At a quarter past ten on the night of Thursday, May 15, 1986, David Cole, a thirty-year-old British Rail worker, set out from pub to pub in south London with undercover detectives beside him and a backup unit waiting outside. A week earlier, on the night of May 8, 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.
Jim Burns came from Edinburgh. Born in 1949, an older brother to two sisters, he had served in the Royal Air Force until a breakdown ended it, then settled alone at Whipps Cross in east London and worked as a train guard at Liverpool Street station. On the night of March 15, 1986, he was at the Coleherne pub in Earl's Court; witnesses said he met Lupo there, and the two were seen leaving together in a taxi. Laborers refurbishing 32 Warwick Road found him the next morning in its derelict basement, strangled and partly clothed. The papers gave his age as thirty-seven; by his date of birth he was thirty-six. After appeals by the police and by celebrities including Kenny Everett, Kevin McDonagh came forward. A thirty-one-year-old osteopath from Clonmel in County Tipperary, with a practice in Wimbledon, he had met a man at the Coleherne and been attacked in the same basement on March 10, five days before Burns died, and he had lived.
Tony Conolly was from Newcastle. He had taken an art degree in London and gone home to teach at Newcastle College until budget cuts cost him the post, and he was back in London, working in a vegetarian restaurant in the East End, when he met Lupo on the night of April 5. His body was found on April 6 in a railway hut by Ferndale Road in Brixton, a short walk from the Prince of Wales on Coldharbour Lane, where he had spent the evening. Lupo said he strangled him and then took a taxi to a nightclub and danced until three. The papers called Conolly twenty-four; his recorded date of birth, November 26, 1959, made him twenty-six. Because the man he shared a flat with had been diagnosed with AIDS, mortuary staff and the pathologist balked at handling his body, and his return to his family was held up.
In the early hours of April 18 a man of about sixty was found strangled on the footpath of Hungerford Bridge, dragged some fifteen feet. He is believed to have slept in the arches at Charing Cross, and for all the canvassing and appeals, no one ever came forward to give him a name. 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, 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 only after the arrest.
Damien McCloskey was twenty-two, one of seven children from Derry. He had come to London with a friend who soon went home, and he stayed, finding work as a domestic assistant at the Philbeach Hotel in Earl's Court, where he covered the reception desk and the bar, and then a shared flat on Kennington Road. In the early hours of April 25 he met Lupo outside the Copacabana 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 survived by his mother and six brothers and sisters.
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.
January 19, 1953: born in the village of Monte Donato near Bologna.
1974: he comes to London.
1980 to 1984: branch manager of the Yves Saint Laurent boutique on Brompton Road.
March 10, 1986: Kevin McDonagh is attacked by a man he met at the Coleherne, in the basement where Jim Burns is later found, and survives.
March 15, 1986: Jim Burns is seen leaving the Coleherne with Lupo; he is found strangled the next morning at 32 Warwick Road.
April 5, 1986: Tony Conolly meets Lupo; his body is found on April 6 in a railway hut in Brixton.
April 18, 1986: an unidentified man of about sixty is found strangled on Hungerford Bridge.
April 1986: less than a day later, Lupo beats Mark Leyland unconscious near Villiers Street.
April 25, 1986: Lupo strangles Damien McCloskey in the basement of 150 Cromwell Road.
May 8, 1986: David Cole fights off an attempt to strangle him in a lorry park in Vauxhall.
May 15, 1986: Cole points him out at the Prince of Wales in Brixton; he is arrested and confesses.
May 21, 1986: charged with the murders of McCloskey and the unidentified man and the attempted murder of Leyland.
July 10, 1987: having pleaded guilty, he is sentenced at the Old Bailey to four life terms plus fourteen years.
February 12, 1995: dies of an AIDS-related illness at forty-two.