n an exclusive interview this week with Belfast Telegraph crime correspondent Allison Morris, Hazel styles herself as an ingenue, totally manipulated by an older, sophisticated man.
Back when she met Howell, she was “naive”, “vulnerable”, “very quiet”, a “country person” who’d just moved to a big town.
The big town was Coleraine. Not exactly New York.
And Hazel wasn’t exactly isolated. She had her husband, Trevor Buchanan. She had her children and her Church.
And despite how it’s been portrayed, that Church wasn’t some weird offshoot of Gilead.
Jimmy Nesbitt, who starred in The Secret, the movie about the pair’s crimes, recalls the Baptist neighbours with whom he grew up in the same area.
“It’s quite easy to imagine that Baptist community as an odd and cultish world, but it wasn’t at all. They’re certainly a close community, but I knew a lot of these people and they’re charitable people that will go out of their way to help you.”
And Hazel Stewart back then certainly wasn’t your local shy, shrinking violet. Hazel liked to keep up appearances.
What propelled Howell and Stewart — a seemingly respectable dentist and a Sunday School teacher — to commit such a gruesome, inexplicable crime? Was it really just lust?
A common interpretation is that, rather than divorce, which their Church would have frowned upon, the pair saw murder as some sort of macabre alternative.
But this overlooks the obvious point that, if you care so deeply about your Church, then you’re likely also to have some reservations about breaking the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”
So, this was about more than just a way of being together without the scandal of openly admitting adultery. It was about greed.
Howell claimed the life insurance on his murdered wife, Lesley, to the tune of over £400,000. Hazel claimed Trevor’s police pension and paid off the mortgage on her house with the money from his life policy.
Not so “naive”, then, that she couldn’t fill in an insurance form. Not so “vulnerable” that she was troubled by spending the blood money that came from murdering the father of her children. Coercive control is not currently recognised as an offence in Northern Ireland, but soon will be, following the introduction (belatedly) of a Domestic Abuse Act.
Hazel’s ongoing legal action is based on portraying herself as a victim of such control.
A callous, grasping double murderer would not normally be first to spring to mind when you think of the genuinely vulnerable the new legislation is designed to protect.
I’ve always argued that only about a quarter of the people we send to prison in Northern Ireland should be incarcerated. We jail addicts, the mentally ill, people whose actions stem from the deprivation and abuse they’ve suffered in life and we do this because we don’t have anywhere else to send them.
The people who work in prisons do an amazing job looking after inmates, many, many of whom shouldn’t be behind bars in the first place. But Hazel Stewart deserves to be right where she is.
That’s not to say that Howell didn’t play a leading role in their crime. But he couldn’t have killed without her.
And even naive country girls, newly arrived in big towns, do know right from wrong.
You could argue (and it has been) that there was also some degree of coercive control in the cases of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, or of Bonnie and her Clyde. But that doesn’t detract from any, or all, of these killers’ guilt.
Reading Hazel Stewart’s words this week, the most telling, chilling thing, is the sheer insensitivity of the language she uses — devoid of remorse or acknowledgment of the pain she inflicted. That talk about family. About how tough it’s been for poor her.
Colin Howell, she says, turned her head, “and that was the rock I perished on”.
But, ultimately, of course, it wasn’t Hazel Stewart who perished.
It was Lesley Howell. And Trevor Buchanan.
Innocent victims of the coldly-executed actions of one evil man — and one equally evil woman.
Cycling fans are wheelie the maddest
Of all mad sports set-ups, cycling is surely the maddest. Not the actual cycling itself. But the fans. During the Tour de France, one daft woman, eager to be on the telly and holding up a sign of greetings to her granny, clipped a rider — and 40 more went down like dominos. Dodgier still, at the Giro d’Italia, the race leader was encouraged on his way by two men wielding roaring chainsaws.
Did no one in security spot them as they waited for him to arrive and think to ask the obvious: “Um, what do you plan to do with the chainsaws, lads?”
Food for thought for others trolled online
This week’s news of a six-figure sum payout to Stephen Nolan, from an anonymous idiot who’d posted defamatory allegations about him on social media, will surely have unsettled the online trolling community, coming as it does on the heels of another massive libel award to Arlene Foster.
Both used the Belfast libel lawyer Paul Tweed. I imagine not a few public figures, who’ve also been on the receiving end of similar unfounded bile, will be giving Mr Tweed a shout in the weeks ahead.
Diana’s death still felt today
The new statue of Princess Diana (left) has been given a dressing-down for poor fashion choices.
The shirt’s shoulders aren’t sharp enough, the waist’s not cinched in enough — and flat shoes! She’s wearing flat shoes. (Can a statue stand in stilettos?)
True, it’s not the most exciting — it looks like Diana’s about to shepherd three children across a busy road.
But, unveiled on July 1, it represents a royal whose impact is still felt today — like that other effigy in front of Kensington Palace. King Billy.
