Robin Hastings was relaxing with a glass of pink gin in the men’s bar at Castlerock Golf Club with a couple of pals when his pager buzzed with an urgent message to call Coleraine police station. It was late Sunday afternoon on another gloriously warm May day on the North Coast. From its vantage point the clubhouse afforded a spectacular view over the entrance to Lough Foyle and the fishing village of Greencastle in County Donegal on the far side, where a few hours later the sun would set, and then dip to leave a stretch of the Inishowen Peninsula with a brilliant orange skyline.
The Coroner for north Antrim, who played off a six handicap, had been in excellent form as he held court with his regular golfing partner, Bill Yea, from Dungannon. The two were delighted at having just relieved two friends of some money which had been wagered over eighteen holes on the great championship links. Now, however, Hastings had to break off the conversation before going to make a call on the public telephone outside the secretary’s office. A police officer at the other end of the line wasted no time in telling him the grim news: ‘We’ve found two bodies in a garage at the back of The Apostles. Looks like suicide.’
In cases of sudden and unexplained deaths, whose circumstances can include anything from road fatalities to murder, a coroner must be informed immediately, as part of the investigative process which will eventually lead to a public inquest over which he or she must preside to examine and determine the exact circumstances and causes of death. Suicides are not uncommon – but two together is highly unusual. Hastings, a highly experienced coroner by this time, asked to be kept informed of developments, returned to his chair in the lounge upstairs and beckoned the bar steward for another round. He needed a stiff drink.
The bodies of Lesley and Trevor were discovered after two separate attempts had earlier failed to trace them. The first person to look for them was Jim Flanagan, one of the elders of the Howells’ church. Colin Howell had telephoned Jim, a language teacher at Coleraine Academical Institution, that morning, telling him Lesley was missing. He asked his church friend if he would be good enough to go to the village of Castlerock and check No. 6 The Apostles, the house of Lesley’s recently deceased father. Colin Howell told Jim that, given her distressed and emotional state, it was likely that his wife might have gone there to grieve. He explained that he would have gone himself but that he had no one to keep an eye on his children in the meantime.
Flanagan duly drove out to The Apostles. He checked the outside of No. 6 and the garage at the back. He didn’t go inside, but he could see nothing unusual and returned to Howell’s house straight away. An agitated Howell asked him if he would call the ferry companies to ask about Lesley’s possible whereabouts; he told Flanagan that he had already been on to the police and hospitals to enquire if there had been any car accidents or emergency admissions. ‘Maybe she and Trevor have boarded a boat for Scotland,’ Howell thought out loud, explaining that Lesley had been drinking the night before and had driven off. She could very well have gone to see Trevor, as the two had been confiding in each other about their spouses’ affair. Jim was well aware of the marital difficulties in the Howell and Buchanan households.
Before Flanagan left Knocklayde Park to go to a Sunday morning service at Coleraine Baptist, Howell showed him a letter written by Lesley. Flanagan would later tell the police in the investigation immediately after the deaths: ‘I’ve been asked since if I thought it was a suicide note. There was no hint of that in the letter as far as I could see, although I wouldn’t be experienced in these things. But there was an indication suggesting that she was going away and there was a sort of a farewell in it. She expressed her love both to her husband and to her family. I read that, but I have no clear memory of the phraseology. But those sentiments were in it.’
Howell then got in touch with another church friend to ask if he too would come to see him. Derek McAuley said he found Howell, dressed in a sweat-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, looking anxious and agitated. He was now saying that Trevor had come to the house during the night, and that he and the young policeman had been involved in a struggle but that he, Howell, had managed to overpower him. Then Trevor had driven off with Lesley, who had the keys to her late father’s house. McAuley also remembered being shown a suicide note, which he quickly read without paying too much attention to its contents. ‘I do recall that I could see no marks or injury on Colin Howell, so obviously the two of them had not been battering the daylights out of each other,’ he would later tell police.
The last time McAuley had been to The Apostles it had been a social call to see Harry Clarke – a civilized and pleasant visit. But now McAuley feared for his life. He was terrified that Trevor Buchanan had become deranged because of the marital strife and, thinking that he, McAuley, was the man he’d confronted the previous night, might shoot him. The front door was closed but unlocked. He was concerned about going inside because he knew Trevor was a policeman who had access to a gun. He told the police later: ‘It had crossed my mind before that if Trevor had taken the “head staggers”, he could possibly have killed Hazel and Colin with his firearm. I even on occasion had told him, or rather asked him, to keep his gun at the police station.’
In his later account, McAuley remembered pushing the front door open and shouting: ‘Trevor, you know the drama is over now, it’s Derek here. It’s me, Derek, not Colin.’ He climbed the narrow stairs towards the bedrooms, with visions of Trevor sitting with his gun, ready to shoot the first person to walk through the door. If not, he feared, then Trevor and Lesley might be lying dead in one of the rooms. He shouted out again: ‘It’s me, Derek, not Colin,’ and checked the rest of the house. Then he made his way to the back, walking over towards the garage. It was a sunny day, and he had to shade his eyes with a hand as he squinted in at a back window. He saw Howell’s Renault car and noticed how dirty it was. He didn’t see anybody inside, but he could smell what he believed to be gas. He then moved along the side of the garage towards the front again, where he could have sworn he glimpsed someone peering out from behind a curtained window in the house he had just left, No. 6. He went into the house again but found no one, and then decided that it was time to leave.
Back at the house, Howell looked at him in astonishment when McAuley assured him there had been no one at No. 6 and that all he had detected was a strange smell of gas. ‘They were there,’ Howell shouted in disbelief. ‘They were there, they were there.’
It was Jim Flanagan who eventually found the bodies, when he returned to the house a second time at Howell’s request. It must have been a harrowing experience for a father whose daughter had died the previous year. Howell had called him again, this time as Jim was leaving the church in Coleraine where Pastor Hansford had conducted an adult baptism as part of a service which had lasted longer than usual. David Green, an off-duty police detective who had also been at the church service, agreed to go with the elder. It was around lunchtime.
After failing to get a response to knocking on the front door and windows, the two men went into the house. The back door was lying open, and Green noticed the kitchen ceiling light had been switched on. They shouted out and searched the upstairs as well. Flanagan then went to the garage, not expecting to find anybody there either, but when he lifted the up-and-over door he saw Trevor Buchanan’s body in the car, lying slumped well down in the driver’s seat, his right knee stuck in the joint of the open door. The car had been reversed into the garage. Flanagan called out and then discovered Lesley Howell’s body in the boot. She was wearing the earphones of her personal stereo, and some family photographs lay beside her. ‘I’ll never forget the smile that appeared to be on her face,’ Flanagan would later tell police.
As he hurried over to the garage to join his friend, David Green could smell exhaust fumes. The car engine was not running but there was a little smoke in the air. He checked Trevor’s pulse and then Lesley’s, after opening the boot. Then he noticed a hose attached to the exhaust pipe.
Family and friends of the couple were stunned, but Howell appeared to take his wife’s death remarkably well. Some put his composed reaction down to the shock of it all. Three of the four children were up and running around when Pastor Hansford called to tell Howell that his wife was dead. Howell went to the patio door which opened on to the garden, where Matthew, Lauren and Daniel were playing on the slide Daniel had been given for his birthday the previous day. Calling the children in, their father told them their mother was dead and in Heaven. They began to weep and hug each other, and when one of them asked him when she would be coming back, he replied: ‘Never.’
The pastor had been stunned by the news and would later tell police: ‘Trevor Buchanan was such a steady fellow, and I believed he was not the type to take his own life.’ But Howell, he noticed, showed little or no emotion: ‘I felt that maybe he was holding back and would eventually explode emotionally.’ Jim Flanagan, present at the time, was also taken aback by Howell’s reaction to the deaths: ‘He seemed to take the news reasonably well, but that may have been through shock or disbelief or whatever.’
The first people Howell telephoned were his parents, Sam and Sarah, at their home in Portadown. But he made no mention of his relationship with the wife of the man who had also died. He left that to his minister, who had to fill Sam and Sarah in on the full background when they arrived at the Howells’ house later that evening. The pastor recalls: ‘They were very distressed.’
Hazel was at the house of her neighbour and best friend, Hilary McAuley, when Liz Hansford called in to break the news. Standing in the hallway and just hours after he had checked No. 6 for himself, Derek McAuley said he couldn’t believe there had been such a tragedy. Hazel came out of the lounge and immediately began acting out the role of the grieving widow. She hardly spoke. The pastor’s wife recalls: ‘She held her face in her hands and bent over. She must have rehearsed that: the moment somebody comes and tells her. The best way is to cover up the face. We were dealing with an affair, which happens in church life – not very often, but it happens. We were dealing with suicide and a wife who must feel responsible for driving her husband to do this. I would have said she looked guilty at that point – guilt for having driven her husband to suicide. You are not remotely thinking of anybody else and you are not acting as a police officer to these people. You are a minister dealing with folk who have had an affair and a tragic suicide of people who felt humiliation, shame and rejection.’
Hilary McAuley put the kettle on and made some tea, but Hazel said little and, according to Liz Hanford, there was no emotion. The tears didn’t come until later, and that was in front of her two children. Liz Hansford feels this had its own explanation: ‘… You don’t always cry when you are in shock … I was looking at a woman whose husband had just taken his life.’
Liz Johnston and her husband Bertie were just about to begin lunch when she heard the radio news bulletin which reported that two people, a man and a woman, had been found dead in Castlerock. The names were withheld, but Liz immediately suspected that Trevor could be one of them. Gut instinct told her that the man who used to smile and wave as he drove past in his white Toyota car with a spoiler on the back would not be calling again. She recalled looking up at Bertie and saying: ‘I hope that is not what I’m thinking.’ They speculated as to the identity of the bodies: ‘We were putting two and two together because there was so much talk at the time about the affair: how the Church had intervened, and was working away in the background to try and get everything sorted.’ As she had been a local politician with an extensive network of contacts, it wasn’t long before Liz got a call which confirmed that the couple in question were indeed Trevor and Lesley: ‘When somebody told me the names, I couldn’t believe it.’ Liz had many fond memories of Trevor Buchanan and, before she died of cancer in October 2009, she wept in the study of her home as she spoke of one of the biggest regrets in her life, saying: ‘I should have told the police to have him shifted; transferred to somewhere else. If something had been done, it would not have happened. I blame the Church for that. If we had told the police privately, and told them what was going on, they could have moved Trevor further away.’
The day after the awful news had broken, Liz was one of the first of the neighbours at Hazel’s door to offer her sandwiches and cakes as well as some of her china cups and plates, in preparation for the days to follow, when there would be many people calling. She didn’t know Hazel as well as she had known Trevor. She held out her hand to the young mother, but there was no firm grip in return and it felt, or so she thought, as if it wasn’t really a handshake at all. Her impression was that Hazel was in shock: ‘She was cold and, to me, she really wasn’t in mourning. I thought her grief was going to come later. That’s what can happen to some people. They withdraw into themselves, keep it there; they don’t talk and then maybe in a few weeks, sometimes months, it all comes out … She was very controlled and, in the kitchen, she just left it to the rest of us to attend to everybody. She just stood back. I remember being in the garden, asking her about her memories of Trevor, their holidays together and so on, and she never replied. I found that strange, that she didn’t say anything. She just said: “Look. Look where the wheel is lying.” And sure enough there it was at the bottom of the garden where Trevor had thrown it. It was the wheel he had brought to our house.’
There was soon talk that Trevor might have been having second thoughts about suicide, and was trying to get out of the door when he was overcome by the fumes. It made his death all the more poignant.
Shirley McPhillimy, the friend who had been with Lesley just days earlier when she was making a shepherd’s pie for dinner, was devastated. She told police: ‘I kept thinking: was there anything I could have said or done to stop it? When I saw her on the Tuesday, she was still coping, still holding a routine, still happy to save her marriage, still loved Colin and, most importantly, she still absolutely adored her children. She did not give me any cause to think that perhaps she was suicidal … I found the circumstances of her death very strange … I recall the attempted overdose and also on the Tuesday before her death, her mentioning [saying]: “Maybe they’d be better off without me – why not just let them have each other?” But never did I actually think that she would consider suicide. I never thought she would be capable.’
The Howells’ housekeeper Betty Bradley was distraught, but also puzzled: ‘I did wonder why she had decided to leave her devoted children, whom she loved dearly.’ Lesley’s friend, Tania Donaghy, had her own theory, which she shared with police after the investigation was reopened: ‘It was my belief at the time that Lesley had done Colin a favour by taking her own life, and that she must have talked Trevor into helping her to do it, and that he had got caught up in the car, causing him to lose his life as well. I just couldn’t understand it [though], because Trevor was always known as a very steady fellow.’ Tania’s husband Harry, who called at both the Howell and Buchanan homes on the night of the deaths, found Colin coping well: it struck him that there were no tears or signs of emotion, and that Howell was calm and controlled, and gave the impression he was putting on a brave face: ‘As far as I was concerned, you couldn’t lose your wife and not be emotional. I thought he must be devastated, but was holding back his grief.’
It was Howell who contacted Ruth Middleton, Lesley’s friend from her nursing days, to tell her that his wife was dead. Ruth remembers screaming down the telephone: ‘It can’t be. It can’t be.’ But she was also thinking: ‘What have you done? Did you force her to do it?’ She later told police: ‘I had big, big doubts, but because it was a double [suicide], I couldn’t understand it. If it had just been Lesley, I would have been very suspicious.’
Howell also phoned Valerie Allen, telling her he was sorry. Valerie, a university lecturer at the time, was living in Stirling in Scotland with her boyfriend, Ares Axiotis, a philosopher and an American who was naturally blessed with a jaundiced view of human nature. He had never met the Howells but when she told him her friend, and a man, had been found dead in a car at Castlerock he replied: ‘Mark my words, he’s bumped them off.’ Valerie was heartbroken to hear of Lesley’s death. She remembers of that time: ‘I had lots of dreams about her. It just felt we had been chatting on the phone and I would always feel good. The dreams were good. It just felt I’d got off the phone, having had a good chat with her. I never cried. I just felt very angry about the whole thing.’
Trevor’s family, including his mother and father, Lily and Jim, travelled up from Omagh that day. Gordon Buchanan, not long home after a break with his wife Donna in Belfast, had been in the garden playing with his two children when she had called him into the kitchen. He burst into tears as she told him that a former neighbour who moved to Portstewart had called to say: ‘Trevor has been found dead in a car in Castlerock. A woman’s body was there as well.’
It was a Sunday afternoon, and the roads in and around the part of the town where Gordon lived were heavily congested, with long tailbacks of traffic. Thousands of Gaelic Athletic Association football fans were on their way to a first-round Ulster championship game between Derry and Tyrone at nearby Healy Park. With Gordon sitting weeping in the front passenger seat, it seemed an eternity before his wife was able to negotiate her way through the chaos. Eventually they reached his sister Valerie’s bungalow at Clanabogan, a few miles outside the town, where their parents had been having lunch. But by the time they pulled into the driveway Victor, who was already there with his wife Lorna, and a police colleague, Ken Balfour, had already told Lily and Jim.
Gordon’s mind immediately drifted back to the last time he spoke with Trevor, and he wished they had been on their own on the day he had seen his brother at his home in Coleraine, a couple of months earlier. Gordon recalls of that meeting: ‘We had a general conversation and it was good to catch up with him again. I had a friend with me. There was certainly nothing obvious and maybe if it had just been the two of us, he would have talked. Suicide leaves you with so many questions. Was there anything I could have done? Why didn’t I notice?’
The journey from Omagh to Coleraine can take the best part of two hours. There are some fast stretches on the road north, but it can be painfully slow at times, especially the last leg outside Limavady where the road climbs high before dipping downhill towards the River Bann and the town centre. It was a miserable and depressing trip. When they finally pulled up on the road outside Hazel’s house, the place was already filling up with her extended family, also from Omagh, and some senior police officers. Trevor’s sister Melva Alexander and her husband Syd had also just arrived. They had been with their two boys to the park at Castle Archdale in County Fermanagh that afternoon. They were met at the door of Hazel’s house by Pastor Hansford. And then Hazel appeared. She was embraced in the hallway by her in-laws.
But not everybody was in a forgiving mood, and tensions already started to emerge as friends and neighbours fussed around in the kitchen, preparing tea and sandwiches. Trevor’s sister Valerie recalls: ‘Hazel came into the room and cried. She said she was really sorry. It was her fault. We knew then she had the affair. I actually felt sorry for her. I said: “It’s OK.” But at the time I also remember thinking: “What am I doing here? It’s not OK. Trevor is dead and it’s her fault.” ’
Gordon’s recollection of Hazel’s attitude is a bit different: ‘I don’t recall hearing the word “sorry”. I never witnessed any remorse. I put it down to grief and shock on Hazel’s part. We were convinced by the minister, and the police, that it was suicide. I was a policeman. Trevor was a policeman. My two older brothers were policemen, and we took as sacrosanct anything the police told us. In my heart of hearts, I could not accept that Trevor would take his own life. He loved Hazel too much. He loved his children too much. He was a genuine Christian man who had become very involved in the church, taking part in the services. He definitely would not have sat in a car waiting for somebody else to die alongside him. It was just not him. But we were told by people we trusted impeccably – the police and the clergy – that sadly it had been suicide. There was no other answer for it. We were left to reconcile [ourselves] with that, but we never did.’
Victor Buchanan was equally bewildered. It was the Baptist minister, Jim Garrett, from his church in Comber, County Down, and a police colleague who had told him. His first thought was that the death of his brother might be terrorist-related, because of the high IRA threat level in the Coleraine area at the time. He remembers feeling disbelief at the idea that it had been suicide: ‘I could not understand why Trevor had suddenly committed suicide, knowing the conversations we had and knowing it was the last thing would have entered his mind. That was from his lips. He always felt he didn’t have the guts to do it anyway. He told me: “You needn’t worry. It is the last thing I would even consider.” We knew how much he loved the children. Trevor had three loves – the Lord, his wife and children, and his work. All in that order. The affection was apparent. It wasn’t switched on, or switched off. There was no question about his love for Hazel. If he hadn’t loved her, he would not have stayed with her. There is absolutely no doubt about that. He wouldn’t have endured it one step longer. It was only the love he had for her, that he could see beyond all that had gone on. He was prepared to take her back and make a go of it again.’
Melva, the youngest in the Buchanan family and just twenty-three at the time, remembers that everybody else was given an explanation about the affair, but that she was told nothing until she overheard the pastor talking about it. She was warned to remain dignified and to respect Trevor’s memory. She recalls: ‘I must have gone with the flow and did what everybody else told me to do. At that stage, you went through so many phases of emotions. I was only the wee girl and it wasn’t up to me. I remember saying to Valerie: “If this was Syd [Melva’s husband], his sisters would have me over the coals asking questions. But nobody was asking any questions [of Hazel]. We believed what we were told. I don’t even recall Hazel speaking to me. We didn’t see much of her. Any time she answered the door [over those few days], she had a different shell suit on. It was the shell suit era, and if it wasn’t white, it was pink, or lilac, maybe green …’
Hazel’s dress code wasn’t the only issue that bothered her young sister-in-law at the time. In front of people who gathered at the house that day, Hazel wondered out loud how she was now going to mow the grass. Neither was she familiar with the workings of the oil-fired central-heating system, and who would be around the house to help her? Melva was angry: ‘How could she think of such things when her husband had just died? What is she talking about? Who cares about cutting the lawn or worrying about keeping the house warm? You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. We were outside most of the time, in the front garden, hanging around. I was angry with her for quite a while, and then I realized it wasn’t really her fault. Trevor chose to take his life. Affairs can happen. I remember feeling at the time really sorry for Trevor and what he must have gone through. He was such a proud person and this was how he had to deal with it. And then I would probably have been very angry with him as well. I would have thought he had been silly and it was a stupid thing to do.’
It would be many years, of course, before Trevor and Lesley’s families would learn the truth about their deaths. In the meantime, they were tortured by the terrible unanswered questions which an unexplained suicide always leaves behind.