their previous encounters, Kaufman had been calm to the point of meekness. The man in front of him was a different creature. Fired up, sweating and aggressive, he was ready to take a swing at his plain-clothes pursuers, until they pounced on him and threw him in the back of the van.

“I thought: ‘This is what he’s like when he’s confronted those women,’” Fontana recalls.

By the time the group had arrived at the police station, Kaufman was back to his usual cool self.

But Fontana knew better. The detective wasn’t surprised when, asked about the Armadale Street break-in, Kaufman denied having left the flat occupant’s pantyhose out on the bed as part of preparations to rape her. Knowing he had the footprint evidence, Fontana charged Kaufman with the crimeremained true to his word. But by early 1988 he was looking back on a year of frustration in his quest to trap Kaufman. His commanding officer on the task force, who had arrested Kaufman on prior occasions on drug and theft charges, continued to reject Fontana’s insistence that Kaufman was the Narong Road rapist. He was the boss; Fontana was just a sergeant in the crime car squad.

Yet, Fontana felt he knew George Kaufman. He understood what he was capable of – and how his mind worked. The stakeout on his 30th birthday in September 1986 hadn’t been the only time he had predicted the rapist’s next target. A few weeks later, he had been investigating a break-in at a block of units in a laneway in