Michele de Marco Lupo was born in Italy in 1953 and served in an Italian commando unit, where by his own account he had a great many partners among the men he served with. He moved to Britain in 1975, worked as a hairdresser, and opened a boutique in London catering largely to wealthy closeted gay men. He was handsome, physically imposing, and a fixture of the leather and sadomasochistic bars in Earl's Court and the West End, where he played the dominant partner and was widely known.
In 1986 he killed four men in about two months. James Burns, a homeless Canadian, was strangled in a basement in Warwick Road in March and left mutilated. Anthony Connolly, a young man who worked in a bar, was killed on wasteland near Brixton in April. Damien McCluskey was killed at Lupo's own flat in Kensington in April and his body kept there. A fourth man, unnamed in some accounts, was killed under a railway arch in Hungerford Bridge in May. Two others were attacked and survived, and one of them, Mark Leyland, went to the police.
He was arrested in May 1986. He told police he had been diagnosed as HIV positive and that he had set out to take revenge on the world for it, and separately claimed a figure in the region of forty men, which was never substantiated and which he later dropped. He was known in the press as the Wolf Man of London, from his surname and from what had been done to the bodies.
He pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey in July 1987 to four murders and two attempted murders and was given four life sentences with a recommendation that he serve at least twenty years. He died of an AIDS-related illness at Durham prison in February 1995, aged forty-two.