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The killer dentist and the madcap gold mine scheme
A dentist who murdered his wife and his lover’s husband and disguised it as a suicide pact was driven to confess after falling victim to an outlandish gold-mining scam in the Philippines, it can now be reported.
Colin Howell was having an affair with Hazel Stewart, who is due to stand trial next year Photo: MARK JAMIESON
By John Bingham 5:04PM GMT 03 Dec 2010
Colin Howell, a devout Christian, kept the “perfect murder” of his wife, Lesley, 30, and Trevor Buchanan, 31, the husband of his mistress Hazel Buchanan, secret for almost 20 years. But he finally broke down and confessed to the elders of his church last year after seeing his career and second marriage fall apart.
Hours beforehand he searched the term “double murders” on Google to discover he was likely to get 20 years in jail if he pleaded guilty. He was only a year out. Yesterday Howell, 51, was jailed for life, with a minimum term of 21 years, at a hearing at Belfast Crown Court.
The court heard how he used a hosepipe attached to part of a baby’s bottle to gas them as they slept in their homes in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, late on the night of May 18 1991. He escaped suspicion by dressing the bodies and driving them six miles away where he created an elaborate suicide scene in his car.
Tests showed they died of carbon monoxide poisoning and neither police nor the coroner at their inquest suspected anything other than suicide. Howell, who was in debt at the time, used the more than £400,000 he gained in life insurance and other benefits from his wife’s death, to relaunch his career, becoming a partner in a local practice.
His career flourished and he promoted himself as “celebrity” dentist, even claiming – falsely – the Queen of Jordan among his patients. But in 2008, faced with a mounting unpaid tax bill, he fell for a scam purporting to offer him up to £8 million if he invested in attempts to recover gold supposedly buried in caves in the Philippines by Japanese troops in the 1940s.
“Any normal person would have run a mile from it but something compelled him to get involved with it anyway,” said one former friend. “He was a very headstrong person, if someone said ‘you can’t have that’ it would make him more determined.” Howell hoped to give some of the money to missionary work and use the rest to retire, living part of the year in his holiday home in Florida.
But after he had sold his share in two dental practices and ploughed more than £350,000 into the scheme, he flew out to check on his investment only to discover he had been conned. He returned from the trip visibly shaken, and soon became gaunt, pale and broke out in a rash. A few weeks later he finally confessed to the murders.
Passing sentence yesterday, Mr Justice Hart told Howell that he would have received 28 years had he not pleaded guilty. "These were truly heinous crimes, constituting as they did 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," he said.
Hazel Buchanan, who has also remarried and is now called Hazel Stewart, is due to stand trial next year. She denies murder.
