On the night of May 15, 1986, David Cole went from pub to pub in south London with two undercover detectives and a backup unit waiting outside. A year earlier, in the early hours of May 8, 1985, he had left the Market Tavern in Vauxhall with a man he met outside and walked with him to a lorry park, where the man tightened something around his neck as Cole crouched in front of him. It was a silk sock, too short to finish the job; Cole got his hand under it, broke free and shouted for help, and the man ran. The Gay Switchboard, he said, had advised him not to go to the police, given the mistrust between the police and gay men, but in the end he did. On their second visit to the Prince of Wales in Brixton, Cole told the detectives the man was there. He went up and spoke to him, and the detectives arrested Michele de Marco Lupo, who at Croydon police station turned down a lawyer and confessed to murders.
Lupo was born on January 19, 1953, in the village of Monte Donato near Bologna, served his national service with the Italian Bersaglieri, and came to London in 1974. From 1980 to 1984 he was branch manager of the Yves Saint Laurent boutique on Brompton Road. Detectives never learned why he left for a lesser-paid job at Tan Guidicelli and then, eighteen months later, a sales assistant's post at Stravaganza on Oxford Street, from which he had been fired weeks before his arrest.
On March 16, 1986, James Burns, thirty-seven, a British Rail train guard at Liverpool Street station, was found strangled and partly clothed in the derelict basement of 32 Warwick Road in Kensington. Witnesses said he had spent the day drinking and met Lupo at the Coleherne pub in Earl's Court, and the two were seen leaving together in a taxi. After appeals by the police and by celebrities including Kenny Everett, Kevin McDonagh, thirty-one, came forward to say he had been attacked in the same basement the week before by a man he had met at the Coleherne; beaten unconscious, he had stumbled out and run into two constables who took him, they said later, for a drunk. On April 6 the body of Anthony Conolly, twenty-four, was found in a railway hut by Ferndale Road in Brixton, strangled with his own scarf after he left the Prince of Wales on Coldharbour Lane around one in the morning. Because his flatmate was HIV positive, mortuary staff refused to handle the body until it was tested, and the post-mortem was delayed. Lupo said he strangled him and then took a taxi to a nightclub and danced until three.
In the early hours of April 18 a vagrant of about sixty was found strangled on Hungerford Bridge, dragged some fifteen feet; he was never identified. Lupo told police that coming from the Heaven nightclub he had given the man the cigarette he was smoking, felt an urge he could not explain, and strangled him with his own tartan scarf. Less than twenty-four hours later, in the same area near Villiers Street, he beat Mark Leyland, twenty-two, unconscious with a length of wood in an abandoned room off Hungerford Lane; Leyland reported it as a mugging and came forward after the arrest. On April 25 Damien McCloskey, twenty-two, from Derry, a receptionist at the Philbeach Hotel, met Lupo on Earl's Court Road after leaving a club; Lupo strangled him with a sheet in the derelict basement of 150 Cromwell Road, and the body was found only when Lupo led police to it.
He was charged with the murders of Burns and Conolly and the attempted murder of Cole on the night of his arrest, and on May 21 with the murders of McCloskey and the unidentified man and the attempted murder of Leyland. He pleaded guilty to everything, and on July 10, 1987, at the Old Bailey, he was sentenced to four life terms plus fourteen years. Police in New York, Berlin and Los Angeles, cities he had visited in the early 1980s, were asked to check their unsolved cases. The tabloids tried the name the Wolf Man, from the Italian meaning of lupo, but it never stuck, and his crimes drew little lasting attention. He was held at Brixton and then Frankland prisons and died of an AIDS-related illness on February 12, 1995, at forty-two.