Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  In that crucial first hour after the murder, when all the forces were alerted and stood the best chance of apprehending the killer, an unfortunate diversion over another suspect drew many officers away from the original area of pursuit near the parking garage. The first calls describing Versace’s shooter were unclear as to whether he was black or white or brown. A rookie cop spotted a dark-skinned male he had tussled with before. The man, who had just been released on probation, had dope in his pocket and started to run down Espanola Way, drawing the police several blocks from the garage location. The rookie radioed for help, and police converged on him. The suspect was caught and then released without being charged when it became apparent that he had had nothing to do with Versace’s murder. While the chase was on, however, Paul Scrimshaw says, “Andrew could have walked up Collins Avenue and nobody would have looked at him.”

  By now investigators were tripping all over each other at the mansion. Versace’s celebrity was drawing a crowd of law-enforcement officials. The state’s attorneys, who rarely show up at crime scenes, were photographed for the papers peering at the site. Was it a hit or was it random? No one had a clue, but most of the police thought it had to be a hit. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) began to process the scene and do the forensic work. More FBI officers arrived, “to the point where there was getting to be too many investigators there walking around, and trying to get information without a specific function,” says Marcus. “There were agents walking Ocean Drive, walking the alleyway. We probably hit a peak locally of fifty investigators.” In the first hours, the dining room at the front of the mansion became police central. That was disconcerting to members of the household, who were numb with shock and grief. Marcus says, “Mr. D’Amico didn’t want the house turning into the command post. He was devastated. They were on the phone and wanted to leave to go to the hospital. By then the information was relayed to us that Versace had died.” Marcus told Antonio, “Listen, there’s nothing you can do at the hospital. You’re much more vital to the investigation.” But Antonio, not to be deterred, insisted on going there. “We had to remove police cars and tapes to let him go.”

  A few blocks away in Chief of Police Richard Barreto’s office, a high-level meeting began at ten o’clock with the city manager, members of the city government, and the state’s attorney’s office. Also in attendance was Michael Aller, tourism and convention coordinator for the city of Miami Beach. It may have been only an hour or so since Versace had been shot, but already the powers that be were deep into spin control, guarding the city’s image as a carefree, escapist visitors’ attraction. When two German tourists were robbed and murdered in Miami in 1993, the city’s reputation had suffered a severe blow. Now Carnival Cruise was scheduled to run its first gay press junket the following weekend. A reputation for random violence in SoBe would be ruinous. Assistant State Attorney Rose Marie Antonacci-Pollock, who was present at the meeting, says, “All the spin doctors were up there basically figuring out what face to put on this. This wasn’t productive in advancing the case. The city manager and the chief of police wanted to make sure it had nothing to do with South Florida tourism.”

  While the suits were spinning, a phalanx of uniformed officers were trying to identify the owner of the red pickup. When the South Carolina license tag didn’t pan out, the police tried to check the red truck from the VIN—vehicle identification number. Miami Beach police dispatcher Gerry Zabrowski doggedly kept on running the number different ways until he got the Super Computer hit with the FBI advisory that the red pickup was not only a stolen vehicle but also had been part of another crime. By this time Sergeant George Navarro, who would supervise the investigation, had arrived. A fast-rising thirty-seven-year-old originally from the Internal Affairs Unit, Navarro was playing golf on his day off when he got the call to report immediately. His boss, Lieutenant Carlos Noriega, named the force’s best cop in 1986, was already there. The hierarchy of the Miami Beach police investigation was thus established: Noriega, Navarro, and Scrimshaw as lead detective.

  A little before noon, Keith Evans, Miami’s FBI fugitive stalker, also joined the group at the mansion, because the description of the shooter sounded like Andrew Cunanan. “By the time Evans arrived, we had information it might be Cunanan,” says Scrimshaw. “We had derived that much. As we told Evans, his face lit up—he got visibly excited.” Evans had brought his Cunanan file with him. Scrimshaw and Marcus were getting information from the garage via radio as the pickup’s VIN was being processed from there. “I’m relaying the info to Keith and Navarro,” says Scrimshaw. “Keith says, ‘Red? What type?’”

  “Chevy 1500.”

  Evans asked for the VIN number and compared it with that of the truck stolen in New Jersey. “Oh, my God! This is William Reese’s pickup truck! That’s the pickup taken in the New Jersey murder we think Andrew Cunanan is responsible for.”

  “At that moment,” says Scrimshaw, “Cunanan is linked to this investigation.”

  “Hot damn! It’s Cunanan!” Keith Evans said.

  “It was so exciting being there when everything fell together with the truck,” Marcus relates. “It’s not a whodunit anymore. A whodunit of this proportion is a lot more fun.”

  In a little more than two hours, a major piece of the crime had been solved. Sighs of relief emanated from the spin controllers. Now the challenge was to find Cunanan. Despite the fact that he was one of America’s Ten Most Wanted and his picture had been hanging on the homicide bureau’s bulletin board for two months, nobody in the Miami Beach Police Department except for Scrimshaw, Marcus, and Lori Wieder had any idea who Andrew Cunanan was. “What does he look like?” Navarro and Noriega asked Keith Evans. After a police press conference around one o’clock, at which no information on Cunanan was released—the beginning of a sorry pattern—Evans walked Noriega and Navarro to his car. There on the backseat Noriega and Navarro saw the answer to their question—boxes filled with fliers showing Andrew Cunanan’s face. How many fliers? “I don’t want to turn on Keith,” Navarro demurs. According to Navarro, “He had a lot of fliers.” Another mystery was solved.

  33

  King Kong

  IN LESS THAN twenty-four hours the murder of Versace became the number-one story in the country, and I found myself in the middle of it. From the gitgo, however, the story was made very difficult for the press to cover. In the language of the beach police, Versace was an “APE case”—acute political emergency. In fact, says Detective Paul Scrimshaw, “Versace was the King Kong of all APE cases.” Within minutes of the shooting, the first media trucks rolled up to the Versace mansion. The first profiteer had already raced home for his Polaroid camera upon seeing Versace’s body laid out on the Casa Casuarina steps, and was only able to make it back in time to get a shot of the designer’s bare feet sticking out of the ambulance. Nevertheless, within forty-eight hours the huckster was trying to get $30,000 for his Polaroid. The “money shot”—the term was borrowed from pornography and signified ejaculation—went to the local ABC cameraman, who abandoned the story of a little girl who needed a kidney transplant at Jackson Memorial Hospital to run over and shoot the body on a gurney being raced into the trauma center. Hot damn again! It was Versace! Meanwhile, there were ten unauthorized hits on the hospital’s computer system in the first few hours after the murder—people were trying to read Versace’s medical records.

  Law enforcement was quickly overwhelmed. Miami Beach has a population of 100,000 and a police force of 300. The department, like that of many smaller cities, is not computerized for many functions. The department’s idea of the time it takes for the police to do their job thoroughly, clashed hopelessly with the voracious needs of a twenty-four-hour, nonstop global news cycle. It was as if the two entities existed in different time zones; there was no sense that the press could actually help in a criminal investigation. The first instinct of the local authorities was to protect the city’s image and preserve their evidence for court—much as the Minneapol
is authorities had responded to Jeffrey Trail’s murder. The Miami Beach police were muzzled.

  The state attorney’s office, fearing—perhaps even secretly wishing—they had another O.J. on their hands, took every precaution and would not allow the police to give out even basic facts. “Jurors have a different view of the criminal justice system, of prosecution, of police work, because of O.J.,” says then Chief Assistant State Attorney Michael Band, who supervised the investigation for the state attorney’s office. Band feels that jurors have became more skeptical. “And they should be skeptical—not just about police but about everything that’s presented to them.” The Los Angeles district attorney’s office’s stunning loss in the Simpson case had made a deep impression on Band, who had sat down with the Dade County medical examiner’s office, the commander of the homicide unit of the Metro-Dade police department, and several others to make sure nothing like that ever happened to the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida. Band wanted no screwups, but he got them anyway.

  Al Boza, the veteran detective who handled the Miami Beach Police public information office, felt strongly that there should be two official press briefings a day, but that never happened. “Just to say, ‘Folks, this is what happened today—we are moving forward, we have received X number of tips, we have investigators working all night.’ We didn’t do that, and I do believe we paid dearly for it.” From the beginning, everything Boza did was criticized from above. His first press release, for example, announcing Versace’s murder, had to be rewritten, he says, “untold times.” Boza originally wrote, he recalls, “‘As Mr. Versace approached the iron gate of the entrance of his residence,’ and somebody says, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with the word “iron gate.” It gives the sense of a fortress.’ So you will never see the word ‘iron gate’ in any report that I put out about Gianni Versace.”

  Police relations with the media went sour the first day and got worse. Gail Bright, a local ABC-TV reporter in the supercompetitive Miami TV market, knew that the red pickup had probably been traced to Andrew. The local NBC and ABC affiliates both had cameramen who were able to get into the garage early and get the truck’s license plate, which they then checked on their own. They could also hear the VIN being read on the police radio and a non–Miami Beach police source told Bright that the truck belonged “to a guy wanted all over.” Bright asked Miami Beach Police Chief Richard Barreto at a 4:30 P.M. press conference on the day Versace was shot if the suspect was “the guy the Bureau’s looking for.” Barreto, who is six feet three with a thatch of silver hair and looks dashing in his uniform, refused to confirm even the existence of the red pickup, let alone the identity of the suspected killer. Just as the Chief was declining to answer Bright’s question, the TV cameras caught the truck being towed right past the police station. That set a tone that kept each side from cutting the other any slack.

  To Michael Band, who was present at the press conference, Bright’s question meant one thing: They’re already leaking this stuff. “The idea that a reporter knew enough to ask that specific a question told me that there was a leak.” The police were strongly cautioned that any leaks would bring down severe consequences. Paul Scrimshaw thought that policy was wrong. “Used properly, the media can help solve your case and move people forward. The problem usually is, you can’t get their attention.” A few months before, Scrimshaw had handled the homicide of Paul Sigler, a gay man who worked for American Airlines. “We begged the media to publicize it,” he says, yet the police got nowhere. Says Detective Paul Marcus, “Our attempts to get coverage for Sigler’s murder went unnoticed because the Miss Universe pageant was going on. In that case, we needed the media to put his face in the public eye, but we didn’t get any.” In the Versace case, says Scrimshaw, “all of us believed that in the first few hours we should have given the media substantive information.”

  But when police brass could have been broadcasting an all-points bulletin for Andrew, in the hours they had their best chance of finding him, they chose to keep silent. Instead, their priority was to get a photo line-up “professionally prepared.” Lieutenant Carlos Noriega recalls, “Once we established Cunanan, we had to relocate witnesses [who had been released] for a photo line-up.” Had these witnesses seen Andrew’s picture in the media, the line-up would be tainted. There were other technical difficulties as well, which could haunt the authorities later in court. The “wanted” picture of Andrew was too large to fit with the photos of Andrew look-alikes the police had. According to Noriega, “By law the pictures have to be identical in size. Otherwise the defense attorney can argue a defendant sticks out.” It took police until early evening to prepare the line-up. The principal witness, Mersiha Colakovic, had given police a false name—Liliane De Feo—and disappeared; Andrew’s looks were so common locally that a Miami Beach cop in the line-up had to be taken out—he was too similar to Andrew. As it turned out, the line-up was a wash: Nobody could positively identify Andrew Cunanan.

  Even so, Paul Scrimshaw wanted to charge Andrew with the murder of Gianni Versace. Reese’s truck, like Lee Miglin’s Lexus before it, yielded dozens of items of incriminating evidence, from Cunanan’s driver’s license and passport to Lee Miglin’s Lexus insurance certificate to William Reese’s Social Security card. The .40 caliber casings recovered at the scene of Versace’s murder were from the same type of gun that had killed Madson and Reese. That afternoon arrangements were made to deliver the recovered casings and projectile by hand to the FBI lab in Washington in order to compare them with the others Andrew had used, and by the next day the match had been made; the gun used to kill Versace was the same gun that had been used to kill David Madson and William Reese. Scrimshaw felt the circumstantial evidence was strong, but soon learned that it wasn’t strong enough for the state’s attorney’s office. “Michael Band, when we asked him for a warrant on circumstantial evidence ten or twelve hours after the murder, said, ‘I won’t give you a warrant, nor will I prosecute without the gun or a confession.’”

  “I did not want an arrest warrant issued. I did not have a case,” Band says. “I did not have the gun—I had a projectile that matched up to that gun. How do I know that gun wasn’t picked up by somebody else?” Scrimshaw was infuriated, feeling that his investigation was being thwarted because the Versace case was about celebrity and wealth and the state attorneys were stalling on everything. “It added a great deal of pressure to things, because of their presence and the way they wanted it to go.” He wasn’t used to being second-guessed, but just as the police and the media were on two different clocks, the investigators and the state attorneys saw two different realities.

  Florida law has two provisions that work in favor of defendants: the right to a speedy trial within 180 days and one of the most liberal discovery statutes in the country. If Florida were to charge and arrest Andrew, he could demand a speedy trial and might have to be tried in Florida before any other states. Moreover, prosecutors would be barred from introducing his prior crimes (although there might be a slight crossover because he had used the same firearm), and jurors would be instructed to consider the fact that he had no prior convictions when weighing the death penalty. Furthermore, his Florida attorneys would have the right to depose all other witnesses and have access to police reports in the other jurisdictions where he was charged. His lawyers could thereby learn what the other states’ prosecutors were going to use against him, thus exposing their cases in advance. “Early on I made a shot call,” says Band’s colleague, State Attorney Rose Marie Antonacci-Pollock, who spent much of her time at the police station during the investigation. “We wouldn’t be the first ones to trial.”

  Late Tuesday afternoon a second press release was issued, explaining that a photo line-up of possible suspects was in preparation, and asking for media “discretion when releasing information that may later adversely affect the outcome of this investigation.” There was little chance of that. As Sergeant George Navarro says, “The media was cut-throat; they never cared about the c
ase.” They cared only about the story. Finally, at 8:30 P.M., a third press release admitted what had been known for almost ten hours: The police were looking for Andrew Cunanan, “27-year-old white male, 5′9″, 5′10″, brown hair and brown eyes. Cunanan’s known to be a male prostitute servicing affluent clientele. Cunanan is well educated, dresses well and is very articulate. Cunanan should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.”

  I FIRST HEARD that Versace had been shot from my husband, who called from the NBC News Washington bureau. I waited at home in Washington, D.C., throughout the day hoping to hear whether a .40 caliber gun had been used. Vanity Fair was doing the final fact-check on a 10,000-word piece I had completed about Andrew and his first four murders, and when the news broke that Versace had been killed at point-blank range by someone wearing a baseball cap and carrying a backpack, I knew it could be Andrew. Moreover, my piece contained—originally in a little throw-away anecdote—the fact that Andrew had met Versace in 1990, at events surrounding a San Francisco Opera production of Richard Strauss’s Capriccio, for which Versace did the costumes. I made the point that Versace was the one big name Andrew, the celebrity hound, actually had met.

  By late afternoon, still having heard no news about Andrew from Miami, I called New York and said they should send me to Miami anyway—just in case. I was told that the story would be mine if Cunanan was really the suspect. But if it turned out someone else had shot Versace, then the story would go to Cathy Horyn, who had just written the Vanity Fair article about Donatella Versace in South Beach. We both made plans to go.

  Before the final police announcement on Tuesday night, Kerry Sanders of CNBC mentioned that the killer had used a .40 caliber gun. That was it for me; I knew Andrew had struck again. By Wednesday morning, the opening shot of the Today Show was live from Miami Beach in front of Versace’s mansion, signifying that Versace’s murder would be the number-one news story of the day. On my way to the airport, I broke the news on the Today Show that Cunanan and Versace had at least met before, which the Versace family immediately denied. With the official announcement that Andrew Cunanan was the suspect, the story now was on two tracks: the bottled-up investigation and the killer’s personality. Who was Andrew Cunanan? Few knew, and luckily I had just spent two months trying to find out.