Let This Be Our Secret

by Deric Henderson

  Perhaps not all of it was playacting. Two months after Lesley’s death, Howell found two-year-old Daniel crying out for his mother and pointing to her photograph on the wall. As he would recount in later years, he took his young son in his arms and thought to himself: ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ And Hazel told friends more than once that she used to have a certain dream about Trevor. There was one scene in particular in the dream which troubled her greatly: the one where she found herself walking along a corridor and holding out her arms to her late husband. But Trevor just turned away and wouldn’t come to her.

  12.

  Deviance and denial: Colin Howell and sex

  Whatever hopes Colin Howell might have harboured, the murders didn’t quite pave the way to blissful happiness with the woman with whom he had become increasingly obsessed. In spite of his declared willingness – in his letter to his lover immediately after the deaths – to play the long game when it came to their relationship and to wait until an acceptable length of time had passed before going public again, there was one thing over which he had no control – and that was the impact of the murders on his and Hazel’s sex life. He could not have predicted how things would become increasingly dysfunctional between them after May 1991, even though sexual dysfunction was something with which Colin Howell had been well acquainted for most of his adult life.

  Despite their best endeavours, the toxic couple would find that sex was never quite the same again after the murders. Hazel had a deeply troubled conscience, and her guilt over the deaths of her husband and Lesley meant that she found it increasingly difficult to relax when they were having sex. She soon became filled with the conviction that if they did not have intercourse, then they were not sinning. And that if they were not sinning, then God would protect them from discovery. Howell later described this strangely distorted thinking as a ‘twisted Christian, spiritual logic’, whereby God would not only protect them if they desisted from sex, but actually forgave them too: ‘There was this twisted logic … that if we don’t have full sex, then maybe God will forgive us and we won’t get caught …’

  A strong element of denial had always been part of Hazel’s modus operandi, it seemed, when it came to sex with Howell. It was evident from their very first sexual encounter, when she expressed surprise after the event that it had happened at all. And after the deaths, this failure of honesty continued, with the couple refusing to acknowledge even to themselves that they were having sex, particularly in the run-up to the 1992 inquest into their spouses’ deaths, as Howell would later confirm in police interviews: ‘So this myth began to develop and that became a pattern from then on …’ Even when they did not have full intercourse but reached orgasm in any case, they were still in denial: ‘But both of us denied to ourselves and each other that we were having sex, and the climax was always followed up by extreme guilt …’

  Eventually full sex stopped altogether, even though the relationship continued for another four years after the murders. One can only imagine the level of frustration which must have been experienced by Howell: a man with, by his own admission, a particularly voracious sexual appetite. It is not surprising then that he would not give up their sex life without a fight. He had a solution, just as he had a solution for everything.

  Hazel liked being under the influence of gas and air. She had it when she called as a patient before the affair started: it made her feel relaxed and quietly euphoric. But it was only after the murders of Trevor and Lesley that she discovered that the laughing gas combination could raise her libido and make her feel pleasantly detached, thereby lowering her sexual inhibitions. The discovery was made by the couple one night on their way home from a meal at a Chinese restaurant, when they called into Howell’s surgery so that Hazel could have her teeth scaled and polished.

  Obsessive about her appearance in general, Hazel was very particular about her teeth and had some cosmetic work done for her by Howell which she was keen to show off. She didn’t like to go to Howell during daytime hours, however, for fear of being seen – hence the after-hours visit to the surgery after the restaurant on this occasion. Before starting the cleaning process, Howell had given her the nitrous oxide combination he would usually administer to patients who suffered from some anxiety during treatment, as Hazel did. Although by mutual agreement they had effectively stopped having intercourse by this stage, that night they ended up having sex on his dentist’s chair. Howell was able to act out his fantasy, for a short time anyway, and Hazel felt no sense of shame. Under the influence of the laughing gas, she had no trouble in climaxing. It would be the first of many out-of-hours encounters when the couple would have the clinic all to themselves.

  Their use of drugs to heighten – or, in Hazel’s case, to simply enable – sexual enjoyment hit a new high on the occasion when, this time at the Buchanan home, Howell produced a needle and sedated her intravenously, injecting her in the right arm with Hypnovel (a trade name for midazolam), a powerful valium derivative often used as a precursor to general anaesthetic before surgery. The couple proceeded to have sex, although Hazel was barely conscious throughout and for a long while afterwards. It seems hard to reconcile the dentist’s actions with the man who many years previously sacked a member of his staff caught inhaling laughing gas during lunch hour. But then again, double standards and hypocrisy were behaviours which Howell had been comfortable with for much of his life.

  A friend from that time remembers an exchange with Howell shortly after his thirty-fourth birthday in March 1993 – some two years or so after the deaths. He had been given a card by an acquaintance in which was written the following verse from James 1:15: ‘Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.’ Colin asked his friend what she believed the verse meant and why it might have been chosen by the person who gave him the card. Talking to police in later years, she remembered the conversation with Howell as calm and civilized, but also that she felt distinctly uncomfortable when he moved to hug her afterwards: ‘There was always something hidden in Colin’s eyes. There was a stillness about him. I talked to [him] about the verse and its true meaning. I then clearly remember him saying: “It’s not like I’m into pornography.” ’

  Yet again, Howell was deep in denial. The truth is that he was very much into pornography – so much so that, at more than one point in his life, he had despaired of ever being able to free himself of what had become an all-consuming obsession. Over the years Howell developed a formidable sex drive, and there were days when he thought about nothing else. Naked women looking out from the pages of porn magazines did wonders for his sexual vanity, and he once told someone that he felt as if he was some sort of Adonis.

  Pornography – particularly the online variety – later became a very real and serious problem for him, taking up too much of his spare time and threatening to overshadow his real relationships. And the fact that this type of sexual gratification was considered wicked and immoral within the very strict Christian code of ethics he prided himself on living by made Howell’s torment at being unable to stop all the more agonizing. He would liken his addiction to porn to that of an alcoholic always thirsting for the next drink. Describing on one occasion his often futile efforts to walk past sex shops without going in, he told police: ‘It is as if you are in the AA, walking past a pub and gasping for a drink. You can smell the Guinness and just want to go in.’

  It had all started with the porn magazines, however. He read them voraciously. Just months after he married Lesley and while they were holidaying in Fuengirola, Spain, he produced one at their hotel room, telling her he had found it in the wardrobe and insisting his wife act out a sexual fantasy with him. At other times he would try to spice up their sex life by renting pornographic movies. Lesley was never comfortable with it, however. Years later, there would also be a weekend in the Lake District with Hazel. They booked separate rooms for the trip: at that stage, owing to Hazel’s guilt about the murders, they h
ad agreed a no-penetrative-sex pact. But Howell managed to charm his way into her bed anyway, opening a porn magazine and proceeding to pleasure them both. Hazel was filled with self-loathing afterwards for breaking her self-imposed vow of celibacy, and that brief act would overshadow the rest of their time away from Coleraine.

  Howell never used prostitutes, although he was obviously tempted, especially when he was in London for business. When he was there, he would look into massage parlours but he refused to enter, for fear of catching an infection. He would often find himself standing outside sex shops, fighting an overwhelming desire to go inside and see what was available. Sometimes he would call a friend in a panic, try to calm himself and then walk on. Other times he didn’t bother struggling with his conscience and just slipped in anyway to have a look and make a purchase. But it was when the internet became an essential part of his working life that his addiction really took hold. Soon he found himself taking any opportunity he could to sit at his computer screen and log on to X-rated websites and masturbate: in the surgery office after hours, and at home when everyone else in the house was asleep.

  Before he confided in anyone else about his growing problem, Howell found himself, along with some of the church elders, offering to lend his help to another member of The Barn Fellowship who was struggling with his own sexual difficulties. Harry Burke’s particular weakness was downloading pornographic images of young children. By some strange quirk of fate, many years later, after his confession to the murders and his subsequent incarceration in Maghaberry prison, Howell would find himself sharing a cell with Burke, by then a convicted paedophile several times over.

  Howell had known Burke since 1992, during the time when his relationship with Hazel was still ongoing. He was one of the dentist’s patients at the surgery and they shared the same religious beliefs. They played football, went clay pigeon shooting at a club near Castlerock owned by Burke’s father, and once went on a fishing trip together. Burke was single at the time and had few friends. Some years later he went to South America to help with an organization called Youth with a Mission, working with street children in Bolivia. He was hardly the type of individual who could be trusted in the company of those who were so young and vulnerable. But nobody knew of his secret proclivities then, not even the local woman he met and went on to marry before bringing her back to Northern Ireland, where they would have four children of their own. His sordid compulsion to download as well as make indecent child images never left him, however. Eventually his Spanish-speaking wife discovered the dark side of her husband. Her suspicions were aroused when she realized that any time she went unannounced into his room while he was working on his laptop, he would slam down the lid before she could see what he was up to. Finally she challenged him and learned the unsavoury truth.

  With Burke’s marriage now in crisis, the elders of The Barn Fellowship became privy to the fact that one of their members had a serious problem. Howell and a few others in the close circle of the church started to counsel him, even taking him to a one-day conference on addiction in Belfast. Howell, of course, found the day particularly enlightening, given his own compulsions. But he had yet to share his problem with his friends from the Fellowship, and to them he was just a fellow believer keen to help out a troubled member of the flock.

  But Burke’s difficulties were intractable and the best efforts of The Barn Fellowship were to no avail. Howell visited him at his home on one further occasion before deciding it was time for him to step back and let others try to help. The elders later found they had no choice but to bar Burke from the Fellowship altogether.

  Burke was subsequently charged with downloading illegal images of children, and he has been in and out of prison several times since. He was angry, however, with the men who threw him out of the Fellowship and felt he had been unfairly treated by one of the elders in particular. Some years later he turned up on Howell’s doorstep, as the family were about to sit down for dinner. A difficult few moments ensued. With children of his own in the house, the dentist had no intention of allowing a convicted paedophile access to the family home and quickly turned Burke away with a fairly direct refusal: ‘Harry, I can’t invite you in. I have young children here and we know your background. You really have to sort things out before I can re-establish our friendship.’

  Imagine the look of disbelief on Howell’s face then, in early 2009, when Burke put his head around the door of his cell in Maghaberry Prison where the dentist was being held after his arrest. They even found themselves having to share a cell for a few days. Burke was back in custody, facing new charges of breaching a sexual offences order, having allegedly sent an indecent message from his mobile phone. Howell was suffering extreme paranoia at the time and believed that Burke had been sent to spy on him.

  Although he maintained his silence regarding his own problems when they first tried to help Burke, Howell was soon compelled to confide in trusted members of The Barn Fellowship as his obsession with porn became ever more powerful. By the time he was married to Kyle, his second wife – whom he met not long after his relationship with Hazel finally ended – his online compulsion was causing serious problems in his life. He told police: ‘It is probably something I would prefer not to have had an addiction with. I felt it was a betrayal of Kyle. I got my excitement and arousal from that and not from my wife. That wasn’t good for the relationship. Kyle was the main person in my life. She wasn’t going to feel special if I was always thinking and looking around somewhere else.’

  Unlike Burke, Howell restricted himself to ‘soft’ adult pornography – information he would later volunteer during police interviews: ‘Anything I looked at was no worse than me buying a top-shelf magazine in any garage or petrol station. The worst you could see [there] was the worst that I was looking at on the internet. I never got into fetishes like rubber or sadomasochism, or anything I would call a deeper level and the need for something more satisfying … If I actually came across “fetish” things, then I would just leave it. Two men or two women with sex toys – that would have been the worst I would have looked at. I would have used a keyword like “secretary” … That would have been an area I would have targeted.’

  Kyle soon knew about her husband’s questionable use of the internet, and she wanted him to do something to sort the issue out once and for all. How could she feel special and the only woman in his life if he was browsing porn sites online? But the computer screen at night was an irresistible lure. Every now and again he promised to stop but couldn’t help himself. The more he tried, the worse it got, and so he decided to confide in some of the elders at his church.

  Two good friends, who breakfasted and prayed with him every Thursday morning at one of their homes, tried to help. They suggested a method which had the approval of many Christian-based organizations in the United States, and which they felt Howell would be comfortable with. And so he signed up to a software company specializing in ‘accountability’ and filtering programs which monitor the sexual content of web pages. ‘Covenant Eyes’, the firm in question, was founded in 2000 by Ronald DeHaas in the USA, and took inspiration for its name from a passage in the Bible, Job 31:1: ‘I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman.’ At $60 for a year’s subscription, it seemed a relatively inexpensive way for Howell to try to break his destructive habit.

  As recommended by the manufacturers, the dentist’s next step after purchasing and installing the software was to elect an ‘accountability partner’ – in his case, a church friend – who could monitor the web pages Howell looked at on his own computer. The partner would be alerted on a weekly basis by email and provided with a detailed report of the sites the dentist visited when he powered up his Apple laptop, which he also used for business and for PowerPoint presentations for patients. Each website address would appear on the report, along with a rating, which could vary from ‘E’ (Everyone) to ‘HM’ (Highly Mature), the HM classification denoting anything containing nudity, erotica or porno
graphy. For example, the sites accessed to consult the couple’s online bank account, or by Kyle when ordering food for delivery from the local supermarket, would be classified as ‘E’, and ‘scored’ at the lowest level, around 20 points or so. But if Howell accessed a site of an explicit sexual nature after he keyed words like ‘babe’ or ‘hot secretary’ into Google, then the score would soar to somewhere between 200 and 300 points and the ‘HM’ rating would appear. If anything unsuitable appeared on the reports, it was the partner’s task to phone Howell to discuss the lapses with him.

  Howell had the program on his laptop for four years and during that time his friend, whom he referred to as his ‘watchdog’, would be called upon more than once. Sometimes he could go for up to three months, maybe six, without looking at anything inappropriate, but the self-imposed ban was never indefinite. The rest of the time, even the ‘buddy’ system didn’t stop the dentist from accessing pornography at least once a week. When he wanted to, he simply used his office computer, which didn’t have the software installed on it. Once the surgery emptied and his staff left for home, Howell would close the door to watch porn and pleasure himself. As he would later tell police, he cheated on his ‘watchdog’ too: ‘I bypassed my own guards.’ Finally, in mid-2008, he eventually had the Covenant Eyes software removed from his laptop, claiming it was playing havoc with the rest of the content on his hard drive which he needed for his work.

  Howell’s sexual urges also extended to his chair in the surgery. While the devout dentist would, according to former staff, sometimes read his Bible and pray with like-minded patients who called for treatment, every now and again he also took advantage of heavily sedated and vulnerable women to satisfy his predatory instincts.