How the drama unfolded

Grey and gaunt, but dressed smartly in a pressed light grey suit with white shirt and a brown and navy striped tie.

It was the sort of attire he would have worn before he pulled on his surgical gown to attend to his patients inside his first floor surgery at the clinic at Queen St,

Ballymoney.

Colin Howell's appearance was delayed for 40 minutes because flooded roads in the Antrim countryside forced the prison van bringing him from Maghaberry jail to Belfast Crown

Court had to make a detour. Everybody waited. Crowded to one side of the public gallery was the Buchanan family.

The brothers, Gordon, Victor, Jackie, Raymond and Robert and the two sisters, Valerie and Melva. Not a hearing has passed without some sort of family representation and yesterday, for the first time they were all there. Serious and pained expressions.

To their right was Lesley Howell's only brother, Chris, an anaesthetist, who had flown over from England. At one stage he put his armaround the shoulder of Daniel Howell, one of Lesley's three sons, who got a plastic slide asasecond birthday present, just hours before his mother was murdered.

And then to Chris's left was Lauren, her only daughter, now married.

Suddenly, Court 12 at Laganside fell silent. A prison officer peeped through a keyhole to check who was there. The door was pushed open and outwalked Colin Howell, handcuffed to a woman warder who led him into the dock. He never looked anywhere, but straight ahead.

Tense and worried. He held his wrists out and, after what seemed like an age, they were unlocked.

He turned and faced the judge, Mr Justice Anthony Harte. In front of him was his lawyer, Richard Weir QC, his junior counsel Frances Rafferty and his

solicitor Adrian Harvey. To their right, and in the rowbehind, was Neil Connors QC, representing the Crown.

Howell spoke just three times. First to confirm his name, and then, when each of the two murder charges was read out by a court clerk, he replied,

"Guilty" – just loud enough for those at the back of the public gallery to hear.

Almost two years after he was first formally charged before District Judge Richard Wilson at North Antrim Magistrates' Court, Howell admitted for the

first time - in public anyway – that he had been guilty of a terrible crime he'd kept secret for almost 20 years.

MrWeir then got to his feet, and clearly mindful of the length of sentence his client might face, intimated that legal issues meant that the guilty pleas

could not have been entered until yesterday. He said: "I just want to put that on record."

No details of what happened late that early summer's night of Saturday, May 18, 1991 and the early hours of the following morning – the weekend of the

North West 200 motorcycle races - were revealed.

Nothing about how, where and when Trevor Buchanan and Lesley Howell were murdered.

Or how their bodies came to be discovered in Howell's filthy Renault Savanna estate car, filled with poisonous carbon monoxide fumes, in a

garage behind a row of houses in Castlerock known as The Apostles.

Between comings and goings, the tidying up of some legal issues, the hearing couldn't have lasted more than 10 minutes.

The swearing-in of the jury for trial of Howell's co-accused Hazel Stewart will now begin next Wednesday, two days later than planned. The mother-oftwo

is out on bail and will begin her defence in Coleraine later this week.

Howell was asked to stand up again.

He rose, stepped forward and stood to attention. His second wife Kyle, back in her home state of Florida with the couple's five children has all but

disowned him – we don't know if the divorce settlement has been finalised - but Howell still had a gold ring on his wedding finger as he braced himself and listened.

He was once an upstanding member of the Coleraine community. A senior member of the town's Baptist Church who used to look after the youth

Fellowship Group; respected dentist in a fabulous home in north Antrim where he used play the guitar and read his younger children bedtime stories. Howell once had everything and then lost it all. He was swindled out of a small fortune when he became the victim of an

extraordinary scam in the Far East. He lost his wife and family and then his liberty.

Yesterday, the dentist who now belongs to a small church group called the Barn Christian Fellowship – close friends still visit him in jail – had all the appearance of a broken and sad man destined to spend many more years in prison. How long will be determined later.

Judge Antony Harte peered over his glasses towards him and declared quietly, and with some solemnity: "Colin David Howell, you have pleaded guilty

to two charges of murder. The only sentence the law allows is one of life imprisonment which I now sentence you."

Soon afterwards the court emptied. The Buchanans, Chris Clarke, Daniel and Lauren shuffled out and disappeared down a hallway to a family room, well clear of the media reception kicking their heels as they waited outside in the cold for the relatives to appear.

And then, completely without warning, a familiar face with blonde hair appeared, pushing her way through the revolving front door, smiling. It was Hazel Stewart. She hadn't been in the courtroom to see her former lover own up to the double murder, but she had been in the building with her new husband, David Stewart, the former senior policeman who was once staff officer to the ex-RUC Chief Constable Sir Hugh Annesley. The pair emerged into the late morning. They have been through this before outside the court in Coleraine – running the gauntlet of pushing and shoving Press photographers – but never in Belfast. One of the pursuing photographers lost his balance and tumbled to one side, and when she was accidentally hit on the arm, Stewart cried out: "Aaah!" She will be back in the full glare again when her trial opens in Coleraine this week.