It prompted a return visit to a book, fortuitously sitting at the front of one of the bookshelves in our home. A decade or more had passed since I read it but for some reason had never got around to reviewing. Like Jon Krakauer's book which the above mentioned television drama was based on, it too was a heady mix of praying and slaying for lust.
When Colin Howell and Hazel Stewart killed the people they were married to in May 1991, it was presented more as tragedy than treachery. Trevor Buchanan, a serving RUC officer, and Lesley Howell, a nurse, appeared to have entered into a suicide pact, so despairing had both become at the infidelity of their respective partners with each other.
Years later, that narrative would come apart at the seams when Howell walked into a police station and confessed his guilt. The outcome was a life sentence for both Howell and Stewart, the tariff in his case being twenty-one years, in hers, slightly less at eighteen
In the forward to the book, its author Deric Henderson raises:
the most pointed question of all . . . the incompetent police investigation which allowed the two perpetrators to get away with murder for so long.
Police incompetence in murder investigations was not put to rest by the courts. Recently, Jennifer O'Leary in a riveting BBC Spotlight documentary raised serious questions about the police handling of the investigation into the death, now known to be murder, of the young showjumper Katie Simpson.
There were enough red flags raised, but instead the RUC took cover behind a black one, feigning respect when it should have been pursuing the leads in the direction they were all pointing.
Colin Howell was a dentist who pulled women as well as teeth. His affair with Hazel Stewart gave both a motive for getting rid of the people they were married to. In the words of Howell, 'if you look at the murders - I wanted it and Hazel facilitated it.' On the night in question, his path cleared by Stewart, Howell visited death on firstly Lesley Howell and then Trevor Buchanan: his murder method, carbon monoxide poisoning.
Of the Baptist faith, and typical of so many of the ilk, Howell liked to preach more than he liked to practice. The wife he would go on to murder had three abortions in the year before they married, Stewart too would have a similar procedure, and he was addicted to pornography. Not that there is anything inherently wrong in abortion or porn but the theocrats of hatred are usually planted at the foot of the guillotine when it comes time for heads to be lopped off people deemed sinful for having made choices not approved by Porn Again Christianity. The deadly dentist also admitted to sexually abusing five women in his dental chair after he had sedated them. Lesley, nevertheless thought in that peculiarly deranged religious way that her husband and would-be killer was a model of Christ.
Stewart, a woman of ‘little personality’ was also immersed in the Baptist world. She was an adulteress by 1990 and a murderess a year later. For all her professions of spirituality, like Colin Howell she had a keen eye for the material things.
Colin Howell was a dentist who pulled women as well as teeth. His affair with Hazel Stewart gave both a motive for getting rid of the people they were married to. In the words of Howell, 'if you look at the murders - I wanted it and Hazel facilitated it.' On the night in question, his path cleared by Stewart, Howell visited death on firstly Lesley Howell and then Trevor Buchanan: his murder method, carbon monoxide poisoning.
Of the Baptist faith, and typical of so many of the ilk, Howell liked to preach more than he liked to practice. The wife he would go on to murder had three abortions in the year before they married, Stewart too would have a similar procedure, and he was addicted to pornography. Not that there is anything inherently wrong in abortion or porn but the theocrats of hatred are usually planted at the foot of the guillotine when it comes time for heads to be lopped off people deemed sinful for having made choices not approved by Porn Again Christianity. The deadly dentist also admitted to sexually abusing five women in his dental chair after he had sedated them. Lesley, nevertheless thought in that peculiarly deranged religious way that her husband and would-be killer was a model of Christ.
Stewart, a woman of ‘little personality’ was also immersed in the Baptist world. She was an adulteress by 1990 and a murderess a year later. For all her professions of spirituality, like Colin Howell she had a keen eye for the material things.
Howell had his Eureka moment in May 1991. Within weeks the couple were dead. The Baptist brutes were both co-conspirators, both co-executions, both now life-sentence prisoners.
Howell, years later, readily accepted his guilt. After undergoing an 'emotional, spiritual and physical meltdown' he moved to confess. He had lost his son and best friend in separate tragic circumstances. As a conman he ended up being conned out of 335.000 which he invested in a Philippines scam. Things were falling apart. Not so for Stewart who was living the high life. For her, guilt or contrition hardly figured. Despite colluding down to the finest detail including giving her husband sedatives to render him helpless while Howell murdered him, she would later claim to be under the spell of her lover. The courts rejected it and she remains in prison. Those familiar with her called it right in their description: 'the bigger the bible the bigger the rogue.'
Despite the double murder, the affair fizzled out. Stewart began having an affair with another man who later described her as 'a total grabber of opportunities. Nothing was ever good enough. She was materialistic to the hilt. Cold hearted.' She eventually cheated on him also, but fortunately did not murder him, before marrying a senior colleague of her dead husband.
Dated but durable, Deric Henderson's book on one of the North's most sensational murder cases involving sex, sleaze and slaying, is a deft delivery of a degenerate duo.
Deric Henderson, 2011, Let This Be Our Secret. Gill & Macmillan. ISBN 978-07171-4770-0
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