In 2009, Colin Howell walked into the police station in Coleraine, Co Derry, and confessed to the double murder of his wife and his lover\u2019s husband. <\/p>\n
The deaths of Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan almost 20 years previously had been treated as suicides. <\/p>\n
Howell sat in an interview room and outlined to police how, with the help of former lover Hazel Stewart, he had killed them both. <\/p>\n
\u201cI would suggest that anybody who has an affair will always think they would be better off without their partner,\u201d he told them. <\/p>\n
\u201cI do believe that thoughts of murder are immediately connected to that.\u201d <\/p>\n
Howell and Stewart were convicted in 2011 of the murders of their spouses and sentenced to a minimum of 21 years and 18 years in prison, respectively. <\/p>\n
For the first time, the original recordings of those police interviews are to be broadcast in a two-part BBC documentary series, Confessions of a Killer, which begins on Tuesday. <\/p>\n
[\u00a0Hazel Stewart \u2018under coercive control\u2019 of lover Colin Howell when respective spouses murderedOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The tapes show Howell to be calm and emotionless as he recounts how and why he decided to murder his wife and Stewart\u2019s husband, and why he confessed almost two decades later. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen I first decided to come here, I believed it was the right thing to do. I knew it would be big; I didn\u2019t have the vision to see how big it would be,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n In the documentary, Howell is described as a \u201cpillar of the community\u201d. A dentist, he was prominent in Coleraine Baptist Church where he and Stewart, a Sunday school teacher, had met. <\/p>\n \u201cMy influence on her [Stewart] was already strong, and grew,\u201d he said. \u201cEven the affair … was driven by me, albeit with her co-operation. It\u2019s highly likely she didn\u2019t want to [commit the murders] but she did obviously co-operate.\u201d <\/p>\n On the tapes, he outlined to police how he piped the carbon monoxide fumes from the car in the garage into his wife Lesley\u2019s bedroom as she slept, then did the same at Trevor Buchanan\u2019s house and made it look like a suicide pact. <\/p>\n He described in detail how he killed his wife by setting a hose \u201cright up beside her when she was sound, deeply asleep. <\/p>\n \u201cI went back to the garage and started the engine. My concept was that she would have fallen asleep, but then she didn\u2019t,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that happened when she aroused was she called out \u2018Matthew\u2019, my son\u2019s name \u2013 that\u2019s one of the memories that haunts me. <\/p>\n