by Maureen Orth
In the pocket on the door on the driver’s side, Andrew had left two photos, one of a group of his friends from Hillcrest at a party, the other of Robbins Thompson in bathing trunks standing next to his truck. Robbins had given the photo to Andrew, and it was the only print. Although the police had no way of knowing immediately who these people were, it was almost as if Andrew were dropping bread crumbs, Hansel and Gretel–style, to lead investigators on. Why else would he not get rid of all this incriminating evidence during the long drive between Chicago and the East Coast? He appeared to want credit for his crimes.
EMPLOYEES OF A truck stop about a mile down on the Delaware side of the bridge are convinced that Andrew stopped there for a pack of cigarettes after he killed Reese, although he normally smoked only occasional cigars. His image was captured on video but never positively identified. People were terrified, figuring that if Cunanan could find Reese in that isolated cemetery, he could find anyone anywhere. “That was a closed area none of us had ever even been to, and this man was floating around out here and the cops couldn’t find him,” says Andrea Pickman, who manages the Popeye’s Chicken at the truck stop. “It seems like he was escaping through the loopholes and killing innocent people. He was like a madman. I was scared to death.”
While Andrew was barreling down I-95, law enforcement was paralyzed at the Reese crime scene, seeking to resolve a jurisdictional question. Who had the authority? Did Reese’s murder belong to the FBI or to the locals? “Originally it was thought to be a Pennsville police job,” says Tom Cannavo of the New Jersey state police. “Then Salem County called us after I got there, and they advised me it was federal property, and I said, ‘Whoa. Call the FBI.’” Everything stopped until the FBI arrived, about 11 P.M. Had Andrew left any special clues behind to reveal his whereabouts, they likely would have sat there.
When FBI Special Agent Paul Murray of Philadelphia arrived, he told Cannavo and the state police to go ahead and process. “He said, ‘Look, it’s a homicide; we don’t do it much—you do it all the time. You handle it for us.’”
Finn’s Point National Cemetery is on federal ground, so ordinarily the FBI would be in charge of any major crime committed on such a “government reservation.” But someone remembered an old treaty that seemed to give local law enforcement jurisdiction over Finn’s Point. It took several days to research before the FBI prevailed, taking the case out of the hands of the Salem County prosecutor and delivering it to the U.S. attorney in Newark. The park was closed for five days while the cemetery was combed for evidence. A .40 caliber shell casing found near Reese’s body matched the shell casing found at the scene of David Madson’s murder, and the bullet jackets revealed that they had been fired from the same weapon. The FBI later awarded the Pennsville police department special letters of commendation for their cooperation.
A second ticklish issue arose: Who was going to get the Lexus? Chicago wanted the Lexus back undisturbed, just as New Jersey had found it. New Jersey wanted to keep it. “We stepped in to say we wanted the Lexus and the contents for our own case. They said, ‘We are still determining circumstances,’” explains Illinois State’s Attorney Nancy Donahoe. “The overlap in the evidence was something you had to think carefully about.” She adds, “There were so many crossovers in the crime scene that lots of discussion was going on over who was going to get what.”
“We were not going to jeopardize our case,” Cannavo declares. “We turned over the screwdriver and anything we had free to go. Anything tied to our case, we asked that they wait until our case was over.” According to a federal official, “Chicago needed Miglin’s car, but we had it and were processing it for our case. We are not about to release it without processing all this evidence.” In fact, the Lexus contained such a cornucopia of evidence tying Andrew to both Miglin’s and Reese’s murders that it took five days to process it. “The FBI and us were working hand in hand,” Cannavo says. “He left so much behind.”
The quality of evidence was a matter of concern for Chicago, because Reese’s murder occurred when the national FBI lab, which normally handled all DNA testing, was under fire for mishandling hundreds of cases. “Although they had always done superior work for us,” says Donahoe, “the FBI lab was taking heat. We had to decide, Is it worth it or not to go with the FBI lab?” Again mindful of the O. J. Simpson case, Chicago wanted to make sure there were no screw-ups. They successfully fought having any testing done immediately to the small amount of blood found on the carpet of the Lexus trunk.
New Jersey argued that transporting the car a thousand miles to Chicago could easily cause damage and might disturb evidence. Fingerprints could be lost, for example. Chicago conceded that the argument made sense. Nobody had gotten any fingerprints so far. “Everybody wants something big,” Donahoe explains. “They want a fingerprint or blood from the scene of the crime.” Chicago had to settle for the screwdriver.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Newark, which usually has to play second fiddle to Manhattan, was determined to go to trial first if Andrew was apprehended. “Whoever goes first ultimately wins,” says Donahoe, and New Jersey was sticking to the old adage that possession is nine-tenths of the law. Andrew was no longer an ordinary domestic slayer. With Lee Miglin’s murder, he had become “a very dangerous, violent, psychotic killer,” says John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted, and Reese’s murder proved that he was so bloodthirsty he would kill for nothing more than a vehicle.
For the ambitious state and U.S. attorneys involved in the case, Andrew Cunanan was rapidly shaping up as a career maker or breaker, and they were all eager to prove their mettle. “What a case to lose!” Donahoe remarks. Chicago was invited to send a crew to help process the car, but New Jersey was holding on to the Lexus.
25
The Lid
IN CHICAGO, THE media spread out all over town, trying to learn whether or not Lee Miglin was gay and whether Duke knew Andrew, but they came up short. “Everybody wants this guy to have been gay. I could never dig up a single thing,” says Achy Obejas, a lesbian reporter on the Chicago Tribune. “Everybody was happy to confirm it,” she adds, but in fact nobody had proof about Lee Miglin. At one point Miglin-Beitler was called by the owner of a gay bar. “Mark Jarasek and I were here late,” says Paul Beitler. “Mark got the call that there was a TV crew from a local channel in the gay district in Chicago, going to bars there saying, ‘We’ll pay a reward for anyone who can come forward and verify if Lee was gay or having a gay relationship.’ The bar owner said, ‘What the hell is going on? They’re cooking evidence like crazy.’” But the majority of reporters were far more careful. “There was terror around the story,” says Obejas, with regard to creating negative gay images and inciting the family. Since Duke was not the victim, any reporting about him was ultimately dropped.
“How hard did I look to find out if Lee Miglin was gay? I looked incredibly hard,” says Andrew Martin of the Chicago Tribune. “The problem was, the standards for saying it in the paper were so high it was almost a wasted enterprise. I’m not sure if I had [identified] four former lovers they would have run it.” On the other hand, Martin says, “If Miglin had been an active gay man in Chicago gay circles, I’m convinced that we would have known. If he was a regular at these places, I think we would have found out.” Still, “to smear the reputation of a dead prominent Chicagoan, I don’t know what I would have had to have. I would have had to have a hell of a lot. Things came out later, when my paper had lost interest. I thought they lost interest too soon.” Obejas adds, “There were stones that were unturned.”
For the Miglin camp, as well as for the Chicago police, the flow of information became the enemy, out of their control. Reportedly at Beitler’s urging, the mayor told the police superintendent to clam up. Beitler himself called Superintendent Rodriguez, who stopped returning his phone calls. Beitler was incensed that an unnamed detective had speculated in the press that the Miglin murder might not be random. “That’s when I picked up the phone and I called Rodri
guez and said, ‘Listen, unless you have hard evidence, get your detectives under control. We don’t need them speculating in the newspapers about this murder. We could turn around and do the same thing in reverse to the Chicago police department—start speculating we have another O.J. problem going on here.’”
“It had all the earmarks of becoming the story it became,” says Rodriguez, explaining police reticence. “Miglin was well known in the business and corporate world—he was not well known to people on the street, but in these kinds of cases the lid is put on because we have various jurisdictions involved. We don’t know if what an individual says here adversely affects another case. The media is like a dry sponge. It would take anything.”
In fact, the Chicago police were deeply embarrassed that a leak of theirs had inadvertently set off the chain of events that led to the murder of Bill Reese. And they were further upset by the information revealed in the Chisago warrant. The Miglin family was particularly rattled by a story that ran in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on the Sunday after Reese’s death. Bruce Kerschner, the owner of Obelisk, a Hillcrest bookstore frequented by Andrew and located next door to California Cuisine, was quoted as saying that Andrew knew Duke Miglin very well. “He talked about him all the time. They spent a lot of time together.”
Beitler wanted to sue immediately, but in the end Marilyn and Duke did not follow through on their threat to sue the paper for libel. Mark Jarasek says simply that “Marilyn wanted to get on with her life.” At any rate, it didn’t take long for Kerschner to back down. He called a press conference the next day to say that he had been misquoted, and disavowed having any knowledge that Andrew and Duke knew each other. “The reporter asked me if I had heard all the rumors, and when I said I did, he used me,” Kerschner says. The newspaper printed Kerschner’s denial, but it claims that the reporter quoted him accurately. “The FBI did hear that Andrew had mentioned Duke Miglin,” says Minneapolis Police Sergeant Wagner. He thinks that Kerschner’s recantation to the press seemed strained. “I’m sure Miglin’s attorneys read him the riot act.”
Another disturbing oddity was the flash of a picture of Andrew’s modest bedroom in his San Diego apartment as part of the America’s Most Wanted story on television. Among the books and magazines piled up was a 1988 issue of Architectural Digest, which Andrew had obviously saved. In it was a story about Paul Beitler’s restoration of his Richard Meier house. Again Beitler chalked it up to coincidence, but he was becoming less sure.
Then, to add insult to injury, the Washington, D.C., Blade, a gay newspaper, published a story with anonymous sources saying that Lee Miglin had been recognized in the Unicorn, a gay bathhouse in Chicago. Lou Chibbaro, the reporter, was promptly contacted by the Miglin family’s attorney, who protested the story. “We run into this all the time when we deal with the murders of gay men,” Chibbaro says. “People like to hush things up. The man who saw him in the bathhouse—he knew him only because Miglin was a fairly well-known person, and my source knew him enough to recognize him.” One of these sources was later tracked down without Chibbaro’s aid, a male hustler kept by an older man. He had a friend who claimed to have seen Miglin at the Unicorn, but the Unicorn’s owner, Rick Stokes, says he does not comment on his membership.
In the course of its investigation, the FBI picked up several second- and third-hand reports from gays in various parts of the country who knew Andrew and who said they had heard that Lee Miglin was gay or involved in S&M. These sightings were duly noted in their records, but they were only hearsay. And although the police went looking for anyone who might know Andrew on North Halsted, the main gay thoroughfare in Chicago, it is not at all clear that they were also asking whether Lee Miglin was known there. “The police never looked for Miglin up there,” says Cook County prosecutor Nancy Donahoe. “If it was done, I wasn’t told about it.” Donahoe concedes that the cops don’t tell her everything they do, but adds that “I have no reason to believe they did” go out of their way to place Lee Miglin on North Halsted. Andrew yes, Donahoe says. “We look at phone records. We know he knew people there.”
What was the value of finding out if Lee Miglin was gay anyway? For the Chicago police, who were hearing from the archbishop’s office about this case, making Lee Miglin out to be gay could quite possibly spell career suicide. “Why irritate everybody who’s important in the city?” asks Donahoe. “The detectives are real good guys. They were under a tremendous amount of pressure. The mayor’s wife is friends with Marilyn Miglin. If we knew [Lee Miglin] was gay, where are we going to go with it at that point? If Cunanan had said, ‘I had a relationship with him,’ then we would have had to make a decision about how to handle it.” As it stood, they kept the lid on.
On Monday it was the Sun-Times’s turn to ruffle feathers. The paper had found Andrew’s mother living in public housing downstate in Eureka, Illinois. She had moved there to be close to her elder daughter, who lived in Peoria. In the paper MaryAnn Cunanan described her son as a “high-class male prostitute.” She later disavowed ever saying those words, but they were widely disseminated, and they were precisely the same words she would use to describe Andrew to the FBI. Apparently the FBI had not attempted to interview MaryAnn—or perhaps didn’t even know where she was—until the Sun-Times appeared. Later that day, however, a Chicago detective and FBI agent knocked on her door. She said that she had not seen Andrew in two and a half years but that by chance she had talked to him on the phone in April, when he was visiting his sister Gina in San Francisco. Interestingly, he had told his mother he was about to take a job with an architect.
MaryAnn said she had suspected Andrew was gay from the time he was seventeen, adding that he would “befriend wealthy gay men and begin relationships with them, which enabled him to be supported by them. Andrew lived a rich lifestyle from gifts from male companions.”
In this highly charged atmosphere, stories began to appear asking, Who’s in charge here? On the same day MaryAnn was being interviewed by the FBI, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran a piece headlined “Hunt for Suspect Lacks Strategy”:
As Andrew Cunanan continues to evade authorities, it appears that there’s no coordinated strategy among local law enforcement agencies to help catch the man suspected in a nationwide killing spree that began in Minneapolis.
No single agency is assuming overall responsibility for processing information, directing the investigation or developing an approach for finding the 27-year-old San Diego man who has been wanted since the first of four victims was found April 29.
And there is no national model for local investigators to draw upon for coordinating their individual efforts.
Andrew was moving too fast, killing and then each time vacating the premises. The Cunanan command post run out of the Minnesota Fugitive Task Force had links to the FBI in ten cities, but the Bureau had no authority to investigate homicides unless they occurred, as Reese’s had, on federal ground. The FBI did, however, plaster Andrew all over its “Crime Alerts” and “Fugitives” pages on the World Wide Web—he became the first criminal suspect to get such extensive Internet attention from the Bureau. The FBI also contacted the National Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project for help in alerting their members to the menace Andrew threatened. The effort was extremely un-even, however. In New York and San Francisco, where gays are well organized politically, thousands of fliers with Andrew’s picture went up in gay neighborhoods. The New York chapter posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to his capture. In his own hometown of San Diego, however, where there hadn’t been much contact between gays and the FBI, the effort was much weaker. In Miami it was almost nil.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune article quoted a criminologist who said, “We have a centralized law enforcement reporting system for stolen cars, and nothing for human beings. When you have this kind of thing, nothing is set up for it.”
That was painfully obvious in the backstage drama going on with the Minneapolis police, the county attorney’s office, and the Chicago
police. In the beginning, according to Sergeant Tichich, “I couldn’t even get the county attorney to return my phone calls” regarding the murder of Jeff Trail. And the county attorney was not only keeping the case but also assigning another attorney, named Gail Baez, to it. Baez wanted to go to Chicago with a delegation of Minneapolis police to view Madson’s Jeep and all the potential evidence for the homicide case. Comparing notes might be a helpful enterprise. Tichich thought it would be a waste of money and time and said so.
He argued that in the absence of evidence to rule out Madson, Cunanan could try to pin the murder on him. Not necessarily, says Baez. “We had people who could testify to the nature of the relationships.” In the end Baez won out, but the Minneapolis delegation did not receive a warm welcome in Chicago. By then the official Chicago police spokesman was refusing even to confirm that the victim murdered in the garage was Lee Miglin! “Chicago preferred not to deal with anybody, basically,” says Minneapolis Police Lieutenant Dale Barsness.
When the Minnesotans arrived in Chicago, Pete Jackson says, they got a condescending lecture from Commander Joe Griffin “about the Chicago Police Department and the release of information.” They were then taken to see the Jeep at the Illinois state police crime lab, but could pick up little in the way of new knowledge or evidence. Chicago had had such a hard time getting any fingerprints of Andrew’s that they were now searching for his dental records in order to compare them with the bites taken out of the ham found in Lee Miglin’s den. The need for dental records was part of the reason law enforcement finally got a search warrant to go through Andrew’s Hillcrest apartment on May 9, the day of Reese’s murder.
Although Chisago Sheriff Schwegman participated in the search of Andrew’s San Diego apartment—a search in part to facilitate the Chicago investigation—Chisago felt shut out by the big city. When Chisago officials asked Chicago for help, says Rivard, they were told, “‘Sorry.’ They would tell us little information and send nothing. The only report I had was an inventory of what was in the red Jeep; that’s all I have, period. These guys were between a rock and a hard place. They said, ‘We’re really sorry, but we have this captain guy who’s above us; we are under strict orders, blah blah blah.’”
