We spent 18 years believing our mom had taken her personal life earlier than discovering out our father killed her, youngsters of double assassin dentist reveal

The children of double murderer Colin Howell have revealed they spent two decades believing their mother had died by suicide before finding out he had killed her.

Howell, 65, and his former lover Hazel Stewart, 62, murdered their respective spouses Lesley Howell, 31, and police officer Trevor Buchanan, 32, in May 1991.

Both victims were found in a fume-filled garage in Castlerock, County Londonderry, but Howell covered up the killings as a double suicide for nearly two decades.

Police had originally believed Mrs Howell and Mr Buchanan died in a suicide pact, after discovering that their partners were having an extra-marital affair.

But the victims had actually been drugged before being murdered and their bodies arranged to make it look as though they had taken their own lives.

Howell’s crimes only came to light in 2008 when he confessed to elders in his church and then police – and he was imprisoned for at least 21 years in 2010.

He also implicated former Sunday school teacher Stewart and she was jailed for at least 18 years in 2011. She was told last July that she cannot appeal the sentence.

Howell was also imprisoned in 2011 for five-and-a-half years for indecent assaults on five female patients, although this ran concurrent to the sentence for murder.

Now, Howell’s children Lauren, Daniel and Jon have spoken about their mother’s death and its impact on them as children for the first time in a new ITV documentary.

On ‘Killer In The House: The Murders Of Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan’, which airs on ITV1 at 9pm tonight, Lauren said: ‘For 18 years I believed that my mum died in a suicide pact. It turned out that my dad and Hazel had actually killed her.’

She described her mother as ‘so devoted’ with a ‘gentle approach to parenting but at the same time she made it fun, she made it worthwhile, even in the smallest things’.

Lauren, whose full name is now Lauren Bradford-Clarke, recalled how May 19, 1991, was the day after her brother Daniel’s second birthday and the siblings had been playing on a new blue slide he had been given.

She said: ‘I remember asking where my mum was. She was out of the house and that wasn’t a very common thing. There was three or four men from the church sitting on the patio talking with my dad, and I got a sense it was a bit serious.

‘At one point Matthew and I were called into the dining room and told that our mum had gone to heaven and that she wouldn’t be coming back.

‘I don’t know if I really grasped that, I don’t know if you can as a four-year-old. But even if I probably didn’t, I felt lost and I didn’t know what it meant, but I also knew it wasn’t good.’

Lauren said she was told her mother had ‘died from car fumes’, leaving her ‘terrified’ during her childhood when she walked behind a vehicle in case she died from breathing in the gases.

But she also described how she enjoyed spending time with Stewart after her mother’s death, saying they would ‘do girly things’ and she ‘really loved that time’.

Howell then broke up with Stewart, which left Lauren ‘so very upset’ and he married an American woman called Kyle Jorgensen who became her stepmother.

Kyle had two children from a previous relationship and went on to have five children together with Howell. 

Lauren said: ‘On the few occasions we would talk about my mum, she was referred to as Lesley. There was no pictures of her. Quite quickly my mum was almost forgotten.’

She added that her brother Matthew tragically died aged 22 while studying abroad in Russia, and her father told her that he had ‘brought death into the family and therefore God had punished him by killing my brother’.

Lauren also spoke about her shock when Howell eventually confessed to murder after suffering financial ruin when he lost £353,000 investing in a scheme to make money from gold in the Philippines.

She said: ‘I physically fell on the floor. Cold blood ran through my body and I felt angry. After my dad confessed, he was sentenced to 21 years in prison.

‘We’re realising this horrible truth, the years and decades of lies that were told, knowing how that had actually impacted me.’

And on Stewart trying to appeal her conviction, Lauren said: ‘At some point she just has to accept this and stop dragging us through this. It’s enough.

‘She will be eligible for parole soon, she will get out. I have a life sentence. I will never get my mum back. My mum will never walk through the door.’

Lauren’s brother Jon also spoke about his grief, telling the documentary he ‘just grew up knowing that mum committed suicide’.

He added that the children would frequently pray to ‘get a new mum’ following Lesley’s death.

But Jon also explained how their father carried out child abuse, saying: ‘Religion was an enormous part of growing up. That was a very effective way of making me want to be compliant and be a good Christian and a good son.

‘Control was a big part of it. I saw true violence in my father. What I now understand to be true child abuse.’

Jon said his father had come back from the Philippines in December 2008 having suffered financial ruin and took him and Daniel to a Chinese restaurant where he said he had ‘had this realisation that he had to come clean’.

On the day Jon found out his father was a killer, he recalled how elders from their church said Howell had murdered his mother and Mr Buchanan.

Jon said: ‘It just felt like chaos inside. I just didn’t and will never understand. At what point do you suggest to your lover, maybe we could kill them? And that’s an answer 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.

‘I don’t consider him my father. I never should have been raised by him, I should have been raised by my mother.’

He also described Stewart’s appeal as ‘disappointing’, adding: ‘It’s not taking accountability and it’s not honouring the life of my mum and Trevor by failing to own up to your role.’

Jon additionally revealed that he had changed his last name from Howell to his mother’s maiden name Clarke, saying: ‘It was important for me to honour my mum. I want to pass on her last name.’

His brother Daniel also spoke at length in the documentary, saying how he would sing songs, play games and go on camping trips with his father.

But he added: ‘The reality that I always grew up with was that my mum had killed herself on the night of my second birthday because she was feeling sad.

‘I asked my father if suicide is a sin, and that’s the last thing you do before you go onto heaven or hell. I remember being very worried that she had gone to hell.’

Daniel said he ‘adored’ Stewart when she became his stepmother, and used to ask her: ‘When are you going to get married, when are you going to be my mummy?’

But when Howell and Stewart broke up in 1996, he was left ‘devastated because I wanted a mum’, adding: ‘I felt so much closeness to her and I lost her.’

Howell received an insurance payout of £400,000 after Lesley’s death, and Daniel said he used this to ‘fix his financial problems at his dental practice and then had a booming dental practice’.

Speaking about Kyle, Daniel said: ‘When we were growing up together in this new family that the Lord had given us, our mum was not a topic of conversation. It was just a dirty word.

‘But this was not a household of love. The principal idea was that their role as parents is to implement discipline. You’re good if you’re with us, because God speaks to us and then we’ll tell you what’s right. The physical discipline was physical abuse.

‘He really had this good image in the community, very successful, I saw how he interacted with those in the church and then I saw how he was in the home. Age of ten onwards, I always saw my father as a fraud.’

Daniel also explained his reaction to finding out his father was a murderer, saying: ‘I can barely put it into words. It kind of felt like my whole life was deconstructed.

‘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 he, in my view, abdicated from his role as a father.’

Daniel eventually moved to New York because his identity ‘kind of got caught up being the “killer’s son”.’

He said: ‘I was working as a locum doctor in London and a colleague saw my name and heard my accent and said “Oh my God, you’re Colin Howell’s son, the crazy dentist killer”.

‘It was too much, I felt like I wanted to be my own person and have my own identity. Really the main driver of why I decided to move over to New York.’

But he was full of praise for his mother Lesley, saying: ‘By all accounts she was an amazing woman and I’m so blessed to have had her for the two years that I did.’

As Howell continues to serve his sentence at high-security Maghaberry Prison, a separate documentary which aired on BBC Two last Sunday broadcast his confession tapes.

In that programme, called ‘Confessions of a Killer‘, Howell is heard talking in a police interview about Stewart’s role in the murders and says: ‘Definitely as a person she was a victim.

‘There was a co-operation but arising from, you’ve told me, I didn’t know she had a fear, but obviously it’s clear she had a fear and didn’t know how to escape from it.

‘So yeah she responded and did certain things that she now, at the time had even, especially now, regrets. But in terms of the driving force as to why these things happened, she’s been a very unfortunate victim of Colin Howell and I regret that.’

Howell also claims he had decided to confess because of changes in his marriage, finances and ‘a sudden inability to function with patients’ at his dental practice.

He says he had been ‘involved in intermittent sexual behaviours with patients’ at the practice.

The killer, who went to church in Coleraine, adds that he realised ‘as a Christian I was a fake’, saying: ‘My world fell apart.

‘I walked in here probably believing that this was the only way that I could be real and that it would put right what was wrong, that’s why I came and confessed.’

Howell adds that his justice in the law would be ‘deserved’ after his confession, and he had prayed the consequences would be ‘bearable to the people who I’ve said sorry to’.

But Lauren criticised the BBC after saying the corporation denied her plea to hear the tapes before they were broadcast.

She told BBC News NI’s Evening Extra programme that hearing his voice had brought back feelings of ‘shock, horror and trauma’, adding: ‘It has been very, very difficult to come to terms with.

‘I think that if I had been given an opportunity to prepare and hear them in advance at least it would have given me a slight bit of distance from it being broadcast.’

The BBC said the production team were in touch ‘with immediate family members about the making of this series and invited them to contribute to it’.

A spokesman added: ‘We understand the sensitivities involved and the continuing effects of what happened.

‘Our programmes explore issues of public interest and they have been made with care for those most directly impacted and in line with relevant BBC editorial guidelines.’

The case was turned into an ITV mini-drama in 2016 called The Secret, which starred James Nesbitt as Howell and Genevieve O’Reilly as Stewart.

‘Killer in the House’ airs on ITV1 at 9pm tonight and is also available on ITVX