Hair on a towel, fluids on a nightgown and underpants, discarded cigarette butts and a Jack Daniels can.

These pieces of evidence, some collected in the 1980s and others retrieved by police in recent years, will be used to prove a cold case rape from four decades ago, a court has been told.

Michael Francis Martin, 70, faced Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday for the beginning of a committal hearing, where evidence will be tested before a magistrate decides whether he can be committed to stand trial.

He was charged in January with multiple sex attacks on grandmother Jessie Grace Lauder at Newport, in Melbourne's west, in the early 1980s.

Police allege Martin, then aged 26, was a neighbour and assaulted the elderly woman and attempted to rape her at her home in 1981, and returned in 1

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