From the Archives, 1997: The murderous odyssey of Versace prime suspect

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald on July 17, 1997

The first victim, a 28-year-old former Navy lieutenant, was found wrapped in a rug in a loft apartment in the warehouse district of Minneapolis, his head battered with a hammer.

A “private person”: Gianni Versace.Credit: AP Photo/Dave Cheskin

The second, a 33-year-old architect, was found 100 kilometres north on the shores of East Rush Lake, shot once in the head.

The third was a 72-year-old Chicago real estate tycoon, found in the garage of his townhouse, his throat slashed with a saw blade, his chest stabbed with pruning shears and his head wrapped in masking tape with a breathing hole left at the nostrils.

The fourth was the caretaker of a cemetery in Pennsville, New Jersey, an unremarkable man of modest means who was reported missing by his wife and was found shot dead, lying in the burial ground.

Federal investigators believe all four deaths were the work of the same man - Andrew Phillip Cunanan, the 27-year-old fugitive who has been named as the leading suspect in the shooting death of the fashion guru Gianni Versace in Miami Beach.

Asked during a televised news conference on Tuesday night to describe Cunanan’s modus operandi, Mr Paul Philip, the special agent in charge of the FBI in Miami, appeared taken aback. “He kills people,” he said.

For the past three months, police say, Cunanan has been on a murderous coast-to-coast odyssey, suspected of killing the four men before the Miami shooting and, in three cases, stealing their cars.

He has been charged with the architect’s murder and is wanted for questioning in the other cases, putting him on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list. Although the trail has often been warm, so far he has eluded pursuers.

According to people who know him, Cunanan had only just begun to show signs of the wayward behaviour that has now overtaken him.

A manager of Flicks, a gay bar which Cunanan frequented in his home town of San Diego, said he “fitted in well in certain circles”, namely the rich crowd which, in his early 20s, helped him live a very comfortable life.

FBI handout shows images of suspected serial killer Phillip Cunanan.Credit: AP

Cunanan’s mother has described her son as “a high-class prostitute”.

But during the last year the easy life changed for Cunanan.

He stopped taking friends for $1,000 dinners at the California Cuisine, a posh San Diego eatery. He started gaining weight, and reportedly ran up one of his credit cards to its $20,000 limit. The New York Daily News reports that friends in San Diego attributed Cunanan’s increasing moodiness to his discovery that he had become HIV positive.

Then, earlier this year, something snapped. No-one knows what. Although the grim details of Cunanan’s murder spree are known, what it was that motivated him to kill five men, including Versace, remains unknown.

Cunanan’s deadly trek began on April 24, when he flew from San Diego to Minneapolis to stay with an old boyfriend, David Madson, a 33-year-old architect who had lectured at Harvard.

On April 25, Cunanan invited another old friend, Jeffrey Trail, a former US Navy lieutenant, to Madson’s loft. Soon after, neighbours told police, they heard loud noises. Two days later, police found Trail’s body wrapped in a blood-soaked carpet.

On May 3, Madson’s body was found by fishermen at a lake in northern Minnesota. Police believe Trail had been at Cunanan’s side for several days, the latter threatening to kill him if he talked.

After shooting Trail, Cunanan drove to Chicago, where he looked up the father of another acquaintance, Duke Miglin. His father, Lee Miglin, a wealthy real estate developer, was found murdered in his garage some days later.

Cunanan did not leave immediately, but stayed overnight in the Miglin house, showered, helped himself to his victim’s clothes, and drove away in his Lexus. Two days later, Cunanan stopped at an isolated cemetery in Salem County, New Jersey. There he shot a caretaker, William Reese, and drove off in his red truck.

In the two months since then, Cunanan has evaded one of the biggest FBI manhunts. The case has been featured on America’s Most Wanted twice, prompting thousands of calls to the FBI.

Seemingly oblivious to all this, Cunanan made it to South Florida, where the FBI reported sightings of Reese’s truck two weeks ago. “This man is a danger to everyone, not just those in the gay community,” said the Miami Beach chief of police, Mr Richard Baretto.

With the hunt for Cunanan taking on increased urgency in the hours after the murder of Versace, one key question remained unanswered: did the Italian designer have any prior contact with Cunanan? The case for such a connection remains highly speculative and is based on assumptions of their sexual habits. Although Versace has been described as a “private person”, his homosexuality was no secret in Miami Beach.

Some people in the community claimed that Versace had a liking for “rough sex”, an option he shared with his killer. Another unproven and perhaps ultimately inconsequential link between the two is their HIV status.

While American newspapers have reported on Cunanan being HIV positive, few have probed the recent cancer illness which Versace was recovering from, other than to say it was “lymphatic”.

Lymphoma is increasingly one of the more common opportunistic infections associated with the AIDS virus.