MURDER MOST HOWELL

SHOCK DETAILS Interviews of Colin Howell in broadcast

- BY JILLY BEATTIE

SEVENTEEN years after double killer Colin Howell walked voluntarily into a police station and admitted he murdered two people, the chilling recording of his confessions to the PSNI are revealed.

He can be heard telling officers how, “anyone who has an affair always thinks they would be better off without their partner” and adds: “I do believe that thoughts of murder are immediately connected to that.”

Dubbed the Driller Killer in a nod to his former profession as a dentist, without apparent emotion and with incredible detail, he describes his crimes and the actions of his lover Hazel Stewart.

He outlines how the seed of his murderous idea ended in dumping his victim's bodies in a disused garage, setting the scene to look like a double suicide.

The statement was recorded in Coleraine PSNI station in Co Derry on January 29, 2009.

It was hours after Howell, then 50, admitted to church elders he had killed Lesley Howell, his wife and the mother of their four children, before murdering RUC officer Trevor Buchanan, the husband of his then lover, Hazel (nee Buchanan).

He told police: “I hatched a plot of how I might make this happen and cover it up as a suicide. When I would do it, if I would pipe gas, or rather the fumes from the car into my house and then Trevor Buchanan's house.”

The revelations come in Confessions Of A Killer, an exclusive two-part documentary series features original audio recordings from lengthy police interviews around the deaths carried out in 2009.