Dentist druged woman and then had sex with her -

A woman accused of murdering her husband and her ex-lover’s wife said her lover gave her an overdose of laughing gas before they had sex in his dentist’s chair, a Coleraine court heard today.




Hazel Stewart has pleaded not guilty to the murders of her policeman husband Trevor Buchanan, (32) and Lesley Howell (31) the wife of her lover, dentist Colin Howell.



The pair’s bodies were found in a car filled with carbon monoxide fumes in the seaside town of Castlerock in May 1991.



The former Sunday school teacher said she wanted to jump out the window of Howell’s closed surgery in Ballymoney after the incident.



“It made me go ballistic, I freaked out,” Hazel Stewart told detectives after her arrest. “I knew what he was trying to do and I freaked out.”



Ms Stewart said she would remember Howell touching her and trying to have sex with her while she was under sedation.



Howell has already told his former mistress’s trial that he administered drugs through a face mask at his surgery, and once by needle at her home, prior to intercourse with Ms Stewart because she struggled with guilt after the deaths of their spouses.



He claimed the incident in which she took a panic attack was because of a bad reaction to the sedatives, not because he overdosed her.



Ms Stewart said she was not sure if Howell definitely had sex with her while she was semi-conscious but that he certainly tried.



“I took it he had sex with me, I didn’t know,” she said in the taped police interview that was played at her trial. “I just felt why would he knock me out and not do something.”



The mother of two said she initially agreed to being drugged - she said it helped deal with her guilt - but said she became more uneasy with it as it continued. “I still feel I was cornered into that, pressured into that,” she said.



On the one occasion he administered drugs with a needle, she was knocked out completely and did not remember much of the evening. She said Howell kept asking her did she remember anything.



Ms Stewart said the incident in his practice when she “went crazy” was the last time she and Howell experimented with sedatives. The dentist has admitted three counts of indecently assaulting patients under sedative at his practice.



Ms Stewart said she also thought about killing herself before police came to arrest and question her about the killings.



Police first believed the pair died in a suicide pact because they were so depressed about an affair their partners were having at the time.



But detectives reopened the investigation in January 2009 after Howell told investigating officers he had murdered them. He was jailed for 21 years last December.



On day ten of the trial at Coleraine Crown Court, the jury of nine men and three women heard another tape recording of a police interview with Ms Stewart - she later remarried - in which she disclosed she wanted to kill herself because of guilt over the deaths.



She also told investigating police officers that she never planned to have a new life with Howell (51) even though he wanted to marry her.



Ms Stewart said she was in love with him in the early months of the relationship but as the affair developed after the killings, her feelings changed. “He was a companion in many ways but this guy was not somebody I really wanted to be with," she said.



Ms Stewart (47) was arrested by police who had been waiting for her to arrive home at Ballystrone Road, Macosquin, Coleraine. She told the court her heart started to thump when she saw officers and, if she had known they were there before she got to the house, she might have killed herself.



“Maybe if I’d known they were there, maybe I’d have run the car over a cliff. I don’t know. I always said I would do that. Maybe it’s too late for me,” she said.