Both were convicted of murder and received life sentences. In admitting his sins he hoped to assuage a latent guilty conscience.Īt trial, Howell pleaded guilty but Hazel protested her innocence, claiming she had been too terrified of Howell to talk him out of the plan. Howell was suffering a crisis of faith triggered by financial difficulties and the accidental death of his son. In 2009, Howell confessed to Baptist elders to killing the two, with the assistance of Hazel with whom he had been having an affair (which had long since ended by then). Nearly 20 years would pass before the truth of what happened that night emerged. When a church elder told Buchanan’s wife, Hazel, she too showed no emotion. Howell, a respectable dentist and youth leader in the Baptist congregation, is said to have taken the news stoically. Police concluded they had perished in a suicide pact. He was walking away from a fume-filled Renault in which lay two dead bodies: those of his wife, Lesley, and Trevor Buchanan, an officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary whom the Howells knew through the local Baptist church. One winter’s night in 1991, Colin Howell padded along Castlerock beach on Northern Ireland’s prosperous north coast. Will a new ITV drama offer closure, asks Ed Power An Irish Baptist church was traumatised when two key members were revealed as murderers.
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