Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Although their son had been missing for three days and a body had been found in his apartment, Carol and Howard Madson were told nothing. On Wednesday evening, while Carol was fixing dinner, she saw a TV news report about a murder in a downtown Minneapolis apartment building. Gee, that kind of looks like David’s building, she thought to herself. Just that day she had received an anniversary card from David, which he had mailed the previous Saturday.

  If David’s family remained unaware, the news that Jeff had been murdered and that Andrew was missing traveled much faster between Minneapolis and San Diego. On Thursday the police began to stake out Erik Greenman, who was nonplussed at being surrounded by police cars when he stopped at a traffic light in his San Diego neighborhood. He told the police that he had heard about Jeff’s murder from Andrew’s lawyer friend Arthur Harrington, and that Andrew went by two names, Cunanan and DeSilva.

  Erik said that Andrew was nonviolent and that he would never kill Jeff—they were best of friends. He also told police that David was the dominant person in the Andrew-David relationship, and he speculated that David may have become violent toward Jeff if Jeff had said or done anything to come between David and Andrew. (Thus it was a gay friend who offered police the homosexual-love-triangle theory that some in the media would subsequently seize on, angering the Trail and Madson families and causing considerable indignation in the gay press.) Erik volunteered to turn over phone numbers and addresses of Andrew’s acquaintances, but no one asked to search the apartment, and no one ever warned him not to touch anything in Andrew’s room to avoid contaminating the evidence.

  At first, the very idea that Andrew was capable of committing murder was widely discounted. Jeff’s closest friend, Jon Wainwright, contacted police in Minneapolis early on to say that he didn’t think Andrew would do such a thing. However, Rich Bonnin and David’s lawyer friend Jim Payne also contacted the police after reading the item in the Star Tribune about the body in David’s building. Neither had been able to reach David, and the police would not give them any information. “All of David’s friends told the police that David and Jeff Trail had lived in the same city for six months and nothing ever happened,” says Rich Bonnin. “The weekend Andrew’s here, Jeff is murdered. ‘You need to look for Andrew,’ I told Wagner. But all they said was, ‘Where do you think David might be?’”

  Tichich felt certain that David would try to return home. On Thursday, the police began staking out the Madsons’ house. He warned Linda Elwell on the phone, “We think David is suicidal, and if he tries to call you, you better call me.” Monique Salvetti, an officer of the court herself, was taken aback when Tichich warned her that she too had better call in. “‘Now, are you going to level with us or what? Can we count on your cooperation? If you hear from David, if you know something, you better come forward,’” Monique remembers Tichich saying. “I got the distinct impression that he was really saying, ‘Don’t fuck with us.’”

  She and Elwell took umbrage, as did many of David’s other friends, that they would be suspected of harboring a fugitive. They were also upset that the police seemed to be concentrating their effort on finding David and not Andrew, although Wagner assured them that was not the case. “I know coworkers of David’s called and yelled at police, ‘You better be treating this as a missing person because he’s not capable of this,’” says Monique, “but the police said, ‘Look, we see a lot of things you don’t,’ very dismissively. It was the tone of voice they used. They just concluded it was David, and didn’t need to go into much more evidence.” Elwell and Laura Booher, who had gone looking for David on Tuesday, could not understand why they weren’t being formally questioned. If Tichich suspected David, they wanted to know, why wasn’t it put out to the media and broadcast that they were looking for him? Tichich basically told her to mind her own business. “You don’t know the facts.”

  On Thursday morning, May 1, Wagner telephoned Carol Madson, David’s mother, for the first time to report that David was missing. “He was very soft-spoken,” Carol Madson recalls. “He didn’t alarm me. He said there had been a body found in our son David’s apartment, and they were looking for David for questioning. I was kind of in a state of shock.”

  “We were trying to catch him,” Wagner explains, by surprising him if he went home. Carol Madson told Wagner that they had not heard from David in about ten days but of course they would cooperate. “I hung up the phone and called Ralph at the store.” She told her son, “Find Dad, and the two of you should come home together.” She worried about her husband.

  Howard Madson, David’s father, was out of town making a delivery for the store, but not far away. He had had a massive heart attack three years earlier, had been operated on twice, and had undergone six bypasses. His wife was afraid that the news would trigger another attack. Just then Howard Madson walked through the door of the hardware store. “We have to get home right now,” Ralph says he told his father. “Then I had to calm Dad down, because he thought something had happened to Mother. When we walked in, Mother was just in shambles. She relayed the story to us. It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be right. We didn’t get the story straight.” They called Wagner, who essentially repeated what he had told Carol.

  Meanwhile, Greg Nelson called the police to find out if David was a homicide victim. He said he understood from his lawyer that if this were true he could be a murder suspect. To eliminate himself, he said he could fax copies of plane tickets that showed that he had flown back to Washington, D.C., where he lived, on April 23. He also accused David of “psychological and physical abuse.” That and other evidence the police were gathering “to corroborate S&M activity,” according to Tichich, continued to make them believe that David could have taken part in Jeff’s murder. “It was well known that Madson was involved in S&M, and so was Cunanan, and it had gone on a long period of time.”

  When Sergeant Tichich called the Madsons at around 2 P.M. and reached Carol Madson, it was her turn to be jolted. “‘Your son is a homosexual who uses steroids,’” she says Tichich told her. “‘He flew into a rage and killed Jeff Trail. People who are on steroids can do that. He’s wanted for murder. If he contacts you, be sure to call us.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous,’” Carol Madson recalls. “‘David’s not on drugs. He’s opposed to drugs of any sort,’ which he was.” She adds, “He [Tichich] had no proof, of course. He was just very blunt … his whole attitude was, ‘Well, you knew this.’” She reported the conversation to her son and her husband, who says he heard essentially the same thing from Tichich two days later.

  Tichich, who denies that he ever spoke to Mrs. Madson, claims that he believed at that point that David should have been formally charged with murder. The steroids in the gym bag, Erik Greenman’s description of David’s dominance in his relationship with Andrew, and the fact that Andrew and Jeff had been close, all added up to the first police theory: a homosexual-love-triangle murder triggered by “’roid rage.” “I first thought Madson because he hadn’t showed up for work. There was a body rolled up in a rug,” Tichich explains. “There’s all this physical evidence. They tramped around in blood and had taken measures to conceal this body. You have to believe Andrew was able to control Madson for extended periods of time without the possibility of escape.”

  Tichich went to the Hennepin County attorney’s office to ask for a warrant charging David Madson with murder. (His request was denied.) “The murder happened at his place and he was seen walking around after. I thought we should charge him,” he says. Tichich was also quoted on local TV implicating David, saying, “They rolled Jeff’s body in a rug and intended to dispose of it.” In another TV sound bite he said, “They took advantage of the opportunity to run out the back door and into David’s Jeep.”

  By Thursday evening, the Madson family had begun to realize that “David’s life was in serious jeopardy,” says Ralph, who was already furious at the way Tichich had talked to his mother. When he called Tichich that night, he claims, the detective t
old him that someone had accused David of infecting him with AIDS, to which Ralph countered “Bullshit!” Ralph then called Steve Wagner to protest Tichich’s offensive call to his mother and got a sympathetic ear. Wagner became “the good cop.”

  From then on, more often Steve Wagner dealt with the Madsons. (Ironically, Tichich says he does not recall any conversations that would have soured his relationship with the Madsons—“I had no hint or clue there was ever any problem between us and I have been mystified by this since this has happened,” he says today—became the good cop for the Trails, calling them back promptly and treating them politely.) Thursday night Ralph told Wagner, “Something’s happened to my brother, I know it.” Wagner in turn had begun to take his cue about Andrew from his interviews with Monique Salvetti. “This Andrew guy is one bad hombre,” Wagner told Ralph. “We fear for your brother’s life.”

  FRIDAY, MAY 2, was one of those frustrating days for the investigators. Armed with a search warrant and two technicians, Wagner went to Jeff Trail’s apartment to retrieve the written message Andrew had taken for Jeff and to record the voice message Andrew left Sunday night on Jeff’s answering machine. At first, however, neither Jerry Davis nor Jon Hackett could positively identify Andrew’s voice. The technicians took photographs and dusted for fingerprints but got nothing; allowing Jerry Davis to clean up had been a mistake. The inability to find samples of Andrew’s fingerprints anywhere would eventually become a major foil to building a case against him.

  In Barron, the Madsons were beside themselves. They made numerous phone calls trying to locate David. Diane Benning, David’s sister, was the only member of the family who had met Andrew and was aware of David’s trepidations about him. “Right away I knew it was Andrew,” she says. None of the Madsons is passive, but Ralph recalls that Diane was particularly frustrated and keyed up. “My sister was on the phone probably ten times, just hollering out, ‘For God’s sakes! You’ve got to find David!’”

  That morning the Madsons were astounded to discover an entry in the “Bulletin Board” of the St. Paul Pioneer Press—a grab-bag page of mostly humorous contributions from readers (Howard Madson read it religiously every morning)—headed, “A joke for today: From David who is an engineer and I’m OK.” The joke began, “An engineer, an architect and an artist are having an argument …” Jeff was a trained engineer, and Andrew billed himself an expert on art. Could this be a veiled message from David? They thought it might be, because David always kidded his parents about reading that page. They urged Wagner to call the paper and find out who contributed the item. “My jaw dropped when I read it,” Wagner says. “I thought, It has to be from David. I showed it to Tichich. Everyone said, ‘It’s gotta be David.’”

  But the Pioneer Press refused to reveal its sources, even lighthearted ones. Wagner was outraged. “I threatened to close down the paper,” he says. That didn’t go over too well with the county attorney. The paper said the item had come in via e-mail, and it would conduct its own investigation. When police did not hear back, Tichich got in a shoving match with a Pioneer Press reporter.

  Friday after work, Howard and Ralph Madson delivered a riding lawn mower to a customer just outside of town. “It was pretty hard to hold it together,” Ralph says. Father and son had a heartrending conversation. “Oh, God, don’t you wonder what David’s thinking right now?” Howard Madson asked. “Think how scared and terrified he is,” Ralph replied. The talk was so emotional that Ralph later called Wagner. He made Wagner promise that if anything happened to David, he would be called first, not his parents. He worried that his father couldn’t take the shock. “That’s against policy,” Wagner answered, but Ralph got him to agree.

  IN LA JOLLA, San Diego police left a message for Norman Blachford after they had found an address of his beach-side condo listed for Andrew Phillip Cunanan on a recent California driver’s license. The police also found an address for MaryAnn Cunanan in Rancho Bernardo, but neighbors said she had moved to Chicago in December 1995. The single thumbprint Andrew had given to the California Department of Motor Vehicles for his license was the only one that existed anywhere to provide a basis of comparison. Otherwise, there were no records—none at all for Andrew DeSilva—and that fact alone made law enforcement’s job much harder.

  Tichich wasn’t making much headway. He still thought David Madson was the primary suspect and possibly had AIDS. Other theories and questions kept popping up: Did Jeff tell David something that put a wedge between Andrew and David, causing Andrew to flip out? Or did David flip out? Tichich asked Jerry Davis, a former Air Force intelligence officer, to help the police find out if Andrew had had a one-way or a round-trip ticket to Minneapolis. Davis says Tichich thought Davis might have some pull with the military. “He gave me this big spiel about the police department can’t just go into places and make people do stuff. They have to go through the court system.”

  Jerry thought he was being asked to do someone else’s work, and blew up at Tichich. “What started to irritate me was that he was just asking me thousands of questions and wasn’t sharing anything.” Tichich, on the other hand, felt that he was just doing his job—he had no need to share. “At first I thought it was because it was a gay victim that they were just dragging their feet,” Jerry Davis says. “But there are eleven openly gay officers on the Minneapolis police force.” Some of them assured Jerry that he was wrong, that Tichich was merely idiosyncratic.

  Finally, at about 8 P.M. on Friday, Jeff Trail’s 1996 Honda Civic was found, two blocks from David’s loft, where it had been parked since Sunday. It had now been five days since Jeff’s murder and the police were hardly any further along than they had been Tuesday night, when Jeff’s body was discovered. Worse still, no one had a clue as to where to look for Andrew and David.

  19

  Chisago

  THE MOST FAMOUS thing in Chisago County, population forty thousand, is the upscale drug-rehab center, the Hazelden Foundation, where an array of celebrities—Calvin Klein, Eric Clapton, Bob Packwood, Liza Minnelli, Kitty Dukakis—have all gone to detoxify. There is also a buffalo farm, but otherwise Chisago, just north of the Twin Cities, is a picturesque, peaceful rural county that grows corn, soybeans, and oats. Lake Wobegon could well be there.

  Fishing season begins in early May, so on Saturday morning, May 3, 1997, Kyle Hilken and Scott Schmidt were out scouting potential camping sites for their next weekend’s fishing trip on East Rush Lake, about an hour from Minneapolis. The lake is not visible from the highway, but comes into view a few miles down a county road and around a curve not far off the Rush City turnoff from Highway 35. The logical place to stop after you see the lake is an abandoned farmhouse with a red roof and turret on top. It’s made of old-style pressboard siding, and the windows are broken and boarded. Tall pines form a border along the backside of the house; butternut and walnut trees grow in front. Nearby is the small, sagging barn, and between the two buildings, a gravel driveway leads to a steep slope of lawn about 140 feet down to the high grass and brush bordering the lake.

  About 10:45 that morning, Hilken and Scott drove to the end of the driveway and Hilken got out. He had walked only a few feet before he motioned for Scott to come over. They looked down toward the water’s edge, then ran back to their Jeep and called 911. A body, clothed in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, was lying on its back facing the lake about twelve feet from the water. The right eye had been blown out and his left eye was open.

  Madson had been shot three times. “I think he probably got taken by surprise,” says Sergeant Todd Rivard, of the Chisago County sheriff’s department, who supervised the scene. “He had these defensive wounds in his left little finger and his right knuckle. He was shot in the right eye and right cheek and in the back between the shoulder blades—the bullet lodged in his chest.” A loop of tire tracks was visible in the grass, and the body had apparently been dragged about twenty feet from where the killing took place. The body carried no identification, just a bookmark in the pants po
cket from a store in San Francisco. A set of keys and keyless entry device to David’s Jeep Cherokee was found nearby. The car was gone.

  TO RIVARD, A big bear of a man of forty-six with a mustache, who for seventeen years had been the sergeant “in charge of all homicides in Chisago,” the body “looked fresh.” The left eye, for example, appeared “moist.” Although earlier in the week it had rained, and cold, hard winds had swept across the lake, the last two days had been clear. The sun, Rivard says, could beat down on a body at that time of year. Had David been there very long, his body would have decomposed to a greater degree. And the corpse was clean. “The condition of his clothes and everything … he looked great. I mean, he was clean, unsoiled, except for his back, where he had been drug a ways. Otherwise, the guy just looked great.” Nevertheless, the corpse had bugs in its mouth. The county coroner, Dr. John Plunkett, a forensic pathologist for more than twenty years, who had seen “hundreds and hundreds” of bodies, came to the crime scene and said David had been dead thirty-six hours at most.

  “We’ve had a lot of bodies dumped in our county, and it seems always by the water,” says Rivard, “like there’s some kind of mystique about water.” Rivard theorizes that since the killer would have difficulty seeing the water at night, “he must have been killed during the daylight hours.” In small counties like Chisago, they rely on a state agency, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, to process the crime scene. The BCA also serves as a liaison between jurisdictions. BCA agent Jon Hermann was one of the first to show up at the old farmhouse. He thought David looked like a bodybuilder.