Jonny Howell was just eight months old when his mum died. In later years, whenever he or his siblings asked their father what had happened, Howell would always reply: ‘It looks like suicide, but no one was really ever sure.’ Some of the Howell children remember seeing their father cry once in the weeks after their mother’s death, when Matthew was aged six, Lauren four and Daniel two. The only other time they ever recalled him becoming emotional about Lesley’s death was a few months later, when little Daniel pointed towards a photograph of his mother and started to cry. Howell lifted Daniel into his arms and said to himself: ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ Otherwise, Howell seemed to adjust quite quickly to single parenthood, reading the children stories from the Bible at bedtime or reaching for his guitar to sing them a song. As time went by, Lesley’s name was rarely mentioned in the family home, with Howell actively discouraging the children from discussing their mother, even among themselves. Visits to her grave stopped. Soon it was as if – as far as Howell was concerned anyway – his wife and the mother of his four children had never existed.
But while to friends and even to his own children it seemed as if Howell was taking Lesley’s death remarkably well and coping admirably, in fact every so often he would react to situations in bizarre ways, which suggested that underneath his façade was a deep unease.
In March 1992 – almost a year after Lesley’s death – some of the widower’s friends decided to hold a surprise thirty-third birthday party for him at the family home. It had been arranged that a doctor friend and an old pal from his time at university would take him out for a time, while the house was set up. Everybody hid in the kitchen and waited. When Howell returned to the house and switched on the lights in the kitchen, he gasped in astonishment as they all broke into song, wishing him a happy birthday. He couldn’t believe it. One of the guests there that night remembers: ‘The look on his face was like sheer fear. He was like a cornered rabbit. His eyes were staring and he didn’t look at all comfortable.’
Then there was the time in early 1993 when he contacted David Hussey – a former acquaintance from his student days – completely out of the blue, to commiserate with him over the death of his brother, Harold. David, who had also studied dentistry, went on to become a senior lecturer and consultant in restorative dentistry at the School of Dentistry at Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. Harold Hussey had been a serving officer in the RUC. On Christmas Eve 1992, he had attended a family party with David and his other siblings at their mother’s house in Omagh. It had been a great family get-together, with a sing-song in one room and karaoke in another. But just days later, on 27 December, Harold Hussey was found dead in his car.
The young policeman had been staying with his in-laws on the outskirts of the town, at Gillygooley, not far from where Hazel’s family lived. He had spent the day driving around Northern Ireland to look at various police stations where he had served in the past, before he pulled in by the roadside, a few miles outside Omagh, attached a hosepipe to the exhaust of his car, and switched on the ignition. He died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The large attendance at his funeral service at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Omagh on New Year’s Eve was a very public acknowledgement of the thirty-nine-year-old sergeant’s popularity. Friends, especially his police colleagues, were stunned.
Howell and David Hussey had not spoken for several years and they were never particularly close. Hussey knew Hazel Buchanan’s family quite well: her brother, Raymond Elkin, was a dentist who had also studied at Queen’s, and had been in the year below David. Howell, however, telephoned Hussey, saying he had just wanted to get in touch to pass on his sympathy and telling him: ‘I know what you are going through. You know, I have been through something similar myself in the past few years. I’m thinking about you.’ But the gesture was misplaced and inappropriate and left Hussey bewildered. He would later tell friends that the call had made him feel uncomfortable. As one friend said: ‘It put him in the position of having to discuss a very personal and sensitive family issue with a man he hadn’t seen in ages.’
Hazel Buchanan, meanwhile, rarely discussed the death of her husband with anybody outside her immediate family. Even those close to her never heard her mention the word ‘suicide’. About a year after the deaths, Hazel turned to one of her sisters and said: ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if Trevor walked through the door now, to see the joy in Lisa and Andrew’s faces?’
One former colleague of Hazel’s, who knew her when she had worked part time in an office outside Coleraine, recalls of her: ‘I always got the impression that she was holding something back, and that she didn’t feel comfortable talking about her husband’s death. I felt that I knew her, but on the other hand, I didn’t … You knew as much as she wanted you to know. Her personal life was a closed book. Hazel had low self-esteem. She didn’t like anyone making a fuss of her and couldn’t cope with confrontation.’
In the aftermath of Trevor’s death, Hazel did her best to help her two children come to terms with what had happened. Photographs of their father remained on display in prominent places in the house, and sometimes they browsed through the family albums together. Every Sunday the two children helped to tidy up and put flowers on Trevor’s grave. Even though he died when they were young, the children had fond memories of their father. He had always helped them with their school homework. Andrew was just seven when his dad took him to have a look around Coleraine police station. He got his fingerprints taken, and remembers being fascinated by it all. Lisa recalls how proud she felt on the morning Trevor arrived at her primary school in his police uniform, carrying a savings book she’d forgotten to take with her that day. Their parents might have been on the verge of splitting up at one stage, but there had never been any arguments in front of the children. After his death, Hazel told them: ‘Daddy and I had our problems, but I loved him very much.’
Whatever she had done, it seems that Hazel was a very good mother to her children, and they were devoted to her. She made sure they kept their Christian faith. They were not spoiled, but they wanted for nothing. She read them Bible stories at bedtime and prayed with them before they went to sleep. She admitted to Lisa and Andrew that she had been involved in an affair with another man, and related to them the Bible story of the seduction of Bathsheba by David. However, she probably left out the part where David arranged to have Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband and his love rival, killed on the battlefield. She regularly told them that their father was in Heaven and was watching over them. It gave them a sense of reassurance.
Meanwhile Trevor’s family did their best to keep in touch with Hazel and to help her move on from the tragedy and build a new life for herself and the children. Victor and Lorna Buchanan were the first of the in-laws to make contact, once the aftermath of the funeral had subsided. Hazel had apologized for her behaviour, and they were prepared to be magnanimous, especially for the sake of Andrew and Lisa, whom they adored. They also wanted to make sure the children didn’t lose touch with their grandparents.
Trevor’s sister Valerie became a committed Christian three years after his death, after a lot of agonizing about her religious beliefs while trying to come to terms with her brother’s death: ‘I couldn’t get my head around this [Trevor’s suicide]. I thought God had the power to stop him. Why did He not stop him? At the end, I came to the conclusion God knew Trevor was going to be even more hurt if he lived. So He let him die. I suppose this was my way of making peace with myself. Now I know he is in Heaven.’ Valerie went on to become a founding member of the interdenominational Omagh Community Church. She was keen to renew contact with her brother’s widow: ‘When I became a Christian, something inside me really changed. I was happier. I had a real relationship between me and God. I believe God was telling me I needed to forgive. I told [Hazel] I realized she never set out with the intention that Trevor would die. She was very grateful, appreciative and pleased that I became a Christian. But as a Christian now, I have to question her Christianity. Why did she do such a thing, when she knew what was right and what was wrong?’
Hazel considered moving away to live in another town. She looked at a house in Ballymena, but eventually decided to remain in Coleraine, even though she felt shunned by some people on the streets of the town. She began to attend services at the Baptist church in nearby Limavady, where she would sometimes weep as she got to her feet with the rest of the congregation to sing hymns. She never sought sympathy, but others were prepared to forgive, as she attempted to rebuild her life. But Howell was still very much part of it.
They met at her house on Friday nights. While the children played in one room, they would be all over each other in the next. They played a game called ‘Wolf’, where the lights were switched off and Howell was blindfolded. The children hid. Howell growled and listened for the giggles and then grabbed hold of them in the darkness. But the lovers were never affectionate in front of the children. Howell’s and Hazel’s children got on well together. At one stage, Lisa believed her mother might marry the dentist. Young Dan Howell was keen for this to happen too, but one member of the extended Howell family was very much opposed to the relationship being formalized and asked Howell: ‘How can you marry an adulteress?’
But Howell was afraid Hazel would end the affair, and so he asked her to marry him, although an engagement ring was never produced. He wanted them to move away to begin a new life – if not somewhere else in Northern Ireland, then maybe to Scotland, where in 1995 he investigated the possibility of buying two separate practices – in Inverness and Lossiemouth. They discussed selling their homes.
Four years after the deaths, however, Hazel had had enough. She didn’t want to marry him, saying that she wouldn’t be able to cope with his children as well as her own, and she was reluctant to lose her police pension. She wanted out altogether, although Howell didn’t realize it at the time. Many years later, after his arrest, he told police: ‘I wanted to believe that we were an item and to keep on going. Maybe the only way that I could keep that dream alive was to control the situation … I didn’t read the signs. I didn’t listen. She was saying: “This is a disaster. This will never work.” I was … trying to find a solution, to make these arrangements and present her with a package that would make things better for her and that she would accept.’ By the time he was in custody facing a life sentence, he admitted: ‘I committed adultery with a sad adulteress. She became my way out of a black hole.’
As time went on, the relationship became more and more strained. Hazel knew the writing was on the wall, but it was a long, protracted goodbye. Many years later, in the course of police interviews, she would say that the affair had been ‘very serious’ when it first started, and that she had initially thought she was ‘in love’ with Howell. But that changed quite quickly: ‘As time went on, and things happened, my feeling changed. I could see a different person. Maybe he knew I wasn’t as keen. It wasn’t a natural or normal relationship. From the church point of view, we were not allowed to be together.’ However the toxic couple might have explained it to themselves, the truth probably was that the heinous crime they had committed together, but never discussed, slowly but surely poisoned everything between them until they could ignore it no longer.
Hazel claimed in later years that she had tried to break off the relationship a number of times, but Howell would always manage to win her over again somehow. ‘He is someone who is very controlling, very. He gets his own way in one shape or form. Whether he fools you, or cons you, whatever, he will get you. If he wants something he will get it … I was going out with someone that I thought that I loved at a time and had turned out quite obsessive.’ Howell’s retrospective account, however, suggests that Hazel was not quite as helpless or as sincere in her attempts to end things as she might have wanted others to believe.
Although Howell was desperate to keep the relationship going, in his heart he knew it was only a matter of time before it finished. He gave Hazel money to pay for petrol, the telephone bills, and even clothes, but he knew he had to let go. Anyway, she was already two-timing him with a man she had first met twenty years previously: Trevor McAuley, a print worker with the local Coleraine Chronicle newspaper. Howell quickly realized that she was seeing someone else: he of all people recognized the signs. Years later, he would say: ‘Whenever you’re a deceiver, you know when you’re being deceived. You know the tricks.’
He used to stand in the forest behind Hazel’s house to watch the comings and goings, and he noticed a strange car – a green Mazda – in the driveway at a time when she was supposed to be entertaining one of her sisters. She had told Howell to stay away because, she claimed, her sister did not like him. And then one night when he walked into a Chinese restaurant in Glengormley on the outskirts of Belfast he stumbled upon Hazel and the new man in her life having a meal. It was a place which she and Howell had frequented of old when they wanted to be on their own. Trevor McAuley, Hazel’s new boyfriend, recalls that night: ‘I never saw shock on anybody’s face like the shock on hers. She could hardly speak. They just said hello to each other. He had a couple of his children with him and you can imagine the atmosphere. It was very tense.’
Deeply jealous, Howell kept returning to spy on the Buchanan house. He pulled up in his black BMW to see who was there and would then drive off at speed. One night, as he stood on the other side of the fence at Mountsandel Wood, Hazel saw him from her bathroom window and quickly summoned McAuley to see for himself. He remembers: ‘It was pitch black. He must have had a torch and found his way up through the forest. He was just standing as if he was a statue. It was very spooky. It alarmed her. I remember telling her: “He’ll not bother me. I’ll sort him out if he approaches me.” She replied: “You be very careful, because you don’t know what he is capable of.” ’
McAuley’s relationship with Hazel Buchanan lasted eight years. It was good in parts, strained at other times, and finally ended in acrimony after a weekend in Dublin in the summer of 2004. Trevor McAuley spoke at length with the author about his relationship. He insisted on referring to her throughout as ‘Buchanan’. As with Howell and her husband Trevor, she would eventually cheat on him too – with an ex-police officer she met at the Fitness First gymnasium in Coleraine and whom she went on to marry.
Hazel and Trevor McAuley first set eyes on each other when they were teenagers in 1976 in another Antrim seaside town, Port-rush. She had been working at a guest house where McAuley and his friends used to tour in their car on the lookout for new and friendly faces. Once Hazel finished preparing the rooms and cleared up the dishes at her place of work, they would spend time in Barry’s amusements arcade, walk the West Strand, and from time to time buy chips. It did not last long – maybe two to three weeks – before the girl from Omagh returned home. She was a Baptist but she smoked at the time. Trevor recalls: ‘She was quite the tomboy. I remember her in a little black jacket with two white stripes. She had dark hair. It was all very innocent. We kissed, but sex was an absolute no-no.’
Twenty years later they were reunited after he spotted her in the car park of the Irish Society Primary School in Coleraine, as he waited with his sister to collect her children. By this time he was divorced, with three of his own. He noticed the woman with a vaguely familiar face in the car park near the school. He remembered all the talk about the two suicides at Castlerock and then realized it might be the girl he had fancied when he was a teenager: ‘But this girl hadn’t prominent teeth, not the same teeth as I remembered she had. It was only later I realized Howell had done this fancy cosmetic work. I thought: “Hmmm, might be, might not be.” ’
They were properly introduced a few months later. A friend who attended Coleraine Baptist Church suggested that they should meet: Hazel was on her own, feeling lonely, and might be glad of the company. The two agreed to go for a walk on the beach at White Rocks outside Portrush, along a stretch which passes below the famous golf links of Royal Portrush. Trevor remembers the first meeting: ‘She knew that I knew what had happened. I didn’t want to ask questions. I didn’t want to know anything about the affair. I didn’t want to know anything about the suicide. I told her that and she appreciated that … I didn’t want to be put off by it. I needed to focus on the future and not look back. I felt the girl deserved a chance. She talked very little about him, her husband. I knew about Howell because he was pestering the life out of her. When I met her at the White Rocks, as far as I was concerned she was out of that relationship. It was a dirty and sordid thing. As far as I was concerned, Trevor Buchanan committed suicide because he couldn’t stand it any longer.’
As well as working as a compositor on the local newspaper, McAuley was also extremely useful with his hands and brilliant at DIY, just the sort of man the house-proud Hazel needed to have about the place. He came from a working-class Protestant housing estate called Windy Hall on the outskirts of Coleraine, just off the main road to Ballymoney.
Even though Hazel insisted that her affair with Howell was well and truly over and she was in a new relationship, the dentist, it seemed, held out lingering hopes of a reconciliation with his old flame. Trevor McAuley remembers how Howell did his best to discredit him in Hazel’s eyes: ‘Howell was bad. He said to her at one time: “What would it take to get rid of that boy from Windy Hall? That boy is only from Windy Hall.” It’s a wee estate, but I’m proud to be from Windy Hall and proud to be associated with anybody who comes from it … I could see what Howell was doing … He was trying to manipulate her brain and make her wonder if she would stay with this boy, McAuley. To make her feel that, if he wasn’t on the scene, she was finished financially. And finance was her big thing …’ Howell was applying heavy emotional pressure to Hazel too. ‘I remember her telling me how much it was upsetting him – her going out with me. He wasn’t able to eat and he was stopping the car and being sick. All he had eaten the whole day was a banana … She hadn’t the brains to see that he was working her head.’
Perhaps Howell was not the only one not quite ready to let go. Unknown to Trevor, Hazel twice met the dentist behind his back – once when she invited him to have sex at her house after jumping up and down on his knee, stripping to her underwear and throwing herself on to a bed. Howell later claimed he made his excuses and left. He said: ‘I stood at the end of the bed and just said: “I don’t want any more.” She got dressed and I left.’ He added: ‘I knew Hazel was still very needy of the relationship. She knew it. She wanted it to end, but she couldn’t let it end.’
There was also the time Hazel contacted her ex to see if she could borrow some equipment which her son Andrew needed to go on a camping expedition. Trevor McAuley was not best pleased, especially after she told him she wanted Howell to continue treating her two children at the Ballymoney clinic, and even though Howell had told her: ‘Well, if we’re split up, we’re split up. Everything you had from me is now gone.’
The first signs of a rift and uncertainty between the new couple began to emerge. Hazel wasn’t quite the woman Trevor McAuley had hoped. Not only was she emotionally demanding, but financially too: ‘I couldn’t earn enough money to keep her. I said that to her many times: “I nearly feel I can’t afford you. I shouldn’t have you because I can’t afford you.” She would have used Howell and his wealth, his money, to make me feel I should be taking over that [side of things]. [As if] she was [saying]: “He’s not there any more, I’ve got rid of him. You need to take over here now. I can’t cope without it.” ’
Money quickly became a major issue, as Trevor recounts with some anger: ‘It was clothes and the house. The house bugged me so much. I put thousands into that house and that doesn’t include the time. How do you put a price on the time? I did all the work: redecorating, putting in a new kitchen, tiling, bathrooms. There isn’t a room in the house which I didn’t re-do. I put Amtico floors in it. Then those two [Hazel and David Stewart] sold that house when they got married.
‘Most times, you [I] would have bought her clothes. But … sometimes, she would have bought them on her credit card. But whenever the credit card bill came in, half the time she didn’t have the money to pay for it. I ended up paying the credit card. She never paid anything towards the holidays. She didn’t even take spending money on a holiday. We went with her children. We went to the south of France, Majorca, Benalmadena in Spain. Good hotels were expected … Whenever you were in that coach being transferred – from the airport – I was always worried the hotel would not meet her standards … It would have been bad if it failed to match her expectations … The first holiday we had was in Benalmadena and I remember sitting shocked on a little wall, because all she wanted was to buy presents for friends. But she hadn’t brought any money. And I had to buy them. That was the first time I looked at Buchanan and began to think to myself: “I’m in a different league here. Financially I’m not sure I’m going to be able to cope with this relationship.” ’
McAuley, with three children of his own from his first marriage, soon found his modest financial resources stretched to the limit in his efforts to meet Hazel’s demands: ‘There were times I had nothing. There were times when I hadn’t a penny, when it all had to go to her. The first time I had to give her money, I came round to the house and I just knew there was something not right. I remember her patronizing me. I said: “There is definitely something wrong. You’re not yourself at all.” She replied: “You are a very sensitive man. You can pick up on that … Financially, I am not making it at the minute.” … Being the big man, I said: “What do you need?” … If anybody had ever needed a few pounds, I thought they’d be talking about £30 or £40. She was talking £300 to £400. I wasn’t with her that long and for me to hand that over was a big thing. It left me with nothing. I was looking after three of my own children. I was paying the Child Support Agency as well. I was keeping her, and her children. I pretended I didn’t ever need anything. I never got very much, but she would have pressurized me into buying myself a shirt. I couldn’t afford it. It sounds pathetic, but that’s the way it was.’
Hazel expected the best of everything, no matter the cost. Trevor recalls: ‘Everything had to be the best. If we went to look at a new kitchen and it cost £10,000 in one place, but £20,000 for the exact same somewhere else, she would have bought the one at £20,000. I couldn’t pay for it, but I know her mother gave her money towards it … There was nothing which needed to be done that could lie undone. It had to be done. She had very expensive tastes in life. She could have gone to a clothes rail and picked out the most expensive item straight away. It seemed to be something she could do. She was like a professional shopper. She used to get really, really cross and frustrated when she couldn’t find things … She’d be running here and there, and I was a bundle of nerves.’
He found Hazel’s style of communicating her feelings and needs very difficult to handle, too: ‘She wouldn’t be angry, but you’d know, even though she might not say anything … There used to be serious mood swings. It got so bad at the end, I would pretend I was playing football matches, so I didn’t have to go to her house. She was a very depressive person. When I left at night, until I came back the next day, I never knew what … to expect. If the mouth dropped, the reason was always money. It was lack of money … The only way I could lift her out of depression was by spending money … Trevor’s death played on her mind. She used to talk about how she felt. She used to say: “I’m useless. I’m for nothing. I am no better than a worm, crawling below the ground.” Because of what had happened and because of the abortion, she likened herself to a worm many times. It wasn’t just once, when she was down. I would have tried to lift her up out of it …’
There were some lighter moments in the relationship, according to Trevor. Hazel did display a sense of humour from time to time: ‘She could be funny in her own way, though it wasn’t very often. She could be witty and she enjoyed a joke. But … you always had to gauge her mood.’ The only way to cheer Hazel up, it seemed, was to go shopping: ‘I knew that if the mood was really bad, the only therapy [for her] … was to spend money. To shop and buy things. That was the only thing that pulled her out of a bad form.’
Fingering the clothes rails in search of a new outfit worked wonders to lift Hazel’s spirits, apparently. She was a regular in the more up-market fashion stores in and around the North Coast, although some staff, especially in Coleraine, found her aloof, even snobbish at times. Trevor concedes: ‘She was so good at finding what she wanted. She could find a needle in a haystack. She would have made a good fashion buyer, rather than doing something involving figures. It was another case of going in the wrong direction.’
At the time, Trevor attended the Church of Christ in Coleraine. Hazel was going regularly to Limavady Baptist Church, sometimes three times on a Sunday. But, as McAuley confirms, she yearned for the day when the ban would end, and she could return to Coleraine Baptist: ‘That was a goal she had.’
She eventually got her way in 2002, when Pastor Jim Smyth from Limavady made an informal approach to Pastor Edwin Ewart, who had taken over from Hansford in 1996. Pastor Ewart called with Hazel to discuss her reintegration and he advised her to do it quietly and then gradually build up her attendance over a period of time. The fact that she had moved on and was now with Trevor McAuley was an important consideration in the ‘amnesty’ being granted: ‘Whenever it was established that we were in a relationship, she got it [the ban] lifted.’ In relation to Hazel’s approach to life in general, he recalls: ‘There had to be a goal at the end of everything she did, an advantage …’
Trevor got on famously with the Buchanan children, and many a Sunday night was spent driving them back to Belfast, where they were students at Queen’s University and the College of Art. He thought the world of them: ‘Lisa and Andrew were fantastic. They never cast up anything to that girl about their father, which always amazed me. Their loyalty was incredible. They thought their father had committed suicide because of an affair she had with Colin Howell. It didn’t matter to them. She was their mother and they loved her to bits. They were totally committed. I used to take them to Belfast on a Sunday night at my expense, but Buchanan would have stayed on in the house and many times on my way home, I used to think: “Why didn’t she come with me for the company?” There didn’t seem to be a heart there. Maybe because of the deaths all her feelings died. They died along with Trevor Buchanan.’
When it came to her new boyfriend’s three children though, Hazel just did not want to know or to have anything to do with them: ‘She made that clear from the start, when she said: “I’ll never be anything to your children.” … It put me under terrible pressure. I recall having them for a week [they lived with their mother] and she didn’t even know they were there. I remember one night being caught out. We were in a Chinese restaurant. I popped in for a carry out and she rang the mobile. My boy answered. I was supposed to be working and she was asking: “What’s he doing there?” ’
The couple kissed and cuddled. But Trevor felt there was something else in the way Hazel deliberately kept him at a distance during the years that they were together: ‘The sexual side of it was driving me mad. There were times when things would have happened, but it wasn’t a sleeping together thing. Even on holidays, there was nothing. In eight years, I could count on one hand [the number of times] when we got close. She didn’t want me to. It was a powerful strain.’
Trevor would try to bring up the subject of marriage and buying a home together. He harboured exciting thoughts of a future together. Hazel clearly had serious reservations, although she rarely confided her doubts. They once talked about buying a plot of land. Another time, Hazel asked him to check with estate agents in the area and find out what houses were available for sale. They went to see some for themselves. But Hazel was not happy with any of them. In retrospect, Trevor sees that this was just her way of stalling: ‘If you had Buckingham Palace, it wouldn’t have been good enough. When I look back on it now, it’s only because she didn’t want to marry me. It wasn’t because the house wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t because Buchanan wasn’t ready. It was because I wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t fuel her life. And her life needed to be fuelled.’
Hazel had never wanted to marry Trevor McAuley. Years later, in police interviews, she would sum up the eight-year relationship with some considerable detachment: ‘I didn’t feel anything for him. I liked him as a person, but I felt with my life, and what had happened and everything, that I could never marry again …’
The relationship may have lasted eight years, but tensions and tantrums over money put it on hold several times. Sometimes the separation lasted a week, sometimes just a couple of days. Trevor was desperate to secure a new and loving wife, but Hazel’s desire to keep the relationship going was motivated only by self-interest, it seemed. It was the start of another long, slow goodbye on her part.
As time went on, Trevor’s family made their feelings on the relationship felt. Initially, his mother and sisters had been willing to give Hazel a chance, knowing what a difficult time she had been through. But as it became obvious that there was nothing reciprocal about the relationship – that Trevor was doing all the giving and his new girlfriend doing all the taking – they tried to reason with him that it would be better all round for him to disengage. On his deathbed, Trevor’s father left him in no doubt about what he thought of Hazel. He was having chemotherapy for terminal cancer in Antrim Area Hospital when he took his son by the hand, looked at his sad eyes and asked him to make a solemn pledge. Trevor recalls: ‘My father was a plasterer with big hands, and I remember him taking my hand and he said: “You promise me you’ll not go back to that bad woman.” That was a big thing for him to say, because they knew how unhappy I was. This was after we finally split. I would say we were finished maybe two weeks, or a month. When it all finished, I was devastated. There were times I wanted to go back, but I knew I couldn’t go back, because it … was never going to be any different.’
It ended in July 2004, after they returned from an open-air Simon and Garfunkel concert in Dublin. They took the train from Belfast. As they pulled up at Connolly Station, Trevor could sense an impending separation which this time, he feared, would be permanent: ‘I’ll never forget the morning we left. There were times there was a distance between us, but this time it was greater. In the train, I remember going and sitting beside people we had gone with. I could get no conversation out of her. I thought it might have been because we had gone on the train and she didn’t really like that. She might have considered it a bit common … The weekend was really, really strange. She was in total withdrawal. Even at night, she would not come down out of her room. I was quite embarrassed because of the people I was with. I went up to see what was wrong, and there was absolutely nothing. Then that night she finally told me she was concerned about the way she was treating me … I don’t know whether it was genuinely eating her. She just couldn’t convey to me the way she was feeling.’
They did not enjoy the concert. Apart from Hazel’s sullen attitude, Simon and Garfunkel had not lived up to the expectations of either of them. Hazel’s mood darkened even more afterwards, when it started to rain and they couldn’t flag down a taxi. By the time they arrived home in Coleraine the following night, the town was at a standstill as thousands of people gathered on the streets for a parade of teams to mark the start of the annual Milk Cup, an internationally renowned youth soccer tournament. Trevor’s failure to make a speedy getaway because of the crowds just added to the gloom: ‘Everything was irritating the life out of her. We finally got home and it was eating me what was wrong … I went into the house, took her bag in, but before I knew it, she had gone to bed. She never even said “cheerio” … I went to her room and sat on the edge of the bed, asking her what was wrong. I said: “Do you not think after all this time we really need to take a decision to get married?” This is what she said, and this was the final straw: “Trevor, I don’t know if I ever loved you. I don’t know if I love you now, and I don’t know if I’ll ever love you in the future.” ’ He reeled back in stunned silence for a few seconds, as the impact of the harsh words hit him. He then walked out of the Buchanan home, never to return.
The end of the relationship impacted on his health and his state of mind. He walked the roads at all hours, agonizing about what might have been, if only Hazel had been prepared to give him a chance: ‘After that night, I lost it. I must have lost the guts of two stones. People thought I had cancer. I walked the roads. If it wasn’t in the morning, then it was the middle of the night.’
The previous Christmas, Trevor had signed Hazel up for a year’s subscription to a local gymnasium, so that she could work out and relax as she pleased; the monthly fee was debited from his bank account directly by the gym. If she saw him walking the roads when she was in her car, she would sometimes stop for a few brief words. The very last time Hazel stopped to say hello to him, she was wearing all her gym gear, including the bottoms and top he had bought her on that sad and miserable weekend in Dublin. He remembers their exchange clearly: ‘She says: “It’s terrible. I’m still at Fitness First and you’re paying for it.” I said to her: “No, I’m not. I’ve stopped it.” I was so pleased with myself. It was really brave and she looked shocked. She was stunned.’
Stunned she might have been, but Hazel had moved on. She already had a new man on her arm. David Stewart was a former Chief Superintendent who once served as a staff officer to Sir Hugh Annesley, the Chief Constable of the RUC. Stewart, a divorcee with a family, had retired from the police in 2001, just before the RUC became the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Tall, with greying hair, lean, tanned, well spoken and keen to keep himself fit, he was introduced to Hazel in the Fitness First gym by a policeman friend. The two had shared spiritual interests too: Stewart was taking a fresh look at his Christianity around the time they met. It was love at first sight on the treadmill and at the spinning classes.
After they finished working out, they would meet for coffee. It was early 2004 and Hazel was still in a relationship with Trevor McAuley, but when Stewart left for Latvia for a year on a policing project (he now worked in a consultancy business) he kept in contact with the woman he was already besotted with. When he returned home that summer – just after the time Hazel had been in Dublin with Trevor – the ex-policeman was keen to progress the relationship and he proposed in January 2005, just months after she ditched Trevor. They did not tell their families at the time, but announced their engagement in April. They got married on 18 July at Galgorm Manor near Ballymena. It was a small family reception with just some close friends, maybe fifty to sixty guests, who mingled as a harpist played. The couple attended Coleraine Baptist Church for a brief period before switching to Portstewart. They moved into a new home at Ballystrone Road in Coleraine in late 2006.
The last time Trevor McAuley and Hazel spoke was at his father’s graveside in September 2004. He needed a white shirt for the funeral and she told him to get one. Trevor recalls: ‘She put her arm around my waist and said: “Did you get the shirt in Next?” How bizarre is that?’ Friends had told Trevor how she had met Stewart in the gym while he was still paying her subscription. Everything became clear to him then: ‘So that’s where she got the confidence to put me out of her life and not take me back. But it was the best Christmas box I ever bought anybody, never mind her. Because the day I saw her on television coming out after the first court appearance with that man [David Stewart], I said to myself: “That could have been me.” ’ Trevor has since remarried and lives with his second wife in Coleraine.
Hazel told Stewart she had been involved in an affair with Howell. She said it had been a dreadful and confusing time. It should not have happened and that Trevor died because of it. He said she told him she felt trapped and was unable to break away from him. Stewart was once treated by the dentist, years before he met Hazel. Stewart said in a statement to police in December 2009 that Howell struck him as a very confident and insincere person, and he never had any further dealings with him. He said: ‘I did not probe then the details of Hazel’s affair or the death of Trevor. As far as I was concerned the details of her affair were in the past and the police had investigated the circumstances of Trevor’s death. In the years that followed it was obvious to me that Hazel carried a heavy burden and at times was very down and depressed about the circumstances.’
He added: ‘Hazel is my wife and I know her extremely well. She is a kind, trusting person with a soft nature. At times she can be too trusting, something she has in common with other members of her family. She is quick to defer to those she thinks know better than her. She has always enjoyed working with children and tends to lack a critical judgement on people. Hazel will always tend to see the good in others. These are admirable qualities, but need to be balanced with the realization that not everyone is as helpful and as sincere as they appear to be.’ He insisted that she was a dedicated mother, tireless in all her dealings with her two children, and he added: ‘The love and affection they share is very apparent. I find it difficult to express in a statement that may go before a court, how I feel about Hazel. She always puts me first and we have a great and trusting relationship. She is my best friend and the better part of me.’
Trevor McAuley’s judgement of the woman with whom he shared so many years of his life was considerably less flattering. ‘I think Buchanan is a total grabber of opportunities. Nothing was ever good enough … She was materialistic to the hilt. Cold-hearted. She should have told me at the start she didn’t want me. She should have been straight with me from the start … She [only] wanted me around because I could do everything she needed … To me, she was as clever as Howell. She had me round her little finger. She could make me do anything, including spending money I didn’t have … She could work me like no other woman worked me and I hate that.’