Colin Howell killed his wife, Lesley, as she slept before killing his lover Hazel Buchanan’s husband Trevor, and making it look as though they had taken their own lives
A man who murdered his wife and his lover’s husband kept his twisted crimes a secret for 18 years, letting his own children believe their mother took her own life. Colin Howell and his lover Hazel Buchanan plotted to murder their spouses in 1991.
Howell, a dentist in Castlerock, Northern Ireland, is said to have “carefully planned and ruthlessly executed” the murder of his wife Lesley and Buchanan’s husband Trevor. Both Lesley and Trevor were asleep when Howell killed them.
He then covered up the murders by placing the deceased in a car filled with exhaust fumes, leading police to assume the pair had taken their own lives. But 18 years later, Howell turned up at a police station and confessed to the crimes.
On ITV’s Killer in the House, Howell’s daughter Lauren recalls the moment she heard her father had murdered her mother. She said: “I physically fell on the floor. Cold blood ran through my body and I was so angry.”
Her brother Jonathan said: “It felt like chaos inside. I will just never understand.”
Jonathan went on to describe his father’s crimes as “twisted”. He says he no longer considers Howell to be his dad, a sentiment echoed by his siblings.
He said: “At what point do you suggest to your lover, maybe we kill them? That’s an answer that I’ll never get.
“The motive behind their decision to murder is unfathomable. Rather than have his own reputation tarnished by leaving his wife for another woman, he would rather violently murder two people and hide it in a twisted world.”
Jonathan added: “I don’t consider him my father, I never should have been raised by him. I should have been raised by my mother.”
Jonatha’s brother Daniel says he made the decision to swap life in London for New York so he could “have my own identity” away from being the “crazy dentist killer’s” son.
He added: “I tend to refer to him as Colin, I don’t know what it means to forgive him. When he chose to murder my mother, in my opinion, he chose to abdicate from his role as a father. My whole identity got caught up being the killer’s son.
“I was working as a local doctor in London and someone heard my accent and was like, ‘Oh my god, you’re Colin’s son, the crazy dentist killer’. It was too much and I felt like I want to be my own person and have my own identity.”
In December 2010, Howell was sentenced to a minimum of 21 years behind bars after pleading guilty to two counts of murder. Sentencing him, Mr Justice Hart described the “cold blooded, carefully planned and ruthlessly executed double murder of two people who Howell saw as standing in the way of his adulterous desire to be with Hazel Buchanan.”
The judge told the court Hazel cried out for their son Matthew as her husband gassed him. Matthew died years after her death after a fall in Russia. Buchanan, known as Hazel Stewart after remarrying, was jailed for 18 years after being found guilty of murder.
