Double-Murderer Dentist: Accomplice Speaks Out From Gaol
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- Published: Monday, 28 June 2021 19:14
- Written by Chris Tapper
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The former lover of a Northern Irish dentist who murdered both his wife and his lover’s husband, has spoken out from prison, with claims that the dentist tested ‘knock-out’ gas on her, before he used it in order to abuse women at his Coleraine surgery.
Colin Howell is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to the murders of his wife Lesley Howell, and his lover Hazel Stewart’s then-husband, Trevor Buchanan.
In 2010, Howell also received a five-and-a-half-year sentence for sexually assaulting five female patients while they were under sedation at his dental surgery in Ballymoney, County Antrim.
Hazel Stewart recently spoke about Buchanan’s activities to the Belfast Telegraph. She is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence after also being found guilty of assisting in the murders, despite her claims that she acted under duress exerted by the Howell.
Stewart told the Belfast Telegraph that the dentist “experimented” on her with powerful sedatives so he could use the same method to abuse women in his surgery.
From Hydebank Wood detention centre, Stewart told the newspaper that she believed Howell used her in order to test the drugs that he would later use on his victims.
“She believes he experimented on her to see what she could remember before he sexually assaulted five women at his dental practice,” Allison Morris wrote.
“Even when he was taking me to the surgery and gassing me, he was experimenting on me and I knew that. How could I stop it?” Stewart told the reporter.
In August 2020, The Irish News reported that Howell had been questioned by specialist officers and a file sent to the Public Prosecution Service after Stewart claimed she was in a coercively abusive relationship with the dentist.
She’d said Howell had manipulated and sexually abused her during their time together.
But in a letter to Stewart in November 2020 the Belfast Telegraph reported the PPS as saying it had “concluded that the evidence available is insufficient to afford a reasonable prospect of obtaining a conviction of the suspect in respect of any offence.”
"The suspect accepts that he sedated you with your agreement and that sexual activity occurred, but he claims you were always conscious so that you were capable of consent and that you were consenting at all times.”
The Sun said “Her lawyers are planning to challenge that decision saying she is being discriminated against because she is in jail.”
The killings took place in 1991, when the dentist used car exhaust gas to first kill his wife Lesley, as she slept in their house, downstairs.
Howell then took his wife’s body to Stewart’s house, where he then killed Stewart’s husband by the same method.
Trevor Buchanan, a police officer, had been previously drugged with sedatives supplied to Stewart by the dentist. As a result, he was unable to fend off Howell.
Howell was said to have contacted elders at his church, to say his wife Lesley was missing. Her body, and that of Trevor Buchanan were later discovered in a fume-filled car in a garage at Lesley’s father’s house.
On the discovery of the couple’s bodies, police treated the deaths as a double-suicide. Both Howell and Stewart had previously told their respective spouses of their affair and it was assumed that the suicides were related to their marriage breakdowns.
A coroner’s court ruled in 1992 that both Trevor and Lesley had taken their own lives in an apparent suicide pact and the deaths were recorded as carbon monoxide poisoning.
It was nearly 20 years after the killings that Howell handed himself into the police, admitting he had gassed his former wife and Trevor Buchanan. By this time, both Howell and Stewart had remarried.
Howell had been described as a ‘deeply-religious’ man and is thought to have confessed to the killings after the death of his eldest son Matthew (22), after a fall in St Petersburg, Russia.
There was speculation at the time that the dentist considered his son’s death and subsequent huge financial losses in an investment scheme were ‘punishments’ from God for his crimes, thus prompting his confessions.
The dentist was also stripped of his NHS pension after the trial.
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