\n<\/p>\n
It became a pattern. Again and again over those months, the court heard, Michael pointed the finger at his brother, always insisting he himself had nothing to do with the killing.<\/p>\n
But the recordings kept catching him out.<\/p>\n
The other undercover officer, Anna, got to know him separately, and during a covertly captured conversation in a caf\u00e9 in December 2023 she put it to him that his nephew had killed somebody.<\/p>\n
“My nephew didn’t kill nobody,” Michael replied. “It was my brother.”<\/p>\n
By now the investigation had broken cover. Michael had been arrested and questioned about the murder, then released – while, unknown to him, the undercover operation quietly continued around him.<\/p>\n
Then, in a police interview in March 2024, came the slip that helped place Michael at the scene.<\/p>\n
Denying he had been covered in blood that night, Michael blurted out: “Well if I’m up the top of the alleyway keeping look[out]… how would I have got blood all over me? Come on.”<\/p>\n
Nobody – not the police, not his family, not a single witness – had ever accused him of being the lookout, prosecutor John Price KC told the jury.<\/p>\n
That detail existed nowhere but in Michael’s own memory of the night.<\/p>\n
In trying to talk his way out, he had placed himself at the top of the alley as Anthony was beaten to the ground.<\/p>\n
And it explained a mystery, buried in the files since 1984.<\/p>\n
Two minutes after the attack, a young man had rung 999 from a phone box near the alley, asking for an ambulance for a man who was bleeding heavily – then hung up without giving his name.<\/p>\n
Nothing was found, and the call was dismissed as a false alarm.<\/p>\n
Only someone who had been there could have known so quickly, Price said.<\/p>\n
That caller, the prosecution told the jury, was 15-year-old Michael Stewart – the lookout, the first to run, raising the alarm for the dying man his own group had left behind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n