THE WOMAN accused of the murders of her RUC husband and the wife of her former lover told police she might have considered killing herself if she had known officers were coming to arrest her.
Hazel Stewart (47) denies the murders of Trevor Buchanan and Lesley Howell in May 1991.
Her lover at the time, dentist Colin Howell, dramatically confessed to the killings and to making their deaths appear as suicide 18 years after the event and is serving a 21-year jail sentence.
Recordings of police interviews Mrs Stewart gave are being played to the jury at Coleraine Crown Court in Co Derry. In one of 15 such interviews the court heard Mrs Stewart tell detectives her heart started to thump when she saw the arresting officers.
She was heard to say that 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.
The interview tapes also revealed that Howell tried to convince her to go along with his plan to murder their respective spouses by telling her that an abortion she had had in England proved she could kill.
The interviews reveal her claims that she confronted Howell and told him to get out of the house when he arrived to poison her husband with car exhaust fumes after he had gassed his own wife hours earlier.
The tapes also contain her claims that she thought Howell’s wife Lesley was very confident, entertaining, clever and a good mother.
She is heard to claim that when she and Howell resumed their relationship after the killings, she went berserk when she feared Howell had given her too much laughing gas before a sex session on his dentist’s chair.
Killing their spouses did not seem to bother Howell and he acted like it was just another day, she also claimed.
The jury of nine men and three women heard a recording in which she told investigating police officers that she never planned to have a new life with Howell even though he wanted to marry her.
She said she was in love with him in the early months of the relationship in 1990 but as the affair developed after the killings, her feelings changed.
She said: “He was a companion in many ways but this guy was not somebody I really wanted to be with.”
Howell, she told the court, had talked about carrying out the killings but she added there was nothing in it for her.