Let This Be Our Secret

by Deric Henderson

  The last time Trevor McAuley and Hazel spoke was at his father’s graveside in September 2004. He needed a white shirt for the funeral and she told him to get one. Trevor recalls: ‘She put her arm around my waist and said: “Did you get the shirt in Next?” How bizarre is that?’ Friends had told Trevor how she had met Stewart in the gym while he was still paying her subscription. Everything became clear to him then: ‘So that’s where she got the confidence to put me out of her life and not take me back. But it was the best Christmas box I ever bought anybody, never mind her. Because the day I saw her on television coming out after the first court appearance with that man [David Stewart], I said to myself: “That could have been me.” ’ Trevor has since remarried and lives with his second wife in Coleraine.

  Hazel told Stewart she had been involved in an affair with Howell. She said it had been a dreadful and confusing time. It should not have happened and that Trevor died because of it. He said she told him she felt trapped and was unable to break away from him. Stewart was once treated by the dentist, years before he met Hazel. Stewart said in a statement to police in December 2009 that Howell struck him as a very confident and insincere person, and he never had any further dealings with him. He said: ‘I did not probe then the details of Hazel’s affair or the death of Trevor. As far as I was concerned the details of her affair were in the past and the police had investigated the circumstances of Trevor’s death. In the years that followed it was obvious to me that Hazel carried a heavy burden and at times was very down and depressed about the circumstances.’

  He added: ‘Hazel is my wife and I know her extremely well. She is a kind, trusting person with a soft nature. At times she can be too trusting, something she has in common with other members of her family. She is quick to defer to those she thinks know better than her. She has always enjoyed working with children and tends to lack a critical judgement on people. Hazel will always tend to see the good in others. These are admirable qualities, but need to be balanced with the realization that not everyone is as helpful and as sincere as they appear to be.’ He insisted that she was a dedicated mother, tireless in all her dealings with her two children, and he added: ‘The love and affection they share is very apparent. I find it difficult to express in a statement that may go before a court, how I feel about Hazel. She always puts me first and we have a great and trusting relationship. She is my best friend and the better part of me.’

  Trevor McAuley’s judgement of the woman with whom he shared so many years of his life was considerably less flattering. ‘I think Buchanan is a total grabber of opportunities. Nothing was ever good enough … She was materialistic to the hilt. Cold-hearted. She should have told me at the start she didn’t want me. She should have been straight with me from the start … She [only] wanted me around because I could do everything she needed … To me, she was as clever as Howell. She had me round her little finger. She could make me do anything, including spending money I didn’t have … She could work me like no other woman worked me and I hate that.’

  15.

  Money, money, money …

  Once Colin Howell finally decided to move on from Hazel Buchanan, he wasted little time finding someone else. He had a brief liaison with a woman but, as he admitted later: ‘I knew it was going nowhere.’ It was just before Christmas 1996 when a policeman, Steven Cargin, brought Kyle Jorgensen, a young American divorcee, along to a Christian ‘singles night’ at Howell’s house. She had been attending Portstewart Baptist Church. Cargin introduced her to Howell and very quickly they began dating. It was love at first sight and was a whirlwind romance. Colin and Kyle married the following year on 2 May 1997 – Howell called in to have his teeth whitened that morning, telling only close friends about the marriage ceremony. A fortnight later his new wife announced she was pregnant, the first of five children the couple were to have. She told police after Howell’s arrest: ‘This just seemed [something] God had done for me and it was such a wonderful privilege and provision for me as a single parent.’

  Kyle Jorgensen, originally from New York, arrived in Northern Ireland with her two young children, Dylan and Katie, in July 1996. She had only recently managed to extricate herself from a deeply unhappy four-year marriage to a David Epp in Sanibel, Florida. Wanting to make a fresh start for herself and her children, she decided to cross the Atlantic to study Irish history. She applied for a place at Trinity College, Dublin, as well as Queen’s University in Belfast and the University of Limerick, and was finally accepted at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.

  With her course due to start in October that year Kyle rented a house in Portstewart at Millbank Avenue, an area of the town where many students lived. Following her brother Arnie’s religious conversion a year previously, Kyle had only just rediscovered religion herself. And so, soon after settling in the town, she became a regular attender at Portstewart Baptist Church, where she met the friend of Howell who subsequently introduced her to her future husband. Aged thirty, Kyle was eight years Howell’s junior and in many ways a vulnerable young woman, having just arrived in a strange country with two small children and still in the throes of a very acrimonious divorce.

  The newly-weds lived for a short period at Howell’s house at Knocklayde Park, but with six children (Kyle’s two and his four) and another baby on the way, space was at a premium. Howell decided to build what would be a very lavish family home at Glebe Road, a few miles outside Castlerock, but as they waited for the building work to be finished they moved into a rented, semi-detached house on Freehall Road, also in Castlerock.

  Like Lesley before her, Kyle quickly found that her independent pursuits – in her case, her university studies – had to be sacrificed in the interests of family life. Howell helped with the children whenever he could, but much of his time was spent at work. He was extremely driven and single-minded and felt that his role was to provide financially for his family, while his wife’s place was in the home.

  Beneath Howell’s very traditionalist view of the sexes, however, was also an intractable core of misogyny, it seems. One former female employee recalls his clear attitude that women were basically inferior to men: ‘This was Colin’s attitude [quoting Genesis 3:16]: “And to the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pains and thy groanings; in pain thou shalt bring forth children, and thy submission shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” ’ In the surgery, he would make life difficult for female members of staff who fell out of favour and would take any opportunity to upbraid them over tiny, insignificant shortcomings. At home too he was a strict and sometimes brutal authoritarian. He used to smack his older children with a wooden spoon as a form of punishment and was never slow to let his wife know who was boss.

  With six children in her care as well as baby Erik, who had been born with a problem of the digestive system and had to stay in hospital for some time immediately after his birth, the summer of 1998 cannot have been easy for Howell’s new wife. She also had to undergo major treatment after Erik’s birth because of an infection. And her ex-husband in the United States was still making waves in her life with his bid to win custody of Dylan and Katie. Apart from a couple of church acquaintances, she knew hardly anybody in the area, and even though Northern Ireland was moving towards a peaceful new era with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998, Kyle was still bewildered by the politics of the place.

  Imagine her shock that summer, just sixteen months after they married, when Howell made an astonishing confession. They had just finished dinner and, for the first time in ages, were more or less on their own, sitting in the lounge as Kyle was feeding baby Erik. Howell, who hadn’t eaten much, seemed on edge and distracted. He said there was something he had to tell her. In the moments which ensued, Kyle Howell would get a terrifying glimpse into the hitherto hidden depths of her new husband’s soul – and a first intimation of the nightmare into which he was to drag her in years to come.

  When they first met, Howell had been quick to tell Kyle all a
bout what had happened with his first wife – or, rather, the official version of what had happened. Lesley, he explained, had taken her own life because of his affair with another woman, and he took full responsibility for having driven her to such a tragic end. She had suffered from depression, and had been taking prescription drugs as well as self-medicating with alcohol. Howell described how he routinely came home to find her drunk and the children running around the house unattended. He said his lover’s husband, Trevor Buchanan, had taken his own life as well. But beyond this, he had not entered into any more detail in his explanations to Kyle. There had been an unspoken understanding between the two of them that it was probably best left at this.

  But now, as Kyle sat on the sofa with Erik on her knee, Howell began shaking and suddenly blurted out: ‘It’s my fault. It’s all my responsibility. I did it. I killed Lesley.’ Stunned and utterly incredulous, the young American found herself involuntarily shifting to the other end of the sofa. But he continued with his shocking admission anyway. While he didn’t describe fully what had happened, he told her about how he had used a garden hose and how he had also killed Trevor Buchanan.

  Once she was able to compose herself enough to speak, Kyle’s first response was to tell him that she wanted to call the police, there and then. But Howell urged her not to do so – not straight away. Pleading with her to stay calm and think of the future, he told her: ‘Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath. It’s been seven years and surely you can wait one more day. We need to sort the children. We have to make sure they are financially OK. Let me try and put the practice up for sale. We can take our time and make sure everything is in place.’

  This was a man she no longer recognized. Kyle felt confused and disorientated. Next, she worried about the children’s safety and her own well-being. She felt she had been duped. Her head was crowded with all sorts of thoughts and emotions. She felt alone and trapped, far from home and from anyone she felt she could really trust or depend upon. Not knowing what she should do, for the remainder of that evening she allowed Howell to talk her down and she listened while he reasoned that they should carefully plan how to protect the children’s future, before he would surrender himself to the authorities. At first she thought Howell was joking, but when she realized he was serious she challenged him: ‘Why did you marry me? How could you marry me and not tell me this? Why did you do this? You fooled me. How could you do this to me?’ She told police: ‘I was so freaked out and scared … I just felt kind of trapped. I was here alone in Ireland … I just wished I’d phoned the police.’

  The following day, after Howell left as usual for the surgery, she telephoned her mother in the United States. She didn’t say anything about her husband’s startling admission, but simply asked: ‘Mom, what do you do when you know somebody had done something illegal, but they’re now a Christian?’ Her mother just replied that she didn’t know. Next, Kyle rang her brother Arnie with the same question – but again, without a word about what Howell had just told her. Arnie assumed that Kyle believed Howell had cheated again, and the conversation was left at that. A day later, while out for a walk with some acquaintances from the church, she called an elder aside and quietly asked him, again without disclosing any specifics, the same question. The man paused for a while, before replying: ‘Well, if it goes before the cross …’

  Kyle was in turmoil. She thought about Nicky Cruz, well-known founder of the Nicky Cruz Outreach, an evangelical Christian ministry based in the US. Cruz was the ultimate example of how bad men could turn good, with God’s help. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, he had once headed up one of the most feared criminal gangs in New York City – the Mau Maus, named after the anti-colonialist uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. But once he had discovered God, Cruz had turned from a violent life of crime to that of an influential and peace-loving Christian evangelist whose mission was to preach the Gospel. Maybe Howell was like Nicky Cruz, Kyle found herself thinking. Or maybe he was some kind of Irish terrorist, like the ones she had heard about, who had killed people and spread death and mayhem during the years of the Troubles. Had she been manipulated by a charming psychopath?

  She rummaged through Howell’s personal belongings and discovered Lesley’s death certificate which confirmed she had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Perhaps her husband had simply exaggerated the extent of the role he had played in Lesley and Trevor’s death, because of the guilt he felt over his affair with Hazel Buchanan? People in the church were always telling Kyle what a wonderful man Colin was: a good father who loved his children. Some had even hinted that Lesley and Trevor Buchanan had taken their own lives, because it was they – and not Colin and Hazel – who had been having an affair. Perhaps that was where the truth lay after all?

  Maybe it was because she herself had been the victim of an unhappy marriage for four years that Kyle was ultimately prepared to keep quiet and stand by the new man in her life. Maybe it was because, by this time, she felt a huge responsibility to Howell’s four children too. Maybe it was because she was alone and isolated and without any support from close family. She had no money of her own and no qualifications to help her get a well-paid job: she had worked as a waitress before coming to Ireland.

  After his confession to his wife, it seemed at first that Howell had every intention of coming clean and handing himself in to the authorities. He began to make plans to sell his practice, so as to set Kyle and the children up financially. It was September 1998 and her parents were due to come to Northern Ireland. Howell booked rooms at the Burrendale Hotel, Newcastle, County Down, and invited his own parents to join them all there for the weekend. He had decided that he would make an announcement to everyone and then hand himself over to the police. But the night before, his father called to say that he was unable to come because at the last moment he had been asked to stand in for a preacher at a church event. And so the family summit was called off.

  While Howell was at church that weekend, he claimed a girl called Sandra approached him and said: ‘Colin, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but you just need to know all your sins are forgiven and forgotten by God.’ She also quoted a verse from First Corinthians 4:5 – ‘Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time: wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts. At that time, each will receive his praise from God.’ It was the sign Howell needed – he decided to abandon his plans to surrender himself to the authorities and confess to his crimes. He was more than happy to believe that Sandra’s words were a communication from God. The Lord was clearly telling him that all had been forgiven.

  As time passed, and the memory of the evening when he had confessed the shocking truth began to recede, Kyle herself gradually let go of the idea of telling the police. While she could never completely erase the revelation from her mind, she was prepared to move on. And Howell certainly was. He was very convincing when he told her that he knew God had now forgiven him. Kyle Howell agreed to stick by her husband. But she also warned him that if he stepped out of line at any time in the future, she would call the police and tell them everything.

  So what had prompted Howell to suddenly confess all to his new wife? What triggered his conscience? Might it have had something to do with a chance meeting with a well-known Northern Ireland politician while he camped and fished in the sea with his children at Murlough Bay, near Ballycastle?

  One of Howell’s best friends when growing up in north Belfast was called Paul Wilson. He was a Catholic – one of the few who lived in the same street, Kilcoole Park – who used to help Howell and other teenagers gather wood for huge Eleventh Night bonfires on the eve of the big parades and demonstrations by thousands of members of the Orange Order, who paraded across Northern Ireland to mark the anniversary of Protestant King William’s victory over Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Paul Wilson’s father Paddy, a founding member of the mainly Catholic and nationalist Social Democratic and Labour P
arty and member of the then Northern Ireland Senate, was murdered in June 1973. He and his secretary, Irene Andrews, a Protestant, were stabbed in a random and frenzied attack by loyalist paramilitaries who surrounded his red Mini car at a disused quarry.

  Wilson was also election agent for the then MP for West Belfast, Gerry Fitt, who went on to become a member of the House of Lords in London. Fitt rented a house every summer at Murlough Bay. Howell, who had pitched his tent close to the water’s edge, noticed him getting out of a taxi and later approached him to enquire as to the whereabouts of his old friend who had left Belfast just months after his father was killed. Fitt invited him to his house the following morning and, as the children ate toast and drank orange juice, Howell was called out to the hallway, where he was handed a telephone. Paul Wilson, now married and living in England, was on the other end of the line. It was a Saturday morning and he was about to leave for a rugby match at Twickenham with his two sons, who were wearing England shirts and carrying Union flags. They spoke for several minutes and promised to get in touch. They never did, but the conversation left Howell deeply troubled. It was another defining moment in his life because, while he had massive sympathy for his friend whose father had been murdered in such a brutal fashion, he also felt an overwhelming sense of shame because of the dark secret he shared with just one person – his ex-lover – and the cruel way in which he had murdered. He felt such a hypocrite, and not for the first time.

  By the end of the 1990s, Howell’s life was beginning to look up on other fronts. Financially, things were on a far more healthy footing than during the last fraught years with Lesley, when the bank manager had been constantly on the phone and Howell had been forced to put the new family home on the market in secret and to try to sound out his former employers about taking the Ballymoney surgery off his hands. Friends and acquaintances quickly noticed Kyle’s influence in the way in which he had adopted a far more structured approach to financial matters. The substantial injections of cash from which he benefited in the aftermath of Lesley’s death helped enormously too, of course.