A double killing that remained undetected for 18 years was 'the most sensational' case in Deric Henderson's 42 years as a journalist in the North, he tells GERRY MORIARTY, Northern Editor
DERIC HENDERSON says that Colin Howell will hate his book Let This Be Our Dark Secret, published yesterday, about how the dentist conspired with his lover, Hazel Stewart, to murder their spouses. "He'll pick a hole in every paragraph, just in the way he theatrically tried to pick holes and challenged everything when he was centre-stage in court in Coleraine during the trial of Hazel Stewart," he says. "But he'll love the publicity around the book; he'll love it."
That, he adds, is the key to Howell: vain, sociopathic and narcissistic, with a merciless streak.
As for Stewart, “I doubt she will read the book, because she is still in denial. The penny just hasn’t dropped about what she has done.”
Henderson, Ireland editor of the Press Association, has been a journalist for 42 years, covering the Troubles from start to finish. He is a Belfast-based native of Omagh, a member of the Church of Ireland who is married to a Catholic.
He is a hard-news man to the core. When, in January 2009, word broke that Howell was confessing to double murder and intended to bring Stewart down with him, Henderson knew that here was a timeless tale with a universal reach, and that he would tell it. The issue of TV and film rights is a “work in progress”.
“I have covered some trials in my time,” he adds. “I was there when the Shankill Butchers were sentenced in 1979, I was in Dublin for Mountbatten, I was in Gibraltar for the SAS killings of the three IRA volunteers . . . but nothing compares to this one. This is the most sensational, the most gripping.”
Henderson is hardly going to undersell his account of how and why Howell and Stewart carried out such a cruel double murder. But there is no doubt that Ireland and Britain were riveted by what the blurb on the book’s cover describes as “the shocking true story of a killer dentist, his mistress, how they murdered their spouses – and how they almost got away with it”.
It would have been the perfect murder but for the fact that, 18 years after the act, conscience, aggravated by financial disaster, got the better of Howell.
“If Howell hadn’t broken, Hazel Stewart would have taken her secret to the grave,” says Henderson. “She was very much under his influence, yet mentally she was stronger than him.”
But the truth did come out, fortunately for the families of Howell’s murdered wife, Lesley, and Stewart’s murdered husband, Trevor Buchanan. It didn’t happen in time for some, particularly Trevor Buchanan’s father, Jim, who died without finding out that his son had not in fact been party to a double suicide.
In order to piece together what motivated the killers, Henderson had to infiltrate the tight religious fundamentalist world that Colin Howell and Hazel Stewart inhabited in the Coleraine area. Nobody from that community, apart from a former pastor of Coleraine Baptist Church, John Bansford, and a few disillusioned Baptists, would speak to him. But through more than 50 interviews, plus what emerged from the Stewart trial earlier this year, Henderson got as close as he could to understanding Howell and Stewart.
They both had an deep capacity for self-deception. The book opens with Howell’s second wife, Kyle, an American from whom he is now estranged, calling church elders to their home in January 2009 so that they could hear Howell’s confession. Howell began by recounting how, before their marriage, his future wife, Lesley, had had three abortions at his urging. He moved on to describe how he had begun his relationship with Hazel, wife of the RUC officer Trevor Buchanan, and how the knowledge of that affair had driven Lesley to prescription drugs and drink.
Henderson is convinced that Howell believed he was assisting his wife by killing her. That was after he had a eureka moment in bed one night when, shortly before the murder, Lesley told him she wished she were dead. Howell’s thinking, according to Henderson, was: “I will get you there, and not only will I get you there but I will get Trevor there as well, because he is in a bad way too.”
In May 1991 Howell, after consulting Stewart, went through with the plan, first poisoning his wife with carbon-monoxide fumes, using a hosepipe stretched from the exhaust of his car to the room where she was sleeping. She woke briefly and, according to Howell, her last word was “Matthew”, a cry for her six-year-old son. Sixteen years later Matthew, one of the couple’s four children, died in an accident in Russia. His death spurred Howell to confess.
He then travelled across Coleraine to carry out, with the assistance of Stewart, the same procedure with Trevor Buchanan. Buchanan resisted, but Howell managed to overcome him. Howell then brought the bodies to the garage of his late father-in-law’s house in the nearby seaside village of Castlerock. He made their deaths look like the suicide of two people who could not live with the adultery of their spouses.
In dealing with the central details of a calculated murder, Henderson also delves into the background of the main characters. We get an insight into a close-knit fundamentalist Protestant world that doesn’t like to give too much away. Stewart comes across as passive, shallow and materialistic, a woman who loved “her style” yet always seemed to “carry a haunted look about her”.
Howell was devious and deviant, a man who had an obsession with pornography, who was convicted of sexually assaulting some of his dental patients while they were under gas, and who drugged Stewart at times before sex, “something Hazel had fun with”, according to Howell.
Henderson explores how they managed for so long to reconcile a callous double murder with their Christian beliefs. A comment by a former boyfriend of Stewart’s perhaps best captures their attitude: “The bigger the Bible, the bigger the rogue.”
Both murderers received life sentences. Howell must serve a minimum of 21 years and Stewart a minimum of 18. Howell will be 71 when he gets out, Stewart 66. Howell, according to Henderson, is proud of his family’s longevity and believes he should have at least 20 years left after his release. He is trying to perfect his literary skills in prison; Stewart is still hoping that an appeal will free her.
Let This Be Our Secret,by Deric Henderson, is published by Gill Macmillan, €14.99
