According to his birth certificate, Akinwale Oluwafolajimi Oluwatope Arobieke was born on 15 July 1961 at Manchester’s Crumpsall Hospital.

His mother’s name was listed as Abisola Aduke Arobieke, a secretarial student from Catherine Road, Manchester. No father’s name or occupation was given. The birth was registered on 17 August 1961.

At the age of six months he was placed in care and he spent time in a Barnardo’s home in Llandudno, Conwy, a defence barrister acting for him once told a court.

As a young man he went from job to job. At one stage he was a Mersey Tunnels cleaner, and later he worked as a city council messenger.

By the time of the trial over Gary Kelly’s death, he was living in Dingle, an inner city working-class area - best known as the birthplace of Ringo Starr - overlooking Liverpool’s waterfront. Its rows of back-to-back terraced houses were used as the setting for Alan Bleasdale’s Boys From The Blackstuff and Carla Lane’s Bread.

Later, after his release from prison, Arobieke moved to neighbouring Toxteth, the heart of Liverpool’s long-established black community.

Nothing is known about Arobieke that could easily explain his odd behaviour.

On his release from prison in 2006, after two years and 10 months, a court handed him a Sexual Offences Prevention Order (Sopo).

Sopos were introduced by the Labour government as part of the 2003 Sexual Offences Act on similar lines to the Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos), which were designed to tackle persistent low-level nuisance conduct. Sopos are civil orders, but breaching one is a criminal offence with a penalty of up to five years in prison.

The odder Asbos gained much media coverage (a woman banned from having sex with her husband too loudly, an 87-year-old instructed to turn down the volume of her Glenn Miller records, a man ordered to stop sniffing petrol on forecourts).

Arobieke’s Sopo banned him from touching, measuring or feeling muscles and asking people to do squat exercises in public; feeling muscles in private without consent; loitering around or going into gyms and sports clubs; talking to anyone under 18 on purpose; entering a school or university without permission; driving or being a passenger in any car other than a taxi; leaving Merseyside without the chief constable’s permission; and entering St Helens, Warrington or Widnes without police permission.

He had not actually been convicted of any sexual offences, although a number of allegations of sexual assault had been ordered to lie on file.

In court appearances, Arobieke has always denied getting any kind of sexual gratification from feeling muscles.

When he was jailed in 2001, Arobieke accepted his behaviour could cause fear but told the court he believed he had a genuine friendship with the young men he approached.

In 2007 Judge Bruce Macmillan, sitting with two magistrates, rejected Arobieke’s request to overturn the Sopo, saying: "It is clear his touching of boys and young men is motivated by sexual urge." The following year the interim order was made permanent.

During one 2008 hearing, Arobieke admitted that he had an "unusual interest in muscles, the development of muscles and the potential of young men to improve their physique". He said he had allowed an exercise routine to "get out of hand. It became an obsession".

Many of those who have been squeezed by him believed at the time his motivation was sexual.

There has been discussion of fetishes of similar kinds. In a 2008 almanac of sexual paraphilias by Dr Anil Aggrawal, sthenolagia is defined as sexual arousal from the display of strength and muscles.

But very little is known about it, says Mark Griffiths, professor of behavioural addiction at Nottingham Trent University.

There are thousands of websites devoted to “muscle worship”, Griffiths says. Typically, muscle-worshippers tend to like being dominated by women or men who are more muscular than themselves.

But Arobieke is usually at least as big and strong as those he has approached – often much more so. It’s not clear to Griffiths how to describe Arobieke’s interest in muscles. “This doesn't fit the stereotype,” he says.