by Maureen Orth
After ten years of marriage, they had Marlena, named partly for Marlene Dietrich, and then Duke, named for John Wayne. Marlena, twenty-eight, was married and living in Denver in 1996; Duke, twenty-five, was a fledgling actor in Hollywood. Duke had begun college at the Air Force Academy, partly because Lee had trained to be a flyer in World War II. But after two years, Duke transferred and graduated from the University of Southern California. He settled in funky Venice Beach, where he had lived unobtrusively with a roommate, aspiring composer Chris Lennertz, whom he knew from USC, for six years. Both children helped their mother with her business on a part-time basis—Duke sometimes traveled to San Diego for her. So far he had only acted in B-level movies that went straight to video without theatrical distribution. Duke’s big break, he hoped, was coming in the summer—a bit part in Air Force One.
Lee was quiet and meticulous, always carefully and elegantly dressed, never without a fresh manicure. He had begun in real estate with a legendary and colorful broker/developer named Arthur Rubloff, Chicago’s Mr. Real Estate, who ran a large company and died in 1986. Abel Berland, the vice chairman at Rubloff, remembers arriving at his office one morning at 8 A.M. to find the thirty-one-year-old Albert Miglin seated in the chair opposite his desk. “Who are you?” Berland demanded. Miglin explained that he could not get an appointment through Berland’s secretary and wanted to come to work there. Berland turned him down but Miglin, born to sell, pleaded so eloquently about being a poor boy who knew how to work “before I knew how to walk” that Berland relented. His pay was $250 a month. Miglin began putting in six-day weeks, working until 8 or 9 P.M. every night. “I’d say good night and Miglin was still working,” recalls Berland. “It was more his persistence and tenacity that pulled him over the top.”
“By the time I’m forty, I want to stand for something in this community,” Miglin told Berland. “I want to be somebody.” When Miglin was thirty-seven-years-old, he told Berland he wanted to introduce him to the twenty-year-old girl he was going to marry—Marilyn Klecka. “He brought her in; she was a part-time model for Patricia Stevens,” Berland remembers. “I was tremendously impressed with the girl. She had her eyes on the ball and was going to the top. She was going to be the largest dispenser of cosmetics in the world.” She also convinced Al Miglin to change his first name to Lee.
Starting “with nothing except their own energy,” Berland says, they bought a house for $30,000 on the Near North Side (one of Chicago’s most prestigious neighborhoods) and “literally with their own hands and hearts made it a home.” They also cozied up to the boss, preparing elaborate dinners with fine wines for him and his wife. “In the early days they invited me and Mrs. Berland regularly.”
Lee was both an optimist and a pragmatist “who believed in the future of real estate,” says Berland. Although they began to acquire more and more valuable properties and amass a fortune, the Miglins were not flashy and did not throw their money around. Apart from the considerable holdings of Miglin-Beitler, Lee’s personal portfolio of real estate included two dozen buildings on the North Side of the city. “Lee epitomized the American Dream,” says his partner Paul Beitler, who lived far more luxuriously in a meticulously restored neo-Corbusian house by Richard Meier and loved to fly in the company’s private jet. Although Lee had recently sailed first class on the QE2 by himself, “they didn’t understand how successful they were,” says Chicago socialite-writer, Sugar Rautbord, a family friend.
Rather, the Miglins were fastidious early risers who ate dinner in the kitchen, often by 6 P.M. They employed two housekeepers who lived out, and because Lee was so particular, everything was kept spotless. For example, a week before Andrew came to town, Lee had demanded a thorough scrubbing of the walls of their garage, across the back alley from the house where he kept his cars—his two-year-old black jade Lexus, a Jeep, and a Bitter, an exclusive, limited-edition $80,000 German car designed by the race car driver, Eric Bitter.
Lee paid all the family bills and took care of business, and Marilyn relied on him to manage the financial end of Marilyn Miglin Cosmetics. She too was a tireless worker, the creator of the $500-an-ounce fragrance Pheromone, with thousands of devoted fans on the Home Shopping Network; in 1994, the last year for which records are published, her cosmetics company grossed $25 million. But to certain tenants and employees, the warm friend of the mayor and bubbly TV pitchwoman was also known as an abrupt taskmaster who seemed to be looking for opportunities to do battle.
The potential for lawsuits and fights in the real-estate business is naturally vast, and the Miglins, particularly Miglin-Beitler, had their share. One wealthy neighbor, Lou Richardson, fought with Lee all the way to the State Supreme Court and won, ending a six-and-a-half-year dispute over damage done to her property during the renovation of a Miglin-owned town house. A cosmetics employee went to court to charge that she was denied her $800 commission. The small stuff seemed to grate on Marilyn the most. If anyone happened to park in the alley across from her garden, she would take prompt issue, claiming it obstructed her sight line of the graveled yard beyond. She once mistook a city sanitation worker for a homeless person and chastised him for picking through her garbage.
“She’s not a cream puff,” says Miglin-Beitler’s former longtime spokesperson, Mark Jarasek, who defended her as being only a latent Type A. “Marilyn hides it till she needs to bring it out.” Many noted that Lee always walked a few steps behind her.
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, May 3, 1997, a few hours after David Madson’s body had been discovered at East Rush Lake in Minnesota, Stephen and Barbara Byer were pulling out of their designated parking spot in the alley behind the Miglins’ Gold Coast house at precisely 2:15 P.M. The Byers were art dealers who rented an elegant duplex town house from the Miglins just one street over on East Division. The rear of their house—the focus of Lou Richardson’s lawsuit—faced the rear of the Miglins’ across the alley, so they were used to seeing the Miglins in their kitchen, where the blinds were never drawn. The day was cloudy and rainy. After first noticing that the Miglins’ garage across the alley was open, they checked to see if anyone was inside, and saw Lee Miglin. “He was at the very rear of the garage, wearing a tan suede jacket with his back to us, and it appeared he was puttering with some plants,” says Stephen Byer. Since Lee was hard of hearing and wore hearing aids, Stephen Byer didn’t bother to call out, and they went on. When Stephen Byer returned to his parking spot at precisely 5:30—he checked his watch because he was running late—he noticed the kitchen blinds were drawn. He thought it odd but he really didn’t pay attention. By then the Miglins’ garage was closed. There was no sound from their aging retriever, Honey.
The Byers liked Lee Miglin. He had come over to their house two nights earlier to renegotiate their lease and wound up telling stories about his early days as a door-to-door salesman. Even for such an informal meeting, he hadn’t changed, but wore a gray pinstripe suit, white shirt, and silk tie. He was a dandy with white hair and there was never a hair out of place—everything had its order. But that usual tranquillity was shattered on Sunday morning, May 4, at around 8:15. The Byers, on their way out to breakfast, came face to face with Marilyn Miglin at their backyard gate.
“Steve, Steve, come over quickly. Something’s wrong!”
“Marilyn, what do you mean?”
“I just got back from Canada and something’s wrong,” she repeated. “Lee isn’t home. Lee is missing. He was supposed to meet me at the airport and he didn’t, and I took a cab and somebody else has been at the house.”
Byer sought to reassure her. “Marilyn, try to calm down. I’m sure Lee is fine.” But as soon as the Byers rushed across the alley, through the garden, and into the kitchen with her, “I sensed she was right—something very bad had occurred. First, there in the kitchen was a pint of H¨aagen-Dazs ice cream with a spoon stuck in it. Half eaten and half coagulated. And secondly, there was an empty Coke can on its side in the sink. Lee was a serious, fastidious, compulsive kind of man,�
�� Byer explained. Lee Miglin would never leave anything out like that. He began to query Marilyn. “Was Lee going to pick you up?”
“Yes,” she responded. “He always shows up.”
“Did you try calling him?”
“Of course. There was no answer.”
“Why don’t I look around the house?” he suggested.
“I don’t know if you should. I saw a gun in the upstairs.”
“A gun?” Byer was taken aback. “Look, why don’t you call the police?”
“I have been. I’ve been trying to get ahold of them and no one has come over so far.”
“Well, how long ago did you call?” Byer asked.
“Like fifteen minutes ago.”
At that, Stephen Byer told his wife, Barbara, to stay outside with Marilyn. He went upstairs to look around—and promptly got lost. The two town houses the Miglins put together had been joined at the kitchen level but not above. “You go up one stairway and you can’t get across or down the other side. The two stairways don’t meet.” To add to his confusion, “The first thing I saw disturbed me greatly: I saw a ham, like a Smithfield ham on a bone. I saw that literally on the desk in the library with a slice cut out of it. The knife was stuck right in the ham and it wasn’t even on a plate. ‘Oh my God,’ I said to myself. I guessed Lee Miglin would never have left a Coke can in his sink or a pint of ice cream on his countertop, let alone a ham on his desk. So it was pretty obvious pretty quickly that something very bad had happened.”
From watching police dramas on TV, Byer decided that he better not touch anything. He continued on to a bathroom, where he saw “other signs that really were troubling. There was a gun lying on the white marble sink and in the sink itself there were black whiskers. Lee Miglin had white hair, and these clippings were for a two- to three-day growth of beard. And then I looked over at the tub and there was a layer of scum in the tub—soap or body debris—and there were also a couple of towels on the floor between the sink and the tub.”
Upstairs on the third floor, in what appeared to Byer to be a guest bedroom, a closet with Lee Miglin’s out-of-season clothes had been opened, and casual clothes and shoes were strewn around. “I could see that somebody had gone through it and kind of pilfered it.” By now Byer surmised that whoever had shaved and used the bathroom was somewhere in the house. “I assumed that it was a drug addict or someone who had broken in and was now sleeping it off.”
But everywhere he looked there was an eerie silence. Still, as Byer continued his search, he expected “to find some bad guy sleeping somewhere—or Lee’s body.” Again mindful of the cop shows he had seen, Byer opened closets with the sleeve of his jacket, so as not to disturb any evidence. “I kept opening closets and kept expecting Lee might fall out of a closet.”
After searching the top floors, Byer, who is Jewish, crept down the stairs into the dark basement to face the most jarring moment of all. He stumbled onto an altar with more than a hundred unlit candles. “They have a chapel in their basement and I really didn’t understand what it was.” He came back upstairs and repeated his search on the other side of the house, up and down, yet found nothing disturbed. “The house was totally quiet.”
The police still hadn’t arrived, so Byer took the keys to the garage to check whether any cars were missing. Sure enough, Lee’s dark green Lexus, usually parked there, was gone. Byer looked into the two cars that were there—the Jeep Duke used and the silver Bitter parked behind it. But he didn’t see anything awry.
He went back to tell Marilyn: “The Lexus is gone.”
“Oh my God. I bet Lee is in the trunk of the Lexus.”
“Marilyn, it may be that Lee’s OK and we’re misinter-preting what’s going on here,” Byer tried to soothe. “What’s the car phone number?”
When Byer called the Lexus, he claims first he got a recording that the party he wanted to reach was unavailable. “Then the second recording came on saying, ‘The number you are trying to reach is now out of state.’ Which I have never heard on any cell phone before.”
Marilyn Miglin, meanwhile, walked nervously into the living room. She kept repeating, “I know he’s dead. I know he’s dead.”
“Marilyn, you don’t know that,” Byer contradicted.
“Yes, I know he’s dead and they’ll never catch him. They’ll never find who did this.” She began opening the living room drapes—they were not usually drawn either. Byer cautioned her about touching anything. “That doesn’t make any difference,” Marilyn replied. “They’ll never find whoever did this.”
Just then the police finally arrived, two uniformed officers, a man and a woman. Marilyn had reached a police captain she knew and told him he had better send someone right over. Stephen Byer took the male officer on the same search of the house that he had just made, pointing out what was out of place. Once again they got disoriented trying to figure out how to go from one part of the house to the other. When the two reached the bathroom, both thought the gun lying on the sink looked real. “I agree,” the officer said. “Something appears to have gone very wrong. I’m going to call for backup now.”
Just then, four more police officers showed up, and one of them asked if anyone had been to the garage. Byer told him, yes, the Lexus was missing. Then Barbara Byer took the key and led two of the officers across the alley, where she unlocked the garage by the side door and let them in. At first, things once again appeared normal. The three briefly looked around and came out. But Barbara Byer hesitated and went back in. She let out a scream.
From the Miglins’ kitchen, Stephen Byer could see that his wife was crying and had to sit down on a bench in their garden. He ran over. “Oh my God, Lee’s dead,” she said. Byer went to enter the garage but was barred by one of the policemen: “I don’t want you to come in here.” Then Byer glanced down and saw brown wrapping paper and some blood coming from under the Jeep. It was parked at the rear of the garage with a garbage can placed to the side of its right front fender to obscure the body. He hadn’t noticed the blood before.
“I just went back in because I knew there was something wrong with this wrapping paper on the floor,” Barbara Byer told her husband. “Lee would never leave wrapping paper on the floor. And what happened was, I picked up the edge and his feet were sitting there!” Stephen Byer turned white and started feeling dizzy. He was on the verge of passing out when a policewoman rushed over. “Hey, don’t collapse, don’t crack up, the family needs you.”
“You’re right. I just have to catch my breath.” Byer joined his wife on the bench. Barbara asked the policewoman, “Have you told Marilyn?”
“No,” she answered. “I really don’t know what to say.”
“Oh my God, you have to tell her.”
“I really don’t want to.”
“Someone has to tell her. All right, I will.” Barbara Byer went across the alley to find Marilyn Miglin in the kitchen.
“Marilyn, I’m so sorry to tell you this. They’ve found Lee.” Marilyn was obviously stunned, but she put up a brave front and marched right over to the garage to identify the body. “I knew it!” she said. “I knew it.”
By then, sirens were blaring, racing police cars were skidding to a stop in the alley, and cops were suddenly everywhere.
21
Minefield
FEAR NOW GRIPPED Lee Miglin’s upscale and eclectic Chicago neighborhood, where socialites from the quiet side streets and bar hoppers on the busy thoroughfares frequently mingled. But the Gold Coast had long been a notorious haunt of master killers. Two days after murdering eight Chicago nurses in 1966, Richard Speck hid out less than a mile away from the Miglins’ at the old Raleigh Hotel on Dearborn Street, now an expensive office space. Six blocks away James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King, was arrested for holding up a cab driver at gunpoint at State and Delaware. The Walgreens Drugs, around the corner from the Miglins’ at North and Wells, sold one of the four tampered-with, poisoned-Tylenol bottles that ended up killing seven in 1982.
Jeffrey Dahmer picked up one of his seventeen male victims at the gay movie theater, the Bijou, five blocks up Wells from Walgreens. And John Wayne Gacy, responsible for the deaths of thirty-three, helped remodel what was then the Winstons Doughnut House at State and Division, just one block from where the Miglins lived; because the basement where Gacy had labored smelled bad, police dug it up, searching for more buried bodies, but found only rats. Ironically, both Dahmer and Gacy were also gay, and Speck was bisexual—they just weren’t out of the closet the way Andrew was. Apart from the serial-killing notoriety, which was not publicized, and the affluence, which was self-evident, the neighborhood also had a reputation for being closeted.
In Miglin’s case, the police at first had no idea who or what they were looking for. Was it a Mafia hit? Did Lee Miglin have enemies? Did a real-estate deal go wrong? Police quickly learned that $2,000 that Lee Miglin’s secretary had delivered to him on Friday afternoon was gone, as well as several thousand dollars more that he kept in the house. Two leather coats were missing, one of them Duke’s, a couple of suits, along with some insignificant ladies jewelry and a dozen pairs of new Sulka black socks from the bedroom.
In the first few days, no one around the neighborhood reported having seen anything unusual. Marilyn Miglin had last talked to her husband at 2 P.M. on Saturday, when he told her that he was working both inside and outside and was going to get a salad for dinner. The time of death was estimated at between 2 P.M. Saturday and 6 A.M. Sunday.
The crime scene itself was immaculate, with little blood, except where the body lay, and a few spatterings on the wall near the service door. Nevertheless, Lee Miglin’s murder was horrendously brutal—the most vicious of all Andrew Cunanan’s crimes. Lee Miglin was found lying on his back fully clothed, in the tan suede jacket, white shirt, and jeans, with one shoe on and one shoe missing. Once again, the shoe was a Ferragamo, this time black suede. Inexplicably, a small tube of Dermarest hydrocortisone cream was found underneath the body. Gay pornographic magazines had been left not far away. The zipper of Miglin’s jeans was open, with teeth missing on the left side, yet there was no overt sign of sexual molestation. Lee Miglin was wearing black Calvin Klein bikini underwear trimmed in white.
