THE WOMAN accused of murdering her RUC husband and the wife of her former lover in 1991 will not give evidence in her own defence, her counsel has told Coleraine Crown Court.
The prosecution announced yesterday it had concluded its case against Hazel Stewart (47) before Paul Ramsey QC said the defence would not be calling any evidence.
He told Mr Justice Anthony Hart that Ms Stewart will not take the stand and confirmed that she was aware that her decision not to testify could be taken into account by the jury.
“The jury may draw such inference as would appear proper from her failure to do so,” he said.
Ms Stewart denies murder but has admitted in police interviews, recordings of which have been played to the court, of involvement in the plot to murder Trevor Buchanan and Lesley Howell in May 1991 and to make their deaths appear as the result of a suicide pact.
The jury of nine men and three women has also heard that she destroyed the hosepipe used by her lover, dentist Colin Howell, to poison her husband with car exhaust fumes and that she cleaned the scene of his murder. She also supplied clean clothes for Howell to dress Mr Buchanan’s dead body before he removed it to stage the fake suicides.
Howell dramatically confessed his role 18 years after the police were fooled into thinking that his wife and Ms Stewart’s husband took their own lives because they were devastated following discovery of the illicit affair.
Howell told elders in his church that he had killed Mr Buchanan and Ms Howell as they slept in their respective homes in Coleraine, Co Derry, by gassing them with carbon monoxide piped from his car and then drove the bodies to nearby Castlerock where he staged the scene.
His confession led to the case being reopened and the arrest of Ms Stewart. He is currently serving a 21-year sentence for the murders and has alleged that Ms Stewart was his accomplice.
She claimed she wanted no part of the plan and that Howell forced her into going along with it. She has acknowledged she took no action to stop the murders.
The court also heard details of a letter sent by Howell from his prison cell to the trial judge in which he said he wished to clarify matters contained in his evidence to the court given over four days last week.
He said he wanted to make clear minor details about the timing in relation to two incidents prior to the murders: one when he dangled an electric cable over his wife in the bath and the second when he made contact with Ms Stewart again after an enforced break in their affair ordered by church elders.
The trial was adjourned until next Monday when the prosecution and defence will start delivering their closing statements.