By hiding in Miami after Versace’s murder, Cunanan had broken his usual pattern of picking up a new getaway car and leaving the vehicle tied to a previous killing behind. They said that he had shot himself in the mouth and left no suicide note. It took more than 12 hours for police to announce that they had finally found the body of Andrew Cunanan in a second-floor bedroom. He immediately notified police, who moved in a swat team and lobbed tear gas into the houseboat.
The killer’s trail ended on July 23, when a caretaker checking on an unoccupied houseboat anchored off Collins Avenue, less than three miles north of Versace’s mansion, discovered someone inside and heard a shot. Trail, Madson, and Miglin, however, carried the personal signature of what criminologists call a “pathological, sadistic sexual offender.”
The fourth dead man, William Reese, a 45-year-old caretaker of a Civil War cemetery in New Jersey with a wife and son, is considered by clinicians who study serial killers a “functional homicide.” Unlike the other victims, Reese was probably murdered simply for his 1995 red Chevrolet pickup truck. The Miglin family has vociferously denied that Lee or his 25-year-old son, Duke, a fledgling actor in Hollywood who has a bit part in this summer’s Air Force One, ever met Cunanan. Real-estate tycoon Lee Miglin, 75, also professed to have been happily married for 38 years. The third victim, esteemed in Chicago political and social circles, was much older and very rich, a type Cunanan was known to research carefully. Although they had broken up in the spring of 1996, Cunanan still kept Madson’s picture taped to his refrigerator door.
Cunanan considered Trail, a graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, to be his best friend, and referred to him as “my brother.” Madson, a rising architect, was the great unrequited love of Cunanan’s life. Two of Cunanan’s alleged victims, Jeffrey Trail, 28, and David Madson, 33, looked as if they had walked off a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box: from upright, loving, midwestern families, they were intelligent, handsome, and well liked. The sadistic savagery of those crimes reverberated throughout America’s gay communities. More than a dozen law-enforcement bodies, including the F.B.I., were seeking to question him not only about Versace’s murder but also about four others that took place between April 27 and May 9. In the end he reached an exclusive pinnacle that provided him with the celebrity he had always sought: he became America’s most wanted fugitive. Wherever he went, he craved the limelight and aspired to the top, whether through charm or falsehood. Cunanan’s story is a singular study in promise crushed. His wit was biting, his memory photographic. Or he could say of a work of art what year it had been painted, who had owned it through the centuries, what churches it had hung in. He could describe the texture and delicacy of the blowfish he claimed to have eaten at an $850 Japanese lunch. He tracked possible sugar daddies with care and would say with a pout that he didn’t know whether to fly to New York or Paris for dinner. A voracious reader with a reported genius-level I.Q., he coveted the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Until recently, Andrew Cunanan, 27, was just a gay gigolo down on his luck in San Diego.
He knew very well that the act of murdering Versace, the Calabrian-born designer whose flamboyant clothes virtually defined “hot,” who tarted up the likes of Princess Diana and Elizabeth Hurley but whose gowns also made Madonna and Courtney Love more elegant, would instantly catapult him to where he had always fantasized being: at the center of worldwide attention. The prime suspect, dressed in nondescript shorts and a baseball cap, came in close for the kill and then coolly walked away along Ocean Drive. Now the emperor lay dead, gunned down almost Mob-style on the steps of his lavish Mediterranean villa, shot in the head and face in broad daylight. In Miami’s pagan, over-the-top South Beach, particularly among the large gay contingent, Gianni Versace had been a tanned, adored idol.