Inquest returns open verdict in Caribbean Club death

Shakara Taylor

(CNS): A 31-year-old British woman who fell to her death from the top floor of the Caribbean Club resort on Seven Mile Beach in May 2013 did so just a few weeks after her fiancé called off their wedding. However, the jury in the coroner’s inquest returned an open verdict and not one of suicide because no one witnessed the woman’s death and no suicide note was discovered.

According to reports in the UK’s Daily Mail, Shakara Taylor (31) was left ‘distraught’ when her marriage was postponed by 52-year-old David Ravenscroft, and following her death as a result of the eight story fall she was buried in a white coffin in the wedding dress she had bought for the ceremony she would never attend.

A former beauty queen from Blackpool on the Northwest coast of England Taylor was also a member of a Spice Girls Tribute band and an award winning Morris dancer.

She moved to Cayman with Ravenscroft her former boss, but in March 2013, following their whirlwind romance he postponed the marriage as he told the coroner’s court that he wanted to wait and see where the couple were in six months. Although Taylor was upset he said she had calmed down but Ravenscroft described her as being “down in the dumps and struggling to deal with it.”

On the morning of her death she had dropped Ravenscroft at his gym promising to pick him up later but CCTV footage at the Caribbean Club showed Taylor arriving at the hotel and getting a lift to the seventh floor. Minutes later cameras on the ground floor recorded footage of her body on the ground outside the building. A post-mortem examination found she died from the serious injuries to her head and body sustained in the fall.

Although an open verdict was returned, the court had heard that Taylor had a history of mental illness including a period of residential psychiatric care. Ravenscroft was apparently unaware of her mental health issues or that she made two previous suicide attempts. Taylor’s records also revealed a history of clinical depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, an eating disorder and alcohol and drug abuse.