by Maureen Orth
Today Pete feels his life has turned around. He is living with his “Filipina wife—all the partner I could ever want.” He spends his days scheming to find buried treasure—$55 billion in gold bullion that the Japanese supposedly left behind in the Philippines during World War II. Pete is a follower of Clare Prophet, leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a cult based in Montana and San Diego, whose followers took to underground survivalist shelters in the hills of Paradise Valley, Montana, in 1990 to prepare for doomsday. He calls her Mother Chiara.
If he could just sell his book and screenplay ideas, Pete emphasizes, he could “bring in the bulldozers and back-hoes.” He could find the treasure that has had conspiracy buffs and fortune seekers drooling for decades. “Then you’ve got the problem of how do you dispose of eighty metric tons of gold—I’d have to talk to the IMF,” he says. “If you let go with eighty tons of gold, there’d be worldwide crisis. If you float so much gold, you’d ruin the world economy. I could make a deal with the United States government. We could go fifty-fifty on my share—will you take care of it? But I have conditions. I want you to take in twenty-four engineer trainees from the Philippines every year. That would be my deal with Congress—just like what the Rothschilds did during the revolutionary years. If it wasn’t for the Jews and their gold, General Washington would have failed.”
Now Pete is setting out to make a little gold of his own through his son’s tragedy. His proposal in part reads:
The movie story would certainly negate most, if not all, of the perverted lies and misinformation and malicious invectives weighed [sic] waged against Andrew Cunanan and which had been notoriously fed to the American people and peoples the world over in order to mask the sordid cover-up of the errors, misjudgment and miscalculation of the corrupt ones in state and society. “Somebody got paid. That’s life is [sic].” So, Andrew Cunanan was murdered.
I had never known my son, Andrew, to be a homosexual. For a very definite purpose he was being made to act as such. Who was calling the shots?
I’m Andrew’s father. I had known all along what had been happening: Names, places, events and motivations, not to mention the modus operandi.
… Please indicate your interest and/or counter offer … time is of the essence.
Like MaryAnn, Pete is in denial about Andrew. MaryAnn does not believe that Andrew killed Versace, but admits that he probably killed the others. Pete believes Andrew was forced to kill Versace, but he will not acknowledge that Andrew killed anyone else. “I was teaching him to be a diplomat. If I lucked out digging gold, we wouldn’t need any money. My dream was that Andrew would be a philanthropist and an American on duty as counsel in the Philippines. With this kind of personality who was outgoing, young, ambitious, and nice-looking, articulate and intelligent, with money, educated. And”—Pete pauses—“he has a big daddy in Washington.”
A big daddy in Washington?
“You put two million in his campaign fund, and all you ask for is a lousy counselor post, wouldn’t he give you the choice? Hey, you got to work your way up there, through the corridors of power. Hey, the only problem is I didn’t get the money.”
Pete still blames MaryAnn for dashing his dreams. He is bitter and outraged that the rest of the family cut him out from having any say in Andrew’s “estate,” whatever that might be. “Twenty-seven years I put up with that nut. I was a simple guy in the navy. Every time I’d leave the house, she had somebody,” he fumes.
“I didn’t even have time to scratch my head and she would lie and lie and lie. She’s a neurotic psychotic with a psychiatric record. All she did was eat, shit, fuck off, and sleep for twenty-seven years!” He avoids answering whether or not he beat her, but he is just warming up. “I was a good provider. Would you believe that I could take her to parties with my rich clientele? I couldn’t take her along with me. She belonged to the gutter crowd. I fell in love with her until she loused it up. She made a cesspool out of our married life so she could wallow in it, so I gave it up.”
Pete vehemently declares that Andrew was trapped in a vast conspiracy of evil, that he was not a homosexual, and that he was tricked into dope dealing for a high-powered syndicate of very rich, older men, whom he probably met while working several years for an advertising firm in San Francisco. (There is no record that Andrew ever worked for an advertising firm in San Francisco.) “He stumbled into something so big they had to kill him.” He claims he has names, dates, and places that he will reveal once he gets paid for the book and movie rights. He says Andrew communicated with him regularly before he died. In fact, these unnamed people are so dangerous that it would be better to call his manuscript “a literary forgery.” He warns, “If you don’t, your life would be in danger.” At one point he asks, “What was Andrew doing in and out of Russia six times in 1996?” (There is no record of Andrew ever traveling to Russia.)
He blames law enforcement for targeting his son, and talks openly about killing people himself, his violent temper suddenly surfacing. “Many times I felt like walking to San Diego and blasting the devil out of the guys—the FBI, the police. I would be committing suicide, but I would take some guys with me.”
People have wondered whether Pete and Andrew could possibly have had an intimate relationship when Andrew was growing up. Pete is not upset by the question. He coolly takes a drag on his cigarette, and says no. He would rather talk about getting the movie made. He has a leading man all picked out—he’d like help in contacting “John Junior.” He wants John F. Kennedy, Jr. to play Andrew.
“Their mannerisms are very very close, almost the same,” he explains. “I watch John Junior very carefully. The guy has a lot of moxie in him—that dignity.” Pete says he is “willing to spend twenty-four hours a day” to teach John Kennedy, willing also to “get a seasoned director. There’s enough money there. It’s all a matter of cutting the pie!”
3
Bishop’s
“I’M GOING TO Bishop’s! I’m going to Bishop’s!” Andrew was ecstatic. He had been accepted to the most highly regarded private school in the area, the Bishop’s School in exclusive La Jolla. He couldn’t contain his excitement when talking to his classmates at Bonita Vista Junior High, some of whom actually bought the idea that he was a rich kid going off to a fancy school. But others, and certain parents, were surprised. “Going to Bishop’s from Bonita is like going to Vassar from Podunksville,” exclaimed the mother of one of Andrew’s friends. “Those kids have catered graduation parties. Where was the money coming from?” Andrew’s best friend, Peter Wilson, was also going to Bishop’s, because Peter’s parents felt that “Bonita was changing.”
Tellingly, Andrew wrote in Kristen Simer’s eighth-grade yearbook, “Remember when I used to always sit next to you on the bus last year and everybody thought I liked you? (How proposterous!) [sic]. Maybe some day you’ll date Tom Selleck!” Andrew was already beginning to hint that he wasn’t ever going to have a girlfriend.
The idea of going to Bishop’s was Andrew and MaryAnn’s more than Pete’s. MaryAnn sent applications to several private schools, believing that Andrew should be exposed to the best. Bishop’s tuition in those days climbed from $4,000 to $6,200 a year, and the few students receiving financial aid rarely got more than $1,500. For the Cunanans, Bishop’s would mean a considerable financial sacrifice. But once again Andrew was being singled out by his family as the special one, not to be denied.
He clearly had looked forward to Bishop’s, “invisioning [sic] ivy covered walls, spacious classrooms and teachers the like of Mr. Chips and Miss Jean Brodie.” Andrew wrote a handwritten letter of application that is both compelling and revealing. “I imagined it as the West Coast version of Groton, Deerfield and so on …” Really. Very few of Andrew’s eighth-grade classmates from Bonita Vista Junior High in Chula Vista, California, would have ever heard of Groton and Deerfield “and so on.”
Andrew’s answers to a series of questions labeled “Student Personal Information” are particularly te
lling: “What household duties do you have at home?” “None,” he said, citing frequent disruption by his family as the cause for “things which make it difficult for you to complete your school work.” When asked what he did with “time to do just as you please,” Andrew responded, “I am a fanatical reader. I also enjoy chess, clothes, Mercedes’ and running.” He listed his “special talents and abilities” as “dramatics, ability to learn foreign language.” Among titles of books “read this year,” he quoted not only The Catcher in the Rye and The Scarlet Letter, but also The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire, both of which have strong gay characters, as well as Henry V, Part One. When asked “Who usually helps you with your problems?” Andrew wrote, “The Heavenly Father.”
All of Andrew’s pent-up aspirations and desires, and his inherent conflicts with his emerging identity, came tumbling out in his response to, “If you could make one wish, what would it be?” “Success, a house overlooking the ocean, two Mercedes, four beutiful [sic] children, three beatiful [sic] dogs and a good relationship with God.” Mercedes were a constant desire throughout his life, but even then a wife was not mentioned. Nonetheless, Andrew wanted it all.
The decision to go to Bishop’s School altered Andrew’s life profoundly. He entered an environment of achievement and luxury that might have inspired others to buckle down and learn how to fulfill some of their aspirations. But Andrew was used to being handed everything without having to earn it, so instead of being grateful he was secretly resentful. “In high school Andrew had a quick intelligence, openness, ambition, easy camaraderie, and a sort of Mediterranean lust for life. But they were vitiated by negative and potentially explosive subterranean veins of darkness,” says a Bishop’s faculty member. “One such vein was envy. Andrew secretly regretted his classmates’ wealth and lifestyles, which were continually all around him.”
Although Bishop’s strove to be nurturing, it only intensified Andrew’s underlying anger and already well-developed penchant for pretending to be someone he was not. Outwardly Andrew was flamboyant, exuberant; in-wardly he was deeply insecure and worried about what people thought of him. Few of his new friends knew that he was half Filipino, and very few knew he had a brother or sisters. His family was never seen at school. Rather, he masked his anxieties with bluff and bravado, acting almost maniacally happy-go-lucky—a “real lampshade-on-the-head sort of guy,” according to former classmate Sarah Colman Jordan. “Simplicity, Sincerity, Serenity”—the school motto—hardly described Andrew Cunanan. Today Andrew’s mother blames the “wrong crowd” at Bishop’s for his downfall.
Originally founded in 1909 by the Episcopal Church as a girls’ boarding school, Bishop’s is a historical landmark of Spanish mission-style buildings grouped around a quad and anchored by a bell tower, which students sometimes sneak into and climb for a sweeping view of the Pacific. The school sits on a prime parcel of land donated by a member of the Scripps family—one-half of the Scripps Howard newspaper fortune. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies are nearby in an area celebrated for its overwhelming beauty.
La Jolla (pronounced la hoya, Spanish for “the jewel”), the northernmost township of San Diego, is perched on flower-strewn palisades and lushly landscaped hillsides overlooking miles of dramatic coastline. Billing itself as a “seaside village” in the manner of the French Riviera, La Jolla has always been synonymous with affluence and scenic wonder: sun-dappled coves, white sand, and sea lions sunbathing next to tourists. Bronzed surfers put on shows in the waves, while visiting scholars from the nearby think tanks stroll by with their pants legs rolled up.
But La Jolla is far more insular and conservative than its Côte d’Azur counterparts. Until the 1950s, blacks were confined to two streets reserved for maids and chauffeurs. Jews were kept out by covenant until the seventies, and most wealthy gays remain closeted to this day. Andrew’s class at Bishop’s had a Republicans Against Welfare Club.
Privileged La Jolla natives have a certain ease both indoors and out that Andrew could never comfortably absorb or imitate. He was already too deeply concerned about his image and too dishonest ever to let his guard down—though he covered his fears well with outrageousness and constant emoting at high volume. Try as he might, however, he never did perfect the slightly smug insouciance of those to the ocean views born. These were the Reagan years, the go-go eighties, and excess was the height of style. Bishop’s students—the girls in preppy plaid pleated skirts, the boys in blue blazers—did of course come from all over the region, but the vast majority were very different from Andrew.
Bishop’s bends over backward to prove that it has students on scholarships and that the other students do not act like snobby rich kids. But sometimes the students can’t help themselves. An acquaintance of Andrew’s from the class above him explains that Bishop’s kids were so eager to play down their elite status that they “almost” thought it was cool to be poor. “The fact that your family had fifty million dollars as opposed to one million—that wasn’t really a big deal among people.” Unless, of course, you were among the 99.5 percent of the general population then who didn’t have one million, as Andrew’s family certainly didn’t. Pete Cunanan probably never made more than $50,000 a year. “From Andrew’s perspective,” admits his former classmate now, “perhaps there was a huge gulf the rest of us didn’t see.”
Once you’re there, Bishop’s is tolerant and liberal, in the nonpolitical sense, within its own cocoon. Andrew joined a school body that assumed that anyone who gained entry became “one of us”—possessed not only of brains, but also of a fifteen-going-on-thirty level of sophistication, replete with ski trips, sports cars, and holidays in Europe. In fact, Andrew was soon going to debutante balls, dining out in fine restaurants, and attending parties in classmates’ drop-dead houses. The good life of materialism his father had taught him to covet was spread out in front of him every day, close enough to touch. Andrew yearned to belong to that charmed circle, and since he hadn’t been born to it, he would just have to pretend he had. “He very much carried himself as coming from a very highly cultured family,” says his former classmate Kim Burgart Weir. “Because he wasn’t from La Jolla, it was easier not to know the truth, because all the families from La Jolla know each other.”
At first Andrew made the forty-five-minute commute from Bonita in a carpool with an older girl, who drove, and three others. Immediately he began to show off, to entertain, to charm. With Andrew along, Sarah Colman Jordan remembers, the ride to and from school “went from being silent hell to being fun.” Andrew would tell hilarious stories. “He was very interesting. He knew how to talk and how to listen. He was very good at taking what interested you and tailoring his stories to that.” Girls who did not otherwise receive a lot of compliments received them from Andrew. They’ve never forgotten.
“I was an ugly duckling, and most boys are cruel at that age,” says Burgart Weir. “Andrew was one of the few boys who was nice to me, who always had a compliment on my clothes or hair.” Andrew often hung out with the girls on the quad to trade gossip about celebrities. “It was very Clueless,” says his classmate Heidie Hamer, referring to the Alicia Silverstone movie about the posh of Beverly Hills High School.
In his freshman year Andrew became close to twins in his class, Matthew and Rachel Rifat, who were bright and well traveled. Andrew was impressed that their mother, Anne, was on the debutante committee. He spent many weekends with the Rifats at their house in the Mission Hills district of San Diego. Anne Rifat, who is soft-spoken and warm, sensed that Andrew came from an unstable family. “That’s why I let him come here so much.” Andrew would put on one of Anne’s capes and twirl around in it, but he could sense immediately if she thought he was going too far. “He was intuitive,” she recalls. “One look from me and he’d stop.” In his carpool, Andrew began to make obvious cracks about where his desire lay—remarking on various boys and their “cute butts.” At school, however, he was rela
tively quiet as he sized everything up, and he even let the Rifats meet his parents.
Of course, it was all very staged. When his mother rang the Rifats’ doorbell, Andrew would run and throw open the door, saying “Ma-ma!” and blowing kisses. MaryAnn Cunanan is fond of telling people that Andrew always assured her that he preferred her to the other kids’ mothers, “those phony women,” the society ladies of La Jolla. “You are real,” she quotes him as saying. “They are not.”
But nobody who knew Andrew believed that. “Andrew was not interested in sharing the limelight with anyone, and they [his parents] were not part of his world, really,” says Anne Rifat. “He’d come into the kitchen and talk to me. He treated MaryAnn like a child. ‘Little Mother’ he would call her. He would get frustrated and very upset with her. I got the idea that he didn’t particularly want her around. She was too ethnic for him; I got the sense he was a little bit ashamed of her.”
To his father, Andrew was affectionate and loyal. Pete drove Andrew and Rachel, who was his date, to their first Bishop’s Christmas formal. To keep up appearances, Pete steeped himself in debt, but Andrew and Rachel went to the dance in his Lincoln Town Car. And Pete always dressed very formally in front of the Rifats, wearing suits and silk shirts. He even gave Andrew a credit card, which Andrew promptly overspent.
Andrew and the Rifats quickly became enthralled with a beloved member of the faculty who was the head of the upper school, Dr. Otto Mower, a former Catholic priest from Lugano, Italy, who had left the priesthood and married. Erudite and genteel, Mower preached the Renaissance ideal. He taught art history and philosophical ethics in a spellbinding manner, and art history and architecture soon became Andrew’s passions. He became a Mower acolyte, and once again the ex–altar boy, “who had a profound respect for the church,” says Matt Rifat, fantasized about becoming a cleric—a worldly priest who smoked and drank, certainly not one who took vows of poverty and chastity. Andrew posed in the Bishop’s chapel in mock prayer for Matthew Rifat’s camera, and also as a drunken altar boy. Andrew viewed the priesthood as a way to live surrounded by art, in Rome, without having to work very hard.
