Totalcrime
A true crime podcast, written and produced by Chris Summers, veteran crime reporter with more than 30 years of experience. He has been writing producing content for Totalcrime on Substack since March 2024 and is now launching into podcasting. The podcast will be a mixture of Chris narrating true crime stories from the UK and around the world, and occasional interviews with people who are knowledgeable about crime.
Totalcrime
Murder in Dead Dog's Alley
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One night in 1984 a civil servant, Anthony Littler, who had just got off a Tube train after a night out with some fellow real ale enthusiasts, was attacked as he walked home along a darkened alley in north London. It would take 42 years to solve the crime. In today's episode I am joined by crime reporter Danny Shaw, who covered the trial of two brothers who were convicted of the murder, which was part of a campaign of "gay-bashing", although there is no evidence Mr Littler (pictured) was a homosexual. He explains to me how the police caught up with Anthony and Michael Stewart.
Hello and welcome back to the Total Crime Podcast. I'm Chris Summers and this is episode twenty-five. And today we're sort of going back to nineteen eighty-four and a and a case that's been solved, what is it, forty-two years later. And I'm joined by Danny Shaw. I don't hope you don't mind me calling you veteran uh crime reporter, a bit like myself. Not at all, Chris. Yeah, you you were um at the BBC obviously for for many years, and you've now sort of branched out and freelancing uh popping up here and there, and you did a fantastic um background about this case on in the Daily Telegraph. If anyone wants to find it, it's on the 2nd of June, um, which was just after they were found guilty. There, sorry, the uh the protagonist in our case, Michael Stewart and his brother, or half-brother, I believe, Anthony Stewart. I'd really like the way you started your your piece um describing the uh evening of the 30th of April 1984. It's often uh hard to remember what what a sort of different time it was, you know, no mobile phones, no cctv, you know, transport was very different, no sort of Ubers or whatever. Um and this case um revolved around a guy called Anthony Littler, who was um a civil servant, a bachelor, um, and a bit of a real ale fan. So can you can you sort of uh tell me what what uh happened that night? It was a it was a sort of around up until almost 11 o'clock at night. He was in a in a pub with um campaign for real ale buddies, I understand.
SPEAKER_01So this goes back to April the 30th, 1984. So think about this, the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister. This, as you said, was well before the era of mobile phones and the internet. This is when everyone used to get on the tube train in London and read a physical copy of a newspaper, normally the evening standard. And um, you know, people used to go to work from Monday to Friday, and then they used to get the train back, and they used to go out for drinks after work, and that was a kind of normal sort of uh thing that people did. And so it's after closing time um on that day, uh just after Easter in 1984, and um this man, Anthony Littler, who's a civil servant, he lives in East Finchley in North London, a sort of quite a leafy part of the city, and he's getting the train back because he's just been with some friends uh at Carl Shorten, um drinking pints of Fryery myrrh bitter. He's a real ale enthusiast, he's been at the pub, he's had quite a lot to drink, but apparently he's not drunk. He's on the train back, it's after midnight, he gets off at East Finchley tube station uh for the 15 or so minute walk back to his to his flat in East Finchley. And what happens next uh is um you know no one witnesses, apparently. There's no CCTV, um, but his body is found uh on a pathway that leads from the tube station to a road called East End Road, uh, and he's lying in a pool of blood and he's been battered over the head a couple of times um and has died, you know, uh pretty much straight away. And Anthony Littler, 45 years of age, um becomes a murder victim. Um and um this death in in this pathway called Dead Dog Sally, this murder remains unsolved for four decades. Four decades. No one is brought to book for it until this year, when two men who were then aged 15 and 18, Anthony Stewart, the 18-year-old, Michael Stewart, who was then 15, are found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey. It's a remarkable story of a case that was seemingly kind of dormant and was never going to be solved, but has now been solved.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and now I I sort of uh often when when cases you know if somebody's charged, suddenly, you know, you my sort of ears prick up, you know, like, oh, that sounds like it could be an interesting case. I'll follow it through to trial, or I'll you know, I'll try to make an attempt to cover it at a trial. What how did you is that what happened to you, or did you know about it beforehand?
SPEAKER_01Or well, I live in the Sphinxie area, so I know this part of London really well. I use the tube station, you know, three or four times a week. Um, I know all the roads around here, and I was aware of this case. Um, and a few years ago the police made an appeal uh to try and solve it, and I thought at the time they were just going through the motions, you know, they they they're never going to solve this case, you know, they're just doing an appeal uh possibly to appease family members or you know, uh part of a kind of routine review of cold cases that they do. So I, you know, I got interested in it, and then suddenly it emerges that two people have been arrested, and then it it it comes to pass some time later that they've been charged with murder. And so I then become interested in the case and start to follow it as it goes through the courts, um, from uh partly from a local point of view, because of because of that interest, and secondly because it's very unusual for a case that's laid dormant for for for four decades um to make its way to court. So, what was this all about? I was really keen to to to sort of find out what lay behind this, where was the breakthrough that had brought this to court. So that's really what brought me to the old Bailey, and I spent the best part of six weeks every day listening to the evidence in court.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I spoke to when I was down there for the sentencing, I I spoke to one of the the court clerk, and she, you know, was uh she mentioned you and she was sort of uh oh, it's a shame you weren't there, and mentioned, you know, knew you lived locally to the area uh and were sort of the person who sort of knows encyclopedic knowledge of this case. Um I I I remember covering a case I think it was last year or the maybe the year before, a cold case, a murder from of a sex worker, or what they used to be called prostitutes, um, in 19, I think in 1973 or something. That was in Finsbury Park, and and the weird thing about that was sort of covering this case where it felt like you were going into a time machine, it was talking about you know people smoking in pubs, and it was it was there was a pub near the old sort of highbury Arsenal's ground, and it just you know felt like a bit like the TV show Life on Mars, you know. Um, and in this case, 1984, you get a taste of how different it was because it revolved around this this um so-called gay bashing, which you know obviously nowadays we live in a very um modern world where you know LGBT groups are very prominent and the police sort of are very um you know keen to sort of stamp out on homophobic crimes and hate crimes, it's therefore, but you know, gay bashing and things like was quite common. It mentioned, I I I've you know heard at the sentencing about how this group would sort of frequently um attack um you know gay men, it often in sort of public toilets in you know cottaging. Um and it wasn't because they were necessarily homophobic, it was more because those men were more likely to keep quiet and not go to the police if they got robbed or whatever, because obviously there would be questions to ask about what were you actually doing there. Um yeah, right. So uh Anthony Lettler is not believed to have been gay, is he? But um that that this group were targeting gay men quite a lot.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean that whole era about the 1980s, you think of the um you know uh homosexuality was still a crime for men under the age of 21, for example. So if you were gay and you were under the age of 21, or even if you were over the age of 21, you used to pick up men in in public toilets, used to go cruising. Um, you know, it's not like it is, you know, these days. Um, so that was a phenomenon. And this was a group, this was also a period of time when you know we had the the whole crisis around AIDS and so on, so there was a real stigma attached to being gay. So there was a local group in East Finchie, whether it was one or two groups, it used to go around queer bashing or gay bashing, excuse the language, but that's the the the language of the time that was used, and they would you know lure people into public toilets or pretend that they were interested in having sex with a man in a public toilet and then bash them over the head. And um, Anthony Stewart and Michael Stewart were part of that scene, were part of that gang that were doing that, and that kind of morphed into robbery, where I think they realized that actually here is something that they could not only sort of go gay bashing, but that they could also uh steal some money from someone as well who was who was vulnerable. Now, Anthony Littler, there's the police have looked into this, there's no evidence to suggest that he was gay. Um, I think he'd had uh girlfriends previously. He was a single man living alone, and he was walking back by himself late at night down a dimly lit pathway to his flat, and there were some public toilets at the station, and there were also some public toilets sort of quite close to the alleyway where where he was heading. And whether that group, whether the gang that that killed him thought that he was gay or he was heading from the toilets or heading to the toilets, we will never know. But they ambushed him, he was struck over the head, he suffered a serious injuries uh to his to his skull, um, but no money was stolen. So what it looked like was he was targeted and that the attack was more ferocious perhaps than the perpetrators thought, and they were so scared that uh uh of what they'd done that they killed this man that they scarpered rather than sort of rifling through his his jacket or taking his briefcase. So he did have a fair bit of cash, I think it was about 80 pounds in cash, he had credit cards, it's quite a lot of money uh in those days, but they didn't take any of it, and they didn't take his briefcase. Um so a bit of a puzzle to the police. Was this gay bashing? Was this a robbery? Was it a robbery gone wrong? Um, but they had no clues. And the initial police investigation, which in those days obviously relied on house-to-house inquiries, taking statements from people, um, trying to find out what time he left the tube station, um, and also um getting some information from a 999 call that was made that was thought to have been made by one of the attackers. That was quite crucial evidence. That's basically what police had to go on, but within five months, um six months, they'd wrapped up the investigation, closed the investigation, no one arrested, no one charged, case closed.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I believe uh they went on Crime Watch the old ITV programme Police Five as well.
SPEAKER_01That's right. There were big appeals, Crime Watch had 14 million viewers at its peak, Police Five on ITV, Shaw Taylor the presenter, very popular. So there was a lot of publicity, a lot of appeals, and this was in the constituency of Margaret Thatcher. So there would have been quite a lot of interest in this case, but despite all that, no one was ever uh arrested.
SPEAKER_00I wonder whether his uh occupation as a civil servant sort of led to any sort of wild conspiracy theories about why he'd been killed. We do we know which department he worked in or I I don't think there was anything sensitive.
SPEAKER_01I think it was customs and excise, it was something like that. I don't think there was any suggestion that he was, you know, uh a spy or working for security services or anything like that. No.
SPEAKER_00So the police were pretty sure it was it was either a robbery or a or a um like you say, uh to use the term a gay bashing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Um I think I think I think certainly by um 1993, so nine years later, um nothing much happened in the interim. They did have a tip-off um uh that he may have been killed as part of a kind of gay bashing um campaign, and that gay bashing was had been taking place in that area at the time, and police did carry out some inquiries, and in fact, they interviewed one of the men who was later convicted, Michael Stewart, in 1993, just interviewed him as a witness, and he admitted going gay bashing, but said he had nothing to do with the murder of Anthony Littler, and really police didn't take it any further.
SPEAKER_00Okay, um, so then it all goes very quiet um for about basically another 20 years. And as you as you wrote in your your piece in the telegraph, um it appears that then a sort of an inheritance dispute sort of kicked off um a sort of a dispute between siblings and some of the family secrets then came out. So can you can you just explain what happened?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean breakthroughs in these these old cases, Chris, as you know, and I'm sure you've featured before, usually come through forensic science. It comes through DNA testing uh quite often with the very sensitive techniques that we have now that you know we didn't have uh 20, 30, 40 years ago. But in this case, there was no DNA evidence. Um there were there were no eyewitnesses, no CCTV, no mobile phone evidence, nothing like that. But the the crucial breakthrough came through changes in allegiances pretty much. So uh the Stuarts, um Michael and Anthony, the two older boys, um they had two siblings, um, one of whom was Gaynor, uh teenage sister, who'd fallen pregnant at a young age and gone to move in a squat and didn't really particularly get on with Anthony and Michael, and also uh a younger younger boy called Daniel, and there was a dispute, a family dispute about an inheritance that got very nasty, and Daniel was threatened uh by Michael, he threatened to burn his house down and cut his throat. Um he said that Anthony had sided with Michael during the argument, and Daniel went to the police and he he said to the police that both brothers this is in effect what he said, he said that both brothers brothers had confessed to him that they'd been involved in Anthony Littler's murder. Michael, he said, had boasted about it at the time, back in the mid-1980s, and said the victim had been hit over the head with a baseball bat. Anthony, he said, had tearfully confided in him uh at a pub over a drink, um, saying, I don't think they meant to kill him, they just wanted to rob him, but he died, it was a robbery gone wrong. But in in effect, Daniel goes to the police and said, Both my brothers were involved in the murder of Anthony Littler, and they've both separately confessed to me. I mean, that's a huge disclosure, a bombshell disclosure, and you would have expected detectives to then start to kind of build a case around that or try and find evidence that directly goes against it, but you you certainly just can't kind of sit on that and leave it by itself because that's pretty crucial um information.
SPEAKER_00But then so the number of sort of 10 years goes by until this DCI Neil Johnson in essence, nothing really happens.
SPEAKER_01Now trying to understand the reasons for that. What I've discovered is that Scotland Yard at the time, in around sort of 2012-2013, this is just after the London Olympics of 2012, was going through this huge cost-cutting regime and having to reorganise the London boroughs and make cuts to units and so on. And it was felt at that time, and particularly with teenage homicides and knife crime, um, you know, to the fore, this was not a priority. And um the resources I think that were felt that that would be required simply weren't available. And so it was not pursued uh for another essentially another um ten years when uh Detective Chief Inspector Neil John took over the case, and then he was really the catalyst for some action that has resulted in these two guys being convicted. He believed that there was a case that could be built here, um, but it would require more investigation, more digging, and some proactive work involving undercover police officers.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, we have um I mean there have been cases like this, like famously the Daniel Morgan case, where uh the police, I think they did a lot of uncover work undercover work there, didn't they? Bugging houses and whatever uh to try to get to the bottom of who killed him or try to sort of get confessions and um but that that didn't really work out in that case. But in this case it did. So there's two uh undercover officers um who you you will tell me about. One one was called JJ, and one was called Anna, I believe, and they sort of befriended uh one or both of the brothers and sort of slowly sort of um got their confidence to such an extent that one of them actually picked them up from the police station when they uh I mean this was an extraordinary covert operation.
SPEAKER_01Um cars that that Anthony and Michael drove were bugged, listening devices were installed uh into Michael Stewart's conversations, but the most daring part of the mission was certainly these two undercover officers known as JJ and Anna, um, and they befriended Michael Stewart to try to get him to spill the beans. Um and you know, in court we heard hours of of these covert recordings of Michael Stewart talking to JJ um or being recorded while JJ was in the room. Foul-mouthed rants from Michael Stewart swearing, blaming everyone for this, that, moaning. I mean, you know, uh it's difficult to describe, um, but he came across as a really vile, unpleasant, um misogynistic individual. Really, he really did from those recordings. And he did uh talk about the case, and he said that uh the the the murder had been carried out by his b brother, his um his half-brother Anthony and three of his friends, he said they were gay bashing, they grabbed hold uh of Anthony Littler, he wouldn't let go, and his mate smashed him over the head. And he sort of repeated the allegations against Anthony Stewart 27 times in those interviews, but always claiming that he hadn't been involved in the killing. But he did give away um in a conversation saying, talking about the miracle stuff that he pulled off, um, and he said, This is the biggest stunt I'm pulling now, making these I won't use the word, believe I didn't effing murder someone. So the suggestion was that Michael Stewart was blaming his brother, but he was involved, and he was just pulling this stunt um on the police officers. You know, there were some other incriminating remarks that he made as well. Um overall impression was this was a guy that was trying to wriggle out of it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was interesting because the the dynamic seems to have sort of changed over the years. It seems at the time of the murder, um Anthony was the sort of the older one, the more dominant one, the one who's actually involved in the killing in the alley itself, and Michael was was just the lookout. Yeah. Um but over time Michael seems to have become the sort of more vile character, and and Anthony was I mean, he either went quiet or he he sort of shown some signs of remorse. I think he was apparently sort of quite upset and sort of confessed when he when he sort of um made any confessions, they were sort of a bit remorseful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean I think I think they're I think their lives have have taken quite different paths. I think you know Michael's been in trouble with the police, Michael Stewart, you know, a number of times over the years, and has got this sort of very loud, boastful, kind of vile sort of um personality. Anthony Stewart Basically has been in work it seems the whole time, um, led a sort of more law-abiding life and you know hard has hardly said anything. Um said very little to the police and and certainly um the impression is he is the quieter one and possibly the one who's more regretful uh about what has happened. So quite different personalities. Now my my sense is that at the time I don't think Michael Stewart would have been there had it not been for Anthony Stewart. Um, you know, you don't you the you're 15 years of age, you don't go around doing that unless your older brother says come along with me. Um so you know, my my my sense is that Anthony was probably more involved. Michael Stewart probably was the lookout at the end of the alley. Um, but clearly the sort of the traject the trajectories of the two have changed over the years.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and there was three others apparently involved who who've never been sort of identified or named or something brought to pass. Yes.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I think police have had their suspicions about individuals over the years, and I think there have been other arrests, but no, no one else has been charged.
SPEAKER_00Right, yeah. Um, so you you spent six weeks in in the trial listening to all this evidence. Um what was the what was the main sort of planks of the defence cases? You know, that they were did it completely deny that they were there or there wasn't really a defence case, Chris.
SPEAKER_01Uh you know, neither Anthony Stewart nor Michael Stewart gave evidence um at the trial. Um, you know, they that their their answers to to police interviews were in effect, it wasn't me, I wasn't there. Um, and you know that that that was it in effect. My own view is that I think their refusal to give evidence um on their behalf in in their defence um did not go down well with the jury. Um I don't think juries like that when there's a decent case, a decent prosecution case, and there are some serious questions to answer. I think the jury kind of expect that if you're the defendant and you're protesting your innocence, that you go in the witness box and you answer those questions and you put your point of view and you you make your defence, and neither of them did that. And um, you know, that was clearly a decision that was made by them and their in consultation with their their lawyers that perhaps that they would be torn apart in the witness box. Who knows? Perhaps they would have been. Um, but the jury came back so quickly with their verdicts of guilty of murder, I think within a few hours, so quickly after a long trial, very complex uh legal summing up, there was a lot of you know legal issues for for the jury to consider um before they reached their verdicts, but they they they didn't hang around. And and and my sense is they had formed an impression about these two, and you know, not going in the witness box is probably sort of the deciding factor.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um I'm just gonna um gonna mention a couple of things that were well, one of the things that was said at the sentencing hearing. So they've been found guilty, they were gonna get life sentences, uh just a question of how long. Uh that's the point where you get victim impact statements, and there was one particular from this cousin, Patricia McClure, who said that um in 1984 Anthony was a cousin, he was much older than her, he was he was 17 years older than her. Um, but he you know he he came to their family parties, she remembered him playing card games, having a great sense of humour, sort of making people laugh. Uh, and she felt in many ways he was sort of like an older brother that she she never had because she was an only child. Um he became godfather to her daughter when she was born in 1979. Um and he just sounds like a genuinely nice, nice man, you know, just a harmless man. Um she said her aunt, in other words, that's Anthony's father, I'm sorry, mother, never got to find out. She died before finding out what happened to him, and um she went to her grave never knowing what happened. So it it was a very, very sad moment that. Um, but it painted a good picture of him. Sometimes you get you know, cases where there's just a photograph and there's no sort of three-dimensional character of this person, but he he was clearly somebody who you know. I'm glad that DCI John and the the Met sort of worked so hard to get justice for him all these years later. Um I'm gonna wrap up now, but I just wanted to ask you uh about a similar sort of uh on that subject of you know cases which are very old. Um I'm writing an article at the moment, and it makes me think it's about you know whether you can't become a serial killer nowadays because the technology, the CCTV, the DNA is so good that you know it in 1984, for example, or the Yorkshire Ripper case, you know, all those cases where you know people just went out and killed, and there was very little the police, you know, it was very hard for the police if they didn't have any eyewitnesses or foot, you know, fingerprints or something like that to actually get a handle on who was doing this. Um nowadays you get cases um where people are you know commit one or maybe two murders and they may have gone on to become a serial killer, but because of the there's so much you know forensic tools out there for the police that it's you know very difficult. I don't know what your what your thoughts on that are.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, I mean, you know, crime investigations changed enormously. If if this murder had happened uh in 2026, I have no doubt that suspects would have been identified within 24-48 hours. There's CCTV around the station, um, there's mobile phone, you know, telephony and data, the you know, oyster cards that might have been used at the station and so on, um, as well as all the other basic stuff. And and they would have completely sealed off the scene. You know, we know how sensitive DNA techniques are. So you know uh it I it I think it is in terms of in terms of these these big crimes in terms of murders, it's harder to get away with. And you see it, you know, I you know, you and I will get the emails from the Met police every week about someone being murdered um or you know, it's a killing that's a suspected uh murder or case of manslaughter, and 90% of them are cleared up. The suspects are arrested through really good police work and obviously making use of the of the best you know forensic material. At the same time, um there are dedicated homicide teams. There weren't in 1984, it was just the sort of local um CID officers um you know on the patch. I happen to be on call perhaps with someone who was a bit more experienced leading the inquiry. Um so you know, I think I think things have come leaps and bounds, certainly in the Met police, and I think that's filtered out to other forces as well, and that's why I think when you your point about serial killers might get harder for people to get away with it. Um having said that, the flip side of that is that I think there's an expectation that you know amongst jurors that well, where is the CCTV, where is the mobile phone, where is the DNA evidence? If you haven't got that, not sure about this case. And so, you know, uh the threshold I think for proving it has possibly got higher as well because our expectations have got higher, which is why coming back to this, I was so surprised that the jury reached a verdict within a few hours, because there wasn't any of that. And it shows what a great strong case the police and the Crown Prosecution Service put together.
SPEAKER_00And one last question. Uh they is it is it do you get the uh feeling that this murder suddenly stopped their crimes, you know, that suddenly they thought, Jesus, we we've actually killed somebody here, and that they they stopped the sort of gay bashing as or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Look, it's very difficult to tell because police didn't take allegations like that very seriously back in 1984. So unless we look through the records, we just we just don't know. I imagine that these two individuals and their friends probably didn't go out gay bashing after this murder. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Okay, well, thank you very much for sparing all this time and thanks for covering the trial and doing such a great uh piece on it in the telegraph.
SPEAKER_01You're welcome, Chris. Thanks very much. Good to be on the program.