A jury was urged to avoid a miscarriage of justice today as the murder trial of Hazel Stewart in Northern Ireland drew to a close.
A barrister for the accused (48 today) said her dentist lover, Colin Howell, was responsible for the murders of his wife and Ms Stewart's first husband and impossible to stop, but there was no plan or joint enterprise.
Paul Ramsey addressed Coleraine Crown Court on the 14th day of her murder trial. "This is a difficult, distressing and heart-rending case. We have listened day after day to horrific, almost unbelievable evidence as to what happened on that night in 1991," he said.
"It is a tragedy - but we must not compound that tragedy by a miscarriage of justice.
"I would ask you to consider the evidence in this case should give you cause to hesitate, to pause and to resist the headlong urge to convict that the Crown have urged upon you."
Prosecutors have insisted the killings of their spouses were a joint enterprise, a plan executed by Howell and Ms Stewart to rid themselves of their respective partners for them to be together.
Ms Stewart, from Ballystrone Road, Macosquin, Coleraine, who has denied the two murders, sat impassively in the dock today.
Her husband, Pc Trevor Buchanan (32) and Lesley Howell (31), the wife of her lover, were found dead in a car filled with carbon monoxide fumes in a garage behind a row of houses known as the Twelve Apostles in the seaside town of Castlerock, Co Derry, in May 1991.
At first police thought they had died in some sort of suicide pact because of the distress over their spouses' affair.
It was only when Howell (51) first confessed to his church elders and then police in January 2009 that he had murdered them that Ms Stewart was arrested by investigating detectives.
Howell, a father of ten from Glebe Road, Castlerock, is serving a 21-year jail sentence after pleading guilty to the murders.
He first gassed his wife as she slept on the sofa of their home in Coleraine. He then drove her body to the far side of the town, where he murdered Pc Buchanan by the same method before taking the two bodies away to stage-manage the suicide.
PA