By 1997, the wealthy older homosexual men had moved on. Cunanan was now 27. As Cunanan’s youth faded away, so too did his health. He began to display symptoms associated with AIDS and convinced himself that he had the disease. Early in the year, he underwent tests, but never returned for the diagnosis. Had he done so, Cunanan would have learned that the results were negative. He began to gain weight and his once neatly groomed hair became long and unkempt. His sharp mind was dulled by vodka and painkillers, in which he would also deal as a means of support.
In April, the brooding, jealousy, drinking and drug abuse apparently came together with fatal results. Cunanan had become convinced that two of his lovers, architect David Madson and Jeffrey Traill, a former naval officer, were seeing each other behind his back. Though they had not known each other at the time, both had lived in California when they first met Cunanan. In the intervening years, they’d relocated to Minneapolis, where they were finally introduced to one another by their mutual friend.
On the receiving end of an angry phone call from Cunanan, Traill denied that he was seeing the architect. On 26 April, Cunanan flew to the Minneapolis-St Paul airport, where he was picked up by Madson. According to friends, the plan was to sit down and allay Cunanan’s suspicions. The meeting, scheduled for the following day, did not go as planned. Cunanan became enraged, grabbed a hammer from a kitchen drawer and bashed in Traill’s skull.
Cunanan and Madson rolled the corpse of the former naval officer in a Persian rug. During the next two days the pair attempted to behave as if nothing unusual had happened.
Their cover was blown when the building manager of Madson’s loft complex came upon the body. Cunanan and Madson learned of the discovery and fled Minneapolis in the architect’s Jeep Cherokee. Seventy kilometres out of town, they pulled over to the verge on a country lane, and Cunanan put three bullets into Madson’s head. The gun, which he had brought with him from San Francisco, had once belonged to his friend Traill.
On 4 May, in Chicago, he tortured and killed a highly successful 72-year-old developer named Lee Miglin. After making himself a meal, Cunanan spent the night in the Miglin home. The next morning, he left in the developer’s 1994 Lexus, but not before he drove repeatedly over his corpse, reducing it to mush.
Cunanan made no attempt to hide his identity – indeed, it appears he was taunting the authorities. When discovered in the vicinity of Miglin’s home, Madson’s Jeep Cherokee had his pictures covering the front seat. Cunanan was placed on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list.
On the run
On 9 May, seeking to dump the Lexus, he shot and killed William Reese, a 45-year-old caretaker at Finn’s Point National Cemetery in Pennsville, New Jersey. Before long, driving Reese’s stolen truck, he arrived in Miami Beach, Florida. He checked into the rundown Normandy Plaza Hotel, where he rented a room by the month.
During the two months leading up to Versace’s murder, Cunanan would frequent the city’s gay bars and clubs. It is thought that many of his days involved walks around the neighbourhood where the designer’s mansion was. On 15 July, the morning on which he committed his final murder, he had followed Versace home from a local café.
With the designer’s murder, Andrew Cunanan became a household name, but the heightened awareness appeared to provide no boost to the ongoing manhunt.
In the end, despite the hue and cry that had erupted throughout the city, it was not the FBI or the Miami Beach Police Department that found Cunanan, but a Portuguese caretaker who, checking on a client’s houseboat, startled the killer.
A standoff ensued, ending with the police entering the houseboat and finding Cunanan dead on the floor. He had committed suicide using Traill’s gun – the same weapon with which he’d murdered three of his five victims.
It can be said that a tragedy of errors contributed to the death of Gianni Versace. The Miami Beach Police Department had received confirmed sightings of Cunanan, but had failed to make this information public. Thus, the murderer was able to move freely and without suspicion within the city’s gay community.
Though abandoned, Reese’s stolen truck sat for over two months before it came to the attention of the police.
Eight days before Versace’s murder, Cunanan had boldly used his own identification and the Normandy Plaza Hotel address in pawning some gold coins he had stolen from the Miglin home. The information was then faxed to the Miami Beach Police Department, as required by law. There it was placed on the desk of a clerk who was away on holiday. It was discovered a few hours after Versace’s murder.
The most incredible of all these many mistakes came when a SWAT team invaded and searched a Normandy Plaza room in which Cunanan was supposed to have been staying. Not only did they not find the murderer, it appeared neither traces nor clues had been left behind. Two days later, hotel staff realized they had given the authorities the incorrect room number.
SPREE KILLERS AND MASS MURDERERS
The earliest and most extreme recorded acts of mass murder are those committed by groups, including armies and states. As with serial killings, most acts of mass murder by individuals have taken place in recent decades. Shootings at schools and workplaces have increased dramatically and a new term was added to the lexicon: the ‘spree killer’, one who embarks on a murderous rampage, claiming victims in more than one location.
MARC LÉPINE
Among major Canadian cities, Montreal is regarded as one of the safest. Its annual homicide rate usually falls below the Canadian national average. In 2005, this city of 3,500,000 experienced 35 murders. Yet on the rainy afternoon of 6 December 1989, 14 of its citizens, all female students, had been murdered in just under 20 minutes. The incident came to be known as the Montreal Massacre.
The nightmare began shortly after five, on the final day of the term at the Université de Montréal’s Ecole Polytechnique. The beginning of the Christmas break was mere hours away. An engineering student stood at the front of a second-floor classroom, partway through a presentation on heat transfer, when a slim young man entered. In his hands he held a rifle, a semi-automatic Strum, Ruger Mini-14. Everyone remained seated, many thinking that they were all part of some poorly conceived end-of-term prank. The man approached the front of the class and ordered the student to stop. He then fired a shot into the ceiling and ordered the nine female students – about a fifth of the class – to separate from the males. Still, the students remained seated. When he repeated the command, they all stood. He again ordered the women to the other side of the room, adding that the men must leave. After a brief period of confusion, the men did as they were told.
Now alone with the women, the gunman asked whether they knew why they were present. When one student answered that she did not, the man provided her with an answer: ‘I am fighting feminism.’ Another student, Nathalie Provost, tried to reason with the man by saying that all were simply students and not necessarily feminists.
With that the gunman opened fire on the women, killing six, and wounding the others. Provost was shot three times, but survived.
He left the classroom and started down the second-floor corridor. He opened fire on a male and female student in a photocopy room, and shot another male student who happened to cross his path.
The gunman then entered a second classroom. He attempted to shoot a female student, but had run out of ammunition. The gunman left and, in the seeming privacy of an emergency stairwell, was seen reloading his gun. By the time he returned to the classroom of his failed shooting, the students inside had locked the door. He fired three shots into the lock, but the catch remained in place.
With that, he turned his attention back to the corridor, and shot at a female student who was coming from the lift. Though she was hit, the student managed to escape through the emergency stairwell. At the second-floor foyer, the gunman again reloaded. He spotted a student attempting to hide behind a counter and fired twice, missing both times.
By now, many in the large six-storey building had become aware th
at a killer was on the loose – shots had echoed down the corridors, and fleeing students had given warning. Tragically, like many of his initial victims, others thought the noise and activity was all part of a prank designed to mark the final day of classes. One quick-thinking female employee at the financial services office locked the door and was moving to safety when she was shot and killed through a glass window.
Apparently giving up on the office, the gunman moved to the first-floor cafeteria, where he came upon about a hundred people and opened fire. Through the confusion of the scattering crowd, he managed to kill one woman and wound another student. After killing two women who had fled to a storage area at the far end of the room, he spotted a man and a woman hiding beneath one of the tables. The gunman ordered them to stand, which they did. He then exited the cafeteria, leaving the couple unharmed.
By this point, Montreal police had not only arrived, but had succeeded in securing the perimeter of the building. Faced with a situation that appeared entirely foreign, they debated their next move.
Meanwhile the gunman was making his way up two flights of escalators to the third-floor classrooms. In the corridor he wounded one female and two male students. Incredibly, he then came upon a class that was still in session, the students and professor oblivious to the surrounding carnage. In fact, three students were giving a presentation before the rest of the class.
The gunman stormed the room, telling all to get out, and yet no one moved. One student later said that his gun looked like a toy. Seemingly frustrated by the inaction, the gunman shot Maryse Leclair, the only female member of the presentation team. Some students tried to escape, others attempted to hide. Six more were shot as the gunman ran about the room. He fired randomly, stopped to reload, then began again.
Lying on the floor, Leclair pleaded for help, at which point the gunman again stopped shooting. He walked over to the bleeding woman, knelt, unsheathed a hunting knife, and stabbed her three times in the heart.
The gunman then stood up, grabbed his rifle, swore, and committed suicide by shooting himself in the forehead.
In the 18 or 19 minutes that had elapsed since his rampage had begun, the gunman had killed 14 women, and wounded 14 other people, including four men.
One awful coincidence was that the father of Maryse Leclair served as the director of communications for the Montreal police. After arriving at the scene, he met briefly with the press, and then entered the building. It was he who found his daughter’s body.
The jacket of the dead gunman contained three suicide letters, two addressed to friends, which revealed his identity: Marc Lépine.
Born Gamil Rodrique Gharbi on 26 October 1964 at Montreal, Lépine was the son of an Algerian father and a French-Canadian mother. Much of his early life was spent in Costa Rica and Puerto Rico. His father was abusive, both physically and mentally, victimizing Gamil, his younger sister and his mother. It was claimed that he didn’t consider women to be equal to men. The Gharbi family disintegrated when Gamil was 7 years old, and his father left the country. In 1982, Gamil legally changed his name to Marc Lépine – adopting his mother’s surname. That same year, he entered college, the usual route to university for those living in Quebec. He attended two different institutions, taking a variety of courses relating to science and electronics, before dropping out, a sudden decision he never explained.
In 1986, Lépine applied to the Ecole Polytechnique, and was accepted on the condition that he pass two compulsory college courses. One of the two courses was completed in early 1989. He received a perfect mark on the final exam.
A somewhat reclusive young man, Lépine appears to never have had a girlfriend. He seemed either shy or boastful in the company of women, and shared his father’s opinion that they were something less than his equals.
Lépine himself defined the primary motive behind his actions as suicide. Despite the decision to keep the full text of his suicide note secret, nearly a year later it was leaked to journalist Francine Pelletier, then of the newspaper La Presse. Much of the letter concerns his hatred of feminists, who he says ‘want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men.’ Accompanying the letter was a list of 19 women whom he claims survived because of lack of time. Among the names on the list was that of Pelletier herself.
An official three-day period of mourning followed the massacre, culminating in public vigils across the country.
The tragic event provided support for those seeking greater gun control and is generally acknowledged as a major contributing factor in the passage of Canada’s 1995 Firearms Act.
For not having entered the building immediately, the Montreal police came in for a great deal of criticism. Indeed, there had been a police presence for a full 14 minutes before the first officers stormed the doors of the Ecole Polytechnique. The criticism increased after it was learned that the first to enter had done so after police had learned of the gunman’s suicide.
The city has since suffered through two more school shootings. The first occurred on 24 August 1992, less than three years after the Montreal Massacre. The murderer on that muggy summer day was Valery Fabrikant, a Soviet émigré who held an associate professorship in mechanical engineering at Concordia University. Disgruntled at having been denied tenure, he had told one university administrator that he intended settling the issue ‘the American way’.
He met first with the head of the faculty association, whom he shot and killed. Three professors who had little or nothing to do with Fabrikant’s status were also murdered, and the departmental secretary was wounded in the attack. Fabrikant was eventually overpowered by a professor and a security guard whom he had taken hostage and was arrested at the scene. Following many months of proceedings, which were interrupted in order to conduct a hearing into the then-former associate professor’s mental fitness, Fabrikant was sentenced to life in prison.
On 13 September 2006, Dawson College, an institution within blocks of the scene of the Fabrikant murders, became the site of the third shooting. Unlike those who had committed the previous shootings, the killer, 25-year-old Kimveer Gill, had no connection with the institution chosen as the site of his attacks.
The school year was just a couple of weeks old when Gill carried out his attack. He arrived at the downtown campus at about 12:30, and was spotted removing a number of weapons from the boot of his car. Abducting a passing lawyer, he forced the man to carry a bag, containing a gun and ammunition, to one of the school’s main entrances. There, using a Beretta Cx4 Storm semi-automatic carbine, Gill fired on the assembled students. In the confusion that followed, he lost track of the lawyer, who chose the moment to escape, bag in hand.
Gill entered the building and walked directly to the cafeteria. He shot the two closest students and, after ordering the others to the floor, began firing randomly. It was at this point, roughly three minutes after the first shots were fired, that Gill was confronted by two police officers who had been visiting the campus on unrelated business. Gill briefly took two more hostages, before being shot in the arm by one of the two policemen. He then put his pistol to his head and committed suicide. The entire shooting rampage, lasting no more than seven or eight minutes, left one student dead and 19 more injured.
This time the Montreal police and emergency services earned praise for the speed and efficiency of their response. Some reports have it that as many as 80 police cars and 24 ambulances arrived on the scene. Prompt response and intervention were credited with minimizing further loss of life. The force had learned well the horrible lesson taught them 17 years earlier by Marc Lépine.
GEORGE HENNARD
George Hennard considered Steely Dan’s ‘Don’t Take Me Alive’ to be his theme song. The lyrics of this very bleak piece of music, inspired by the constant eruptions of violence in 1970s Los Angeles, concern a cornered murderer who is surrounded by police. Whether he knew it or not – and it is likely
that he did – Hennard would one day be in a very similar position.
George Hennard was born on 15 October 1956, the son of an army surgeon and his wife. He had a difficult relationship with his mother, and would depict her in drawings with a serpent’s body. After graduating from high school in 1974, he joined the United States Navy, and later the Merchant Marine. In 1989, after 15 years of service, Hennard was dismissed for possessing a small amount of marijuana. The end of his duty left him extremely depressed. He told a judge, ‘It means a way of life. It means my livelihood. It means all I’ve got. It’s all I know.’ Although he underwent drug treatment, he became increasingly reclusive. He lived alone in a large, two-storey colonial-style house in Belton, Texas, the seat of Bell County. Belonging to his mother, this once grand home had fallen into disrepair, a state that had led to several confrontations with local officials.
A good-looking man, Hennard appeared to have a great deal of problems with women. Those who knew him best often described him as a misogynist. He was given to shouting obscene remarks at women as they passed his home, and appeared threatening to his neighbours.
In the winter of 1991, while on a trip to Nevada, he bought a 9mm Glock-17 semi-automatic pistol and a 9mm Ruger. In May, Hennard was carrying one of the guns when he was arrested by a park ranger in Lake Mead, Nevada, for driving while intoxicated and carrying a loaded weapon.
The next month, Hennard expressed his bitterness towards women in a five-page letter to Jill Fritz and Jana Jernigan, two sisters who lived down the street. Made public within 24 hours of the shooting, it is a rambling, venomous document. Hennard begins by mistakenly referring to the young women as ‘Stacee’ and ‘Robin’. It reads, in part, ‘Do you think the three of us can get together some day? Please give me the satisfaction of someday laughing in the face of all those mostly white treacherous female vipers from those two towns who tried to destroy me and my family.’ At another point in the letter, Hennard expresses his appreciation of the sisters: ‘It is very ironic about Belton, Texas. I found the best and worst in women there. You and your sister are the one side. Then the abundance of evil women that make up the worst on the other side.’ Hennard included photographs of himself and concluded by asking that the two women not disclose the contents of the letter to anyone other than their immediate family.
The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases Page 17
