Karen Sweeney, AAP
“She seemed like a very lovely lady, she didn’t deserve this at all.”
That’s what accused killer Stuart Paul Anderson told a reporter about the woman he’s accused of brutally beating to death.
There was a widespread appeal for information in the days and weeks after the body of his 77-year-old neighbour Vicki Ramadan was found in her Sydenham home in Melbourne’s northwest on April 6, 2019.
“I really hope the cops catch the son of a bitch,” Anderson said in the interview with A Current Affair.
The unedited footage of that interview was played to jurors in Anderson’s Victorian Supreme Court murder trial on Tuesday.
He has pleaded not guilty to killing Mrs Ramadan sometime between March 23 and 25, 2019.
Witnesses say they saw him in a screaming argument with her in the days before she was killed.
He was the one who found her body in the hallway of her home.
Anderson claimed he first met Mrs Ramadan when she knocked on his door and asked him to help her with some odd jobs.
On the morning of March 23, 2019 a taxi driver saw Mrs Ramadan and Anderson arguing about him arriving late to help her with some work.
Mrs Ramadan later apologised to Anderson who went to her house in the afternoon to assemble a flat pack.
About 3.30pm a witness heard Anderson aggressively yelling at Mrs Ramadan, telling her “f*** you, fix it yourself”.
He left and arrived home “scary” angry, a woman living with him said.
At 6pm Anderson was back working at Mrs Ramadan’s.
Prosecutor Neill Hutton said there were signs of life on March 25 – a call from one of her phones to another at 9.30am and an electricity spike consistent with a hotplate at lunchtime.
And then nothing.
Anderson told his partner at about 9am on April 6 that he was going to check on Mrs Ramadan and pick up tools he left at her house.
That’s when he first says he found the body, after walking through a back door that had been kicked in.
He called out to his partner and together they called triple zero, the jury heard.
Anderson stuck with that story during his first two police interviews but after officers became suspicious about his story he told them in August 2019 that he had lied because he actually found her body between 1.30am and 2am on April 6 after he himself knocked in her back door.
But the trouble with what Anderson told the reporter, his partner and police is that it’s false, prosecutor Neill Hutton said.
“It’s essentially a sham, a charade. It’s false,” he said.
Anderson’s barrister Glenn Casement said identity was an issue in the trial.
“My client didn’t kill the deceased,” he said.
The trial before Justice Amanda Fox is continuing.
