Let This Be Our Secret

by Deric Henderson

  Meanwhile Howell had been trying to contact Hazel throughout the afternoon. He was unaware that she had been to Lisburn with Trevor and their children to do some shopping and just to get out of the house too. The family outing hadn’t been a success, though. The atmosphere between Hazel and Trevor had been very tense because of the rekindled affair. They had argued for most of the afternoon and returned home around teatime.

  Howell was getting more and more alarmed. He kept dialling Hazel’s number, waiting to hear the click, and then putting the receiver down. But she failed to call him back. He didn’t know where Hazel was, and he needed to make sure she was ready for what was going to happen later that night. After Gillian Hunter’s call, it occurred to him that Lesley might be planning to leave him, and that she might end up crashing the car somewhere. Then again, maybe she had arranged to meet somebody. As he would say in court in later years, he did not feel that he was in a position to question his wife’s movements at this stage in the relationship. She was basically free to come and go as she pleased, without being answerable to him. ‘I had lost all my dignity and leadership in the family at that stage.’

  Eventually Hazel called him. It was a hurried, surreptitious call and she kept breaking off to look over her shoulder. Trevor was outside in the garden. Howell whispered urgently: ‘Tonight’s on. We’re going to do it.’ Again he went through the key things she would have to take care of. He told her she would have to make sure Trevor’s car was parked away from the garage. He reminded her about the tablets and that she would need to make sure Trevor was asleep. He concluded the call by saying to his lover: ‘If I don’t turn up, it’s because something’s wrong at this end.’

  Early that Saturday evening, Trevor called in to see his neighbours, Liz and Bertie Johnston. Liz Johnston, who went on to become the Ulster Unionist mayor of Coleraine Borough Council, knew of the Buchanans’ marital problems and quickly detected that Trevor was upset when he turned up in his tracksuit bottoms, sweat-shirt and trainers. He asked her husband, an engineer, if he could repair a bicycle wheel belonging to his son Andrew. Liz, who knew Trevor through her previous job as a British Telecom supervisor, would be one of the last people to see him alive.

  Liz invited Trevor and Andrew in for a cup of tea, but the young policeman said it was too close to dinnertime and that they could not stay. Bertie was unable to carry out the repair work until the following Monday because he lacked the necessary equipment at the house, and he handed the wheel back to Trevor. Liz remembers: ‘I noticed the vacant look when he came to the door, and I said to Bertie afterwards that they must have had a row, because I knew what was going on in the background. It was known within church circles, not just among the Baptists … Trevor had lovely dark-brown eyes, but they were really glassy and he was shaking. You knew he was irritated and agitated about something. He had the wheel in his hand and he was playing about with it. Trevor just took Andrew by the hand and walked away, and that was the last we saw of him.’

  Trevor later called upon another neighbour, his friend Derek McAuley. He stayed talking for an hour and then returned home. He seemed in good form. Derek was friendly with both Trevor and Howell; he went jogging with the dentist.

  Meanwhile, later that night, once the house fell silent, Howell slipped out to the garage again to finish his preparations. Donning a pair of surgical gloves he had brought from the surgery, he pushed the wider part of the child’s feeding bottle over the mouth of the exhaust pipe of his car. The bottle was made of a hard plastic, and he knew it would not melt. No tape was needed to complete the adaptation. Sometime before midnight, he checked on Lesley again. She was fast asleep. He noticed that she had been listening to music on her headset before falling asleep. Now Howell pulled the hose through the kitchen to where his wife was lying – a distance of twenty-five paces or so, as he had previously calculated. He pulled it to its full length, then returned to the garage to switch on the car ignition. Back in the house, he leaned over his wife on the sofa and pointed the hose nozzle in the direction of her face. He then tucked it under the quilt she had pulled over herself, and positioned it within six or eight inches (15–20 centimetres) of Lesley’s mouth. He then backed outside into the hallway so he could watch from a safe distance. The door could not be completely shut because of the hose, so he was able to peep into the room every thirty seconds or so.

  Howell stood in the hallway for a few minutes, maybe five, as Lesley began to inhale the deadly fumes now filling the room. He felt himself getting stressed as the smell grew stronger and stronger. His wife started to grow restless and he feared she was about to wake up. He moved towards her again. She began to turn on to her side, her head resting on a pillow. Howell then swiftly pulled the quilt up over her head. His wife suddenly stirred and called out the name of their eldest child, Matthew. He knew that she realized that her life was in peril. He panicked. Howell was never to forget his dying wife’s weak, plaintive cry for their young son. They were the last words she uttered. Years later, he would recall: ‘That is one of the memories that haunts me. She called his name. I didn’t expect her to be awake. I hadn’t imagined [this] would happen.’

  It was dark, and in what little light there was from the living-room fire he could see what he had to do – and that was to physically restrain his dying wife. She struggled slightly, but clearly hadn’t the energy to fight back. He recalled: ‘I had a reality check of what was happening. It was almost disbelief.’ As her head lay on the pillow, face up, Howell sat on top of her. He couldn’t see her eyes because of the blanket covering her face, but as he straddled her in the final moments of her life he believed that she was aware of what was happening.

  Lesley’s arms were now trapped by the quilt, and he held the hosepipe under it with his right hand, leaning down hard on her head with his left, until she stopped breathing. By this stage, he was feeling unwell. The fumes were making him dizzy and light-headed, and he feared he would be overcome. He went into the hallway again, took a few deep breaths to compose himself and then returned, this time holding his breath. He wanted to make sure that Lesley was dead. He pressed her chest a number of times, to check if she was breathing. He didn’t bother to feel for a pulse.

  In that moment, Howell couldn’t believe what he had done. Gathering himself, he pulled the hose back out of the room and went out to the garage. He disconnected it from the exhaust, rolled it up and put it into the back of the car. Back in the house, he removed the nightdress Lesley was wearing. He dressed her in dark leggings and a blue T-shirt, and carried her body to the boot. He had pushed the backs of the rear seats forward to create more room. Howell knew he had to move quickly now – it was essential that he complete the second killing as soon as possible, so that post-mortem results might not reveal too much of a time lapse between the deaths. Covering Lesley’s body with a blanket, he set his bicycle on top of her. Years later, he would say of his wife’s murder: ‘It was like a surgical procedure.’

  Before leaving, he made one final check of the house. He went inside again and cocked his ear to the children’s bedroom door. Everything was quiet. Jonny was asleep in his cot. He gathered up some family photographs from a cabinet and from the wall, as well as Lesley’s Sony Walkman and headphones. He told police that gathering up the photos and the Walkman was a last-minute decision.

  He called Hazel to signal that he was on his way. She was in bed with Trevor, but heard the click of the phone and got up at once to call him back. ‘I’m finished with Lesley,’ he told her breathlessly. ‘Is everything ready? I’m coming round.’ He asked if Trevor was sleeping and if their car was outside the garage. Hazel confirmed that her husband was asleep and that the car would be parked as instructed by the time he arrived. She did not ask the question: ‘Is she dead?’ because they were not using that type of vocabulary.

  Telephone contact with Hazel was vital, as Howell would tell the court in later years: ‘There has to be constant confirmation. Anyone who has tracked, for example, terroris
t activity around [to] a bomb, [knows] there are probably a hundred mobile phone calls. So when you are planning something as devious and as complex as this, you have to have regular contact. I needed to contact Hazel that day. I couldn’t just have turned up, because I needed … to be prepared emotionally and practically.’

  Howell locked up the house at Knocklayde Drive. After putting Lesley’s body in the boot, he wheeled the car on to the road. In the Legges’ house next door there was still activity. There may have been a house party, he surmised, and he did not want to attract attention.

  Howell took a direct route to Hazel’s house. He drove into the town’s Waterside area, along Railway Road and through the town centre on to the Lodge Road. He passed the police station and veered left at the Lodge Road roundabout, which took him to the Mountsandel Road. Nervous that he might run into a police checkpoint, he took a right and then a left at a T-junction, into Charnwood Park. He had made this journey many times before. The Buchanans lived at No. 34, a bungalow on the right. It had taken him ten minutes to get there, and it was already well into the early hours of Sunday morning. It was all taking longer than he had anticipated. He reversed the car into the drive. There was nothing there to block his way. Trevor’s white Toyota Corolla was sitting at the front of the house.

  After waiting for about thirty seconds, Howell opened his car door and put one foot outside. He looked for Hazel’s silhouette at the kitchen window. Just then, the garage door flipped open. Howell wound down the window on the driver’s side, put his head out and reversed in. There was no light in the garage, but he saw Hazel disappear into the adjoining utility room. He reversed over something on the floor. He was not sure what it was: he thought it might have been a puncture repair kit or even a bicycle. He was worried the crunching noise might waken Trevor.

  There was not much room inside the garage because of shelving. Howell pulled the garage door closed and waited inside. Hazel told him that Trevor was still asleep. She disappeared again, and when she returned thirty seconds later, she asked, nodding towards the car: ‘Is that Lesley?’ In other words: was Lesley’s body in the boot? Howell said it was. Hazel was standing on the steps at the entrance to the utility room at this stage. Howell then started to connect the hosepipe to the car exhaust, as before. Once finished, he went into the utility room. Hazel went to check again that Trevor was asleep. She returned to say that he was. All of their exchanges were spoken in whispers.

  Howell then moved into the kitchen and waited. According to his later account, he noticed a plate on a worktop. On it was a bread roll which had been sliced open and filled with tuna fish. The crumbs of what must have been a second roll were visible on the same plate. Mixed into the tuna of the uneaten roll, he could see what he presumed to be little blue flecks of the Lorazepam tablets he had given Hazel. In court, he would later say: ‘I was horrified and shocked and probably annoyed that my accomplice had been clumsy and not crushed [the pills] up finely enough that they still would be visible.’ But he would never mention it to her at the time, or in later years: ‘I wasn’t there to be annoyed at something she hadn’t done properly in terms of the preparation. But it was just striking and clumsy that she had made a tuna sandwich that you could actually still see the blue flecks of the tablets.’

  While Hazel checked on Trevor again, Howell went into the lounge. The fire was not lit and the grate had been cleared. He then went quietly up the hallway. The main bedroom was at the top end of the hall, on the left-hand side. He looked into the room. Trevor was asleep in bed. The door was slightly ajar, but he pushed it open a little bit more to get a good look. The young policeman was lying, face down, on the far side of the double bed, wearing his boxer shorts.

  Howell went back to his car and started to unroll the hose. The house was smaller than his, and he knew he did not need the same length of hose. There was a lot of excess coiling, and he considered getting a knife and shortening the hose, but decided this would take too much time, so he kept moving. Hazel was behind him somewhere, and every now and again she would disappear. He later recalled: ‘She was more of a shadow than a person.’ He pulled the hose up to the bedroom door. He opened the door and brought two or three coils into the bedroom. He placed the tip of the hosepipe on the pillow on Hazel’s side of the bed. He then went back to the car and switched on the engine. By the time he returned to the bedroom, however, the coiling had fallen off the bed. He lifted it back on again and waited outside the door.

  After what had happened with Lesley and how she had woken up, Howell feared the same might happen with Trevor. And sure enough, Trevor must have heard something, for he stirred. Howell saw his intended victim lifting his head. Immediately, he rushed into the room, grabbed the nozzle and pulled the cover over Trevor. So much for the sedatives Hazel was supposed to have given her husband. But, as Howell told police later, he had now ‘crossed the Rubicon’, and there was no going back. Andrew and Lisa were fast asleep in an adjoining room. In a frenzied whisper, Hazel expressed her concern that fumes from the car might seep in under the children’s bedroom door, but Howell told her not to worry, that it would not happen.

  He then jumped on top of Trevor in an attempt to try and wrap him in the bedcover. What happened next was not entirely clear to Howell: Trevor may have grabbed him by the wrist, and the two men wrestled and rolled on to the floor. The struggle might have lasted fifteen to twenty seconds. Howell bumped his head. He remembers them being on their knees together and at one stage looking each other in the eyes. Neither of them spoke, as he recalled. In an adjoining room, Hazel could hear the sounds of a struggle. She would later find her husband’s watch on the floor.

  By this stage Howell had the hose in his right hand and, desperate for a quick kill, he shoved the nozzle between Trevor’s teeth while pulling the blanket over his head, enfolding his body completely and trapping his arms. He then shoved the hose further in Trevor’s mouth and listened, as his victim gasped for breath and finally lost consciousness before dying.

  Howell felt nauseous from the fumes. He was dizzy as well, but not so dizzy that he could not walk. But he knew he needed fresh air quickly. He went outside, switched off the car engine, and then ran out into the back garden to a small path leading into Mountsandel forest. He thought he was going to be sick in a hedge and he doubled over, holding his stomach. He didn’t vomit because, as he would later claim, he was afraid of leaving forensic evidence.

  Meanwhile Hazel had dropped a pair of denim jeans, a blue sweat-shirt, socks and some lace-up shoes on the floor of the hallway for Howell to dress her dead husband in the spare bedroom. In one movement Howell carried him there from the main bedroom and dressed him. Then he put his victim’s body over his shoulder and made his way to the car. He opened the boot, lifted away the bicycle and set Trevor down, to the right of Lesley’s body. He swiftly covered both bodies with the sheet and placed the bicycle on top again.

  Hazel already had a fire blazing in the living room and was in the process of getting rid of some of the incriminating evidence. Howell gave her the rolled-up hose to destroy – he didn’t want to dump it somewhere and risk it being found. She cut and hacked it into pieces and threw it on to the fire to burn. Hazel then went into the bedroom, pulled away the bed covers and pushed them into the washing machine. Years later Howell recalled: ‘I don’t even remember seeing her face. I just remember her presence rather, and reading how she was. I know I was particularly shocked that I had this physical struggle with Trevor and that he had fought back and that I’d overcome him and had to hold the pipe in his mouth. So there had to be panic. It was one of those things that, when you started, you’ve got to finish it. I just pushed through … I wasn’t particularly looking to see how Hazel was reacting, one way or the other. So it would be unfair of me to say she was distraught. I don’t think relief would be the right word [either] …’ He also revealed: ‘I never had to confront her, so there was never any eye-to-eye contact or face-to-face. I don’t need to look at her because sh
e’s there to be the perfect accomplice.’

  Howell noticed that he had a bump on his head. He didn’t think Trevor had managed to strike out at him, but assumed now that he had. He would never subsequently discuss with his lover how her husband had fought for his life. For now, however, he was seized with the urgency of the next step in his plan.

  He was worried that forensic evidence might be discovered in the bedroom. Perhaps a piece of skin belonging to him or Trevor – and which had been detached during their struggle – might be found in the fibres of the carpet? Howell had spent time in the forensic science laboratory at Queen’s during his year out studying anatomy, and he regarded himself as being forensically aware. And so he instructed Hazel as he left: ‘Make sure you hoover the floor.’ He did not tell her where he was going, because he was not even sure himself.

  The Buchanans’ next-door neighbour, Ronnie Gray, then a primary school headmaster, had been in the bathroom of his house in the early hours. He opened the window and heard footsteps. He suspected it was a prowler and, in order to get a better view, he went to the lounge window at the front of his bungalow and looked out again. He saw a car driving out under the amber street-lights, and he guessed it was probably Trevor on his way out on some kind of police-related matter. It was approximately 3.40 a.m.

  8.

  ‘Let this be our secret’

  Colin Howell put his foot down on the accelerator and drove towards Castlerock, some four and a half miles away. In the boot of the car lay the bodies of his wife and his lover’s husband. He couldn’t quite believe what he had done. When he reached the outskirts of Coleraine, he turned right off the main road and on to the Cranagh Road, reducing the chances of someone spotting his car or, even worse, being waved to the side of the road by police – a not uncommon occurrence in Northern Ireland at the time.