GERMANY:Frank is never alone. When the 40-year-old leaves his parents' cramped apartment he is followed by at least three plain-clothes policemen.
Locals call them the "minders", but Frank calls them "the Measures".
The Measures have been imposed to watch Frank day and night. When he leaves the apartment block in the morning, the Measures follow him at an indiscreet distance. When he returns in the evening, the Measures sit in a car outside all night and leave engine running to keep the heating going.
The Measures are there to prevent a repeat of January 1992 when Frank met a 20-year-old woman in a local pub and walked her home. She didn't want his company and told him so when she reached her parents' home.
He pulled a knife, attempted to strangle her and stabbed her five times. She survived, but Frank was sent to prison for eight years.
For residents of Quedlinburg, a tiny town near the Harz mountains in eastern Germany, the attack was a shock but the identity of the perpetrator was not.
Frank was already a notorious figure in the town since January 23rd, 1984, when the then 17-year-old smashed his way into an apartment with a hammer in the middle of the night.
He lunged at the woman inside and, as court documents record, "hit her 57 times with the broad as well as the sharp side of the hammer in the head, neck and back regions". Police discovered the woman's body two days later with her two-year-old son crouched alongside, suffering from hypothermia.
The second, non-fatal attack, came just three months after Frank's prison release in November 1991, only granted after psychological reports suggested he was "middle-grade dangerous" who "in the meantime had reached a firm level of motivation through therapy".
State officials took no chances this time around, changing the law a day before Frank was released from prison last December to permit "the Measures", even though they were not specifically requested by any court. Since mid-December, 32 police officers have been assigned to watch him day and night. Three men in winter anoraks and woolly hats hang around outside a small cafe where Frank drinks his coffee and occasionally gives an interview. "Feel free to try and talk to him," an official who deals with the case told one German journalist.
"Just throw a heavy object like a chair or a vase against the window to alert the boys outside to intervene in case, during the conversation, he . . ."
The case of Frank and the Measures has become a media sensation in Germany. Camera teams camp outside the apartment block ready to film "a day in the life" reports, watched by Frank's irritated neighbours who complain that they are filmed if they use their balconies.
Frank has no friends. Former schoolmates avoid him and, though they didn't invite him to their recent 25th school reunion, he was the talk of the evening.
No one knows how long the Measures will continue. Law enforcement officials are afraid to stop watching him for fear he will strike a third time. A compromise may be reached when they meet Frank and his pensioner parents at a meeting later this month to be chaired by a local pastor. Frank calls his crimes "unforgivable", but his current situation unbearable. He suffers from depression and is already contemplating ignoring meetings with his parole officer, just to get back in prison. "In prison I was freer," he said.