Brothers guilty of 1984 gay hate murder after 42-year investigation

Anthony Littler left a pub in Surrey on the evening of April 30, 1984, a man who knew what he liked—real ale, the company of fellow enthusiasts, the ordinary rhythms of a life lived quietly. He was 45, a civil servant, unremarkable in the way that most people are. He arrived at East Finchley Tube station just after midnight and walked down a narrow alleyway toward home. Two teenagers were waiting. They struck him twice over the head with a blunt object. He fell, bleeding catastrophically into the pavement. Within half an hour he was dead.

Michael Stewart was 15 that night. His brother Anthony was 18. They had made a practice of hunting men they believed to be gay, moving through north London in a pack with friends, looking for solitary targets in the dark. The attack on Littler was not an aberration—it was part of a pattern, a hobby, the kind of casual cruelty that a group of teenagers can normalize among themselves until it becomes simply what they do. Littler had his briefcase with him, £80 in cash, credit cards. They did not rob him. The violence was the point.

Michael Stewart called for an ambulance from a phone box at 12:22am, his voice young and well-spoken to the operator, telling her a man was bleeding heavily outside the station. Then he hung up without giving his name or precise location. The ambulance service searched the area, found nothing, and stood down the call. Thirty minutes later, a couple walking home from the station found Littler lying in a pool of blood in the alleyway. He had suffered two skull fractures and a brain injury so severe that it killed him where he lay. The second ambulance call, the one that mattered, came too late to save him.

The police investigation went nowhere. Despite an appeal on BBC Crimewatch and ITV's Police 5, no leads emerged. When detectives came to the Stewart house asking questions, both brothers claimed they had been home at the time. Anthony insisted he had never used that alley. The case remained open but dormant for four decades, one of thousands of unsolved murders that accumulate in police files, growing colder each year.

The breakthrough came on May 1, 2013—the 29th anniversary of Littler's death. Daniel Stewart, the youngest brother, who had been 10 years old when the killing happened, came forward to police after a falling-out with his family. He told officers that Michael and Anthony had confessed to him, that they had boasted about their involvement in what they called "queer bashing." Years after the crime, Michael had even admitted his guilt to a girlfriend and shown her the location where it happened. The confession had been sitting inside the family all that time, a secret kept and then released.

In 2022, police reopened the investigation. They deployed covert surveillance—bugging the brothers' cars and Michael's home. Anthony Stewart, now a binman in his late 50s, was a man of few words. Michael, however, had what investigators described as a loose tongue. He talked. He bragged about what he had done in 1984. The recordings captured him, decades later, still willing to speak about the murder as though it were something to take pride in.

The trial at the Old Bailey presented the prosecution's case methodically. Prosecutor John Price KC walked the jury through the evening: Littler at the pub, the train journey, the walk down the alley. The brothers had lain in wait, Price argued. They had ambushed him. There was no evidence they knew him, no robbery, no motive beyond the fact that he was alone and they believed him to be gay. The first 999 call—the one Michael made—had given wholly inaccurate information, Price said. It was a call made by someone who was there, who knew what had happened, but who was trying to obscure his involvement. The jury deliberated for less than three hours. On Monday, they found both brothers guilty of murder.

Senior Crown Prosecutor Samantha Yelland acknowledged afterward that the case had presented unusual challenges. Key evidence had been lost over the decades, including the murder weapon itself. The decision to use covert surveillance had been made because there was little else to work with—no physical evidence, no witnesses who could be compelled to testify, only the word of a younger brother and the confessions captured on tape. "It's never right that someone dies in these circumstances," Yelland said, "in particular in a hate crime." Detective Chief Inspector Neil John of Scotland Yard described the attack as brutal, calculated, the work of teenagers who had targeted Littler because he was alone and defenseless, because the alley was dark and empty. The brothers would be sentenced on July 3. After 42 years, the case had finally closed.