Colin Howell has settled well into life at Maghaberry. He gets on well with the staff and most of the other prisoners. He has his own accommodation inside the prison hospital, with a television set in his cell. He also has access to a computer – but not to the online pornography which once held so much of his attention. The former dentist goes to church on a Sunday and studies the Bible every day, also delighting in ecclesiastical visits now and again from a few friends from his church-going days on the North Coast. He occasionally has a go at the crossword in The Times newspaper, which he reads six days a week. After signing up for creative writing classes organized within the jail by writer-in-residence Carlo Gebler, Howell is a prolific writer, specializing in Christian-themed children’s books. Compulsively driven and needing to be occupied, he no doubt welcomes the distraction. An outrageous proposition to the prison authorities – that he could open a dental practice for the staff and inmates – was rejected out of hand, even before he was struck off by the General Dental Council and declared bankrupt.
Howell complies with the prison regime, but he has few real friends inside the jail. Some of the inmates believe him to be arrogant, with a lofty, superior and sometimes snooty attitude. This was evident when he delivered food when working as an orderly in the hospital, but especially during the trial of Hazel Stewart. He left Maghaberry early in the prison van to make sure he was in Coleraine in time; and on each of the four days, when he returned it seemed Howell was in his element, glorifying in the media attention. One prisoner said: ‘He strutted about like some kind of gladiator. He loved the fact he was in the limelight. He strolled about the prison like a movie star who knew he was the man in the big picture.’
One of Howell’s closest friends in jail is another murderer who also almost got away with it. Ken McConnell, a former police inspector and notorious womanizer, strangled and robbed a frail, asthmatic and defenceless elderly widow, Annabella Symington, at her south Belfast home on Halloween night, 1989. He stole the money to pay his gambling debts. With unbelievable callousness, he stuffed a cardigan into his seventy-seven-year-old victim’s mouth to stop her screaming. Unlike Howell, McConnell never confessed to his crime; he was caught in January 2010, after police were able to match his DNA with that found under the pensioner’s fingernails. He was jailed for eighteen years.
Hazel Stewart is being held in a women’s jail at Hydebank Wood on the southern outskirts of Belfast. She is planning to appeal her conviction, but in the meantime, according to staff, she has settled in well after a difficult first few months. She uses the gym four or five times a week. Like Howell, she reads her Bible daily and prays at her bedside every night. Stewart was heartbroken that she missed her son Andrew’s wedding, in May 2011. On the day her son married, she asked prison staff to leave her alone in her cell, no doubt imagining how the ceremony and reception would be going without her at the top table.
Colin Howell earned £20 a week working as an orderly in the prison hospital. After his spectacular fall from grace he is financially ruined, with hardly a penny to his name. He owes former patients an estimated £230,000 which they paid in advance of getting treatment at his clinic. After his arrest, staff at the surgery found a £20 IOU note in Howell’s petty cash box.
He retains a substantial property portfolio, with his name still on the deeds of his seven-bedroom house outside Castlerock, the half-share of a derelict building in Granada, Nicaragua, and the flat at Queen Street, Ballymoney, as well as a share of the rest of the building. After Howell was jailed, the Public Prosecution Service, which claimed he had assets as well in Singapore and the Philippines, set out to recover all he owned under the Proceeds of Crime Order (Northern Ireland) 1996. The application was later withdrawn without explanation. It is understood, however, that the decision not to proceed was taken because the murders were carried out in 1991 and, as such, assets belonging to Howell and Stewart could not be recovered under this legislation, since it has no provision for retrospective confiscation.
Both Howell and Stewart defrauded insurance companies. Outstanding mortgages on their homes were paid off under the terms of the families’ respective endowment policies. Stewart also received a police widow’s pension between 1991 and 2005, when she remarried, as well as a special children’s allowance for several years. Howell has known for some time that one day the insurance companies would come looking for their money; just before he confessed to the murders he did some rough calculations about what he might have to pay back. Also during this time he destroyed one of his computers. Howell used a screwdriver to remove the laptop’s hard drive which he then smashed to pieces and dumped in various litter bins in Castlerock. The laptop had contained details of his financial affairs, including his bank accounts and the ill-fated venture in the Philippines. He had promised the friend who encouraged him to invest in the project that he would never reveal to anyone the names of those involved in it – he was told that to do so would put their lives in danger, especially that of ‘Alan’, the man in Manila.
The 2009 inquiry which followed Howell’s confession was a highly sensitive and exhaustive police investigation which was headed up by Superintendent Murray. One of the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s top detectives, with twenty years’ experience and a Master’s in Criminology from Cambridge University, Murray, forty, is meticulous and demanding. He was also determined that, unlike in 1991, there would be no mistakes and oversights this time around. His was a textbook investigation.
Early on, investigating officers considered contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States to discuss staged suicide scenes. They also looked closely at whether or not to exhume the bodies of Lesley and Trevor from Coleraine Cemetery. The final decision was to leave the graves alone, primarily because the self-incriminating statements made by the accused were so consistent and watertight, and also so damning. When considering the possible exhumation, officers had spoken with Simon Cosbey, the toxicologist who carried out the original blood tests in 1991. They all concluded that carrying out further tests would most likely serve no useful purpose: apart from the carbon monoxide fumes as well as traces of prescription drugs, what other toxins were likely to be found, to strengthen the case of two people being deliberately poisoned? The feelings of the families of the deceased and the further trauma they would face were also major factors in the decision against exhumation.
Murray’s team consulted Adrian West, the UK’s leading criminal psychologist, when Howell was being questioned about the death of Harry Clarke. West has worked as a profiler on many police investigations in Britain, including the murder in April 1999 of the BBC presenter, Jill Dando. Howell has always emphatically denied that he murdered his former father-in-law. But some, including Harry’s son, Chris Clarke, still remain sceptical about Howell’s plea of innocence.
Many of those who sat in the congregation with the Howells and Buchanans to listen to Pastor John Hansford’s sermons are no longer members of Coleraine Baptist Church. They have moved on to other places and different churches. But they, and those who stayed on, will surely have reflected on how this tragic affair was handled. Hansford insists he has no regrets: ‘I often wondered why I didn’t pick up on Colin’s lies, but then he lied to a colossal number of people. I don’t feel too bad that I missed the signs. I would scrutinize my conscience in many ways and, as I look back, I feel everything was done that could have been done, humanly speaking, at the time.’
He says that he feels desperately sorry for Howell, whom he describes as a Jekyll-and-Hyde character. ‘We saw one side of him in the life of the church, and yet there was another life going. It is hard to make head or tail of his Christian commitment, and how it all played out in his life …’ The pastor’s attitude to Hazel Stewart has changed over time, as he explains: ‘I think Hazel schemed. I picked up that her marriage to Trevor lacked sparkle and was not very exciting. She was looking for far more … There are many women who find themselves in that position, but didn’t go out and do what she did. Hazel would have come across to me as being a victim of circumstances, particularly of Colin’s dominant personality. Looking back now – and this is a personal assessment and judgement – I wonder whether that was true … Initially, one felt the whole blame resided with Colin, though not exclusively, because it takes two for this to happen. I can see now that Hazel was far more a participant in what happened than she led us to believe at the time. She portrayed herself to be an innocent in the whole thing, but my reading of the situation now is that I don’t think she is. I would see Colin Howell now as a very broken man. I hope a very repentant man. I still believe there is forgiveness and grace available if there is true repentance.’
The pastor’s final thoughts are for the children whose lives have been so badly damaged: ‘I feel desperately sorry for his kids. After telling them their mother took her own life, they had to come to terms with the fact that their father murdered their mother. I want the kids to know the part I played in all this. I want them to know that I have tried, as far as possible, to be as truthful about the whole thing.’
While some in the Baptist Church have had misgivings and concerns, it is the close relatives of Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan, above all, who have suffered anguish of an unimaginable level. A number of them have described their feelings in interviews for this book, as well as in personal letters, known as impact statements, which Judge Hart studied carefully before he passed sentence. Their testimonies are moving and sometimes heart-breaking.
At her home near Omagh, just a year after Howell and Stewart were arrested, Valerie Bleakley, Trevor’s oldest sister, would confide, in a quiet, halting voice: ‘I can’t describe what it has done to me. The only way I can describe what I feel is that something inside me has died. A lot of the time I’m quite emotional. I have a pain in my chest all the time. I can’t cry and I can’t laugh since last January. There has been such deep, deep pain.
‘I just couldn’t believe that Hazel was involved. I could believe it, but I couldn’t believe it. Surely she couldn’t have been that stupid. But she was. It was just as if Trevor had died all over again. The emotions were even stronger. That first week, I drifted between shock, anger and at times hatred. Other times, strangely enough, I felt sorry for her. I couldn’t work out my feelings, because on the day of the first court appearance I was almost relieved when she was not put in prison that day … but could not understand why. I do have a certain amount of compassion. I think the worst scenario for me would be going to prison and the isolation of it. I just couldn’t bear to think of that for anybody. It didn’t make me feel jubilant, but she deserved to go to prison because justice must be done and she has murdered my brother. How could she do such a thing and deprive her children of a father who loved them passionately? I think about what were Trevor’s last words: who heard them, what did he say in those last moments. There are only two people who can answer that.’
Trevor’s father, Jim Buchanan, was confined to a wheelchair for some time before he died in July 2007, aged eighty-four; he suffered from angina. Hazel went to visit him years after Trevor’s death, and even though he was still hurting, he felt he had forgiven her for all the pain and misery. But he never fully recovered. Mrs Buchanan still lives in Omagh.
Melva Alexander, Trevor’s sister and the youngest in the family, is also regretful and filled with a grief which remains unabated: ‘I would just love to know why. If I knew that Hazel had any remorse or even showed any. But she hasn’t. She carried this for eighteen years … She has robbed me of my brother; wrecked Mum and Dad’s lives; left the children without a dad who would have loved and supported them … The biggest problem at the time was being told that Trevor was in the back of a car with another woman. I have spent eighteen years of my life correcting that statement. I’ve said that to so many people. It wasn’t true. It was bad enough that he took his own life, but there were these horrible stories that he was with another woman … Then you had people telling Daddy that possibly he was changing his mind and wanted to get out of the car. What a thing to tell Dad. That haunted us for another while, especially around the time of the inquest.’
Gordon Buchanan took charge of the family throughout the investigative and lengthy legal processes following the arrests. They never missed a hearing, no matter how brief, in the run-up to the day Hazel was sentenced. He also insisted on a second Coroner’s Court inquest to make sure the records of the deaths were officially corrected. At that inquest in June 2011, Senior Coroner John Leckey issued a new verdict of ‘homicidal carbon monoxide poisoning’, setting the record straight once and for all. Gordon finds himself tortured by the same questions and feelings as the rest of the Buchanans: ‘… I ask myself how Hazel carried that lie for eighteen years, burdening our family with the heart-wrenching pain of loss and the unanswered questions associated with suicide, while leaving Trevor’s unblemished character vulnerable to innuendo and speculation as a result of the bodies being placed together. When I saw her in court, I thought: “How did you get to such a low point? How could you do such a thing: take your husband away from the children he was devoted to? How could you do that to someone who you presumably once loved and who loved you dearly? Where did it all go wrong? Where did your good upbringing and your faith go?”
‘I feel sadness for the legacy she has left others. I feel no pity towards her because of what she did. She carried this cruel, dark secret without, for a moment, even thinking about divulging it. I feel so much sadness that the children did not get the chance to get to know their father better. I know how much he loved them and I know they doted on him. I know they had a wonderful father who looked after them well, guided them well and would have done anything for them. They have been deprived of that. My heart goes out to them. I hope, now that this matter has been settled in court, they will take time to remember their dad and know he was a good man who was proud to be their father.’
Like other members of the family, Gordon has been determined not to allow his feelings towards the two murderers to develop into a hatred which could consume him: ‘I never knew Howell. There was a family bond with Hazel and she broke that bond. What she did amounts to the ultimate betrayal. Howell is clearly cruel and calculating and I will be forever haunted by the knowledge that Trevor was aware of what was being done to him – in his own bed, the safest place one could imagine … It would be easy to call them names, but I think they have caused us enough pain and taken up enough of our lives without becoming twisted and bitter. Saying nasty things about them would only take away whatever humanity is left in us. Their own actions speak volumes about their character. Trevor’s reputation does not need to be retrieved, because it was never damaged in the first place. His integrity is untarnished. He was an honourable and kind man. He wasn’t a saint and I’m not trying to paint him as one. He was simply a good and decent man who loved his family and his wife … His Christianity was the real McCoy. It wasn’t a Sunday morning thing. It was all day, every day, flaws and all. He was the genuine article.
‘What do I think of Hazel? I just need to know why she felt compelled to go down this road. Why did Trevor have to die? Was murder easier than divorce? Was money more precious than the sanctity of life? My deepest thoughts are more to do with the loss of Trevor, but the hurt it caused me and my family, the unanswered questions; why it was done in such a cruel and horrible fashion, more than what I actually think about Hazel as a person.’
Former associates and colleagues of Howell were stunned by his arrest, and many of them moved quickly to distance themselves from a man they did not particularly like anyway. Mohammad Husban, the young Jordanian who spent three years at his clinic, remains shocked and dismayed, as one of his friends confirmed: ‘He is absolutely shattered. He used to look up to Howell. Howell was almost a father-like figure to him back then, but he cannot believe that he could have been an evil individual, that he could be guilty of such an appalling act. He will never forgive him for what he did. He thinks all the time about Howell’s family and how they are managing, especially the little ones.’
Hazel Stewart’s son, Andrew, a graphic designer, and her daughter, Lisa McConnell, a nurse, remain convinced of their mother’s innocence. They told friends that the jury’s verdict means they have been punished twice – first with the death of their father, whom they loved dearly and miss so much, and then with their mother’s imprisonment.
As for Howell’s children, only one – his daughter, Lauren Bradford – has stood by him. His second wife Kyle divorced him in August 2010, after returning to the United States with their five children, Erik, Jorgen, Jensen, Finn and little Susanna. Dylan and Katie, Kyle’s two children from her first marriage, have also left Northern Ireland. Kyle was twice questioned by detectives about Howell’s confession to her in August 1998. She left Northern Ireland in the months following her arrest and has never been back. Police submitted a file to the Public Prosecution Service to consider whether she should face criminal charges. Howell has told the authorities that he would be prepared to testify against her – just as he gave evidence against Hazel Stewart – but at the time of writing no decision to prosecute had been taken.
Lauren continues to visit her father in prison. At one stage in her life she had a difficult relationship with him, but she is the only one now who has not abandoned him. Lauren never missed a day of Hazel Stewart’s trial and found it a dreadful experience. She could not understand why Stewart, who admitted her role in the murders when she was first questioned by the police, could then put both of the families through such an ordeal by pleading not guilty.
In a letter to the court before Judge Hart jailed Howell, Lauren wrote:
I love my father, but I will never understand how he could have done this. He and Hazel have impacted on so many people. All that taken into consideration, I am now grateful that he has done the right thing by pleading guilty to [Lesley and Trevor’s] deaths. I feel like he has finally restored their honour, albeit almost twenty years later. He could have gone to his grave with it.
I visit my father in prison on a regular basis. Some people may misunderstand this as me being soft, but the only reason I can do this is because of the remorse he showed to me. I initially went to see him so I could try and understand what happened, yell at him maybe and tell him how much he had hurt me. He was the only one with the answers I needed. I never expected to go back after the first few visits, but with each visit, I began to see the reason why he confessed and I believe he is in prison to pay for what he has done. Every time I am there, without fail, there is a moment when he becomes overwhelmed that I am sitting there. And so he should. Almost any conversation I have with him, he thanks me for giving him time. It does not take away from the fact that I hate what he has done to my mother, to me and to all my brothers and sisters, not to mention the Buchanans. There is a divide in our family that may never be mended, and although the main reason for that lies beyond him, it is just another ripple in the whole mess.
I would not be able to look at my father if he didn’t have the right attitude, remorse and guilt. I am not easily taken in and the only reason I can see him is because I believe his remorse is genuine. I am not writing this to ask for a greater or lesser sentence. It wouldn’t work even if it did. I believe the judge to be a fair man. I just want justice for my mum and due consideration for my dad. I want him to pay the consequences for what he has done. Whatever the judge decides, I will support him and continue to visit him and will always love him. I will probably miss my mum every single day, like I have for the last twenty years and will never get to know the wonderful person that I know she was. But at least I now know the truth and hopefully, one day I will heal.
Unlike his sister, Dan Howell will not be signing the visitors’ book at Maghaberry any time soon to see the man he now refers to as ‘Colin’, and who once told him: ‘Fear the Lord because He is awesome and His wrath is terrifying.’ The last time Dan spoke with his father was in the Yoko noodle restaurant in Coleraine on the evening of 17 December 2008. His brother Jonny had been at the table as well – the night before the boys left for America with their stepsister Katie and grandfather Sam Howell, to join Kyle and the rest of the family for Christmas. It was here that Howell told the boys of his losses in the Philippines and that he had cheated on their stepmother.
Dan and his father were never particularly close and, unlike Lauren, he has not been forgiving in the aftermath of Howell’s extraordinary confessions. Dan also sent a letter to the court before his father was sent down. This is what he wrote:
Colin murdered my mother Lesley sometime during the night of my second birthday. He always said this was because my mother had committed suicide, and as I grew up, I struggled with feeling rejected, believing that my mother wanted herself dead on my birthday, not understanding why she didn’t care. During my childhood, Colin became more and more reluctant to talk about my mother with any of us. We stopped visiting her grave. All contact with her brother Chris was cut. This culminated with us being told we were not to talk about any of what happened among the family. I was denied any memory of my mother as was my younger brother Jonny …
For all his life, my late brother Matthew had believed his mother left him when he was six and he shared with me the anguish that caused and ways in which he blamed himself for what happened. Colin appeared to have no problem rubbishing my mother’s name and allowing us to believe she was a bad mother.
His actions have left me without a father, but even more tragically, my youngest brothers and sister, children of Colin’s marriage to Kyle Jorgensen, are fatherless at very young ages. His deceit and selfishness came as a terrible surprise to them. They thought, as young children tend to, that their dad was the best thing ever, and now I notice the profound effect that is having on them. They don’t like to talk about it, but when they do they voice anger as well as missing what they once knew. They have been uprooted from their community and friends.
When I found out about how Colin had murdered my mother, it put a tremendous strain on me. I struggled to do the work demanded of me in my medical degree. It put a lot of pressure on my closest friendships and it has split the different sides of my family apart, leaving me in the middle to try and mediate between them. To describe this as life-changing is an understatement.
I have known Colin for all my life and I believe I know him well. He is very intelligent and very good at coming across sincerely. People trust his intentions to be good, despite everything he has done. He is excellent at portraying himself in the way he wants people to see him. Everyone thought he was a model citizen, a success story, just before his arrest – during a time when he was having an affair, and there was the sexual harassment and his involvement in this financial situation in the Philippines, all the while concealing what he had done.
I therefore believe that no one can ever know if he has truly changed, and therefore he remains a danger to society. It is vital in my opinion that he is in prison protected from society for as long as possible, since he has demonstrated how much harm he is capable of causing and how good he is at concealing it.
Colin Howell has never seen Dan’s carefully considered and yet deeply emotional judgement of him. If he did, he would no doubt be appalled, as would any father on learning that his own son believes him to be too dangerous and too much of a liability to society to ever be released from prison again. It is an extraordinary assessment.
But so many things are extraordinary in this barely believable saga. The affair between the driven, ambitious dentist and the bored, dissatisfied housewife was in itself nothing unusual – extramarital relationships happen all the time, of course. What was incredible, however, was the plan Howell conceived to enable him and Hazel to have a future together, and her willingness to be part of a plot which involved not divorce or legal separation, but a double murder – carefully planned and brutally executed.
Howell and Stewart have been haunted all their lives. They found no real happiness and there will be little or no public sympathy for either of them, especially the self-centred Howell. There is, however, great fellow-feeling for the families so cruelly affected by a merciless man and a callous woman who deprived children of their parents and inflicted untold loss and distress on innocent people. In many ways, it is the love, togetherness and determination of these families to keep the memory of their lost loved ones alive which represent the most extraordinary aspect of all in this tragic human story.