Confessions Of A Killer (BBC2)
A former editor of mine used to call it ‘the law of carrots’.
If he put a headline on the front page about carrots, he said, you could guarantee there would be another carrot story on page 5.
The same rule applies to television schedules. Tomorrow night, ITV airs the true-crime documentary Killer In The House, about the murders of Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan – two days after BBC2 began its two-parter dissecting the same case, Confessions Of A Killer.
Fortunately for us, the two programmes compliment each other. ITV has interviews with relatives of the victims, while the BBC focuses on audio of dentist Colin Howell’s police interview, in which he admitted to killing his wife and his lover’s husband – and making their deaths look like suicide.
And what an extraordinary interview it is. Howell and his mistress, Hazel Buchanan, got away with the murders in 1991, even though their affair was common knowledge at the Baptist church in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, where they met.
But 18 years later, apparently tormented by his conscience, Howell walked into a police station and confessed to killing both victims in their beds, by drugging them senseless and pumping car exhaust fumes over their faces with a hosepipe. Then he dressed them, posed them in a car in the garage to make it seem like they chose to die together, and bicycled home.
The officer who conducted the interview was so incredulous that he asked the murderer several times whether he was ‘100 per cent certain’ that this had really happened.
After 15 years, the interview audio is muffled and sometimes indistinct, making subtitles necessary. Yet it’s not only what Howell is saying, but the way that he says it, that makes the tapes so compelling.
Howell and his mistress, Hazel Buchanan, got away with the murders in 1991, even though their affair was common knowledge
The BBC focuses on audio of dentist Colin Howell’s (pictured) police interview, in which he admitted to killing his wife and his lover’s husband – and making their deaths look like suicide
His tone is calm and amiable, his speech articulate and emphatic. It’s almost as if the confession is necessary to convince himself that everything he did, while illegal, was both reasonable and necessary.
‘I would suggest,’ he says, ‘that anybody who has an affair would always think they’d be better off without their partner. I do believe that thoughts of murder are immediately connected to that. As I say, not everyone takes action on it.’
Those words would be chilling in the mouth of an unhinged psychopath in a crime novel, such as Patricia Highsmith’s heartless schemer Tom Ridley. To hear them from a father-of-four and a lay preacher at his local church is breathtaking.
Howell was jailed for life, with a minimum sentence of 21 years. Hazel Buchanan, who had no idea her ex-lover was going to turn himself in, denied murder but was also given a life sentence. She will not be eligible for release on licence before 2029.
The whole story is so dark and strange, you might have to watch both the BBC and ITV accounts before you can fully believe it.
