Let This Be Our Secret Read online

  Up until this point, the dentist had remained relatively composed. All at once, however, he began to falter and lose momentum. Seeing this, Kyle shook herself out of her shocked state and stiffened. She pleaded with him again, imploring her husband to finally come clean about everything. She quoted passages from the Bible to strengthen her plea, and said to him: ‘One shall have to undergo suffering to reach truth. That is why it is said that truth is eternally victorious.’

  Howell composed himself once more. Then he told them that something else had been preying on his mind of late – something far worse than anything he had already admitted to. And with that he began to recount in meticulous detail exactly what had happened on the night of 18 May 1991, almost eighteen years previously.

  Now, finally, he was saying it out loud, in public, in the presence of other people. The fact was that Lesley, his first wife, and Trevor Buchanan had not died in 1991 as a result of a suicide pact, as everyone had thought – but that he had been responsible for their deaths.

  This, at last, was the whole truth: he, Colin Howell, had murdered both his wife and the man who was married to his then mistress, Hazel Buchanan. He had broken God’s most cardinal law – not once, but twice. He, Colin Howell, was a double murderer.

  He explained – in some detail – how he had done it. How he had poisoned Lesley with car exhaust fumes, and how as she realized that her life was in peril she had called out for Matthew, their eldest son, a six-year-old child at the time. How he, Howell, had then murdered Trevor in the same way, gassing him with deadly carbon monoxide as he lay in his bed and tried to defend himself. How he had left the bodies in a car at the back of The Apostles, the row of cottages which overlooked Castlerock. How he had set up the scene to look like suicide, and had then run along the nearby beach before cycling home.

  Everyone in the room remembered the shocking events of 1991 when the bodies of Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan were found together in a car in the garage of a house, the victims of an apparent double-suicide pact. At the time everyone, including the police, had believed that Lesley and Trevor had been so distressed by the ongoing affair between their spouses that they had been driven to the ultimate act of desperation. Everyone except Kyle, of course, who was barely out of her teens at the time and still living in the United States.

  Apparently immune to the stunned silence of those around him, Howell was now in full flow. The confession continued, relentlessly, unabated. His account of how he had managed to convince investigating officers that the deaths had been suicides left the elders gasping in disbelief. As Graham Stirling would later recall: ‘I shivered about him bragging it was so clever to fool the police … We were absolutely gobsmacked and shocked beyond belief, because I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I was going to hear that sort of confession. I was coming across expecting to hear another adulterous affair that had gone too far, or something, but did not anticipate hearing anything like that.’

  And finally it was over. The full horror of what Colin Howell had done and the full extent of the lie which he had been living for all that time was plain to see. The façade he had spent so many years creating and maintaining had collapsed before their very eyes. And the craven, tortured and perhaps delusional hypocrite that was Colin Howell had finally been laid bare for the first time.

  The elders and Kyle sat in stunned silence for some minutes. All they could think of doing was to ask him if it was really true, if he was sure that the details were correct. Finding it difficult to believe what he had just been told, it occurred to Graham Stirling that perhaps Howell was just making it all up to escape the mess that his life was in. ‘It was almost as if I felt that he was doing this as a cop-out of all the really huge financial implications and difficulties that he was in, that his business was failing, that there was a downturn in everything, and he was just floundering … So I asked him, was he really sure that this was exactly as it was? Colin assured us the facts were correct. Why would he confess to such a thing if it wasn’t true? The evidence would match that of the police evidence at the time.’

  Andrew Brown was a fellow dentist who had been so worried about his friend’s frame of mind that he had recently contacted the Dental Protection Agency because he feared that Howell was no longer capable of treating patients. He would immediately see what had happened with his friend in another light: as the workings of Divine Providence. He later told police: ‘From our perspective on it, we would say God had his hand on that, to take him there, because nothing else was going to. It had to be something of such a cataclysmic effect on him in order to shake him out of … [the] barriers that he put up to get this locked [away]. I mean, he must have had it behind fifteen- to twenty-foot concrete walls in his mind, to stop it coming forward again and again …’

  Howell had now regained his balance. While his full confession had taken every ounce of his resolve to deliver so that he was emotionally spent, he had known for weeks, perhaps months, that his time as a free man was now very limited. He had already prepared himself for a long spell in jail. The night before he met with the elders, he had even booted up his computer to type the words ‘double murders’ into Google. On the basis of this research, he reckoned he might get a twenty- to thirty-year sentence. If he got twenty years, then he could be a free man by the time he was seventy – leaving him another twenty years of life. The Howell family had a history of longevity. He was already hoping to have some kind of life left after his release.

  At 10.15 a.m. Willie Patterson phoned for the police to come to the house. Kyle was weeping again, distraught in her sorrow and anger, and in between her sobs she wailed to her husband: ‘You sucked the life out of Lesley, and that’s what you do, Colin – you suck the life out of people …’

  While Patterson made the call, the others stayed with Howell and tried to help him come to terms with the fact that he would be leaving his family for a very long time. They assured him that they would do their best to see that his children would be safe and secure, and that someone would endeavour to look after his financial affairs. Then, as they waited for the police to arrive, they all held hands and prayed.

  An hour and a half later, Sergeant Soren Stewart and two other detectives, Constables Melody Kidd and Kathryn Parish, arrived at the Howell home. The dentist himself opened the door. His first words to the sergeant were: ‘Mr Stewart – I’m sorry to bring you out here under these circumstances.’ Then the officers went into the room where the elders were assembled and as Parish took notes and Howell waited outside Patterson explained to them what the dentist was claiming to have done.

  The decision was quickly taken to arrest him but when Willie Patterson went to fetch him Howell was nowhere to be seen. The elder returned in a panic, saying: ‘He’s gone, he’s gone!’ Kidd and Parish glanced at each other and then both looked out of the upstairs window at the lake below. They speculated that Howell might have jumped into the water, while Stewart’s first thought was that he might have hanged himself. But just at that moment the man of the house appeared nonchalantly from one of the bedrooms, carrying a small sports bag and wondering what all the fuss was about. He was immediately arrested by the three officers and taken to their car. He did not say a word during the fifteen minutes it took them to reach Coleraine police station.

  Later that day while Howell waited in his cell to be brought to a nearby interview room he must have had time to reflect on how he had come to this. He had lost everything: his wife, his family, his glittering career, his family home, his money, his place in the Church, his standing in the community – and now finally his liberty.

  2.

  Howell–Clarke: to have and to hold

  July 1983

  Colin Howell was looking forward to a new life together with his young fiancée, Lesley Clarke. It was May 1983, just a few months before the wedding, and he was preparing to sit his final exams in dentistry at Belfast’s Queen’s University. Their plans were to move to the town of Coleraine and set up home to
gether. Clearly full of hope for the future and passionate about his bride-to-be, the twenty-four-year-old Howell penned a letter to her.

  My dearest Lesley – I was just about to go to bed when I was filled with thoughts of you. It occurred to me that I’m always too busy thinking of work to relax with you, or that there is always a reason for us to be apart early in the evening. I’m just saying that I’m looking forward to long evenings together alone when these blasted exams are over. I miss you sometimes, like now, and want to tell you I love you and I’m looking forward to our future together. I hope Coleraine brings you new friends and new commitments to God. I’m just so tired now that I can’t say all that’s on my mind. It’s 1.10 a.m. and I need sleep. With all my love, Colin xx.

  They were married on 16 July at Windsor Baptist Church, just off Belfast’s Lisburn Road. The night before the wedding, the bridesmaids had stayed with Lesley at the Conway Hotel near Dunmurry, where the reception was held the following day. They were all in high spirits, yelping and laughing. Like her fiancé, the bride-to-be was excited and full of anticipation.

  There had been a heat wave that summer and it was a fabulous day for the wedding and the well-attended reception afterwards. The Howells and the Butlers (Colin’s mother’s side of the family) were all God-fearing Baptists, well known in north Belfast for earnest observance of their strict religious principles. Colin’s family, especially his mother Sarah, would have preferred there to have been no alcohol on the tables at the reception, but the bride’s father was having none of it. Harry Clarke was himself from a devout Brethren background in mid-Ulster but he was his own man and did not see the harm in his guests being able to enjoy a few drinks. Chris Clarke recalls that the difference of opinion made for a slightly strained atmosphere. ‘It was bizarre and slightly uncomfortable. There was rigid segregation. The tables were set in such a way that there was a corridor down the middle. Drink was served at one half, but not at the other: there were wet tables and dry tables … My dad made a stand that he was serving alcohol to his guests … I can’t remember if a toast was actually proposed. My dad was a fair but not a provocative man.’

  The belief that it was important to observe a particular kind of religious lifestyle was not one confined to the older generation of the Clarkes and the Howells. It was a crucial factor in the lives of Colin and Lesley too – although neither of them felt quite as strongly about the issue of alcohol as Sarah Howell. Very much in line with his upbringing, however, Colin Howell firmly believed that there should be no sex before marriage, that his bride should be a virgin and that he would remain faithful to her until death.

  Lesley was his first serious girlfriend and the first woman with whom he had sex. They had slept together before they were married however, and he felt a lot of guilt about this. And they had also transgressed what Howell would have seen as God’s immutable laws in other, very serious ways. In the year before they married Lesley had had no fewer than three abortions, two of them just months apart. They had both agreed that the pregnancies be terminated. Lesley later confided to a friend that she feared at the time that her fiancé would end the relationship if she did not concede. It was she who paid for the abortions. On each occasion Howell had accompanied her to the same clinic in west London – the very one to which he would also take his mistress, Hazel, a number of years later.

  Despite his impassioned letter to his fiancée, in the days before the wedding Howell had his doubts about the marriage – or so he would tell an examining psychiatrist in the years to come. Lesley had been unsure about it too. But the young man felt very much that they were compelled to go ahead anyway – apart from anything else, he was convinced that no one else would want either of them after what they had been through. All the arrangements were in place and so Howell decided, because of the momentum, to go ahead with the wedding anyway. He was determined to make a go of it and adamant that the relationship would last forever.

  Lesley’s Christianity meant everything to her too. She prayed a lot and spoke to those close to her of her desire to get to know God better. One of her favourite passages in the Bible was James 1:2–4, which refers to trials and temptations as opportunities for spiritual growth: ‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.’

  Valerie Allen, one of Lesley’s closest friends who had known her from their days growing up together in Dublin, would in later years identify the rigid religious ethos to which both Colin and Lesley were so deeply committed as being at the very heart of the tragedy which would later play out in their lives: ‘I felt that all this had happened in a cultural structure where guilt about premarital sex and so on drove people together; where they were under huge pressure to make the marriage work and not to divorce at any cost … I felt angry that they had not had enough life and sexual experience to have been able to … handle this better … I’m guessing Lesley [was] the first one Colin had been with. I don’t know if he was [for her] or not. [But] if they had both had a bit more sexual experience, they might not have got married. Or they might have got married and made it work, rather than be gobsmacked at an affair. I felt a lot of it was guilt and inexperience. It made them feel that they had to stay together, when they had other options open to them, like divorce, or having sex with each other and not marrying.’

  Colin Howell was brought up in the Protestant Woodvale district of Belfast, before the family moved to the neighbouring Ballysillan district. He was the fourth of five children, with two brothers, Gordon and Jim, and two sisters, Pauline and Maud. In later years, he would have minimal contact with any of his siblings, but he was always close to his father, Sam, a former manager at a Government Training Centre. Howell would later say of his relationship with Sam: ‘I was Dad’s little buddy.’ They played golf and went fishing together and, even after Lesley’s death, his father did not blame his son or regard him as being responsible for it. He felt Colin was a son about whom he could be proud.

  Howell’s mother loved him as well. Howell has great memories of her on family camping holidays in Donegal, when they could get away from the tensions of Belfast, then a troubled and dangerous city. She always looked out for her second youngest, and he recalled one occasion in particular when she was there to reassure him – the night when, as a teenager, he had forgotten to switch off his electric blanket and had accidentally touched the pins of the plug when he woke up; he had cried after giving himself an electric shock. And he had memories too, again as a teenager, of turning away in embarrassment one afternoon in Belfast when she challenged a barber over the price of a haircut. She was a good mother, but Howell didn’t have the same relationship with her as he had with his father. His mum died in 2007, aged seventy-five.

  From a very early age, Colin attended Shankill Baptist Church and it was more or less inevitable that by the time he was six years old he had committed himself fully to the family’s faith. For the remainder of his childhood and indeed into adulthood he attended church three times on a Sunday, as well as lining up faithfully once a week with his local battalion of the Boys’ Brigade. By the time he was thirteen, the young Colin had decided that he wanted to become an overseas missionary, just like the people who came to speak at his Shankill church every now and then.

  Howell was educated at Cavehill Primary School. He sat an entrance exam for a grammar school place at Belfast Royal Academy but narrowly failed. He went instead to The Boys’ Model, a big all-boys secondary school in north Belfast which also had an excellent record in academic achievement. Here he conducted himself well and never got into trouble. However, he didn’t feel comfortable with the fairly macho, aggressive ethos among the boys in the classrooms and on the sports pitches; many of the pupils came from tough working-class districts, heavily influenced by loyalist paramilitaries. He remembers suffering from a lack of confidence and low self-este
em. But by the time he sat his ‘O’ levels in the mid-’70s his family had moved out of Belfast and he much preferred Portadown College, County Armagh, a mixed-sex school, where he would go on to obtain ‘A’ levels in maths, chemistry and physics. He was a school prefect and a member of the Scripture Union. Former headmaster Harry Armstrong recalls of him: ‘He was a perfectly reasonable, well-balanced young man, a hard worker, keen on his studies – a model pupil, really. It was obvious he had his eyes on a professional career …’

  Howell’s ambition was to study medicine, but his one ‘B’ and two ‘C’ grades were not good enough for him to be able to qualify. He decided to do dentistry at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he spent six years, including a year out to do a Bachelor of Science degree in anatomy. With thirty-five students in his year Howell tended to keep himself to himself and rarely socialized with any of them. He shared a house with five other students at 37 Stranmillis Road, just opposite the Ulster Museum. His evangelical Protestant beliefs and fire-and-brimstone type of Christianity didn’t sit well in the clubs and bars around the university which the crowd tended to frequent. They considered him something of an outsider. One ex-student who knew him during his fourth and fifth years remembers: ‘He wasn’t the brightest, but then he wasn’t the dumbest either. He kept a low profile and didn’t stand out. He was a bit of a loner and didn’t seem to mix with the more gregarious amongst us who might have been a touch loud, told jokes and held court. He wouldn’t have been part of that crowd. He was very peripheral: quiet, shy and a bit of a country boy, really.’