HAZEL STEWART was “up to her neck” in a calculated plan to murder her husband and the wife of her former lover and lied consistently to cover it up, a Co Derry court has heard.
She denies involvement in the killing of her husband, RUC sergeant Trevor Buchanan, and Lesley, wife of dentist Colin Howell in May 1991. They were poisoned by carbon monoxide fumes and their deaths made to appear as suicide.
Summing up the prosecution for the jury, Ciarán Murphy QC said Mrs Stewart had decided not to give evidence in her own defence because “she doesn’t have answers to give”.
“Hazel Stewart has chosen not to be heard, not to answer questions that would be asked of her, questions that cry out for explanation from her,” he said. “If there is any conceivable innocent explanation she has not put it forward.”
Mrs Stewart (48) of Ballystrone Road in Coleraine, Co Derry, sat impassively in the dock as the crown counsel summarised the case against her.
This was a joint plan executed by Colin Howell and Hazel Stewart, he said. Each of them wanted rid of their partners so that they could be together. “Were they in it together? The answer is ‘Yes’.” He described Howell, now serving a 21-year sentence after he confessed to the murders two years ago, as “a nasty piece of work”. Trevor Buchanan, Mrs Stewart’s RUC husband, was “a decent, honest man” but Mr Murphy alleged she did nothing to save him when Howell used a hose to pump poison gas into his mouth as he lay drugged in his bedroom.
Mr Murphy continued that Mrs Stewart “had little thought for her husband and wanted rid of him for her own selfish ends”. Referring to Howell’s actions on the night of Buchanan’s murder he said Mrs Stewart’s non-involvement did not point to her innocence. “It was a bit like employing a hit man to kill someone. They do the dirty work but it doesn’t mean that you’re not responsible,” he said.
For the defence, Paul Ramsey QC, told the jury they had to adjudicate in a “heart-breaking and extremely difficult case”. Summing up he told the jurors that the accused was a 27-year-old vulnerable woman involved with a charismatic man in Howell. But Mr Ramsey told them that the fact that Howell turned up at her house to murder her husband while she did nothing to stop it did not mean, under law, that she was guilty of murder.
Mrs Stewart could have been charged with assisting an offender, perjury at the Coroner’s Court, perverting the course of justice or withholding evidence, he said, but she was not. He said the crown had “gone for broke” with charges of murder instead and he elaborated on what he said was a lack of evidence. “She is not on trial for her morals,” he said.
He said she could not have been a willing and equal partner in Howell’s crimes and he warned jurors not to be “swept away on a tide of revulsion” at the case and to concentrate on the evidence.
Countering the prosecution’s accusations surrounding her failure to testify, Mr Ramsey referred to 15 detailed interviews she gave to police following Howell’s confession two years ago. He told the jury she had a right to silence yet spoke to the police at length over three days. “If you’re innocent of murder, if your involvement is more peripheral, wouldn’t you have nothing to fear and unburden yourself?” he asked.
He further contested claims that the murder plan was hatched weeks in advance by Howell and the defendant and ruthlessly executed. The killings were carried out on the spur of the moment and Howell had been fortunate to have got away with it.
Mr Ramsey continues his summing up today before Mr Justice Harte addresses the jury.