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20 years later: Cunanan, Versace and celebrity culture

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He was the first person from San Diego County to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, and the feeling now — 20 years later — is that it probably didn’t bother him at all.

Andrew Cunanan wanted so desperately to be wanted.

The San Diego native’s killing spree in the spring and summer of 1997 culminated in the point-blank shooting of Gianni Versace on the steps of the fashion icon’s Miami Beach mansion. Cunanan, 27, quickly became the stuff of criminal legend, an elusive, gay chameleon who stirred the public’s fears and fascination and kept the fledgling 24-hour media beast fed with a swirling mix of sex, celebrity and murder.

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Some of the people he’d known in San Diego and elsewhere went into hiding, lest they become his next victim. Others sold their stories — one former roommate got $85,000 — to tabloid magazines and TV shows. Supposed sightings of the accused killer came in from almost every state in the country as the FBI launched one of its largest manhunts in history.

Then eight days after Versace’s slaying, Cunanan killed himself with the same gun on a houseboat docked in Miami Beach. There was no note, no explanation for his three months of rage. That left the forensic psychologists, the sociologists, and others to sift through the traces of who he was and what he’d done.

And why.

The front of Casa Casuarina, Gianni Versace's Miami mansion, where the celebrated designer was slain by Andrew Cunanan.
(Giorgio Viera / EFE)

“I think Cunanan wanted to be famous,” said journalist Maureen Orth, whose 1999 book, “Vulgar Favors,” remains the most-comprehensive account of Cunanan’s rampage. “He would do anything to be famous, including killing, and I think we as a culture have moved more in that direction. Fame is everything now.”

Orth’s book is the source material for the much-anticipated next installment of the FX TV show “American Crime Story.” Its first season, “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” won nine Emmys.

The 10-part Cunanan series, scheduled to air beginning early next year, will focus on the killing of Versace, who was 50 and at the peak of an influential career designing clothes for Princess Diana, Madonna and scores of other celebrities. Versace has also been the focus in recent 20th anniversary coverage by other media, including 48 Hours, 20/20, the Miami Herald, and People magazine.

But to get to Versace, you have to go first to Cunanan’s other victims — two men he knew in Minnesota, a wealthy businessman in Chicago, a cemetery caretaker in New Jersey. And before them, you have to go to where it all began.

San Diego.

‘Occasionally self-indulgent’

Cunanan was the youngest of four children, born Aug. 31, 1969, into a Catholic family headed by a Navy petty officer father, Pete, and a homemaker mother, MaryAnn. He was considered the “white sheep” of the family, his siblings told the Union-Tribune a month after he killed himself.

In the third grade, at Sunnyside Elementary in Bonita, his IQ tested at 147. He didn’t just read the encyclopedia; he memorized it. Convinced he was destined for great things, his parents lavished their attention on him, and when it was time for high school, they went the private route: Bishop’s in La Jolla. They moved to Rancho Bernardo to be closer to the campus.

In the new house, Cunanan got the master bedroom.

At Bishop’s, he ran cross-country and excelled at art history. He had a boisterous laugh and was flamboyant about his sexual orientation. Both brought him considerable attention. He talked about older gay men who gave him gifts. He told entertaining stories, not all of them true, about his family and his life outside school. In his senior year, his classmates voted him “Most Likely to Be Remembered.”

Voted "Most Likely to be Remembered" at Bishop's school, Andrew Cunanan was. Days after the murder of Gianni Versace, media members gathered outside the home of the Cunanan's mother, Mary Ann Cunanan, on Division Street in National City.
Voted “Most Likely to be Remembered” at Bishop’s school, Andrew Cunanan was. Days after the murder of Gianni Versace, media members gathered outside the home of the Cunanan’s mother, Mary Ann Cunanan, on Division Street in National City.
(Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune)

After his junior year, school officials wrote a summary of Cunanan, to be used with college applications, that described him as “an individual in every sense of he word” and gave its “enthusiastic recommendation” of him.

“He relates very well to adults, discourses brilliantly about culture and history, and is capable of profound thought,” the summary said. “He is independent, occasionally self-indulgent and at times only interested in pursuing areas that truly interest him.”

Cunanan wrote his own summary a year later, a quote from an 18th Century French king that ran under his senior picture in the Bishop’s 1987 yearbook: “Apres moi, le deluge.”

After me, the flood.

Cunanan enrolled at UC San Diego, but he dropped out after his father — a stockbroker suspected of embezzling — fled alone to the Philippines. He followed his dad there but only stayed about a month. He told relatives the living conditions were deplorable.

Back in San Diego, he pursued a more upscale lifestyle. He was a fixture at local gay bars and restaurants, picking up the tabs for friends and leaving big tips. He shopped at high-end department stores, flaunted cashmere topcoats and gold Cartier wristwatches.

He got his money from wealthy older men who enjoyed the company of pretty younger ones. There were parties and out-of-town trips and eventually a new Infiniti and a monthly $2,500 allowance as the “kept boy” of a millionaire from Arizona who had a condo on Coast Boulevard in La Jolla.

As he moved in those circles, Cunanan earned a reputation for spreading lies as readily as he spent money. He sometimes used aliases — Andrew DeSilva, Drew Cunningham — and adopted personas as a pharmacist, a former Israeli soldier, a student getting his doctorate in history. He said he had an ex-wife and a 7-year-old daughter. He bragged about knowing various celebrities, including Versace. Almost everything that came out of his mouth was meant to impress.

“He watched and listened and figured out what other people wanted him to be, and became the particular Andrew each one wanted,” author Gary Indiana wrote in his 1999 book about Cunanan, “Three Month Fever.”

Then he became the Andrew no one wanted.

The spree begins

He had a falling out with his wealthy benefactor, who refused to buy him a new Mercedes. He was running out of money. His looks started to go. He told friends he was “bored” in San Diego and planning to move to San Francisco. But first he said he had some business to take care of in Minnesota.

Two friends lived there, Jeffrey Trail, 28, a former Navy officer he knew from San Diego, and David Madson, 33, an architect he’d met in San Francisco who became his lover.

“Andrew, it appears, was carrying two torches simultaneously,” Orth writes in her book. “(He) desperately needed to think that someone, somewhere, also cared about him.”

Within a week of his arrival in Minneapolis, in April 1997, both Trail and Madson were dead. Trail was bludgeoned by 27 blows to the face, head and torso from a claw hammer. His body was found rolled up in a carpet in Madson’s apartment. Madson was found on the shoreline of East Rush Lake, shot three times. His Jeep was missing.

Just as police were identifying Cunanan as the killer, another body was discovered in the garage of a home in Chicago’s Gold Coast area. Lee Miglin, 72, a politically connected real estate investor, had his head nearly severed by a garden saw. He’d been beaten and stabbed. His face was wrapped, mummy style, in masking tape. A garden glove was stuffed in his mouth. His legs were bound with an orange extension cord.

The killer apparently made himself comfortable in the home. There was a pint of ice cream on a kitchen counter, a ham on a desk in the library, black whiskers — Miglin’s hair was white — in the bathroom sink.

Police were baffled. There was speculation in the press that it was a mob hit. Then, three days after the killing, Madson’s jeep was found parked nearby. The dots were quickly connected back to Minnesota, and then to Cunanan. He was considered a spree killer now. The media frenzy was under way.

Miglin’s green Lexus, which was missing, had a phone in it that was activated every time the ignition was turned on. Police figured Cunanan was driving it and started tracking the car as he headed east to New York and Pennsylvania. Word of the tracking leaked to the press. Orth calls that “probably the most serious blunder of the entire manhunt.”

A blunder because Cunanan apparently heard that he was being tracked and decided to ditch the Lexus. He wound up at Finn’s Point National Cemetery in New Jersey, where caretaker William Reese, 45, was getting ready to go home for the night. He had his red Chevy pickup parked outside.

When Reese didn’t come home as planned, his wife went looking for him and then called the police. They found the caretaker dead, shot in the back of the head. The Lexus was nearby. The pickup wasn’t.

Famed Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace lived the life of opulence that Andrew Cunanan lusted after.
(Giorgio Viera / EFE)

Most Wanted

Cunanan went to Florida. According to Orth’s book, he worked as a male prostitute and lived in a small hotel room. And on June 12, 1997, he became the 449th person on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

One month later, Versace was walking back to his mansion with magazines he’d purchased at the News Cafe a few blocks away. He was putting the key into the lock of the front gate when someone came up from behind and shot him twice in the head.

When police arrived, they saw a dead dove on the ground, a sometimes-calling card for mob killings. It turned out the dove had been struck by a fragment from one of the bullets that hit Versace, and within hours attention had shifted to Cunanan. He’d been seen running into a parking garage, and police found clothes matching the description of what he’d been wearing on the ground next to a truck. A red Chevy pickup.

The murder became front-page news around the world as the media descended on South Beach. All manner of rumor and speculation made it into the public discourse, and sightings of Cunanan poured in from around the country.

On July 23, a man who was keeping an eye on a houseboat docked on Indian Creek noticed that it had been broken into. Inside, cushions had been pulled off a sofa and made into a bed on the floor. As he searched the houseboat, he heard a loud bang from the master bedroom on the second floor. He ran outside and called the police.

They found Cunanan dead. He’d shot himself in the mouth with the same .40-caliber handgun he’d used to kill three of his victims.

Gianni Versace's star power thrust his killer Andrew Cunanan into the celebrity spotlight. At Versace's memorial mass in Milan, Princess Diana sat beside British pop star Elton John, (being comforted an unidentified man). Within weeks, the world would be mourning Princess Diana.
(LUCA BRUNO / AP)

It wasn’t long before the spectacle of the San Diego-bred spree killer was replaced by Princess Di and then others. But questions linger, including whether Cunanan knew Miglin, the Chicago businessman, and whether he’d ever met Versace. Orth’s book quotes people as saying yes to both.

To some, the more interesting question is what the case says about American culture, especially its obsession with celebrity and fame. Eugene Halton, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, said Cunanan is a “poster child” for the kind of consumerism that leaves people identifying themselves by what they own and by the personalities they follow on social media.

“He had such a love of materialism and celebrity that he often exaggerated or outright lied about his own background and what he was doing and who he knew,” Halton said.

He discusses Cunanan and Versace in his 2008 book, “The Great Brain Suck: And Other Epiphanies,” and he quotes J. Reid Meloy, a UC San Diego forensic psychologist, who called the killer’s spree “the horrible flowering and self-destruction of a high-velocity young psychopath.”

Meloy noted that nobody would have ever heard of Sirhan Sirhan if he hadn’t killed Bobby Kennedy, or Mark David Chapman if he hadn’t shot John Lennon. “Destroying a figure of that stature,” he said, “links you to that figure in perpetuity.”

john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com

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