Accepting that Sweeney Todd didn’t happen, the trade of barbering seems to be less blemished by murderers in its midst than are nearly all others that are comparable in terms of number of traders.1 Generalising psychiatrists, which means nearly all of them, will deduce from that comment that the 9-to-5 plying of scissors and cutthroat razors works “cathartically” upon barbers, turning them against using those tools lethally from 5 to 9. Until 1987, the public relations officer of the Hairdressing Council could, if he or she had wanted to, have proclaimed that there was a sort of minus-quantity of illegal dangerousness attributable to barbers—a deduction arising from the perception that there had been more deaths caused by barber-hangmen than by barber-murderers. (The most household-named of the former were James Billington, who executed during the last ten years or so of Queen Victoria’s reign, meanwhile running a barbershop in Farnworth, Lancashire; his sons, William and John, who followed in both sets of his footsteps, William for the longer in the executional set; and John Ellis, who combined the same occupations—the barbering one in Rochdale, also in Lancashire—between 1907 and 1923, and who, eight years after retiring as a hangman, committed suicide with a razor that he had used professionally.) However, the outcome of proceedings at the Old Bailey in the summer of 1987 would have prompted the public relations person to put any proposal for a “You’re Safe and Sound When Your Barber’s Around” press release on what public relations people refer to as the back burner.
Michele de Marco Lupo was born to working-class parents, his father a bricklayer, in the northern Italian city of Bologna, which should be famous for things other than a spaghetti sauce and a sort of sausage, in 1953 or thereabouts.
Lupo, a not uncommon Italian surname, is the Italian word for wolf.
As soon as Lupo was old enough to be a choirboy in the cathedral, he became one; and, as his voice took longer to break than is normal, he grew to be the leading juvenile chorister. When he left school, meaning to go to a college of art, his form-master gave him a reference: “A boy of high quality whose morality is beyond question.” Since hardly any boys of school-leaving age have proved that they are more or less moral than other boys (or girls, for that matter) of the same age, the teacher’s tribute may actually have been a retort to rumours or a groundlessly optimistic prophesy that Lupo’s morality would become unquestionable. I must emphasise that that is only a guess. In 1971, he was conscripted. To anyone who remembers World War II jokes about Italian servicemen but did not fight any of those servicemen, the idea of that country subsequently having commandoes will seem as preposterous as the idea of Switzerland having sailors; but Italy did, and perhaps still does: in 1971 there were at least twenty-two Italian commando units. Private Lupo was assigned to the 22nd.
One gathers that he served his time untroublesomely—that, while doing so, he was taught how to kill with efficiency and, if necessary, without the aid of blunt or sharp or explosive instruments—and that, also while serving his time, he either discovered or had a preconscription suspicion confirmed that he was unequivocally homosexual.
The latter knowledge, so it is said, worried him only as his parents—rigid adherents to Catholic doctrines, including some regarding matters that a growing number of Catholics believed that God had no strong feelings about—would be shocked, shamed, even made to feel guilty if they learned of his condition. With the intention—again, so it is said—of preventing that, he, demobilised from the army, decided to emigrate, at first with no particular other country in mind. He could speak, with varying degrees of fluency, four languages in addition to Italian, and so he believed that he had a wider choice of other countries than the average educated intending emigrant. English was one of the foreign languages he could speak.
In the end, it was a tossup between the United States (or rather, some of them: he excluded Alaska, Hawaii, those in the rather un-Catholic Bible Belt, and also those that were predominantly rural) and England—or rather, London. His choice, which was London, may be blamed upon the time when he was choosing, which was in the early 1970s, closely following the decade when London was supposed, mostly by people not living there, to be an especially “swinging” city. Small incidents sometimes have large effects: Lupo may have been lured to London because of an article about it in a once-glossy magazine that he picked up in a Bolognese dentist’s waiting room. London had swung in a number of directions, several toward destinations that were either downright sleazy or attractive to sleazy people. Not only in Soho, there had been an uncontrolled infestation of establishments offering pornography on the premises or to be taken away; the word “kinky” had been coined as a replacement for “perverted,” and shops specialising in merchandise appealing to kinky people had opened, not unlike sores, on prime sites in high streets, juxtaposed with branches of Woolworth’s and Marks & Spencer’s and of the brand-new chains of stores selling “natural Swedish pine” (unpainted Taiwanese chipboard) furniture and “farmhouse” (heavy and lopsided) crockery; transvestites had transvested in public, for money, in certain pubs and membership-at-the-door clubs, and some of those pubs and clubs, and others that provided no advertised entertainment, had become “in places” for people who needed drugs or desired to meet male or female prostitutes, etcetera.
By 1973, when Lupo arrived in London, it had swung in more directions, and further in those directions, than most founder-members of its “permissive society” had ever, in their wildest, wettest dreams of 1959, dreamed possible. It lived down to Lupo’s expectations. He was enchanted. There is no accounting for taste.
Quite as enchanted as he was by what he saw were many natives (leaving out greengrocers, milkmen, people like that, but not excepting one or two heterosexual wealthy men) who caught sight of him. He was darkly handsome, he wore his white shirts, always white, open to the button above his Gucci belt, as if forgetful of buttoning and irrespective of nippy weather, and his jeans looked painted on; those lucky spectators who got close noticed that he smelt only of antiperspirant; and those luckier ones who struck up a conversation found it hard to continue, having been thrilled so by his funny accent, his charming smile, his lovely manners.
He soon had many male friends, and as each of them already had many gregarious male friends, he was almost as soon friendly with the friends of the first friends, and as each of them had other gregarious male friends, it wasn’t long before he was friendly with them as well; and so on. I understand that there are marine protozoa that have a similar colonially multiplying facility, though I don’t understand how, in their case, each of the ever-increasing multitude of organisms is able, as the fancy takes it, to adjoin any of the others. Lupo did not have sexual relations with all of the friends. Not quite all.
If he needed to rent a flat or bed-sitter when he arrived, I don’t know where it was. He had no trouble in finding a job—doing something at a London branch of the French fashion and cosmetics firm Yves Saint Laurent. (Most of the other male employees took to him—he, showing slight discrimination, only to most of those.) He did not stay there long because, meanwhile, having been advised—wrongly, as it turned out—that the easiest way for him to make lots of money was as a hairdresser in an elegant “salon,” he trained to be a hairstylist. The training must have been extremely unarduous, considering that he completed it in a month or so while he was working five or six days a week for Yves Saint Laurent and either enjoying the gay social whirl or recuperating from it at most other times. He then practised shampooing, snipping, and setting in one small salon after another, and eventually was engaged to perform in a large yet chic unisex salon in Belgravia. The total of his tips there, only a small percentage of which he declared to the Inland Revenue, dwarfed his properly taxed salary.
After a couple of years, he bought—apparently without the need of a mortgage—a flat in Roland Gardens, a select, dog-legged turning off Old Brompton Road, within easy walking distance of his daytime workplace.2 Though some of his friends who were interior decorators gave him ideas, his initial furbishing of the flat was fairly conventional. Over the years, however, as he sought more and more idiosyncratic sexual pleasures, and as he entertained more and more men who were as sexperimental as he was, he added a number of fixtures and fittings that were so unconventional that he cannot, surely, have had them fixed or fitted by workmen who were at all narrow-minded or inquisitive of the items’ intended purposes; suffice it to say that among the items were shackles, either suspended from a ceiling (more dependable than most) or attached to posts of Lupo’s four-poster bed. Lying loose about the flat, much as in bourgeois living rooms, copies of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook and pottery souvenirs of places on the Costa del Sol were deposited as if casually, were whips, riding crops, and unequestrian but just as hurtful implements, several of which had been bespoken by the occupant. By no means all of the visitors who, shackled or not, were given a taste of Lupo’s leather or ironmongered bric-a-brac received the treatment on the house: as a moonlighting trade, drummed up by small ads in which he used the business name “Rudi” and which he inserted under the headings of “Esoteric” or “Bondage—No Holds Barred” in “homosexual-contact” weeklies, he tortured for cash (paid in advance by the torturees; Lupo’s period of operation was one of high inflation, and so the best idea of his tariff is given by what he charged for the deluxe treatment in 1985, toward the end of the period, which was £100; I cannot tell whether his satisfied customers, not knowing that he was also a hairdresser and therefore expectant of tips, gave him any—but even if none of his regulars did, some of them must, like some drug addicts, have needed to thieve so as to afford their habits). Every so often, one or other of Lupo’s neighbours complained about his loud playing of records (especially those made by his friend, a singer known as Freddie Mercury), but none of the neighbours seems to have complained about, or even commented upon, the thwacking sounds, the screams of pleasure and/or pain, the cries for mercy or greater punishment, which frequently disturbed the peace of that part of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.
Lupo was insatiable. Not content with his sexual busyness at home and in the London homes of friends, he travelled far and wide in the pursuit of being sadistic to masochists—for instance, a ballet dancer in Amsterdam, an unemployed aristocrat in West Berlin, a dress designer in Paris, a commercial artist, a shop assistant, a stockbroker, and a fashion photographer in Manhattan. And he exhibited himself, gossiping with old acquaintances while keeping his mascaraed eyes open for prospective friends or clients, in London clubs popular with homosexuals, such as a place called Heaven (owned by a company called, oddly enough, Virgin), underneath the arches that the music-hall act of Flanagan & Allen had made respectably famous many years before. On one occasion, in one of the clubs, he caused an especial stir by popping up, dressed to some extent as a nun, out of a coffin, and then made everybody laugh by lifting his skirt, to reveal that he was wearing fishnet tights, and doing a bump-and-grind dance. It would be interesting to know whether that act was witnessed by an acquaintance of his, a radio disc jockey who had turned to slapstick comedy, for the act was of a kind that would be performed by the versatile entertainer in his own series of television shows.
Lupo had a penchant for dressing up, and black leather was the material he most favoured for his costumes. He seems to have had only one all-black-leather costume, and that costume he wore only at home, tête-à-tête, and then only in the company of one or other of the friends or clients who were prepared to go to almost any lengths in aid of getting goose pimples all over. The outfit consisted of a hood, slitted so that he had no difficulty in seeing, breathing, and speaking (but, as it was not slitted at the sides, requiring whoever else was present to speak clearly), and with thongs, a little like spring onions, planted in and drooping from it; a leotard that had large holes in it, so that Lupo must have resembled a negative of a Henry Moore statue; a wristband, just one, that was embellished with and clasped by iron studs and bits of chain; boots of the type associated with wine treaders and soccer hooligans. There were no smalls. One of the clients for whom Lupo often donned that costume often brought along a costume of his own, which was that of a prewar preparatory-schoolboy—monogrammed cap, blazer, Aertex shirt, striped tie, short trousers, socks that were kept up by rubber bands, plimsolls, and an accessory satchel—and I hope that most readers will find it hard to imagine the scene of the elderly schoolboy and the leathered Lupo doing whatever it was they did.
Until fairly recent times in England, any white woman who wore a thin gold-looking anklet was advertising that she was a prostitute, any white man or woman whose hair was of fairground colours was to be pitied, and kept well away from, because that could only mean that he or she was being treated for fleas or lice with something like gentian violet, any white woman wearing an earring through her nose almost certainly had one black parent, and any man of any colour who wore an earring on an ear was undoubtedly a merchant seaman. But such decorations are no longer sure signs. It won’t be long before diminutive men—and certain women too, perhaps—take to wearing the necktie of the Brigade of Guards, simply because the combination of blue and red goes nicely with a shirt or blouse. I must warn any heterosexual and occasionally slovenly man who possesses leather clothes or jeans that have come apart anywhere that he should either have them mended or throw them away—the reason being that, in some homosexual circles (which are sometimes unwittingly trespassed into), the wearing of such torn garments is interpreted as an indication that the wearer is “into violent sex.”
It is at this point that the story of Michele Lupo becomes appropriate to a book about murder.
For months, maybe years, before the spring of 1986, he had sometimes worn leather clothes that he had torn to signify that he was into violent sex—to act as a tacit invitation to like-minded men. During a short period before that spring, he was able to buy leather clothes at a discount price, for he had left the unisex salon in Belgravia and become manager of a clothes shop, Tan Guidicelli, in Beauchamp Place, about halfway between Harrods and the Brompton Oratory. He had flaunted himself, and the gaps in his leather clothes, in clubs and pubs in various parts of London, some of the parts very seedy indeed, and the violent sex that he had enjoyed with some of the men whom he had met on those premises had whetted a desire to extend violence to mutilation and murder.
On Saturday, 15 March 1986, he visited the Coleherne pub in Old Brompton Road and picked up, or was picked up by, James Burns, a railwayman in his midthirties. They did not go to Lupo’s home, only a stroll to the east, but about the same distance north, to the derelict basement of a house in Warwick Road, near the Earls Court Exhibition Building. Shortly afterward, two tramps entered the basement, meaning to make themselves unconscious with methylated spirit, and found the body of James Burns, who had been strangled with his own Burberry-check scarf and, either before or after death, savagely bitten, as if by a rabid wolf. Perhaps surprisingly, the tramps reported their discovery at the Kensington police station, in the parallel Earls Court Road. An investigation was begun. No one who had noticed Lupo and Burns conversing in the Coleherne, and leaving the pub together, imparted that information to the police.
On Thursday, 3 April, Lupo visited the Prince of Wales pub in Brixton Road—south of Elephant & Castle, and still farther south of Blackfriars Bridge, over the Thames. There he met Anthony Connolly, a twenty-six-year-old native of Newcastle-upon-Tyne who had had brief spells of employment as a waiter but was presently on the dole, and who considered himself fortunate to have been given accommodation in a nearby council flat, the registered tenant of which was a carrier of AIDS. Lupo left the pub ahead of Connolly—who, as he left, remarked to friends at the bar, “I have just met the most beautiful man.” Two days later, his body was found in a disused railway shed even closer to the Prince of Wales than to the council flat which he had shared. He had been strangled and, either before or after death, savagely bitten, as if by a rabid wolf; the most noticeable difference between his murder and that of James Burns, less than three weeks before, was that, in his case, the strangling ligature had been taken away by the criminal.
An investigation was begun by detectives working from the police station in Kennington Road, to the north of Brixton Road. Strangely, and worryingly, the Kennington detectives were unaware that the Kensington detectives were investigating a similar crime—and vice versa. The Kennington ones were hindered by a forensic-medical delay: when Connolly’s erstwhile flatmate went to Southwark Mortuary to identify the body, he happened to mention that he was a carrier of AIDS, and the mortuary staff, frightened that Connolly might have contracted that disease from him, refused to let a postmortem examination be conducted, and were supported by colleagues in other mortuaries, who refused to cross the picket line as stand-ins; and so a fortnight passed before a pathologist was able to venture within the vicinity of the body.
By then, Lupo had strangled (and, before or after, bitten) Damien McClusky, an Irish hospital-porter, just past his majority, whom he had lured to the derelict basement of a house in Cromwell Road, South Kensington, between the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Baden-Powell House, the headquarters of the Scout Association. There was no serendipity in this case—no one stumbled upon the body. Officers of Special Branch who, knowing that McClusky belonged to the Irish Republican Army, had been keeping tabs on him, took his sudden disappearance concernedly, suspecting that he was lying low alive, making ready to use his membership in the IRA as the excuse for doing something psychopathic.
On Friday, 18 April, Lupo left Heaven late at night and started walking across Hungerford Bridge, which is meant as much for trains as for wayfarers. His intended destination can only be guessed at; the bridge leads, from Heaven’s side, toward, among other districts of South London, Brixton—nowhere near Roland Gardens. Halfway across the bridge, he was accosted by a male vagrant, ostensibly “bumming for a fag” (but hoping for greater generosity—much as, when an October comes, children pleading for “a penny for the Guy” to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night are actually so contemptuous of that coin that they are liable to mug any literal-minded donor). Lupo—who was not only a nonsmoker but also an ardent supporter of the ASH antismoking organisation because he considered smoking to be a filthy habit—enticed the vagrant across the bridge and, on waste ground in the region of the Royal Festival Hall, strangled him with a black stocking which he, Lupo, happened to be carrying. There appears to be no information as to whether it was the stocking he had used on Anthony Connolly and Damien McClusky, or one of them, or fresh hose; a matter relating to a subsequent incident suggests that he did not use one stocking murderously more than once. The body was soon found, but the identity of the vagrant is still unknown. It is understandable that the detective or detectives who dealt with this case did not connect it with either of the cases that the respective detectives of Kensington and Kennington had not yet connected, for Lupo had not bitten the vagrant. He would say that, try as he might, he could not explain what possessed him to commit this particular murder: “I just decided to do it,” he would remark with a shrug—adding, so that none of the audience ran away with the idea that his libido was grateful for even the grubbiest of small mercies, “I certainly did not get any sexual feelings—certainly not,” and then uttering an afterthought that sounds suspiciously like a misquotation from William Burroughs, Jean Genet, or Barbara Cartland, or all three of them: “Something inside me was screaming to the world.”
Presumably, something inside him was still screaming twenty-four hours after the murder of the vagrant, when, having coaxed or been coaxed by a young cook named Mark Leyland to one of the increasing number of public conveniences in Central London from which water had been cut off, he attacked Leyland with a length of iron adrift from the redundant plumbing. Leyland, unpartial to sex as violent as that, fled—eventually to a police station, where he told a no doubt dubious detective that he had gone to the loo simply and solely to relieve himself and had suffered attempted robbery with violence.
Less than three weeks later, between one and two o’clock in the morning of 8 May, a Thursday, Lupo was in or loitering near the Market Tavern, Nine Elms, which is about a mile and a half northwest of the Prince of Wales, Brixton. The Market Tavern is so named because of its proximity to the New Covent Garden wholesale fruit market; and because of that proximity—the law being sympathetic of the fact that much marketing is done in unsocial hours and that some marketing is thirsty work—the tavern was entitled to be open when most others had to be shut. The law ignored the fact that comparatively few of the people who took advantage of the Market Tavern’s entitlement were marketers of fruit. David Cole, one of the early-morning regulars there, was—as James Burns had been—employed by British Rail; he was in his late twenties; he is homosexual.
According to his recollection of events in the small hours of 8 May, he got to talking to Lupo, whom he knew only by sight, and, at Lupo’s suggestion, walked with him from in, or near, the Market Tavern to the market’s main lorry-park. Lupo or Cole produced and broke an ampoule of amyl nitrate, a drug whose primary proper use is to relieve angina but which is used improperly, and dangerously, as an aphrodisiac. Squatting in a space shadowed by banana lorries, they sniffed the drug. Neither was quite recovered from its physical effects when Lupo pulled what he thought was a black stocking from one of the pockets of his black-leather trousers. It appears that he had come out in rather a hurry: he had pocketed, not a black stocking, but a black sock. In the darkness, he realised his error only when he tried to circle the sock round Cole’s neck and found that it was nowhere near long enough. By then, his efforts to make a little go a long way were starting to make Cole suspicious of his intent. Cole’s suspicion was confirmed when Lupo gave up with the sock and made a noose of his beautifully manicured hands. Cole’s heart, still thumping as an effect of the drug, thumped even harder, faster, from fear. He chiselled his hands through the noose made by Lupo’s, scrabbled it apart, shoved Lupo back, staggered to his feet, and ran all the way home—though, even before he was out of the lorry-park, his heart felt as if it might burst.
He rested. He wondered what he ought to do. And having decided what he ought to do, he wondered if that was wise. He telephoned an organisation that offers guidance to homosexuals, gave a counsellor an account of his experience, and was told that he should not inform the police. (A spokesman for the organisation has denied that Cole was given such negative counsel. Well, yes.) He had read of the murder of James Burns, and the more he now thought about it, the more firmly he believed that the murderer and the man who had tried to strangle him were one and the same. He telephoned Scotland Yard, and was told to telephone Kensington police station. A Kensington detective took a statement from him and decided that the man who had tried to strangle him was not the man who had succeeded in strangling James Burns; however, the detective had heard of the strangling of Anthony Connolly, and so he sent Cole’s statement to Kennington police station. By the time it arrived there, the “Connolly-murder squad” was working from a police station in Stockwell, closer to the scene of the crime. Cole’s statement was sent to that station—and eventually read by Detective Superintendent John Shoemake, the officer in charge of the Connolly murder investigation. Shoemake interviewed David Cole. Fortunately, Cole’s memory of the events in the small hours of 8 May had not been dimmed by time.
In the early evening of 15 May, four undoubtedly heterosexual male members of the Connolly-murder squad paraded in black leather clothes that they had begged, borrowed, or hired, and, after being inspected by Shoemake and Cole, set off with the latter on a tour of places frequented by homosexuals; Cole had had to be cajoled into acting as lookout for his assailant and was so apprehensive of success that he often trembled and then had to be “jollied along” by the largest of the imperfectly disguised detectives. The posse cannot have looked as strange as it sounds; the detectives must have marched separately, pretending that they were not in one another’s company, otherwise the progress of a “heavy mob” of men dressed as they were would surely have caused beat policemen along the route who had not been let into their secret to band together and trail them precautionarily. The tour began north of the Thames, taking in such places as Heaven and the Copacabana Club (which, despite its name, is in the Australian part of London), and continued on the south side: the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, adjacent to the plain Vauxhall Station of British Rail, the Market Tavern—and the Prince of Wales, Brixton. It was in that hostelry that David Cole spotted the man who had tried to strangle him, first with a black sock, then with his bare hands. Cole began trembling so violently that his escort knew at once that they were at journey’s end—that the one man in the bar whom he was now determined not to look at was the man they were after.
Lupo came quietly. If any of the other customers guessed that the men leading him out were, in the argot of most of them, “pigs,” none was intrepid or tipsy enough to utter the word “harassment” above a whisper. One surmises from Superintendent Shoemake’s subsequent comment that his officers had “acted exemplarily in the face of harrowing and difficult experiences” that they would have reacted roughly to rudeness or ridicule of the slightest kind.
During his accompanied walk to the Stockwell police station, and for some time following his reception there, Lupo insisted that he didn’t know David Cole from Adam. But then, as if orgasmically, he spilt out such a diverse confession that Shoemake and anyone else who was present must have been somewhat taken aback. Yes, he had tried to strangle David Cole—and yes, he had murdered Anthony Connolly—and oh, by the way, he had also murdered James Burns and the unidentified vagrant and Damien McClusky. He needed to give directions as to where McClusky’s body was decomposing. A few days later, Mark Leyland, having read of Lupo’s arrest, suggested to the detective who had taken his statement regarding the attempt to “rob” him that Lupo might be the culprit—and when that suggestion was eventually mentioned to Lupo, he agreed that it was so.
By then, Shoemake had visited, and some of his subordinates had taken stock of, Lupo’s flat in Roland Gardens; Shoemake had also visited a flat in Chelsea which Lupo had cited as a “temporary residence,” explaining that he had stayed there for some weeks, looking after the occupant, an elderly Italian widow whose daughter was married to an art director who was best known for his work on many of the James Bond movies. The daughter said that Lupo was “a lovely man who was very kind to a lonely old lady.”
Among other possessions of Lupo’s that Shoemake took from the guest bedroom in the Chelsea flat were some leather-bound volumes: albums of snapshots, not all of which Lupo would have dared show the old lady, appointment registers (in which the handwritten word Surgery recurred), and address books. Leaving no stone unturned, Shoemake got a subordinate to count the entries in the address books: there were over seven hundred (a total considered insufficient by all of our comic daily papers, the least untrustworthy of which reported it as a thousand). Several of the entries were incomprehensible; perhaps they were in code, or perhaps they had been scrawled, Ouija-fashion, by Lupo while he was under the influence of an hallucinogenic drug. A number of the decipherable names were of much-publicised persons, one or two of whom so relished publicity that they employed press agents to buy them more. Included in that entire number were the names of smart photographers (it would be interesting to know whether any of them had taken any of the snaps in Lupo’s albums), transvestites and transsexuals, dress designers (one of them peculiar in that he had become famous without having designed anything for either of our newest princesses by marriage), far-distant relatives of royal rulers of negligible places like Monaco, and society ladies (one of them best known by her nickname of Bubbles, which seems more likely to have been derived from a Shirley Temple perm that Lupo gave her than from her being associated with the song about bubbles which begins, “I’m forever blowing”). Speaking only of male names in Lupo’s address books, he had entered an unrepresentatively large number of social workers.
I cannot tell you why the law’s usual delays were added to in Lupo’s case. More than thirteen months passed between his arrest and his trial, which was held in Court No. 7 of the Old Bailey, before the Recorder of London, Sir James Miskin, and a jury on Friday, 10 July 1987. Part of the unusual delay may have been due to if-at-first-we-don’t-succeed efforts by psychiatrists, none successful, to find that Lupo was suffering from “a recognised mental illness or personality disorder.” His claim, made to most of the psychiatrists, that he had had four thousand sexual partners since his arrival from Italy (which works out, on the basis of six-day weeks, and without allowing for holidays, as an average of one conquest per diem) is unlikely—as it would be impossible to verify—to get into the Guinness Book of Records; if it did, the editor might add a footnote to the effect that the slang word baloney is a corruption of the place-name Bologna.
Lupo’s trial counsel, Lord Gifford—not for the first time, poor fellow, defending a defendant who had no defence—said little more during the proceedings than did his client, who, apart from saying “Guilty” to all of the counts of the indictment, said nothing. The recorder, illustrating the illogic of post-capital-punishment legal arithmetic, sentenced Lupo to life imprisonment on each of the four murder charges, and to consecutive terms of seven years for the two attempts, and told him, “I am confident that you will never be released until it is totally safe for the public at large.”3
But Lupo was unlikely to live that long. He had contracted AIDS. It is reasonable to guess that his greatest punishment was that the prison authorities did their utmost to keep him away from other convicts, even those who were affected by the same disease. That was a punishment that came close to being fitting to his crimes.
1. Prior to Stephen Sondheim’s musicalising of the tale, the man most associated with stagings of it was Tod Slaughter, author of Sweeney Todd, The Demon-Barber of Fleet Street, and, from about 1922 until the late 1950s, the almost invariable player of the eponym. “Slaughter” really was his name (his brother, Ernest Slaughter, was a Fleet Street reporter for almost as long as he himself was an actor-manager), but “Tod” was a replacement for “N. Carter”; his secrecy about what lay behind the initial suggests that it stood for a name as innocuous as Noel. The moment that audiences of his playing of Sweeney Todd most savoured came when, after dropping a customer, chair and all, through the trapdoor and then exiting to “finish him off,” he reentered, his hands drenched with “blood” (a mixture of olive oil and cochineal), and ruminated: “The old Jew—hmf—I thought he was anaemic.” His repertoire of melodramas included some that were loosely based on the doings of real mass-murderers: Landru, Jack the Ripper (which he presented at, among many other theatres, the Granville, in the South London suburb of Fulham, while an uncle of mine was its manager), and The Wolves of Tanner’s Close (he as William Hare). A special friend of mine, Richard Carr, stage-directed the last of his “farewell tours.” I had tea with him once—which is to say that I drank tea; he was abstemious of that beverage, fearing that it might mar his fine-tuned taste for Scotch, of which he drank the equivalent of a bottle a day, none during performances.
2. Fewer than two hundred yards west of the Onslow Court Hotel—the residence, until 18 February 1949, of Mrs. Olivia Durand-Deacon, the only one of the heaven knows how many victims of John George Haigh, the “acid-bath murderer,” with whom he was charged with having dissolved.
3. In November 2006, I wrote to the Prisoner Location Service, asking whether Lupo was still imprisoned, and was told, wonderfully unhelpfully, that their records “did not disclose him to be in prison custody.” Dead, then? Please God, yes. Even I, suspicious of psychiatrists, cannot believe that any of them would have decided that it was totally safe to release Lupo.
