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

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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.

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. At that stage they were the only victims of a miscarriage of justice in the UK to have ever been denied any compensation.

Michelle worked alongside John Shaughnessy, Alison’s husband, at the Churchill Clinic in Lambeth, and the police quickly picked up the gossip about an affair between them. Since then he has made documentaries, written for The Observer and New Statesman, and spent a period in the BBC's Drama Serials Department. 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. 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. She was lying fully-clothed on her front in the landing with visible stab wounds on her hands and her legs.

These words of hate scribbled in a diary helped convict sisters Michelle and Lisa Taylor of the savage murder of newly wed Alison Shaughnessy. They had been written at the height of Michelle’s infatuation with John, on a day when she was ill, off work, and clearly at a low ebb. 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.

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