police station. But with his first turn of the dial, there was a click and a ringing sound from another phone extension somewhere else in the flat. He hadn’t seen it earlier. He heard a thump and the sound of running feet as the would-be intruder fled.

Within minutes, police cars were screeching to a halt downstairs, and officers were rushing to seal off the surrounding streets. They knocked on doors and scoured every laneway and garden, but found no sign of their quarry.

By midnight Fontana was home, birthday celebrations forgotten as he directed the operation by phone, ordering a check on the license number of every car parked in the surrounding streets. Through the night, police were called to three other break-ins – all flats in Narong Roadwhere the intruder had hidden during the police search. One of them was a flat whose occupant had been raped two months earlier on July 5, in the first of this assailant’s wave of 1986 attacks. It was in this flat that police found one of the characteristic round-patterned Nike footprints.

The car registration checks and follow-up calls yielded one car, a Ford sedan parked in a nearby road and not owned by a resident or known visitor. It was traced to a car yard. Its owner told Fontana that the Ford had been lent to a mate of his. The man’s name was George Gerald Kaufman.

George Kaufman – Heroin Addict and Rapist

As the detective ran through the results of his background check on this man, Fontana felt like