The affair was back on again. Howell had been unable to withstand his fatal attraction to his mistress. Had he been able to foresee the deadly consequences which would follow, would he have tried harder in his efforts to resist her?
In March 1991, there was to be another defining moment in the Howells’ marriage, and one which in many senses foreshadowed and indeed paved the way for the awful events to come. The balance of psychological power between husband and wife was about to shift.
When Howell and Lesley first got together, the consensus among her friends was that she was ‘too good’ for him – and in later years, others also wondered about the relationship. A former colleague of Howell’s from his university days sums up what many thought: ‘She [Lesley] was a lovely-looking girl, and I often wondered what she saw in Colin. He always had a smile, but he struck me as a fairly ordinary bloke.’ Lesley had always been outgoing, witty and had an engaging personality, making friends easily. She was very attractive and, as even Howell later admitted, more intelligent than her husband in many ways. He could be arrogant and manipulative, as well as charming when it suited him, but Lesley more than had the measure of him and had no trouble knocking him back with a cutting one-line rebuke. She never did this in public – indeed, even at the height of their marital crisis, she was never openly critical of Howell – but occasionally, in the privacy of their home, she would cut him down to size with a sarcastic remark delivered to cause maximum embarrassment. Years after the deaths, Howell admitted that at times he felt belittled and humiliated by his wife, although he insisted he never lost his temper about it. This awareness that Lesley had the upper hand must have eroded his male ego, and perhaps explains why he felt so much more comfortable in the company of the prim, compliant and house-proud Hazel, who seemed to look up to him and admire him. His mistress was attractive, quiet and shy and valued what Howell told her, and no doubt he felt more at ease with this than with a wife who challenged and questioned him. Derek McAuley’s wife Hilary, one of Hazel’s closest friends, told police: ‘To me Hazel seemed to be happy to remain living with Trevor and still seeing Colin Howell … Hazel was infatuated by Colin Howell.’
Even when the marriage – and her life – was disintegrating around her, Howell still felt that Lesley was the one in control. He found himself having to spend more time with the children and manage domestic matters, as she struggled to cope with the emotional crisis. He had effectively given up hope. He found his wife difficult and awkward. He had become defensive and sometimes felt powerless.
Six weeks before her death, Lesley rang her friend Ruth Middleton, anxious to discuss an incident which had occurred with Colin. As Ruth recalled to police, Lesley prefaced the disclosure in a rather unsettling way, with the words: ‘I’m telling you this in case anything happens to me.’ Ruth would later tell police of the conversation: ‘She told me she had been lying in the bath relaxing and had taken the tape recorder into the bathroom on the extension cable. She said it was behind her on the floor, or at least that’s what I understood. Colin came into the bathroom and said he needed the tape recorder. He lifted it and somehow the cable came out of it and fell into the bath. She got a shock and as a result her arm shot up and the lead went with it. The lead had landed on her arm. She did not know how this happened as it was behind her, as was Colin. He made her promise not to tell anyone, as he was embarrassed that he had done something so silly, and she promised him she wouldn’t tell anyone.’
Lesley did not explicitly say that she believed her husband made a serious attempt to kill her, but it was clear that the young mother was very unsettled by the incident, and felt the need to communicate her fear and distrust of him to her friend. She also contacted two other close female friends – Margaret Topping, and Jen, her brother Chris’s then wife – to tell them about what had happened. It was clear that Lesley’s distrust of her husband had plumbed new depths.
Years later, when questioned by police, Howell emphatically denied that his wife suffered an electric shock in the bath, or that he had attempted to kill her on this occasion. But he acknowledged that it was an incident in which he felt he had seized control in the disintegrating relationship. And when he appeared in court at the trial of Hazel Stewart in February 2011, he was more than happy to give a definitive account of what he believed had actually happened.
It was a Saturday in early spring. Lesley had wanted him to put up curtains in the bathroom at the house at Knocklayde Park. Due to the financial pressure he was under at the time, he decided to do it himself. He took the children – Matthew, Lauren and Daniel – to the B&Q store in Coleraine. Lesley had bought the curtains and he purchased the rail – a pole – to hang them. There were queues at the store and it took longer than he anticipated. Howell had been meeting secretly with Hazel at the time and, although he had not done so on this occasion, he was late arriving back, and Lesley immediately challenged him as to why he had been away for so long. Such interrogations were part of day-to-day life for the couple by this stage.
Howell used a Black & Decker drill to bore holes in the wall in the bathroom. The drill was connected to an extension lead plugged into the hallway. The work remained unfinished by the time it came to bathe the children, make the tea, put them to bed and read them a story. He disconnected the drill and pushed it and the extension lead against the wall. Lesley was in her dressing gown and decided she wanted a bath. She emptied some Radox into the water, stepped in and lay back. She wanted to listen to music, and had brought the cassette player into the bathroom. She placed the cassette at the top end of the bath, but Howell, who feared it might fall into the water, moved it to the bottom.
At one stage he was sitting as they continued to argue. He was holding the extension cable, and there was a brief pause in the row. They exchanged looks. Even though he never planned to electrocute his wife, Howell suddenly realized Lesley believed at that moment he could kill her by dropping the lead into the water. He stood up with the lead in his hand and flicked it – very lightly – across her back before deliberately letting the plug fall on to the floor and then walking out. There was a bang as it hit the wood, but Howell insisted Lesley suffered no electric shock.
All those years later, Howell told the court: ‘I didn’t have an intent[ion] to throw it in. I saw an opportunity to get Lesley off my back; to have a shift of power from the control she had over me and get it back again … I was being pressurized, pressurized, pressurized and pressurized. When I held the plug and the loose cable it was to show Lesley, there’s a way for me. I was saying to myself, there’s a way to escape. I was showing Lesley I can’t [couldn’t] stand the control.’
Howell would later couch this issue of loss of control in his life – and the terrible impact this had on his subsequent actions – in a typically biblical frame of reference: ‘King Solomon, considered to be the wisest man, said that a man who commits adultery gives up his strength to the one who is cruel. So a man who commits adultery gives up … his authority in the family, and therefore the control is given over to his wife, or to an adulteress. And I wouldn’t like to argue with the wisest man in the world.’
6.
‘Eureka’
May 1991
Dressed in a black jacket and skirt, Lesley Howell wept quietly on her own, as the mourners began to drift away. Her father’s coffin had been lowered from view inside the small church at Roselawn Crematorium on the outskirts of Belfast. As she looked across to the other side of the room, she caught sight of a familiar face: it was Pat Chambers, an old friend from her days of growing up in Scotland and Dublin.
Pat, who had been sitting near the front on the opposite side, was crying as well. She felt deeply for the girl she knew as Lesley Anne, who was six years younger than her. She went over to say how sorry she was. Lesley threw her arms around her, rested her head on her shoulder and said: ‘Pat, what am I going to do? I’ve lost the only man I ever loved.’
‘Sure, you’ve got Colin. You’ve got the kids,’ replie
d Pat, unaware of just how little comfort her words would offer to a woman whose marriage crisis had already passed the point of no return.
With the loss of her father, Harry Clarke, Lesley Howell’s life had hit rock bottom. Harry had collapsed and died of a suspected heart attack in the Howells’ kitchen just after midnight on 7 May 1991. His daughter was inconsolable.
Henry Clarke had moved to Castlerock the previous year from his home in Hillsborough, County Down. Everybody called him ‘Harry’. He wanted to be close to his only daughter and four grandchildren. He was aware of his son-in-law’s financial difficulties, and even though Lesley never discussed her problems at home with him her father knew that all was not well.
Grandpa Clarke used to take the grandchildren to a playground park, close to his small property, high above the seaside village on the North Coast. Known locally as ‘The Apostles’, the twelve houses of Cliff Terrace are something of a landmark in Castlerock – six pairs of distinctive black basalt dwellings in an English vernacular style, with lattice windows, overhanging eaves supported by struts, hooded dormers and strong timber doorways inside shared arches. Built in 1888, they originally formed a terrace along the road at the west entrance to the former Downhill Estate, and were designed to house the staff of the then Earl of Londonderry, Sir Harvey Bruce.
Harry owned No. 6, a two-up, two-down. It was a tiny house, much smaller than the three-bedroom detached home he left in Hillsborough, and although it was great in the summer months, it could be a miserable and desolate place during the dark winter nights when it was exposed to the howling gales blowing in off the Atlantic below. Lesley’s brother Chris, who was working as an anaesthetist in England at the time, had opposed the move. Why would a man in retirement leave a fine home and some good friends in Hillsborough for such a place? His father told him he needed to get away from all that. Maybe it was because he had been spending too much time in the local pubs. The Independent Unionist MP for North Down, James Kilfedder, and the cardiologist Professor Frank Pantridge, who invented the portable defibrillator, were among his closest friends in Hillsborough. They regularly met up for a lunchtime drink.
A ceremonial sword which hung from the wall in Harry’s front room was a reminder of his twenty-two years in the army. He had been a quartermaster sergeant and turned down the chance of a commission in order to begin a career in business. He liked his whiskey and he smoked a pipe, and sometimes when the weather was good he would sit on the front porch to take in the air, as well as some magnificent views of the coastline towards Portstewart.
The Howells would call with the children to see Harry on Sunday afternoons. Matthew, Lauren and Daniel usually played at the back of the house, free from any passing traffic coming and going from a caravan park directly opposite. Mr Clarke had not been around long enough to get to know his immediate neighbours, but a few remembered him as tall with silvery hair. He had a small circle of new acquaintances in the area, including Lyle Hatrick, an insurance agent and a former captain of Castlerock Golf Club, who used to sit and have an occasional drink with Harry at the house, or sometimes in the sun at the front porch. Mr Clarke would also stop off quite often at the Golf Hotel in the centre of the village for a drink – Robin Butler, the owner of the hotel, was another acquaintance. And even though it was a fair distance away from Hillsborough, old friends travelled up to see him sometimes too.
Some of Harry’s neighbours at the time recall that Lesley would often seem quiet and withdrawn when she called to see her father, and a few of them thought that it was because she had been suffering from post-natal depression. Howell never acknowledged anyone. One former neighbour remembers of the dentist: ‘He was cold, just cold. He never spoke to anybody.’
Towards the end of April or early May 1991, Harry had not been feeling well. Lesley always worried about him living on his own. He had stayed with the Howells from time to time in the past, and one day, after he complained of having flu-like symptoms, she prepared the spare room for her father and went to pick him up. Mr Clarke had been to see his GP a few days earlier. He had been anxious and depressed. His wife had been in failing health for many years before she died, and maybe the strain and pressure of tending to her needs for so long had started to take its toll. He had been given a prescription for some moderate doses of Temazepam, Gamanil and Diazepam – sleeping tablets, sedatives and antidepressants – as well as eye drops for glaucoma.
On the night Harry died, Lesley and Colin Howell had gone out to the theatre, followed by dinner; and Amanda, the daughter of their housekeeper Betty Bradley, had agreed to babysit. A student at Coleraine Technical College, she had been to the house many times before. She thought Lesley was loving and kind-hearted and that Colin came across as a gentleman. She enjoyed her baby-sitting duties in this house because the children were always well behaved and the Howells were never too late returning home.
The children were asleep and Amanda was doing her homework in a small family room towards the front of the house, close to the kitchen, when she heard someone shuffling up the hallway. She saw an elderly man in his dressing gown and pyjamas. Although she had never seen him before, she assumed that this was Lesley’s dad. She saw Mr Clarke going into the kitchen, where he kept a bottle of whiskey and sometimes poured himself a nightcap. She heard the kettle being switched on and the door being closed.
Not long afterwards, the Howells returned. It was just gone midnight. Lesley was first into the house. She went to the kitchen and then began to scream when she found her father on the floor, lying on his side. Howell rushed in, knelt down and felt for a pulse in Mr Clarke’s carotid artery. He could not detect anything.
Dr Hazel Siberry, Harry’s GP, was called to the house and pronounced life extinct. Given the position of the body, it looked to be a classic case of myocardial infarction – heart failure. A distressed Lesley and her brother Chris, who had been contacted by telephone, accepted Dr Siberry’s finding and agreed that a post-mortem examination was not necessary. Harry Clarke was dead, aged sixty-nine.
At the time, nobody suspected for a moment that Harry Clarke’s death was anything other than sudden and from natural causes. Why would they? But years later, after the arrests of Howell and Stewart, some people, including his son Chris, had their doubts, suspecting something more sinister. Mr Clarke had collapsed just twelve days before the discovery of the bodies of Howell’s wife and Trevor Buchanan. If Howell murdered them, then surely he would have been capable of killing his father-in-law to get his hands on the inheritance because he was so strapped for cash?
Why would Colin Howell end up using an old British passport belonging to his late father-in-law which was found in his BMW later that year? It was autumn, and friends discovered it after he asked to borrow their seven-seater Peugeot 505 for the weekend. He loaned them his car. The couple checked to make sure they had not left any of their belongings behind, and there it was – lying in the side pocket of the driver’s door.
Harry Clarke’s name was on the passport, but curiously the ID photograph was of Colin Howell. He had obviously replaced Harry Clarke’s picture with a small head-and-shoulders snapshot of himself. It was not particularly well done, but was clearly good enough to conceal his identity. His friends were astonished and wondered why. Even after the tragedy of his wife’s and Trevor Buchanan’s deaths, they remained close to Howell. He and the children would be invited to the house for tea, but they confided in others – all members of Coleraine Baptist Church – about what they had found. They were equally intrigued.
But Howell, being Howell, just passed it off. He told them it wasn’t really all that significant, and there was no need to think of him carrying a false passport as being the least bit suspicious. One of his friends told police: ‘He said it was not what it looked like. Nobody knew what was going on at the time. The matter was just left and subsequently forgotten.’
Detectives challenged Howell after his arrest, but he denied he had used it to travel abroad. Instead, he claimed
he presented it at the counter to obtain children’s videos at shops in neighbouring Limavady where he believed few people would have known him. It was not long after the bodies had been found in Castlerock and he did not want to draw unnecessary attention to himself because of all the gossip and speculation in Coleraine. He had a compulsion to watch pornographic movies, but said the videos he rented out under the name of Harry Clarke were for the children back home.
Howell told police: ‘I didn’t live in a very real world. That was part of the unreality. It was a clumsy effort to be anonymous in a different town.’
Even though he had no definite proof, Chris Clarke certainly had his suspicions. He stayed at Howell’s home with his wife Jen at the time of his father’s funeral. He knew that Howell’s business was in trouble and that he was cheating on Lesley, and he accused Howell of deliberately feeding his sister sedatives at a time when he knew she was drinking. Chris told the author: ‘I think it is very likely that he did murder my father. I thought initially he simply murdered him because he might be encouraging my sister to leave. Now I think he murdered him to get his hands on money, as a prelude to murdering my sister. With hand on heart, I can’t say Colin Howell murdered my dad. I just don’t know for certain, but it is much more likely than not that he did.’
Lesley’s aunt in Lurgan, County Armagh, Mrs Alice Berry, had planned to come and see her niece after her father’s death, but Howell made it clear he did not want her to come, although she was free to attend the cremation at Roselawn. She did not go. Mrs Berry, a former teacher, recalls: ‘I had promised Lesley I would travel up. Colin called and said: “I am ringing to dissuade you from coming here as neither of them is fit to see you.” I assumed it was the wishes of Lesley and Chris that I didn’t go. I had to take into account what I assumed were their feelings at the time. Lesley sounded anxious when she called me. She probably felt I was the only person she could turn to. I think Howell was afraid she would tell me too much about what was going on and she would confide in me. He was suspicious.
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