by Gordon Kerr
It was not the first murder Cunanan had committed, but it would mark the end of a bloody road for him. The media frenzy was extraordinary. The police, who until now had been slapdash in their approach to this unfathomable spree killer who seemed to vanish every time he killed, taunting them with photos and calling cards, began to work harder at catching him.
Cunanan had a brilliant mind, spoke seven languages and possessed a chameleon-like capacity to become different people. It had served him well in the world of gay bars and pick-up joints he frequented, working as a male prostitute. And, with his male model looks, he had been good at it. Wealthy businessmen, married men with families, kept him as their guilty secret, plying him with credit cards, cars and apartments, in return for his services.
Beneath it all, however, there was an irrational anger, ready to erupt at any time, especially as he reached his late 20s and his looks began to fade. At 28, he had put on weight and let his hair grow. He was drinking vodka and taking the pain killers he had previously sold to earn some extra cash. In San Francisco he began to descend into the depraved world of gay porn. Orgies, leather and chains became his currency, and he appeared in several porn films.
Deserted by his wealthy providers and eaten up by jealousy over two of his lovers who had begun an affair, he also began to kill.
In April 1997, Cunanan came to suspect two of his friends, David Madson and Jeff Trail of having an affair, and he became irrationally jealous. He flew to Minneapolis, where they lived, and at a meeting of the three men where Trail and Madson hoped to reassure Cunanan that nothing was going on, Cunanan became furious and killed Trail with a claw hammer.
Madson fled with him in a red Jeep Cherokee, but Cunanan had left his backpack at Madson’s apartment and inside were items identifying him. Approximately 72km (45 miles) north of Minneapolis, he pulled the vehicle over to the side of the road and pumped three bullets into Madson, killing him.
Cunanan was on a spree now and enjoying the release and the rush it gave him.
His next victim was probably randomly chosen. Lee Miglin had made his money from real-estate developments, and his company managed more than 10 million square metres (32 million square feet) of buildings throughout the midwest. His wife, Marilyn, who sold cosmetics and perfumes on the Home Shopping Network, was out of town on the evening of Saturday 3 May. At some point in the evening, Andrew Cunanan turned up and forced Miglin into his garage, where he tied his wrists and wrapped his face with duct tape, leaving only a hole through which he could breathe. He then began to torture him, reprising scenes from his favourite ‘snuff film’, Target for Torture. Finally, he stabbed him in the chest with a pair of pruning shears and slowly slit his throat with a hacksaw. In a final act of fury, he placed the body under the dead man’s car, a 1994 Lexus, and drove back and forward over it.
Cunanan spent that night in the house, watching some videos and sleeping in Lee and Marilyn’s bed. Next morning, he set off in the Lexus. When David Madson’s Jeep was discovered, a few blocks away, the front seat was strewn with photographs of Cunanan. He was taunting the police and by the end of that day, he had made the FBI’s list of America’s top ten most wanted.
His next victim was 45-year-old William Reese. Cunanan wanted his 1995 Chevrolet pickup, and shot him at point-blank range in his kitchen.
The nation was horrified and the police were stumped by these seemingly motiveless killings. Theories were postulated as to what was driving Cunanan. Many in the gay community believed that he had discovered that he was HIV-positive and had gone out of his mind.
Cunanan, however, was on his way to Miami Beach to commit one more murder, this time premeditated – Gianni Versace.
After the killing of Versace, Miami Beach was getting too hot. Eventually, the authorities caught up with Cunanan, hiding out in a houseboat. As hundreds of police waited on the quayside and on neighbouring rooftops, a team boarded the vessel and moved from room to room looking for him. Eventually they found him, spreadeagled on the floor with a bullet hole just above the right ear on that once handsome head. Now no one would ever know why he did what he did.
Heaven’s Gate
18241 Colina Norta, San Diego, USA
18241 Colina Norte is a beautiful mediterranean style mansion in an exclusive area of San Diego. Ironically, for over 30 members of the Heaven's Gate cult, this Santa Fe cul-de-sac came to represent a literal dead-end, when the flying saucer they expected to transport them to heaven, failed to materialize.
The stench of decay was overpowering as deputy sheriff Robert Bunk approached the mansion at 18241 Colina Norte, in the quiet commuter town of Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County, California. Nothing much happened in Rancho Santa Fe normally. The highest income community in the US, the area is mostly residential, with just one shopping avenue and a preponderance of large, expensive houses. As he stood in front of the door, deputy sheriff Bunk realized the stories were true: there were bodies in the house. He thought of Jonestown and called for back-up.
He and another officer were the first to enter the building. They found bodies lying everywhere, on beds or on bunks. At first, the corpses’ short hair suggested that they were all male, and that is what they initially reported back to headquarters. There were 39 bodies, altogether, and further inspection revealed that 21 of them were in fact women. They were all white and their ages ranged from 26 to 72. Each of the deceased was dressed alike, in identical black shirts and tracksuit bottoms. On their feet, they wore brand-new black-and-white Nike trainers, possibly because of the Nike motto, ‘Just do it’. Armband patches on their shirts read, ‘Heaven’s Gate Away Team’. This was almost certainly a reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which a team of a few members, called the ‘away team’, went off on planetary explorations. A square purple cloth covered each face and upper body and each of them had three quarters and a five-dollar note in his or her pocket. Whenever they had left the house, it was later learned, they always carried exactly this amount of money so they had enough to get a taxi home or to make a phone call.
An eerie silence gripped the house as the officers went about their duty. On computer screens, images of alien-human hybrids flashed. Videos were discovered containing footage of the people in the mansion calmly making their farewells to family and friends. It was evident from these that there had been no coercion; these people had died willingly.
The San Diego County medical examiner made a further shocking discovery. Seven members of the cult had been castrated, including their leader, Marshall Applewhite.
Marshall Herff Applewhite was a leader of men from the outset. He lost his wife and two children as well as his job at the University of Alabama School of Music over an affair with a male student. In 1972, in his early 40s, he admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital.
Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles was four years older than him and a nurse at the hospital. She was a member of the Theosophical Society, an organization formed in 1875, by, among others, Madame Blavatsky, to advance the spiritual principles and search for ‘Truth’. She encouraged Applewhite to join her in her work and in her life.
The two of them had a lot in common. They shared an interest in UFOs, astrology and science fiction, and started to believe that they were, in fact, earthly incarnations of alien beings with the mission on earth of saving as many people as possible in the coming end of the world. Bonnie left her four children and the two set out to spread the word and gather followers.
The message they preached said that their enemies would kill them and their followers and that their bodies would lie on the streets for 3.5 days before they would rise from the dead and ascend in a cloud to a higher level where they would exist with God. Their ‘cloud’ would arrive in the form of a spaceship.
After Applewhite had spent a humiliating four months in prison for credit card fraud, in 1975, the pair headed for the most fertile territory for finding people who would believe what they said – California. There, they started a group called Hu
man Individual Metamorphosis and 25 people signed up. Following a meeting in the Oregon town of Waldport, to which 200 people turned up, another 20 joined them, abandoning their previous lives. One couple even left their 10 year-old daughter behind.
That same year, Applewhite and Nettles provided an exact date for the arrival of the spaceship. Their followers gathered together and waited on the given night. Nothing happened, of course, and Applewhite at least had the decency to apologize and invite anyone to leave who wanted to. But, for many, there was nowhere else to go and they had come this far in search of the ‘next level’. They were not about to give up now.
The two leaders now asked everyone to cut their hair in the same, short style and to wear unisex clothes. They were encouraged to stick rigidly to their training regimen, to aspire to be genderless, eternal beings. Sexual contact was forbidden and privacy was not allowed. They became isolated from the rest of society, perceiving the media to be distorting what they stood for, and Applewhite encouraged ‘crew-mindedness’ – working and thinking together in preparation for the way they would have to be on the spaceship. They were all related, Applewhite claimed, with him as their father and Nettles as their grandmother. He called himself ‘Do’ and she became ‘Ti’. Nonetheless, their numbers had fallen by the end of 1976, from 200 to only 80. As finances became difficult, they sold ‘spaceship rides’ for $433 (£216.00), and a legacy of $300,000 (£150,000) helped them out.
Ti/Nettles died of cancer in 1985 and, contrary to their teachings, did not resurrect. Applewhite said she had merely gone on ahead to make things ready for them and would, in fact, be piloting the mother ship when it arrived.
Having changed their name to Total Overcomers Anonymous, in 1993, they placed an advert in USA Today claiming that the end was near. Applewhite led his group to Rancho Santa Fe three years later in order to make preparations. They formed a web page design business called Higher Source and promoted their beliefs on the Internet. By now they were calling themselves Heaven’s Gate.
A comet called Hale-Bopp was due to reach its brightest in our skies towards the end of March, 1997. Do informed his people that Ti had told him, telepathically, that Hale-Bopp was the sign they had been waiting for. An object in the wake of the comet was clearly the spaceship they had been expecting, he said. They bought a powerful, state-of-the-art telescope to have a closer look, but returned it to the shop, telling the bemused manager that it was no use as they had been unable to see their spaceship with it.
On Friday 21 March 1997, all 39 members went to a restaurant and ordered the exact same meal – salad and pot pies, followed by cheesecake. It would be their last meal on earth, because the next day the comet would be at its closest point.
On the Saturday, they dressed in their identical clothing and each filled an overnight bag with clothes, lip balm and a notebook. They split into three teams. The first group of 15 ate pudding or applesauce laced with barbiturate Phenobarbital, washing it down with vodka. They then lay on their beds or bunks and put plastic bags over their heads. The remainder tidied up after them, covering them with the purple shrouds. The next day, another 15 went through the same process. On Monday, seven more members followed and then, the final two.
Former members received videos of what had happened and the police were alerted.
There were no reported sightings of a spaceship in the area.
Luke Woodham
Pearl High School, Mississippi, USA
Luke Woodham was one of those kids for whom high school was hell. He was a social pariah - a nerd - who was easily seduced by Satanist friends into believing he could summon demons to right the wrongs in his life. Woodham set out on 1 October 1997 to settle a score with an ex girlfriend. In his eyes, he'd been pushed to the brink, and now he was going to push back.
‘Oh, Mr Myrick! I’m the one that gave you the discount on the pizza the other night.’ 16-year-old, bespectacled Luke Woodham was speaking to the man who had just subdued him after his killing spree at Pearl High School in Mississippi, on 1 October 1997. Shocked assistant principal Joel Myrick, replied, ‘What? Why did you do this to my kids?’ Woodham replied, ‘Mr Myrick, I’ve been wronged. The world has wronged me and I just couldn’t take it anymore.’
Shortly before launching his spree, Woodham, often teased and called a ‘nerd’ by fellow students, had passed a chilling message to his friend and co-conspirator, Justin Sledge, trying to explain his actions. ‘I am not insane, I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can’t pry your eyes open, if I can’t do it through pacifism, if I can’t show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet.’ The page ended with a line from the writings of German philosopher, Nietzsche, asking, ‘How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?’
Woodham was an angry young man. His girlfriend, Christina Menefee, had dumped him the previous year and it had devastated him. ‘I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t want to live,’ he sobbed later, in court. ‘It destroyed me.’ He had always been a loner in school and his home life was poor after the break-up of his parents’ marriage. Therefore, his relationship with Christina had assumed an overwhelming importance to him. It was the first acceptance this school outcast had ever found.
Not long after the end of his relationship, he had become friendly with 18 year-old Grant Boyette, and 16-year-old Justin Sledge. Boyette and Sledge wore black and described themselves as Satanists. Boyette, who was fascinated with Adolf Hitler, was the leader of a group known as the Kroth, and they invited Woodham to join the Kroth, telling him that he had ‘the potential to do something great’. Woodham felt at home with Boyette and his fellow Satanists. He also felt powerful. He claims that he and Boyette cast a spell on a teenager they did not like and he was killed in a traffic accident the following day. ‘One second I was some kind of heart-broken idiot and the next second I had power over many things,’ Woodham said later. ‘My mind didn’t know how to take it. You can send demons to go and do things,’ he went on. ‘I’ve seen them. I know what I was dealing with. I felt like I had complete control, complete power over things. I know it’s real in spite of what people think.’
Boyette and Sledge brainwashed Woodham, telling him that murder was a viable means of achieving his aims. They repeatedly told him that if he shot Christina Menefee, he would never have to see her again and his problems would be over. Together, the group planned a raid on Pearl High School, with Woodham going in first as an assassin. They plotted to kill parents and massacre the school population.
As a dress rehearsal for the killings, Woodham killed his pet dog, Sparkle. In his writings is a description of how he and an accomplice set fire to the dog and threw it into a pond. ‘I’ll never forget the sound of her breaking under my might, he wrote. ‘I hit her so hard I knocked the fur off her neck ... it was true beauty.’
On 1 October, he woke up, calmly grabbed a baseball bat from his room and beat his 50-year-old mother, Mary, breaking her jaw and smashing her skull. He chased her into her bedroom where he stabbed her to death with a butcher’s knife. He then cleaned up the blood, washed his clothes and picked up his writings and a shotgun. At his trial he claimed to remember nothing of the killing.
He took his mother’s Chevy Corsica and drove to Pearl High School. He met Sledge there and handed him the pages of writing. Sledge is said to have taken to his heels and hidden in the school’s library as Woodham returned to the car for the shotgun. He walked into school, the rifle hidden beneath his blue trenchcoat, found Christina Menefee among a crowd of students and shot her dead at point-blank range. Then he shot and killed Menefee’s best friend, Lydia Drew. He re-loaded and continued to fire into the crowd, ultimate
ly wounding seven other students.
He ran back to his car and as he tried to drive away, another student blocked his exit. In the meantime, assistant principal Myrick had rushed to his truck to retrieve the .45 calibre pistol he kept there. He then stopped Woodham, who had run from his car and subdued him.
Luke Woodham was found to have been perfectly sane at the time of the killings, and was given three life sentences and 140 years for seven counts of aggravated assault. The charges against Grant Boyette and Justin Sledge, initially conspiracy to murder, were changed to accessory to murder. Boyette eventually pleaded guilty to the much lesser charge of preventing a principal from doing his job and was sentenced to a boot camp-style programme called Regimented Inmate Discipline, or RID, which lasts up to six months at Parchman Penitentiary, and five years supervized probation. He maintains his innocence.
The shootings at Pearl High School were the first of their kind and set a new and deadly ‘fashion’ among American high-school pupils for gunning down their fellow students.
Gary Heidnik
3520 North Marshall Street, Pennsylvania, USA
3520 North Marshall Street looked, to most people, like any other house in the area - dilapidated and seedy looking, but apparently normal. Inside though, Gary Heidnik's home was anything but. He kept young girls shackled in the cellar like stray animals, there to cater for his every sexual need and provide him with the family he so craved. When the girls didn't behave themselves, he murdered, mutilated and cooked them up in his kitchen.
