Let This Be Our Secret

by Deric Henderson

  ‘Before Lesley died and since then I have often wondered why she didn’t call me and explain why I wasn’t wanted at the house. I sometimes felt: “Did I let her down?” I felt guilty that she died thinking I had failed to fulfil a promise. But then I realized it was nothing to do with her or Chris. It was Howell’s decision.’

  Howell categorically denied that he murdered his father-in-law when he was questioned by police in 2009. His view of his relationship with his father-in-law was that it had been good, but shallow: ‘He [Harry] generally was kept in the dark about most things in our life. I never discussed with him financial difficulties or the marriage difficulties I was having … I think he perceived me as being a good thing for Lesley. That would be my understanding. He was kept out of all the inside details. Perhaps he didn’t want to know.’

  Mr Clarke had left his daughter more than £212,000 in his will, presumably as a result of the sale of his house in Hillsborough. She did not tell anybody just how much money she had in her account, but she did tell friends that she had become financially independent and planned to leave her husband. She was determined Howell would get nothing. Although he would later deny it, the dentist eventually did inherit the £212,000, as well as a fifty per cent share of the money in Mr Clarke’s personal bank account – around £12,000 – and half of the proceeds of the sale of Harry’s house at Castlerock, which sold for £34,000. Howell pledged to set aside some of the money for his children’s education. He also used some of it to buy a house opposite a police station on the Coleraine Road, Portstewart, which he rented out to students attending the University of Ulster. He later sold it on to a solicitor in Limavady.

  No. 6 was bought by a couple who already owned a holiday caravan in Castlerock, Valerie and Paddy Manning, who then lived in the village of Sion Mills, County Tyrone. Mrs Manning owned a jewellery shop in neighbouring Strabane and they wanted to find a house on the coast. They had it newly decorated, but after hearing that two bodies had been found in a car at the rear they did not move in until the garage was demolished.

  The other half of the proceeds from the sale went to Chris, who was unaware his father had left so much money to Lesley.

  Mr Clarke’s death was a massive body blow to Lesley, but Howell felt that the relationship had deteriorated so badly that he was unable to do anything to console his wife, and that deep down Lesley knew – as he did – that they were close to separation.

  Shirley McPhillimy was first introduced to the Howell family through a friend who had been on a skiing trip with her solicitor husband Richard, who had once looked after the dentist’s legal affairs. She remembers calling to the Howells’ house in the days after Harry’s death. Lesley was preparing a shepherd’s pie for dinner; she was making it early, she told Shirley, because she found it too difficult to cook in the evening. Three of the children were running around the house and it was obvious to Shirley that the young, grieving mother was finding it hard to cope. She told police after Howell’s arrest: ‘The bubbly personality had gone. She was sad and angry, emotional and struggling to keep herself and the family together. I knew it was a huge effort for her to keep going. She told me she was not sleeping right … I could tell she was stressed.’

  Meanwhile Pastor Hansford had returned from a six-week speaking engagement in India which had been arranged by a man called Shankar Sankannawar, who was living in Ballymoney and who was a Baptist who was heavily involved in missionary work in his home country. When Hansford left for India, his feeling was that the counselling process was working well for the Howell and Buchanan couples. In the week before his departure, he had been able to bring Trevor and Howell together for a meeting – and the two men had even shaken hands in a gesture of reconciliation before they parted. So, on his return to Coleraine, the pastor was reasonably hopeful that positive progress towards restoring their marriages would have been made. He did, however, continue to have his doubts about Howell – and with good reason.

  In his absence, the church elders had kept the pastor informed about the death of Lesley’s father and, not surprisingly, Lesley was one of the first people the pastor spoke with when he got back to Coleraine. Speaking to police later, Betty Bradley remembers ushering him into the Howells’ kitchen, where he was joined by a yawning and dishevelled-looking Lesley in her dressing gown, clearly very upset and still groggy from the sedatives she had taken. She needed two cups of coffee before she was ready to engage in a proper conversation. Surely this wasn’t the same happy-go-lucky, vibrant young mother who used to walk about the house, singing her heart out as she listened to music on her headset? Hansford recalls: ‘I remember reading a passage from the Bible and praying with her. I didn’t go away alarmed … I met him [her father] once, and she was very fond of him. They had a great relationship. I was about to go after an hour and a half, and I’m standing in the hallway when Lesley hugs me – really, really hugs me and doesn’t let go. She thanked me most profusely for all the help I had given her and then she said her goodbyes. She was an emotional girl, but as I drove off, I kept thinking about why she thanked me and hugged me so much. I didn’t smell drink off her breath.’

  But when others were not around, Lesley was drinking heavily to dull the pain of the loveless marriage. At times Howell found her incoherent and forgetful. He claimed his wife had been taking Temazepam tablets which she found in her late father’s house. According to him, one afternoon in particular stands out in his mind – he remembers discovering Lesley in a drunken stupor. Lying more or less comatose on the kitchen floor, she had clearly been crying and her head was lolling in a pool of vomit and spilt red wine. Standing over her with a broken glass in hand was one of the children, who was trying to help Mummy. The child had gone to the fridge to retrieve some milk but had dropped the bottle, its contents splashing over both of them. It was a horrible and distressing sight, and if ever there was a defining moment when Howell wanted his wife out of his life, this was it. He just wished she would drink herself senseless, drive off in the car and kill herself.

  He always believed she would kill herself eventually. He felt she had given up on the children. But he feared that if they did split up, there would be a custody battle and that she would win. Apart from the stigma of a formal separation, that was another reason why he did not want to go through with a divorce. It would, he believed, be so much worse for the children to be with a mother who couldn’t cope with them. Howell’s view of the situation was that, if he left her, she would retain custody of the children – but that she was not a fit mother because of her drinking habits which he claimed had started to develop after the birth of Lauren. He said she was an alcoholic, but friends and Lesley’s brother Chris categorically deny this accusation.

  13 May 1991

  Colin Howell would later call it his ‘Eureka moment’ – the exact time at which he decided he was going to murder his wife and his lover’s husband. It was the early hours of 13 May – 3 a.m., to be precise. Lesley had been crying all day. The tears and the recriminations started that morning and went on all day, despite the fact that Chris and Jen Clarke were staying at the house at the time, just after Harry Clarke’s funeral. Lesley was distraught about her father; she felt betrayed by Howell. He could not comfort her. They went to bed, lying side by side, but neither could sleep.

  Lesley was in a bad way. She had been drinking to try to ease her pain which, after so many months of emotional upheaval and now the loss of her father, must have seemed interminable. Suddenly she sat up in bed. She turned to her husband and she told him she wished she was dead and in Heaven. She just wanted away. Then she said to Howell: ‘This is going to be over soon. I am going to go to Heaven. Maybe you and Hazel are meant to be together. I’ll never get over this. Trevor will never get over this.’

  She turned over again and fell into a deep sleep. Howell then hugged his wife, and found himself thinking: ‘I can help you. I can help you.’ For the first time in years, he said he felt love for his wife. According to what he told
one of the psychiatrists charged with assessing him in prison years later, in that moment he didn’t feel the killings would be evil or wrong: ‘I believed that this would be a solution that would be good for them – that’s the way I was thinking at the time.’ He wanted to relieve Lesley and Trevor of their pain; it seemed to him that if he helped them to die, he would be carrying out a form of euthanasia. It would be an act of mercy; he would be doing a good thing and God would bless his actions. He was also convinced that the children would feel good as well if their mother was no longer around. As he would later recount, he felt in that moment that Lesley had actually given him permission to kill her: ‘It was a way out of this prison for her, the children and me.’

  Howell then got out of bed and drove off in his car. Chris Clarke, who was with his wife in the spare room, heard him either leaving or arriving back. He assumed his brother-in-law had been (or was going) to see his lover. He turned to his wife and said: ‘You would think he would cut that out while Lesley needs his support.’ Could this have been the first time Howell discussed his plan to murder? He admitted he discussed it twice with Hazel – first at her house after Mr Clarke’s death and then a second time at the Barmouth Road.

  Hazel’s initial reaction to the germinating scheme was one of disbelief, but over the next few days Howell began formulating his strategy. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense – to him, anyway. He remembered during a particularly heated row Lesley had screamed at him: ‘You’d probably be better off if Trevor and I were killed in a car crash.’ It was a throwaway remark, uttered in anger and despair, but now it seemed to reinforce Howell’s feeling that arranging their deaths was the right thing to do. He believed he could do something good for his wife. He could help her. After years of bad feeling and then indifference, he actually felt he loved her again.

  The lovers arranged to meet at the Barmouth Road to discuss the plan a second time. Howell told her: ‘I have a plan for Trevor and Lesley that can look as if they committed suicide, but I need your help.’ He explained that they would die of carbon monoxide fumes. Hazel’s first reaction, according to Howell, was to express fear about the consequences for them if they were found out. She told him: ‘If we get caught, I’ll slit my wrists. If I see them coming to get me, I’ll have my wrists slit.’ She insisted it was a crazy idea which would not work. But she knew he needed her on board, and although he didn’t go into all the details, Howell was clearly determined to go ahead. It had been on his mind – albeit subliminally – for weeks if not months, possibly as far back as the previous October when his wife had to have her stomach pumped after the overdose.

  Howell told Hazel he wanted the deaths to be painless. He was afraid Trevor might wake up and shoot him. Part of his plan was that both victims would be sedated. As they sat side by side in Trevor’s car, Howell gave her the tablets he had brought with him: Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety drug. He told Hazel they belonged to his mother, who sometimes stayed at Knocklayde Park and took them when she had trouble sleeping in a different bed. According to Howell’s account to police, Hazel took the tablets he handed her – maybe six or eight in a little blister pack – and slipped them into her handbag. He instructed her to use two spoons to crush them and put the powder into Trevor’s food.

  Howell told police he had not finalized his plan when he met Hazel at the Barmouth Road to hand over the tablets. He told her Trevor had to be sedated, but he claimed that Hazel had difficulty in understanding what he needed her to do. She panicked and seemed frustrated, and he told her to calm down. They discussed Trevor’s shift pattern and what time he was likely to eat. She was to crush and blend the tablets into his food – maybe a soup or stew – make sure he was in a deep sleep and that his car was parked at the front of the house, away from the garage, which was to be left unlocked. Howell visualized Trevor and Lesley falling asleep from the car fumes and just dying simple and painless deaths.

  He claimed he told his lover: ‘Look, Hazel, don’t worry about the details. Leave it all to me. All you need to know is this.’ He refrained from using words like ‘dead’ or ‘killing’, talking instead about when he had ‘finished’ with Lesley and Trevor. He told police: ‘Our communications were always sanitized to avoid the horror, the real horror of what we were doing.’

  Howell imagined a future with Hazel and her children. They could all be one big, happy family. Yet even though Hazel had professed her love to him, he was never convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this was what she wanted. Howell murdered for love, but without a guarantee that the new woman in his life was ready to commit herself. But his tunnel-vision take on reality at the time was such that he didn’t stop to consider this for very long. His emotions, his thinking process, his decision-making – all of these had been warped and distorted by months of domestic conflict, financial pressure and the relentless emotional distress of his wife. It was too intense and he just couldn’t handle it any more. As far as Colin Howell was concerned, he was left with only one option.

  7.

  Till death us do part

  18 May 1991

  Lesley Howell fell asleep around 11 p.m. on the couch in the living room that night. She had changed into her nightdress and lit a fire so that she could sit up and watch television. She just wanted to be by herself and have a few drinks from the box of red wine she had bought earlier in the day. Howell was quite happy to leave her alone. As he would later admit when recalling the events of that night, he was not the nurturing type: ‘That was one of the harsh things about me.’ It was surely an understatement.

  Earlier, Howell made sure the children had been to the toilet before putting them to bed and then blocking their door with a hockey stick. He had deliberately kept them up later than usual, to tire them out. They normally went to bed around 8 p.m., but he had not put them down until about 10 p.m. They had all celebrated Daniel’s second birthday that afternoon and the children had been in high spirits and somewhat overexcited, so they had been quite happy to stay up past their normal bedtime.

  That afternoon he had busied himself in the garage, assembling the plastic slide he intended to give his son as a present from Mummy and Daddy. Howell set aside the child’s toy for a few minutes to attend to something else. Picking up a baby’s feeding bottle he had brought with him from the house, he cut it in half, and then squeezed the neck of it – the narrowest part of the top half – into the end of a garden hose. This was the ‘dry’ hose, as he called it – an extension hose he used when watering the grass and the garden flowers. The other hose he had was kept permanently connected to a water tap near the house. For his current purposes, the dry hose was best: free of any water or moisture, it would ensure the steady, uninterrupted flow of deadly carbon monoxide fumes from the exhaust of his car.

  It was the afternoon of the FA Cup Final, but even though he was a keen sportsman and could hear the televised coverage from Wembley Stadium of Tottenham Hotspur’s 2–1 victory over Nottingham Forest Howell’s attention was focused elsewhere. As he stood in the garage looking at his handiwork, he went over some of the details of the murder plan again in his mind. For it all to work, it was important that Lesley should be sleeping on the sofa. Had she been sleeping in bed, the extension hose would not reach the bedroom and the plan would have to be aborted. He had calculated the distance previously, carefully counting out the number of paces from the garage to the living room. But it was fairly certain that this detail would fall into place that night – after all, it had become a habit of his wife in recent times to sleep on her own.

  Lesley had been out of the house for a good part of that day. She had forgotten to buy Daniel a card for his birthday, and she went to do this and some other shopping in Coleraine. She went to the hairdresser’s, where she got her hair coloured, with red lowlights. Then she stopped for a quick coffee in Couples café near by – a customer who was in the salon that day remembers the young mother: ‘She had bought her kids lots of presents. She was a lovely woman …’
In the café, Lesley saw her next-door neighbour, Rosemary Legge. Although the Legges and the Howells were not particularly close as neighbours, they were on good speaking terms. Rosemary commiserated with Lesley over her dad’s death, and she would later tell police: ‘I gathered from her [that] she was just mechanically going through the motions of doing general domestic things, but had no real interest in what she was doing.’

  The young mother returned to the house and then left again some time later, because she had an appointment for a sunbed session at Dorothy Moody’s Green Acre studio on the Green Road, a few miles outside Coleraine. She thought the session was scheduled for 6 p.m., but later realized it was for 7 p.m. Lesley had been listening to the taped music of the Irish singer Enya when she fell asleep on the sunbed. Afterwards she had a brief chat with Dorothy’s daughter Ruth about the fact that she had fallen asleep on the sunbed, and she booked another half-hour session for the following Monday. During the hour she had to wait for the sunbed, Lesley had turned up at Knockintern Garage on the Ballymoney Road to buy petrol. Gillian Hunter, whose husband Uel owned the garage, was behind the till that evening. She was concerned to see that Lesley, a regular customer, seemed to be unsteady as she got out of her Renault 5 car and struggled to insert the nozzle properly into the petrol tank. Lesley came in to sign for the purchase before Gillian saw her driving off towards Ballymoney. Howell had an account at the garage, and Gillian knew him well. She was so struck by Lesley’s appearance and demeanour that evening that she decided to ring Howell to let him know she was worried about his wife. It was a detail which would come in very handy for Howell later and would help to corroborate his claims that Lesley had been in a suicidal frame of mind that evening.