BACKGROUND: The seemingly perfect crime unravelled after 20 years when Howell decided he was a 'fraud'
IT WOULD have been the perfect murder but for dentist Colin Howell’s born-again conscience.
Hazel Stewart would not have gone down for double murder but for the personal crisis suffered by Howell – a trauma triggered by the death of his son Matthew and a failed financial enterprise three years ago.
It has been an absorbing but strange trial when over 15 days in Coleraine court, and through most of four weeks, the jury heard a lurid tale of murder, money, power struggles and sex – of how Howell and his former lover Stewart conspired to murder their spouses, Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan, in order to protect their affair.
It could be said it was the perfect murder because Stewart and Howell escaped justice for almost 20 years. If Howell hadn’t owned up two years ago they would have taken their guilt to the grave. In early 2009, he confessed to the double murder to police officers after first telling his church elders. He was also prompted to do so by his second wife Kyle, from whom he is now estranged.
He lodged a guilty plea and in December last year received a life sentence with the decree that he serve a minimum of 21 years. But to clear his conscience he then signed up to taking Stewart with him.
“Matthew” was the last word uttered by Lesley Howell as her husband was gassing her with carbon monoxide fumes at their home in Coleraine in May 1991, a desperate dying cry for her son.
Sixteen years later in May 2007 22-year-old Matthew, one of their four children, was killed when he fell off a balcony while on holidays in Russia – a death Howell saw as a dark portent. The ominous feeling intensified when a year later he became involved with a fellow Baptist in a venture to find a reputed multimillion pound lost hoard of Japanese gold bullion. This was purportedly abandoned in bunkers in the Philippines at the end of the second World War by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
Howell, who lost £350,000 (€412,000) in the enterprise, felt duped by his co-religionist. “I looked at him and said, ‘you’re lying, you’re a fraud’, and as soon as I said that it reflected back on me and I knew I was a fraud too,” Howell recalled. “I made a decision in that moment that I wanted to confess to those murders.”
Howell agreed he was evil, callous, manipulative and merciless, but not anymore. “I was a monster and I was a killer but I’m not any longer and that’s part of my confession,” he said.
Stewart did not give evidence, and showed little emotion. Her and Trevor Buchanan’s children, Lisa and Andrew, stood by her, attending every day of the trial, as did her second husband, former policeman David Stewart.
Trevor Buchanan’s brothers and sisters also attended, sitting on the opposite side of the crowded court from the Stewarts. There were also appearances in the courtroom by Colin and Lesley Howell’s surviving children, Lauren, Daniel and Jonny and by Lesley’s brother Chris Clarke.
For most of the trial, Stewart sat expressionless in the dock, although she did break down when an incriminating taped police interview with her was played in which she accepted she was engaged in the double murder with Howell.
The court heard how in the year before Lesley married Howell in 1983, and during their relationship, Lesley had three abortions, experiences which soured their marriage. Stewart also had an abortion with Howell.
There was “a heaviness that never lifted . . . Inside we were crumbling,” said Howell of his first marriage. It led to tensions, and coupled with Howell’s affair with Stewart, produced a bitter power struggle between Howell and Lesley.
He described how they quarrelled and how almost invariably Lesley with her sharper wit won these tussles. But then in April 1991, a month before the murders, they were arguing in their home where Lesley was having a bath. Lesley told a friend that Howell tried to electrocute her. Howell denied the charge. But he agreed that while they were bickering he showed his wife an electric cable, flicked it across her shoulder, and then dropped it to the floor. The balance of power in the marriage shifted from her to him in that moment, he claimed. “Lesley saw something in me that could kill her. She was right about that.”
Howell said the “eureka moment” when he decided on the double murder was May 15th, 1991, four days before the bodies of Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan were discovered.
When Howell told Stewart of the plot her first reaction was to fear they would be caught but she did not object to the idea, he said.
First to die on the night of May 18th into the 19th was Lesley Howell. While she slept he hooked a hosepipe to the exhaust of his car, stretched it into the room, and placed the nozzle to his wife’s mouth. He went through the same process with Trevor Buchanan in the Buchanans’ home.
The four young Howell children and the two young Buchanan children were asleep in their respective homes at the time.
Howell then faked the double suicide.
Official questions are now being asked about why the police weren’t more suspicious, particularly as one officer, David Green who was not directly involved in the case but who discovered the bodies, had expressed concerns. Howell himself said he could have been caught if full, proper forensic tests were carried out.
After the murders Stewart and Howell continued their relationship. He drugged Stewart so they could have sex. “It was something Hazel had fun with. She did it voluntarily.”
He denied that the drugs were an experiment to test if he could do the same with his dental patients. Howell has admitted sexually assaulting three of his patients at his practice while they were sedated on dates between 1998 and 2008 – this long after the double murder.
