According to Houston, it was not until October 2010 that he became aware of David Green’s misgivings. During the initial inquiry, he insists, he maintained an open-minded approach and had no reason to suspect a crime had been committed. He did not recall Green raising any concerns: ‘What I can say is that if David Green had told me anything that would have raised concerns with me, I would not have needed any encouragement to ensure relevant further inquiries would have been carried out.’
14.
‘A sad adulteress’
Jonny Howell was just eight months old when his mum died. In later years, whenever he or his siblings asked their father what had happened, Howell would always reply: ‘It looks like suicide, but no one was really ever sure.’ Some of the Howell children remember seeing their father cry once in the weeks after their mother’s death, when Matthew was aged six, Lauren four and Daniel two. The only other time they ever recalled him becoming emotional about Lesley’s death was a few months later, when little Daniel pointed towards a photograph of his mother and started to cry. Howell lifted Daniel into his arms and said to himself: ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ Otherwise, Howell seemed to adjust quite quickly to single parenthood, reading the children stories from the Bible at bedtime or reaching for his guitar to sing them a song. As time went by, Lesley’s name was rarely mentioned in the family home, with Howell actively discouraging the children from discussing their mother, even among themselves. Visits to her grave stopped. Soon it was as if – as far as Howell was concerned anyway – his wife and the mother of his four children had never existed.
But while to friends and even to his own children it seemed as if Howell was taking Lesley’s death remarkably well and coping admirably, in fact every so often he would react to situations in bizarre ways, which suggested that underneath his façade was a deep unease.
In March 1992 – almost a year after Lesley’s death – some of the widower’s friends decided to hold a surprise thirty-third birthday party for him at the family home. It had been arranged that a doctor friend and an old pal from his time at university would take him out for a time, while the house was set up. Everybody hid in the kitchen and waited. When Howell returned to the house and switched on the lights in the kitchen, he gasped in astonishment as they all broke into song, wishing him a happy birthday. He couldn’t believe it. One of the guests there that night remembers: ‘The look on his face was like sheer fear. He was like a cornered rabbit. His eyes were staring and he didn’t look at all comfortable.’
Then there was the time in early 1993 when he contacted David Hussey – a former acquaintance from his student days – completely out of the blue, to commiserate with him over the death of his brother, Harold. David, who had also studied dentistry, went on to become a senior lecturer and consultant in restorative dentistry at the School of Dentistry at Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. Harold Hussey had been a serving officer in the RUC. On Christmas Eve 1992, he had attended a family party with David and his other siblings at their mother’s house in Omagh. It had been a great family get-together, with a sing-song in one room and karaoke in another. But just days later, on 27 December, Harold Hussey was found dead in his car.
The young policeman had been staying with his in-laws on the outskirts of the town, at Gillygooley, not far from where Hazel’s family lived. He had spent the day driving around Northern Ireland to look at various police stations where he had served in the past, before he pulled in by the roadside, a few miles outside Omagh, attached a hosepipe to the exhaust of his car, and switched on the ignition. He died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The large attendance at his funeral service at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Omagh on New Year’s Eve was a very public acknowledgement of the thirty-nine-year-old sergeant’s popularity. Friends, especially his police colleagues, were stunned.
Howell and David Hussey had not spoken for several years and they were never particularly close. Hussey knew Hazel Buchanan’s family quite well: her brother, Raymond Elkin, was a dentist who had also studied at Queen’s, and had been in the year below David. Howell, however, telephoned Hussey, saying he had just wanted to get in touch to pass on his sympathy and telling him: ‘I know what you are going through. You know, I have been through something similar myself in the past few years. I’m thinking about you.’ But the gesture was misplaced and inappropriate and left Hussey bewildered. He would later tell friends that the call had made him feel uncomfortable. As one friend said: ‘It put him in the position of having to discuss a very personal and sensitive family issue with a man he hadn’t seen in ages.’
Hazel Buchanan, meanwhile, rarely discussed the death of her husband with anybody outside her immediate family. Even those close to her never heard her mention the word ‘suicide’. About a year after the deaths, Hazel turned to one of her sisters and said: ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if Trevor walked through the door now, to see the joy in Lisa and Andrew’s faces?’
One former colleague of Hazel’s, who knew her when she had worked part time in an office outside Coleraine, recalls of her: ‘I always got the impression that she was holding something back, and that she didn’t feel comfortable talking about her husband’s death. I felt that I knew her, but on the other hand, I didn’t … You knew as much as she wanted you to know. Her personal life was a closed book. Hazel had low self-esteem. She didn’t like anyone making a fuss of her and couldn’t cope with confrontation.’
In the aftermath of Trevor’s death, Hazel did her best to help her two children come to terms with what had happened. Photographs of their father remained on display in prominent places in the house, and sometimes they browsed through the family albums together. Every Sunday the two children helped to tidy up and put flowers on Trevor’s grave. Even though he died when they were young, the children had fond memories of their father. He had always helped them with their school homework. Andrew was just seven when his dad took him to have a look around Coleraine police station. He got his fingerprints taken, and remembers being fascinated by it all. Lisa recalls how proud she felt on the morning Trevor arrived at her primary school in his police uniform, carrying a savings book she’d forgotten to take with her that day. Their parents might have been on the verge of splitting up at one stage, but there had never been any arguments in front of the children. After his death, Hazel told them: ‘Daddy and I had our problems, but I loved him very much.’
Whatever she had done, it seems that Hazel was a very good mother to her children, and they were devoted to her. She made sure they kept their Christian faith. They were not spoiled, but they wanted for nothing. She read them Bible stories at bedtime and prayed with them before they went to sleep. She admitted to Lisa and Andrew that she had been involved in an affair with another man, and related to them the Bible story of the seduction of Bathsheba by David. However, she probably left out the part where David arranged to have Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband and his love rival, killed on the battlefield. She regularly told them that their father was in Heaven and was watching over them. It gave them a sense of reassurance.
Meanwhile Trevor’s family did their best to keep in touch with Hazel and to help her move on from the tragedy and build a new life for herself and the children. Victor and Lorna Buchanan were the first of the in-laws to make contact, once the aftermath of the funeral had subsided. Hazel had apologized for her behaviour, and they were prepared to be magnanimous, especially for the sake of Andrew and Lisa, whom they adored. They also wanted to make sure the children didn’t lose touch with their grandparents.
Trevor’s sister Valerie became a committed Christian three years after his death, after a lot of agonizing about her religious beliefs while trying to come to terms with her brother’s death: ‘I couldn’t get my head around this [Trevor’s suicide]. I thought God had the power to stop him. Why did He not stop him? At the end, I came to the conclusion God knew Trevor was going to be even more hurt if he lived. So He let him die. I suppose this was my way of making peace with myself. Now I know he i
s in Heaven.’ Valerie went on to become a founding member of the interdenominational Omagh Community Church. She was keen to renew contact with her brother’s widow: ‘When I became a Christian, something inside me really changed. I was happier. I had a real relationship between me and God. I believe God was telling me I needed to forgive. I told [Hazel] I realized she never set out with the intention that Trevor would die. She was very grateful, appreciative and pleased that I became a Christian. But as a Christian now, I have to question her Christianity. Why did she do such a thing, when she knew what was right and what was wrong?’
Hazel considered moving away to live in another town. She looked at a house in Ballymena, but eventually decided to remain in Coleraine, even though she felt shunned by some people on the streets of the town. She began to attend services at the Baptist church in nearby Limavady, where she would sometimes weep as she got to her feet with the rest of the congregation to sing hymns. She never sought sympathy, but others were prepared to forgive, as she attempted to rebuild her life. But Howell was still very much part of it.
They met at her house on Friday nights. While the children played in one room, they would be all over each other in the next. They played a game called ‘Wolf’, where the lights were switched off and Howell was blindfolded. The children hid. Howell growled and listened for the giggles and then grabbed hold of them in the darkness. But the lovers were never affectionate in front of the children. Howell’s and Hazel’s children got on well together. At one stage, Lisa believed her mother might marry the dentist. Young Dan Howell was keen for this to happen too, but one member of the extended Howell family was very much opposed to the relationship being formalized and asked Howell: ‘How can you marry an adulteress?’
But Howell was afraid Hazel would end the affair, and so he asked her to marry him, although an engagement ring was never produced. He wanted them to move away to begin a new life – if not somewhere else in Northern Ireland, then maybe to Scotland, where in 1995 he investigated the possibility of buying two separate practices – in Inverness and Lossiemouth. They discussed selling their homes.
Four years after the deaths, however, Hazel had had enough. She didn’t want to marry him, saying that she wouldn’t be able to cope with his children as well as her own, and she was reluctant to lose her police pension. She wanted out altogether, although Howell didn’t realize it at the time. Many years later, after his arrest, he told police: ‘I wanted to believe that we were an item and to keep on going. Maybe the only way that I could keep that dream alive was to control the situation … I didn’t read the signs. I didn’t listen. She was saying: “This is a disaster. This will never work.” I was … trying to find a solution, to make these arrangements and present her with a package that would make things better for her and that she would accept.’ By the time he was in custody facing a life sentence, he admitted: ‘I committed adultery with a sad adulteress. She became my way out of a black hole.’
As time went on, the relationship became more and more strained. Hazel knew the writing was on the wall, but it was a long, protracted goodbye. Many years later, in the course of police interviews, she would say that the affair had been ‘very serious’ when it first started, and that she had initially thought she was ‘in love’ with Howell. But that changed quite quickly: ‘As time went on, and things happened, my feeling changed. I could see a different person. Maybe he knew I wasn’t as keen. It wasn’t a natural or normal relationship. From the church point of view, we were not allowed to be together.’ However the toxic couple might have explained it to themselves, the truth probably was that the heinous crime they had committed together, but never discussed, slowly but surely poisoned everything between them until they could ignore it no longer.
Hazel claimed in later years that she had tried to break off the relationship a number of times, but Howell would always manage to win her over again somehow. ‘He is someone who is very controlling, very. He gets his own way in one shape or form. Whether he fools you, or cons you, whatever, he will get you. If he wants something he will get it … I was going out with someone that I thought that I loved at a time and had turned out quite obsessive.’ Howell’s retrospective account, however, suggests that Hazel was not quite as helpless or as sincere in her attempts to end things as she might have wanted others to believe.
Although Howell was desperate to keep the relationship going, in his heart he knew it was only a matter of time before it finished. He gave Hazel money to pay for petrol, the telephone bills, and even clothes, but he knew he had to let go. Anyway, she was already two-timing him with a man she had first met twenty years previously: Trevor McAuley, a print worker with the local Coleraine Chronicle newspaper. Howell quickly realized that she was seeing someone else: he of all people recognized the signs. Years later, he would say: ‘Whenever you’re a deceiver, you know when you’re being deceived. You know the tricks.’
He used to stand in the forest behind Hazel’s house to watch the comings and goings, and he noticed a strange car – a green Mazda – in the driveway at a time when she was supposed to be entertaining one of her sisters. She had told Howell to stay away because, she claimed, her sister did not like him. And then one night when he walked into a Chinese restaurant in Glengormley on the outskirts of Belfast he stumbled upon Hazel and the new man in her life having a meal. It was a place which she and Howell had frequented of old when they wanted to be on their own. Trevor McAuley, Hazel’s new boyfriend, recalls that night: ‘I never saw shock on anybody’s face like the shock on hers. She could hardly speak. They just said hello to each other. He had a couple of his children with him and you can imagine the atmosphere. It was very tense.’
Deeply jealous, Howell kept returning to spy on the Buchanan house. He pulled up in his black BMW to see who was there and would then drive off at speed. One night, as he stood on the other side of the fence at Mountsandel Wood, Hazel saw him from her bathroom window and quickly summoned McAuley to see for himself. He remembers: ‘It was pitch black. He must have had a torch and found his way up through the forest. He was just standing as if he was a statue. It was very spooky. It alarmed her. I remember telling her: “He’ll not bother me. I’ll sort him out if he approaches me.” She replied: “You be very careful, because you don’t know what he is capable of.” ’
McAuley’s relationship with Hazel Buchanan lasted eight years. It was good in parts, strained at other times, and finally ended in acrimony after a weekend in Dublin in the summer of 2004. Trevor McAuley spoke at length with the author about his relationship. He insisted on referring to her throughout as ‘Buchanan’. As with Howell and her husband Trevor, she would eventually cheat on him too – with an ex-police officer she met at the Fitness First gymnasium in Coleraine and whom she went on to marry.
Hazel and Trevor McAuley first set eyes on each other when they were teenagers in 1976 in another Antrim seaside town, Port-rush. She had been working at a guest house where McAuley and his friends used to tour in their car on the lookout for new and friendly faces. Once Hazel finished preparing the rooms and cleared up the dishes at her place of work, they would spend time in Barry’s amusements arcade, walk the West Strand, and from time to time buy chips. It did not last long – maybe two to three weeks – before the girl from Omagh returned home. She was a Baptist but she smoked at the time. Trevor recalls: ‘She was quite the tomboy. I remember her in a little black jacket with two white stripes. She had dark hair. It was all very innocent. We kissed, but sex was an absolute no-no.’
Twenty years later they were reunited after he spotted her in the car park of the Irish Society Primary School in Coleraine, as he waited with his sister to collect her children. By this time he was divorced, with three of his own. He noticed the woman with a vaguely familiar face in the car park near the school. He remembered all the talk about the two suicides at Castlerock and then realized it might be the girl he had fancied when he was a teenager: ‘But this girl hadn’t prominent teeth, not the same teeth as I remem
bered she had. It was only later I realized Howell had done this fancy cosmetic work. I thought: “Hmmm, might be, might not be.” ’
They were properly introduced a few months later. A friend who attended Coleraine Baptist Church suggested that they should meet: Hazel was on her own, feeling lonely, and might be glad of the company. The two agreed to go for a walk on the beach at White Rocks outside Portrush, along a stretch which passes below the famous golf links of Royal Portrush. Trevor remembers the first meeting: ‘She knew that I knew what had happened. I didn’t want to ask questions. I didn’t want to know anything about the affair. I didn’t want to know anything about the suicide. I told her that and she appreciated that … I didn’t want to be put off by it. I needed to focus on the future and not look back. I felt the girl deserved a chance. She talked very little about him, her husband. I knew about Howell because he was pestering the life out of her. When I met her at the White Rocks, as far as I was concerned she was out of that relationship. It was a dirty and sordid thing. As far as I was concerned, Trevor Buchanan committed suicide because he couldn’t stand it any longer.’
As well as working as a compositor on the local newspaper, McAuley was also extremely useful with his hands and brilliant at DIY, just the sort of man the house-proud Hazel needed to have about the place. He came from a working-class Protestant housing estate called Windy Hall on the outskirts of Coleraine, just off the main road to Ballymoney.
Let This Be Our Secret Page 19