NI Dentist's Shocking Confession: Double Murder Details Revealed

In 2009, Colin Howell walked into the police station in Coleraine, Co Derry, and confessed to the double murder of his wife and his lover’s husband. The deaths of Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan almost 20 years previously had been treated as suicides. Howell sat in an interview room and outlined to police how, with the help of former lover Hazel Stewart, he had killed them both. “I would suggest that anybody who has an affair will always think they would be better off without their partner,” he told them. “I do believe that thoughts of murder are immediately connected to that.” Howell and Stewart were convicted in 2011 of the murders of their spouses and sentenced to a minimum of 21 years and 18 years in prison, respectively. For the first time, the original recordings of those police interviews are to be broadcast in a two-part BBC documentary series, Confessions of a Killer, which begins on Tuesday. [ Hazel Stewart ‘under coercive control’ of lover Colin Howell when respective spouses murderedOpens in new window ] The tapes show Howell to be calm and emotionless as he recounts how and why he decided to murder his wife and Stewart’s husband, and why he confessed almost two decades later. “When I first decided to come here, I believed it was the right thing to do. I knew it would be big; I didn’t have the vision to see how big it would be,” he said. In the documentary, Howell is described as a “pillar of the community”. A dentist, he was prominent in Coleraine Baptist Church where he and Stewart, a Sunday school teacher, had met. “My influence on her [Stewart] was already strong, and grew,” he said. “Even the affair ... was driven by me, albeit with her co-operation. It’s highly likely she didn’t want to [commit the murders] but she did obviously co-operate.” On the tapes, he outlined to police how he piped the carbon monoxide fumes from the car in the garage into his wife Lesley’s bedroom as she slept, then did the same at Trevor Buchanan’s house and made it look like a suicide pact. He described in detail how he killed his wife by setting a hose “right up beside her when she was sound, deeply asleep. “I went back to the garage and started the engine. My concept was that she would have fallen asleep, but then she didn’t,” he said. “One of the things that happened when she aroused was she called out ‘Matthew’, my son’s name – that’s one of the memories that haunts me. [ Ex-wife of double murderer Colin Howell not to be prosecutedOpens in new window ] “I suppose I panicked ... so I ran in and just put the hose closer and put it over her head – whatever it was, quilt – over her head.” He drove both bodies to a garage in nearby Castlerock and staged the scene to make it look as if they had taken their own lives. “We’d done it and the relief factor was probably stronger than the remorse factor for me,” he said. The police interviewer asks him why he did not simply leave his wife, suggesting that it might have been easier to “walk out the front door” than think “she’s better off dead” and murder her. “That is right,” Howell replies. “I can’t disagree with that; that would have been a better thought and an easier thought.” Explaining his decision to confess, he said: “I know that I have lived in an unreal world, a fantasy world almost, being one thing deep down and not even knowing that I’m a fake ... there’s a lot about me that’s fraud.” He referred to “the earthquake” his confession would cause. “The problems created by doing the right thing 18 years too late rather than doing the right thing 18 years ago ... it is the right thing, but it’s the delay makes it the monumental thing,” he said. “I just thought: this is the time in my life to not be in control any more, to do what is right,” he said. “I’ve lived a lie for a long time, the hypocrisy of me and the way I’ve lived my life. [ Lurid tale of obsession, sex and money that ended in cold-blooded murdersOpens in new window ] “Yes, [the] reputation of being a good dentist ... probably what I survived on, was a good image, when deep down in the core of my heart I was someone who was willing to take the life of two people.”