Let This Be Our Secret

by Deric Henderson

  The only type of precious metal which Colin Howell had bothered with was the gold that he used for the fillings he gave to the occasional patient when he first started to practise. Yet in April 2008 he joined a treasure trail which would begin at a branch of the Northern Bank in Coleraine and extend all the way to the exotic islands of the south-west Pacific. As a friend later remarked about the whole affair: ‘Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.’

  Howell had plenty of spare cash on hand. He had sold off his half-share of the practice in Bangor, and David Wilson was going to pay him £300,000 to become a full partner in the Ballymoney surgery. Howell retained his share in the building and still owned the two-bedroom flat on the top floor. Although he faced two hefty tax bills, the implant business was thriving and bringing in a very healthy income.

  The dentist had dabbled in property before this. He had a site for building a house for the family in Florida, and at Christmas 2006 while on holiday in Costa Rica with Kyle’s sister and her husband he decided to make another investment. His brother-in-law already owned properties in Costa Rica, Hong Kong and Nicaragua. From Costa Rica, the two men boarded an eight-seater plane which touched down on a grassy runway in Granada, Nicaragua, where they then spent the day checking out derelict sites for building. They identified one, and Howell paid £45,000 for his half-share. It was supposed to be a fun investment which they believed might – just might – make them some serious money. It all depended on the volatile politics in that region of Central America. Provided the electoral fortunes of the Sandinista movement were kept in check, the two men reckoned their site could, in the future, be worth up to ten times what they paid for it.

  The Nicaraguan deal was of limited risk, relatively speaking, but the Philippines project was in a different league. When he was first approached at the beginning of 2008, Howell had been warned by friends – especially one in The Barn Fellowship – not to get involved. Kyle had her doubts as well. Howell heard about it through a friend who had connections with an American missionary who was, it seemed, heavily involved in coordinating a scheme to recover gold that had been buried in underground bunkers during the Second World War on the orders of Japanese generals. Or at least that was what Howell was told.

  The gold was allegedly amassed by Admiral Yamamoto and then hidden away in caves and tunnels in the Philippines. It was never found, despite claims that some of it had turned up. Various experts have challenged and disputed that it existed at all, but the quest by treasure hunters from across the globe still continues.

  Howell was told that some of the soldiers who had hidden the gold were later murdered after it emerged that its whereabouts had become known – secrecy was therefore absolutely vital. A man known as ‘Alan’ was the contact in Manila and, Howell’s friend told him, it was to Alan that a former general, now in his eighties, had handed maps identifying six different sites where the gold was stashed, some of it up to 100 feet (30.5 metres) deep in underground bunkers. The operation to recover it had started, but additional funding was needed. It was a tricky and delicate operation apparently, as the bunkers were booby-trapped with explosives and filled with poisonous gas.

  An Englishman and five Americans were already involved in the project, Howell was told. And so the God-fearing dentist from Castlerock agreed to invest. He had, after all, plenty of money at his disposal. It was a hare-brained idea, but he stumped up £50,000 as an initial investment. He confided in friends that he believed he could make between £10 million and £20 million from the scheme. He was convinced that the return on his stake would be more than sufficient to finance a long retirement, pay for the upkeep of his extended family and their third-level educational requirements, and generally keep him in the style to which he had become accustomed. He also wanted to be able to teach his young children at home. His outstanding tax bills could be settled too and money would be set aside to help various charitable projects and organizations to which he was committed. These included Family Spectrum, which dealt with adults who had been victims of child abuse, the Christian Family Centre in the village of Armoy, County Antrim, which has close links with The Barn Fellowship, and an organization called Acts of Mercy. There would also be money to build schools and orphanages in south-west India, where Howell had been the previous October with his son Jonny and stepdaughter Katie, to check out potential sites in the state of Karnataka, where Shankar Sankannawar had once done missionary work.

  Howell made arrangements to begin transferring the money to his contact, and if anyone at the bank asked him where it was destined for, he just replied: ‘It’s for charity. It’s church work.’ He mainly filled in the forms himself, but from time to time he called on others to help with the paperwork, especially in the days before he left for the Philippines, when he was very busy at the surgery.

  As the months passed and Howell pumped more and more money into the project, he must have begun to wonder if his wife’s reservations and the caution of his friends had been justified after all. But when, in the autumn of 2008, he was assured by ‘Alan’ in Manila that the excavation process was very nearly finished and that there was just another forty feet (12 metres) to go, any lingering doubts he had simply disappeared. Although he had never met ‘Alan’, they were in regular contact by email and he trusted the man implicitly, along with the others he knew were involved in the project. And the gold diggers were so, so close.

  But Howell’s resources were draining away rapidly. He and Kyle had joint bank accounts, although she didn’t have any of the PIN numbers and was happy to leave her husband in full control. He realized he would have to cash in their ISAs – tax-free savings – worth about £50,000. Even this would not be enough, however, and so in desperation the dentist began to approach business contacts on the North Coast, to see if they would consider getting involved. He also sounded out a fellow dentist as to whether he would be interested in making an offer for the implant clinic. Howell told him that he was thinking of going to live and work in America.

  Not surprisingly, none of Howell’s business contacts was willing to take up the offer. One man who was approached said he simply couldn’t believe what he heard when Howell came around to his house to discuss a proposition. He recalls: ‘I thought to myself: “Are these people wise?” But they were dead serious. There was all this hidden gold, but they [the Japanese] had put explosive devices around it. There was gas which had to be neutralized. It was all heavily guarded. All they could see was a hole in the ground, and they needed more money. Howell told me he had put in £100,000 and he was going to take out millions … He told me the Lord’s hand was in this, and he was going to get money for doing the Lord’s work, funding some sort of missionary exercise. I just … laughed to myself. I asked him: “Who owns this gold? Is it the Japanese? Which government? Is it the landowner? Who owns the titles to the gold?” He seemed to be taken aback, because it was obvious he hadn’t really thought about it. My impression is that the £100,000 [he was asking me for] would have gone to Colin Howell. It would never have seen the Philippines. It was all supposed to be very secretive, but rather than give an immediate answer I waited and called to tell him I wasn’t interested … It was pie-in-the-sky stuff. How could you dig up gold, bring it home without a legal contract? Colin said he could get one, but I told him it wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on … He then asked if I would give £80,000, £50,000 – £20,000 even … They were nearly there: they had to pay medical bills; somebody had been injured; somebody had died. They just needed more money. He needed an answer by [the] Monday.

  ‘Colin, I’m told, never managed money very well … He was never a businessman. These were supposed to be fine Christian people from a strong evangelical Christian background and, even though they took the view that the Lord provided for them, this was stretching it a bit too far. Who would want to get involved in this sort of carry-on?’

  In the run-up to December 2008, staff at Howell’s surgery noticed that he seemed increasingly distracted an
d on edge. There were whispered telephone conversations behind closed doors; and plans to spend the festive season out in Florida with Kyle, the children and his ageing father began to drift. All the money the Howell family had in savings – including much of the cash he had made on the sale of the Bangor practice and what David Wilson had handed him over the previous month in return for Howell’s share in the general practice in Ballymoney – had gone. A total of £353,000 had been poured into the seemingly bottomless pit of the Philippines gold venture: there was nothing left.

  On 7 December 2008 Kyle left for America with her younger children to spend Christmas and the New Year with her family in Florida. Howell left Northern Ireland around the same time, but he travelled in a different direction, taking a flight from London to Singapore and then a connection on to Manila. It would be the dentist’s first time in the Philippines. As far as the reason for his current trip went, he didn’t feel unduly worried. He confidently expected to see some of the long-awaited gold for himself, even though he had been told that some additional money was needed to buy a special neutralizing chemical agent to solve the problem of the toxic gas in the tunnel.

  ‘Alan’ had arranged to meet the dentist at his hotel. Howell was expecting to be shown two bars of the gold which had already been recovered. At the agreed time, his man in Manila arrived, carrying two old tin ammunition boxes. Fearing that they might be booby-trapped, Howell insisted they should not be opened in his room, and so they moved elsewhere to view the contents. But as Alan opened the boxes with a flourish, Howell’s face dropped. All he could see were some silver dollars and old bank notes which amounted to about $30.

  Flabbergasted, the dentist immediately realized he had been the victim of an elaborate scam. Looking directly at Alan, he said: ‘You’re a fraud, aren’t you?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ responded Alan.

  Howell just replied wearily: ‘Because I’m a fraud. My whole life has been a fraud.’ If ever there was a turning point in Colin Howell’s life, then this was surely it, as he sat across the table in a fourth-floor hotel room, thousands of miles from home – duped out of every penny he had by a con man with a convincing line in Filipino charm.

  That night, Howell paced up and down in his hotel room. He was in a daze, telling himself what an idiot he had been, reproaching himself over and over again for having been so foolish. He was also distracted by the view from the fourth-floor window. Down below, he could see crowds of young girls walking up and down on the streets, offering themselves for sex. Provocatively dressed, with their pert figures on full display, Howell thought they looked so young and so pretty, but he resisted the temptation to engage. He considered flying directly to Florida to tell his wife about losing all their money, but decided to return home instead. When he got back to Ballymoney he told his staff about Manila’s street girls. They could not believe a man of deep religious convictions would recount such an experience. Some smiled knowingly and walked away, but one woman, a part-timer in the surgery, a member of The Barn Fellowship and a good friend, could not hide her astonishment. She told police: ‘I was shocked and disgusted, considering Colin was such a Christian man.’ But she was also aware that it was more than just lustful thoughts which had turned him into a man who had become so obviously troubled and distracted. She knew he had lost all his money in the Philippines and that he had been cheating on Kyle. She offered him some spiritual guidance. He needed to take a long, hard look at himself, and she handed him some quotations from a book, My Utmost from his Highest by Oswald Chambers, a prominent early twentieth-century Scottish Protestant minister and teacher. One read:

  Never be sympathetic with a person whose situation causes you to conclude that God is dealing harshly with him. God can be more tender than we can conceive and every once in a while He gives us the opportunity to deal firmly with someone so that He may be viewed as the tender One. If a person cannot go to God, it is because he has something secret which he does not intend to give up. He may admit his sin, but would no more give up that thing than he could fly under his own power. It is impossible to deal sympathetically with people like that. We must reach down deep in their lives to the root of the problem which will cause hostility and resentment toward the message. People want the blessing of God, but they can’t stand something that pierces right through to the heart of the matter.

  If you are sensitive to God’s way, your message as His servant will be merciless and insistent, cutting to the very root. Otherwise there will be no healing. We must drive the message home so forcefully that a person cannot possibly hide, but must apply its truth. Deal with people where they are, until they begin to realize their true need. Then hold high the standard of Jesus for their lives. Their response may be, ‘We can never be that.’ Then you drive it home with ‘Jesus Christ says you must.’ ‘But how can we be?’ ‘You can’t unless you have a new Spirit.’

  Howell had not eaten or slept for the forty-eight hours it took him to return from Manila. He turned up at the surgery a broken man. At first he told staff: ‘I’m trembling inside. I don’t want to talk about it.’ But eventually he divulged a little more, informing some of them that an investment project had gone spectacularly wrong. ‘It’s been a disaster,’ he confided.

  Some of Howell’s staff expressed alarm about his mental state. This was a completely different person from the one who had left for the Philippines. One of his team later told police: ‘It was just like when Matthew died. He was withdrawn, not focused and completely deflated. He just wasn’t thinking rationally. He wasn’t thinking straight. He’d lost weight. Normally he was the driving force, but you had to take him in hand and show him what to do. We were worried about him. He seemed almost disorientated. I thought he was going to kill himself.’

  Andrew Brown, his dentist friend and Barn Fellowship confidant, was so concerned that he contacted Dental Protection (the professional indemnity association for dentists) to seek advice, although he did not give the identity of the person on whose behalf he was making the enquiries. He believed that Howell was no longer capable of treating patients.

  Kyle had returned from Florida at the beginning of January, ordering her husband to be out of the family home before she got back. She too had fears about Howell’s state of mind, and she would not allow him to take one of the boys to a rugby tournament in Dublin because she was worried for the child’s safety. It was different when he called in to the family home each evening, to say goodnight to the children – then, at least she was close at hand and could keep an eye on what was going on. But she was not prepared to take the risk of releasing her son into the care of a man who was clearly losing touch with reality.

  Howell’s financial situation was critical. Not only had he squandered all their savings in the madcap investment venture, but he had serious debts. Patients had paid him a total of £230,000 in advance for various treatments he might not be able to complete. The dentist also still faced two huge tax demands: one for capital gains on the sale of his share of the practice in Bangor, and the other a projected income tax bill from the Inland Revenue. His tax bills were estimated at £250,000.

  He was in emotional, spiritual and physical meltdown. After all these years living a lie and deceiving so many people, it had suddenly hit him just how much of a cheat and hypocrite he had been for so long. Now he had no choice but to face the music and accept the harsh reality of what his life had been all about. Like all deeply troubled evangelicals, it was time to bring everything – all those desperately dark secrets – to the cross.

  It was not just the loss of all his money, of course. Howell had known when he packed his suitcase in Manila and ordered a taxi to the airport, that much, much more had taken him to the dead end he now found himself in. Like Matthew’s death, the fiasco in the Philippines and his growing inner torment more or less left him with nowhere else to go. Perhaps, as his friend Andrew Brown later surmised when he spoke to police, it really was the workings of Divine Providence which had led him here. T
he bright light of the truth was about to shatter his dark world. There would be no escape for Colin Howell this time.

  18.

  ‘Hiding, but not hiding …’

  February 2009

  At North Antrim Magistrate’s Court in Coleraine on Monday, 3 February 2009, Colin Howell was formally charged with the double murder before District Judge Richard Wilson. He spoke twice: once to confirm his date of birth – 8 March 1959 – and again, to say that he understood the charges against him. Even though he had lived there for only a month, his address was given as Sea Road, Castlerock, the caravan park where he had been staying since Kyle had ordered him out of Glebe Road. It was the opening phase of a quite remarkable legal process. The courtroom was packed. Members of Trevor Buchanan’s family sat to the prisoner’s left, towards the front. Howell, who had been led, handcuffed, into the dock, was guarded on either side by two prison officers. He just stared at the floor in front of him.

  Detective Inspector Ian Magee gave evidence of the arrest and said he believed that he could connect the accused with the two murders. When he had first been charged, Howell answered: ‘I’m sorry.’ His defence lawyer, Francis Rafferty, said there would be no application for bail, and the prisoner was quickly led away.

  On the day of his arrest, Howell had been questioned in an interview room at Coleraine police station by Detective Constables Alan Devine and Anne Henry. Devine, the lead inquisitor, invited him to speak: ‘Is there anything you want to tell us, Mr Howell, in your own words?’ Howell replied: ‘Can you advise me on what the starting point is?’ Over the next three days – off and on – the two officers sat and listened, sometimes in disbelief, as Howell proceeded to recount, calmly and matter-of-factly, what had happened at his home that night in 1991, and how he had ended up with two bodies in the boot of his car in Castlerock in the early hours of the next day.