Hazel Stewart denies the murders of her husband Trevor Buchanan and Lesley Howell in 1991 A woman accused of a double murder said she did not know her lover’s wife’s body was in his car on the night of the killings, a court in Coleraine has heard.
Hazel Stewart, 47, denies murdering her husband Trevor Buchanan, 32, and Mrs Lesley Howell, 31, in May 1991.
In a tape of her sixth police interview, she said: “I did not think anything was going to happen to Trevor.
“I did not know Leslie’s body was going to be in the car.”
But Coleraine Court also heard on Tuesday that a police officer who conducted the interview said Mrs Stewart said she did know her former lover, dentist Colin Howell, 51, was coming to her house on the night of the murders.
She had said that she had “a bad feeling” about it.
Trevor Buchanan and Leslie Howell were originally thought to have died in a suicide pact on the north coast of Northern Ireland.
Detectives reopened the inquiry, 18 years after the deaths, when dentist Howell, 51, stunned his church elders by confessing to murdering the two.
Later, when he was questioned by police, he claimed that Hazel Stewart was part of the plan which they covered up and then kept secret since the time of the deaths in May 1991.
Howell, a father of 10, from Glebe Road, Castlerock, is serving a 21-year jail sentence after pleading guilty to the two murders at Belfast Crown Court last November.
Last week, he spent four days in the witness box testifying against his former lover.
Howell gassed both his victims and then drove the two bodies to the neighbouring seaside town of Castlerock, County Derry, where he stage managed the apparent suicide.
The trial continues.
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