A man accused of murdering a gay civil servant in an alleyway in 1984 told a girlfriend years later ‘that’s where we killed that bloke!’, a court heard.
Michael Stewart, 57, and Anthony Stewart, 60, are accused of beating Anthony Littler to death after he was found with ‘catastrophic’ head injuries in an alleyway near East Finchley Tube station in north London on May 1, 1984.
Mr Littler, 45, was found dead at the scene still with his briefcase, £80 cash and credit cards when police and paramedics were called around 12.50am, half an hour after the brutal killing.
Michael was a 15-year-old schoolboy at the time of the murder and is said to have carried out the savage attack with his older brother Anthony, then an 18-year-old council binman, using ‘blunt force weapons’.
The court heard Michael dialled 999 anonymously shortly after the assault but the call was flagged as a ‘false alarm’ as he did not give them enough information to find the victim.
He is said to have repeatedly confessed to the killing over the years but the brothers were not arrested until their younger brother Daniel Stewart reported them to police in 2013.
Daniel told officers of his brother’s alleged confessions to the killing and boasts of being involved with ‘queer bashing’, jurors previously heard.
A former girlfriend of Michael said he confessed his guilt years later and ‘showed her where the killing of Anthony Littler had happened’.
Anthony Littler (pictured) was beaten to death in an alleyway near East Finchley Tube station on May 1, 1984 and his case was never solved
Handout photo issued by the Metropolitan police in 1984 of an alleyway in East Finchley, north London where Anthony Littler was murdered
She told police about a conversation where Michael told her he had killed a man in a public toilet and hid the body behind a building.
He said he would lure men he believed to be gay into public toilets and his brother would beat them up.
She asked if he had ‘left the guy to die’ and he claimed he ‘called the Old Bill’.
The girlfriend said she researched the killing but could not find anything.
The woman said on another occasion she had been staying at Anthony’s home with Michael when they had a row after the brothers asked her to get them drugs.
She was walking away when she realised Michael was following her in his car.
The woman said she got in the car and just before they passed East Finchley tube station and Michael shouted: ‘That’s where we killed that bloke!’
Jonathan Price, KC, prosecuting, said: ‘So he had now told her about a killing in an alley by the tube station and earlier, the making by him of a telephone call to report what had happened.
‘Does this show, despite the much-altered narrative, that when he first spoke to her about it, he was in fact recalling his involvement in the killing of Anthony Littler?
‘Had he chosen, for his own reasons, to distort the facts and to make it appear other than what it had been?
‘It would indeed be truly grotesque if he should have thought that by describing it to her in the way he did, it might somehow impress her. But is that what he did?’
Michael is also said to have told her that his father Brian Stewart had ‘got away with murder’ at the Old Bailey.
Mr Price said Brian Stewart had not been charged with murder and had actually been fined £50 for causing grievous bodily harm at Tottenham Magistrates Court for a fight at a butchers.
Met Police reopened Mr Littler’s case in 2022 and employed covert investigative techniques before arresting the brothers
Michael was later covertly recorded by police, the court heard.
Jurors heard that in a conversation with a undercover police officer in a cafe in 2023, Michael was asked if his nephew had killed someone and replied: ‘My nephew didn’t kill nobody, it was my brother,’
It was also heard that in a phone call in 2023 a woman said he had once told her he killed someone and then said: ‘Did I? Oh well, never mind. Who knows? Who knows?’
Mr Price said that in a police interview Michael committed a ‘Freudian slip’ when he said: ‘Well if I’m up the top of the alleyway keeping look, how would I have got blood all over me? Come on.’
Nobody had suggested to Michael that he had been keeping lookout, and at the time he was being asked about the accusation of a murder in a public toilet, not the alleyway, the prosecutor said.
Michael Stewart, of Station Road, New Barnet, and Anthony Stewart, of Old Farm Road, Finchley, both deny murder.
The trial continues.
