This former choir boy served in an Italian elite army commando unit before dedicating his life to sadomasochism and hairdressing. In 1975 Michael moved to London where he started a career as a hairdresser and worked his way up to owning a styling boutique. He also racked up about 4,000 gay lovers and developed a taste for the whip, building a modern torture chamber in his house. It all turned ugly in March 1986 when Lupo was diagnosed with having AIDS. He then started his bloody rampage against the gay night life scene.

Over a period of two months he slaughtered four men whom he picked up in gay bars and left their bodies in the streets of London slashed and smeared with excrement. After two potential victims escaped, police arrested Mike on May 15.

He received four life sentences and presently police in Berlin, Hamburg, Los Angeles and NYC are investigating mutilation deaths that might be linked to Lupo's travels.

Lupo, Michael

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, butno further charges were filed.

Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers

Michael Lupo (1953—1995) was a serial killer originally from Italy, operating in Britain.

History

On March 15, 1986, a 37-year-old man named Alec Kasson was found murdered in a derelict flat in Kensington, London. The investigation did not make much progress as it was apparent there were no obvious ties between killer and victim.

On April 6 that same year, Anthony Connolly, 24, was found murdered on a railway embankment in Brixton. He had been strangled to death with his own scarf. Because Connolly had been sharing a flat with a man who was HIV positive, there was a long delay between the discovery of the body and the post mortem because the coroner wanted to make sure Connolly was not himself infected with HIV. This created serious tensions between the authorities and the gay community, the latter accusing the former of dragging their heels and not taking the death of a homosexual man seriously enough.

Trial and imprisonment

Six weeks later, on May 18, Michael Lupo was arrested and charged with the murders of Anthony Connolly and James Burns. Lupo, who was aged 33 and ran a flower shop in Chelsea, was originally from Italy and was a former soldier. He apparently called himself "The Wolf Man" and boasted of having had 4,000 lovers.

On May 21, Lupo was charged with two other recent killings, those of a young hospital worker named Damien McClusky, who had been strangled in West London, and an unidentified man, who was murdered near Hungerford Bridge over the Thames. In addition to these four murders, Lupo was charged with the two attempted murders of Vincent Manjoney and Lawrence talbot.

In 1987, at the Old Bailey, Lupo pleaded guilty to all charges and was given four life sentences, plus fourteen years. There were investigations from a number of cities Lupo had visited in the early 1980s, such as New York, Berlin and Los Angeles, to see if he was responsible for unsolved homicides in those areas, although no such evidence of any further crimes committed by Lupos in these or any other locations came to light.

In February 1995, Lupo died in prison from an AIDS related illness. He had contracted the disease shortly before his killing spree and he claimed that finding this out was what had set him off on his rampage.

References

The New Encyclopedia Of Serial Killers, Brian Lane and Wilfred Gregg (Revised Edition 1996), Headline Book Publishing ISDN 0747253617.

Wikipedia.org