As the cross-examination drew to a close, Mr Ramsey came back one last time to the question of Howell’s motives for testifying. He challenged him that these were questionable, to say the least: ‘You want a platform[, Mr Howell]. Your ego demands a platform. In an effort to rehabilitate yourself and reinvent yourself … that’s what you are doing. That’s what the exercise has been over the past few days, hasn’t it?’
Howell was having none of it. He fired back: ‘What I have demonstrated is that, no matter what the cost of what I lose, there’s something much more important … to me. If I was calculating for the best, I wouldn’t have stepped forward. If it was [just for] self-interest and self-preservation, I would still be free, placing dental implants and having a glorious website and being popular with people … So the opposite is true. My actions speak that … That’s why I’m here.’
No matter what his motives, it was evident to everyone in the courtroom that Colin Howell’s testimony had been far too detailed and compelling to be dismissed as mere vindictiveness. It had been a startling performance which clearly made a huge impression on the people who really mattered: the jurors who sat opposite him. That was the task the defence faced: to persuade them of Hazel Stewart’s innocence.
21.
‘What will happen to me?’ – The Hazel Stewart trial, Part Three
This dramatic and sensational trial was almost over. All the key witnesses had addressed the court and there was just one left whom the jury expected to take the stand. Hazel Stewart had sat silently throughout, maintaining a stoical composure, showing hardly any emotion, even as her former lover described the intimate details of their weird sex life.
The jury anticipated they would hear at first hand her explanation of what happened the night Howell called at the house in Charnwood Park, and why she acted as she did. Her defence would surely make for a gripping testimony at a quite extraordinary hearing which had become the talk of the country. But the decision was taken by her legal team that Hazel Stewart would remain where she was. She would stay in the dock and not be uttering a word.
She could, of course, have gone into the witness box. But her lawyer announced to the court that he did not intend to call her to give evidence or face cross-examination by his colleague, Mr Murphy. Mr Ramsey said he realized that the jury could draw an adverse conclusion from the decision – but this was, after all, her inalienable right. He turned to the nine men and three women and asked: ‘How would your task be helped by observing a contest between a housewife and an eminent and able senior counsel like Mr Murphy? It would be like sending a pub team to play a Premier League side like Manchester United or Chelsea at their home ground. No contest.’
By then the jury had already heard Stewart speaking. After she was taken in for questioning all her interviews had been recorded on tape and formed a crucial – and indeed critical – part of the case for the prosecution. The jury was able to listen to the full and graphic detail of Hazel’s exchanges with her inquisitor, Detective Sergeant Geoff Ferris. The process of playing back the police recordings to the court lasted for almost two days.
Howell was being questioned in an adjoining room when Ferris had pushed the ‘record’ button to begin the first session of his interrogation of Hazel Stewart. Years ago the policeman had been a useful soccer player when off duty, quick on his feet and good with his head. But, as the court would hear, it took him the best part of three days to negotiate his way past the lady sitting in the dock.
Neil Connor, junior counsel for the prosecution, got to his feet and invited the jury to listen. They could also follow a written record of the questions and answers which would scroll down, line by line, on monitors in front of them. Ferris positioned himself in the witness box in readiness to leaf through the transcripts, just to confirm that they tallied with what was being broadcast. Mr Connor then asked for the first tape to be played.
The initial interview began with the detective introducing himself and a colleague, Constable Nicola Moore, and noting the time and date for the purposes of the tape: it was approaching 19.40 hours on the evening of Thursday, 29 January 2009. Hazel sat at the opposite side of the table with her solicitor, Stephen Ewing – he worked for Stephen Hastings, the head of the firm, who later represented her at the trial. She was still in a state of shock.
Ferris began: ‘OK, so you understand, Hazel – you’ve been arrested now for a very serious offence. It doesn’t get any more serious than murder, OK. And we have lots of questions to put to you and to ask you. During the course of the interviews, we will be asking the questions. We will try and ask them in a fair manner, and hopefully you’ll understand every question.’
Stewart: ‘Hmm.’
Ferris: ‘So, can you tell us about your involvement?’
Stewart: ‘Well, I’m not going to lie. I had an involvement with Colin Howell. It was intense at times, and he’s quite a controlling person. Where do I start? He said he would never leave his wife or whatever at the time. That it was fine, and one day he said to me …’
Ferris interrupted and quickly advised her: ‘Just take your time. You’re OK. Take your time.’
Only a few minutes into the first tape, this was already proving to be a mesmerizing and compelling exchange which held the courtroom spellbound. All listened intently as the interview continued. At first Hazel seemed reluctant to say anything, but Ferris managed to coax her along, quietly and without fuss. Yet he also made her circumstances clear: ‘You have to face reality here. Nobody else can deal with this situation, apart from you. Other people will have to answer for what they did. But your knowledge around that time is all down to yourself. We have to deal with that and you have to deal with that as best you can. I know you have lived with it now for eighteen years, or whatever the case may be. I am sure that has been difficult for you, but now is the day that you probably thought would never come.’
Stewart told him how the relationship started; how her husband had been ‘gutted’ when he found out; how he did not want her to leave, although she would have divorced him because she was in love – or at least she thought she was. She spoke about the trauma of having a secret abortion, but insisted time and time again that she wanted nothing to do with Howell’s plan to murder. She never wanted it to happen. She had been terrified.
Each of the interview tapes lasted forty minutes. Hazel’s voice, soft and hesitant and with traces of a west Tyrone accent, reverberated around the courtroom. Her replies were brief and sometimes monosyllabic. She could be heard taking the occasional sip of water. Apparently she did not eat anything during the three days of questioning.
It was now the start of the second day, just coming up to 10.20 a.m., as Ferris noted for the tape. He then started the proceedings by enquiring: ‘How are you feeling this morning, Hazel?’
‘Dreadful, terrible,’ Stewart replied. Yet she stuck firmly, doggedly to her story: ‘I was so scared. I thought, if I say something against this, he’ll turn round and he’ll kill me. That’s how I felt.’
Ferris then asked: ‘Did you feel any time that the truth would come out?’
Stewart: ‘I always knew. I would never have said. I would have taken it to my grave because of my children and my family. I thought it would be better for me to suffer this every day – which I did – than to open a can of worms and affect so many people after so long.’
Ferris: ‘Did you ever think, or would you have had any hint that, “Well, the only person that could tell the truth would be Colin”?’
Stewart: ‘Yes. And maybe I had my fears because of the type of person he was.’
However, just after lunch on the afternoon of the second day of the interrogation Stewart’s version of the facts began to change – albeit only slightly at first. She said she should have stopped Howell murdering her husband. Later that afternoon, she admitted that Trevor had taken a tablet to help him sleep on the Saturday evening, but she said that she had not given it to him. Despite what he claimed, she could not recall
Howell ever giving her sedatives to put into her husband’s food to ensure he was well sedated by the time he arrived to murder Trevor.
Ferris accused her of twisting the truth: ‘It’s nearly written across your forehead. I know you’re finding difficulty with some questions. You’re not in here for stealing a cheque out of work, or a burglary, or a theft, or a shoplifting case. You’re in here for the most serious of offences under the law in this country. I’m asking you to be truthful.’
At the start of her third day of questioning, Hazel said she felt fine, but the strain in her voice and in the way she responded was obvious to those who were listening to the exchanges between her and the detective. Soon she was claiming – for the first time – that she had told Howell to get out of the house before he had made his way to the bedroom to gas her husband.
Ferris persisted. There was a perceptible change in the tone of his voice now; he was more urgent, more forceful. ‘We’re getting no satisfaction whatsoever … What is important is that we get to the bottom of it [this]. All the pieces of the puzzle have to fit, and there are a couple of pieces not right. You’re in a situation where you feel totally hopeless, but I’m asking you to tell us everything involving Trevor. He’s got a family as well. They need to know the truth, Hazel … Next week, we’ll walk away from this. We’ll be dealing with another murder inquiry. So I’m asking you. Don’t be adopting the hardened attitude and try[ing] to fool us. You know you’ve told lies, and you conned the police away back in 1991.’
Stewart: ‘I didn’t like doing that.’
Ferris: ‘It’s gone. It’s done. What we’re saying to you in here is: “Look, sort it out now.” We need to know and we do know the picture. But it has to come from you, Hazel.’
She paused briefly, and then said: ‘What will happen to me?’
Ferris: ‘Sorry?’
Stewart: ‘What will happen to me?’
It was approaching lunchtime on Saturday, 31 January, and it was the first time it seemed to dawn on Hazel Stewart that there was now little or no room for manoeuvre. She still sounded well in control of herself and her emotions, but the pressure to divulge everything was becoming more and more apparent. Her resistance started to wane as Ferris continued with his questioning. There was a short pause in the tape as Stewart asked for a glass of water. When the interview resumed, she accepted that she had encouraged Trevor to take a sleeping tablet, but insisted over and over again that she had not given it to him. But she conceded that the plan to murder could not have gone ahead without her husband being sedated. Yes, she had known earlier that Saturday what Howell was planning to do, and when he arrived at the house with his wife’s body in the car boot – yes, she knew what the next part of his plan would entail. She could, and should, she admitted to Ferris, have shouted and screamed, but she did nothing to stop her lover. He was on a mission, but he could have been stopped, she agreed: ‘I let it happen. Yes, I let it happen.’
She left out the clothes for Howell to dress her husband’s lifeless body. She cut up and burned the garden hose which had been used to kill him. She changed and washed the bedcovers in the room where he had fought for his life, and she had opened the windows to release the lingering fumes of carbon monoxide.
Ferris pressed the point: ‘You got rid of the evidence. Is that fair?’
Stewart, who had always been so fussy and house-proud, replied: ‘I suppose you could say that. I never thought of it like that, but I just felt I had to get the room tidied up.’
By the time the judge and jury heard the fifteenth and final tape, the atmosphere inside the courtroom was electric. And for the first time since the trial began, Stewart’s vacant, impassive demeanour changed. Pushing her blonde hair to one side, she pulled out a handkerchief and began to cry. As she listened to the final exchanges between herself and the detective, she held her head in her hands, now weeping openly.
Ferris could be heard pressing on relentlessly, until Hazel now accepted the fact that Howell could not have murdered on his own. It had to have been a ‘joint enterprise’ – again those all-important words – between the two of them, for the plan to work. Finally, the detective sergeant asked her: ‘Is there anything [more] you want to say, Hazel?’
Between her sobs, the reply came tumbling out: ‘I would like to say sorry to Trevor’s family. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a son. I’ve a son and I love him very much. To David, my husband I love so much, [to] Lisa and Andrew – they’re my life and I have lost it. The biggest mistake of my life was ever meeting Colin Howell. I have paid the price for the past seventeen, eighteen years. Since that happened, I lost so much of my life. I lost joy, a peace, and contentment. It was like living in a black hole. Every day I got up, every night I went to bed, it was there. I thought about it 24/7. It never left me.’
Sitting in the front row of the public gallery of the court, her daughter Lisa and son Andrew were now crying too, as were some of her sisters in the row behind. David Stewart’s face was drained; he looked pale and exhausted. Hazel Stewart’s family were reliving every moment of her pain with her. They clearly found it unbearable.
The voice on the tape was now weary, resigned: ‘I had to do things for my children and be strong for them. My guilt was horrendous. My shame. I hated him. The relationship went on for years, but only because of him … He did not want it to end. Maybe I couldn’t say to him … I was scared of him, not knowing what he would do. I saw what he had done, how capable he was of doing things. I was scared sometimes for my children. I just didn’t feel easy about it at times. They thought he was all right, but they weren’t that comfortable with him … But life has been horrific for me. I never got over it. I’m going through all this now. The thought of losing my children, losing David, is the hardest thing. Yeah, I destroyed their lives, Lisa and Andrew’s lives. Colin’s children didn’t deserve this, or Lesley. Lesley was a lovely girl. Trevor was very good too.’
Gordon Buchanan’s head fell back and he looked skywards. Victor Buchanan leaned forward. Raymond Buchanan sat with his chin resting on his right hand. Trevor’s two sisters, Valerie and Melva, were in the same place as they had been throughout: the front row, sitting at an angle from their former sister-in-law. What must they have thought?
And what must have been going through the mind of Lauren Bradford, Lesley’s only daughter, who sat with the Buchanans, directly opposite Stewart’s daughter Lisa? During one brief interlude earlier in the trial, Lisa had crossed the room to speak to Lauren. No doubt they had some catching up to do since the days when they had grown up in Coleraine and had spent so much time together. And the two young women had many other things in common, having both suffered the awful ordeal of losing a parent through suicide, only to find out years later that it had been murder. It had been an astonishing trial in so many respects – not least because of the extraordinary sideshow being played out on the periphery of the main courtroom proceedings, as so many shattered relatives and friends tried to come to terms with the devastating fallout of two murders which had happened almost two decades earlier.
2 March 2011
Hazel Stewart struggled so hard with her breathing that a police officer near by feared she was going to hyperventilate. Waiting for the jury to deliver their verdict, she sat in the dock for almost twenty minutes, looking gaunt and forlorn, in the same coat she had worn throughout the trial, which failed to conceal her heaving chest and shifting shoulders.
Her children, it seemed, had already resigned themselves to the worst. Even before the jury returned, Lisa was sobbing loudly. Her mother looked over and nodded as if to say: ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry.’ Hair swept back into a ponytail, her daughter appeared to mouth back: ‘Mummy, I love you. Mummy, I love you.’ Andrew doubled up and held his head in his hands, as if he was praying for a miracle. At one stage, Hazel’s solicitor, Stephen Hastings, left his seat and leaned over to try to reassure the two of them. Sitting beside them, the loyal and attentive David Stewart seemed to
have aged ten years. Red-faced, his tie hanging loose, he looked completely exhausted.
The jury had requested the transcripts of Hazel’s last six interviews with Geoff Ferris, which had effectively damned her. Even if she remained convinced of her own innocence, surely some of those who had been sitting on her family’s side of the courtroom had good reason to be fearful. In his summing up of the previous day, Judge Hart had asked the jury to make a calm and fair decision based on the evidence, and not to be influenced by the sensation which surrounded the case. He stressed that the legal definition of ‘joint enterprise’ did not mean that Stewart had to commit the murders, only that she was part of the plan to carry them out, and that a plan in itself could take different forms too: ‘The word “plan” does not mean there had to be formal agreement about what’s to be done: a plan could be made on the spur of the moment, with a nod, wink or knowing look. Put simply, the question for you is: Were they in it together?’
Stewart’s personality, the Judge had said, was soft, weak and vulnerable, but she had openly flirted, and was willing to have sex, with Howell. Was Howell controlling or was she perfectly capable of deciding for herself? They had both proved themselves to be capable of sustained deception in the past, although here he cautioned: ‘The mere fact the defendant tells a lie is not in itself evidence of guilt. She may lie to protect someone else, to conceal her disgraceful conduct, or in panic or confusion.’ The defendant, however, he continued, had not given evidence to undermine, contradict or explain the evidence put by the prosecution, and the jury could draw such inferences as appeared proper from her failure to do so.
Finally, the Judge asked the jury to consider the crucial question of why Stewart had not intervened to stop the killing. ‘Did she do everything, or as much as she could have done, to prevent the murders or at least the murder of her husband? Why did she not tell someone beforehand what he was planning on the night Howell came to her house and committed this murder? Why did she not wake her husband, keep the door closed, scream the house down, run to a neighbour to raise the alarm and get help?’
Let This Be Our Secret Page 29