Victor was an officer in charge of personal security arrangements for some of Northern Ireland’s VIPs. His job was to put measures in place to protect these prime targets from the IRA, trying to second-guess and anticipate what the gunmen and bombers might be planning, as he and his colleagues escorted senior members of the judiciary to courthouses in various parts of Northern Ireland. Victor’s career in the RUC had almost ended in June 1972, when a bomb exploded inside a derelict house he was searching in open countryside near Rosslea, County Fermanagh. Part of the building collapsed on top of him and another officer, leaving him critically ill and close to death and with horrific facial injuries including the loss of his left eye. He was not expected to live but remarkably, after a series of major operations over an eighteen-month period, when surgeons had to rebuild one side of his face using tendons and muscle from his wrists and feet, he was fit enough to go back on duty.
In his professional life, Victor had often dealt with welfare issues – the type his brother was now sharing with him. The long hours and stress of police work at that time had taken its toll on many of his colleagues when he was in Fermanagh. Heavy drinking and marital breakdowns sometimes ended in officers taking their own lives; he had direct experience of three such cases. Although Trevor assured him he would never contemplate such drastic action, Victor was on the lookout for signs that his brother might be another potential victim.
Even though the church elders were anxious to prevent details of the affair getting out, it inevitably became the source of much gossip. It wasn’t quite the talk of Coleraine, but Hazel’s neighbours knew, and the church had been rocked by the scandal. ‘It was a strange situation,’ Harry Donaghy later told police. ‘We knew that these other folk knew about the affair, but [they were] not necessarily [aware] that we knew. In church you could be having conversations with people, and both families came into the conversation. You had to be careful not to disclose details of the affair or to make any comments which would make people think, or ask any questions … Lesley and Trevor had asked us not to tell anyone.’ Harry recalled once meeting Trevor at the forecourt of a petrol station: ‘I spoke with him. I was straight. I told him I knew about the affair and he didn’t have to put on a brave face or happy face all the time, and that Hazel and him were in my thoughts and prayers, and if he ever needed to talk, I was there for him if he wanted.’
Lesley started to take antidepressants, and Howell, it seemed, was quite happy to make sure they were always available. She would generally have been a fairly moderate drinker, but, because of the stress of her situation, she was now developing a taste for red wine. Although she did try to share her sense of despair with close friends, she was feeling increasingly isolated and, with her natural tendency to ‘put on a brave face’ in front of others, she was in some ways her own worst enemy. Years later, long after her death, Howell himself would acknowledge the depth of the despair his wife was clearly feeling, as well as her tendency to hide behind a cheerful front: ‘I’d seen it a hundred or a thousand times before, when she was able to just flick the switch and present herself as the smiling person. She was hiding so much hurt and trauma, even to her friends. There are friends who say they knew Lesley and I don’t really believe she shared her heart [with them], what she really felt. I suppose that was part of the trauma that made things more desperate and more black and [made it seem] like there was no way out.’
October 1990
For Lesley, things would only get worse. She was still reeling from the initial discovery of the affair, still trying to believe that her husband’s remorse was genuine, and still hoping – despite all that her instincts were telling her – that the affair really was over, when fresh revelations about Colin and Hazel’s relationship were to come to light. The effect on the young mother would be truly devastating, and the marriage – and her life – would go into a vertiginous free fall.
Since Howell’s latest infidelity had been exposed, both he and Hazel had been adamant that the relationship had never developed into a fully sexual one. The fact that each of their betrayed spouses – and indeed the other parties who were privy to the confessions – were willing to believe that this was actually the case might seem hopelessly naive to many people, but this must be viewed in the context of the world in which they all moved. The belief held in fundamentalist Baptist circles was that sex outside of marriage was morally wrong, that one should marry as a virgin and remain faithful to one’s spouse for the rest of one’s life. In a community where the church has such influence over its followers, the guilt associated with sexual infidelity is therefore extreme – and so in the case of Howell and Hazel it was not unthinkable to those around them that they might have hesitated before crossing over into the perilous territory of having full sex.
And so when, some weeks after the affair had first been exposed, Howell made the further admission to Pastor Hansford that he and Hazel had actually been sleeping together, the pastor anticipated that the emotional fallout for the wronged spouses – and for Lesley in particular – would be very damaging. Yet again, the church intervened to manage the crisis. Arrangements were made to have the Howell children stay with friends. Pastor Hansford came over to the house in order to try to give Lesley some advance warning about her husband’s imminent confession and the new bombshell which was about to hit. During this conversation Howell waited in the bedroom, only emerging once the pastor had knocked on the door to let him know that he had done his best to prepare Lesley, who was now in the kitchen.
At first she could not believe her ears. There was a stunned silence for ten seconds, maybe longer. Howell and Hansford just stood there as Lesley stared blankly in shock. Then, without warning, she lunged forward, screaming, swearing, her arms flailing and fingers jabbing at his face. Howell ducked to protect himself. There had been fierce verbal confrontations between the couple before, but nothing on this scale. This was an uncontrolled rage, and the pastor felt it best to excuse himself and leave as quickly as possible.
Lesley made an abusive telephone call to Hazel before she ran to the bathroom and reached for a bottle of painkillers in a cabinet above the sink. She shoved them into her mouth and, in her haste to swallow as many Paracetamol as she could in one go, dropped some of the tablets into the wash basin, while others scattered on the floor. Then she reappeared in the hallway – but this was no longer the vivacious, bright, engaging young mother with brown eyes, dark hair and a soft, mellifluous accent. She was groggy and almost incoherent as she staggered around the front living room, in search of her husband’s car keys. He stood aside as his wife left, banging the front door shut and driving off. Shaken and panic-stricken, he then phoned the pastor and urged him to return and help him deal with a domestic crisis which had reached a new and worrying level.
As Hansford recalls: ‘Colin had the empty bottle. We were talking, trying to decide where she would have gone, which friend would she have gone to to lean on, when she comes back. She wants absolutely nothing to do with Colin. She is very disturbed. We [she and I] go into the lounge, we sit together, me with my arm around her. She was really hyper, spaced out, angry with Colin. She was pouring her heart out about the problems in the marriage … I managed to talk her down after twenty minutes [or so], and she then agreed that I would take her round to the Accident and Emergency department in Coleraine. I had to sign her in, because the surgeon approached me, asking if I was her husband. The Social Services have to be informed if somebody attempts to take their own life.’
Lesley stayed in hospital for three days. She made a full recovery, but as a young mother who had trained to be a nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital, she found the whole experience embarrassing and chastening. Ruth Middleton, who had once shared a house with her when they were nursing in Belfast, was one of the friends who visited her during her time in hospital, and Lesley told her about taking the tablets and then having second thoughts. Ruth would later recount to police, following Howell’s arrest in 2009: ‘She thought to he
rself: “I can’t do this. I can’t leave the kids.” She promised me face-to-face that she would never do it again. She said it was the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to her.’ Lesley would also speak to Betty Bradley, her housekeeper, about what had happened. ‘I’ve been very silly, Betty,’ she kept repeating.
The young mother later tried to have the details of the attempted overdose removed from her medical records. Gillian Alcorn, another of her friends from nursing days and who belonged to the same mothers and toddlers group in Coleraine, recalled when she spoke to police in later years: ‘I remember Lesley being upset at the time, as there was now a written record of her overdose. I believe she asked her doctor to remove it, or re-word it – though, as a nurse, Lesley would have known that the incident would have to be documented. I think it was more a cry for help at the time, and she said to me she would never do it again.’
But Lesley was badly shaken by the whole experience and still very upset when she left hospital. She tried to compose a letter to her father but was too distraught to send it. Howell, however, was not particularly concerned, it seemed. He might have played the role of a dutiful husband and father – anxious about his wife’s well-being, hoping she would make a full recovery – but deep down he regretted that she had ever returned to the house after the incident. Even though he agreed that he would have no further contact with Hazel, as far as he was concerned the marriage was over. He had become defensive and had lost all interest. He felt that Lesley had become irrational and neurotic. He wasn’t prepared to give her the attention she demanded and, as in the past, compensated for his lack of affection by giving her money to buy clothes, even though he could not afford it. He still yearned to be with Hazel.
Lesley went on a crash diet to lose weight. In a bid to win back her husband’s full and undivided attention, she bought herself a new range of clothes, running up significant credit card bills in the process. She had regular facials, hairdressing appointments and sunbed sessions and she started to attend an aerobics class. Liz Hansford remembers Lesley’s efforts: ‘I thought she was saying to Colin: “Look at me. This is what you rejected.” ’
Lesley’s friend Tania Donaghy avoided Howell whenever she could, calling at the house to see her when he was not at home. She noticed the sadness in Lesley’s eyes as her friend grew more and more depressed. She would later tell police: ‘She had changed her hairstyle and I thought she was trying to do anything to save her marriage – her whole appearance was getting like Hazel Buchanan.’ But still Howell took no notice. The young mother tried hard to conceal her distress, but deep down she was a tormented soul. One night at a restaurant, the Bushmills Inn (in the village of Bushmills, not far from the famous Giant’s Causeway), as Howell sat near by, Lesley whispered into the ear of a woman friend who was also a member of her Bible study group. Lesley told her about the affair, explaining that the reason why she had lost so much weight was because she could not eat. The woman wept all the way home in her husband’s car.
With further intervention from Pastor Hansford, Hazel and Howell pledged to him and to their spouses that there would be no further contact between them. And for four months – between November 1990 and March 1991 – this would indeed be the case. Hansford insisted that all four wanted his counselling. He initiated a programme in which they would first discuss problems within their marriages and then the events which led to the adultery. Trevor, Hazel and Lesley were open and frank, but Howell was a reluctant participant. Trevor and Lesley would sometimes meet together by themselves. She was worried about him because he felt he was not coping well, although Lesley later told one of her friends: ‘Maybe our conversations are not all that helpful for one another.’
While Howell might have been going through the motions of trying to repair his marriage for the benefit of the pastor and others in the church, it was obvious to Lesley when they were alone that he just wasn’t interested in any real reconciliation. One night when he said he was going out for a jog, he simply ignored her pleadings to stay at home. She suspected he was leaving to meet up with Hazel, but he left anyway. Lesley went out for a walk to take in the air and to collect her thoughts, and found herself being propositioned by a kerb crawler looking for sex. By the time she got home, her husband was in bed fast asleep.
Relations between the Howells got worse and worse. There were some fierce verbal exchanges, and at times Lesley lashed out at him. She would occasionally produce family photographs of happier days, wave them in his face and then cut them into pieces. She would snatch the telephone from him if she suspected he was talking to Hazel. One night Howell woke up to find his wife at his bedside, looking at him with clenched teeth as she shredded his underpants with a large pair of scissors. She also kept track of his movements by following him in the car when he was out running the roads. Sometimes she questioned her husband’s friends as to whether Hazel’s name had been mentioned while they had been out running together.
In February 1991, Lesley and Colin Howell joined friends at a formal ball to launch a campaign to build a new hospital in Coleraine. The event was held at the town’s Jet Centre and, as part of the function, guests watched a peculiarly appropriate film – Dangerous Liaisons, the Oscar-winning 1988 drama based on the eighteenth-century French novel by Choderlos de Laclos about sexual conquest and scorned love. That night, Lesley looked like her old radiant self: wide-eyed, smiling confidently in a black evening dress and wearing a gold Albert neck-chain as she and Colin stood hand in hand, the picture of a contented couple who had rediscovered peace of mind. But friends in the know said she found the event distinctly uncomfortable.
Trevor Buchanan, meanwhile, was doing his best to cope with the crisis in his own way. He kept in regular contact with his brother Victor, whose job often took him to Coleraine. The brothers would meet to talk, sometimes up to three times a week, in Trevor’s car at the police station on the Lodge Road. Victor recalls: ‘I knew there was a serious situation with Trevor and I spoke to him about it. I told him: “The middle of the night can be difficult. If you are lying awake and something is troubling you and you have nowhere to turn, a silly thought can come into your head.” He told me: “I know where you are going with that. Many a night I feel like that, because you can’t help going back over what happened, but you needn’t have any fear about me taking my own life.” ’ If the young policeman ever considered leaving his wife, he kept his thoughts largely to himself. But a close friend, Derek McAuley, remembers being with Trevor in his car as they were pulling a trailer of rubbish to the local dump. The car radio was on, and Derek recalls how they exchanged glances as they listened to the well-known Clash song, ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’
As the weeks passed, the counselling process seemed to be having some positive effect, at least as far as the Buchanan marriage was concerned. Victor’s impression was that the crisis was blowing over. Trevor told him the relationship was getting better and, while it was not fully restored, he was apparently even prepared to accept he might have been partly to blame. He called his brother and said: ‘We’re back in the marital bed again.’ Victor remembers: ‘From his disposition, it was clear his old self was returning – laid-back, affable, carefree. There was always a serious side, but he wasn’t in a state of high stress. Things were back. He told me: “Maybe there is a bit to go. I suppose I wasn’t perfect either.” He was trying to take the heat off Hazel.’ There was never even the slightest indication he considered taking his life. He once investigated a suicide and afterwards told a friend: ‘How can anyone do that and leave such a mess?’
But for Colin Howell there was no sense that the crisis was passing, as he would later recall in a statement to police: ‘That four-month period was a bit like I was choking. It wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t dare tell anybody – Lesley or John Hansford – what was really going on with me, the struggles I was having, and the emotions. I was making a deliberate effort, out of duty and from my spiritual and Christian background, this was the r
ight thing to do. That’s why I did it.’ He could not bear being separated from the woman on the far side of town. He felt as if he was living in some sort of cocoon, under pressure from his wife and the church. He wanted to escape a situation he could not handle. He submitted to, but did not believe in, the counselling process. And when he was told by Pastor Hansford that Hazel was doing really well and had moved on in her life, it only made him more determined to renew the relationship. He would later tell investigating police officers: ‘That was the last thing I wanted to hear. That really got me stirred up. I needed to know if she had really moved on … If she’d decided that, then she can [could] move on and I’d need to sort myself out.’
So, in March 1991, after both of their birthdays that month, he decided to get in touch with Hazel once more: ‘… It was like holding your breath, and I remember when I phoned Hazel and she was glad to hear from me, it was like coming up for air. It was the wrong sort of air at the time, but it was the air I needed and wanted. I said: “How are things? They’re terrible over here,” and she said, “It’s awful here [too].” So we began to identify [with] and mutually comfort each other – that life was terrible and life was black.’
Howell had suspected that the pastor was trying to bluff him when he said Hazel wanted nothing more to do with him. And when he finally spoke to her on the phone, it was clear to him that she still had feelings for him. ‘It was quite obvious from the way she replied that she hadn’t moved on. I was pleased, even though we were making this deliberate effort to be separate and to make our marriages work … I was also afraid to tell John Hansford what was really in my heart, because whether it was valid or not I didn’t trust him not to tell Lesley. I said [couldn’t say]: “John, my heart is breaking for Hazel and I just can’t get over her.” I didn’t even dare say that, so I had to hide how I felt. It was really a very false time.’ Howell claimed Hazel told him: ‘I’ll love you till I’m old and grey.’
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