In the hours before killing his wife, former dentist Colin Howell divided his time between building a birthday present for his son and manufacturing a murder weapon, he told the trial of his lover today.
The dentist and his wife, Lesley, then held a party for their two-year-old boy Daniel, with Howell making sure all four of his children were up late so they would be asleep when he poisoned their mother and set off to do the same with Trevor Buchanan, the husband of his mistress Hazel Stewart.
Howell has already revealed to police how Mrs Howell called out their eldest boy Matthew’s name while he poisoned her with carbon monoxide fumes as he held her down on the sofa in the living room.
Today he recounted the events again to the jury in Stewart’s double murder trial at Coleraine Crown Court.
Howell, who has pleaded guilty to the murders, said he led a hosepipe from his car outside into the house and placed it at his wife’s mouth as she slept on the sofa.
He had watched her life ebb away from the door of the room but when she started to stir he ran in and stood above her.
“Then she began to turn to her other side and I reacted to that and pulled the quilt up a bit and held her down,” he said.
“And that’s when I heard her call my son’s name quietly at the last moment.” Howell revealed that if Lesley had been sleeping in the marital bed — she had been on the sofa since learning of the affair — he could not have killed her that night, as the hosepipe would not have stretched upstairs.
He said he had spent most of that day in the garage constructing a slide for his son and modifying a plastic bottle that he would use to connect the pipe to the exhaust of the car.
During this time he got a call from the concerned owner of a nearby petrol station who said his wife had been acting strangely on the forecourt.
She told the dentist that Mrs Howell had almost put the wrong fuel into her car, had been staggering from side to side as she walked across to pay and when she drove off, she went in the opposite direction to her home.
Howell, who said he felt surreal ahead of the killings, told the court he feared his wife, who had been taking sedatives since the death of her father only days previously, was leaving him.
“My thought was Lesley running away because obviously that would have blown the (murder) plan,” he said.
Before she returned, Howell alleged Stewart, who he had been trying to call all day, phoned him back.
“I said to her ‘tonight’s on, we’re going to do it’,” he told the court.
The dentist described in comprehensive detail the planning he had put into place ahead of the killing, right down to keeping his children up late.
“Being a birthday they were up later than usual, but part of my plan was to keep them up late so they would be tired because I knew I would have to leave the house for a while, I thought for two hours but it turned out to be five.
“They usually went to bed at 8pm, that night it was 10pm.” Howell said that when he killed his wife he dressed her in leggings and a T-shirt and put her in the boot of his car, putting the bike he would use to get back home on top of her body.
Before this told the court he rang the Buchanans’ house again — hanging up immediately so only a clicking noise would be heard on the other line — and waited one minute for Stewart to call back.
“I remember I said to her, ‘I’m finished with Lesley, is everything ready?’,” he told the court.
Howell then drove the 10 minutes to the Buchanans’ house, passing a police station on his way, to kill Trevor Buchanan, the second murder of the night.
PA