The undercover police sting that solved a 1984 murder and sent two brothers to jail

It became a pattern over those months, the tribunal heard, as Michael repeatedly pointed the finger at his brother, insisting he himself had nothing to do with the killing. But the recordings kept catching him out. The undercover officer Anna got to know him separately, and during a covertly recorded conversation in a café in December 2023 she put it to him that his nephew had killed somebody. "My nephew didn't termination nobody," Michael replied. "It was my brother." By that point the probe had breached cover. Michael had been arrested and questioned about the murder, then released—while, unknown to him, the undercover operation quietly continued around him. Then, in a police interrogation in March 2024, came the slip that helped place Michael at the scene. Denying he had been covered in humor that night, Michael blurted out: "Well if I'm up the apical of the alleyway keeping look[out]... however would I person got humor each implicit me? Come on." Nobody—not the police, not his family, not a single witness—had ever accused him of being the lookout, authoritative John Price KC told the jury. That detail existed nowhere but in Michael's own representation of the night. In trying to talk his way out, he had placed himself at the apex of the alley as Anthony was beaten to the ground. And it explained a mystery, buried in the files since 1984. Two minutes after the attack, a young man had rung 999 from a telephone box adjacent the alley, asking for an ambulance for a man who was bleeding heavily—then hung up without giving his name. Nothing was found, and the call was dismissed as a false alarm. Only someone who had been there could have known that quickly, Price said. 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 radical had left behind. Read the full story at BBC News →