Once Colin Howell finally decided to move on from Hazel Buchanan, he wasted little time finding someone else. He had a brief liaison with a woman but, as he admitted later: ‘I knew it was going nowhere.’ It was just before Christmas 1996 when a policeman, Steven Cargin, brought Kyle Jorgensen, a young American divorcee, along to a Christian ‘singles night’ at Howell’s house. She had been attending Portstewart Baptist Church. Cargin introduced her to Howell and very quickly they began dating. It was love at first sight and was a whirlwind romance. Colin and Kyle married the following year on 2 May 1997 – Howell called in to have his teeth whitened that morning, telling only close friends about the marriage ceremony. A fortnight later his new wife announced she was pregnant, the first of five children the couple were to have. She told police after Howell’s arrest: ‘This just seemed [something] God had done for me and it was such a wonderful privilege and provision for me as a single parent.’
Kyle Jorgensen, originally from New York, arrived in Northern Ireland with her two young children, Dylan and Katie, in July 1996. She had only recently managed to extricate herself from a deeply unhappy four-year marriage to a David Epp in Sanibel, Florida. Wanting to make a fresh start for herself and her children, she decided to cross the Atlantic to study Irish history. She applied for a place at Trinity College, Dublin, as well as Queen’s University in Belfast and the University of Limerick, and was finally accepted at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
With her course due to start in October that year Kyle rented a house in Portstewart at Millbank Avenue, an area of the town where many students lived. Following her brother Arnie’s religious conversion a year previously, Kyle had only just rediscovered religion herself. And so, soon after settling in the town, she became a regular attender at Portstewart Baptist Church, where she met the friend of Howell who subsequently introduced her to her future husband. Aged thirty, Kyle was eight years Howell’s junior and in many ways a vulnerable young woman, having just arrived in a strange country with two small children and still in the throes of a very acrimonious divorce.
The newly-weds lived for a short period at Howell’s house at Knocklayde Park, but with six children (Kyle’s two and his four) and another baby on the way, space was at a premium. Howell decided to build what would be a very lavish family home at Glebe Road, a few miles outside Castlerock, but as they waited for the building work to be finished they moved into a rented, semi-detached house on Freehall Road, also in Castlerock.
Like Lesley before her, Kyle quickly found that her independent pursuits – in her case, her university studies – had to be sacrificed in the interests of family life. Howell helped with the children whenever he could, but much of his time was spent at work. He was extremely driven and single-minded and felt that his role was to provide financially for his family, while his wife’s place was in the home.
Beneath Howell’s very traditionalist view of the sexes, however, was also an intractable core of misogyny, it seems. One former female employee recalls his clear attitude that women were basically inferior to men: ‘This was Colin’s attitude [quoting Genesis 3:16]: “And to the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pains and thy groanings; in pain thou shalt bring forth children, and thy submission shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” ’ In the surgery, he would make life difficult for female members of staff who fell out of favour and would take any opportunity to upbraid them over tiny, insignificant shortcomings. At home too he was a strict and sometimes brutal authoritarian. He used to smack his older children with a wooden spoon as a form of punishment and was never slow to let his wife know who was boss.
With six children in her care as well as baby Erik, who had been born with a problem of the digestive system and had to stay in hospital for some time immediately after his birth, the summer of 1998 cannot have been easy for Howell’s new wife. She also had to undergo major treatment after Erik’s birth because of an infection. And her ex-husband in the United States was still making waves in her life with his bid to win custody of Dylan and Katie. Apart from a couple of church acquaintances, she knew hardly anybody in the area, and even though Northern Ireland was moving towards a peaceful new era with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998, Kyle was still bewildered by the politics of the place.
Imagine her shock that summer, just sixteen months after they married, when Howell made an astonishing confession. They had just finished dinner and, for the first time in ages, were more or less on their own, sitting in the lounge as Kyle was feeding baby Erik. Howell, who hadn’t eaten much, seemed on edge and distracted. He said there was something he had to tell her. In the moments which ensued, Kyle Howell would get a terrifying glimpse into the hitherto hidden depths of her new husband’s soul – and a first intimation of the nightmare into which he was to drag her in years to come.
When they first met, Howell had been quick to tell Kyle all about what had happened with his first wife – or, rather, the official version of what had happened. Lesley, he explained, had taken her own life because of his affair with another woman, and he took full responsibility for having driven her to such a tragic end. She had suffered from depression, and had been taking prescription drugs as well as self-medicating with alcohol. Howell described how he routinely came home to find her drunk and the children running around the house unattended. He said his lover’s husband, Trevor Buchanan, had taken his own life as well. But beyond this, he had not entered into any more detail in his explanations to Kyle. There had been an unspoken understanding between the two of them that it was probably best left at this.
But now, as Kyle sat on the sofa with Erik on her knee, Howell began shaking and suddenly blurted out: ‘It’s my fault. It’s all my responsibility. I did it. I killed Lesley.’ Stunned and utterly incredulous, the young American found herself involuntarily shifting to the other end of the sofa. But he continued with his shocking admission anyway. While he didn’t describe fully what had happened, he told her about how he had used a garden hose and how he had also killed Trevor Buchanan.
Once she was able to compose herself enough to speak, Kyle’s first response was to tell him that she wanted to call the police, there and then. But Howell urged her not to do so – not straight away. Pleading with her to stay calm and think of the future, he told her: ‘Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath. It’s been seven years and surely you can wait one more day. We need to sort the children. We have to make sure they are financially OK. Let me try and put the practice up for sale. We can take our time and make sure everything is in place.’
This was a man she no longer recognized. Kyle felt confused and disorientated. Next, she worried about the children’s safety and her own well-being. She felt she had been duped. Her head was crowded with all sorts of thoughts and emotions. She felt alone and trapped, far from home and from anyone she felt she could really trust or depend upon. Not knowing what she should do, for the remainder of that evening she allowed Howell to talk her down and she listened while he reasoned that they should carefully plan how to protect the children’s future, before he would surrender himself to the authorities. At first she thought Howell was joking, but when she realized he was serious she challenged him: ‘Why did you marry me? How could you marry me and not tell me this? Why did you do this? You fooled me. How could you do this to me?’ She told police: ‘I was so freaked out and scared … I just felt kind of trapped. I was here alone in Ireland … I just wished I’d phoned the police.’
The following day, after Howell left as usual for the surgery, she telephoned her mother in the United States. She didn’t say anything about her husband’s startling admission, but simply asked: ‘Mom, what do you do when you know somebody had done something illegal, but they’re now a Christian?’ Her mother just replied that she didn’t know. Next, Kyle rang her brother Arnie with the same question – but again, without a word about what Howell had just told her. Arnie assumed that Kyle believed Howell had cheated again, and the conversation was left at that. A day later, while out for a walk with some acquaintances from the church, she called an elder aside and quietly asked him, again without disclosing any specifics, the same question. The man paused for a while, before replying: ‘Well, if it goes before the cross …’
Kyle was in turmoil. She thought about Nicky Cruz, well-known founder of the Nicky Cruz Outreach, an evangelical Christian ministry based in the US. Cruz was the ultimate example of how bad men could turn good, with God’s help. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, he had once headed up one of the most feared criminal gangs in New York City – the Mau Maus, named after the anti-colonialist uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. But once he had discovered God, Cruz had turned from a violent life of crime to that of an influential and peace-loving Christian evangelist whose mission was to preach the Gospel. Maybe Howell was like Nicky Cruz, Kyle found herself thinking. Or maybe he was some kind of Irish terrorist, like the ones she had heard about, who had killed people and spread death and mayhem during the years of the Troubles. Had she been manipulated by a charming psychopath?
She rummaged through Howell’s personal belongings and discovered Lesley’s death certificate which confirmed she had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Perhaps her husband had simply exaggerated the extent of the role he had played in Lesley and Trevor’s death, because of the guilt he felt over his affair with Hazel Buchanan? People in the church were always telling Kyle what a wonderful man Colin was: a good father who loved his children. Some had even hinted that Lesley and Trevor Buchanan had taken their own lives, because it was they – and not Colin and Hazel – who had been having an affair. Perhaps that was where the truth lay after all?
Maybe it was because she herself had been the victim of an unhappy marriage for four years that Kyle was ultimately prepared to keep quiet and stand by the new man in her life. Maybe it was because, by this time, she felt a huge responsibility to Howell’s four children too. Maybe it was because she was alone and isolated and without any support from close family. She had no money of her own and no qualifications to help her get a well-paid job: she had worked as a waitress before coming to Ireland.
After his confession to his wife, it seemed at first that Howell had every intention of coming clean and handing himself in to the authorities. He began to make plans to sell his practice, so as to set Kyle and the children up financially. It was September 1998 and her parents were due to come to Northern Ireland. Howell booked rooms at the Burrendale Hotel, Newcastle, County Down, and invited his own parents to join them all there for the weekend. He had decided that he would make an announcement to everyone and then hand himself over to the police. But the night before, his father called to say that he was unable to come because at the last moment he had been asked to stand in for a preacher at a church event. And so the family summit was called off.
While Howell was at church that weekend, he claimed a girl called Sandra approached him and said: ‘Colin, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but you just need to know all your sins are forgiven and forgotten by God.’ She also quoted a verse from First Corinthians 4:5 – ‘Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time: wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts. At that time, each will receive his praise from God.’ It was the sign Howell needed – he decided to abandon his plans to surrender himself to the authorities and confess to his crimes. He was more than happy to believe that Sandra’s words were a communication from God. The Lord was clearly telling him that all had been forgiven.
As time passed, and the memory of the evening when he had confessed the shocking truth began to recede, Kyle herself gradually let go of the idea of telling the police. While she could never completely erase the revelation from her mind, she was prepared to move on. And Howell certainly was. He was very convincing when he told her that he knew God had now forgiven him. Kyle Howell agreed to stick by her husband. But she also warned him that if he stepped out of line at any time in the future, she would call the police and tell them everything.
So what had prompted Howell to suddenly confess all to his new wife? What triggered his conscience? Might it have had something to do with a chance meeting with a well-known Northern Ireland politician while he camped and fished in the sea with his children at Murlough Bay, near Ballycastle?
One of Howell’s best friends when growing up in north Belfast was called Paul Wilson. He was a Catholic – one of the few who lived in the same street, Kilcoole Park – who used to help Howell and other teenagers gather wood for huge Eleventh Night bonfires on the eve of the big parades and demonstrations by thousands of members of the Orange Order, who paraded across Northern Ireland to mark the anniversary of Protestant King William’s victory over Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Paul Wilson’s father Paddy, a founding member of the mainly Catholic and nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party and member of the then Northern Ireland Senate, was murdered in June 1973. He and his secretary, Irene Andrews, a Protestant, were stabbed in a random and frenzied attack by loyalist paramilitaries who surrounded his red Mini car at a disused quarry.
Wilson was also election agent for the then MP for West Belfast, Gerry Fitt, who went on to become a member of the House of Lords in London. Fitt rented a house every summer at Murlough Bay. Howell, who had pitched his tent close to the water’s edge, noticed him getting out of a taxi and later approached him to enquire as to the whereabouts of his old friend who had left Belfast just months after his father was killed. Fitt invited him to his house the following morning and, as the children ate toast and drank orange juice, Howell was called out to the hallway, where he was handed a telephone. Paul Wilson, now married and living in England, was on the other end of the line. It was a Saturday morning and he was about to leave for a rugby match at Twickenham with his two sons, who were wearing England shirts and carrying Union flags. They spoke for several minutes and promised to get in touch. They never did, but the conversation left Howell deeply troubled. It was another defining moment in his life because, while he had massive sympathy for his friend whose father had been murdered in such a brutal fashion, he also felt an overwhelming sense of shame because of the dark secret he shared with just one person – his ex-lover – and the cruel way in which he had murdered. He felt such a hypocrite, and not for the first time.
By the end of the 1990s, Howell’s life was beginning to look up on other fronts. Financially, things were on a far more healthy footing than during the last fraught years with Lesley, when the bank manager had been constantly on the phone and Howell had been forced to put the new family home on the market in secret and to try to sound out his former employers about taking the Ballymoney surgery off his hands. Friends and acquaintances quickly noticed Kyle’s influence in the way in which he had adopted a far more structured approach to financial matters. The substantial injections of cash from which he benefited in the aftermath of Lesley’s death helped enormously too, of course.
Once the inquest of May 1992 was out of the way, Howell received £120,000 from Lesley’s life insurance. He had been in two minds about what to do, before putting in the claim, however. He read the small print of the insurance policy carefully to make sure that there were no exemption clauses covering the case of death by suicide, and discovered that no such clauses applied. He knew that he was committing fraud – since Lesley’s death was the result of murder, not suicide – but he felt others would be suspicious if he failed to lodge the application. He later insisted that financial gain had never been a motive for the killing of Lesley. However, there was no doubt that this money – and the sum of £212,000, of which he was also the immediate beneficiary after Lesley’s death (as a result of her late father’s will) – must have helped considerably to alleviate his financial difficulties at the time. Howell had invested a third of the life insurance money in the purchase of a bungalow in Portstewart, which he rented out to students and which he sold for a very satisfactory profit (£13,500) shortly after he met Kyle.
Meanwhile – thanks in some part to the improvement in his financial circumstances – Howell’s career in dentistry was going from strength to strength. The Ballymoney practice was flourishing, and in February 1999 he was able to take on another new associate – Robin Alexander from Irving in Scotland. Alexander, whose wife Patricia, a dental hygienist, was originally from Ballymena, qualified in Glasgow and had ten years of professional experience before he came to work for Howell. The two men got on very well, and four years later, in 2003, Alexander bought a share in the Ballymoney practice for some £220,000.
With Robin Alexander full time in Ballymoney, Howell started to shift his focus to an area of practice in which he had become increasingly interested – implantology. It represented more of a challenge than his standard NHS and private patient work, and the driven and ever-ambitious Howell was only too aware that it was financially a far more lucrative field to be in. The prospect of the greater earning potential was a huge draw for him, especially with an ever-expanding second family to support. In 1999 he opened his Causeway Dental Implant studio, having converted part of the first floor of the Ballymoney premises. The two businesses – the general dental surgery and the implant studio – shared the same reception, but the practices operated more or less independently of each other, with Howell concentrating exclusively on implants and cosmetic work. Alexander managed the general and more routine side, and there were days and sometimes weeks when the two dentists would hardly see each other. Howell also owned the top-floor apartment, from which he was able to make some additional income as a rental property.
As ever, Howell applied himself with great energy and dedication to developing his new specialism and to keeping things ticking over in the general practice. Life was very busy at the time. He was forever on the go and, with a big family to look after, he never found himself with much free time. He always seemed to be in a hurry and often worked through the lunch hour. When occasionally there was a gap in his appointment schedule, he might pick up a newspaper down in the reception area and quickly flick through the pages and have a word or two with whoever was on duty, before rushing upstairs to his office again. He was an exacting boss and colleague, and he expected those who worked with him to display the same dedication to the job as himself. One ex-member of staff remembers when he first opened in Ballymoney: ‘[Howell] was a workaholic and very, very driven in terms of what he wanted to do and achieve, especially when it came to making money. He would have come in at 3 a.m. to see a patient. He expected the other dentists to do the same … He was plausible about the whole thing. He would say to patients: “I know you are working nine to five with a family and can’t come in to see me. But listen, I’ll go home and have my tea and I’ll see you at 8 p.m.” He made it sound as if he was bending over backwards to help people. In actual fact, he was helping himself. It was all part of the image he was trying to create, this really caring, conscientious person.’
Howell rarely discussed religion with his staff inside the practice. But he did not miss an opportunity to make his dedication to his religious principles and his status as a deeply moral member of the local community felt among those who worked with him, often in a rather sanctimonious way. At staff nights out, he would drink very little and generally either arrived late or left early, citing church or babysitting commitments. One summer, he refused to attend a staff outing to the Grand Opera House in Belfast to see the musical, Mamma Mia!. Asked by one of the girls who was booking tickets in advance for the party whether he would be joining them, he pronounced loudly that his conscience would not allow him to go: ‘I’m sorry. Mamma Mia! is about a woman who does not know who the father of her daughter is. I cannot make myself go to a show about that. I don’t approve of it.’ It was 2008, just months before he confessed all to the church elders and then to the police.
After work and family, church affairs dominated the devout dentist’s life. There would be Baptist breakfast meetings at the Lodge Hotel in Coleraine. Every now and again he would ask friends and acquaintances to join him. Not all accepted. One businessman became so exasperated with the repeated invitations that he eventually said to him: ‘Colin, no harm to you, but don’t ask me again. I’m just not interested.’ Howell drank very moderately – maybe two glasses of wine with dinner – and exercised assiduously, playing golf, squash, five-a-side soccer, cycling and regularly going running. He also had an array of gym equipment at his home.
The implantology practice was thriving and bringing in substantial sums of money. In 2003, he paid £75,000 for a share in a practice in Bangor because, being close to Belfast, it had a much larger catchment area and was an ideal location from which he could promote his work and develop his reputation. He was based there two days a week. His partner in the Bangor practice was another dentist who specialized in implantology and cosmetic work. After this, in 2004 Howell took on another Scot – David Wilson from Glasgow – as an associate in the Ballymoney practice. Wilson’s brief was to take on a number of Howell’s NHS and private patients in the general practice with Robin Alexander so that Howell could devote himself full time to expanding the cosmetic side of the business.
Like other dentists at the time, Howell was quick to recognize that implantology was a growth area in commercial dentistry. But unlike others perhaps, it seems that he did not have any qualms about presenting himself as an expert, even though he had very little training or experience. Several of his contemporaries have claimed that he declared himself a specialist in implantology after undergoing a course in Manchester in 1999 which lasted for a mere couple of days. Howell lectured a few times to students at the School of Dentistry at Queen’s and, through his connections with a big UK pharmacy company, organized courses and talks on various aspects of implantology. At one time, he was hosting regular monthly sessions at the Lodge Hotel, Coleraine. Here, he might talk for forty-five minutes or so to an audience of up to a dozen dentists, after which they would all have an opportunity to participate in group discussions on specific cases. After completing a certain number of sessions, those who had regularly attended were given a certificate. Howell also became a Fellow of the International Team for Implantology.
The dentist’s quest for professional recognition knew no bounds and was not tempered by any consideration that he might not have the substance to back up his claims of expertise. One dentist commented, using a very apt metaphor: ‘This was all part of his growing stature. There was a thin veneer of truth, but very, very thin. When you scratched the surface, it wasn’t all as it would seem.’ But Howell was not about to let such concerns stop him. Ever the risk-taker and always the opportunist, he was determined to make the most of whatever breaks came his way to further his thriving career.
In July 2005, after graduating in dentistry in Belfast, a young Jordanian called Mohammad Husban arrived at Howell, Alexander and Associates in Ballymoney to take up his first job. In many ways, the arrival of the young man on the scene at this particular juncture was to be a godsend in terms of Howell’s commercial interests. And perhaps that is exactly how Howell would have seen it himself at the time – as an opportunity sent directly from God.
Mohammad’s father, Yasin Husban, was a top Jordanian dentist. He had held the rank of Major-General in the Jordanian Royal Medical Services, during which time he treated King Hussein himself on one occasion. He opened his own private dental practice in Amman in 2000. Yasin had done his Master’s degree in dentistry at the University College of London’s Eastman Dental Institute in the mid-’70s, and had been keen for Mohammad, the eldest of his three sons, to be educated in Britain as well. A couple of professors from the School of Dentistry at Queen’s who met Yasin during a trip to Jordan had suggested that his son go to Belfast to study. After all, it was one of the best universities in the UK, particularly for the medical sciences. Mohammad duly arrived in Northern Ireland to begin his studies in September 1998.
When he started working for Howell at the Ballymoney practice in the late summer of 2005, Mohammad found his new employer to be very welcoming and hospitable. In fact, for the first eight months of his three years in the County Antrim town the young man lived in Howell’s top-floor flat above the surgery, some of the time rent-free. He was very quickly made to feel like a valued member of the staff and he enjoyed taking part in regular team-building days, involving all sorts of outdoor activities which included camping in County Fermanagh, and also staff nights out to the theatre in Belfast. According to friends, Mohammad considered Howell to be an excellent dentist who treated him well during his three years’ training. He would always be financially reimbursed when he bought any fittings for the apartment, and Howell would also refer some of his private patients to the young dentist to do fillings and whitening.
The Howells were also very hospitable when Mohammad’s parents, Yasin and Hana, came to Northern Ireland to visit their son. They put the couple up in the family home in Castlerock, showing them around their son’s workplace and taking them out for dinner at the fashionable Ardtara Country House outside the village of Upperlands. One night, however, Howell forgot to inform staff that his guests were of the Muslim faith, and there was an awkward moment when the main course arrived with bacon trimmings. The plates were sent back to the kitchen, as the host apologized for any offence caused. Luckily, the guests just laughed it off. Howell got on famously with Yasin, and, as well as their common interest in dentistry, they were both avid soccer supporters of Manchester United. And the dentist did not miss the opportunity to let the local media know about his high-profile guests: the local newspaper, the Ballymoney Times, ran an article about them that week which featured a photograph of the smiling Howell and his staff with the two visitors from Jordan, and was headlined: ‘A Crown with a Difference for Local Dentist’.
Friends of Mohammad were in no doubt that Howell used his father’s fairly limited connection with the King of Jordan to promote his implant business. And given how well the Husbans’ visit to Northern Ireland had gone, it was hardly surprising that in May 2006, when Yasin, as Chairman of the Congress Committee for the Jordanian Dental Association, was charged with organizing their twentieth annual conference at the luxurious Le Royal Hotel in Amman, Colin Howell was one of the delegates from Northern Ireland invited to give a presentation. It was a hugely prestigious and high-profile international event. Other speakers invited included two representatives from the School of Dentistry in Belfast, Professor Tom Clifford (head of Prosthodontics) and Professor Philip-John Lamey (Professor of Oral Medicine).
The Amman conference was a vast and impressive gathering. There were 1,500 delegates from all over the world, including Italy, Germany, Australia, Lebanon, Greece, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Syria and the United States. The conference covered all aspects of dentistry, including prosthetic dentistry, conservative dentistry, endodontics, orthodontics, implantology, oral and maxillofacial surgery, the use of lasers in dentistry, periodontology and paediatric dentistry. As well as the lectures and courses, there were many important social events to attend outside the conference hall. Organized tours were laid on, with trips to view the Roman ruins in the city of Jerash, the ancient settlement of Petra and the Dead Sea; delegates were taxied everywhere and accompanied by attentive guides. Howell was in his element as he smeared himself with the mineral-rich black mud on the Dead Sea shoreline before lying back to float in the water. Sociable and outgoing when it suited him, he quickly made an impression on those around him. One delegate remembers: ‘He was a very outspoken guy and you could become friends with him really easily. People liked him because of his friendliness. He was interested in people and their culture, and he was not afraid to ask questions. He could also share a joke …’ The night before the conference started, Howell and his party were invited to the Husbans’ family home.
On the first day of the conference, the ambitious Northern Irish dentist delivered a lecture entitled ‘Implant in the Aesthetic Zone’. He focused mainly on the cosmetic side but covered other aspects of dentistry as well, such as cross-infection control in the general practice, bone-grafting products and techniques, and implant design. On the second day Howell performed a procedure for his audience by completing the final stages of some implant work on a patient. Forty dentists in a lecture theatre at the King Hussein Medical Centre were also able to watch Howell at work via video link. He rose to the occasion admirably and his performance was well received. Some of the delegates, however, had their doubts about his bona fides, one of them remembering: ‘The lecture he gave was all about how he did things, and what he thought. There was no evidence-based scientific analysis to prove to people what [he was] saying was correct. It was all wishy-washy stuff. There was no scientific paper. It was all about Colin. It was all about Colin’s ego. It was typical Colin.’
Once he was back home, Howell wasted no time in capitalizing on the success of his Jordanian venture and maximizing the kudos of the high-profile contacts he had made. He placed an advertorial in the Sunday Tribune newspaper which was headlined ‘Operation Smile’ and included text which claimed: ‘In fact, he counts the Jordanian Royal family, its government ministers and dignitaries as some of his more high-profile patients.’ Howell himself was quoted as saying: ‘The King of Jordan wanted his team of dentists brought up-to-date on procedures, and I actually performed live surgery at a lecture I was giving on quality dental implants … with over 400 dentists watching.’ In the same piece, Howell recommended a particular make of implant which he described as the ‘Mercedes of Implants’, adding: ‘If it’s good enough for the King of Jordan, it’s not too shabby for us mere mortals.’ He claimed that there were only six practices in Northern Ireland with the experience to provide the range of treatments he offered, and insisted that price was very important and a measure of a dentist’s expertise. He generally quoted between £1,600 and £2,100 for one implant, complete with a crown, and he warned patients against those quoting any less: ‘If you are being quoted the [a] lower price, then you probably shouldn’t go there, as either the dentist is a very inexperienced dentist, or is using budget implants.’
Some of Howell’s fellow professionals were less than impressed by his credentials and his exaggerated claims, as one confirms: ‘There was something in a dental magazine which claimed that he treated Queen Rania. It just wasn’t true. Somebody raised it with him. Colin said it must have been an error by the guy who wrote the article, and he would let them know. But to the best of our knowledge, he never did.’ Another dentist remembers: ‘He inflated the truth of exactly what he did. He was taking full-page adverts in glossy magazines and it was a strategy which seemed to work. Patients came from far and wide, including the Irish Republic. I never heard of any complaints, but obviously there were some. He certainly performed treatments that would have been stretching the normal rules of clinical practice and maybe sometimes breaking them.’ Another dentist felt equally critical of Howell’s work: ‘I think that patients were disappointed when some of the procedures didn’t work out. These … may have been outside the realms of traditional dentistry. They seemed to be risky, unpredictable and therefore more likely to fail, which meant it made it harder to go back and do corrective work … I have had to do that corrective work.’
Howell was keen to create and feed the impression that he was a major global authority on implantology who treated the rich and famous. But specialists in the field were more than a little sceptical about his abilities and ethics: ‘We viewed him as a common or garden general dental practitioner with a particular interest in one area of dentistry, in the same way as somebody with a special interest in orthodontics. It was an extra string to his bow, but nothing special. He was never considered by any of us to be somebody we would look up to.’
But there were plenty of patients who were more than impressed by his PR and, taken in by the hype, were happy to travel to Ballymoney. His local customer base expanded ever more rapidly, with many patients also travelling up from the Irish Republic, where dental charges were twice and sometimes three times as expensive. Dentists in Dublin, Cork and Galway, who might have spent three years being trained in implantology at some of the top units in the United States, were coming back home looking for a fairly quick return on their investment, but not all of their patients could afford their prices for root canal treatment, crowns, fillings and implants. For such clients, even Howell’s fees were considerably lower.
By the mid- to late 2000s, the dentist’s earning capacity was huge and he was making substantial sums of money, year on year. There was never any shortage of women in search of a brilliant new smile. One couple paid him £35,000 for cosmetic treatments over a three-year period and were delighted with his work. Things were on the up-and-up for the Howell family. After Freehall Lane, once building was finished on their family home they moved into the fabulous new property just off the Glebe Road. Painted a primrose colour, down a narrow, stony, twisting lane and with a trout lake near by, the house had wonderful views across open countryside and ample, well-landscaped gardens, as well as a terrace at the front which caught the early morning sun.
By 2008, the Howells had also purchased a site for a house in Florida, near where Kyle’s parents lived, on Sanibel Island. They liked to spend as much time as possible in Florida with the children, and the proposed house for construction would enable them to stay there for longer periods. They also enjoyed family holidays to exotic locations such as Costa Rica.
The couple had a good circle of church-going friends with whom they socialized regularly and, even with such a young family, they would eat out from time to time on their own, sometimes at Ardtara, which had an excellent reputation for fine dining. Life had never been better for Colin Howell. What had happened in the past was now firmly in the past, and surely there would never be any need for him to visit the dark days of May 1991 ever again. Or would there?
In August 2008, the entire staff of Howell, Alexander and Associates gathered at Galgorm Manor Hotel, near Ballymena, for a farewell dinner to mark the departure of Mohammad Husban. The young man had spent three happy years in Ballymoney and was sorry to be leaving. He was a popular member of the surgery team. During all that time, Howell had never once raised the issue of religion with the young Jordanian. But as Mohammad sat quietly at the restaurant table, having just been presented with a wallet, cufflinks and House of Fraser vouchers from the staff, Howell started to talk to him about God.
One of Mohammad’s friends recalls the young man’s account of the conversation: ‘He [Howell] asked Mohammad about forgiveness and said how, in his religion, Jesus had died for their sins. Whatever you’ve done, you would be forgiven, and would go straight to heaven. Howell told him that if he believed in Jesus, then that’s where he was going, no matter what he did in life. He then asked him how people of the Muslim faith viewed that opinion. Mohammad told him it was God who decided who went to heaven and who went to hell. God’s forgiveness depended on how bad the things you had done were. It didn’t matter if you stole something, or murdered anybody – you could be a really good Muslim, and then commit a crime. But would God forgive you? It would be up to God to make that judgement.’
At this, Howell suddenly began to shift in his seat. He was looking uncomfortable and his face was flushed. He said he needed to go to the bathroom and excused himself. It seemed that Howell had been more than a little unnerved by the conversation, as Mohammad’s friend relates: ‘He eventually came back. Mohammad was preparing to engage again and pick up where they left off. Howell changed the subject completely. Religion wasn’t [ever] mentioned again.’