Stewart Brothers Get Life for 1984 Anthony Littler Murder After 42 Years

3 articles · Updated · bbc.co.uk · Jul 10

Michael Stewart, 57, and Anthony Stewart, 60, were sentenced at the Old Bailey to life imprisonment, with minimum terms of 10 and 15 years, for beating Anthony Littler to death in north London in May 1984.
42 years after the killing, prosecutors secured convictions without forensic evidence by using a covert 2023 operation that bugged the brothers’ vehicles and sent undercover officers into Michael Stewart’s life.
Michael repeatedly incriminated the group in recorded conversations, and in a 2024 police interview he blurted out that he had been at the top of the alley “keeping lookout” — a detail investigators said only a participant could know.
The court heard the brothers, aged 15 and 18 at the time, were lying in wait to rob men they believed were gay; there was no evidence Littler himself was gay, and nothing was stolen.
The sentence closed one of the Met’s longest-running cold cases after failed investigations in 1985, 1993 and 2012-15, bringing long-delayed relief to Littler’s surviving relatives.