“By summer 1980, when he was 20, he was emerging as a 'character' in West London.
At Kingston Crown Court he was fined £15 for impersonating a police officer.
Then a picture of him with a trophy appeared in his local newspaper when he duped the Fulham Chronicle into believing that he had won the British Karate Championships by breaking 47 tiles with his feet.
He used the name Paul Gadd - real name of the now disgraced pop star Gary Glitter. Readers were told he was 'a singer with the band Xanadu and a session musician with the Electric Light Orchestra'.
Another newspaper, the West London Observer, exposed him as a sham, but he would not be put off.
His need to impress now had him describing himself as a cousin of Jeff Lynne, lead singer with ELO.
Step by step, George was becoming more than a harmless eccentric. Within weeks, he was in the paper again, this time on charges of indecent assault after grabbing a woman's breasts in a car park.
As 'Paul Gadd, unemployed entertainer' he was given a three-month sentence, suspended for two years.
He was acquitted of assaulting another woman, actress June Zeller, on the same day.
Soon afterwards he entered his 'Steve Majors' period when he posed as a stuntman of the same name and made a ludicrous attempt to speed down a ramp on roller skates and leap across four double-decker buses.
He clipped the fourth bus and landed in a heap, fracturing his femur and dislocating his spine. But he got up grinning and managed to skate about before being carted off to hospital.
The following year, 1982, George tried to rape a modern languages student he met near Turnham Green Tube station in Chiswick, West London. He was not caught for another year.
By now a new interest had come into George's life - guns.
He had joined the Territorial Army, training with the 10th Battalion Parachute Regiment at White City. He enlisted under the name S F Majors and completed 29 days' training.
The training did not cover pistols but late in 1982, while still with the TA, he joined Kensington and Chelsea Pistol Club as a probationary member, named Steve Majors.
He completed eight periods of pistol shooting, but in September that year his application for full membership was refused.
In November the TA also rejected him as unsuitable, but in his fantasy world instead of shedding his Army uniform he elevated himself to the elite corps of fighting soldiers, the SAS.
He told whoever would listen that he was Thomas Palmer, the hero who led the storming of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980.
Now came the Kensington Palace incident in January 1983, when he was discovered in the grounds with the Rambo-size hunting knife and simply sent home.
Although Diana was away that evening, the significance of the incident to police later investigating Jill Dando's killing cannot be exaggerated: George, they now became convinced, was undoubtedly a threat to the public.
Within weeks of being released without charge, he was identified as the man who assaulted the student in Turnham Green.
Questioned by police, he broke down and confessed and in March 1983, under the name Steven Majors, George, then 22, was jailed for 33 months at the Old Bailey for attempted rape.
He served 18 months and was released without treatment or supervision. No one knew of his arrest carrying a knife near the walls of Kensington Palace.
By now guns and the Army were a fixation. He wore khakis in public, bought specialist military magazines, and showed acquaintances guns he kept in his flat.
He built up a huge collection of magazines, photos of the famous and articles from newspapers that police were later to discover.
George had been through several personality phases, and more were to come, but the Army and guns were to remain a constant.
In 1986 he mimicked his SAS hero Thomas Palmer's finest hour by staging a bizarre 'raid' on the home of a friend from school called David Dobbins.
The Dobbins family lived in South Kensington and one evening there was a knock on the door. It was George, in combat gear and balaclava, and he charged in holding a pistol and fired a shot.
When the panic subsided they realised it was a blank.
By now he was increasingly filling his jobless days by pestering women in Holland Park in West London. He carried flowers and a 12in hunting knife tucked in the leg pocket of his Army trousers.
One female acquaintance, Susan Coombe, said George (whom she knew as Tom Palmer) would try to 'chat them up or he would follow them to see where they lived'.
She said: 'If a girl he approached was polite and made conversation he would fall in love, but if they were not interested he would get angry.'
At the time George was living in council-paid accommodation at the Stanhope Gardens Hotel in West London, where he was renowned for romancing Oriental girls because white women usually rejected him.
One night at the hotel, a girl was heard screaming for help in George's room. A burly Scottish resident went to the rescue and forced George to open the door.
Out fled a naked Japanese girl, carrying her clothes, with blood running down her legs. The police were not called.
George's stalking habits continued when he moved to his dingy council flat in Crookham Road, Fulham.
His odd behaviour frequently came to the attention of police, who compiled an intelligence report on him. One entry described him as an 'idiot - but a dangerous one', while another said he was 'a persistent pathological-liar'.
Later George would harass language students of the London Study Centre in Fulham Road.
Surprisingly, perhaps, one of them, Itsuko Toide, from Tokyo, became a girlfriend and on May 2, 1989, she married him at Fulham register office. The marriage was a disaster and she fled back to Japan.
After she left, George changed his name for the last time. Now he became Barry Bulsara, taking the real surname of one of his idols, Freddie Mercury.
He took the fantasy to extraordinary lengths, insisting he was not only Mercury's cousin but also a follower of Zoroastrianism, Mercury's religion.
Mercury's death in 1991 was a golden opportunity for George to immerse himself in the singer's life. He visited Mercury's home in Kensington so often, making sinister approaches to female fans, that the Queen International Fan Club called the police.
George would save up for months to hire a white limousine in which he would drive up to the house on the anniversary of the singer's death, dressed like his idol in tight vest and leather jacket.
He would hand out business cards to women on which was printed 'Bulsara Productions Inc: Directors Barry Bulsara and Frederick Bulsara Mercury'.
And he consulted a plastic surgeon with a view to being made to look like his idol.
He had two consultations at the New You clinic on Fulham Broadway with surgeon Riad Roomi. Mr Roomi told him he would carry out the work only if George obtained the approval of a psychiatrist. The surgery was never carried out.
His supposed link with Mercury was now his main gambit when accosting girls, or when running up huge bills on premium-rate porn chat-lines on his mother's phone.
It was about this time that he was questioned over the murder of Rachel Nickell, stabbed to death on Wimbledon Common in July 1992.
Broadmoor patient was recently charged with the murder.
By now Jill Dando was living in Gowan Avenue, only 500 yards from George's flat and four doors from the doctors' surgery he attended.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1040722/Rambo-karate-kid-rock-star-The-fantasy-life-Barry-George.html
