UK news This article is more than 7 years old

Stephen Port told his sister of dead body in his bedroom, court hears

This article is more than 7 years old

Sharon Port says alleged serial killer told her about body in flat a day before alleged victim was found in local churchyard

The alleged serial killer Stephen Port told his sister he had a dead body in his bedroom around the time the body of his second alleged murder victim was found propped against a wall in a local churchyard, the Old Bailey has heard.

Sharon Port, 44, from Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, telephoned her younger brother in August 2014 to find him “very distressed”.

“I asked him to tell me why he was stressed and what was wrong. He didn’t want to tell me at first,” she told jurors on Thursday.

“He just said there was a body in his flat. I just told him to go to the police station straight away. It was a bit of a shock.”

It is alleged Port, 41, had a “fetish” for sex with young, drugged, unconscious males, and drugged his victims at his flat in Barking, east London, with the “date rape” drug GHB. He denies 29 charges against 12 young men, including four murders, seven rapes, four indecent assaults and administering a substance with intent.

The four he allegedly murdered are Anthony Walgate, 23, originally from Hull; Gabriel Kovari, 22, originally from Slovakia; Daniel Whitworth, 21, from Gravesend; and Jack Taylor, 25, from Dagenham, east London.

Port smiled in the dock as his sister, who was called as a prosecution witness, entered the court. She told the court the conversation about the body in the flat took place on 27 August 2014, two weeks after she had started a job as a retail assistant for a clothing company.

The court has heard that the body of Kovari was found in the grounds of St Margaret’s church, Barking, on 28 August 2014.

Judge Mr Justice Openshaw asked Sharon Port if she understood the body her brother was talking about to be dead.

“Yes,” she replied.

She said she understood “that he had stayed the night with my brother, and when he woke up in the morning he wasn’t moving. They had taken some drugs, but I didn’t know what.”

Prosecuting, Jonathan Rees QC asked: “Did your brother give any indication of how long this person had been in this state?”

“One day and a night,” she replied.

Asked what her brother, a chef at a bus depot in West Ham, east London, had been doing during that time, she replied: “Working.”

She understood the body was in her brother’s bedroom. Rees asked: “Did it follow that he [Port] had been in the flat overnight when the body had been there?”

She replied: “Yes. I just told him to go to the police station.”

Asked to raise her voice so the jury could hear, she replied: “It’s not a nice memory.”

She said: “He said he was going to go to the police station. I told him to go the police station straight away. I felt sick. It’s not the sort of things you hear every day. I was worried. I just wanted him to drop everything and to go to the police station and to ring me when he got out to tell me what had happened.”

Port’s sister said he later texted her at about 5pm to say he was on his way to the police station. Having failed to reach him by telephone, she and her boyfriend drove over to Port’s flat the following day. On the way he called to say he had been released on police bail, she said.

When they got to his flat, she found him to be “fairly stressed, very tired”. His nose was a “little bit crusty” but it could have been hay fever, she said. “I can’t be 100% sure it was because of drugs.”

Rees asked her: “Did you learn any more about the body in the flat?”

She replied: “Not really. He didn’t really talk a lot. He was very subdued.

“He just said he was on bail and that was that, really. He had to go back in a month or two. I assumed it was all sorted. I came home, and that was that really.”

Port was jailed in March 2015 for eight months for perverting the course of justice over a police statement he gave when the body of his first alleged victim, Walgate, was found propped up outside the communal entrance to his flat in June 2014.

His sister said Port had later told her that the body in his flat was that of someone called Anthony who was Lithuanian.

Cross-examined by David Etherington QC for the defence, she said Port had told her in March 2015 that “the conversation in August 2014, there wasn’t a body in the flat, he was talking about Anthony”.

She described her brother as quiet and said he had been bullied at school. He was 26 when he came out as gay, and their mother had found it hard, she said.

She said she knew nothing of drug use until that telephone conversation.

It is alleged that Port trawled social media sites including Grindr and Fitlads to meet young, boyish-looking gay men, invited them to his flat, and either spiked their drinks with GHB or injected it into their backsides to render them unconscious so he could live out his drug-rape fantasies.

Barbara Denham, who was walking her dog in Abbey Green, near St Margaret’s church graveyard, found Kovari’s body. Three weeks later, on 20 September 2014, she also found the body of Port’s alleged third murder victim, Whitworth.

Describing her discovery of Kovari’s body, Denham told the court: “I was right close to him.” She walked round the body seemingly slumped against the wall. “Because there was no movement, that made me decide to turn back and get his attention. There was no movement. I just touched him slightly on the ankle, but obviously he just felt cold to the touch.”

She continued: “He was wearing dark glasses and they were skewiff. That made me think there was something not quite right.” Denham could see one of his eyes, which looked glazed, and confirmed to her was dead, and she called police.

She said the body had not been there at 5pm the previous evening when she had also walked her dog along the same route.

Describing finding the second body, that of Whitworth, Denham said: “I thought it cannot be the same thing again, in exactly the same place, in exactly the same position.

“I was so sad to find out, yes, it was, I’m sorry to say.”

She touched him on the stomach, and again there was no obvious sign of him being alive.

There was a handwritten note in a plastic sleeve in Whitworth’s hand, which, the court has heard, the police took on “face value” as a suicide note.

The prosecution allege Port planted a fake suicide note on the body, in which Whitworth admitted involvement in the “accidental” death of Kovari, to frame his alleged third victim for the death of his alleged second victim.

The case continues.

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