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Gianni Versace was not for the faint of heart. You didn't wear a Versace dress if you didn't want to be seen.
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Gianni Versace was a true original. Life always came with fireworks. I don't think there was a model that wasn't in love with him.
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He was on top of a mountain. Andrew Cunanan lusted for a taste of that world. Versace seemed to personify a lot that he wanted to be.
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He always had a big want list, you know, oh, I want that, I would like that. What was he willing to do to get it?
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He looked at me and he said, you have no idea what I'm capable of. There was a rug that was rolled up and there was a body inside.
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He killed the guy for his truck. And Annen really became their prime and only suspect.
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By that time, he was far away. It seemed like we were always one step behind him.
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Andrew just walked up right behind him and shot him. We just turned on shot. Johnny Versace.
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A lot of things that were left unanswered. He was determined to be remembered. The only way to be remembered is to kill for fame.
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He was willing to kill for fame. Once there was a true genius who conquered the capitals of fashion and earned worldwide fame.
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And once there was a man who earned fame another way. This is the story of how brilliance met bitter envy.
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Of how, and maybe why, the bright light that was Johnny Versace was snuffed by a failure named Andrew Cunanan.
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He was fixated by celebrity. He was determined to be remembered. And what Cunanan killed was indeed true magic.
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No one understood that, magic or the power of fame, the pull of celebrity, quite like Johnny Versace.
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That was the hottest ticket in town. He was a major, major star. So other stars would want to go and be there.
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Yes. All of them dying to see Versace's latest surprise. He dispensed with the tailored suits and shoulder pads and baggy pants of the 80s.
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And set out to celebrate the body. Suddenly everything went sexy. Everything went sexy and it had colors and it was loud.
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It was different. Legendary model Beverly Johnson watched from the runway as Versace exploded on the world.
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You know, even the name had that kind of appeal, Versace. Versace, his big brother Santo and little sister Donatella, were born on the very toe of the boot of Italy.
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Growing up, literally, among the ruins of the ancient Roman Empire, his parents were modest, hard-working people.
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Versace learned of the knee of his dressmaker mother, learned that every stitch mattered, that quality was paramount.
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He was 25 when he set out for the capital of Italian culture, Milan. This was the Versace house.
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It's here we met Antonio D'Amico, Versace's partner in life and in business. So here is, I see the Medusa there.
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Yeah, yeah, on the door. He told us the story behind Versace's logo, the Medusa,
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and how Johnny spotted it right on the front door of his new house. It was already there.
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And that was the idea for the logo. It was the idea to keep the Medusa as a logo.
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What did Medusa say to you? Medusa, you know, it's a seduction. Something that you look at you and you cannot take off your eyes.
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Yeah, you can't look away. That's why seduction is like, and that was the fashion of the sage seduction.
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A myth. Whoever looks on the face of Medusa turns to stone. In reality, the fashions behind that logo were impossible not to look at.
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Ballet empresarios, movie directors, rock stars came running. Elton John became a friend.
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And remember Miami Vice? In its final season, the stars wore Versace. Some of these photographs of famous people in those clothes are iconic.
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They're world famous still. like Princess Diana in that blue sheath. She didn't want to wear like an English old style,
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so she asked Johnny to make dresses for her. His fashion shows made history, like the one in 1991 with Cindy Crawford,
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Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington, all on the same runway.
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Unforgettable, said the noted fashion journalist Hal Rubenstein. The music was amazing. The color was amazing.
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The men and women were breathtaking. This was him. This is how he wanted you to see life.
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Life always came with fireworks. Johnny Versace was not for the faint of heart. Right.
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Because when you put that on, from the time you walk out of your door, all eyes are on you.
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Well, there were some famous ones, too, right? Oh, yeah. The safety pins. Elizabeth Hurley, 1994, had her boyfriend Hugh Grant's movie premiere.
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She wasn't really a star back then, but she was after she wore the Versace safety pin dress.
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It was a celebration of the woman body and really being proud of your sexuality And Versace wasn just a brilliant designer An openly gay man he became a champion for a community badly in need of one
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by embracing his sexuality and showing others they could too. It's even more amazing to realize what he did when you realize why and when he did it.
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And especially in America, having come through the 80s when AIDS was so devastating.
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We became terrified of sex. But not Versace. His designs made a statement. Be bold.
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Be brave. I loved the audacity of what he did. I loved his fearlessness. He's not apologizing to anyone.
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It's a force to be reckoned with. Fantastic. He talked to Katie Couric about his fashion philosophy when he visited the Today Show in 1996.
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It's very important for people to look themselves, to express themselves. that's the only heart in fashion to be yourself and i think we designer have to help people to
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be glamorous happy and alive by 1997 he was getting ready to take his company to a new level
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this was an auspicious time in versace's life maureen north covered the versace case for vanity
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fair he wanted to be the very first italian designer to get on the new york stock exchange
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and he was getting his whole business ready for an IPO. Taking his company public.
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He was on top of a mountain. He was happy as can be. Everything was right. Everything was going right.
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So, having met the money men in New York, Gianna Versace retreated to his luxurious mansion in Miami Beach,
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blissfully unaware that the name Versace would soon again be splashed across headlines,
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put there by a killer intent on stealing the fame of a genius, and who, even now, was eluding police as he drove inexorably toward his destiny.
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A very different path to fame. Andrew spent time with wealthier men who could help keep him in a life that he aspired to.
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A life that would take on one strange turn after another. He looked at me and he said, Stacy, you have no idea what I'm capable of.
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Around the world in San Diego, and a lifestyle away from the Versace empire, Andrew Cunanan started small, but also had designs on doing big things.
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Andrew was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he was raised as if he was.
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He was the adored baby fourth child, and he was treated like a little emperor. Maureen Orth, a Dateline consultant, wrote the book on Cunanan, Vulgar Favors.
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He was the product of an extremely dysfunctional family, a very unhappy marriage,
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marriage, a Filipino father who is incredibly materialistic and pretentious, and a Sicilian
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mother who was sort of beaten down by the father who had her own mental health issues.
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Andrew adored his father, mostly ignored his mother, and focused on getting what he wanted
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for himself, according to his close friend Stacy Lopez. He always had a big want list, you know, oh, I want that, I would like that.
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Fancy car? Yes, and I think going to a school like Bishop's, you know, some kids drove to school in a Lamborghini.
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The exclusive Bishop's School in Ritzy, La Jolla. Andrew's father pinched pennies to send him here.
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To get in, Andrew wrote this admissions essay, illustrating just how much he wanted it, too, despite the misspellings.
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I long look forward to my tour and interview at Bishop's, envisioning classrooms and teachers the like of Mr. Chips and Miss Jean Brody.
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I was not disappointed. He knew even then that flattery will get you somewhere. Roman Jimenez, a freelance journalist, was editor of Update, a San Diego gay and lesbian newspaper.
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He had brains and he had looks and he had charm. I remember when he came to school, you know, he just had such a big personality.
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Even at that stage, huh? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I thought he was very brave because back in the early 80s, generally people were not openly gay, and he was.
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Out and proud, but never at home. Due to religious reasons, he felt his family would not be as accepting.
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He hid his homosexuality from his family forever. But Andrew and Stacey accepted each other unconditionally, as his inscription in her yearbook attests.
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Can you read that? Sure. Thanks. It's too bad I'm gay or I'd be madly in love with you.
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Love always, Andrew. Andrew started dating at bishops, but not boys his own age.
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Andrew spent time with wealthier men who could help keep him in a life that he aspired to.
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He was a boy toy. Sure. A boy toy who liked to show off the gifts he received. He had come to the dance in this red leather jumpsuit.
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Oh, boy. And I remember going, wow, Andrew. He says, yes, my boyfriend Anthony bought it for me.
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Stacy liked to tease Andrew about his dating choices. I said, oh, so who's your sugar daddy now?
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And he was like, wouldn't you like to know? At Bishop's, Andrew cruised along academically.
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Most of us had to study but you never saw him in the library studying Coasted through Exactly So was it a prophecy when on graduation in 1987 he was voted most likely to be remembered
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He just had a very dynamic personality and was very funny and everybody loved him.
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After bishops, Andrew tried college. But the boy who coasted through high school found UC San Diego altogether too demanding and costly.
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So he bailed. There were problems at home, too. Andrew's father, a stockbroker, was accused in a civil lawsuit of embezzling $100,000.
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And he fled the country, left his family, never came back. Without telling them, he sold their house out from under them.
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He took the money and he went to the Philippines and completely abandoned them. Andrew was now on his own
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and he turned to the older men he knew could support him. He cruised Hillcrest, San Diego's gay area
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and fell deeper into his world of sugar daddies who took care of his financial needs.
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I think Andrew grew up thinking that maybe the world owed him a living and he didn't really have to work for things.
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For the older men in his life and others Andrew invented a new identity for himself
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Andrew De Silva and made up stories about a gilded past, about accomplishments that never were,
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and impressed those men by appearing well-read and cultured, told them he loved art and opera.
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So Andrew was moving in more elite circles now and traveling. He went to the San Francisco Opera House in 1990,
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and a chance meeting afterwards would change his life and change history. That meeting was with Johnny Versace, who was in San Francisco designing costumes as the sketch shows for the opera Capriccio.
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There was a party where Versace was going to appear and Andrew's friends scored some tickets.
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And so during the party, he claimed and other people claimed that Andrew met Versace.
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Mind you, Antonio, remember him, Versace's partner? He was at the party and claimed that meeting never happened.
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But Andrew's excitement was off the charts. He couldn't contain himself with some of his friends.
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He jumped on the foot of their bed and said, I met Versace, I met Versace, I met Versace.
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He was so thrilled that he had done it. He admired everything the superstar designer had achieved.
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fame, fortune, and freedom as a confident gay man. But there was one difference as big as a runway is
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long. Andrew Cunanan wasn't willing to work for any of it. And that meant disappointment and trouble
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might lay ahead. I remember he looked at me and he said, Stacy, you have no idea what I'm capable of.
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As Versace's star rises, Cunanan finds a spotlight of his own. Andrew would come here almost every night.
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He would hold court here. He pretended to the whole world he was this rich kid living off a trust fund.
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In the 1990s, almost anyone might have gotten a little thrill meeting the fabulous Gianni Versace.
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But Andrew Cunanan? Something more than that for him. Versace seems to be somebody that he studied a lot, because Versace seemed to personify a lot that he wanted to be.
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But in 1991, when Versace was launching his fall line at dazzling supermodel studded event,
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Andrew had dropped out of college and was working a menial job at a drugstore he was also dealing party drugs to his pals
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in six years everyone would know his name but in 1991 Andrew Cunanan was living in obscurity
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and scratching around for his next meal ticket Andrew didn't like to work really hard
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but he liked nice things I fully expected him to be in a relationship with somebody older that was catering to his needs.
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Sure enough, in 1994, Cunanan scored. He was still posing as Andrew DeSilva when he met a wealthy older man who seemed, for a time, happy to pay the bills.
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He's kept by this really rich guy, Norman Blatchford, who gives him an infinity to drive around.
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Now Andrew was living in a beachfront condo in pricey La Jolla. This new relationship put Cunanan in rarefied company of the sort he liked a lot.
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Norman Blatsford belonged to a very secretive, very affluent gay fraternity called Gamamoo.
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They would have these very lavish meals and brunches and dances. And when he wasn't brunching and dancing with the older guys,
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He liked hanging out with the beautiful young crowd in the Hillcrest neighborhood, San Diego's gay place to see and be seen.
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This bar right here flicks. Maureen Orth learned a lot about Andrew Cunanan when she came here.
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Andrew would come here almost every night. He would put people together here. He would hold court here.
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He was the life of the party, and every night was a party. And he would just sort of sit and watch and see if there are any new cute guys in town.
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And he would be the first guy to know who they were and like start presenting them around Like a non man about town Yeah Didn seem to have any interest in having a job or a career of any kind No I think he pretended to the whole world he was this rich kid living off a trust fund and he didn need to work
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And for some reason, people bought his story. Jeff Trail, for instance, an upstanding guy who became Andrew's friend.
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Jeff Trail was the all-American boy, a graduate of the Naval Academy, politically conservative.
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He hated drugs. He didn't drink. One of Jeff's closest friends was John Wainwright.
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People liked Jeff. He just had a lot going on for him. Jeff was very tentative about coming out. He never came out to his family.
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The friendship worked for a while. And while Jeff shied away from drugs, Andrew didn't.
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Desperate to be noticed, he'd do almost anything, legal or not. So he became the drug dealer. He became the procurer. He became the guy who connected people together.
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And he was the one who always picked up the dinner tab. With Norman's money, of course. But in 1995, as Norman's kept man, Andrew met a handsome young architect named David Madsen and fell in love.
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I think that David was a kind of a do-gooder, lovely human being. Everybody remembers him from his small town.
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But David, according to Maureen Orth, did have a weakness for material things, which Andrew was only too happy to cater to.
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He gave him fancy Cartier watch and fancy suits, and David always accepted his gifts.
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And Andrew was on top of the world, finally living the good life he felt entitled to.
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This was the best it would ever get. Didn't they call him the mayor of Hillcrest?
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That was one of the titles, and he reveled in it. because it was the center of attention.
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But, and this is no surprise, Andrew Cunanan's happiness was built on a fragile foundation.
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For months, he juggled his benefactor, Norman, and his lover, David, until in the fall of 1996, the man with the money got wise.
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Andrew wanted a Mercedes, and he tells Norman that unless he can have a Mercedes, he's going to walk out.
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And Norman says, OK, go ahead. And Norman let him walk, which stunned him. So that took away a big piece of his income.
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And that mattered to Andrew. It absolutely mattered because, you know, that's who he was.
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Norman's rejection began a kind of implosion. John Wainwright saw it. Andrew started to let himself go.
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He was looking unkempt, which was so unlike Andrew. And then, like a line of dominoes, his social world came tumbling down.
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The love of his life, David Madsen, broke up with him. His friend, Jeff Trail, moved on, told friends they'd had a falling out.
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And the mayor of Hillcrest began a rapid decline. When the allowance went away, there were lots of reports that surfaced about him during this time being more heavily involved in the drug trade.
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Harder stuff now, like crystal meth. At some point, as he became more and more unhappy, I think he also became more dependent.
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And of course, crystal meth brings you up, but crystal meth also takes you down.
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And as Maureen Orth discovered, Andrew developed a taste from violent sex. The S&M part of this was very disturbing to me because I spoke to FBI profilers who told me that for certain people,
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if they don't have real relationships of any kind in their life and then they depend on this to excite them,
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then the fantasies have to escalate. And he was just living off a diet of porn magazines, S&M porn videos.
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They were always around him all the time. And getting more and more intense all the time.
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And getting more and more intense. By early 1997, both Jeff Trail and David Madsen had moved away,
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both coincidentally to Minneapolis. And a rootless and unwanted Andrew Cunanan had gotten fat and puffy.
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He had told me that he was very depressed. and he's like, I'm fat and I don't look good
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and nobody's going to want me. And when he picked up a fashion magazine now, he read about all the things he didn't have, would never have.
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He could read about Elton John's glittering 50th birthday party in London, for instance, where Johnny Versace was a guest.
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That is when, in his own small world in San Diego, Cunanan planned a party of his own.
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A last supper with his few remaining friends. Told them he was moving to San Francisco.
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But the first... He was going to Minneapolis to settle some business, as he put it.
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But it's clear now, Andrew Cunanan wasn't planning any move to San Francisco. What his friends couldn't have known
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was that he'd bought a one-way ticket to Minneapolis. Whatever happened there, he had no intention of coming back.
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I spoke to the waiter from the restaurant, and at the end of the meal, he remembers Andrew Cunanan leaning back in his chair and looking at his friends and saying,
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all of you think you know the real Andrew, but none of you really know the truth.
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A mystery in Minneapolis. There was a rug that was rolled up and you could see that there was a body inside.
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Andrew Cunanan shed his life in San Diego like a man planning to die. He gave his clothes.
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He gave his shoes away. He had it all marked out about who he wanted to have what.
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By the time he left San Diego for the last time and came to Minneapolis, he was completely, basically broke.
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And angry. And very, very angry. Reeling from the loss of his benefactor, Cunanan landed in Minneapolis.
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And this is where it all began to go wrong. He first called on his old friend, Jeff Trail.
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Jeff may have sensed Cunanan's visit wouldn't go well. In fact, Jeff called John Wainwright in San Diego to talk about it.
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I could just tell that there was apprehension in his voice. He definitely wasn't happy about it, but at the same time, you know, he invited Andrew to stay with him.
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Why would he do that? I think he knew Andrew was on this downward spiral as well.
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So just trying to be a friend, being supportive. Jeff left Andrew in his apartment while he and his boyfriend went away for the weekend.
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On Sunday, Andrew moved to his ex-lover David Madsen's fourth floor loft in the city's eclectic warehouse district
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and persuaded Jeff to drop by for a visit. Sometime in the next hour or so, a neighbor reported hearing somebody yell,
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get the F out of here, and heard banging. The neighbor peered into the hallway, saw nothing, and the building went quiet again.
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But next morning, neither Jeff Trail nor David Madsen showed up at work. Jeff's boyfriend called the police and the police were just said, oh, give me a break.
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You know, we don't pay attention unless people are missing for at least 72 hours.
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By Tuesday, worried friends persuaded the building manager to unlock ex-lover David's apartment.
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David's dog darted out as the open door revealed something horrifying. In the main room, there was a rug that was rolled up, and you could see that there was a body inside.
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Dale Barsness, chief of the Minneapolis Homicides Unit. Blood splattering on the wall and on the floor.
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He'd been bludgeoned with, we found out later, a hammer. Police assume David Madsen was the victim.
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After all, it was his apartment. But when crime techs unrolled the rug, they found Jeff Trail.
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The attack was brutal and personal. 27 blows to the head and face and chest. David and his red Jeep Cherokee were missing.
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Friends of both Madsen and Trail told police someone named Andrew was visiting from San Diego, but he too had vanished.
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So if Madsen wasn't the victim, thought the police, maybe he and this Andrew killed Jeff.
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Evidence of the scene pointed police to a possible motive. Duct tape, some handcuffs, you know, stuff that people involved in sex would use.
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It could have been a love triangle of sorts. Witnesses even reported to the police they saw David and Andrew together after the time of the murder.
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Neighbors saw them walking the dog. It means David was with Andrew and did not appear to be trying to escape.
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Police believe at this time David and Andrew Cunanan are together, are together willingly, and are on the run.
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Minneapolis newspaper reporters Jim Walsh and Chris Graves started digging and quickly heard a different story from David's friends who didn't buy the love triangle motive.
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Everybody who knows David says that can't be true. It's not in his DNA. It's not who he is.
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The reporters talked to those who said they too saw David and Andrew with the dog.
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But it looked like David had been crying. David was described moody, a bit withdrawn, and sort of grumpy, I think is the word that people used.
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It just didn't seem right. Friends who knew David's dog walking routine insisted there was no way he was home at the time of Jeff's murder.
00:28:04
Madsen walks the dog before the 10 o'clock news every night. Right. And so the presumption is that Jeff comes to the house, has to be buzzed in, walks up.
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The door gets open. There is a confrontation at the door because, remember, we know the neighbors here is get out, get out.
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Then sometime after the murder, went the theory, David and the dog returned to the apartment.
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What we presume happens, David, not thinking anything, walks in. and Andrew had rolled up Jeffrey Trellett in the rug and pulled him behind the couch.
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Police searched David's bedroom and found Andrew's duffel bag. Inside was an empty gun holster and .40 caliber bullets, but no gun.
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Did that mean David and Andrew were now armed? Investigators certainly suspected David and Andrew killed Jeff Trell.
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Yet they issued no bulletin for David's missing Jeep. No, be on the lookout for either one of those men.
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It was the beginning of what Maureen Orth would later call the largest failed manhunt in U.S. history.
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It's just one hapless mistake after another. And four days after they found Jeff Trail's bludgeoned body.
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We're going up to East Rush Lake. It would take 30 to 40 minutes to drive from Minneapolis.
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Saturday, May 3rd, Chisago County Deputy Chris Hendrickson was called to work on his day off.
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Fishing season was starting, and two men scouting a prime spot found a dead man instead.
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He was well-dressed. He wasn't dirty. He didn't appear to be in a fight. He had a defensive wound in his hand and then a gunshot wound to his head.
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The police confirmed the victim by the lake was David Madsen And I said whoa wait a minute This just changes everything A caliber gun killed Madsen
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Shell casings matched the ammunition found in Cunanan's duffel bag in David's apartment.
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By this time, police knew the missing gun from the holster belonged to Jeff Trail,
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that Andrew had stolen it from Trail's apartment. An alert was now posted for Madsen's red Jeep and for the man they now feared.
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was a double murderer. That's when I believe Andrew Kananen really became their prime and only suspect.
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And by that time, he's far away. And it was already too late for victim number three.
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A killer who makes himself right at home. Whomever was in the home had helped themselves to ham some ice cream.
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they had gone upstairs and shaved. Chicago. This is where America's romance with skyscrapers
00:31:14
began more than a century ago. A romance that's called Dreamers ever since. When I saw that Sears Tower building,
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I said, you know, that looks pretty good. I think I can do that. Paul Beichler made it happen when he joined forces with developer Lee Miglin four decades ago.
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We were giants, and we didn't realize it. We were moving at a lightning speed and changing the skyline literally overnight.
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You two were tied at the hip. Yeah, he was my best friend. He was a person that I spent five days a week with, 12 hours a day.
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He was just that close. As their company prospered, Migland organized an annual thank you ceremony with a symbol for the employees, a special gold coin.
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And he said, you know, people can hold that gold in their hands and they can say, this job got me this gold.
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At the same time, Migland's wife Marilyn was building her own empire, a cosmetics line popular on the home shopping network.
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She and Lee were a perfect couple, a perfect team. They worked together very, very well.
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And then one Sunday morning, when Marilyn flew home from an appearance on Home Shopping Network,
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Lee wasn't at the airport as planned. At their townhouse on Chicago's fashionable Gold Coast, her worry turned to alarm.
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No sign of Lee. And then down the alley behind his house, a neighbor found Lee Miglin, dead in his garage.
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Marilyn called Paul Bytler. I was frozen. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
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It didn't dawn on me to ask what happened or how he was murdered or when, only that I had just lost the most important person next to my family in my life.
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Beitler rushed to the Meeglin home and headlong into chaos. It was like a three-ring circus.
00:33:09
In the front yard were all the news media with the lights blaring. Investigators could see that this was not a typical robbery homicide.
00:33:17
Lee's Lexus was gone, as were clothes and more than $2,000. The killer had left evidence, looked like he'd spent the night.
00:33:27
Whomever was in the home had helped themselves to some food in the refrigerator,
00:33:33
some ham, some ice cream, that they had gone upstairs and shaved. Apparently the bristles from his beard were on the floor.
00:33:43
But the most disturbing evidence... There are aspects of the homicide that indicate that there was some torture that occurred.
00:33:52
More than some, much more. He practically slid his whole throat with a bow saw. He put him in a kind of an S&M mask with just two holes for the nostrils.
00:34:04
After he had been repeatedly stabbed, he'd been battered. There was so much hatred and so much anger in that murder.
00:34:13
Suddenly widowed, Marilyn Biglin made a public plea for information leading to the killer.
00:34:17
What do you say about a man you loved passionately for 38 years? A man who exemplified courage and honor and dignity.
00:34:30
Thousands packed Holy Name Cathedral to pay respects to the widely admired member of the Chicago establishment.
00:34:37
But days were going by, and the investigation was going nowhere. until police stumbled on a red Jeep parked literally around the corner from the Midland townhouse.
00:34:49
You have a red Jeep Cherokee that's got three tickets on it and nobody bothers to check the bin number or anything until the fourth ticket after four days or five days.
00:34:58
When the number came back a match to David Madsen's missing Jeep, reporters Chris Graves and Jim Walsh, who'd been covering the murders in Minnesota,
00:35:07
began reporting on the Chicago case, too. The question right away was, what's the connection between Cunanan and Lee Megland, who is an extremely wealthy, older man?
00:35:17
Beitler tried to stop the media speculation. We'd really like to make this known. The family does not know Cunanan.
00:35:25
There's been no connection with the family whatsoever. Then Beitler discovered a few Chicago police were leaking tips to the media.
00:35:33
What did they say? They drew an inference that Lee was known to be involved in the gay community in Chicago.
00:35:44
Beitler, a major contributor to then-Mayor Richard Daly's campaigns, called the police superintendent to shut that down, too.
00:35:52
I said this is a character assassination that going on right now If you have evidence that you can bring forward that shows that what your detectives are offering to the media is true then let see it
00:36:05
It didn't take much on the part of the various people within the police department to realize
00:36:11
that there was no upside to this investigation, that if they got out in front of this thing too far
00:36:20
and they made mistakes, this could be a career changer. It appeared the investigation withered, said Maureen North.
00:36:53
supposed to be a random crime. In a statement to Dateline, the Chicago Police Department said,
00:36:59
in part, we stand behind the work of department investigators who base their conclusion on
00:37:05
verifiable facts and evidence. Yet, in 1997, Minneapolis reporter Jim Walsh flew to San Diego
00:37:13
and thought he found a connection between Lee Miglin and Andrew Cunanan. I interviewed a bookstore
00:37:18
owner who said that Andrew Cunanan was friends with Duke Miglin, Lee Miglin's son. Duke was a
00:37:29
small-time actor in Hollywood, and he said Cunanan always talked about Duke Miglin, talked about him
00:37:35
all the time, that he knew him well, they played tennis together. But less than 24 hours later,
00:37:41
the bookstore owner denied he'd ever heard about Duke Miglin directly from Cunanan.
00:37:46
Back in Chicago, Duke McGlin addressed the rumors with his father's staff. And he was very forthright, and he said,
00:37:54
Look, I will tell you the truth. The truth is, no, I don't know Cunanan. I haven't been engaged with Cunanan.
00:38:02
But by then, Andrew Cunanan had escaped another dead man in his wake, flush with Lee McGlin's cash at the wheel of McGlin's Lexus,
00:38:12
which was his first miscalculation. that fancy Lexus was equipped with a cell phone that could be traced.
00:38:23
Police tipped their hand. Authorities had confirmed to the Chicago media that the FBI was tracking Andrew in Lee Miglin's car.
00:38:32
That immediately went out all over the airwaves. And Cunanan was listening. He realized he had to get out of that car
00:38:39
and had to find a place where he could get a vehicle. Johnny Versace not only designed fashions for sexy and elegant supermodels,
00:39:02
he made clothes that everyone could wear. In May 1997, he was unveiling his ready-to-wear collection on a runway in Istanbul.
00:39:11
And what was Andrew Cunanan doing that May? He was running away. He had a big jump on the Chicago police who had taken three days to figure out he killed Lee Miglin and those two men in Minnesota.
00:39:27
Police now realized an extremely dangerous killer was careening across the country.
00:39:32
And they put the word out. Police say the missing Lexus is Black Jade Pearl. Cunanan was driving east in the fancy Lexus he'd stolen from Miglin.
00:39:41
but had no idea that the car's built-in phone was pinging off cell towers. More that by Friday, May 9th, he'd picked up a tail.
00:39:50
The FBI. Cell phone surveillance was primitive back then and lacked pinpoint targeting,
00:39:58
but agents were closing in. But that was when something really bad happened. The Chicago authorities had confirmed to the Chicago media
00:40:08
that the FBI was tracking Andrew in Lee Miglin's car. That immediately went out all over the airwaves.
00:40:15
In Philadelphia, police say a cellular phone was activated from the stolen Lexus taken from murder victim Lee Miglin.
00:40:21
Andrew obviously heard it. He couldn't miss it at that stage. He couldn't. In her book, Maureen Orth called the police leak,
00:40:28
tipping off Kunan and, quote, probably the most serious blunder of the entire manhunt.
00:40:34
He then tried to destroy the antenna of the car. He tried to rip out the phone, but the phone box was in the trunk of the car, which he didn't know.
00:40:44
But in any case, he realized he had to get out of that car and had to find a place where he could get a vehicle.
00:40:51
A place where he could fly under the radar, way off the beaten path, where no one would know he was coming with a gun.
00:41:01
He drove through miles of marshland before finding this unlikely spot, a Civil War burial ground, Finns Point National Cemetery in Pensville, New Jersey.
00:41:12
If I gave you directions or told you to put it in your GPS, you probably would not be able to find it.
00:41:17
Alan Cummings is the Pensville police chief. In 1997, he was a 32-year-old patrolman.
00:41:23
I've never heard of Andrew Kanan before that date. Neither had this man William Reese, 45 years old
00:41:31
The caretaker of the cemetery He was a kind and gentle man Said his wife Rebecca
00:41:36
She spoke with us in 1997 He was the kind of husband who would keep a list The entire year of things you said you wanted
00:41:43
So at Christmas time He had them When my mom and I had off from school We would always go see my dad
00:41:50
And his rock place Surprise him with picnics I love being in the cemetery because I was with my father Troy Reese was adopted by William and Rebecca when he was six They raised him with love and special nurturing
00:42:05
He'd been born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Troy said William taught him to never give up.
00:42:11
Every time I fell on my bike, he would encourage me to get up, keep trying, never quit.
00:42:17
Bruise after bruise until I got it finally right. That Friday, 12-year-old Troy was waiting for his father to pick him up from school.
00:42:26
But he didn't show up. And then my mom said, let's go look for your dad. At the cemetery, Rebecca noticed her husband's red Chevy pickup truck was gone.
00:42:39
In its place, a black Lexus with Illinois plates. Parked in front of the garage.
00:42:44
I could see a look in her eyes that a kid never wants to see because she knew something was wrong.
00:42:52
They walked to William's office. The door was wide open. We went upstairs, searched for him, then we went to the middle floor, searched for him.
00:43:02
The only place they didn't look was the basement. From what my mom told me, there was a Holy Spirit guarding her away from the basement.
00:43:12
She contacted the local police, and we sent an officer down there to look for him.
00:43:18
And there he was, William Reese, shot once in the back of the head. When my mom was crying, I knew something bad happened to my dad.
00:43:29
She told me, your dad's never coming home, but he's in a better place than heaven.
00:43:35
Troy asked to watch his mother's interview from back in 97. He had never seen it.
00:43:41
And at that point, I think my entire world and my son's world began to crumble. This would not be Troy's only loss.
00:43:51
His mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2005, forcing him to fend for himself at age 19.
00:43:59
I just wish we could have a happy family like we once had when I was a kid. The different police agencies, lacking coordination, had been slow to understand how dangerous and apparently desperate Andrew Cunanan was.
00:44:16
But they realized it now. The FBI has now joined local law enforcement agencies in San Diego, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New Jersey in the search for Cunanan.
00:44:26
They could piece it all together because Cunanan left so much evidence of the cemetery.
00:44:32
In the basement, a shell casing from the same .40-caliper gun that killed David Madsen.
00:44:38
Outside, Lee Miglin's Lexus. And inside the car, his credit cards and a bloody screwdriver evidently used in his brutal stabbing.
00:44:46
The Pensville PD was now part of the manhunt, but Chief Alan Cummings wonders today, as he did then,
00:44:52
whether William Reese's murder could have been prevented. We had found out that the Philadelphia police was aware of him being in the area,
00:45:01
but our police department was not advised of him possibly being in our vicinity.
00:45:05
What if the information was put out to our community? Maybe we could have prevented this horrible tragedy.
00:45:11
One of the things about this investigation is that there were so many different police entities
00:45:16
and for a long time they didn't cooperate sufficiently. And because of that, by Friday night, Cunanan had escaped another murder scene
00:45:26
and sped away in Reese's red Chevy pickup truck with jersey plates. Which could be probably fairly easily identified.
00:45:34
Yes, but he stopped in South Carolina in a Walmart parking lot. He stole somebody's license plate to switch out Reese's license plate.
00:45:43
Clever? No, mostly lucky. The stolen Carolina plate was never reported missing. And now the red pickup truck was in the clear.
00:45:53
And Andrew Cunanan was in the wind. A killer who likes to party. He was lying low during the day.
00:46:03
He was out at night. Up to his old tricks. He brought one guy in and he was wearing a Cartier bracelet.
00:46:09
And when he left, he was no longer wearing it. Andrew Cunanan was hurtling down the East Coast.
00:46:28
Wanted now in four murders, some of them quite grisly. And police, slow to realize who he was, had no idea where he was.
00:46:38
So they sounded the alarm. and after William Reese was shot to death just for his car,
00:46:45
the national media jumped all over the story. Police say there's a serial killer loose in the country tonight
00:46:51
and law enforcement officials are racing against time. With murders in three states,
00:46:56
the FBI was now overseeing the Cunanan case and no one seemed safe after the random murder of victim number four.
00:47:05
New York City, two hours from Pennsville, New Jersey, was on high alert, particularly in the gay community.
00:47:11
Cunanan could be in New York or on the way to New York. He seems to be targeting gay men.
00:47:17
But he was nowhere near Manhattan. In fact, he was 1,300 miles away, heading for another popular island.
00:47:27
On the night of May 11th, Cunanan quietly slipped into Miami Beach in that stolen pickup truck with its switched-out plates.
00:47:34
Andrew Cunanan came here to South Beach to the crowds the noise the music the looky-loos staring at each other strange place to come for a man who had to know
00:47:45
he was a subject of a massive manhunt Andrew Cunanan decided to hide in plain sight under an assumed name he shelled out $29.99 plus tax the daily rate
00:48:00
to stay at the Normandy Plaza Hotel, five miles north of the Versace mansion. It may as well have been five million miles, as far as luxury living goes.
00:48:10
The plaza. What was reputation of the place? It was a dump. Correspondent Kerry Sanders covered the story for NBC News.
00:48:19
You'd drive by and maybe even lock the door and roll the window up when you drove by.
00:48:23
It was just a nasty place. Which is why it's now out of business and boarded up.
00:48:30
Back then, it was a good place to hide out, especially for an unconventional tourist choosing to avoid the sun and live in the shadows.
00:48:40
He was lying low during the day. He was out at night. He was an easy guy to blend in. He was half Filipino, half Italian. He could have passed for any number of ethnicities.
00:48:50
Once he lived large on a rich man's allowance in an oceanside condo and picked up tabs for pricey dinners. Now?
00:48:59
He's living off of maybe one submarine sandwich a day. And once again, he was doing drugs and turning tricks.
00:49:07
Getting some old guys that probably had some money, and he was robbing, doing petty robbery.
00:49:14
He brought one guy in, and he was wearing a Cartier bracelet, and when he left, he was no longer wearing it.
00:49:18
By mid-June, Cunanan had been in Miami Beach for a month and had settled into his seedy routine of the Normandy.
00:49:25
He wasn't moving, but for some reason he decided his truck needed to. He drove that red pickup truck to this garage, just two blocks from the Versace mansion.
00:49:37
Versace wasn't home. He was preparing with his supermodels to show his fall winter collection at Paris.
00:49:43
Cunanan, in his own way, was also making a big name for himself. The FBI had just put him on its 10 most wanted list,
00:49:52
publicizing it on some relatively new computer technology. He was one of the very first people they ever put up on the Internet as a fugitive.
00:50:01
The FBI had actually received a few tips that Cunanan might be in Florida, but they didn't communicate that to the Miami Beach police.
00:50:09
Well, the FBI is notorious for sharing information one way, and that's from you to them.
00:50:16
Richard Barretta was the Miami Beach police chief 20 years ago. They could have probably done a little better job in sharing information.
00:50:23
Then a possible break, though it had nothing to do with the FBI. America's Most Wanted did a story on Cunanan,
00:50:30
and a counterman at the sub shop near Cunanan's hotel saw it. I looked up and saw his face, and I automatically recognized him from America's Most Wanted.
00:50:41
He dialed 911. He's inside the store now. And they told him to try to delay his order.
00:50:46
Miami Beach police responded within minutes, but it was too late. If it was Cunanan, he'd already taken his tuna, sub, and soda and left.
00:50:56
There was no doubt, however, that it was Cunanan who walked into the Cash on the Beach pawn shop.
00:51:02
Running low on money, he decided to pawn a gold coin. The shop owner, who didn't recognize him, paid him $190.
00:51:11
Cunanan actually signed his own name. And the owner submitted the paperwork to the Miami PD as required by law.
00:51:19
Then Andrew Cunanan returned to the Normandy Plaza, where the closest he got to his past life as bon vivant and cultural wannabe was in fantasy.
00:51:29
He was surrounded by Vogue and Vanity Fair and all these upscale magazines. and he had art books and books of history and architecture
00:51:40
and all the things he all aspired to and that he pretended in his own fantasy world he was part of.
00:51:47
No way of knowing what was in that mind of his. But we do know that the latest Fantasy Fair had just come out.
00:51:55
It had a splashy story and pictorial that featured the richest and gaudiest house in all of South Beach,
00:52:01
owned by a man Cunanan bragged about meeting in better days, Johnny Versace. And the superstar designer was coming home.
00:52:14
Johnny Versace's love affair with Miami Beach. It was mutual. Johnny's face was always big and open and his eyes were always wide.
00:52:23
Remember, he was staring at everybody so he was making eye contact. You're not going to say hello.
00:52:28
But someone had a different greeting in mind. In the late spring of 1997, the fugitive Andrew Cunanan was living in the shadows,
00:52:51
turning tricks, dealing drugs, scratching around for a little sandwich money in Miami Beach.
00:52:56
all while his one-time idol was on top of the world and enjoying a very different kind of life.
00:53:06
May found Gianni Versace in Milan, attending a press conference about his new men's collection.
00:53:12
A stop in Venice for the city's famous art expo. Then, Paris for the premiere of his new Haute Couture line.
00:53:22
The new collection was a smash. I had been to the show in Paris, and it was amazing.
00:53:27
After Paris, Versace and his partner Antonio stopped in New York to make final plans to take his company public.
00:53:35
On July 10th, they joined their friend Hal Rubenstein for a dinner in Manhattan.
00:53:40
Johnny loved to go out to eat. He said he would go eat anything. But frankly, he would only eat at places that basically had some version of pasta.
00:53:46
So he would eat Chinese food because they had lo mein. And then it was time to relax.
00:53:54
He was coming down to South Beach where he often loved to just kick back after having an intense time He loved it It was his playground
00:54:06
Versace's love affair with South Beach, the vibrant gay mecca on the island of Miami Beach,
00:54:11
began five years earlier when the town was enjoying a dazzling revival. That's when he got to know Hal Rubenstein.
00:54:18
Johnny was on his way to Cuba, and his plane, his charter, got delayed about 10 hours.
00:54:23
And so he told the driver to take him someplace that isn't boring. So he took him to the news cafe.
00:54:29
He sat there for about five or ten minutes and was astounded by what he saw. What did he see?
00:54:35
Beauty everywhere. Beauty everywhere. It was the music. It was the roller baiting.
00:54:44
It was the body. It was the beauty. Antonia was with him. Johnny was kind of like, oh, my God.
00:54:51
genius, this place is genius. John Giant took one look at this and basically in about five minutes canceled
00:54:57
his trip. To Cuba? To Cuba. And he said, I want somebody to show me around, show me around, show me around.
00:55:06
Hal was then a New York Times reporter in South Beach denizen. A friend asked him
00:55:12
to give Versace a tour. So what did he say when he came here? Oh, he was deliriously happy. He got to see
00:55:17
people. He got to see people interacting and he loved to watch people flirting and coming on to each other.
00:55:23
There's a certain kind of exhibitionism, I think, that is exhibited in Miami. The fact that everybody's eating outside, that everybody's, like I said, everybody's watching everybody else.
00:55:33
Yep. Versace decided to make it permanent. He set his sights on a tired old Mediterranean villa on Ocean Drive.
00:55:42
It would need a gut renovation, of course. Yeah, it was beautiful. But inside, we have to change things.
00:55:48
So we had, you know, the pool, we had a second part of the house with the garden.
00:55:55
They made it spectacular in a Versace kind of way. He chose every fabric, every bit of furniture, every stone and tile,
00:56:05
insisted on getting it perfect his way, perfectly over the top. And from here he reigned as the crown prince of the new South Beach.
00:56:15
The Today Show came to call in 1994. Yeah, I think it's like a global village here.
00:56:21
Everyone is from Cuba, from New York, from Italy, from Germany. And that is modern to me, the mixture of people.
00:56:29
You don't care if you are black or white. You care just of your heart, of your mind.
00:56:34
It's cool. I like it. And the town loved him right back. People recognize him and say, hello, Mr. Versace, how are you?
00:56:42
Oh, good, good. Thank you. Ciao. He had a very distinctive look, and he's just one of these people who sort of carried himself a certain way.
00:56:49
Johnny's face was always big and open, and his eyes were always wide, and he was, remember, he was staring at everybody, so he was making eye contact.
00:56:56
Now, you're not going to say hello. Of course. Did you worry about him? He was a big star.
00:57:02
Well, I never worry about that. But his brother worried. Santo talked to Johnny about hiring some protection.
00:57:10
So that conversation happened. Yeah, yeah. His brother wanted him to have a body gas.
00:57:15
But he didn't want it. And so there they were in July of 1997, fresh from a whirlwind trip to Europe and Manhattan and home in South Beach.
00:57:25
A rare chance to relax with dinner and a movie. We went to see a movie in Coconut Grove.
00:57:33
And then we started to watch TV. And then he was kind of falling asleep on the couch.
00:57:39
because after 9 o'clock, I was like... But then he'd been pushing himself for weeks.
00:57:49
A good night's sleep was certainly in order. You never know what tomorrow will bring.
00:57:57
Two shots heard round the world. I heard the shot. Something said to me, something happened.
00:58:09
July 15, 1997, a Tuesday. Johnny Versace rose early, and before the heat and humidity became oppressive,
00:58:31
he left the mansion on Ocean Drive and strolled down the street to the news cafe.
00:58:36
A morning ritual. He loved to buy magazines and newspapers and get his coffee. He was, uncommonly, alone.
00:58:44
And reading up on the latest fashion news, his own runway show was over, but not the competitions.
00:58:51
So he went there early because he wanted to see what was going on in Paris in Fashion Week.
00:58:56
Usually we go together. He has to go by himself. You know, he couldn't wait. That same morning, said Maureen Orth,
00:59:04
Andrew Cunanan most likely awoke in the pickup truck he'd stolen from his most recent victim,
00:59:09
the truck he'd parked in a public garage two blocks from the mansion. But now, as the sun heated the air on Ocean Drive,
00:59:16
he stood across from the mansion, watching, waiting. Andrew was wearing a pair of khaki shorts
00:59:23
and a baseball cap and a T-shirt. Just before 8.45 a.m., Johnny walked home, three blocks.
00:59:31
He climbed his coral steps toward his Medusa-logoed front gate, fidgeted with his keys.
00:59:36
had no idea. Andrew just very boldly crossed the street, walked up right behind him
00:59:43
and shot him in the head. Two bullets, execution style, and Andrew turned and walked away.
00:59:51
I heard the shot. My heart stops to beat Something said to me something happened Anyway so I ran out and I saw Johnny lay down on the stairs in the blood
01:00:12
From inside the mansion, Versace's chef called 911. This is Johnny Versace. He was entering his house.
01:00:23
We just heard guns choppy right outside. He's on the steps of the house. There was a woman who had just walked her daughter to school.
01:00:30
She saw it completely, and Andrew just nonchalantly walked fast down the street.
01:00:36
Subject left, he northbound, was running with the gun. What were you doing? I was in charge of the bike squad here on Miami Beach at the time when the call went out.
01:00:45
Howard Zeifman was a sergeant then. He still serves as a reserve officer. What was the situation when you got here?
01:00:51
The rescue had already arrived. I saw that they were working on a gentleman on the steps.
01:00:56
I didn't know at the time. Right here. Right here. Could be anybody walking by, because this was a famous mansion.
01:01:01
People stopped by all the time and took pictures. And one of the officers said, hey, it's Versace.
01:01:06
At 921, Gianni Versace was pronounced dead at the local trauma center. He was 50, murdered in broad daylight.
01:01:15
The Miami Beach Police Department is just blocks from the mansion. It was the hour of shift overlap. The night officers still around.
01:01:25
Chief Richard Barreto. We had a whole lot more policemen on the street than we would have an hour later.
01:01:31
And I asked people as they were walking by, you know, did you see anybody running from here?
01:01:35
Did you see anybody moving in the area? One witness saw a man duck into the 13th Street garage two blocks away.
01:01:41
Do you need a marked unit to the garage? Zeifman and other officers rushed over.
01:01:47
What did you find here on the third level? Truck parked there, out of state plates.
01:01:51
But what looked suspicious was outside the truck. One of my recollection is there was clothes laying on the ground.
01:01:58
Zafeman thought the killer probably changed his clothes to avoid being identified.
01:02:02
How would he have gotten out of here? You can go down the elevator, go down the stairs. People walking out, you just blend in with them.
01:02:09
You didn't catch him, but at least you locked down the island. Locked down the island as quick as we could.
01:02:14
Homicide chief George Navarro was called in. He was taking charge of what would be the biggest case of his career.
01:02:22
I went straight to the scene. It was now just past noon. Blood was still on the steps, but so was a dead bird, and that caused rumors to fly.
01:02:32
Was that a signature of a mafia hit or something? It was, back in the day. Turns out we autopsied the pigeon, and it was just a fragment of the round,
01:02:41
one of the rounds that hit Mr. Versace. He ricocheted and hit the pigeon. It was the first and last time we autoptied a bird.
01:02:48
It was that kind of a story. I quickly realized that this wasn't just another homicide because of the amount of media.
01:02:58
Buonasera, Gianni Versace. The media from around the world is covering the story of murder, mystery, and high fashion.
01:03:08
Versace's murder was, of course, part of a much bigger case. But Navarro, like the rest of his department, knew nothing about it until...
01:03:17
An FBI agent approaches me and says to me, can we talk about this case? I said, sure. What do you got?
01:03:25
He goes, I think we may know someone that may have done this. The FBI man, Cunanan's chief tracker, had eyeballed the shell casings of the scene
01:03:35
and told Navarro they might match Cunanan's other murders. What was it like to hear that story from the FBI agent?
01:03:43
I got goosebumps because now this was bigger than just Johnny Versace getting murdered.
01:03:51
And then he mentioned the last homicide of Mr. William Reese and the red pickup and it clicked.
01:03:59
Navarro knew his guys in the garage were all over a red pickup truck with South Carolina plates that looked suspicious.
01:04:04
So I called my detective that was running that scene at the garage on the radio,
01:04:10
and I asked him to read the VIN number on the vehicle. For Navarro, it was like winning the lottery.
01:04:16
And we made a match. We knew that was Mr. Reese's car. That night, Chief Barreto held a press conference to tell the global media that Andrew Cunanan was the killer
01:04:26
and Johnny Versace was victim number five. Cunanan is known to be a male prostitute who services affluent clientele.
01:04:36
Cunanan is well-educated, well-dressed, and is very articulate. So at the end of day one, Chief Investigator Navarro knew he had his hands full with this slippery killer who'd gotten away four times before.
01:04:50
You try to think like he thinks. It's a cat and mouse game, you know. Our job is to catch him and his job is to elude us.
01:04:58
Cunanan was still at large, armed, desperate, and more dangerous than ever. The Versace family quickly leaves town.
01:05:10
He was cremated immediately, and they left with his ashes, and that was it. Did Cunanan also make a quick getaway?
01:05:20
The director felt that Cunanan wasn't on Miami Beach. He had slipped away. There's a reason July is off-season in Miami Beach.
01:05:44
Temperatures that mirror the humidity and drive all the hardcore sun worshipers inside.
01:05:50
In the days after Johnny Versace died on his mansion's coral steps, Detective George Navarro was most definitely feeling the heat How much pressure was on you Oh incredible Never had that much pressure on me ever Literally working around the clock sleeping two hours three hours
01:06:08
How do you keep going? I was young back then. So much they didn't know. Would he kill again?
01:06:17
Was this a vendetta against people who'd upset him? Was he targeting gay men? Was Versace, the most prominent gay man in town, one of a list?
01:06:27
The Versace family wanted no part of finding out. Versace's family obviously was devastated.
01:06:35
How could they not be? However, they wanted to get him out of there. They got all kinds of privileged treatment, all kinds of protocols were broken.
01:06:46
and he was cremated immediately and they left with his ashes and that was it. The family skipped the Miami Beach memorial service,
01:06:59
which investigators attended, hoping perhaps Cunanan would show up to revel in his kill.
01:07:05
He didn't. The police drag then is intense in South Florida. The 230 investigators now assigned to the case chased more than a thousand leads
01:07:13
in the 18 square miles of Miami Beach. knowing, given the intense coverage, that Cunanan had to be watching their every move.
01:07:22
That's why we had to use runners and cell phones and landlines instead of our radios.
01:07:27
In other words, you're trying to keep the media from finding out because the media would be telling him directly.
01:07:32
Correct. But when you do that, it's kind of a double-edged sword. When you don't give the media what they're looking for, they kind of try to go find it on their own.
01:07:41
That's exactly what Minneapolis reporter Chris Graves did. She followed the Cunanan Trail first to Chicago, then Miami,
01:07:52
and here discovered a missed clue. So I'm in South Beach. There was a strip mall in the near vicinity,
01:07:59
and I just start going door to door to door to door to ask people if they knew Andrew Cunanan.
01:08:05
At Cash on the Beach Pawn Shop, Graves hit the jackpot. This woman came up and said, yeah, we know him.
01:08:15
I said, what? What? It was the shop where Cunanan had pawned that gold coin, signed his real name on the pawn slip,
01:08:25
gave the Normandy Plaza address, and provided his fingerprint. The guy doesn't look like a serial killer.
01:08:32
And remember, as required by law, the pawn shop sent police the transaction. They got it five days before the murder.
01:08:41
Lo and behold, the South Beach police had a copy of that pawn slip days before Gianna Versace was dead.
01:08:49
So could they have prevented the murder? Up in Chicago, Paul Beitler read Grave's story.
01:08:56
And do you remember finding out about this coin being found? Oh, I couldn't believe it.
01:09:01
I knew immediately what those gold coins were. In fact, they were probably the coins that I had actually handed to Lee Miglin.
01:09:09
So that coin tied Cunanan to Lee Miglin's murder and revealed where he was hiding in Miami Beach.
01:09:17
That is, if police had been looking. But before the murder, they weren't, even though Cunanan was on the FBI's most wanted list.
01:09:26
Took a beating over the pawn shop, rightfully so. Because the one officer whose job was to check pawn slips didn't get to it.
01:09:34
He was assigned elsewhere that week. So he was sitting on his desk for almost a week.
01:09:39
What did that detective feel like when he realized what had happened? It felt terrible, but it's that old Murphy's Law again,
01:09:45
and a very antiquated system that we had back then. But the pawn shop discovery did point Detective Navarro to that run-down hotel, the Normandy Plaza.
01:09:56
Let's talk to everybody. Let's interview all the employees. Show pictures of Andrew. Nobody's ever seen this guy.
01:10:02
And then the next day, a memory suddenly improved. Which does he most closely resemble?
01:10:09
When the manager of the hotel all of a sudden remembered Andrew Cunanan. Okay. And remembered that he's under this name, Kurt DeMars, from Paris, France.
01:10:23
By then, Cunanan was long gone, skipped out on his rent. Another miss in a growing list of misses across four states.
01:10:32
What was that like? Knowing that you can't see him, he's not around, he's gone now, but...
01:10:37
Very frustrating. It seemed like we were always one step behind him. Then it got worse.
01:10:45
The FBI pulled all their special agents out except for four. Why? The director felt that Kunanin wasn't on Miami Beach, that he had slipped away.
01:10:54
At the time, I was pissed because we had leads still coming in, hundreds, you know.
01:10:58
Then, eight days into the search, just when it seemed police would never catch a break.
01:11:06
So we get a call on the radio from dispatch. Shots fired at this houseboat. And I thought to myself, what a perfect place to hide.
01:11:22
Closing in on a killer. He was like a trapped rat. Eight days after the murder of Johnny Versace, leads were still coming in, hundreds every day.
01:11:48
And then, July 23rd, late afternoon. Okay, Mr. Johnny, do you have an emergency?
01:11:54
Yes. The call came from a pier in Miami Beach. A caretaker has been checking on the powder blue hairpots
01:12:00
boat the owner was away but it looked like someone was inside and something was wrong
01:12:08
light all the time yeah all the latch was on he approached the boarding door and then a gunshot
01:12:15
i shot boom in an instant hundreds of miami beach police the fbi out of town investigators
01:12:22
An army of reporters were converging on the pier. It's gone now. The houseboat was knocked down years ago.
01:12:31
Only a few rotting posts and a square of concrete marked the spot. But that day, that moment...
01:12:39
What color is it? It's the blue one. So when we first got here, Uniform Patrol had a perimeter set around the houseboat.
01:12:47
We called Marine Patrol to cover the water perimeter to make sure whoever was in there wouldn't get away.
01:12:53
Then we called the SWAT team in. Where were the cameras of the world? We took over that parking lot right next to the fire station.
01:12:59
So that's where we set up the media staging area. So all the filming was being done from across the street.
01:13:05
It was too dangerous to be here. Sure. There were a few over there on the other side of the water.
01:13:09
There were some on the other side of the water that snuck in. Snuck in? What do you mean, snuck in?
01:13:13
Snuck in. We actually knew what he meant. Some of us from NBC, including me, found a perch across the waterway where we got a direct view of the houseboat.
01:13:23
And when police cordoned off the scene around the houseboat, NBC correspondent Kerry Sanders found another way to get closer.
01:13:31
It's a roadblock. Police weren't letting anybody in. And I looked over to my left and I saw a construction worker who was on his bicycle and he was riding home on the sidewalk.
01:13:40
And I ran over to him and I go, can you give me a ride on your handlebars? And I hopped up on his handlebars, gave him $20, and he rode me down on the bicycle about four or five blocks to get to where this was all going on.
01:13:55
A siege atmosphere settled in. How did you try to reach him to get word to him? So we had hostage negotiators on scene from the FBI and from the local sheriff's office.
01:14:05
And they attempted to make contact via the landline telephone, but he didn't answer it.
01:14:11
So we tried a bullhorn and no response. Everybody waited, the world watching. At one point, some officers moved in quietly, busted a window, and tossed a listening device into the houseboat.
01:14:26
We were getting absolutely nothing from inside the houseboat. So we were pretty confident he was either gone or he was dead.
01:14:34
Gone? How would he be gone? He slipped away from us before, more than once. They gave it 30 minutes.
01:14:41
And then it seemed clear that if someone was inside that boat, they were not going to come out.
01:14:48
There was a SWAT team standing by armed with tear gas When they went in what was it like
01:15:00
They cleared the houseboat, and when they went to the second floor bedroom, they discovered a white male with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
01:15:08
Was it him? Maybe. Maybe not. Detective Navarro had fans brought in to disperse the tear gas.
01:15:15
And then he and the FBI man went in with a camera. The space looked more like an apartment than a boat.
01:15:23
We went upstairs without touching anything, and we had, you know, booties on and gloves,
01:15:27
and went up there and looked at them. And they knew. After staring at pictures of that face for so many days,
01:15:36
it was certainly Andrew Cunanan. We were very excited that it was over. We actually high-fived each other.
01:15:44
We were happy that nobody else was going to die. The police camera captured Cunanan's last refuge, his exit scene.
01:15:53
What did he have in there with him? Books and magazines and stuff. He was out of food. He was out of money.
01:15:59
Actually, that houseboat kind of gave me the sense he was like a trapped rat. In the living room, a spread of glossy magazines with their high-fashion ads
01:16:12
and reminders of a life he could never have. There was some pecans and stuff that were eaten like empty.
01:16:19
The whole bowl was eaten like there was no food left in the house. There was a TV on the boat.
01:16:25
Police believe he'd been watching and so knew, had to have, that he was finally a famous man.
01:16:32
And so at that stage of desperation where he knew he couldn't go anywhere, couldn't do anything, couldn't get food.
01:16:37
I think that's why he killed himself. I think what happened was, in Cunanan's mind, when he hears the caretaker walk in and say something or whatever, he thought that was police.
01:16:50
I think he kills himself then. And when he did, he took his secrets with him. He left no note, no explanation for why he killed Jeff Trail and David Madsen and Lee Miglin and William Reese and Gianni Versace.
01:17:07
But now we've learned more about Andrew Cunanan and the consequences, the aftershocks of his terrible acts.
01:17:20
Looking for answers and saying goodbye. You took somebody away at the height of their career, at the height of their happiness, devastated a family, a close family.
01:17:37
Well the world attention was focused on a fugitive killer It shifted momentarily to this exquisite old cathedral in Milan If Gianni Versace brought celebrity to the runway
01:17:55
celebrities paid their respects in kind. The world is coming. It's like a state funeral.
01:18:01
It is a state funeral. Versace's memorial mass in Milan. You took somebody away at the height of their career,
01:18:08
at the height of their happiness, devastated a family, a close family. We watched on television as Donatella and Santo made their entrance.
01:18:18
Fashion stars like Giorgio Armani, Carl Lagerfeld, and Naomi Campbell were there.
01:18:24
And the greatest star of them all, Princess Diana, the most famous woman of her time, sitting with a tearful Elton John.
01:18:32
Even then, people couldn't help but wonder what would happen to the house of Versace.
01:18:37
Didn't know, then, that another Versace was willing to carry the torch. Like so many others, model Beverly Johnson had her doubts.
01:18:46
We thought that was it. It was over. And when Donatella was going to take over, we were like, oh, wow.
01:18:55
Good luck with that. And then we realized how uber-talented she was. It was a testament of the genius that that family had.
01:19:07
In Miami, Moscow, New York, Tokyo, or countless cities in between, are reminders of the boy from southern Italy who built a fashion empire.
01:19:19
Antonio D'Amico is carrying on with his own designs, working on a new sportswear line.
01:19:24
His first collection focuses on golf wear. He lives a quiet life outside of Milan, surrounded by reminders of the man he loved.
01:19:32
Do you find yourself thinking about that? what you saw on the steps that day, does it come back to you often?
01:19:41
It was a nightmare for years. Yeah. But, you know, it's a question of timing. Yeah.
01:19:55
Time, as they say, heals you, but it doesn't go away. The other men who lost their lives
01:20:03
are equally mourned. The people who love Jeff Trail and David Madsen understand that these two men simply befriended the wrong guy.
01:20:11
And Lee Miglin. Friends and family will not fully recover, ever. And even now, his death remains a mystery.
01:20:20
Was it a random killing? Or was there some connection that made Miglin a target?
01:20:26
It's an unfinished chapter for Paul Beitler. And the only two people who can solve that riddle aren't on the earth anymore.
01:20:33
Are you done? I mean if you found a string to pull would you pull it? I pull it I haven given up And if there somebody out there that can solve this problem and this riddle
01:20:48
and has more information, love to hear it. Now you live with it. Yeah. What does he mean to you in memory?
01:20:58
Only good. Only good. He was a giant of a human being. George Navarro, who now runs his own security consulting business,
01:21:11
is also frustrated that Cunanan took the easy way out. So was it an upsetting thing to hear?
01:21:18
Upsetting because I had a lot of questions for him, you know. A lot of things that were left unanswered
01:21:23
that I'd like to know the answer to. Why he did it, you know, what the connection was with the victims and that sort of thing.
01:21:33
The ordeal, five murders, three months, inexplicable violence, did teach law enforcement a tough lesson.
01:21:41
One of the strong underlying themes of this whole story is just really the lack of participation,
01:21:48
the lack of collaboration and cooperation among law enforcement authorities in so many different areas of the country.
01:21:57
Communication is so much better now. Things do change. But one thing hasn't. The world's fixation with the famous.
01:22:06
And the puzzle. What drove a guy like Andrew Cunanan? What made him a killer? Stacey Lopez doesn't have any answers.
01:22:18
To this day, she thinks about her friend Andrew and feels only confusion and pain.
01:22:23
And it's not something that I talk about often. I mean, who do you talk to about something like this?
01:22:28
You know, yes, I loved the serial killer. I mean, it sounds so awful, but he was a big part of my adolescence,
01:22:37
and he was my friend. Did you find yourself mourning his passing? I found myself mourning the friend that I knew.
01:22:47
And I had a very hard time accepting what he had done. Have you spent any time thinking about what he was about?
01:22:57
No, I don't care. I'll be honest. I'm going to cut you short on that one. That's okay.
01:23:02
I don't care. And to put it this way, he's a footnote in history. just one more person with a gun
01:23:09
so screw you you get nothing Hal Rubenstein would rather talk about his friend Johnny
01:23:17
what that man taught him about life if you're going to still be here don't sit there with one foot in the back door
01:23:25
waiting to stop no no no you grab life for as long as you get the chance and you grab it to yourself
01:23:32
and you make the most out of it you