to six. The police had already spoken to JJ in their first trawl of clinic workers. Now, on June 13, they went back to her, but she confirmed her story in four pages of detail.
Still, the police pursued their theory and, on July 24, they interviewed JJ again. She remained adamant, recalling the detail of conversations and the brands of cigarette which Lisa and Michelle were smoking with her. She said was sure of the day because she had been out buying things for her birthday party and she remembered showing them to Lisa and Michelle; and she was sure of the time because she was waiting for Neighbours to start on television when they arrived. On the same day, the police also interviewed Lisa and Michelle and secretly tape recorded the two girls talking to each other in Battersea station. But, just like JJ, the two sisters stood by their story.
The police, however, now discovered something which kept their theory alive. Searching Michelle’s room, they found an old diary, full of teenage worries, some of them about John Shaughnessy. They were particuarly interested in one entry, in which Michelle described Alison as “an unwashed bitch” and added: “My dream solution would be for Alison to disappear, as if she never existed.” It was written on October 31 1990, a full seven months before the murder, and there was no other similar line anywhere in the diary. But to the police, it looked like a motive. They became convinced that JJ was lying.
Two weeks later, JJ Tapp was woken at twenty to six in the morning by four detectives who arrived at her room with a search warrant and a stunning announcement. They told her they were arresting her for conspiracy to murder Alison Shaughnessy. JJ was bewildered.
“What? Me?” she said. “What’s conspiracy?”
New rules mean that all interviews in police stations are now tape-recorded, but the detectives spent two hours and fifty five minutes with JJ, searching her flat, and then driving her down the road to Tooting police station. By the time they sat down in front of the tape recorder to start their formal questioning, JJ had decided to abandon the story which she had told with such consistency in her three previous statements.
The recorded interview begins with the words of a detective inspector: “Whilst we were conducting the search of your room this morning, you mentioned about the fact that you had not told us the truth initially about the presence of Lisa and Michelle Taylor being with you on June 3…”
JJ agreed with him. She was now sure that she had not been with Lisa and Michelle from a quarter past five that afternoon. She remembered it all now, she said. She had been round at her mother’s. She was sure of that: she had been out buying things for her birthday party and she remembered showing them to her. She had not seen Lisa and Michelle until about seven o’clock and then they had told her that they had been in her room and for some reason which she could not quite explain to the police, she had decided to say that she had been with them. But it wasn’t true, she said. She had been with her mother, and her mother would vouch for it. JJ signed a statement and by half past six that evening, she was free again. The charge of conspiracy to murder on which she had been arrested, was dropped. It was on that same day, August 7, that Lisa and Michelle Taylor were arrested. The next day, they were charged with murder.
The trial, in July last year, was a battle of doubt and counter-doubt. The Crown said that Alison must have arrived home at twenty to six, allowing 20 minutes for Lisa and Michelle to kill her, clean themselves, change their clothes and drive back through the rush-hour to the clinic, arriving by six o’clock. It was only a theory and the defence attacked its foundation by producing two neighbours who remembered events of that evening and suggested that Alison had not really arrived home until after six.
There was no scientific evidence to link the girls to the crime, no skin under the dead girl’s nails, no tell-tale hair on her clothes, no footprint in her blood and, perhaps most surprising of all, not one spot of blood from any of the 54 wounds on either girl or on their clothes. A doctor who lived in the same road said he had seen two girls running from a house at about the time that the murder was committed; but the height, hair-colour and clothing which he described did not match Lisa and Michelle and he failed to pick them out at an identity parade.
The Crown made much of the fact that Michelle had originally claimed that her sister had never even been to Alison’s flat while she now admitted that that was not true. Michelle said she was just trying to keep Lisa out of the police inquiry; the police said she was covering up crime. The defence pointed to five unidentified sets of finger prints in the flat and revealed that some of the dead woman’s jewellery had been stolen. The Crown said this had nothing to do with the killing.
Reporters swarmed all over the trial, chewing over the sexual innuendo and the detail of the victim’s wounds, regurgitating the whole affair in stories which presented Crown allegations as though they were fact. Michelle was repeatedly described as a jealous mistress; her journal was a diary of hate; the Sun ran a front-page picture of her kissing John O’Shaughnessy under the headline “Cheats kiss”. All this was published on a grand scale while the trial was in progress and with no means of preventing the jurors from reading it. Lisa and Michelle’s lawyers feared that if the trial were evenly poised, the newspapers might tip the balance against them.
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. Neither of them really knew what they were doing but a volunteer army of friends and neighbours offered them money and advice and within three days, they had printed a thousand posters – “Lisa and Michelle are innocent, please help us campaign” – and displayed them around Forest Hill. Someone sent them £1,000 anonymously. Children from their street brought them their pocket money. They bought a second-hand photocopier for £50 and ran off so many posters and pamphlets that it burned out. They tried to re-investigate the case, but it was difficult.
Del wanted to prove that Alison Shaughnessy could not have been at home until after six, as her neighbours said, and he tried to follow up a hint that she had stopped on her way back from work to pick up a parcel from the post office. He went to the post office, then to the sorting office, found they had moved, went to the new site and found that as a result of the move they had piled up all of their paperwork in a muddled mountain from which he had no hope of retrieving any trace of Alison.
They tried to prove that Lisa and Michelle had been shopping in Bromley earlier in the afternoon and not, as the police said, hanging around near Alison’s house waiting to kill her. They went to the Body Shop where Lisa had bought a bottle of perfume, only to find that it had been taken over and all the old till-rolls had been thrown out. They went to a car parts shop which had been visited by a friend of the girls called Phillip, who remembered he had seen them shopping on that day. The shop assistant remembered Phillip and remembered selling him the particular spare part but they no longer had the records of the transaction to prove the time and the date when it had happened.
They struggled on, slowly attracting more attention from decent newspapers and television programmes. They received a tantalising call from a woman who said she had recently got to know JJ. Ann and Del taped the call in which the woman said: “She is very paranoid about it…After talking to JJ, I’m 100% sure that those girls aren’t guilty…I will tell you something between you and me: I know they are not guilty. She lied. She is very paranoid. She kept saying to me that she felt very guilty. Sitting in the cafe, there was a man in the phone box and he looked like one of the CIDs and she went white…By her conversation, she has lied in court and she is frightened.” The woman said she would make a statement, but she never called back again.
Still it was obvious that JJ had lied at some point, either in her first three statements or in her later interview with police. Ann and Del Taylor commissioned a speech expert, Peter Wright, to analyse her final interview with police. “She seems at times an accomplished liar,” he said. She vacillated, she was weak and suggestible, she was obviously frightened and was, he concluded, an unsatisfactory witness. If JJ would admit that her original alibi was the truth, it would be the end of the Crown’s case: Michelle and Lisa could not possibly have been in Battersea at all. But when the Taylors’ lawyer wrote to JJ asking for help, she refused to meet them and when I called her, she slammed the phone down and, within 48 hours, she had changed the number.
And then there was Derek Williams. His name turned up in unused statements which now have to be disclosed by the Crown to the defence. The volunteer social worker and his colleague turned out to be almost homeless themselves and they had vanished from their old haunts. With some help from the Guardian, Ann and Del Taylor found them, and the two of them confirmed their story to the girls’ lawyer, Michael Holmes, although they asked for their names not to be publicised.
They said they had called police more than ten times trying to alert them. Two detectives hadd finally turned up to interview them, they said, but by that time Williams had been long gone and the police had showed little interest in their story. “When the news broke that two girls had been arrested for the murder, we could not believe it.”
Ann and Del Taylor do not claim to know that Derek Williams is guilty of murder. They can see that he may have been boasting to make people frightened of him or that the social worker and his colleague may have wanted to get him into trouble. Their lawyer has written repeatedly to the Crown Prosecution Service, asking for any evidence that the police ever followed up the tip that was received that night by Sean Oxley in Bow Street police station. As far as the lawyer can establish, the police never traced Williams and excluded him from the inquiry without ever speaking to him. That is the point which now worries Ann and Del Taylor.
In Bullwood women’s prison in Essex, Lisa and Michelle wait impatiently for their case to reach the court of appeal. On a Sunday afternoon in the visiting room, sitting across a table littered with crisp packets and fizzy drinks, they look back on the last year like a bad video they don’t ever want to see again.
They say that JJ lied in court and, even though she was one of their best friends, they say they do not blame her. Lisa said: “I feel sorry for her. If she had the same police that I had, then I feel sorry for. You can’t blame her. She was just like us. She’d never had anything to do with the police, she was in there by herself, with no solicitor. What can she do?
“All the time I was in the police station, I was waiting to go home. In a police station, you don’t know what’s going on. The light’s always the same and you don’t know what time of day it is, or if it’s night or what. I was just waiting to go home. I never thought they’d charge us and I never thought I’d be found guilty, never. I nearly had a nervous breakdown afterwards. I didn’t sleep at all for about a week and I was just speeding around and not listening to anything anybody told me and crying all the time. But you can’t live in two places at once. You either live outside the prison, or inside. If you try and do both, it does your head in.”
Michelle is still angry at the way that Fleet Street lynched her. “It was such crap. We couldn’t believe what they were doing but we never thought it would make a difference. When they found us guilty, I just went blank. I felt empty.”
Both of them are holding on to their humour in the hope that the court of appeal will open the prison door for them. If they are released, they say, life will never be the same. Michelle has started talking about studying the law. “We’re not the only ones in here who are innocent. And I want to get a law degree and help prisoners. I had no idea what went on until all this happened.”
Lisa is not so sure, not so confident of her abilities. “I just know I’ll never trust anyone again, especially not anyone in authority. I’m stronger now. I used to be all passive and weak but I wouldn’t let it happen again. I’d know better if it ever happened again.”
* The name Derek Williams is false and has been substituted for the real one to avoid legal prejudice.
