A brief romance sucked Kris Taylor into a 20-year nightmare when bedsit butcher blamed him for a brutal murder.
Today, for the first time since he was wrongly accused, Kris relives an ordeal that pushed him to the brink of suicide.
The recovering drug addict was just out of rehab in late summer 1999 when he met 20-year-old Gourlay.
Within weeks, it became a fatal attraction that landed him in the High Court in Aberdeen, blamed for slashing trainee nurse Melanie Sturton’s throat.
Melanie, 22, of Aboyne, Aberdeenshire, was Gourlay’s downstairs neighbour in a block of bedsits in Aberdeen’s west end.
On October 8, 1999, Kris and Gourlay had been out with friends before returning to her bedsit where they drank beers, shared a joint and had sex.
The next morning, Kris left early to go home to his mum. A few days later, news emerged of the shocking murder.
Suspicion fell on Gourlay and, when the evidence was pieced together, it was conclusive. Dressed top-to-toe in black, she had entered Melanie’s flat with a Sabatier boning knife and unleashed a bloody orgy of violence.
The callous chef left Melanie in a pool of blood behind her door, stepped over her body and got on with her life.
Gourlay proclaimed her innocence.
During the trial in 2000, Kris believed he was a prosecution witness called to fill in the hours before Melanie’s murder. But his nightmare was only just beginning.
A spurious witness blamed him for the crime and Gourlay was happy to support the story.
As Kris stood in the witness box, Gourlay’s defence advocate Edward Targowski QC accused him of the murder.
Kris recalled: “I thought he was having a laugh. A mate of mine was in the court and said the colour just drained from my face.
“The boy just turned and said to me, ‘I put it to you, Mr Taylor, that you slashed Melanie Sturton’s throat’.
“I said, ‘What?’
“I just never saw that coming at all.
“I couldn’t comprehend what was going on. Here’s them trying to lay it on my lap.
“I was just standing in the box looking over everybody in the court thinking, ‘Oh s**t’.”
Kris recalled how Gourlay never made eye contact with him once.
He said: “I was staring at her, wanting her to look at me.”
Gourlay’s pack of lies didn’t wash and she was jailed for 14 years.
Judge Lord Marnoch described it as a crime of “unimaginable depravity”.
But the false accusation led Kris’s life to spiral into a mess of alcohol and drug use.
He said: “It affected me badly psychologically and put me in a deep depression. I’m still having issues with depression.
“I came close to ending it with the stress of it all.
“It was a murder without motive. I cannot fathom it. It was pointless. I can’t understand it.”
● Kris Taylor can be heard today speaking to Scottish journalist Isla Traquair on her podcast series The Storyteller: Murder Most Foul on iTunes, Spotify and Acast.
