A former Sunday school teacher accused of murdering her policeman husband and her lover’s wife will not give evidence at her trial, her lawyer told Coleraine Crown Court today.
Paul Ramsey QC told judge Mr Justice Anthony Hart that 47-year-old Hazel Stewart will not take the stand in the high profile case.
She is accused of plotting with her ex-lover Colin Howell to kill his wife Lesley and her husband Trevor Buchanan in May 1991 and covering it up as a suicide pact. She denies the charges.
The judge asked Mr Ramsey was his client aware that her decision not to give evidence would be taken into account by the jury of three women and nine men. “The jury may draw such inference as would appear proper from her failure to do so,” he said.
The barrister said Ms Stewart, who sat impassively in the dock wearing a white shirt and her familiar plum coat, knew the situation. He told the court the defence would be calling no evidence in the case.
The development came on the 12th day of the trial after Crown lawyer Ciaran Murphy had closed the prosecution case.
The bodies of PC Buchanan (32) and Mrs Howell (31) were found in a car filled with carbon monoxide fumes in the seaside town of Castlerock, Co Derry. Police first believed the pair died in a suicide pact because they were so depressed about the affair their partners were having at the time.
But 18 years after the deaths, Howell confessed to elders in his church that he had killed them in their respective homes in Coleraine by gassing them with carbon monoxide piped from his car and then drove the bodies to Castlerock and staged the scene.
The dentist, who was sentenced to 21 years after pleading guilty to the murders last year, alleges that Ms Stewart was his accomplice in the murderous plot to rid them of their spouses.
Yesterday, the court heard Ms Stewart breaking down in recorded police interview tapes and admitting to detectives that she was aware of the plan and knew her husband was to be killed on the day it happened.
She also confessed to burning the hose pipe Howell used to gas the pair and to deceiving police in the aftermath.
The secretary said she was aware part of the plot involved drugging her husband so he would be weak when Howell arrived but she insisted she did not give him a sedative, and that he took one himself because he was having problems sleeping.
However, she told detectives in the emotional interview two days after her arrest in January 2009 that if PC Buchanan had not taken a pill she would have had to act.
Ms Stewart claimed she wanted no part of the plan and that Howell forced her into going along with it. But she acknowledged she took no action to stop the murders.
PA