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Plus 10 more riveting cases....Click here to grab a copy.
Murder Most Vile Volume Six
A Perfect Murder
Colin Howell was a respected pillar of the
community in the city of Coleraine, Northern Ireland. A dentist by profession,
Howell was deeply religious, a father of six and a devoted husband to his wife
Leslie. At least that was how it appeared on the surface. In reality, Howell
was a serial philanderer, who routinely molested his dental patients while they
were under sedation, and was currently involved in a torrid affair with a
fellow church member. Like Howell, Hazel Buchanan was married, in her case to
Royal Ulster Constabulary officer, Trevor. She was also the mother of two young
children.
The affair between Colin and Hazel appears
to have been an open secret amongst the church congregation. The only ones who
didn’t know about it were apparently their spouses, Leslie and Trevor. But then
Leslie did find out and she took it badly. She became deeply depressed and
began drinking heavily and taking prescription drugs. In an effort to placate
her, Colin swore that he’d break it off with Hazel. And he did, at least for a
couple of weeks. Then the affair was on again, as hot and as heavy as
before.
No one knows when Colin Howell first cooked
up his diabolical scheme to rid himself of an unwanted wife and at the same time
free his lover from her marital obligations. That he thought about it for some
time is obvious given the meticulous nature of the crime, the level of planning
that went into it. What we do know is that on the evening of Saturday, May 18,
1991, Howell arrived home to find his wife passed out on the couch. She had
been drinking heavily again, and popping pills, in part due to her distress
over the affair, in part due to the death of her father twelve days earlier.
Whatever the reason, her semi-comatose state offered Howell the ideal
opportunity to follow through with the plan he’d been hatching.
Walking quickly to the garage, Howell
picked up a device that he’d constructed days before by cutting a baby's
feeding bottle in half. The wide end of this contraption was forced over the
exhaust pipe of his wife’s Renault Savanna. Into the narrow end, he inserted a
length of hosepipe, which he ran across a utility room, across the kitchen and
into the living room where his wife was sleeping, a distance of some 25 feet.
After positioning the hose just inches from Leslie’s face, he returned to the
garage where he turned on the car’s engine. He then stood in the doorway and
waited for the deadly fumes to take effect.
Despite her inebriated state, however, the
fumes got Leslie coughing and she woke. Fearful of his plan going awry, Howell
then rushed forward and held his wife down, forcing the hose into her face. In
her final moments, when she must surely have known that she was about to die,
Leslie called out the name of her six-year-old son Matthew, asleep in his
bedroom just yards away.
Howell staggered from the living room to
the garage to turn off the car’s engine. He took in a couple of deep breaths to
clear his lungs of the carbon monoxide he’d ingested during the struggle. Then
he walked back to the living room and placed his ear against Leslie’s chest to
ascertain that she was dead. Phase one of his plan had gone off without a
hitch. Phase two was likely to be more difficult.
Leslie had died dressed only in pajamas and
a dressing gown, but Howell’s plan required that she be fully dressed. He
therefore dressed her in jeans and a T-shirt and then carried her to the
garage. There, he placed her in the trunk of the Renault, drawing a blanket
over her head, then placing his bicycle on top of the body. Having done that,
he drove to Charnwood Park, on the other side of Coleraine. This was where his
lover lived. This was where the second part of his plan needed to be carried
out.
Trevor Buchanan was asleep when Howell
arrived at the Buchanan residence. Hazel, however, was up and waiting for her
lover. She opened the garage door, allowing Howell to pull his car in. He then
got quickly to work, fixing his contraption to the exhaust pipe, pulling the
length of garden hose through the house so that it was just inches from
Trevor’s face, getting the car running.
But Trevor wasn’t going to go as easily as
Leslie. He woke to find Howell standing just outside the bedroom door. As Trevor
tried to rise, Howell rushed forward to subdue him and a life and death
struggle ensued. As a trained police officer, Trevor would probably have won,
but his arms were trapped under the duvet, giving Howell the upper hand. He
pinned Trevor under his body, covered his head with the duvet and held him
there as the gas took effect and his struggles weakened.
Dizzy with the fumes he’d inhaled, Howell
ran out into the garden, to catch his breath. When he returned, he and Hazel
dressed Trevor and carried his body to the Renault. Howell then drove towards
Castlerock, where Leslie’s father, Harry Clarke, had lived at no. 6 Cliff
Terrace until his recent death. Before reaching the seaside village, Howell
stopped to unload his bicycle, leaving it on a grass verge beside the road.
That accomplished he drove on to his late father-in-law’s home to carry out the
final phase of his plan.
Harry Clarke had a small garage at the back
of the house. Howell reversed the Renault in and then pulled on a pair of
plastic surgical gloves. He lifted Trevor's body from the trunk and placed it
in the driver's seat, leaving the door open. Lesley was left in the trunk, with
pictures of her children scattered around her. Her personal stereo system was placed in her hand, the headset
over her ears, to make it appear that she had been listening to music as she
died. Howell selected a gospel album and pressed play.
Finally, Howell ran a length of vacuum hose
from the exhaust pipe into the trunk. Then, he switched on the car’s ignition
and left. Half a mile down the road he collected his bicycle and peddled home.
The entire murder plot had been carried out in four hours.
The following morning, an apparently
concerned Howell phoned the police to report his wife missing. He was worried
he said, because she’d driven away from the family home in the middle of the
night in an intoxicated state. He then phoned one of the elders at his church,
Jim Flanagan, and asked him to go to no. 6 Cliff Terrace, to check if Leslie
had perhaps spent the night at her father’s house. Flanagan did what he was
asked but did not check the garage and therefore found nothing untoward. Later,
he returned with another church member, a police officer named David Green. It
was then that they found the bodies in the car.
Questioned by detectives after the
discovery, Howell said that his wife and Trevor Buchanan had both been
struggling to cope with the affair between him and Hazel. This was verified by
the pastor of the Coleraine Baptist Church, John Hansford, who confirmed to the
police that he’d been counseling both couples over their marital problems.
Howell also claimed that on the night before the bodies were found Trevor
Buchanan had come to his house and the pair of them had been involved in an
altercation, during which Buchanan struck him. He went on to say that his wife
had been asleep on the sofa when he had gone to bed, but had been gone in the
morning, leaving an emotional note at the house.
The evidence in the case appeared clear
cut. Two jilted spouses, distraught over the infidelity of their loved ones,
had decided to take their own lives. Trevor Buchanan’s family had difficulty
accepting this, insisting that he was not the suicidal type. But here Howell’s
deviousness came to the fore. By leaving the driver’s door open, and aligning
the body in such a way that it appeared Trevor was trying to exit the vehicle
when he died, Howell had managed to allay some of those doubts. It inferred
that Trevor had had second thoughts at the last moment and had tried to leave
the vehicle, only to be overcome by the fumes. It was, in any case, enough to
convince the coroner’s inquest. The deaths were ruled a tragic double
suicide.
Howell was now free to start a new life
with Hazel Buchanan. And the deal was sweetened by a substantial payout from
his wife’s estate. He was left £212,446 in Leslie’s will, while an additional
£27,000 from her father’s estate also passed to him. Insurance payouts amounted
to £120,000, while there was also an endowment policy worth £54,635. All in all
Howell profited handsomely from his wife’s death. He was able to clear up all
his debt and to invest in his previously struggling dental practice. Business
began to flourish.
But the same could not be said for his
relationship with Hazel Buchanan. Within two years, the couple had split up.
Both would eventually remarry. Other things began to go wrong in Howell’s life
too. His son Matthew (who Leslie had called out to in her dying moments) died
in a car crash in Russia in 2007. Then Howell invested £353,000 in a crackpot
scheme to recover gold supposedly hidden by the Japanese in the Philippines
during World War Two. It turned out to be a scam, and relieved Howell of his
ill-gotten gains.
Yet even the loss of his fortune was not
the worst of it for Howell. He was plagued by conscience over the double
murder, driven to the point where he felt he had to talk to somebody about it.
In the late 1990’s he told his new wife Kyle about the murders but the couple
decided that going to the police with a confession would not benefit anyone. Then,
in January 2009, Howell decided to speak to someone else, an elder at his
church. The man urged Howell to go to the police.
On January 19, 2009, Colin Howell walked
into a Coleraine police station and told the whole tragic tale to astonished
detectives. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum of
21 years to be served before he becomes eligible for parole. Despite her
protestations of innocence, Hazel Buchanan was also arrested and put on trial.
She too was sentenced to life in prison.
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