OWNER OF KILLER HOWELL’S HOUSE IN COURT MAN ACCUSED OF HARASSMENT
A MAN who bought the luxury home of killer Colin Howell near Castlerock last year has appeared in court charged with harassment.
Dr Andrew Biggart, a Queen’s University academic, was accused of harassing a neighbour, Willie Gregg, between March 9 and 17 this year.
Mr Gregg — a well known charity campaigner and publican — was in court in Coleraine for the hearing which lasted less than two minutes.
A PSNI officer said she could connect 52-year-old Biggart to the charge.
The accused said he understood the charge against him.
He was freed on £300 bail to appear in court again in four weeks.
Several weeks ago Biggart put up a photograph and message on his Facebook page saying he was calling Howell’s old home on Glebe Road Castlerock, Dunkillyn Farm.
The Belfast Telegraph revealed in December that the academic had bought the house which had been on the market for months for £300,000 but apparently sold for less than the asking price.
Colin Howell moved to the Castlerock house — which has four bedrooms, four reception rooms, its own lake and paddock — long after he murdered his first wife Lesley and Trevor Buchanan, the policeman husband of his mistress Hazel Stewart, in their family homes in Coleraine.
But police arrested Howell at Glebe Road in 2009 after he confessed to church elders in the kitchen of the house that he had murdered Lesley and Trevor 18 years earlier.
He had made it look as if the tragic couple had died as the result of a suicide pact in a car behind a row of cottages at Castlerock called The Apostles.
Howell and Stewart are currently serving life for murder.
Last year a former Coleraine mayor, Sam Cole, sparked controversy after he suggested that the Howell house in Castlerock could become a tourist attraction.
There were reports that even though the house wasn’t a murder scene, people had been seen taking selfies outside the property which had been described in estate agent brochures as a “magnificent and idyllic country residence”. The lake at the Glebe Road house has two islands and Howell is said to have erected a memorial there to his son Matthew who died in an accident in Russia in 2007.