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Image: rafaelmarquez via Creative Commons
Image: rafaelmarquez via Creative Commons
FORMER DENTIST and lay preacher Colin Howell has been sentenced to five and a half years for indecent assaults on five of his former patients.
The five women were sedated and assaulted over a period of four years, the BBC reports.
Howell, 52, is serving a life sentence for the murders of his wife Lesley Howell and his former lover’s husband, Trevor Buchanan, in 1991. Police had initially treated their deaths as suicide, but an investigation was launched in 2009 after Howell confessed to his church elders over the deaths.
Last week, Howell pleaded guilty to 12 sexual assault charges at Antrim Crown Court.
This sentence will run concurrent to that he is already serving for the murder convictions.
UTV reports that sentencing Howell today, Judge Corinne Philpott said although he had known what he did to his indecent assault victims, they did not know precisely what had happened. She said he was an intelligent man who had the “means to stop yourself from doing this”.
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