This dramatic and sensational trial was almost over. All the key witnesses had addressed the court and there was just one left whom the jury expected to take the stand. Hazel Stewart had sat silently throughout, maintaining a stoical composure, showing hardly any emotion, even as her former lover described the intimate details of their weird sex life.
The jury anticipated they would hear at first hand her explanation of what happened the night Howell called at the house in Charnwood Park, and why she acted as she did. Her defence would surely make for a gripping testimony at a quite extraordinary hearing which had become the talk of the country. But the decision was taken by her legal team that Hazel Stewart would remain where she was. She would stay in the dock and not be uttering a word.
She could, of course, have gone into the witness box. But her lawyer announced to the court that he did not intend to call her to give evidence or face cross-examination by his colleague, Mr Murphy. Mr Ramsey said he realized that the jury could draw an adverse conclusion from the decision – but this was, after all, her inalienable right. He turned to the nine men and three women and asked: ‘How would your task be helped by observing a contest between a housewife and an eminent and able senior counsel like Mr Murphy? It would be like sending a pub team to play a Premier League side like Manchester United or Chelsea at their home ground. No contest.’
By then the jury had already heard Stewart speaking. After she was taken in for questioning all her interviews had been recorded on tape and formed a crucial – and indeed critical – part of the case for the prosecution. The jury was able to listen to the full and graphic detail of Hazel’s exchanges with her inquisitor, Detective Sergeant Geoff Ferris. The process of playing back the police recordings to the court lasted for almost two days.
Howell was being questioned in an adjoining room when Ferris had pushed the ‘record’ button to begin the first session of his interrogation of Hazel Stewart. Years ago the policeman had been a useful soccer player when off duty, quick on his feet and good with his head. But, as the court would hear, it took him the best part of three days to negotiate his way past the lady sitting in the dock.
Neil Connor, junior counsel for the prosecution, got to his feet and invited the jury to listen. They could also follow a written record of the questions and answers which would scroll down, line by line, on monitors in front of them. Ferris positioned himself in the witness box in readiness to leaf through the transcripts, just to confirm that they tallied with what was being broadcast. Mr Connor then asked for the first tape to be played.
The initial interview began with the detective introducing himself and a colleague, Constable Nicola Moore, and noting the time and date for the purposes of the tape: it was approaching 19.40 hours on the evening of Thursday, 29 January 2009. Hazel sat at the opposite side of the table with her solicitor, Stephen Ewing – he worked for Stephen Hastings, the head of the firm, who later represented her at the trial. She was still in a state of shock.
Ferris began: ‘OK, so you understand, Hazel – you’ve been arrested now for a very serious offence. It doesn’t get any more serious than murder, OK. And we have lots of questions to put to you and to ask you. During the course of the interviews, we will be asking the questions. We will try and ask them in a fair manner, and hopefully you’ll understand every question.’
Stewart: ‘Hmm.’
Ferris: ‘So, can you tell us about your involvement?’
Stewart: ‘Well, I’m not going to lie. I had an involvement with Colin Howell. It was intense at times, and he’s quite a controlling person. Where do I start? He said he would never leave his wife or whatever at the time. That it was fine, and one day he said to me …’
Ferris interrupted and quickly advised her: ‘Just take your time. You’re OK. Take your time.’
Only a few minutes into the first tape, this was already proving to be a mesmerizing and compelling exchange which held the courtroom spellbound. All listened intently as the interview continued. At first Hazel seemed reluctant to say anything, but Ferris managed to coax her along, quietly and without fuss. Yet he also made her circumstances clear: ‘You have to face reality here. Nobody else can deal with this situation, apart from you. Other people will have to answer for what they did. But your knowledge around that time is all down to yourself. We have to deal with that and you have to deal with that as best you can. I know you have lived with it now for eighteen years, or whatever the case may be. I am sure that has been difficult for you, but now is the day that you probably thought would never come.’
Stewart told him how the relationship started; how her husband had been ‘gutted’ when he found out; how he did not want her to leave, although she would have divorced him because she was in love – or at least she thought she was. She spoke about the trauma of having a secret abortion, but insisted time and time again that she wanted nothing to do with Howell’s plan to murder. She never wanted it to happen. She had been terrified.
Each of the interview tapes lasted forty minutes. Hazel’s voice, soft and hesitant and with traces of a west Tyrone accent, reverberated around the courtroom. Her replies were brief and sometimes monosyllabic. She could be heard taking the occasional sip of water. Apparently she did not eat anything during the three days of questioning.
It was now the start of the second day, just coming up to 10.20 a.m., as Ferris noted for the tape. He then started the proceedings by enquiring: ‘How are you feeling this morning, Hazel?’
‘Dreadful, terrible,’ Stewart replied. Yet she stuck firmly, doggedly to her story: ‘I was so scared. I thought, if I say something against this, he’ll turn round and he’ll kill me. That’s how I felt.’
Ferris then asked: ‘Did you feel any time that the truth would come out?’
Stewart: ‘I always knew. I would never have said. I would have taken it to my grave because of my children and my family. I thought it would be better for me to suffer this every day – which I did – than to open a can of worms and affect so many people after so long.’
Ferris: ‘Did you ever think, or would you have had any hint that, “Well, the only person that could tell the truth would be Colin”?’
Stewart: ‘Yes. And maybe I had my fears because of the type of person he was.’
However, just after lunch on the afternoon of the second day of the interrogation Stewart’s version of the facts began to change – albeit only slightly at first. She said she should have stopped Howell murdering her husband. Later that afternoon, she admitted that Trevor had taken a tablet to help him sleep on the Saturday evening, but she said that she had not given it to him. Despite what he claimed, she could not recall Howell ever giving her sedatives to put into her husband’s food to ensure he was well sedated by the time he arrived to murder Trevor.
Ferris accused her of twisting the truth: ‘It’s nearly written across your forehead. I know you’re finding difficulty with some questions. You’re not in here for stealing a cheque out of work, or a burglary, or a theft, or a shoplifting case. You’re in here for the most serious of offences under the law in this country. I’m asking you to be truthful.’
At the start of her third day of questioning, Hazel said she felt fine, but the strain in her voice and in the way she responded was obvious to those who were listening to the exchanges between her and the detective. Soon she was claiming – for the first time – that she had told Howell to get out of the house before he had made his way to the bedroom to gas her husband.
Ferris persisted. There was a perceptible change in the tone of his voice now; he was more urgent, more forceful. ‘We’re getting no satisfaction whatsoever … What is important is that we get to the bottom of it [this]. All the pieces of the puzzle have to fit, and there are a couple of pieces not right. You’re in a situation where you feel totally hopeless, but I’m asking you to tell us everything involving Trevor. He’s got a family as well. They need to know the truth, Hazel … Next week, we’ll walk away from this. We’ll be dealing with another murder inquiry. So I’m asking you. Don’t be adopting the hardened attitude and try[ing] to fool us. You know you’ve told lies, and you conned the police away back in 1991.’
Stewart: ‘I didn’t like doing that.’
Ferris: ‘It’s gone. It’s done. What we’re saying to you in here is: “Look, sort it out now.” We need to know and we do know the picture. But it has to come from you, Hazel.’
She paused briefly, and then said: ‘What will happen to me?’
Ferris: ‘Sorry?’
Stewart: ‘What will happen to me?’
It was approaching lunchtime on Saturday, 31 January, and it was the first time it seemed to dawn on Hazel Stewart that there was now little or no room for manoeuvre. She still sounded well in control of herself and her emotions, but the pressure to divulge everything was becoming more and more apparent. Her resistance started to wane as Ferris continued with his questioning. There was a short pause in the tape as Stewart asked for a glass of water. When the interview resumed, she accepted that she had encouraged Trevor to take a sleeping tablet, but insisted over and over again that she had not given it to him. But she conceded that the plan to murder could not have gone ahead without her husband being sedated. Yes, she had known earlier that Saturday what Howell was planning to do, and when he arrived at the house with his wife’s body in the car boot – yes, she knew what the next part of his plan would entail. She could, and should, she admitted to Ferris, have shouted and screamed, but she did nothing to stop her lover. He was on a mission, but he could have been stopped, she agreed: ‘I let it happen. Yes, I let it happen.’
She left out the clothes for Howell to dress her husband’s lifeless body. She cut up and burned the garden hose which had been used to kill him. She changed and washed the bedcovers in the room where he had fought for his life, and she had opened the windows to release the lingering fumes of carbon monoxide.
Ferris pressed the point: ‘You got rid of the evidence. Is that fair?’
Stewart, who had always been so fussy and house-proud, replied: ‘I suppose you could say that. I never thought of it like that, but I just felt I had to get the room tidied up.’
By the time the judge and jury heard the fifteenth and final tape, the atmosphere inside the courtroom was electric. And for the first time since the trial began, Stewart’s vacant, impassive demeanour changed. Pushing her blonde hair to one side, she pulled out a handkerchief and began to cry. As she listened to the final exchanges between herself and the detective, she held her head in her hands, now weeping openly.
Ferris could be heard pressing on relentlessly, until Hazel now accepted the fact that Howell could not have murdered on his own. It had to have been a ‘joint enterprise’ – again those all-important words – between the two of them, for the plan to work. Finally, the detective sergeant asked her: ‘Is there anything [more] you want to say, Hazel?’
Between her sobs, the reply came tumbling out: ‘I would like to say sorry to Trevor’s family. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a son. I’ve a son and I love him very much. To David, my husband I love so much, [to] Lisa and Andrew – they’re my life and I have lost it. The biggest mistake of my life was ever meeting Colin Howell. I have paid the price for the past seventeen, eighteen years. Since that happened, I lost so much of my life. I lost joy, a peace, and contentment. It was like living in a black hole. Every day I got up, every night I went to bed, it was there. I thought about it 24/7. It never left me.’
Sitting in the front row of the public gallery of the court, her daughter Lisa and son Andrew were now crying too, as were some of her sisters in the row behind. David Stewart’s face was drained; he looked pale and exhausted. Hazel Stewart’s family were reliving every moment of her pain with her. They clearly found it unbearable.
The voice on the tape was now weary, resigned: ‘I had to do things for my children and be strong for them. My guilt was horrendous. My shame. I hated him. The relationship went on for years, but only because of him … He did not want it to end. Maybe I couldn’t say to him … I was scared of him, not knowing what he would do. I saw what he had done, how capable he was of doing things. I was scared sometimes for my children. I just didn’t feel easy about it at times. They thought he was all right, but they weren’t that comfortable with him … But life has been horrific for me. I never got over it. I’m going through all this now. The thought of losing my children, losing David, is the hardest thing. Yeah, I destroyed their lives, Lisa and Andrew’s lives. Colin’s children didn’t deserve this, or Lesley. Lesley was a lovely girl. Trevor was very good too.’
Gordon Buchanan’s head fell back and he looked skywards. Victor Buchanan leaned forward. Raymond Buchanan sat with his chin resting on his right hand. Trevor’s two sisters, Valerie and Melva, were in the same place as they had been throughout: the front row, sitting at an angle from their former sister-in-law. What must they have thought?
And what must have been going through the mind of Lauren Bradford, Lesley’s only daughter, who sat with the Buchanans, directly opposite Stewart’s daughter Lisa? During one brief interlude earlier in the trial, Lisa had crossed the room to speak to Lauren. No doubt they had some catching up to do since the days when they had grown up in Coleraine and had spent so much time together. And the two young women had many other things in common, having both suffered the awful ordeal of losing a parent through suicide, only to find out years later that it had been murder. It had been an astonishing trial in so many respects – not least because of the extraordinary sideshow being played out on the periphery of the main courtroom proceedings, as so many shattered relatives and friends tried to come to terms with the devastating fallout of two murders which had happened almost two decades earlier.
2 March 2011
Hazel Stewart struggled so hard with her breathing that a police officer near by feared she was going to hyperventilate. Waiting for the jury to deliver their verdict, she sat in the dock for almost twenty minutes, looking gaunt and forlorn, in the same coat she had worn throughout the trial, which failed to conceal her heaving chest and shifting shoulders.
Her children, it seemed, had already resigned themselves to the worst. Even before the jury returned, Lisa was sobbing loudly. Her mother looked over and nodded as if to say: ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry.’ Hair swept back into a ponytail, her daughter appeared to mouth back: ‘Mummy, I love you. Mummy, I love you.’ Andrew doubled up and held his head in his hands, as if he was praying for a miracle. At one stage, Hazel’s solicitor, Stephen Hastings, left his seat and leaned over to try to reassure the two of them. Sitting beside them, the loyal and attentive David Stewart seemed to have aged ten years. Red-faced, his tie hanging loose, he looked completely exhausted.
The jury had requested the transcripts of Hazel’s last six interviews with Geoff Ferris, which had effectively damned her. Even if she remained convinced of her own innocence, surely some of those who had been sitting on her family’s side of the courtroom had good reason to be fearful. In his summing up of the previous day, Judge Hart had asked the jury to make a calm and fair decision based on the evidence, and not to be influenced by the sensation which surrounded the case. He stressed that the legal definition of ‘joint enterprise’ did not mean that Stewart had to commit the murders, only that she was part of the plan to carry them out, and that a plan in itself could take different forms too: ‘The word “plan” does not mean there had to be formal agreement about what’s to be done: a plan could be made on the spur of the moment, with a nod, wink or knowing look. Put simply, the question for you is: Were they in it together?’
Stewart’s personality, the Judge had said, was soft, weak and vulnerable, but she had openly flirted, and was willing to have sex, with Howell. Was Howell controlling or was she perfectly capable of deciding for herself? They had both proved themselves to be capable of sustained deception in the past, although here he cautioned: ‘The mere fact the defendant tells a lie is not in itself evidence of guilt. She may lie to protect someone else, to conceal her disgraceful conduct, or in panic or confusion.’ The defendant, however, he continued, had not given evidence to undermine, contradict or explain the evidence put by the prosecution, and the jury could draw such inferences as appeared proper from her failure to do so.
Finally, the Judge asked the jury to consider the crucial question of why Stewart had not intervened to stop the killing. ‘Did she do everything, or as much as she could have done, to prevent the murders or at least the murder of her husband? Why did she not tell someone beforehand what he was planning on the night Howell came to her house and committed this murder? Why did she not wake her husband, keep the door closed, scream the house down, run to a neighbour to raise the alarm and get help?’
The jury retired at 10.47 a.m. on Wednesday, 2 March. They examined the transcripts, deliberated and had lunch, before returning to the court. Looking at his watch, a court official was able to calculate that it had taken them exactly two hours and twenty-nine minutes to reach their decision. The foreman got to his feet. The court clerk asked him: ‘Have you reached a verdict on count one?’ [the murder of Lesley Howell].
The reply came quickly: ‘Yes.’
‘What is your verdict – guilty or not guilty?’
‘Guilty.’
‘Have you reached a verdict on count two?’ [the murder of Trevor Buchanan].
‘Yes.’
‘What is your verdict – guilty or not guilty?’
‘Guilty.’
The distress of Hazel Stewart’s two children was painful to witness. Lisa cried out: ‘Oh no. Oh no. It’s not fair. No, it’s not fair. It’s not fair.’ Hazel reached for her handkerchief to rub her eyes, and for a moment seemed not quite sure what to do next. Her son, husband and sisters all looked towards her, weeping as well. Some of the Buchanan family sitting on the opposite side of the room hugged one another. One or two shed tears, but there was no sense or sign of triumphalism – just relief that justice had been done, had been seen to be done, and that this long nightmare was nearing an end at last.
Once the verdicts were announced, Mr Justice Hart wasted little time in passing sentence. The defendant was asked to stand. He told her she had been convicted of two murders and the only sentence open to the court was that of life imprisonment. It was mandatory and the length of time she would have to serve in jail would be determined at a later date. He then beckoned two prison officers on either side. ‘Take her away.’
For the sentencing of Hazel Stewart, Court 12 of Belfast Crown Court was packed with relatives and friends, as well as many other people who had no connection with anyone involved and who were there out of sheer curiosity. Solicitors and barristers involved in cases in adjoining courtrooms on the fourth floor also congregated at the door. To the left of the dock was the senior police officer who headed the 2009 investigation. Detective Superintendent Raymond Murray had taken time out from his annual leave to be there. Beside him was his number two on the inquiry team, Ian Magee.
Stewart had three prison officers sitting with her this time. She looked more drawn than ever, desperately tense and fearful, her face pale and without evidence of make-up, her eyes lowered and fixed on the ground in front of her. Only occasionally did she lift her head to look at the Judge. She was dressed in grey slacks and her customary buttoned-up, plum-coloured coat. Just before she was asked by a court official to take her seat ‘with his Lordship’s permission’, she turned and looked over her left shoulder to seek out familiar faces in the crowd behind. Unlike the day she was convicted, this time there was no drama or tears.
As the hands on the wall clock directly above the dock approached 10.23 a.m., Chris Clarke, whose flight from Liverpool had been held up because of fog, rushed into the courtroom, just in time to hear the Judge announce the sentence.
It took Mr Justice Hart twenty-two minutes to deliver his judgment in The Queen v Hazel Stewart, which ran to seven pages. He said that by its verdict, the jury had accepted that she and Howell ‘were in it together’. Stewart’s culpability was ‘exceptionally high’, because she knew in advance what Howell was going to do and did nothing to prevent the killings: ‘She could have told someone else. She could have told the police and, even after Lesley Howell had been murdered, she could have prevented Howell from entering the house and killing her husband by any one of a number of actions, such as not opening the garage door to him, locking the door against him, waking her husband, ringing the police or alerting her neighbour, to mention but a few. Whilst she knew Howell was murdering her husband in another room, she waited and did nothing to save his life. Had she had a spark of compassion for her husband, even at that late stage, she would have tried to prevent his murder.’
Howell, the judge continued, had planned and carried out the murders and persuaded her to take part. She could not claim any reduction in the minimum term, because she had pleaded not guilty. She had repeatedly lied and persisted in attempting to evade responsibility and, while she had expressed sorrow and regret during police interviews, that was more about the effect of the events on herself, her children and her present husband, than the effects of the murders on all the others whose lives had been ended and blighted.
Her former lover, the Judge declared, was undoubtedly a charismatic, manipulative and hypocritical man with a very considerable sexual appetite, to whom Hazel had initially been attracted because he offered the excitement which she felt her marriage lacked. ‘She then fell in love with him and was driven by that love, and by intense sexual desire, to allow herself to be persuaded by Howell to play her part in these dreadful crimes, despite her fear that they would be caught, a part which she then concealed for many years. Despite her protestations to the police that she was controlled by Howell, his unchallenged evidence during the trial was that they continued their clandestine and highly active sexual relationship for several years after the murders, and that even after she refused to marry him and they decided to end their relationship, Stewart tried to persuade him to have sex.’
Mr Justice Hart said he had been provided with a number of statements from people, including her two children, asking him to show leniency. One of the letters was from employees of the company where she worked, which read: ‘We are as shocked as others by the events of 1991 and this letter should not be construed as any attempt to exonerate Hazel, but we feel that Hazel has had very little positive representation and we are anxious for the Court to be aware of how those who have spent every day for many years with Hazel have thought and still think of her. From our daily dealings and close friendship with Hazel, we can say that Hazel, who has been portrayed as a manipulative, unfeeling, selfish, amoral, devious and wicked woman, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Hazel we have come to love and respect.’
The Judge concluded: ‘Tragically, the consequences for Stewart’s children and her husband are part of the legacy of the conduct of both herself and Howell. Those factors, and the fact that she has a clear record, cannot carry great weight when placed in the balance when fixing the minimum term for such crimes, but I have given them, and the positive side to her character spoken of in the passage previously quoted, such weight as I can. Taking all of the factors to which I referred into account, I consider that the minimum term that Stewart should serve before she can be considered for release is one of eighteen years’ imprisonment.’