Howell Inquest To 'Set Record Straight'

The first phase of a new inquest into the deaths of Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan is now underway.

It aims to set the record straight after their respective partners were jailed for their murders, with a coroner's court hearing in Belfast told today that a second hearing will take place before the end of next month.

However, that's still two decades after their bodies were found in an apparent suicide pact when the pair were found gassed in a car on the north coast in May 1991 and the original inquest ruled they had taken their own lives.

Dentist Colin Howell (pictured) and Sunday school teacher Hazel Stewart have recently been convicted of their murders.

Gordon Buchanan, brother of one of the victims, told the Belfast inquest preliminary: "What the Buchanan family wish is that the record is set straight and that any record is accurate and reflects the truth of what happened."

The court heard that Howell, 52, and Stewart, 48, concocted a story at the inquest which covered up the truth that they murdered their spouses.

The trials showed that dentist Howell used a hosepipe attached to a car exhaust to gas the pair separately while they slept at their respective homes in Coleraine, Co Londonderry.

He then drove them to a garage in Castlerock where they were later found. Stewart did nothing to stop him as he arrived to kill her husband.

The hearing was instigated after Gordon Buchanan wrote to the coroner in April and following correspondence from the Attorney General stating that "there should be formal recognition that two persons were murdered and did not take their own lives".

The initial 'suicides' investigation was reopened when Colin Howell confessed to the murders in January 2009 which led to the former dentist serving 21 years after he pleaded guilty to the killings.

His ex-lover, Hazel Stewart was convicted of the double murder of her policeman husband and her former lover's wife in March.

See: NI 'Suicide' Killer Gets 18 Years

(BMcC/GK)