Meet, Marry, Murder - Season 1, Episode 38 - Taylor - Full Episode | Forensic Files

WILL HANRAHAN: Elderly farmer Bill Taylor missing without a trace. Police interrogate his wife.
They believe she knows where his body is. POLICE: And now we're giving you, and have frequently given you, the opportunity to tell us
what happened to Bill. Can we go out and get his body back? So that his family can bury him?
So his children can bury him? WILL HANRAHAN: This was a story of love, of hate, of intrigue.
The simple fact was they were a family at war. WILL HANRAHAN: Also on the scene, Angela
Taylor's lover, Paul Cannon. Cannon and Taylor were exchanging some pretty horrific messages with each other via WhatsApp.
POLICE: There's no more talk of getting rid of Bill, killing Bill, making love while the blood
is running down the drain. WILL HANRAHAN: It was a countryside murder mystery with an unhappy marriage at the heart of it.
A mystery which could not be solved until the body of Bill Taylor was found. [theme music]
[tense music] When farmer William Taylor met a woman called Angela, she gave him a new lease of life.
He'd been previously married. He had his son by that relationship. His first marriage ended in divorce
when his son Richard was 11. And it seems that his wife simply just got up and left
and didn't come back. WILL HANRAHAN: It had been six years of being a single parent when William Taylor, known as Bill,
found love again. Angela Taylor came from the Northeast, from Middlesbrough. She came down to the Hitchin area.
She formed a relationship with a young man who, at the time, worked on Bill Taylor's farm.
They had a child together. It was a rocky relationship. And it was while she was with him that she and Bill
became known to each other. And before long, he left. And their relationship then flourished
in the wake of his departure. Angela was 26 years old. She was 18 years younger than him.
They seemed to fall in love extremely quickly. He had a lot of money. She was a young girl.
It's not an unusual pairing. She may have been attracted by the money and he, by her youth.
He'd inherited a farm from his family. He was very successful. It was a mixed farm.
Very, very large farm, and he built it up to be an incredibly successful business
worth a great deal of money. What lay in the background, it being on the fringes of Hitchin, was the possibility
of residential development of a substantial part of the acreage for housing. There'd already been discussions.
And the potential benefits or profits from such a development were truly astronomical.
We're talking many, many, many millions of pounds. WILL HANRAHAN: In 1993, just a year into their relationship,
Angela moved in to Harkness Hall Farm. Events which followed took place in and around this lush countryside.
Bill's teenage son Richard now knew others were on the rich, rural scene. Because at the time, Richard was a young man.
He, up until that point, he was his father's only child. I think he had been that for long enough to have got
the idea very clearly in his head that he would be the sole beneficiary and would inherit his entire father's estate.
WILL HANRAHAN: Pretty soon, that hope evaporated when Bill and Angela had a child of their own.
John Price, QC, would become intimately acquainted with the Taylor's family affairs,
personal and financial. And he realized very quickly, particularly, of course, when Angela had her first child with William,
that all of his expectations would be changed. Not that he would be entirely disinherited, but that he might
be expected to share that which, up until that point, he would have had to himself.
It seems to me like from the get go, Richard had a real instinct around Angela and potentially the motives that Angela
had for being with his father. And I don't think that he set out to be objectionable or challenging
in the relationship. I just think he knew. I think he loved his father. He wanted to protect his father.
And he went out of his way to try to make it as obvious as possible that this was a bad fit.
WILL HANRAHAN: When Angela had first moved in, 18-year-old Richard Taylor left the family farm.
Soon after, Bill and Angela tied the knot. In 1997, Bill and Angela got married in Stevenage registry
office, a small affair. Richard and his family didn't go to the wedding. WILL HANRAHAN: Despite Richard's fears,
the marriage, initially, was a happy one. They did go on to have a long relationship.
And they had children of their own. They have a nice home. They've got land. They're wealthy.
It looks very comfortable. WILL HANRAHAN: As the years passed, the couple's wealth grew.
Bill was a shrewd businessman, as well as a dedicated farmer. He was someone who, over the course of his career,
acquired more land. And as he acquired more land, so obviously, his worth increased.
And he worked very hard. He was-- he was a very, very diligent farmer. WILL HANRAHAN: Less than a mile away,
at his own farm, Bill's son Richard was doing equally well. He lived in farming property, from which he also ran
and managed his coach business. He had a business running a number of coaches providing transport.
For example, when the trains didn't run, Richard's coaches would act as a substitute.
Richard really is a chip off the old block where it comes down to his work ethic.
He is like his father. WILL HANRAHAN: Bill and Richard also continued to run the farming estate at Harkness Hall
together. Father and son worked together pretty harmoniously on the farms for many years.
And that continued, despite the relationship and the marriage with Angela. WILL HANRAHAN: This was the crux of tensions
in the Taylor marriage, which, as the years passed, began to deteriorate. As far as Angela was concerned, Bill worked too much.
And he was too close to his son. One of the reasons why, as the years went by, she became disenchanted was because she--
the truth was, she barely ever saw him. You have to think about what being a farmer's wife is about.
You have to be all in. It is such a long hours job. It is hard work. They barely ever, ever, went on holiday,
because he would never leave the farm. So I think she came to realize that much as he cared
for her as he did, the truth was she was probably his second love. The first was the farm and the cattle.
WILL HANRAHAN: To add insult to injury, the person who did get all of Bill's attention
was the man Angela saw as a rival for her husband's affection and his money. I suspect that that will have contributed
to Angela's resentment. That not only did she not see much of him, but she was aware that what he was doing and where he was,
he was spending large amounts of time with his son Richard. There was some serious disharmony within home.
WILL HANRAHAN: By the time Bill and Angela celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary in 2007,
son and stepmother were known to have disagreements with Bill Taylor caught in the middle
and making a big decision. In 2008, Richard was absolutely furious to find out that his father had left his family
home to Angela in his will. WILL HANRAHAN: By 2015, Angela had had enough. There came a point when Taylor clearly
wanted out of the relationship. She wanted to leave. She told him she wanted to leave.
He wasn't happy about that at all. At the time she left, she sued him for divorce.
The one thing which he set his face against, and upon which he never relented, was the idea of a divorce.
And he dug his heels in over that and would not flinch. WILL HANRAHAN: Bill would not accept that the 18
year marriage was over. But he did make sure his estranged wife was financially secure.
Angela's payoff was the source of yet more resentment for Richard Taylor. After a series of protracted negotiations,
they had completed a deed of separation, whereby she was provided for materially.
She acquired the sole ownership of some of the farming property, including the farmhouse
into which she moved with their children when she left him. She was given two farms.
She was given various other properties that could be rented out. She was given, I think, 220 acres of land.
She had been his wife for many years. They'd had children together. She'd supported him in his work at the farm as his wife.
And the these were monies to which, under our family finance laws, she was entitled.
WILL HANRAHAN: Angela had acquired a great deal of wealth, all debt free. The monetary value of what she acquired
under the deed of separation couldn't be precise calculated. But it was somewhere in the region of 3 to 4 million pounds
on the open market. WILL HANRAHAN: The estrangement of husband and wife should have eased relations between father and son.
But somehow, Angela continued to come between them. And the spectacle of the father
and the son almost coming to blows was one which simply delighted her. [birds chirping]
WILL HANRAHAN: Angela Taylor started her new life as a single woman. But she was still very much in her former husband Bill's life,
and in Richard's. Angela had moved to the farm which she'd acquired under the settlement.
That was just across the fields. And only a short walk from William's farm was that of his son, Richard.
So they were all very-- they were all within a walk of each other. Angela went nowhere.
She was still a heavy part of Bill's life. And that made her a heavy part of Richard's life.
She was still there. She was still benefiting. She was still goading Richard every day.
There was an incident at Bill's farm when Richard was hosting a shooting party. Bill attended.
But he didn't intend to go along to the shooting. He attended because you want to complain about the shooting.
For one reason or another, the two of them had a massive row that day. And all Richard could see while his father was shouting
at him, telling him off, over there in the distance, grinning at him, chuckling, laughing, was Angela.
WILL HANRAHAN: Angela's presence made an already tense situation worse. Richard lost his temper.
He got into his car. And he drove his car into Bill's wing mirror, a tiny bit of damage.
Angela was a gleeful observer of this incident. And it was she who rang the police
and gave them an overblown account of what was taking place, used the word firearm.
Which, of course, had the police descending upon the farm in their droves. When nothing, in fact, had occurred involving anyone being
threatened with a firearm. It's just that there were large numbers of people in the near vicinity holding shotguns.
So she purposefully and willfully inflames situations to cause further division.
It was a very significant moment in the story, because it was the beginning of, in effect,
a complete breakdown in the relationship between William and Richard. And they did not speak again for two or three years.
WILL HANRAHAN: Now estranged from his wife and his eldest son, Bill was increasingly isolated.
In the meantime, Angela was free to find love. About two years later, Angela starts a new relationship with
a man called Paul Cannon, who is a 54-year-old farm laborer and digger driver. Paul Cannon was a local man.
He lived at an address in Hitchin. He worked for a local company that did quarrying and the like.
And ran heavy goods vehicles. And he came to be introduced to the story, first of all,
because the company for whom he worked were contracted by Bill Taylor to do some work
on Bill Taylor's farm. And as a result, he and Bill met. And it was as a result of that that he then came
to be introduced to Angela. WILL HANRAHAN: Not that Bill was aware of the relationship
at first. There is no doubt that they conducted the relationship in a furtive way.
They always lived separately. But there was some evidence to show that they were frequently to be seen in the local public house.
And there was also evidence to show that, not infrequently, local hotel rooms would be booked where they might be together on their own.
WILL HANRAHAN: Why the secrecy? After all, Angela was a single woman. I think that they were pretty determined to try and keep it
from Bill, because Angela feared what his reaction would be if he found out. The reality is the Bill is still madly in love
with Angela. And he tells everybody that. WILL HANRAHAN: The feeling was far from mutual.
Angela was still determined to make their split permanent. By the time she met Paul Cannon, she already felt
pretty resentful towards Bill. She wanted to revive divorce proceedings, which she'd
initially commenced in 2014. And they'd got nowhere. WILL HANRAHAN: In a small community,
it was only a matter of time before Bill found out about Angela's new man, which he did in 2018.
He was bitterly upset when he learned of her relationship with Paul Cannon. So much so, because he knew Cannon.
He confronts Paul. And now an elderly man, Paul effectively laughs at him and tells him to put up or shut up.
Cannon couldn't have cared less, faced him down straight. It didn't come to blows.
There was an angry exchange of words. But Cannon was not to be bullied. That was the only ever direct confrontation
that took place between them. He asked Angela to finish the relationship. She refuses to acknowledge there even is one.
He went and saw his employers and actually got him fired. So he was interfering in their relationship.
I think that started a chain of events that very quickly got out of control. WILL HANRAHAN: Bill had got Paul Cannon
sacked from his place of work. He was refusing to grant Angela a divorce. In the eyes of the couple, Bill Taylor was standing
between them and happiness. In March 2018, Angela begins divorce proceedings. But Bill is not going to play ball.
His comment to his son is she made me suffer for 20, I'm going to make her suffer for 5.
And what this was meaning and referring to was that in order to get a contested divorce,
you have to show a five year separation. And that's what Bill was going to do. WILL HANRAHAN: Privately, Angela and Paul
began fantasizing about getting their revenge on Bill. In public, they were openly hostile towards him.
He was, in effect, being bullied by them. He would describe how, if they came across each other,
for example, in Hitchin, they wouldn't move out of the way of the pavement. They'd sort of walk straight at him and try and barge him.
Angela and Paul love taunting Bill. If they were in a car, and he was walking, the car would, as it were, swerve
towards the pavement, that sort of childish, petulant, but nevertheless threatening, behavior.
And it was clear from what he said to friends in the period leading up to his disappearance that it did disconcert him,
if not cause him some fear. I mean, the level of nastiness, cruelty, even narcissism, to some degree, is really clear
in both of these human beings. WILL HANRAHAN: Bill was suffering. But from April 2018, he was no longer
bearing the burden alone. Richard and one of his daughters were out walking their dog one day.
And it just so happened that coming in the opposite direction down the path was his father.
And it was one of those situations where, really and truly, they simply could not avoid speaking with each other.
Once they were confronted with each other and did actually exchange a few words, the ice was broken.
Because the deep roots of affection were there. WILL HANRAHAN: Richard was shocked at Bill's appearance.
One of the things that Richard really notes about his dad is he just looks sad. And this demonstrates just how broken he is by this point.
You know, it's taken its toll on him. He describes him as seeming frail, as seeming half of the man that he was.
WILL HANRAHAN: The reconciliation with his son and grandchildren when some way to reviving Bill's spirits.
But just a month later, he came under attack once again. On the 26th of May, Bill's blue Land Rover is set on fire.
His Land Rover vehicle was badly damaged by fire whilst parked in one of his barns.
There was no doubt that this had been deliberate. The fire had not, in fact, caused as much damage
as was clearly intended. And the items which had been used to start it were found, pretty much intact, in the cab of Bill's Land
Rover, consisting of a petrol can with a residue of accelerant in it and some cloths which had been used as a wick.
WILL HANRAHAN: Police attended and collected evidence of the arson attack. The petrol can and clothing was sent for forensic analysis.
There is some evidence to suggest that he suspected that Paul Cannon, and indeed, Angela might
have been responsible for it. He told the police that he thought he had seen the petrol can at Angela's farm
on a previous occasion. That had a profound effect on Bill. It made him very frightened, very concerned.
Bill, this has been his world for most of his life. This has been his community.
This is where he's grown his family. And now suddenly, he's feeling threatened in his own home.
As a result of that, Richard moved an employee of into Bill's farm to live in the farmhouse as a lodger,
to act to some reassurance to his father in the days that followed this very frightening incident.
That lodger was called-- was a man called Lush. WILL HANRAHAN: A week after Bill's Land Rover was torched,
the Taylor family was following what had recently become the Sunday ritual. What they used to do was they had their lunch themselves.
And then one of Richard's, by now adult children, it was his eldest son who used to work on the farm with him,
would take a plate of food round to Bill Taylor's farm so that Bill could have a good Sunday lunch.
On Sunday the 3rd of June, it's a beautiful day in Hertfordshire. Richard's eldest son had taken a Sunday lunch
around to his grandfather. He went round there in the late afternoon, early evening.
He stayed with his grandfather whilst he ate the dinner. WILL HANRAHAN: Bill washed up his plate,
meticulous as always. And at around 9 o'clock, his grandson prepared to leave. Bill walked him to the gate of the farm in his slippers.
They said goodbye at the farm gate. And Richard's son walked home. And that was the last that anybody
ever saw of Bill Taylor. [tense music] WILL HANRAHAN: Farmer Bill Taylor, for all anyone knew,
had gone home after a family Sunday lunch. William is last seen by his grandson at about 9:30 when his grandson leaves to go home.
And Mr. Lush, the lodger, returned to the house at about 2 o'clock in the morning.
He went past William's room. And the door was closed. And he assumed William was in bed and asleep.
He got up early the next morning. Again, William's door was still closed. He thought the same.
He went downstairs, he made himself some breakfast, and he left the unwashed crockery in the sink.
WILL HANRAHAN: It was on his return to Harkness Hall that afternoon that coach driver Richard Lush
noticed something troubling. The breakfast crockery was still unwashed. And he knew that that would not have been the case if Bill
Taylor had been up and around and about the house as he expected. So now, he went up to Bill's door, he knocked on it.
Then he went into the room and he found Bill's bed made up. It was quite obvious that no one had slept in it.
And therefore, it appeared that Bill must already have gone before Mr. Lush had arrived back in the early hours
of that morning. WILL HANRAHAN: This was totally out of character. Mr. Lush was sure that Bill Taylor
would not simply leave his farm and his animals unattended. The police were notified.
Immediately, the police treated it as one of those disappearances which attract concern and suspicion.
WILL HANRAHAN: Immediately, searchers found evidence to reinforce their fears that Bill had
been the victim of foul play. They had an enormous amount of volunteers in. They had search and rescue teams coming in.
And they searched all the farmland meticulously. One of the things that they couldn't
find anywhere when they searched the house was Bill's Wellingtons. Bill's hearing aid was found in the house.
Now, he never went anywhere without this. WILL HANRAHAN: Police did not believe Bill Taylor
had left of his own accord. The search went on for weeks, the area expanding to cover the fields and farmland
for miles around Bill's farm. A month later, another troubling clue. When, about four weeks after Bill disappeared,
Richard and Richard's sons were working in Bill's farmyard, and one of Richard's sons found a link of an arthritis bracelet
that was immediately recognized as being one that had belonged to William. And that since it had been given to him
by Angela several years ago, he pretty much never took off his wrist. Now, this led the investigators
to think that possibly this had fallen off during some kind of a struggle as he was
being led from the property. WILL HANRAHAN: In the first days of the investigation
into Bill's disappearance, police had interviewed his family, his estranged wife Angela,
and of course, her boyfriend Paul Cannon. Paul, who, at the start of June, had been the proud owner of a Suzuki 4x4,
had raised suspicions early on. Only very shortly before Bill's disappearance, Paul had acquired the vehicle from one of Angela's sons
and had been driving it around. There was evidence that on the Monday, on the very Monday
that Bill disappeared, Paul Cannon was using his telephone to be in contact with someone
to sell that car. So he was, having acquired it relatively recently, now he was getting rid of it within less than 24
hours of Bill's disappearance. WILL HANRAHAN: When questioned as witnesses, Paul and Angela professed to know nothing
about Bill's whereabouts. They appeared happy to help police with their inquiries.
All of the members of the family, Richard's side of the family, and Paul Cannon,
and Angela Taylor had been asked by the police, whilst they were dealing with them as witnesses,
if they would voluntarily surrender their mobile telephone handsets for forensic examination.
And they all did. WILL HANRAHAN: Paul Cannon was confident there was nothing on his phone to trip him up.
Overconfident, perhaps. Cannon and Taylor were exchanging some pretty horrific messages with each other via WhatsApp.
They had assumed that because WhatsApp is advertised and promoted as a secure and an encrypted chat application
that it wouldn't be possible for their messages to be recovered. [message sounds]
POLICE: WhatsApp messages, WhatsApp's safe. What do you mean by that? PAUL CANNON: No comment.
POLICE: Did you think that WhatsApp couldn't be accessed by police? What was it you had to be safe about?
What was it you were worried about police finding out? There was some evidence in text messages
to suggest that Paul Cannon had reassured Angela Taylor that he had deleted their WhatsApp conversation.
And so at the end of July, 2018, when asked to hand over his handset for forensic examination.
He did so. It was downloaded within a matter of minutes. And it was returned to him.
And the police began the process of examining the content of the download. WILL HANRAHAN: Phil Ridley specializes
in digital forensics. It is possible for forensic analysts to recover encrypted messages from devices,
as we've discovered in this case. Recovering those messages requires technical knowledge.
And particularly if things have been deleted, it can take a while to uncover them.
And they needed to use more than one program to try and do it. WILL HANRAHAN: In the meantime, with Angela Taylor
and Paul Cannon at the top of their list of suspects, police continue to look for Bill.
By the end of August of 2018, they had decided that this was no longer a disappearance.
This was a murder. They installed surveillance equipment to monitor Angela and Paul Cannon.
This included a camera overlooking Angela's house. And, as it turned out, a listening device
was installed in their car. WILL HANRAHAN: The couple were arrested in September 2018
on suspicion of Bill's murder. But there wasn't enough to charge them. Days later, a breakthrough that changed everything.
And it wasn't until after Angela and Paul Cannon had first been arrested and then bailed
that at the beginning of October, the technical man suddenly unearthed, as it were, deep in the recesses of the download
from Paul Cannon's phone, 28,000 WhatsApp messages. When the police recovered these messages,
this was probably exactly what they were looking for in terms of evidence. The discovery of the cache of text messages
was the moment that the case broke. It was the eureka moment. [grim music] WILL HANRAHAN: When the messages were read and analyzed,
they revealed the escalation of a macabre plot between Paul and Angela. It would have shown intent to commit
the murder and also the nature of the crime in that it was premeditated. A six-month long conversation between him and Angela,
starting in mid-February of 2018 and coming to an end after Bill had disappeared, in which, on many,
many occasions, they had talked about bringing about his death. WILL HANRAHAN: Frustrated that Bill was denying her a divorce,
Angela had raised the subject in a WhatsApp message about finding another solution.
Police would come to suspect plan B meant hiring someone to bring about Bill's demise.
[tense music] He replies to her that he knows someone who might be able to give the answer to that.
There's a gap in the messages of about three or four minutes. And then he comes back and tells her that the answer is 20k.
WILL HANRAHAN: Over weeks and months, the messages between Angela and Paul became less matter of fact and more disturbing.
Cannon and Taylor sent 1,500 messages with some horrific content, living out this bizarre fantasy that devolved into the murder
of her estranged husband. [typing sounds] WILL HANRAHAN: Of the 28,000 WhatsApp messages recovered
from Paul Cannon's phone, almost 2,000 were about his and Angela Taylor's hatred
of her estranged husband Bill. And there were a significant number of those messages
were conversations in which they explicitly contemplated his death, sometimes in the most grotesque,
even pornographic, of terms. I think that Taylor was in a grand passion with Cannon.
And that passion was very sexual for her. Maybe this was the first time she'd ever
felt like this in her life. But it started to have meaning. And their whole relationship revolved
around this sexual pairing, this electricity, passion that they had together. POLICE: Obviously we know, and you
know, that Bill Taylor hasn't been heard of since the 4th of June, 2018. And what's clear from those messages,
those WhatsApp messages between you and Angela is that after that date, there's no more talk of violence,
there's no more talk of revenge, there's no more talk of, you know, getting rid of Bill, killing
Bill, making love while the blood's running down the drain, none of that. Why is that?
PAUL CANNON: No comment. POLICE: Why has it stopped on the 4th of June? Is that because you knew that Bill Taylor was dead?
Is that you didn't have to talk about killing him, because you knew that he'd already been killed?
WILL HANRAHAN: By the time these messages were unearthed, another crucial piece of evidence had been secured.
NEIL LANCASTER: During the investigation into the arson on the Land Rover, the police retrieved
some exhibits from within. And they were submitted for DNA analysis. And DNA connecting them to Paul Cannon
was discovered on some of the fabrics which had been used as part of that attempt
to torch Bill's car. This made him a prime suspect for these offenses. WILL HANRAHAN: The forensics were
reinforced by hints in Paul and Angela's message trail. POLICE: Why did you make the comment, light my fire?
Or does he say it to you? Because neither of you have said it to each other ever before.
You call each other darling quite a lot. And he calls you wife. But it's never been a phrase of endearment between you before.
Can't be a coincidence that night the Land Rover gets set on fire can it? There is no question that the Land
Rover was set on fire by Paul or by someone acting for Paul. We know this because Angela sent a message
immediately afterwards along the lines of baby, you light my fire. Paul replied by talking about how he would like to see
the expletive deleted dead. It's quite clear from this point that they don't just
fantasize about Bill's death. They intend Bill's death. WILL HANRAHAN: By November 2018, police had enough
to charge the couple with the murder of Bill Taylor, as well as the arson attack on his car.
Of course, at the time, he was still missing. They hadn't found his body. But the content of these text messages
was so explicit that it did tell them why he had disappeared and who was responsible for having done it.
POLICE: Are you ever going to tell us where Bill's buried? You ever going to help us with that?
But without a body, it could still be hard to convict them. It was fully expected that we were
going to be trying to prove a case of murder without a body. WILL HANRAHAN: The trial was scheduled for April 2019.
Two months before it commenced, a local fisherman made a shocking discovery. On the 10th of February 2019, eight months
after he was reported missing, Bill's skeleton was tragically found, waist deep in mud,
adjacent to the river Hiz close to Hitchin in Hertfordshire. It was found when a local fisherman was looking
along the banks of the river Hiz in a very quiet part of the river. He was propped up.
He was seemingly-- maybe having a picnic or sitting down, having something to eat or drink.
But it was staged to look as if he was sitting there. His feet were on the riverbank.
He was bent over in a sort of inverted L shape. And his head was resting on the bank.
WILL HANRAHAN: The trial date delayed by this new discovery, Angela Taylor and Paul Cannon eventually
stood in court to face murder charges in November 2019. Key to the prosecution's case were
the violent, bloody, frequently sexual WhatsApp messages. And for the purposes of the trial,
we extracted between about 1,500 and 2,000 of those messages, which were relevant to what
had happened to Bill Taylor. And they were, all of them, placed before the jury in writing.
WILL HANRAHAN: Not only that, but a pair of police officers were drafted in to read the most incriminating messages aloud
in front of the open court. Some evidence has an ability to still a court, or to quieten
a court, or to create an atmosphere in a court that is, when you're there, immediately noticeable.
And there's no doubt about it that the presentation of the evidence of the text messages
had that effect on the atmosphere in the courtroom. And I believe that in this particular instance,
the atmosphere was created by the shock that was felt at listening to two people seriously contemplating
the death of a third, and doing so using such appalling language, and seeking to conjure up images of violence that were
really, profoundly shocking. Sexually feeling aroused by the idea of torturing him, making him watch,
being covered in his blood. And there was, undoubtedly, an element of exaggeration,
and of hyperbole, and of them speaking to each other in ever more explicit and pornographic terms
just for the sake of enjoying what they were talking about. And it is, perhaps, no coincidence
that when faced with the discovery of these messages and with the task of trying to explain them,
Paul Cannon's evidence to the jury was that they were no more than an exercise in sexual fantasy.
WILL HANRAHAN: Though Bill's body had yielded few clues, and though Angela Taylor and Paul Cannon refused
to help police, prosecutors laid out what they believed had happened on Sunday, the 3rd of June, 2018.
Paul and Angela form a plan. They understand what Bill is like about his cows. You know, he's devoted to them.
So one evening, they spook the cows. All we know is this. He was lured from home by the movement of his cattle.
WILL HANRAHAN: Just days shy of his 70th birthday, hardworking farmer Bill Taylor was ambushed.
It was the moment he stepped outside to check on his livestock. If the prosecution were right that the fatal attack
took place in the farmyard of his own farm-- And then when he was killed, his body was disposed of.
And it was disposed of in the most secluded spot possible on land that belonged to Angela.
So it seems highly likely that Bill was conveyed to the place where his body was found.
It is difficult to imagine that all of that could have been achieved by a man on his own.
WILL HANRAHAN: Though only two accomplices were on trial, the prosecution believes they were not the only culprits.
So there are strong grounds to suspect that there may have been a second person involved.
And of course, when you combine those facts and those circumstances with the fact
that in February of that year, there is the clearest of evidence that Angela and Paul Cannon and were
looking to recruit someone to get rid of Bill, there is every possibility that out there somewhere is
a third person who was involved in the events of that night, but who has not yet been identified
and might possibly never be identified. WILL HANRAHAN: But for the jury at St. Albans
Crown Court in November 2019, there were two people in the dock. Was their claim that their violent fantasies were
essentially innocent credible? The jury, however, rejected this out of hand. On the 8th of November, 2019, they were
both found guilty of murder. Both Paul Cannon and Angela Taylor were sentenced to life imprisonment.
And in each of their cases, the judge fixed a very substantial minimum term. They were sentenced to life imprisonment
with a recommendation that they should not be considered for parole before 22 years had expired.
They both received two year sentences for arson of a motor vehicle which were to run concurrently.
WILL HANRAHAN: The real Angela Taylor couldn't have been more different from the woman
that her former husband continued to love and to idealize. There's no doubt about it that Bill retained deep affection
for Angela no matter what. And if the opportunity had presented itself, the evidence indicates that he would, undoubtedly,
have wished, right up until the day he disappeared, to be reconciled with her. And there was nothing to indicate that he wouldn't have
had another try at it were it not for the fact that he was murdered. [tense music]

Angela Taylor hated her estranged husband Bill because he wouldn't grant her a divorce, so she and her lover took matters into their own hands.

Though wedded couples vow to stay together until death do they part, this new true crime series looks at what happens when a groom or bride causes their beloved's death.

Brief Summary

Bill Taylor's murder reveals a web of jealousy, betrayal, and financial greed involving his estranged wife Angela and her lover Paul Cannon.

Key points

Family Tensions. The relationship between Bill, Angela, and Richard deteriorates over the years.
Angela's New Relationship. Angela begins a new relationship with Paul Cannon, complicating family dynamics.
Bill's Land Rover Torched. Bill's vehicle is deliberately set on fire, heightening fears for his safety.
Taylor's Disappearance. Taylor goes missing after a family lunch, raising immediate concerns.
Bill's Last Seen. Bill is last seen by his grandson after a Sunday lunch, leading to his disappearance.
Bill's Disappearance Turns Suspicious. Searchers find evidence suggesting foul play in Bill's disappearance.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

The simple fact was they were a family at war.

WILL HANRAHAN describes the intense conflict within the Taylor family.

0:34WatchJun 8, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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