Howell had another reason for taking this slightly circuitous route. About a mile outside Castlerock village, he changed down a gear, enabling him to negotiate a narrow stone bridge. He then turned right into the Barmouth Road. He knew this area well: it was where he and Hazel used to rendezvous, near a bird sanctuary on the banks of the River Bann. There would be few people about, especially after dark: just courting couples in cars with the headlights switched off. It was here that he and Hazel sometimes had sex. It was here that he had discussed the plan for the murders with his lover.
He passed over the level crossing of the Coleraine–Londonderry railway line which skirts a stretch of Castlerock golf links. He pulled in by the side of the road, lifted his bicycle from the boot and left it hidden in deep grass on a verge outside the boundary fence, between the fifth green and the sixth tee box. He then drove to the entrance to the beach at Castlerock. The next part of his plan was not clearly formulated as yet – he had never been able to get far beyond the point at which he had carried out the two killings. He now needed to find a credible venue for the staging of the double suicide, and the thought had just occurred to him that the beach at Castlerock might be a good place. But almost as quickly, just before he reached the sand, he changed his mind. Daybreak was approaching fast, and he feared he might meet people out for early morning walks. He would be seen. He was also worried his footprints would be found in the sand.
So he turned the car and kept driving, through the village, up a steep hill and then on to the row of tiny cottages, The Apostles, sitting high above the small seaside resort. He went round to the back of the houses and to a brick garage at the rear of No. 6, until so recently the home of Lesley’s father. Howell pulled on another pair of the rubber surgical gloves which he had taken from the surgery. He was careful to wear gloves throughout what he would later refer to as ‘the procedures’, because he did not want to leave any fingerprints.
Once he had pushed open the up-and-over door of Harry Clarke’s garage, he reversed in, leaving just enough room to enable him to open the boot. The garage was narrow and he had to manoeuvre the car tight to one side. The place was cluttered and untidy; there were old kitchen worktops and shelving up to the ceiling. An artificial Christmas tree was lying on one of the ledges. A wooden chair sat on top of a bench in front of the window and there was an empty grey plastic bin underneath, close to an old radiator. Lengths of electric cable dangled from a couple of hooks, and below was a foldaway orange-and-white-coloured summer chair.
He removed the sheet covering the bodies and, still trembling with adrenalin, carried Trevor’s body from the boot and along the side of the car, heaving it on to the driver’s seat. Trevor’s body was now lying low, his head slumped to the right, at the same level as the dashboard, his backside off the seat. Howell could not manage to close the door because his victim’s right knee jammed in the hinge of the open door. He then placed Trevor’s right hand on the steering wheel.
Howell’s next task was to get Lesley’s body into position. He laid her out on her back so that she was stretched out the full width of the boot, with her right arm raised towards her head and her left across part of her stomach. Her legs lay sideways. He pushed an old lampshade to one side and then tried to fit her bare feet into a pair of white training shoes. Now he was in too much of a hurry to lace them up and he didn’t bother. Lesley’s knees rested on a rolled-up red, yellow and green striped golfing brolly which Howell had used to shield himself from the rain when he played a few rounds with friends.
His work was not quite finished yet. He set out three family photographs beside his wife’s body. One was of her with her brother Chris and their father; in it, she had a shorter hairstyle, Chris sported a beard and their father stood between the two of them. The second picture was of Lesley in her Royal Victoria Hospital uniform, with her mother, on the day she graduated as a State Registered Nurse. And the third photo captured happier times too: it showed Lesley and Howell, just before they left her rented house in Belfast for a School of Dentistry dinner dance. Lesley was in formal evening wear, clutching a red rose, and Howell was in a dinner suit with a red carnation in his buttonhole, his hands behind his back. The oval-shaped photograph of the seemingly perfect couple was framed in silver.
Howell had noticed some days previously that a vacuum hose which once belonged to an old Hoover in need of repair had been lying in the boot of the hatchback for weeks, and he had known it would come in handy. He pushed one end into the exhaust pipe and placed the other just inches away from Lesley’s head, beside one of the unfastened safety belts. The narrow hose kept falling out, but he knew that once he pulled the tailgate closed, it would stay in place.
Everything had gone more or less to plan thus far, but there was one final act he had to do. His wife had always enjoyed listening to gospel music on her Sony Walkman, especially when the children were asleep or occupying themselves. She could get on with the housework and retreat into her own little world, tidying up as she danced from room to room, singing to herself. Howell switched on the car’s ignition and, as the engine started to tick over and release more noxious fumes, he inserted a tape into the Walkman, positioned the earphones in each of Lesley’s ears, pushed the play button and then pulled down the tailgate.
He had a moment of slight panic when he first turned on the ignition without firing up the engine – he had forgotten to open the driver’s side window to use as a ledge to enable him to get out of the garage. The door was open and was jammed by Trevor’s right knee. Once he had opened the window fully, he switched the car engine on properly. He then climbed on to the roof and slid down over the bonnet. He took one final look back at the scene as he closed the garage door. All he could hear was the faint voice of Adrian Snell – the English-born religious singer who was his wife’s favourite and whom she had once heard live in Belfast’s Ulster Hall – coming from Lesley’s earphones.
Howell took off, picking up his pace quickly into a run. In his hand was a plastic carrier bag, inside it the blanket he had used to cover the bodies in the boot, and the used surgical gloves. But he needn’t have worried. There was no one around. The deathly silence was broken only by the sound of the waves of the incoming tide and the chimes of the clock in the tower of Christ Church parish church, which sounded every fifteen minutes. Castlerock was asleep.
The people next door to Harry Clarke’s, at No. 5, never heard a thing. Moore and Ann Adair from Londonderry had been out the night before at the Golf Hotel. Their small dog, a Yorkshire terrier called Lucy, was in the kitchen and slept undisturbed. The first the Adairs would know of the deaths was later that day when Mr Adair went to get a newspaper and met a police officer standing in his doorway.
Howell made the first part of his escape on foot. By the time he jogged down the steep hill of Tunnel Brae, jumped on to the sand and turned right, he had the beach at Castlerock to himself. He was wearing jeans, trainers and a jumper. He ran towards the mouth of the River Bann where it collided with the sea – known locally as the Bar Mouth.
Howell had always kept himself fit. He was competitive and had once cycled through France. To his right, he could now see the lights of some houses and the Golf Hotel. He was the only sinner around and soon he was by the water’s edge. He turned right again and made his way up along the side of the river. Then he moved inland and, head down, pushed his way through the heavy undergrowth and the thick and oppressive buckthorn bushes by the side of Castlerock golf course. The first signs of daybreak were beginning to emerge clearly now. He could have cut through the golf course and been confident enough that he wouldn’t have encountered anybody out on the fairways at this ungodly hour, by making his way towards the seventh hole and then the sixth. That would have been the most direct route, but he decided to stay off the golf course and he stuck to the river’s edge.
Eventually he made his way back to the Barmouth Road where he had left his bicycle, close to a few occupied cottages on the edge of the nature reserve.
All was still and there were no signs of life. He didn’t take long to retrieve the bike from the grass verge. Soon he was on his way again, this time pedalling frantically towards Coleraine. The steep hills on the road of the return three-mile journey did not present a huge challenge to Howell: he had cycled many mountainous roads before. Although the enormity of what he had done may still have had to sink in, his heart was racing with the physical and mental strain of the last hours. But he was a man on a mission and still very much in control.
It might have been around 5 a.m. or 5.30 a.m. by the time he got home. It was now light and he worried that somebody in the neighbouring houses might have seen him. He checked that the children were still asleep and then he called Hazel, using the click system. Although there was clearly no need now to worry about Trevor hearing anything, he did not want to disturb her two children. Hazel called him straight back and he told her he was home and asked if she’d done as instructed: ‘Have you cleaned up? Have you burned the hosepipe?’ Hazel assured him she had. He then briefed her on what she was to tell the police later that day, once the bodies were found: ‘You have to say that you heard Lesley and Trevor speaking in the early hours of the morning …’
Howell then went to the living room where he had left the windows open to get rid of the fumes. He raked out the ashes in the grate from the night before. With firelighters, wood and coal from a bucket sitting on the hearth, he lit a new fire and, using a pair of scissors, he cut up the jeans and long-sleeved sweat-shirt he had been wearing for the last few hours. The surgical gloves were also thrown into the flames, along with the plastic bag.
Howell did not go to bed. He knew he would have to call the church elders later and report Lesley missing, claiming she had left the house with Trevor in the middle of the night and had failed to return. He would also tell them that he had been involved in an altercation with Trevor; this would explain the bump on his head, in case anyone noticed.
But there was one more detail which needed his attention now, one which would help convince everyone that the deaths had been suicides. While Howell had never been one for keeping a diary himself or for writing letters now that his student days were over, Lesley had always been more inclined to put pen to paper. She would have exchanged letters all the time with her old friends from school and the girls she had met while nursing. Not long beforehand, when Howell had been rummaging through some old papers and documents in the house, quite by accident he had found a note Lesley had obviously written after her father died, when her spirits had been very low. Normally her writing was small and tidy, but the way this note had been written was not as neat, and it was obvious that these were the words of a woman in deep distress who may have been contemplating suicide. The note read:
Dear Colin, I’m just trying to go to sleep now, [for] how long I don’t know. Thank you for your help over the past few days and for the good times in our marriage. I don’t know what to say to you because I don’t know how I feel, but I have seen that life goes on after a few weeks of pain, and, let’s face it Colin, I am nothing in comparison to what you lost in the one you loved awhile back. If I wake up in the morning, just let this be our secret. Lesley.
Maybe she had second thoughts about the note even as she had written it, because it appeared to have been crumpled up. In any case, once Howell found it he set it carefully aside. Because it did not look fresh, initially he had hesitated as to whether he should use it at all. Yet something which appeared so clearly to reflect a depressive and suicidal state of mind was too good to pass up, as a handy extra ‘prop’ when it came to executing the next part of his plan – which was to convince everyone that the deaths had been suicide rather than murder. The note was perfect after all. He set it down on the kitchen floor and waited.
9.
Getting away with murder
Robin Hastings was relaxing with a glass of pink gin in the men’s bar at Castlerock Golf Club with a couple of pals when his pager buzzed with an urgent message to call Coleraine police station. It was late Sunday afternoon on another gloriously warm May day on the North Coast. From its vantage point the clubhouse afforded a spectacular view over the entrance to Lough Foyle and the fishing village of Greencastle in County Donegal on the far side, where a few hours later the sun would set, and then dip to leave a stretch of the Inishowen Peninsula with a brilliant orange skyline.
The Coroner for north Antrim, who played off a six handicap, had been in excellent form as he held court with his regular golfing partner, Bill Yea, from Dungannon. The two were delighted at having just relieved two friends of some money which had been wagered over eighteen holes on the great championship links. Now, however, Hastings had to break off the conversation before going to make a call on the public telephone outside the secretary’s office. A police officer at the other end of the line wasted no time in telling him the grim news: ‘We’ve found two bodies in a garage at the back of The Apostles. Looks like suicide.’
In cases of sudden and unexplained deaths, whose circumstances can include anything from road fatalities to murder, a coroner must be informed immediately, as part of the investigative process which will eventually lead to a public inquest over which he or she must preside to examine and determine the exact circumstances and causes of death. Suicides are not uncommon – but two together is highly unusual. Hastings, a highly experienced coroner by this time, asked to be kept informed of developments, returned to his chair in the lounge upstairs and beckoned the bar steward for another round. He needed a stiff drink.
The bodies of Lesley and Trevor were discovered after two separate attempts had earlier failed to trace them. The first person to look for them was Jim Flanagan, one of the elders of the Howells’ church. Colin Howell had telephoned Jim, a language teacher at Coleraine Academical Institution, that morning, telling him Lesley was missing. He asked his church friend if he would be good enough to go to the village of Castlerock and check No. 6 The Apostles, the house of Lesley’s recently deceased father. Colin Howell told Jim that, given her distressed and emotional state, it was likely that his wife might have gone there to grieve. He explained that he would have gone himself but that he had no one to keep an eye on his children in the meantime.
Flanagan duly drove out to The Apostles. He checked the outside of No. 6 and the garage at the back. He didn’t go inside, but he could see nothing unusual and returned to Howell’s house straight away. An agitated Howell asked him if he would call the ferry companies to ask about Lesley’s possible whereabouts; he told Flanagan that he had already been on to the police and hospitals to enquire if there had been any car accidents or emergency admissions. ‘Maybe she and Trevor have boarded a boat for Scotland,’ Howell thought out loud, explaining that Lesley had been drinking the night before and had driven off. She could very well have gone to see Trevor, as the two had been confiding in each other about their spouses’ affair. Jim was well aware of the marital difficulties in the Howell and Buchanan households.
Before Flanagan left Knocklayde Park to go to a Sunday morning service at Coleraine Baptist, Howell showed him a letter written by Lesley. Flanagan would later tell the police in the investigation immediately after the deaths: ‘I’ve been asked since if I thought it was a suicide note. There was no hint of that in the letter as far as I could see, although I wouldn’t be experienced in these things. But there was an indication suggesting that she was going away and there was a sort of a farewell in it. She expressed her love both to her husband and to her family. I read that, but I have no clear memory of the phraseology. But those sentiments were in it.’
Howell then got in touch with another church friend to ask if he too would come to see him. Derek McAuley said he found Howell, dressed in a sweat-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, looking anxious and agitated. He was now saying that Trevor had come to the house during the night, and that he and the young policeman had been involved in a struggle but that he, Howell, had managed to overpower him. Then Trevor had driven off with Lesley, who had the key
s to her late father’s house. McAuley also remembered being shown a suicide note, which he quickly read without paying too much attention to its contents. ‘I do recall that I could see no marks or injury on Colin Howell, so obviously the two of them had not been battering the daylights out of each other,’ he would later tell police.
The last time McAuley had been to The Apostles it had been a social call to see Harry Clarke – a civilized and pleasant visit. But now McAuley feared for his life. He was terrified that Trevor Buchanan had become deranged because of the marital strife and, thinking that he, McAuley, was the man he’d confronted the previous night, might shoot him. The front door was closed but unlocked. He was concerned about going inside because he knew Trevor was a policeman who had access to a gun. He told the police later: ‘It had crossed my mind before that if Trevor had taken the “head staggers”, he could possibly have killed Hazel and Colin with his firearm. I even on occasion had told him, or rather asked him, to keep his gun at the police station.’
In his later account, McAuley remembered pushing the front door open and shouting: ‘Trevor, you know the drama is over now, it’s Derek here. It’s me, Derek, not Colin.’ He climbed the narrow stairs towards the bedrooms, with visions of Trevor sitting with his gun, ready to shoot the first person to walk through the door. If not, he feared, then Trevor and Lesley might be lying dead in one of the rooms. He shouted out again: ‘It’s me, Derek, not Colin,’ and checked the rest of the house. Then he made his way to the back, walking over towards the garage. It was a sunny day, and he had to shade his eyes with a hand as he squinted in at a back window. He saw Howell’s Renault car and noticed how dirty it was. He didn’t see anybody inside, but he could smell what he believed to be gas. He then moved along the side of the garage towards the front again, where he could have sworn he glimpsed someone peering out from behind a curtained window in the house he had just left, No. 6. He went into the house again but found no one, and then decided that it was time to leave.
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