THE husband and two teenage sons of a teacher, Eve Howells, were yesterday found guilty at Leeds Crown Court of murdering her in August 1995. The victim was found battered to death by a series of hammer blows in the sitting room of the family home in Dalton, Huddersfield.
The Leeds jury took just under eight hours to return unanimous guilty verdicts on David Howells (48) and sons Glenn (17) and John (16). The boys were aged 15 and 14 at the time of their mother's murder. All three had pleaded not guilty.
Glenn admitted hitting his mother 10 times with a hammer, but claimed he had been the victim of emotional and physical abuse, a claim borne out by many witnesses.
Mr Justice Alliott adjourned sentence until 2 p.m. today to hear mitigation on the length of the sentences. He told counsel that he would have no option but to pass sentences of detention "at Her Majesty's pleasure" on the two boys and life imprisonment on the father.
Almost from the moment they were born, the brothers were tortured by their mother. She rarely let them play outside the home, and was known to drag them in by the hair if they did not come immediately when called. She shrieked, swore and spat at them and smacked them on the back and legs, targeting the older Glenn, more than her "favourite" John.
They were treated so badly that a next-door neighbour sags she will always regret not calling in the social services to stop the torture. She recalled how Mrs Howells said she had tied them to the kitchen table when they were aged two or three, and added: "We used to dread them going in for bathtime because of the screams that used to come from the bathroom.
When John was about four and Glenn six their mother would frequently take their favourite cuddly toys and hold a lighter them, threatening to burn them as she listened to them crying and pleading with her not to. At the age of five John was referred to a child psychologist.
The victim's stepmother, Ms Mary Dyson, said: "She seemed to have it in for Glenn for some reason. She seemed to despise him." The boy became his mother's "body slave", according to one psychologist, forced to massage her back as she stood naked and dig the dirt out from her toenails.
After repeated calls to Childline Glenn thought about leaving home and then suicide. The closest he got was when he tied a scarf around his neck intending to hang himself from his bunkbeds. "I couldn't do it," he told the court, "for the same reason I couldn't run; I couldn't leave John on his own".
David Howells, regularly described by his wife as an alcoholic, consistently denied John's witness box claims that the murder was planned by all three. Eve Howells shad been involved in a long-standing affair with her husband's best friend and colleague, Mr Russell Hirst. A cellmate of David Howells said he discovered what had been going on two months before his wife was killed, giving him a prime motive for murder.
Apart from the hatred he felt for, his wife, his final motive, according to the prosecution, was greed. David stood to inherit his wife's £155,000 fortune.
Detectives initially believed that the teacher was attacked during a bungled burglary after finding a bureau overturned in the living room where she died. Her seemingly grief-stricken husband and sons said £100 had been stolen.
Within days suspicion had fallen on the brothers, mainly because of forensic tests. The boys' guilt became even more obvious when they went with their father to identify their mother's shattered body - and Glenn was seen to wink and smirk at his brother.
But there was nothing to indicate that their father, who had been playing darts two miles away when his wife died and had the "perfect alibi", played any part in the death. He could quite easily have escaped detection but for the intuition of Det Supt Gary Haigh. Mr Haigh, who led the inquiry, said he always felt the boys could not have acted alone.
A visiting room in the cells was wired up in the days before the boys were arrested on September 20th. In 12 taped conversations between the boys and their father, numerous references were made to the murder.