Let This Be Our Secret Read online

  DERIC HENDERSON

  Let This Be Our Secret

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 ‘Behind the concrete walls in his mind …’

  2 Howell–Clarke: to have and to hold

  3 Trouble in paradise

  4 Buchanan–Elkin: ‘She’s the right one …’

  5 In flagrante

  6 ‘Eureka’

  7 Till death us do part

  8 ‘Let this be our secret’

  9 Getting away with murder

  10 ‘Why didn’t you come to me, son?’

  11 ‘I have taken a mother from my children’

  12 Deviance and denial: Colin Howell and sex

  13 The inquest

  14 ‘A sad adulteress’

  15 Money, money, money …

  16 The wages of sin

  17 All that glitters

  18 ‘Hiding, but not hiding …’

  19 A ‘joint venture’? – The Hazel Stewart trial, Part One

  20 ‘Waltzing together in time …’ – The Hazel Stewart trial, Part Two

  21 ‘What will happen to me?’ – The Hazel Stewart trial, Part Three

  22 A time of reckoning

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LET THIS BE OUR SECRET

  Deric Henderson, Ireland Editor of the Press Association and the 2010 Northern Ireland Journalist of the Year, has spent two years investigating the background to this extraordinary story. He was in court for the sentencing of Colin Howell and was on the Press Bench throughout Hazel Stewart’s trial. He has carried out more than forty interviews with relatives, friends and associates of Colin and Lesley Howell, Trevor Buchanan and Hazel Stewart. He has examined the initial police investigation which failed to detect a crime, and he details how the affair embarrassed and then scandalized the Baptist Church. He has been all over this story since it broke and has produced the definitive account of the biggest murder case to hit the United Kingdom in many a year.

  This book is dedicated to my wife Clare and our two sons, Deric Jr and Edward. Where would I be without them?

  Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.

  (James 1:15)

  Introduction

  I broke a promise to write this book.

  Having spent the best part of my adult life intruding on grief while reporting on the violence which once dominated so much of day-to-day life in Northern Ireland I vowed I would never again arrive unannounced on the doorstep of victims’ relatives. The pledge was made as I sheltered under an umbrella on a wet and miserable Sunday morning in June 1994 in the village of Loughinisland, County Down, where six men were shot dead as they watched a World Cup soccer match on a pub television the previous night.

  A bereaved woman had answered my knock on her front door. She was wearing a black dress covered in specks of white fluff. The garment had obviously been hurriedly retrieved from the bottom drawer for a period of mourning. Her eyes were red and glazed and she twisted a white handkerchief in her hands. Excusing herself for looking so tired and weary, she politely refused my request for an interview.

  I never walked up a driveway or garden footpath again to seek out personal testimonials from those in mourning – not even when my home town of Omagh, County Tyrone, was bombed in the summer of 1998 leaving twenty-nine people dead, including a mother pregnant with twins. I left it to others to apologize for calling at such a bad time, before being invited inside to pose the difficult and painful questions.

  The arrests of Colin Howell and Hazel Stewart in January 2009 changed all that.

  Even though an entry in my diary of 20 May 1991 records the incident – ‘Couple die in suicide at Castlerock’ – I did not recall the deaths of Trevor Buchanan and Lesley Howell. The tragedy barely registered outside Coleraine in County Londonderry where they both lived. But I remember the time well. The affable Peter Brooke was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the British Government was in secret talks with the leadership of the IRA – and I was just out of hospital after a major health scare. The first faltering steps were being taken towards a peace settlement and the attention of those of us who waited to challenge the politicians emerging from the depressing Castle Buildings in Belfast was far removed from that beautiful stretch of the North Coast where the two bodies were discovered. Fast forward twenty years, and who would have believed so many column inches and so much air time would be devoted to a tragedy that had more or less passed us by?

  It was a crime of passion which went undetected for so long because of the cunning and guile of the two people who carried it out: Colin Howell, a narcissistic but seemingly harmless small-town dentist, and his obedient lover, Hazel Stewart. The ingenious and ruthless way in which they murdered Howell’s wife Lesley and Stewart’s husband, Trevor Buchanan – before fooling investigating officers into believing their partners had killed themselves – means their evil deeds will live long in the memory. They left behind a trail of emotional carnage. Not just for those closest to them, especially their children and their wider family circles, but also in Howell’s case for the women patients the dentist abused while they were heavily sedated and under his care.

  I found this a tough and demanding assignment. Many of the people interviewed made a deep and lasting impression on me, especially the brothers and two sisters of Trevor Buchanan. Listening to them was almost like witnessing their dead brother being brought back to life. The most poignant moment of all was when Victor Buchanan told how his grief-stricken father, Jim, reached into his son’s coffin, gathered him into his arms and cried out: ‘Why did you do it, son? Why didn’t you come to me? Why didn’t you come to me?’ Journalists can become detached and unfeeling, but this was the first time in over forty years in the business that I had to set down my pen and walk away to compose myself.

  Colin Howell and Hazel Stewart had practically everything they ever wanted, except peace of mind. Howell emerged from a working-class background to make a good career – and a lot of money. He regarded himself as a born-again Christian, as did Hazel Stewart, who led a fairly ordinary life until she started cheating on the man who worshipped the ground she walked on.

  Howell’s guilty conscience finally got the better of him; and although Stewart continues to protest her innocence following her trial in 2011, no one in the courtroom in Coleraine will forget the moment a jury found her guilty at the end of fifteen unprecedented and dramatic days of evidence and legal submissions.

  The Howell and Buchanan couples were devout Baptists, and this book also examines how their Church dealt with the whole affair. Perhaps those in their Church could have done things differently; perhaps they, like other people and institutions, stood little chance of penetrating Howell’s web of deception and Hazel Stewart’s lies.

  But the most pointed question of all must concern the incompetent police investigation which allowed the two perpetrators to get away with murder for so long. Even though she was troubled and in a loveless marriage, why would a young mother devoted to her children climb into the boot of a car and kill herself, just hours after she had booked a session on a sunbed for a couple of days later? Why would a police officer who had never before harboured thoughts of suicide – even in the depths of despair – suddenly change his mind and take his own life?

  Researching and writing this book has been an extraordinary experience. Above all it has been humbling and sometimes painful to witness the quiet dignity and integrity of the many decent and blameless people who were so deeply affected and whose lives may never be the same again. In their struggle to come to terms with their pain and
their refusal to become embittered by hatred, all of them have surely shown what the meaning of true Christianity is.

  Deric Henderson

  Belfast, June 2011

  1.

  ‘Behind the concrete walls in his mind …’

  28 January 2009

  The night before he surrendered himself to the police Colin Howell took three of his young children to the outside patio and urged them to look up at the stars. He had a pair of binoculars, and he held the youngest in his arms as he knelt down to let the others take turns to glimpse the magnified night sky. It was his last lingering look at freedom. As a doting father he knew it was the final time he and his children would enjoy this kind of physical closeness.

  The highly successful dentist and one-time pillar of the local community and Baptist Church had been living on his own in a rented caravan in Castlerock for a month after his second wife Kyle had ordered him out of the family home. He recently confessed to a relationship with another woman and that he had squandered all the family’s savings - £353,000 in a crazy investment scheme to recover missing gold bullion in the Philippines – and had pushed her to breaking point. But the couple had agreed that Howell could return each evening to read their youngest children a bedtime story and tuck them up before they went to sleep.

  As he now stood, gazing up at the sky and holding his sons close, there were tears in his eyes. It was an emotional moment, but Colin Howell’s time was up. He knew it and so did Kyle. Casual adultery and financial recklessness were the very least of his wrongdoings. It was the moment for all of his past iniquities to be forcibly dragged into the light. His dark world had finally imploded.

  29 January 2009

  Kyle Howell checked the clock on the wall: it was approaching 8 a.m. She was sitting at the kitchen table with baby Susanna on her knee. Her four other children were upstairs watching a video. Kyle was crying. It had been another long and difficult night. Her husband was no longer the man she thought she knew, loved and had looked up to for twelve years – the one whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the Bible never ceased to amaze her, the one who had once delivered a compelling sermon about sexual immorality to like-minded acquaintances from their local church, and who had talked so convincingly about how he had worked through his own crisis of being unfaithful.

  If Howell had managed to negotiate his way through personal and marital difficulties in the past, then these latest revelations were in a different league altogether. This was cataclysmic; this time there would be no way back. He felt he was eternally damned, and just the night before – not for the first time – he had contemplated taking his own life. Utterly distraught and desperate herself, it had taken every ounce of Kyle’s emotional strength and presence of mind to persuade him not to take this final step. Quoting the Scriptures, she had urged him: ‘There’s grace. There’s grace. The Lord is giving you another chance. This is your chance. If you love your life, you won’t lose it.’ However when she reminded him again of what he needed to do, to unburden himself once and for all of all the darkness of his past, he had kept repeating: ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.’ But refusing to accept this, she had simply replied each time: ‘But you can, you can …’

  And now, in the early winter’s morning Kyle told her husband it was time for the next stage in the process which they both knew was now unstoppable. She was calling in the Church elders so that they could hear the full truth of Colin Howell’s past sins. Resigned, he accepted this, but said he just wanted to take the children to school, so that he could say his goodbyes.

  The young mother then called Graham Stirling, left a message on Andrew Brown’s phone and spoke with Willie Patterson: all three were elders in The Barn Christian Fellowship Church to which the Howells belonged and all had been close confidants of Howell over the years. The three men promised that they would be there at the agreed time. Earlier that morning Howell had called his dental surgery and left a message for his PA, asking her to cancel all his appointments and telling her: ‘I won’t be in for the next couple of days. Something unusual has happened.’

  After dropping the children off at school and hugging them for what he knew would be the last time before they ran off across the playground (Kyle had warned him there was to be no crying) Howell went back to the caravan, collected a few belongings and then returned to the family home at Glebe Road in the hills above Castlerock, County Londonderry. By the time he got home, the elders were already there.

  They pulled up their chairs and waited. One produced a notebook and pen as Colin Howell began a protracted confession which continued, almost without interruption, for well over an hour. A series of revelations from the dentist would culminate in a final admission which would leave those around him stunned, devastated and struggling to comprehend.

  Kyle was weeping again as her husband began to speak. Although he remained calm, he was trembling and shaking, and it was obvious to the Church elders that the powerful emotions he was attempting to keep in check were very near the surface. Willie Patterson would later tell police: ‘Colin looked awful. I don’t know how to describe it. His eyes were standing out of his head and he was in great distress.’ But, with a sense that now he had started he had no choice but to finish, Howell continued, speaking quietly but distinctly, his eyes fixed on the table before him.

  He began by telling them that he had been having an affair with another woman. The relationship, he told those present, had begun in 2002. They had flirted and embraced; he had admitted to the relationship to Kyle and a church friend at the time. Once the woman was no longer within Howell’s orbit there had been no further contact for some time, but the relationship had started up again in 2005 when the woman had come back into Howell’s circle again. Howell would tell Kyle he was going to the surgery to do some paperwork and would then slip off to see the woman at her home. But he was now insisting they had never had intercourse.

  At first the elders listened intently but with no sense of surprise. They had known all about this since the middle of the previous month, December, when Howell had told them he was increasingly tormented by guilt over his latest dalliance and had said he planned to tell Kyle all about it when she returned. Kyle had just left with some of the children for a Christmas break in Florida, where her parents lived. The original plan had been for Kyle to fly out there first and then Howell would follow her with his father and Dan and Jonny, his two sons from his first marriage, and they could all spend the holiday there together. Kyle’s daughter Katie from her first marriage would be travelling out as well.

  Kyle’s reaction to her husband’s revelations of infidelity when he confided to her in a fraught phone call to Florida had understandably not been good. There would be many tense late-night conversations continuing into the early hours which invariably ended with her slamming down the receiver after telling him: ‘I hate you, I hate you.’ The elders also spoke with her in a bid to save the marriage. She told her husband not to join her in the States after all and two days before New Year’s Eve Howell had moved out of the house and into a caravan. Stirling and Brown had been to the virtually deserted caravan park to visit their friend in a pastoral capacity, as part of a bridge-building process which they hoped might end with him eventually being reunited with his family. As Stirling would later recall of Howell: ‘He felt he was being fraudulent in his witness and in his life’s journey. He explained that he felt that he was under powerful conviction by the Holy Spirit and was feeling exceptionally guilty about his lifestyle and the way he was doing business.’

  So the admission about the relationship was scarcely earth-shattering to those who had gathered that Thursday morning to hear what Howell had to say. In the preceding weeks they had been witness to a number of other revelations on his part, in a drip-feed process of confession, noting with alarm that he seemed to be gradually losing all contact with reality and was sinking into a deep depression. He had told first them and then Kyle how he had just lost all the family money in an investment s
cheme which involved funding a search for Japanese gold in the Philippines, but which had turned out to be a scam. And although they had all already known for a number of years about his addiction to online pornography, he had still felt compelled to tell them about his craving once more.

  As Graham Stirling would later confirm, it was clear to everyone in whom he had confided that in December 2008 and early 2009, Colin Howell was deep in some kind of spiritual crisis which in its own way was life-threatening as he contemplated suicide and then eternal damnation: ‘He did say that he was very concerned with regards to his eternal security, his soul’s position with regards to salvation as far as his Christian status was, or the lack of it. And then being able to come to a place where he could be accepted by God and forgiven through his repentance and his confession …’ But the elders had the strong intimation that there was something more, something beyond all this – another affair, perhaps – which their friend needed to tell them, if only he could bring himself to do it. And that was the reason, they surmised, why they had been summoned to the Howell home that morning.

  They were right, of course – in terms of his self-imposed confessional process, Howell was far from finished. Now he was telling them that, at his urging, his first wife Lesley had three abortions, two of them inside the space of seven months before their wedding. And, he continued, there had been another abortion about which he had never spoken – this time involving his former lover, Hazel Buchanan: this had been just months into their affair, which began in the spring of 1990. With each new revelation, Kyle was reeling: ‘I felt like I was getting a punch in the stomach.’

  Next, Colin Howell told the elders that the respectable façade of his professional life had also been a sham all along. While he had been building an unblemished and exemplary career as a cosmetic dentist, he had indecently assaulted women patients while they were under sedation and unable to fend him off. This the elders had certainly not expected. They had never once suspected that he might have forced himself upon anyone in his clinical care.