"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 told the jury they heard multiple arguments between them in the days before she was killed.
It was Anderson who called police after finding her body.
He said he first met Mrs Ramadan when she knocked on his door and asked him to help her with some odd jobs.
A taxi drier saw the pair arguing about Anderson arriving late to help her with jobs on the morning of March 23, 2019.
Later another witness heard Anderson aggressively yelling at Mrs Ramadan, saying "f*** you, fix it yourself" while assembling a flat pack before heading home. He later returned to her house.
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.
Anderson told his partner he was going to check on Mrs Ramadan and pick up tools he left at her house about 9am on April 6.
He said he found her body after going through the back door, which had been kicked open.
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.
Mrs Ramadan was known for wearing lots of jewellery, but that and cash was still inside her home, jurors heard.
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.
