A former choir boy in his native Italy, Lupo discovered his homosexual tendencies while serving with an elite military unit in the early 1970s. Commando training taught him how to kill bare-handed, and he took the lessons with him when he moved to London, in 1975. Starting out as a hairdresser

, Lupo worked his way up to ownership of a stylish boutique, buying himself a $300,000 home in Roland Gardens, South Kensington. Along the way, he boasted of liaisons with some 4,000 male lovers, recording the intimate details in numerous journals. The payoff for promiscuity arrived in March 1986, with a positive diagnosis of AIDS, after which Lupo apparently ran amok, indulging his taste for sadomasochism in a violent campaign of revenge against the gay community.

On March 15, 1986, 37-year-old James Burns was prowling leather bars in search of a companion for the night, undeterred by his own diagnosis of AIDS two weeks earlier. Vagrants found his body in a London basement, mutilated with a razor, sodomized and smeared with excrement, his tongue bitten off in the frenzied attack that took his life. Three weeks later, on the afternoon of April 5, AIDS victim Anthony Connolly was found by children playing in a railroad shed, his body slashed and smeared with human offal in a carbon-copy homicide.

Lupo was leaving a gay bar, the night of April 18, when he met an elderly tramp on Hungerford Bridge and something inside of him suddenly "screamed out at the world." Assaulting the stranger, Lupo kicked him in the groin and strangled him on the spot, afterward dumping his body into the Thames. The following day, Lupo met Mark Leyland at Charing Cross, and the men made their way to a public restroom for sex. Once there, Leyland changed his mind, whereupon Lupo produced an iron bar and attacked him. Escaping with his life, Leyland reported the incident as a mugging, later telling the truth to police after Lupo's arrest. (He has since disappeared.) Victim Damien McCluskey was last seen alive, in a Kensington tavern, on April 24, 1986. His body, strangled, raped, and mutilated with a razor, was discovered some time later in a basement flat.

On the night of May 7, Lupo picked up another gay partner, attempting to strangle him with a black nylon stocking, but once more his prey escaped. This time, police received a full report, the victim touring gay bars with an escort to identify the culprit, finally spotting Lupo on the night of May 15. A search of Lupo's home revealed one room converted to a modern torture chamber, and his confiscated diaries were reported to contain the names of many prominent connections. Convicted at his trial in July 1987, Lupo received four life sentences and two terms of seven years each (for attempted murder), with the judge's assurance that in his case, "life meant life." At this writing, Interpol is double-checking mutilation deaths in Amsterdam, West Berlin, Hamburg, Los Angeles and New York City, seeking connections with Lupo and his various trips abroad.