This is the moment double murderer Colin Howell’s second wife told police he had confessed to her – without mentioning she had known about the killings for ten years.
Howell, 65, and his former lover Hazel Stewart, 62, murdered their respective spouses Lesley Howell, 31, and police officer Trevor Buchanan, 32, in May 1991.
He first told his second wife Kyle Jorgensen in 1998 that he had killed both victims, who were found in a fume-filled garage in Castlerock, County Londonderry.
But Howell convinced Ms Jorgensen to stay quiet and covered it up as a double suicide – having five children with her while she kept his crimes secret for a decade.
The respected dentist eventually confessed the murders to elders in his church and then police in January 2009. He was imprisoned for at least 21 years in 2010.
He also implicated former Sunday school teacher Stewart and she was jailed for at least 18 years in 2011. Stewart was told last July that she cannot appeal the sentence.
Howell was also imprisoned in 2011 for five-and-a-half years for indecent assaults on five female patients, although this ran concurrent to the sentence for murder.
Now, a new episode of ‘Confessions of a Killer’ on BBC Two this Sunday reveals footage of Ms Jorgensen speaking to detectives just hours after Howell’s arrest.
Double murderer Colin Howell with his second wife Kyle Jorgensen, whom he married in 1997
Kyle Jorgensen speaks to police in January 2009 following Howell’s confession to detectives
Colin Howell convinced Kyle Jorgensen (pictured) to stay quiet about the deaths for a decade
Jilly Beattie, a journalist who has followed the case for years, tells the BBC series that Kyle Jorgensen neglected to tell police in the 2009 interview about her husband’s 1998 admission
Colin Howell and his wife Lesley (pictured together) shared four children when he killed her
An officer asks her to introduce herself at the start of the interview on January 29, 2009 at 8.30pm, and she replies: ‘I’m Kyle Jorgenson Howell, wife of Colin Howell.’
The officer then tells her: ‘The reason that we’re coming here today is that it’s come to our attention today that your husband Colin has made certain disclosures about matters that occurred some 17 years ago, perhaps 18 years ago.’
Ms Jorgensen, who is American, claims Howell told her: ‘I can’t because if it comes out it will hurt people’ – but says she insisted to him ‘no, you must say’ and then quoted John 8:32 in the Bible, where Jesus Christ says: ‘The truth will set you free.’
She then claims Howell replied: ‘No, I can’t’ – before saying she told him: ‘It’s the truth, you must get it out. I’m here for you, tell me the truth.’
Ms Jorgensen claims Howell then said: ‘When Lesley and Trevor Buchanan died, everybody thought it was suicide’. She says she asked him: ‘What happened?’
She says Howell told her: ‘I can’t say it, I don’t think I’ll say it’ – before she spent five minutes saying: ‘Please say it, you must say it, you’ll never be free until you say it, you’ll never be free.’
She adds: He said: ‘I did it. I did it’. And that’s where that ended and I just went ‘Oh…’.’
Jilly Beattie, a journalist who has followed the case for years, tells the programme: ‘You can see her quite animated in this video explaining how she had kept saying “The truth will set you free, Colin” and how he was saying “I can’t, I can’t confess”.
‘So there’s quite a lot of drama, quite a lot of histrionics around this, and how she had just kept saying to him: “You have to” to Colin, “you have to”.’
The reporter adds: ‘There was one little piece of information that Kyle left out and that was that she knew about this for ten years. He had confessed to her ten years, a decade earlier. And she hadn’t told anybody.’
Colin Howell was jailed for at least 21 years in 2010 after confessing 18 years after the murder
Howell implicated his ex-lover Hazel Stewart (above) and she was jailed for at least 18 years
Howell’s children (from left) Daniel, Lauren and Jon have also spoken in a new ITV programme
Police spoke to Ms Jorgensen a number of times following Howell’s arrest, and she admitted to them in interviews following the first one that he had told her in August or September of 1998 about the murders.
Ms Jorgensen – who met Howell in December 1996 and married him in May 1997 – claimed she was feeding their first child in the lounge of their home at the time.
Howell and Ms Jorgensen went on to have four further children together, despite his confession.
Ms Jorgensen already had two other children from her first marriage in Colorado, while Howell had four children from his marriage to Mrs Howell.
Police had originally believed Mrs Howell and Mr Buchanan died in a suicide pact, after discovering that their partners were having an extra-marital affair.
But the victims had actually been drugged before being murdered and their bodies arranged to make it look as though they had taken their own lives.
Howell first told Ms Jorgensen in 1998 that he had murdered them and was thinking about handing himself in to police.
But they agreed to stay quiet after he blackmailed her by persuading her not tell the authorities for the sake of their children – or he would kill himself.
She eventually made him confess to detectives after he was swindled out of the family’s life savings of £353,000 investing in a scheme to make money from gold in the Philippines.
After Howell was arrested in 2009, Ms Jorgensen was placed under police investigation – but she left Northern Ireland to return to Florida with her five children and later filed for divorce.
In 2013, the Public Prosecution Service in Belfast said Ms Jorgensen would not face any charges because there was ‘insufficient evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction’.
Howell is now serving his sentence at high-security Maghaberry Prison near Lisburn.
Murder victim Lesley Howell (above) was found in a fume-filled garage in County Londonderry
Murder victim Lesley Howell receiving a nursing award with her mother May Clarke
Police officer Trevor Buchanan (pictured) was one of the two victims of the double murder
The case was turned into an ITV mini-drama in 2016 called The Secret (pictured), which starred James Nesbitt as Colin Howell and Genevieve O’Reilly as Hazel Stewart
Ms Jorgensen declined an offer to take part in the documentary.
But speaking in 2016, she told the Sunday Mirror: ‘He abused patients, he is a compulsive liar, he was an adulterer in our marriage and murdered two people. Everyone thought he was this great Christian guy but they were so wrong. He was a monster.’
The programme also features audio of Howell telling police about confiding in Ms Jorgensen ten years earlier.
He says in the clip: ‘Kyle is the most truthful, straight-forward person that you can meet. And what I didn’t know, well her reaction was you’ve got to go to the police. And she was married to me. She was already married two years.
‘And I kind of knew that she was right, and I agreed with her that we would do that. And what I didn’t know was that she had just – she was new to – she was American, she was young and inexperienced.’
Howell explains that they had begun the ‘process of what would we do’ and the ‘implications’ for their older relatives.
He adds: ‘She said “I’ll stick with you, I’ll visit you in prison”. This is hard to explain except to say that I just got a Christian conviction that I was forgiven, which I shared with Kyle. And Kyle agreed with me.’
In a separate ITV documentary on Tuesday, called ‘Killer In The House: The Murders Of Lesley Howell and Trevor Buchanan’, Howell’s children revealed they spent two decades believing their mother had died by suicide before finding out he had killed her.
Lauren, Daniel and Jon spoke about their mother’s death and its impact on them – with Lauren saying: ‘For 18 years I believed that my mum died in a suicide pact. It turned out that my dad and Hazel had actually killed her.’
Their brother Matthew died aged 22 while studying abroad in Russia.
The case was also turned into an ITV mini-drama in 2016 called The Secret, which starred James Nesbitt as Howell and Genevieve O’Reilly as Stewart.
Confessions of a Killer airs on BBC Two this Sunday at 9pm and is on iPlayer