by Deborah Ball
Friends were puzzled about where Cunanan’s money came from. His only job seems to have been as a manager of a Thrifty drugstore. Cunanan regaled his friends with wild stories to explain the money, claiming, for instance, that he came from a wealthy Philippine family that owned sugar plantations. He spun tales of a former wife and a child, his stories growing ever more far-fetched. He became an enigma, a blend of so many tall tales that his friends couldn’t tell truth from fiction. The truth was that Cunanan, with handsome dark features and a slim body, had learned how to attract the attention of older men, manipulating them into buying him extravagant gifts and keeping him in high style. Even his mother would later describe him as a “high-class homosexual prostitute.”
But early in 1997, Cunanan, usually jovial and outgoing, began to change. He gained about twenty pounds, started to drink heavily, and stopped looking after his appearance.16 He withdrew from his social circle and became shaky and hyperactive. A few friends suspected he was using crystal meth, which was becoming popular in some urban gay circles.
On April 25, 1997, Cunanan flew on a one-way ticket from San Diego to Minneapolis to visit friends. He stayed with a former lover, thirty-three-year-old architect David Madson. A couple of evenings later, he arranged for twenty-eight-year-old Jeffrey Trail, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate whom Cunanan had befriended when Trail was stationed in San Diego several years earlier, to meet him at Madson’s apartment. At about 9:30 p.m., neighbors heard loud voices coming from the apartment. “Get the fuck out!” someone shouted. The walls started shaking, and they heard thudding sounds. Two days later, police broke into the apartment and found Trail’s body wrapped in a carpet. He had been beaten to death with a claw hammer. They also found a nylon gym bag with Cunanan’s name on it, as well as an empty holster for a. 40-caliber Taurus handgun that had been issued to Trail when he was a cadet at the California Highway Patrol Academy. Ten rounds of bullets were missing. The next week, police found Madson’s body in a nearby marsh. He had been shot once in the head with a. 40-caliber gun.
Cunanan stole Trail’s car and started driving. On May 3, 1997, he arrived in Chicago, where he slipped into the suburban home of Lee Miglin, a wealthy older businessman. He tortured Miglin before slashing his throat with a saw blade and puncturing his chest repeatedly with pruning shears. He then bound the dead man’s head in masking tape and wrapped his body in plastic. Cunanan stole Miglin’s black 1994 Lexus and headed east. He left behind a half-eaten ham sandwich, a fake gun, and a razor with stubble on it.
Cunanan stopped in New York City for two days, where he found accommodations in a gay bathhouse. But on May 9, 1997, panicked that the police were tracking him via the car phone’s transmitter in Miglin’s Lexus, he left New York. Driving aimlessly, he arrived in a small town in New Jersey, where he shot William Reese, the caretaker of a cemetery, and stole his red 1995 Chevrolet pickup truck. Two days later, on May 12, he checked into the Normandy Hotel in Miami Beach. Cunanan had killed four men in less than two weeks. As he settled in at the Normandy, the television program America’s Most Wanted ran a piece on him. A few weeks later, on June 12, the FBI put him on their most-wanted list; on the same day, he parked the red pickup in a city garage a few blocks from Casa Casuarina.17 Cunanan moved freely around Miami Beach, going largely unnoticed; his Latin appearance let him blend in easily. Moreover, he was scrawnier now than in the pictures on the posters.
At first, he paid for his room at the Normandy on a daily basis, but later he switched to monthly payments and asked for a better room. He carried a dark backpack everywhere he went. He wasn’t talkative—the Normandy staff nicknamed him “The Hindu”—but was friendly when someone tried to engage him. His appearance was tidy; he kept his fingernails neatly manicured. On July 11, 1997, on one of his trips to a fast-food restaurant near the Normandy, an employee who had seen Cunanan’s photo on America’s Most Wanted recognized him. He called the police, but by the time they arrived, Cunanan was gone.18
Four days later, as Gianni Versace slipped the key into the lock of the gates of Casa Casuarina, Cunanan pulled the trigger. He first shot Gianni on the left side of his neck, just below his ear. The bullet severed Gianni’s spinal cord and exited on the opposite side of his neck. Incredibly, it then ricocheted off the iron gate, and a fragment hit a mourning dove, which fell into the gutter in front of the house. As soon as Gianni hit the ground, crumpled on his left side, Cunanan shot him again, this time hitting him in the face, just to the right of his nose. This bullet lodged in his skull.
Antonio had gotten up just before 8:30 a.m. and gone downstairs for breakfast.
“Where’s Mr. Versace?” he asked Thomas, the house manager.
“He’s gone to get newspapers,” Thomas replied.
As Antonio sat in the dining room eating breakfast, their close friend Lazaro Quintana arrived early for a 9 a.m. tennis date with Antonio. Quintana leaned over and stole a piece of pineapple from Antonio’s plate, when they suddenly heard two loud bangs. Antonio ran to the window. He saw Gianni through the half-open gates, lying on the steps. “No! No!” Antonio screamed. The two men bolted out of the mansion, but Quintana reached Gianni first. He was slumped on his side, and blood was pouring from his head down the cream-colored steps to the sidewalk. Small bits of brain matter were scattered nearby. The paper bag with his magazines lay on the top step, near his black sunglasses.
Quintana checked to see if Gianni was breathing, but he couldn’t tell. Antonio was right behind him. When he saw Gianni, he cried out, “Non e’ possibile! It can’t be!” He crumpled on the top step, sinking into a fetal position near Gianni’s feet.19 He clutched the gates, with his face turned away from Gianni, rocking and sobbing hysterically.
Quintana looked up at the blond woman who had recognized Gianni a few minutes before. “Did you see who did this?” he blurted. She nodded and pointed at Cunanan, who was only about a block north, walking away calmly with a splayed, ducklike gait.
“You bastard!” Quintana yelled at him. “Stop!”
Cunanan sped up, continuing another block before turning left onto Thirteenth Street, away from the ocean. Quintana chased him until Cunanan ducked into an alley. Quintana followed him, but when Cunanan turned to look back, Quintana could clearly see the black gun still in Cunanan’s right hand. He remembered having seen a police car at a car accident nearby and ran to get a cop. He pointed at the alley where Cunanan had disappeared. As the cops pursued Cunanan, Quintana returned to the house.20
Meanwhile, a staff member in Casa Casuarina had called 911. Four minutes later, an ambulance arrived. The paramedics lowered Gianni carefully to the sidewalk. They found no vital signs, and his left pupil was fixed and dilated. His right eye had been destroyed by the bullet to his face. They wrapped a white brace around his neck and attached five electrodes to his chest, frantically pumping his chest as they loaded him into the ambulance. A man who had been walking his dog snapped Polaroid pictures of Gianni on the litter. Antonio tried to follow Gianni into the ambulance but the police wouldn’t let him go, saying they needed his statement to get a description of the shooter.21
Within fifteen minutes, Gianni arrived at Jackson Memorial Hospital. A local television cameraman was standing outside the hospital, waiting for a photo op of a Miami girl who was awaiting a kidney transplant. When he saw the paramedics quickly wheel in a man with his face covered in blood, he filmed it, figuring it was the latest victim of Miami’s rampant gun crime.
At 9:20 a.m., doctors declared Gianni dead. Ninety minutes later, the hospital chaplain came to give him last rites. By that time, the footage of Gianni taken by the local cameraman was beaming around the world. 22
Cunanan ran to the parking garage just two blocks from Casa Casuarina, shed his shorts and T-shirt, which were sweat-soaked and spattered with blood, and dropped them on the ground next to the pickup truck. He changed into fresh clothes and ran down a back stairwell, heading north. According to some, he had planned to escape in the truck but was
spooked by a police car that happened to be in the parking garage just then, investigating an accident.
Within a half hour, police found the truck and, with it, a trove of clues about who had shot Gianni. There was Miglin’s wallet, William Reese’s identification, movie stubs from two movie theaters in New York, two passports—one in Cunanan’s name—and several. 40-caliber bullets.23 It looked as if Cunanan had slept in the truck. There were clothes strewn all over the seats and floor, as well as a toiletry bag, a plastic bucket with taco chips, and Popsicle sticks.
Quintana and two staff members managed to get Antonio back into the house, virtually carrying him away from the bloody steps. Someone gave him a sedative to calm him. One staff member came back out to take Gianni’s key out of the lock. A little later, another one got a hose to rinse the blood off the steps.
That afternoon, the police took Antonio to the station to answer questions and look at a lineup of photos. Still dressed in tennis shorts, Antonio was in a daze, shivering in the air-conditioned office as he responded to their queries until 10 p.m. Elton John called the mansion several times during the day from the south of France, nearly hysterical. As soon as he heard the news, he hired extra bodyguards for his villa there. “How could this happen?” he cried to the friend who was fielding the calls that were pouring in. “My two best friends—John Lennon and Gianni. I just don’t get it. I just don’t understand!”24
During the week between Gianni’s murder and his funeral, the largest manhunt in U.S. history was launched. When it was discovered that Cunanan had been on the loose for nearly three months, local and federal authorities fielded a barrage of critical questions from the press and politicians. But the FBI and police departments in the three states where the first murders had occurred had struggled to coordinate their efforts, failing to exploit the publicity generated by Cunanan’s previous crimes. By then, the killer was moving freely around Miami Beach, hustling as a prostitute and smoking crack with a junkie who had also taken up residence in the Normandy. Despite early tips that Cunanan might head south from Chicago, drawn to Miami’s large and prominent gay community, the police there did remarkably little to find him. They posted just a few most-wanted flyers in public spots around Miami Beach and made little effort to elicit the help of local gay groups in watching for Cunanan at the city’s clubs.
It took the death of an international celebrity to spark a massive response by the FBI, the Miami Beach police, and Florida state authorities, besieged as they were by enormous media coverage from around the world. More than two hundred agents in Florida joined the chase. They all struggled to sort through the thousands of tips flooding police hotlines, searching for real leads among the calls from psychics, devil-worshipping cults, and other crackpots.
In the hours after Gianni’s death, police finally canvassed Miami Beach’s gay scene, visiting bathhouses, video clubs, sex shops, and nightclubs, including the Warsaw, to distribute flyers and business cards. The day after the murder, they got a good tip when the owner of the pawnshop where Cunanan had sold the gold coin reported the transaction. Within hours, police were searching Room 205 at the Normandy, the address Cunanan had given the pawnshop, but they found no clues of his current whereabouts.
At the same time, police were grasping for a connection between Gianni and Cunanan. They interrogated Antonio for hours about Gianni’s personal habits. Knowing that Cunanan had worked as a male prostitute, they pressed Antonio as to whether Gianni might have met his killer in the past. Highly distraught and under intense pressure from the police, Antonio finally admitted that he and Gianni had hired prostitutes in New York and Miami, but he claimed they had stopped the practice years earlier and had never encountered Cunanan.
The day after the murder, however, Maureen Orth, a writer for Vanity Fair who had already been preparing an article on Cunanan and his first four killings, gave a series of television interviews claiming she’d uncovered a possible connection. She said that in 1990 Cunanan had weaseled an invitation to a San Francisco reception thrown for Gianni, who had designed the costumes for a performance by the San Francisco Opera. According to accounts relayed by Cunanan’s friends to Orth, Gianni surveyed the guests at the reception and quickly approached Cunanan.
“I know you,” he said. “Lago di Como, no?”
“That’s right,” Cunanan responded, clearly thrilled. “Thank you for remembering, Signor Versace.” Orth later reported Cunanan had never been to Italy, much less to Gianni’s grand villa on Lake Como.25 Cunanan, a celebrity hound, frequently boasted that he personally knew Gianni, but few of his friends, accustomed to Cunanan’s wild lies, had ever believed him. For Cunanan, Gianni represented all that he would never be—a gay success story, glamorous, rich, and venerated around the world.
In 1996 and early 1997, as Cunanan’s drug use apparently escalated and he became increasingly deranged, he began to rail against Gianni. Speaking with a friend on his way to the airport for his one-way flight from San Diego to Minneapolis, the site of his first murder, Cunanan called Gianni “the worst designer ever,” adding that he was “pretentious, pompous and ostentatious.”26
When Orth’s claims hit the news, the family and Antonio vehemently denied that Gianni had ever crossed paths with Cunanan. Their denial, however, did little to rein in one of the most lurid rumors: that Gianni had been HIV-positive and had passed the virus to Cunanan, who murdered the designer out of revenge.
Santo and Donatella, as accustomed as they were to the limelight, were horrified by the media frenzy unfolding in the United States, where Cunanan’s murder spree was attracting the sort of twenty-four-hour coverage attention hitherto afforded only to O. J. Simpson and JonBenét Ramsey. The tabloids published lurid details of Cunanan’s alleged involvement in everything from violent S&M sex rings to private clubs of closeted gay millionaires. Newspapers and television programs offered thousands of dollars to even the most tenuous of Cunanan’s friends in exchange for interviews or personal items belonging to the alleged murderer. The FBI put Cunanan’s mother under protection to escape the media horde that surrounded her house. While Gianni was never implicated in Cunanan’s sordid past, the dirt dug up by bottom-feeding television and tabloid journalists quickly soiled the reputations of both the designer and the gay world he had proudly represented.
For a week, Cunanan evaded the massive manhunt. Then, the day after Gianni’s Milan funeral, Fernando Carreira, a seventy-one-year-old Portuguese immigrant who looked after properties for absentee owners, and his wife came to check on a baby-blue houseboat berthed on Indian Creek, the narrow strip of water that runs the length of Miami Beach. The houseboat sat at Fifty-second Street, about four miles north of the Versace mansion. It was owned by Torsten Reineck, a German businessman who managed a gay bathhouse in Las Vegas. According to local legend, the houseboat had in the past served as a hideaway for rich gay men who picked up hustlers at a cruising park nearby.
When Carreira entered the houseboat around midafternoon, he immediately sensed something was wrong. The lights were all on and the drapes, which he’d left open on his last visit, were drawn. Cushions from the sofa had been placed on the floor to make a bed, and a pair of sandals lay nearby. As Carreira pulled a handgun out of his waistband, he nervously whispered to his wife, “Somebody has been sleeping here. Someone is here right now.”
As he began to move slowly through the house, a shot rang out from the master bedroom upstairs. Carreira and his wife scrambled to flee the boat and called the police. Within minutes, officers flooded the area, a swarm of media hard on their heels. TV helicopters hovered overhead, broadcasting the raid on the houseboat live. When the evening news went on the air shortly afterward, the newscasts cut between scenes of the houseboat raid and clips of Gianni’s star-studded funeral in Milan the day before.
After a slow and careful entry, the SWAT team made its way upstairs to the houseboat’s master bedroom. There they found Cunanan dead. Sporting several days’ growth of beard and dressed in a re
d T-shirt and madras shorts, he was sprawled on the bed in a pool of blood with his eyes still open. He had shot himself through the mouth, sending blood flowing from his ears, nose, and mouth. In his hand lay the gun that he had stolen from his first victim, Jeff Trail, a single spent bullet casing lying on the floor nearby. It was the gun that had killed Gianni.
As the police searched the houseboat, it became clear that Cunanan had been hiding there for days. In the fridge sat a partially eaten plate of food, half a loaf of bread, and a bottle of orange soda. In the living room, Vogue magazines, rubbing alcohol, Q-tips, and a bottle of prescription medicine in the name of Torsten Reineck were strewn on the coffee table.
