by Maureen Orth
FOR YEARS DAVID searched restlessly for a career that would satisfy him. “This was a standard joke,” says Doug Petersen, Wendy’s dentist husband. “It seemed like anytime he would go anywhere, like a store or a restaurant, he’d say, ‘Maybe I could get a job here.’ It was always the trendiest restaurant.” David’s personal life was also in turmoil. Not wanting to disappoint his family, he struggled all through college with his homosexuality, dating numerous girls, even falling deeply in love with one, but constantly churning over whether he was straight, bisexual, or gay. “It was a very scary thing for him to confront.” says Wendy. “When we went to college, everything was, like, status quo. Conformity was the way to be.”
Wendy adds, “David was the biggest prep monster. He wore very preppy clothing. He was very studious and conformed very well, but this was one area where he couldn’t conform. And it was a very disturbing area for him.” David wanted to have a family. “But as time went on he couldn’t ignore his underlying attraction to men.” The day came when David went to his father to tell him he was gay. His father’s strong religious conviction made it difficult for him to accept.
“I can’t say that it didn’t make any difference with me, because I disagree with that type of life. However, that had nothing to do with what I thought of him or how I treated him,” says Howard Madson, who believes that Jesus came down from the cross to save sinners, not winners. “I’m not going to go there perfect, and neither are you. We’re gonna go as sinners. What’s the difference whether you lie, cheat, steal, you’re homosexual, you murder. If you believe that forgiveness is there, if it’s on the cross and by the grace of God, you’ve got just as good a chance as anybody else. So I don’t look at David as any different. Yet I do look at him as different because he was homosexual. But that didn’t create any problem between David and me. My feelings for David were no different.” When David told his brother, Ralph, and Ralph’s wife, Cindy, that he was gay, they were relieved. They thought he was going to say he had AIDS. Ralph told him to be careful: “There’s a lot of kooky people out there.”
On many levels, David’s struggles were complicated by the fact that he was so talented and had so many options. When he was a little boy, he would take blueprints thrown into the Dumpster at a nearby design company and build Lego models from them. He majored in political science at college and thought he wanted to be a lawyer. Although he did not do well on his law-board exams, he moved to Minneapolis and went to work for a law firm, but he kept being drawn to architecture. In 1990 he gained one of forty entering slots at the University of Minnesota Architecture School in Minneapolis, where he was seen as a cockeyed optimist.
“David could take a project in architecture class and the professors would see it and say, ‘That’s terrible,’” says Rich Bonnin, his onetime roommate and fellow architect. “Then, after he’d talk it and market it, they’d say, ‘I love it!’ He had this ability to skim, to cajole, to charm and talk his way out of anything.” Along with his talent, he could sell. “David was a salesman. He was good at sales pitches, he was creative, and he liked money,” says Wendy, who thought he should go into advertising. “Architecture didn’t pay enough. David was a very money-motivated person.” Yet by the time David met Andrew, he was making architecture pay off.
He became a guest lecturer for an advanced urban-planning course at Harvard. He worked for the John Ryan Company in Minneapolis, designing “retail financial centers” for large banks, a $70,000-a-year position that took him all over the country. “David was an absolute joy to be around and an immensely talented person, on the precipice of becoming a leading designer in the world in his field,” says John Ryan.
Tragically, however, he met Andrew Cunanan.
FROM THE BEGINNING theirs was a long-distance romance. At the end of their first weekend together, Andrew had to return to San Diego, to Norman, who thought San Francisco was where Andrew’s ex-wife was. Norman believed that Andrew was making his numerous trips there to see his little daughter. Meanwhile, there was nowhere David could call Andrew. There was no address to which David could send letters—just a post office box that didn’t get opened very often. Andrew’s excuse was that his rich family needed to keep a low profile; they changed their phone numbers constantly because they were potential kidnap victims. In one of his numerous postcards to David, Andrew cautioned him when writing to send only a sealed envelope with no return address. “Sorry to be secretive, but it’s very important.”
Andrew was in control. He would do the contacting.
Not long before Andrew met David, Stan Hatley broke his shoulder and showed up at Flicks one night with his arm in a sling. Andrew got a big kick out of parading Stan around the bar, saying, “I shot him. If you’re not careful, I’ll do this to you, too. This is what happens when people upset me.” Everyone treated it as a big joke and indulged Andrew, who was buying drinks as usual. When Andrew returned from San Francisco after meeting David, he acted as if nothing had changed. “We never heard about Madson when he met him,” says Stan, who a few months later moved to Minneapolis himself.
When David got back to Minneapolis, he confided to Rich Bonnin, “I met this really intriguing guy.” He described Andrew as the person “he was least attracted to but the most persistent.” Andrew had told David his real name, Cunanan, not DeSilva. David told Rich that Andrew looked Spanish, even though Andrew had said his family had plantations and a publishing empire in the Philippines. “He seemed to have a good education, seemed to be going places and committed to a career,” David told Rich. “He was away from the family to make a mark on the world … out from under their shadow.”
David thought it odd he couldn’t call Andrew, but he traveled a great deal, worked out at the gym at night, and had plenty to keep him busy. Unlike Andrew, who by now avoided straight society and most women, David had many straight friends, and always had strong female confidantes who watched out for him.
When they would see each other in San Francisco, David would freely introduce Andrew to his friends there, including Karen Lapinski and Evan Wallit, who were engaged and lived in Pacific Heights. Karen and David had gone to school together. Andrew immediately began to cultivate the couple as a way to insinuate himself with David. Like David, they freely accepted Andrew’s largesse.
One of the first gifts that Andrew gave David was an expensive Gold File wallet worth several hundred dollars. David protested that he couldn’t accept it, but he ended up taking Andrew’s presents—that was easier than having to watch Andrew pout. Andrew was elated at having met David. He told Doug Stubblefield that he was in love, and that David was brilliant. “He used lots of terms of endearment,” says Doug. “David was the first person I ever knew him to date, romantically or seriously.”
Even though Andrew and David were seeing each other every two or three weeks, and Andrew had set out to wine and dine David, Andrew had once again begun to frequent a gay San Diego bathhouse where drugs were prevalent—all while still living with Norman Blachford. He also planned to get David to participate in S&M sex with him in order to indulge the fantasies he cultivated from the rough pornography he had been watching for the last several years. He told his friends, however, that David was “introducing him.” According to Doug Stubblefield, “We had a conversation about experiencing the S&M thing with David. He seemed not to know much about it.” Andrew told Doug it “was awkward because he was the top and David was the bottom, but David was telling him what to do.” Later, says Doug, “It became, ‘David won’t let me do everything that I want to do.’” Andrew boasted to Doug, however, that he had gotten wrist restraints: “David lets me tie him up. I really like tying him up. I’m really getting into this stuff. I want to explore more.”
San Francisco was the perfect place to do so. The Castro has a long-established leather scene where what would be startling to the rest of America is treated as commonplace. On the same day Andrew killed Lee Miglin, for example, Jack Davis, one of the most powerful figures in Sa
n Francisco politics—a combative political consultant who is gay and frequents S&M clubs—had his fiftieth birthday party. The entertainment—staged in front of some of San Francisco’s highest elected city officials, including the sheriff—featured a “blood-and-urine show,” in which a dominatrix carved a star into the back of a trussed-up satanic priest. She then urinated on him and sodomized him with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. There were also strippers, both male and female, from a nearby porn theater. The ensuing brouhaha in the press centered largely on whether Davis had hurt the chances of having a new football stadium built, financed with a controversial $100-million-bond issue Davis had been hired by the San Francisco Forty-Niners football team to push through. (It won by 50.4 percent of the votes.)
There are gay sex clubs in San Francisco with large, dark areas of fetish stations. Patrons can copulate in an English taxi, a police car, a telephone booth, a jail cell, or a dentist’s chair. And it’s OK to watch—whoever wants privacy can go behind piles of old tires strewn around. A leather bar has theme parties—“latex fisting night,” for example. Every third Wednesday of the month is “piss night.” Private “associations” hold by-invitation-only parties in un-disclosed locations designed to weed out “novices and voyeurs.”
Mr. S Leather Co. and Fetters USA of San Francisco, where Andrew shopped, is four stories high and publishes a 289-page catalog of sex devices ranging from elaborate suspension cages and electrotorture equipment, to butt plugs, flogs, gags, masks, handcuffs, hoods, “the latest in hospital restraints,” tit clamps, and nineteen handkerchiefs of different colors, each with a different sexual meaning when worn on either the right or the left side: Red on the left means “fister,” red on the right means “fistee”; gray on the left means “bondage top,” gray on the right means “bondage bottom”; hunter green on the left means “Daddy,” hunter green on the right means “wants Daddy.” Mr. S is a gay father-and-son business. “We’re just like Macy’s,” exclaims proprietor Richard Hunter, “with slightly different displays!”
Whether Andrew Cunanan had engaged in S&M before or not, he had been flirting with it for some time. In San Diego he consulted a dungeon master whom he got to know through Project Lifeguard. As with crystal meth, he definitely wanted his behavior kept secret. “The type of sex he had, the S&M-type sex, not everybody is into,” says the dungeon master. “He didn’t want others to know about it.” According to Stan Hatley, “He knew too many people in San Diego and was too into his reputation to let somebody find him doing that there. He saved it for out of town.”
On several occasions in 1995 Andrew pulled the dungeon master aside, wanting to talk about leather and bondage. “At first I took it as a joke.” Andrew had been trying before to pump him for information without admitting anything about his interest. “He would ask me about bondage and flogging: Where do you go? What do you do? Where do you buy things?”
The dungeon master is on the committee for the San Diego Leatherfest, a yearly gathering of seven hundred or so. (In 1997 the leather fair was held at the Comfort Inn.) “Leather enthusiasts, bondage, S&M people sell their wares, hold demonstration seminars, workshops on safe, sane, consensual flogging,” he explains. “For example, if a lover is into flogging, how do you safely tie someone up? How do you take someone to the breaking point and bring them back?”
Andrew, the dungeon master says, started “calling about mixing blood and semen together. Not a lot of people are into doing that. You cut into your skin, make a small incision into the chest or arm. The incisions are micro-thin so you heal without a scar. Lesbians self-mutilate on the chest. People ejaculate into the blood and mix it. It’s very strange. It’s one way HIV spreads.”
The dungeon master says Andrew spoke to him about David Madson on several occasions around the time he was getting involved with David. Erik Greenman, Andrew’s former roommate, says Andrew told him many times about his S&M sex with David. “He said David liked it just as much as he did.” San Francisco friend John Semerau claims that more than once Andrew invited him to have three-ways with him and David. “I had dinner with him and David on two occasions. They wanted me to have sex with them. I never had sex with them,” Semerau says. “Andrew then invited me to come to their hotel room to see the new leather underwear and cock rings they had bought.”
There is also a leather scene in Minneapolis, and Minneapolis police say that David was acquainted with it. Just a few minutes’ walk from the downtown Minneapolis loft where David lived is the Gay Nineties, a large and lively club that presents drag shows and male go-go dancers. The Nineties has a large dance floor and several bars. The back room is the “S&M-leather-boy-type place,” says Stan Hatley, and patrons follow a dress code to get in. “Either you wear leather, you take your shirt off, or wear Levi’s and black boots for S&M, or wear a leather harness.” People are not there for “the vanilla-boy-type sex,” says Stan. “I would see him [David] in the Nineties on those nights,” though he admits, not specifically in the leather area.
A couple of blocks down the street is Y’All Come Back Saloon, a popular gay bar that on Sundays features “tank night.” “You can put a wall between two pool tables in the back and section off part for the tank. People have sex on the pool table, people perform fellatio right then and there. Nobody pays attention, because that’s what happens in a hard-core leather bar,” Stan Hatley reports. His onetime roommate worked there. It, too, has a dress code, and Hatley says he saw David Madson at the Saloon on tank nights. “I guess you could say he was dressed appropriately.” Stan explains that Monday night, the Saloon’s “S&M night,” is more for straights, who congregate on a big dance floor. “You go there; they hang people in cages and whip people with whips.” On Thursday, the S&M night is at yet another Minneapolis gay bar, Ground Zero, where the cage is in the main room.
“I had seen Dave Madson in these types of places,” Hatley maintains. Nevertheless, the Madson family and many friends do not believe that David was ever involved in rough sex.
“I know on two occasions David talked to me about experiences with bondage, and it really wasn’t his thing,” says Rob Davis, who added, “On a personal level, David was submissive in bed, and he’d rather be manhandled than stroked. I’m a teddy bear at home, and David would ask me to be more aggressive.” He conceded, “So I think there was a tie-in about his being dominated.”
FOR DAVID, THE relationship with Andrew was an exercise in frustration. All signs pointed to disaster, but he was blinded by Andrew’s erudition, experience, and wealth. After their second weekend together, David returned home and told Rich Bonnin that sex with Andrew was basically lousy. “The first time they spent the night together and then on several subsequent ones, David told me that, number one, it wasn’t very good sex—Andrew made him uncomfortable—and that Andrew wanted to do things that David didn’t want to do. It was actually a source of quite a bit of strife in the relationship.” David claimed to Rich Bonnin that he never let Andrew be on top. “David always said that Andrew wanted very strongly to have intercourse with him that way and David always said no.” David said Andrew got very upset. “He stormed out of the hotel room downstairs to the restaurant. He threw a little tantrum.”
Andrew would toy with David. David could write only to the post office box and it would take Andrew a week or two to call and say, “I got your letter.” David began to guess that Andrew was in another relationship. When he asked, Andrew would say, “I never said I’d be exclusive, when we’ve only gone out on a few dates.” David said he thought, Well, you know, I guess that’s fair.
In truth, Andrew was in hot pursuit of David, but he was partly stymied by Norman. He would call David and try to make plans, but then he would not commit until the last minute and sometimes he would cancel. “It’s that Pavlovian thing,” says Rich, “where random reinforcement is the strongest form of behavior modification.” If Andrew did things to encourage David to pursue him, Rich Bonnin claims, “David wouldn’t perceive that he was
being pursued.” Andrew would send postcards saying how much he wanted to see David, then be totally noncommittal about whether David should extend a given stay to California or not—obvious passive-aggressive behavior, leading to David’s complaining about Andrew’s refusal to commit. David was not used to that attitude; he was the one who usually remained aloof; he was the one to make the plans. “At the same time, he thought, I’m being challenged, this is interesting,” says Monique Salvetti, David’s closest friend in Minneapolis.
While Andrew was showering David with expensive presents and staying in chic hotels with him, he was also going deeper into S&M. He asked Doug Stubblefield—who had done his thesis at Berkeley on Michel Foucault, the homosexual French philosopher who articulated “going beyond the boundaries of normality”—for advice on which S&M videos to rent. Stubblefield became concerned that Andrew was violating a fundamental tenet of the pain-and-pleasure principle—that it has to be equal and balanced. Doug thought Andrew had trouble drawing the line—he was trying to dominate David too much. His sexual behavior was being carried over to “public spaces where it wouldn’t be so stylized but it would still abuse.” According to Guenter Frivert, a San Francisco store owner who knew Andrew through Karen Lapinski, “Andrew treated David like a slave. He’d give David the key and bark, ‘Here, go get the car.’”
