This was where, in 1990, Hazel Buchanan, a Sunday school teacher, met Colin Howell, a dentist and a charismatic preacher.īoth were married, Hazel to her policeman husband Trevor, whom she had wed at the age of 17, and Colin to Lesley, then pregnant with their fourth child. The betrayals began in the most unlikely of settings, the tightly-knit and deeply religious Baptist community in Coleraine in Northern Ireland. It is a story not just of lust and selfish greed, but of near unbelievable hypocrisy among church-going evangelicals in protestant Northern Ireland – and of a police force too cowed, too trusting, to mount a proper investigation. I have devoted years to investigating the killings, one of the most distressing cases of domestic murder in the last half century, and my book is now the basis of major new ITV drama series, The Secret. And watching Nesbitt, I was spellbound once again. When, in 2009, the terrible truth about the Castlerock ‘suicides’ was finally uncovered, the nation was gripped by the compelling tale of sex, drugs, deceit, greed and murder – laced with a hefty dose of evangelism. It had so nearly been the perfect murder. This was the adulterous betrayal of not one but two loyal spouses, a double killing at the heart of a pious community made to look like suicide. I had just watched him play out a true life murder, a killing as shocking in its detail as it was to become notorious in its malevolent secrecy. But, stumbling forward on the set, the actor was struggling to regain his strength and his composure – and no wonder. The scene was over, the director had shouted cut.
James Nesbitt’s face seemed frenzied, manic almost. Genevieve O'Reilly and James Nesbitt star as Hazel Buchanan and Colin Howell in The Secret
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