Killer dentist guilty of 'cold-blooded' poisoning

A DENTIST who poisoned his wife and the policeman husband of his former lover, and then covered it up as a double suicide, has been jailed for a minimum of 21 years.

Colin Howell, 51, from Castlerock, Co Londonderry, was told by Mr Justice Anthony Hart at Belfast Crown Court that he will not be a free man again until 2031. He pleaded guilty to the murders of his wife Lesley, 31, the mother of their four children, and Pc Trevor Buchanan, 32, who was married to a woman he was having an affair with at the time, in May 1991.

Hazel Stewart, 47, a mother of two from Coleraine, who later remarried, is due to stand trial next February for the two murders. She denies the two charges.

Judge Anthony Hart said: "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."

Howell first killed his wife and later Pc Buchanan at their homes in Coleraine when he attached part of a baby's feeding bottle to a garden hose to poison them with carbon monoxide fumes from a car.

The judge said that many factors aggravated the crimes including the fact that two innocent people were murdered and six children deprived of the love of their mother and father.