# 48: Versace was this Serial Killer's Final Victim

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 28 Sep 2023, 1 h 12 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880399/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851600-44100-2-44d264e51226c0ec.mp3

Today's episode is on Andrew Cunanan, well known for being the socialite, fame-hungry assassin of fashion Icon, Gianni Versace. What is less known, is that Versace was the final victim of five in a month-long murder spree - fuelled by lies, greed, and eventually, fear. Trigger Warnings: HIV/AIDS, drug abuse, suicide Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:00] Gianni Versace was a global fashion icon known for breaking
[0:04] boundaries with his designs. But there's a part of his story
[0:08] that's often missed. Versace died at the hands of a
[0:11] serial killer on the front doorstep of his own home.
[0:15] He was the final victim of a 5 month killing spree that claimed
[0:19] 6 lives across the US. But even with his killer on the
[0:23] FBI's most wanted list, police still struggle to put an end to
[0:28] his reign of terror. Today we're going to be
[0:30] discussing Gianni Versace's murder and the unhinged killing
[0:34] spree of Andrew Cunanan. Before we get into the case, I
[0:40] just want to say I mean absolutely no disrespect to
[0:43] anyone that I talk about in this video.
[0:45] Everything that I'm about to say is publicly available
[0:48] information that myself and my team have found and compiled
[0:52] into this one video. This video will cover especially
[0:56] sensitive topics including but not limited to discussion of his
[1:00] HIV and AIDS drug abuse and suicide.
[1:03] So if you feel any of these topics are a bit too intense or
[1:07] triggering for you, then I would recommend clicking out of this
[1:10] video. Now hopefully I will get to see
[1:12] you some other time with another case, but until then, look after
[1:15] yourself. And while we make every effort
[1:17] to Fact Check our sources and make sure all of our information
[1:21] is correct, no action should be taken in reliance upon the
[1:25] information in this video. And I want to take this
[1:27] opportunity to remind you all that these are real people's
[1:30] lives that we're talking about. So please do keep everything
[1:34] kind and respectful in the comments.
[1:36] All opinions in this video are mine and mine are learn.
[1:40] And with all of that being said, let's get into the case of
[1:43] Andrew Cunanan. So today's case takes place
[1:46] across A5 month span. In mid 1997, Andrew was going
[1:51] state to state all across the US claiming new victims every
[1:56] month. But this unhinged serial killer
[1:59] had quite a normal start in life.
[2:02] He had a seemingly very normal, happy childhood.
[2:06] He was the 4th child, I believe to parents Modesto and Marianne
[2:10] Cunanan. He was born in 1969 in
[2:13] California. At the time, Modesto was fresh
[2:15] out of fighting in the Vietnam War and Marianne was a stay at
[2:19] home mother looking after all of their children.
[2:22] They'd been together a long time.
[2:24] Umm but they weren't very happily married.
[2:27] Like not at all. Mary Anne had always suffered
[2:30] with her mental health like all her life, but when she had
[2:33] children she got really bad bouts of post Natal depression
[2:37] and it was the worst after the birth of Andrew, who was, you
[2:41] know that I think he was their youngest child.
[2:43] I don't think they had any more after him.
[2:45] And honestly after hearing about this, I don't blame them.
[2:47] Mary Anne was so, so mentally unwell after the birth of Andrew
[2:52] to the point where she was practically bed.
[2:54] She was not getting out of bed. She wasn't even meeting her own
[2:57] needs, never mind her children's.
[3:00] So Modesto stepped in as kind of primary caregiver for the most
[3:05] part of Andrew's first year. And this led to them building a
[3:09] very, very deep bond. He hadn't bonded with any of his
[3:12] other children quite the way that he had bonded with Andrew.
[3:16] Modesto always said that Andrew was his best friend and also his
[3:20] mother Mary Ann. To say that she couldn't be as
[3:23] involved in his his first year. She still did grow such an
[3:27] intense bond with Andrew later on in life.
[3:31] But this is also kind of one of the negative parts of his
[3:35] childhood is how much his parents loved him.
[3:38] Not like that. It wasn't how much they loved
[3:41] him, it was the way that they loved him.
[3:44] Andrew was very clearly their favorite child, which was very
[3:48] sad to read about. Like all the other kids knew
[3:51] that Andrew was the favorite. They used to call him the white
[3:53] sheep of the family and like, you know, like the good version
[3:57] of the black sheep of the family because he was different to all
[4:00] of them. He would get praise.
[4:02] He would get things that they didn't get.
[4:05] He was allowed to get away with things that they weren't allowed
[4:07] to get away with. His parents also very much
[4:10] treated Andrew as if he was an adult when he was still very
[4:15] much a child. Like his father would talk to
[4:18] him about things that he probably shouldn't be talking
[4:21] about, you know, like women, et cetera.
[4:23] And his mother would kind of trauma dump on him in a way.
[4:28] She used Andrew as like her therapist, especially when it
[4:32] came to her relationship, her marriage to his father.
[4:35] That was very, very sour. And whenever anything would
[4:37] happen with her husband, she would go to her son and like
[4:41] trauma dump it all on him and kind of put him in the middle of
[4:45] his parents arguing and just just a very inappropriate
[4:50] situation for a child to be in. These are worries and stresses
[4:54] that a child does not need. And also what kind of advice
[4:57] could your like 7 year old kid give you about your marriage?
[5:01] I think it was just more of a case of his mum needed to get it
[5:03] all out and Andrew was like her best friend, just a bit
[5:06] inappropriate. I guess.
[5:07] I do feel bad for him though, you know, having to bear the
[5:11] burden of your parents problems in life.
[5:15] Like that's, that's not a job for a kid that's trying to grow
[5:18] and develop. From a very early age.
[5:20] Andrew realized that his family didn't have a lot of money and
[5:25] this was something the family was quite insecure about.
[5:28] Well, obviously mainly the parents because kids don't quite
[5:31] have a grasp on what all that means.
[5:34] But it was very ingrained into their family by their parents
[5:39] that their financial situation was bad.
[5:42] And that was shameful to them because they lived in a very
[5:45] middle class part of town. But they themselves, their
[5:48] family was working class. So they have surrounded
[5:52] themselves with people that are wearing more expensive clothes
[5:56] than them and their houses are bigger and just everything in
[5:59] general, the people that live around them have more than they
[6:02] have. So every time they leave the
[6:05] house, they're kind of reminded of the situation that they're
[6:09] in, and I think it made those insecurities hit so much harder.
[6:12] Reputation was very important to the Cunanan family, well,
[6:15] particularly to Modesto. He really, really cared about
[6:20] what the neighborhood thought of them.
[6:22] It was one of his biggest goals in life to be climbing up the
[6:26] class ranks. Umm, or at least look as if
[6:30] they're rising up the class ranks.
[6:32] Like he was getting into debt and all kinds of things just to
[6:36] pay for things, not, not to like survive, not on a not on a basic
[6:40] needs level. It was like, oh, we need new
[6:43] shoes and we need the shoes that everyone else has got those
[6:46] shoes. I will take out a loan to get
[6:49] those shoes. It was mainly Modesto's
[6:51] insecurity, but because he was so bothered about it and always
[6:55] talked about it, he'd really grained it into the rest of the
[6:58] family that they should be behaving in a certain way and
[7:02] that they should be trying to seem richer than they are.
[7:07] So this had Andrew going to school as a little kid and lying
[7:12] about what his father did for a job.
[7:14] He would tell all his friends that his dad was a millionaire
[7:17] and they had all these cool things and and they would go on
[7:19] trips to Europe every summer and all that kind of stuff.
[7:23] He would make up so many lies about just about their financial
[7:27] status because he thought that that is what was needed to get
[7:31] by in society. That's kind of what their father
[7:34] had taught them. But once Andrew got into the
[7:36] habit of lying to impress people at a young age, that never left
[7:42] him for the rest of his life. He was a pathological compulsive
[7:47] liar, especially when it came to his reputation.
[7:52] I mean, even up until like in his 20s and stuff, you will see
[7:56] very soon that he just could not stop lying about financial stuff
[8:01] and the people that he knew and the things that he had and how
[8:04] great he was. He had this really inflated
[8:07] sense of self that I think originated from when he was a
[8:11] child. And he was the favorite and he
[8:13] could do no wrong. And he was destined for great
[8:16] things because he was very intelligent as well.
[8:18] Actually, he had an IQ of 147, a great IQ is it starts at like
[8:24] 120. So he was already 27 IQ points
[8:29] higher than the smart people. And for that reason he was
[8:32] actually sent to wait. No, I don't think he was sent to
[8:35] a different school, but he was put on a different program
[8:38] within his school that was only for the smart kids.
[8:42] And that made him feel even more superior to everyone around him.
[8:46] He was the smart kid. He was the rich kid.
[8:49] I mean, like, it was lies, but that's what he was at school and
[8:53] then at home, he was the favorite.
[8:54] He was the Angel boy. They used to call him Prince.
[8:57] He was the Prince of the family, which there was another boy in
[9:02] the family. There were two girls and two
[9:03] boys. And imagine, imagine your
[9:05] brother got Prince and you're you're just called by your first
[9:08] name. Everything that his parents did
[9:11] reinforced to Andrew that he should always get special
[9:15] treatment. It really set him going that way
[9:17] in life. Like they gave him the biggest
[9:20] bedroom in the house. And, and when I say the biggest,
[9:23] I mean the biggest. Even his parents didn't get a
[9:26] big bedroom because they gave him the master bedroom.
[9:29] The youngest child got the master bedroom with an ensuite
[9:33] and the rest of his siblings, his three other siblings had to
[9:36] share two different bedrooms. The favoritism just got like
[9:39] more and more blatant with time. When they were young kids, it
[9:43] was a little bit more subtle, but as they grew up, it was kind
[9:47] of just an accepted fact within their family that Andrew's the
[9:51] favorite and he gets benefits and there's nothing anyone can
[9:53] do about it. So like I say, as as they were
[9:56] getting a bit older, he got the master bedroom.
[9:59] His father at one point decided to take out a loan to buy a car,
[10:04] a sports car as well. It wasn't just any car, a sports
[10:07] car. And this car was gonna just sit
[10:10] in the driveway until Andrew learned to drive.
[10:13] He was the youngest of four children.
[10:15] The older siblings could drive. He didn't even have his license
[10:20] yet. And his father was going to buy
[10:22] one car, and it was going to be for him.
[10:24] And it was going to just wait until Andrew was ready.
[10:27] Like, I just feel really bad for his siblings like it.
[10:30] Living with a sibling like that must have been jarring, just
[10:35] plain jarring. In his late teens, Andrew
[10:38] Cunanan came out as gay. And this changed the trajectory
[10:43] of his whole entire life because at this point he started
[10:46] frequenting gay bars, and he was a very attractive young man that
[10:52] was in very high demand. There were a lot of older,
[10:55] richer men at these clubs and bars that wanted to take care of
[10:59] Andrew. You know, they wanted to buy him
[11:02] things. They wanted to give him money,
[11:04] sometimes in exchange for sex, sometimes not though.
[11:09] Sometimes they just wanted to spend time with Andrew.
[11:11] So from this point he starts various sugar daddy should sugar
[11:16] baby situations. And you know what?
[11:18] Andrew Cunanan loved this. This was perfect for him.
[11:22] The person that feels very entitled to everything in life.
[11:26] He loved being able to just go to a bar and not do any work and
[11:30] just get money for it. He very quickly established a
[11:33] bunch of different sugar daddy, sugar baby relationships on
[11:38] varying levels. Some of them wanted sex from him
[11:42] and he would give him that. He didn't really care what they
[11:45] wanted, but some of them would just kind of want to take him
[11:47] out on dates, and they would want to see him regularly.
[11:50] And that would be in exchange for a monthly allowance plus any
[11:55] gifts that he might want on any expensive clothes.
[11:58] Because all of his gifts that he would request from these people
[12:02] were just like, varying designer clothes because his reputation
[12:06] was so very important to him. He loved designer clothes just
[12:10] like as a physical way to signal that he was better than you,
[12:14] that he was richer than you. Yeah.
[12:16] He loved a bit of designer because realistically, he
[12:18] couldn't afford to pay for those clothes on his own.
[12:20] He didn't have a job. I don't think he ever got a job,
[12:23] actually. I think this was his first, but
[12:25] Andrew was on cloud nine with his current life situation of
[12:30] drinking, dancing, partying, flirting and receiving gifts.
[12:35] But in 1988, when Andrew was 19 years old, his whole family life
[12:41] would crumble around him. It turns out his dad was a
[12:46] criminal this whole time and none of them knew.
[12:50] So Modesto was a stockbroker. Ever since he left the army, he
[12:54] became a stockbroker and he was making seemingly decent money
[12:59] from it. Well, it turns out that he was
[13:02] embezzzling a lot of money from it.
[13:05] He wasn't that great of a stockbroker, he was just
[13:07] stealing from clients and no one knew.
[13:10] But for a couple of months before all of this got found
[13:13] out, Modesto had a feeling that his employers and his clients
[13:19] were on to him about the the shady goings on and he was
[13:23] getting panicked. He knew that it was a matter of
[13:26] time before he got like seriously called out.
[13:29] And like, it wasn't even just a case of losing his job.
[13:32] Like he had stolen so much money that he would be in prison for a
[13:36] longest time. He knew that he couldn't get
[13:39] caught. He couldn't let himself get
[13:41] caught. Otherwise his life would be
[13:42] over. Not only would he be in prison,
[13:44] but his reputation would be tarnished.
[13:46] And you know, that's the most important, important thing to
[13:48] that man. So he stops going to work
[13:51] because he's scared to face them in the office.
[13:54] He stops answering his phone. Meanwhile, his whole family
[13:57] don't have a clue that this is going on.
[13:58] By the way, he's never told them that he's stealing and
[14:02] embezzling. And Modesto starts doing all
[14:04] this shit to prepare to go on the run, right?
[14:08] He starts selling his car. He sold the family home without
[14:12] telling the family that live in it.
[14:15] He sold pretty much everything and then packed up what he had
[14:18] left, left and flew off to the Philippines.
[14:20] He fled the whole entire country.
[14:22] He left his family high and dry with absolutely nothing, not not
[14:27] even the home that they lived in.
[14:29] They had to try and find a new place to live.
[14:31] They were homeless. Andrews first reaction when he
[14:41] realized that his father had fled the country and gone to
[14:44] start up a new life in the Philippines, his first reaction
[14:47] was to go with him, to follow him out there and restart with
[14:52] him in the Philippines. So he did he, he actually full
[14:55] on bought a plane ticket, went out there to go and see his
[14:57] father. But it didn't last long because
[15:01] obviously Modesto had no money. He was on the run from police,
[15:04] so he couldn't like get a job out there.
[15:07] He was living in poverty. He was almost destitute.
[15:10] And this is not how Andrew liked to live.
[15:13] This was not his scene. He was used to like a decent
[15:17] level of luxury. I mean, they didn't have like a
[15:19] big luxurious house or anything. But he was not going to stick
[15:22] around for this. So as quickly as he'd followed
[15:24] his father out there, he also left him back and came back to
[15:28] his life of luxury in California.
[15:31] Well, actually, it was a life of luxury at this point.
[15:33] He had all the sugar daddies. He was earning his own money.
[15:36] I do find it very ironic that Modesto, a man that was so
[15:40] obsessed with wealth and status and reputation, ended up exiling
[15:46] himself to another country in in shame.
[15:49] It was after this experience that Andrew promised himself
[15:52] that he would never end up in a situation like what he saw his
[15:56] father in. He would never let himself fall
[15:59] from grace like that. It was genuinely like the
[16:02] reputation part of it was the worst for all of them.
[16:06] Like they were embarrassed of their father.
[16:09] He was embarrassed for himself. So when Andrew got back to
[16:13] California, he was like, OK, I, I got a, I gotta grind this
[16:17] sugar daddy shit even harder. Like, I need to be getting more
[16:21] allowances, more gifts. And so he starts trying to make
[16:26] his way into wealthier social circles, you know, make friends
[16:29] with richer people and meet their rich friends and then meet
[16:32] their rich friends. And it was working.
[16:34] You know what? One thing I will give Andrew
[16:36] Cunanan? He sounded very charming.
[16:38] And you know why? Because he was a liar and a
[16:40] narcissist. And they're always the charming
[16:43] ones out there because it's superficial.
[16:44] He would still be telling all these grandiose lies at every
[16:48] party, at every bar, every nightclub.
[16:50] And it made people like him because he sounded very
[16:53] interesting. So yeah, he, he very quickly
[16:56] grew his empire of sugar daddies and his social circles.
[17:00] He was quite well known in the in the clubs that he frequented.
[17:04] He'd kept this part of his life a secret from his family the
[17:08] whole time. I believe they knew he was gay,
[17:11] maybe, but they didn't know that he was getting money from his
[17:16] lovers. But he couldn't keep it a secret
[17:18] forever. And eventually his mother found
[17:21] out and she was devastated. She, Marianne, was a very
[17:25] religious woman. And yeah, this, this did not go
[17:29] well. They had like a full on shouting
[17:31] fight in the house. And at one point, Andrew
[17:35] actually got up and pushed his mother against the wall and
[17:39] dislocated her shoulder. That's your own mother.
[17:42] Your own aging mother. How sick.
[17:44] Just a side note, Andrew was very much believed to be a
[17:47] sociopath or a psychopath or some level of, you know,
[17:51] incapable of feeling empathy. And when I read that last part,
[17:55] I was like, Yep, sounds about right.
[17:56] I mean, that part and the fact that he does go on to become a
[18:00] serial killer, that's what that's what this video is about.
[18:02] Regardless, Andrew was having the time of his life in his
[18:06] early 20s. He had everything he wanted,
[18:09] everything he needed, but it wasn't going to last forever.
[18:12] The sad fact is a lot of these sugar daddies, these older
[18:17] wealthy men preferred very young men, like late teens, very early
[18:23] 20s. And Andrew was now aging beyond
[18:27] that bracket of very young fresh meat twink.
[18:32] You know, Andrew, Andrew was kind of no longer they're tight.
[18:36] Don't get me wrong. He it was still an attractive
[18:38] young man and there were still sugar daddies that were
[18:41] interested in him and wanted to continue their relationships,
[18:44] but some of them started kind of dropping out at this point.
[18:47] And actually it wasn't even just his romantic interests that had
[18:51] started losing interest in Andrew.
[18:53] It was kind of everyone like all the new friends that he was
[18:57] making was starting to see through him a bit.
[19:00] That's the thing with pathological liars is that they
[19:02] always end up catching themselves out.
[19:05] They they tell the same lie slightly differently or they
[19:09] tell two different lies to two different people.
[19:11] And when you're in social circles like this and everyone
[19:14] talks, people are starting to just side eye him a bit.
[19:18] And so, yeah, he was losing friends, he was losing sugar
[19:21] daddies. Honestly, everything was a bit
[19:23] rocky for him at this point in time, Like his his mental
[19:27] health, his finances, obviously, because sugar daddies are
[19:30] pulling out. That's like, that's like getting
[19:32] demoted. It's like taking a pickup.
[19:34] Even his relationships that weren't for financial benefit
[19:38] like romantic relationships because he did have a few like
[19:41] genuine things with men that he met at the bars that weren't
[19:45] going to pay him for his services, but he didn't mind
[19:47] because he was attracted to them too.
[19:48] One of Andrew's most intense romantic relationships was with
[19:53] a man named David Madsen that he met in 1995.
[19:56] At that point in Andrew's life, he was very financially stable.
[20:00] He was being looked after by this one particularly wealthy
[20:04] businessman that he never really saw but would send him 2 grand a
[20:08] month. That sounds all right, along
[20:10] with all the other stuff as well.
[20:11] Like nights out, holidays, gifts, everything.
[20:14] Plus $2000 a month. Crazy.
[20:16] So when Andrew met David Madsen at the bar, he kept all of this
[20:20] a secret from him. You know how he got his money
[20:22] and all his sugar baby activities?
[20:25] He kept all of that secret. He just approached David Madsen
[20:28] in the bar, offered to buy him a drink.
[20:30] They got on really, really well. He invited David back to his
[20:33] hotel room because David wasn't in town for long.
[20:36] He was in California for a bit, but he originally lived in
[20:39] Minnesota. So they went back to Andrew's
[20:41] hotel room for, you know, little one night stand.
[20:45] But then, well, actually it wasn't a one night stand because
[20:47] they kept in touch afterwards, albeit long distance.
[20:51] Um, I think Andrew really liked David, so much so that when
[20:55] David went back to Minnesota, Andrew was always calling him
[20:59] and asking if he could come over and visit.
[21:01] And I'm not gonna lie, I don't think David was quite feeling
[21:05] the same about Andrew. Obviously I wasn't there, but
[21:08] this is just the vibe that I'm getting and like I have to say,
[21:11] I can't. Like I get it because he was
[21:14] travelling. He had a one night stand in a
[21:16] different state. He probably didn't expect it to
[21:19] be anything serious or prolonged, but then here's this
[21:23] guy still hitting up his phone and asking to come and visit him
[21:28] in his hometown. Andrew was really, really taken
[21:30] with David. He would tell his friends that
[21:32] he's the love of his life. He wants to marry him one day.
[21:36] All that like, like he was, he was besotted with this man that
[21:41] he had met one night and he would go over to Minneapolis and
[21:45] meet him and he would stay at his house.
[21:48] And like, I think they would, you know, whatever, they would
[21:50] have a good time while he was there, while he was in town.
[21:53] But as soon as he would go back to California, David would like
[21:56] disconnect from him again. And then in early 1997, which is
[22:02] the same year that all of this went down, and I don't know why
[22:04] I've only just put that together in my head, but this could
[22:07] definitely have been a trigger. Early 1997 Andrew gets down on
[22:11] one knee and proposes to David and David rejected him so like
[22:17] bit awkward. And from that point on their
[22:20] romantic relationship ended. But I think they were going to
[22:24] try and stay friends because they did.
[22:26] They did get on really, really well.
[22:28] They had a good friendship and obviously Andrew was besotted
[22:32] with this man so if he couldn't have him romantically, he was
[22:36] going to take him platonically. Andrew actually went to visit
[22:39] David one more time in Minneapolis now that they were
[22:42] just friends. Umm, and because now he was
[22:45] technically single while he was over there, he decided to
[22:48] reconnect with an old friend slash flame.
[22:53] Maybe this friend was called Jeff Trail.
[22:55] He was 28 years old, same age as Andrew, and he had previously
[22:59] lived in California. That's where they made friends.
[23:03] They would go to all the bars and the clubs and everything
[23:05] together. But then Jeff moved to
[23:07] Minnesota, so he never really saw him after that.
[23:10] But hey, now Andrew is single and he's going to be in mini.
[23:15] So he hits up Jeff trail and he's like, Hey, we, we should do
[23:19] something. I'm going to be in town soon.
[23:20] So his flight touched down in Minneapolis on April 25th.
[23:24] And that first night he spent the whole evening with David.
[23:27] He was staying in David's apartment.
[23:29] Well, he was kind of hoping that he might be spending a couple of
[23:32] nights at Jeff's apartment, but his like main living arrangement
[23:36] for while he was there was that he was going to stay with David.
[23:38] So the first night they go out for food, they have some drinks,
[23:42] a little ketchup, a little Kiki. And then he texts Jeff Trail and
[23:47] he says, hey, want to come round to my apartment or the apartment
[23:51] I'm staying in tomorrow. And Jeff's like, OK, cool, see
[23:54] you there. The next day, sometime in the
[23:56] evening, David Madsen goes out to walk his dock.
[24:00] Andrew Cunanan is left in the apartment on his own.
[24:02] And he thinks, perfect, this is this is my time to invite over
[24:06] my booty call. So he texts Jeff Trail and he's
[24:08] like, come over now. So Jeff comes to the apartment.
[24:12] David's still not there. And this is where things things
[24:14] get very intense very quickly and without much explanation.
[24:19] Very soon after Jeff arrived at the apartment, neighbors
[24:23] remember hearing a lot of yelling.
[24:25] There was definitely a fight going on until finally someone
[24:28] screamed get the fuck out, which was then followed by a load of
[24:32] banging and then silence. Andrew Cunanan had just murdered
[24:39] Jeff Trail within 10 minutes of him arriving in the apartment
[24:43] and we have no idea why. Andrew had just grabbed this
[24:47] claw hammer that was laying on the kitchen table and used it to
[24:51] beat Jeff Trail to death 27 times.
[24:54] He used both sides of the claw hammer as well the the flat part
[24:58] and the claw part. Like seriously, what on earth
[25:01] happened in that 10 minutes to inspire such a furious attack?
[25:06] There are some theories, none of them have ever been proven and
[25:10] some of them don't have much weight.
[25:12] Honestly. The the like believed version of
[25:14] events is that there is no specific motive for this.
[25:19] But some people say that Jeff Trail and David Madsen had been
[25:23] seeing each other and maybe that's why Andrew wanted to meet
[25:27] up with his old friend because he found out that David was
[25:31] seeing him and maybe he wanted to meet up with this old friend
[25:34] to kill him because he still loved David.
[25:36] Other people think that maybe Andrew made a sexual advance on
[25:40] on Jeff that he wasn't comfortable with and so Andrew
[25:43] just killed him. But like I say, a lot of people
[25:46] think there was no motive. Maybe Andrew was just a ticking
[25:50] time bomb who was so narcissistic that it was only a
[25:53] matter of time until he killed someone because he didn't get
[25:57] his own way. But regardless of motive, this
[26:00] situation is so insane to me. He hadn't seen this man, hadn't
[26:04] spoken to him in years and years and years.
[26:06] He invites him over to the house for a little catch up and just
[26:09] fucking kills him with than 10 minutes of him arriving.
[26:12] Andrew then panicked and immediately set about cleaning
[26:16] up the crime scene because remember, David's only taking
[26:19] his dog for a walk. If he's a short dog Walker then
[26:22] like he's back any minute. Side note, a lot of people don't
[26:25] think that's true. Some people think that David was
[26:28] in the apartment with Andrew when this all happened and
[26:31] you'll see why in a minute. Either way, Andrew knew he
[26:34] needed to clean up this crime scene fast.
[26:36] So the first thing he does is roll Jeff's body up in a rug and
[26:41] then just shoved it in the wardrobe.
[26:44] Like stuffed it in the wardrobe and then closed the door on it
[26:46] really quick. So it was just like wedged in
[26:49] the wardrobe. He cleaned up himself.
[26:51] He cleaned up as much of the crime scene as he could.
[26:54] Every every surface that had blood spatter on, he cleaned.
[26:58] But he did miss a couple of bits.
[27:00] There was like a spatter that was actually outside the front
[27:03] door. Some people think that maybe
[27:06] Jeff had like turned to try to escape.
[27:09] Maybe he'd been leaving the house or maybe he was attacked
[27:12] like right as he entered. No, because neighbors did hear
[27:16] arguing. I don't know.
[27:18] There was blood on the outside of the apartment anywhere and
[27:21] there was a piece of brain matter stuck in the door like
[27:26] hinge. Bit grim.
[27:28] Later on, David returned home from his dog walk and after this
[27:34] night the two of them went in my ear.
[27:36] David wasn't talking to anyone who wasn't going out and meeting
[27:40] up with friends. Neither was Andrew but they were
[27:44] alive and they were fine. neighbors did see them like
[27:47] leaving the house to walk the dog together.
[27:49] There were a couple of different little sightings but they
[27:52] intentionally weren't talking to anyone, weren't responding to
[27:56] anyone. David had stopped going to work
[27:59] and actually his Co workers had noticed obviously and they knew
[28:02] where he lived. So they came to his apartment
[28:05] and they were knocking on the door and they could hear the dog
[28:07] scuffling about inside and they could hear some whispers, but no
[28:11] one came to the door. So David and Andrea were inside
[28:15] probably, and just ignoring the world around them.
[28:19] This was going on for days and days.
[28:21] No one heard from David. And it was getting to the point
[28:24] where people were concerned, like his friends, his family,
[28:27] the people that like really, really cared about him were
[28:30] like, OK, this isn't, this isn't OK anymore.
[28:33] We need to actually figure this out.
[28:34] They called the police who came down, umm, but they were very
[28:38] reluctant to like kick down the apartment door.
[28:41] I don't know. They were like, if nothing's
[28:42] wrong, then we can't just kick his door down for no reason.
[28:45] Like you're gonna have to pay if, if we kick his door down,
[28:48] you have to pay for it. So instead they get in touch
[28:51] with the building manager and they kind of explain the
[28:53] situation. They're like, look, one of your
[28:55] tenants has gone Mia. Everyone's worried.
[28:58] Please can you use your master key to go and check on it?
[29:02] And she's like, OK, cool, will do.
[29:03] So this lady goes to the apartment on her own.
[29:06] She's all alone when she unlocks that door and walks inside.
[29:11] Now, the scene had changed a little bit from what it was the
[29:15] last time we heard about it. So the last we heard he'd
[29:18] stuffed the body in the wardrobe.
[29:21] But when this lady walked in, the body was still rolled up in
[29:25] the rug but just propped up against the sofa.
[29:28] She was absolutely horrified seeing this.
[29:31] You would be would like, you can tell that's a dead body.
[29:34] Whether you can see feet sticking out or whatever, you
[29:37] kind of know that that's a dead body.
[29:38] And she'd just been told that one of her tenants was Mia.
[29:42] So she thought she had just walked in and found this tenant
[29:46] dead. She panicked and she just
[29:49] grabbed the dog because the dog was still there.
[29:51] The dog was all on its own. There was no one else in the
[29:54] apartment, just this rolled up rug and the dog.
[29:58] She grabs the dog and she runs downstairs and calls the police
[30:01] to come come and check out this scene.
[30:03] The body was recovered from the crime scene and sent to a morgue
[30:06] for identification because 27 blows with a claw hammer to the
[30:11] head is enough to disfigure anyone.
[30:13] No one could look at this person, this poor man's body,
[30:18] and be able to identify him. He did not have facial features
[30:22] anymore. In fact, the only way that he
[30:24] could be identified in the end was through a tattoo on his leg.
[30:28] And this was when they realised that this was 28 year old
[30:32] Jeffrey Trail and not David Madsen, the tenant that they
[30:37] thought they had found dead in his own apartment.
[30:39] They're now realizing that this guy's body in the rug is just
[30:42] like some other guy that they didn't know, they didn't have
[30:46] him in connection with, with any of this at all.
[30:48] So the immediate theory when they found this was that maybe
[30:52] David Madsen had killed Jeff Trail and now David was on the
[30:57] run. He was hiding.
[30:58] So police set about trying to locate him, obviously thinking
[31:01] that they've got a killer on the loose.
[31:03] And seven days later, David Madsen was found dead.
[31:08] He had washed up on the shore of a lake, and he had been shot in
[31:12] the head. Someone had murdered him.
[31:15] He'd actually been shot 3 times, once in the back and twice in
[31:20] the head. And it's been theorized that the
[31:22] first one in his back was probably as he was running away
[31:25] from his attacker, he was trying to escape.
[31:28] They shot him in the back, got him down onto the ground, and
[31:31] then approached him and shot him twice in the head.
[31:34] His body was sent for an autopsy where it was actually revealed
[31:37] that he hadn't been dead all that long.
[31:40] It had only been about 48 hours, probably more like 24 actually.
[31:44] Which is crazy considering it had been seven days since they
[31:48] found his apartment empty. So he'd been on the run for like
[31:52] 5 or 6 days. So David had been alive the
[31:55] whole time that he'd been missing.
[31:57] But now someone, and I'm sure you can guess who, had murdered
[32:02] him. Where David's body was found was
[32:04] about 50 miles away from his house, so not local at all.
[32:08] The people around there didn't really know of David or Andrew,
[32:11] but when they were shown pictures by the police, a cafe
[32:14] owner actually recognized them and said that David and Andrew
[32:18] had been in there like the day before David's body was found.
[32:23] So they had been together right up until the day that David
[32:27] clearly died. So it was Andrew.
[32:30] It had to be Andrew. Thinking of this from police's
[32:33] POV at this point in time, they thought that David Madsen had
[32:38] murdered Jeff Trail and they were just going to try and find
[32:40] David and apprehend him. Now they were finding out that
[32:44] the prime suspect in the first murder case has been murdered
[32:48] himself, and there's been another guy there the whole
[32:51] time. Now Andrew was on the run on his
[32:55] own it it seemed like now they had to find him.
[32:58] So naturally now Andrew Cunanan was the prime suspect in both of
[33:03] the murders. Police had confirmed at this
[33:05] point that Andrew was staying with David at the time.
[33:08] Like a bunch of his stuff, his literally his luggage with his
[33:12] name tag in it was found in David's apartment.
[33:16] So they knew that he'd been there when Jeff was murdered.
[33:19] Everything was connecting now. They knew they needed to find
[33:21] him fast, but they had no idea where he was.
[33:25] They had no leads, they had nothing.
[33:28] It was scary. He'd already seemingly murdered
[33:31] two people, How many more was he going to go on to kill?
[33:41] After killing David, Andrew travelled all the way to Chicago
[33:46] to avoid being detected because he knew that it was only a
[33:50] matter of time until the bodies were found and he wanted to be
[33:53] as far away as possible. When he got to Chicago, he set
[33:56] about finding some temporary accommodation for himself.
[34:00] He needed a house, he needed somewhere to live.
[34:02] But he was realizing that he was very stuck for options.
[34:06] You're a double murderer on the run.
[34:08] What are your options? Sleep in your car?
[34:10] Sleep in like a sleazy motel or like something like that.
[34:15] But this is Andrew Cunanan we're talking about, so he didn't want
[34:18] to do either of those things. He was a bit of a Princess when
[34:22] it came to things like this. He liked high standards and nice
[34:25] places. He wasn't just going to go stay
[34:27] in any motel. He refused to compromise his
[34:31] luxury living. So he came up with a new plan.
[34:34] He was going to scope out a nice big house and he was going to
[34:38] wait until the residents came home, then kill them, and then
[34:42] just live in their house. That is an absolutely insane
[34:46] plan, but I guess to be fair, after you've murdered two
[34:48] people, sanity is out of the window, isn't it?
[34:51] So Andrew arrives in this neighborhood of these great big
[34:55] houses and he's watching them all for a bit, seeing who's
[34:58] coming in and out, and then he spots an elderly man going in
[35:03] and out of this house and there's no one else with him.
[35:06] He seems like he lives on his own, which sadly made him an
[35:11] ideal target for Andrew Cunanan. The man's name was Lee Miglin.
[35:15] He was a 70, 2 year old retired property developer, real estate
[35:20] developer. He was a very wealthy man and he
[35:23] didn't actually live alone. By the way, he had a wife, but
[35:25] she was out of town at the time of this case.
[35:28] It was May 4th, 1997 when Andrew approached Lee Miglin.
[35:34] He'd waited until he arrived back home and then as Lee was
[35:38] entering his own front door, Andrew appeared behind him with
[35:42] a gun. He held it to his back and
[35:44] guided Lee inside his own, and once they'd shut that door,
[35:50] Andrew attacked him. He dragged Lee off into his own
[35:53] garage, where he proceeded to tie his wrists and his ankles
[35:57] and torture him. This is how you know that Andrew
[36:01] Cunanan just enjoyed killing people and inflicting pain and
[36:06] terror on others. Andrew doesn't gain anything
[36:09] from torturing his victims. He was just enjoying it.
[36:13] He subjected Lee Miglin to an extensive beating that broke
[36:17] several of his ribs. He was using a bunch of
[36:20] different weapons to do this, like heavy objects.
[36:23] And he also, when Lee was like laid down on the ground, Andrew
[36:27] grabbed these massive concrete bags and just dropped them on
[36:32] his body. That'll that'll have been what
[36:34] crushed a lot of his ribs. Actually, Andrew made use of a
[36:37] lot of the gardening equipment that was around them because
[36:40] remember, he dragged him to the garage.
[36:42] So he grabbed A gardening glove and used it as a gag.
[36:45] He like stuffed it inside Lee's mouth.
[36:48] He then grabbed a pair of shears and used it to stab Lee in the
[36:52] chest about four or five times. And then he grabbed a garden saw
[36:57] and used it to slice Lee's throat, almost completely
[37:02] decapitating him. It was completely one side to
[37:05] the other. And of course, with a laceration
[37:08] that wide, he lost a lot of blood and very quickly succumbed
[37:13] to his injuries. Andrew then picked up Lee's dead
[37:17] body and just stuffed it behind some bins in the garage.
[37:21] Which I think is just all awful, especially after everything that
[37:26] has just happened. For this man to just be like
[37:28] shoved behind some bins as if he's part of the trash, that
[37:32] makes me so upset. Once he'd taken care of the the
[37:35] blood and the crime scene, Andrew then wandered back out
[37:38] into the house. He wanted to go for a tour of
[37:41] the house that he'd just killed for.
[37:43] He very quickly made himself at home.
[37:45] He ate the food from the fridge. He went and had a bath.
[37:49] He shaved using his murder victim's razor.
[37:53] He because obviously he had like rugged facial hair at this
[37:56] point. He'd been on the room for a
[37:57] little while. So he shaved all that off.
[37:59] And then he listened to the voicemails that had been left on
[38:04] Lee Miglin's house phone. And one of those voicemails was
[38:08] from his wife. Her name was Marilyn.
[38:10] She'd been away for a week, and she was due to return home
[38:14] literally the next day. And this was mentioned in the
[38:17] voicemail that she'd left for her husband.
[38:19] So now Andrew knew that he only had one day, not even that he
[38:24] didn't know how quickly she was going to make it back from the
[38:26] airport and stuff, so he knew his time was limited in this
[38:30] house. So that night, Andrew slept in
[38:33] Lee's bed and then woke up bright and early to be able to
[38:36] get himself the hell out of there before Lee's wife came
[38:40] home. Oh, and he stole a bunch of shit
[38:42] on the way out as well. A load of cash.
[38:44] Thousands of dollars worth of clothes from Lee Miglit.
[38:47] Like nice suits and stuff. Because Lee was a businessman,
[38:52] he had a lot of, like, nice suits.
[38:55] Of course, Andrew Cunanan was having all of them.
[38:57] And then he fled the scene in Lee Miglin's car as soon as his
[39:02] wife got home that day. Even before she got home, she
[39:05] knew that something was terribly wrong.
[39:07] Her husband wasn't there to pick her up from the airport, as he
[39:10] always was. So she had to find her own way
[39:12] home. And then when she got there, the
[39:15] car was stolen. The house was a mess.
[39:17] So she called the police, and she said, look, someone's broken
[39:20] into my house, stolen my car. I can't find my husband
[39:24] anywhere. He will have been in when this
[39:26] all happened. And now I'm scared.
[39:28] I don't know where he is. So police come down and they
[39:31] start to help her. They, they take a description of
[39:33] her husband. They're going to file a missing
[39:35] persons report. Meanwhile, another team of
[39:38] officers are going around the house and, you know, seeing
[39:41] what's been stolen, what's been damaged, and then they come
[39:45] across Lee's body in the garage. It was very clear that this had
[39:49] been a home invasion, and Lee had been murdered as part of it.
[39:54] And they'd been terribly robbed. This case was a total mystery to
[39:59] the police at first because, well, a lot of home invasion
[40:02] robberies are because there's usually not a link between the
[40:07] victim and the perpetrator. Marilyn didn't know of anyone
[40:11] that would, you know, specifically want to do this to
[40:14] her husband. It must have just been someone
[40:16] that knew he was wealthy and knew that they could easily
[40:19] overpower a 72 year old man that was on his own.
[40:23] And that is what happened. Police thought it was just a
[40:25] totally random home invasion. That was until a Jeep was found
[40:31] just down the road and it was abandoned.
[40:33] Like it had been like parked on the side of this road for a good
[40:36] few days. So eventually someone called the
[40:39] police and they were like, think there's a car abandoned on this
[40:41] street. They come and get it.
[40:43] They run the plates on the system.
[40:45] This was Andrew Cunanan's own Jeep that he had left just
[40:50] abandoned at the scene of the crime.
[40:51] So this told police everything and they needed to know a guy
[40:55] that is on the run because he is responsible for two murders has
[40:59] just ditched his car near this other murder scene.
[41:02] Of course he's responsible. And it was clear that Andrew had
[41:06] obviously ditched his own car there and then used Lee's car to
[41:10] continue on the run. And Andrew wasn't stupid.
[41:13] He knew that police were going to figure this out very quickly,
[41:16] and he knew he needed to ditch this car soon.
[41:20] Like he needed to find a new one to steal to take over from this
[41:23] one because police were going to be looking for this one.
[41:26] It was eventually found on May 10th, about a week, just short
[41:29] of a week after Lee's murder, and it was actually found in New
[41:33] Jersey. It was parked outside a cemetery
[41:36] as well. Very creepy, but police were
[41:38] horrified to learn that the circumstances surrounding this
[41:42] abandoned car were very similar, if not identical to the
[41:47] circumstances surrounding the last abandoned stolen car.
[41:51] A panicked wife had called the police saying that her husband
[41:55] was missing, their car was missing, and now this random car
[41:59] has just appeared abandoned. It looked like Andrew Cunanan
[42:03] had struck again, this time in New Jersey, and there was
[42:07] another missing husband. It was a 45 year old man named
[42:11] William Reese or Bill. He went by Bill.
[42:14] He was a cemetery caretaker. So that's why the car was
[42:17] abandoned outside the cemetery because that's where Bill and
[42:20] his car were for Andrew to have been able to swap.
[42:24] Bill had gone to work on this particular day and just not
[42:27] returned home, which was unlike him.
[42:29] Him and his wife had their little routine.
[42:31] She would cook them dinner on an evening and he would come in
[42:34] from work and they would sit together.
[42:36] That night she was just waiting and waiting and he wasn't coming
[42:40] home. So she decided to go down to the
[42:42] cemetery and see if everything was OK.
[42:44] When she arrived at the cemetery, she found that their
[42:46] car wasn't there. First of all, Bill had a truck
[42:49] and he parked it right outside his little office building in
[42:52] the cemetery office building, you know, You know, in
[42:55] cemeteries they have those like little outhouse shed type
[42:58] things. He had one of those and he would
[43:01] park his truck there every day It wasn't there.
[43:04] And there was just this random other car outside the cemetery,
[43:08] the only one around. So immediately his wife is
[43:10] worried and she knows that something's not right, and she
[43:14] goes into his office. Nothing seems missing there at
[43:17] first, although there is a radio playing Christian music full
[43:21] blast, but that's it. So this is when she calls the
[43:24] police and she says she can't find her husband anywhere.
[43:27] He's not at work and his car is gone.
[43:30] She's worried. Police come down to the scene to
[43:33] speak to her and file a report. Meanwhile, again, just as last
[43:37] time, another couple of officers start doing a bit of a search at
[43:40] the scene and that was when they found William Reese, but he was
[43:46] dead. It turns out there was a
[43:48] basement part underneath Bill's office, and it seemed that
[43:52] Andrew Cunanan had guided him down there and murdered him
[43:57] there. Kind of similar to how he guided
[44:00] Lee Miglin into his own garage and carried out the murder
[44:03] there. Although this time he hadn't
[44:06] tortured his victim, that was only Lee.
[44:09] For some reason, he'd simply shot Bill Reece to death and
[44:13] then taken off in his car. He hadn't done anything else at
[44:16] that crime scene. So now he was on the run in an
[44:19] in another new car, in this pickup truck.
[44:22] And for a while, police didn't have any leads on him.
[44:26] They were looking for this pickup truck and they just could
[44:28] not. They couldn't locate it.
[44:30] No one could. He'd managed to drive the pickup
[44:32] truck all the way to Miami Beach, FL, and he checked
[44:36] himself into a hotel called the Normandy Plaza Hotel.
[44:40] Side note, a lot of people have said they think Andrew Cunanan
[44:43] would have hated it there. It was quite like tacky, gaudy.
[44:47] It was a cheap hotel. He needed cheap at this point
[44:49] because he didn't have money. It was 30, $2.00 a night.
[44:53] Or if you wanted a bit of a cheaper package deal, you could
[44:56] pay $29.00 for a week. And at first Andrew was paying
[45:00] it nightly and then after a while he realized police are
[45:04] finding him here. So he starts paying for it by
[45:06] the week. He was there for a while and I
[45:08] think the reason he was managing to lay low is because he wasn't
[45:11] really using the pickup truck anymore.
[45:13] He used it to get to Florida, but then from there he just kind
[45:17] of had it parked at the hotel and he was just kind of doing
[45:20] everything on foot. So to summarise, because I feel
[45:23] like this has been such a a roller coaster at this point,
[45:26] Andrew had murdered four people. The first two were friends or
[45:32] acquaintances, Geoffrey Trail, who he beat to death, and then
[45:35] David Madsen, who he kind of took on the run with him for a
[45:39] while and then eventually shot him and left him in a lake.
[45:42] And then his last two murders seemed to be crimes of
[45:46] opportunity. He killed Lee Miglin so that he
[45:49] could use his house and steal his car.
[45:51] And Bill Reese, well, again for his car.
[45:54] And at this point, Andrew Cunanan had made it onto the
[45:57] FBI's most wanted list. But annoyingly, the appeals for
[46:02] information were very much focused on that pickup truck
[46:06] because they thought that he would be actively driving it
[46:09] wherever he was. So these appeals really, really
[46:12] focused on that car, on its plates, on the colour, on the
[46:15] model, everything. Meanwhile, he wasn't driving it.
[46:19] So for a whole month he managed to lay low at this hotel.
[46:23] No one suspected him. Everyone treated him fine and
[46:26] normal because he was just a normal guy.
[46:29] That was until he did something really stupid, actually.
[46:33] He decided to take one of the rings that he stole from Lee
[46:38] Miglin to a pawn shop and sell it under his real name as well.
[46:44] And this is so stupid because pawn shops regularly have to
[46:48] send like an itinerary of all the things that they've bought
[46:52] just in case it's stolen items and they send it to the police
[46:55] for a review. So obviously, Andrew Cunanan's
[46:59] own real name is going to be on this report next to this little
[47:02] ring that has been stolen from Lee Miglin.
[47:04] Well, I guess this would be a problem if police actually check
[47:08] those lists shared that like the police had that information on
[47:13] their desk and they didn't actually see it until after this
[47:17] whole. So even though he made that mess
[47:19] up, it didn't actually affect anything.
[47:21] And just days after he pawned that ring and almost got caught,
[47:26] Andrew committed his final murder.
[47:29] And this would be the one that made him infamous when he
[47:32] decided to murder global fashion icon Gianni Versace.
[47:38] I'm sure you are very familiar with the Versace name and the
[47:41] brand. If not, where have you been?
[47:44] It's a very luxurious high fashion designer that originally
[47:49] specialized in like women's wear sexy dresses.
[47:53] Uh, but now they just dominate a lot of markets.
[47:55] They have home wear menswear, kids wear everything, jewelry,
[47:59] fragrance. Oh, don't we all love a Versace
[48:01] perfume. Gianni Versace emerged as a very
[48:04] famous and successful designer at a very, very young age.
[48:08] He was about 26 when he first started making like major moves,
[48:12] which is insane because he didn't have connections in the
[48:16] not in the big fashion industry like designer fashion industry
[48:20] when he started out. His connections to the industry
[48:24] were his own mother, which I think is very sweet.
[48:27] That's how he got into fashion designing is because his mother
[48:30] was a seamstress and he used to sit and watch her as a kid and
[48:35] she would make these beautiful dresses and he would be just in
[48:39] awe at how his mother had done that.
[48:42] So she was the one that taught Gianni how to sew and how to
[48:46] design and measure and everything, everything.
[48:49] She planted the seeds for Versace.
[48:52] The brand and family has always been a very, very big part of
[48:56] the Versace brand. I'm sure a lot of you know
[48:59] Donatella Versace who is an absolute icon, mainly for her
[49:03] Instagram comments on absolutely everything ever Donatella
[49:06] Versace. But she has worked at Versace
[49:09] pretty much the whole entire time in some way.
[49:12] She's done a lot of creative help and I believe she's now
[49:16] vice president. Go Girl.
[49:18] There's three Versace siblings and they all worked for Versace.
[49:22] In the beginning. Santo was on like the financial
[49:24] side of things, so it was a family affair and I'm sure the
[49:28] Versace family were very, very proud of their children.
[49:30] At the height of his career, Gianni Versace and the brand
[49:34] itself were known for pushing boundaries because at the time
[49:38] everything was quite modest and respectful and like muted
[49:42] colours and whatever. But Versace was not here for
[49:46] that. He wanted to make sexy.
[49:48] He was using leather and lace and cutouts and bold colours.
[49:52] And this was something that a lot of big luxury designers were
[49:56] a little bit, no, they weren't very keen on experimenting with
[50:01] all of that because it was sometimes seen as tacky or not
[50:06] very classy. But I think This is why Versace
[50:09] really hit the nail on the head because he managed to find that
[50:13] middle ground between like gaudy and sleigh, you know, like he he
[50:19] smashed it. There's actually a famous quote
[50:21] that goes Armani dresses the wife, Versace dresses the
[50:24] mistress. And I think that says everything
[50:26] about what he was going for. He wanted to make sexy lady
[50:31] clothes. You know, everything else was
[50:33] just a bit boring, you know, long dresses and like muted teal
[50:38] or whatever. And he came and slid.
[50:41] He was aiming for that like young, seductive, sexy, fun,
[50:45] free kind of vibe. Gianni Versace himself was
[50:48] openly gay and he lived in the Miami Beach area of Florida,
[50:53] which is a very gay area, or at least at the at the time, maybe
[50:56] it wasn't, but it was very accepting of gays.
[51:00] And he was like royalty there. Everyone knew that Gianni
[51:03] Versace lived there because he was he was quite down to earth
[51:06] in the way that he would just like be walking down the street
[51:09] didn't always have like major security around him.
[51:11] He would go and sit at the local cafes and enjoy a conversation
[51:16] with the locals and he was very heavily involved in the gay
[51:20] scene in Miami Beach, FL. He was at all the clubs, all the
[51:23] bars and to be fair, he is Gianni Versace.
[51:27] So he was very much involved in any club scene that he wanted to
[51:31] be in. No matter what city he was in,
[51:33] no matter what state he was in. He was royalty wherever he went.
[51:37] It's actually been speculated that Danny Versace and Andrew
[51:41] Cunanan might have crossed paths at some point in like a club or
[51:46] a party or an event. They did attend some of the same
[51:50] things, which is why people think this because like, there's
[51:53] a good chance that they probably did meet.
[51:54] Whether it was briefly in passing, just an introduction or
[51:58] whether they like actually had a conversation, we don't know.
[52:01] But we think they met. And Andrew for years after this
[52:05] potential meeting would tell everyone that he is good friends
[52:08] with Gianni Versace, good friends.
[52:11] It's like hard to know where the truth lies when it comes to
[52:15] Andrew Cunanan because pathological liar, obviously.
[52:18] Like, obviously they're not besties, but like maybe there
[52:22] was a little bit of truth in some of it.
[52:24] I don't know, some people think there might have even been a
[52:26] little bit of a, you know, like more than friends moment
[52:29] happening. But there's absolutely no proof
[52:31] of that. And also Versace's family have
[52:34] said that he he didn't know Andrew Cunanan.
[52:37] And let's be real, when you're as famous as Gianni Versace,
[52:42] you're probably not going to remember people that you have
[52:44] very brief run insurance with at random events.
[52:48] So he probably had no idea who Andrew Cunanan was.
[53:00] Some people speculate that Andrew could have held a lot of
[53:04] resentment for Gianni because they weren't friends.
[53:10] I don't know. Because Andrew had built up this
[53:12] like fake friendship with him in his head and in his life.
[53:15] When he talks to his friends, he loves Gianni Versace, his friend
[53:18] Gianni Versace, but in reality, he knows that Gianni's not his
[53:23] friend. People think that he might have
[53:24] just like built up his own resentment in his head from
[53:27] lying to himself. And it's worth pointing out that
[53:30] Gianni Versace was everything that Andrew Cunanan wanted to be
[53:35] but wasn't. He was rich and famous and
[53:38] successful and he had a boyfriend in a big massive
[53:42] mansion. And he was like famous within
[53:45] the gay scene as well, which was a huge thing for the time
[53:48] because this was a roundabout the AIDS crisis and a lot of
[53:53] people still did have rotten attitudes towards gay men
[53:58] specifically. But Gianni Versace was a
[54:00] globally celebrated gay man. That was even more special and
[54:06] even more what Andrew wished he could have been.
[54:09] So a lot of people believe that. Just general jealousy and
[54:12] resentment. And well, I don't really know.
[54:15] A lot of people think that was his motive for the murder, but
[54:19] it seems very specific for him to drive all the way to Miami
[54:24] Beach, FL and seek out Gianni Versace to murder him as his
[54:27] last victim just over what, like a bit of jealousy?
[54:30] Well, actually, there's also the element of famous person.
[54:34] And if you murder a famous person, a lot of people are
[54:36] going to talk about that. And Andrew himself would then
[54:39] become infamous. Maybe that was what he was going
[54:42] for. And maybe he just knew where
[54:44] Gianni Versace lived, so maybe he just knew how to get there
[54:47] and how to do it quickly. So on July 15th, 1997, Andrew
[54:52] took the stolen pickup truck and parked it at a garage just a few
[54:57] streets away from Gianni Versace's home.
[54:59] By the way, he had left the hotel without paying his last
[55:03] bill. Just completely ditched,
[55:05] ghosted, knew that he was never coming back.
[55:07] It's not known exactly what Andrew did when he left the car
[55:11] in the garage. We don't know if he was stalking
[55:14] Gianni all morning or what he did to be.
[55:17] We don't know. We don't know.
[55:19] All we do know is Gianni Versace's version of what
[55:22] happened, and that was just a very normal Tuesday morning.
[55:26] He was an early riser. He was a workaholic, his husband
[55:30] said. Husband or boyfriend, I don't
[55:32] know if they were married. His partner said that he was a
[55:34] workaholic and always used to wake up early to get going with
[55:37] things and put in his ideas down and everything.
[55:40] So Gianni woke up on this Tuesday morning, uh, he left his
[55:43] boyfriend in bed asleep, uh, while he went for a walk to the
[55:48] local cafe. And he would go and pick up a
[55:50] bunch of magazines once a week. He liked to stay in the know of
[55:53] everything, especially in the fashion world.
[55:55] He would pick up his magazines and then he would go and sit at
[55:58] a cafe and have some breakfast. And yeah, he was having a great
[56:01] morning. All these usuals saw him, you
[56:04] know, the the guy at the magazine stall and the guy at
[56:07] the cafe. He said his usual good mornings
[56:10] and then he made his way back to his house.
[56:13] Right around the time that Andrew Cunanan arrived.
[56:17] Gianni walked the few steps at the front of his house and he
[56:20] had this big gate that was always locked, obviously.
[56:23] And as he stood there rummaging around for his key, Andrew
[56:27] Cunanan approached him from behind and just point blank shot
[56:31] him in the back of the head twice and he just fell to the
[56:34] floor. That was it.
[56:35] He'd killed him that quickly. And at this point, Giannis
[56:38] partner was actually sat like just inside the garden part
[56:42] having coffee. And so he heard the gunshots.
[56:45] He heard the gunshots that killed his partner.
[56:47] He rushed out to the gate to see what the noise was, and he saw
[56:52] his boyfriend's body just laying on the steps to their home in a
[56:56] pool of his own blood. I can't imagine how horrifying
[57:00] that must have been for him to see.
[57:02] Like, I've seen crime scene photos of the steps and even
[57:06] just the blood on the stairs is so harrowing.
[57:10] It you know when you get that feeling when you see certain
[57:13] true crime things or you hear certain stories and it just guts
[57:17] you. Like that photo.
[57:18] I saw it, and I nearly threw up just to know that that was where
[57:22] he was standing, that that exact spot is where he lost his life.
[57:27] Oh my God. This attack was very different
[57:30] to Andrew Cunanan's previous murders because, well, this one
[57:33] was in broad daylight on the street.
[57:36] It had loads of witnesses, like he'd never done that before, and
[57:39] it didn't seem like he really cared.
[57:42] One woman actually saw all of this happen, and then she
[57:46] watched as Andrew just walked normally down the street and
[57:50] away, and no one was trying to capture him or anything.
[57:53] Like, no one was trying to. Well, to be fair, he had a gun,
[57:55] obviously. Sorry, I had a stupid moment
[57:57] then. But like, no one was trying to
[57:59] tackle him or anything. And she was stunned and
[58:02] terrified. So she just kind of watched him
[58:05] walk away after just shooting someone and killing them.
[58:08] So yeah, he fled the scene on foot.
[58:10] And he walked to that garage a couple of streets away where
[58:13] he'd left the pickup truck. He'd actually left a spare
[58:15] change of clothes in the car. He got changed real quick, and
[58:19] then he left. Yeah, he left the pickup truck
[58:22] and his old clothes just abandoned there, and he walked
[58:27] back out into the street. And, I mean, now he looked
[58:29] completely different, and he was able to just slip away
[58:32] undetected. Meanwhile, Gianni Versace had
[58:35] been transferred to the nearest hospital, but he was pronounced
[58:39] dead before 10 AM. It didn't take long for police
[58:42] to actually find the abandoned pickup truck in the garage.
[58:45] And of course, as soon as they found that they knew Andrew
[58:48] Cunanan was responsible for Gianni Versace's murder.
[58:52] It's a dead giveaway. Whenever you find an Andrew
[58:54] Cunanan stole an abandoned car at the scene of a murder,
[58:57] there's your answer. Inside the truck, they found all
[59:00] of Andrew's belongings. It seemed like he'd just kind of
[59:03] ditched most of his stuff. And they also found some bits
[59:06] belonging to Lee Miglin and Bill Reese.
[59:09] So now Andrew Cunanan has murdered 5 people and he's
[59:14] highly likely to strike again. I mean, this man would just keep
[59:17] going and going and going until something else puts a stop to
[59:20] it. Now that he'd murdered a huge
[59:22] celebrity, the case was now getting like 10 times more media
[59:26] coverage than it was in the 1st place.
[59:29] And in the 1st place it was already getting a lot because
[59:31] this man is on the FBI most wanted list.
[59:33] So yeah, the coverage on the case was already pretty big, but
[59:36] now it was mega Andrew Cunanan's picture, his description,
[59:41] everything about him was plastered everywhere on posters,
[59:44] Flyers, on news network channels, newspapers, absolutely
[59:49] everything. He was everywhere.
[59:50] And everyone knew to be on the lookout for him, but Andrew
[59:53] managed to avoid detection for over a week.
[59:57] Somehow. He was like one of the most
[59:59] wanted men in the whole country. But they couldn't find him.
[1:00:03] They didn't know where he was. Despite the FBI literally
[1:00:05] getting like hundreds of tips and leads and mentions sightings
[1:00:11] even, none of them went anywhere.
[1:00:13] Maybe some of them were him, but by the time police managed to
[1:00:16] follow up on it, he was already gone.
[1:00:18] That was until July 23rd, 19. 97 Andrew Cunanan's time on the run
[1:00:24] was finally up It was all sparked by a 79 year old man
[1:00:27] named Fernando Carrera who was a caretaker for a very wealthy
[1:00:32] businessman's houseboat. And this was a swish houseboat,
[1:00:36] like this was really cool. It's like 2 stories and it's
[1:00:39] just floating on water. They don't have them where I'm
[1:00:42] from. It was so cool.
[1:00:43] So this businessman has this houseboat and obviously because
[1:00:48] he is very wealthy businessman, has lots of different properties
[1:00:51] and he's always everywhere. So he hires Fernando to take
[1:00:55] care of the place while he's gone.
[1:00:57] On this particular day, Fernando arrived at the houseboat and
[1:01:00] immediately before he even started to enter the house, he
[1:01:04] knew that something was wrong. The lock on the front door was
[1:01:07] broken and there were even a couple of lights on inside.
[1:01:10] There was a light on in one of the upstairs bedrooms.
[1:01:12] And obviously Fernando knew that the guy he worked for wasn't in,
[1:01:16] so someone else was. Someone else had broken into
[1:01:19] this houseboat and now he was was going to have to deal with
[1:01:22] it. So he pushed open the door into
[1:01:24] the living room and again he saw more proof that someone had
[1:01:28] broken in. The sofa had moved and there was
[1:01:31] even a pair of shoes just sitting by the sofa, so it
[1:01:36] seemed that the intruder was still in there with his feet
[1:01:40] out. Fernando was actually armed at
[1:01:42] the time, and so it was at this point that he decided to pull
[1:01:45] his gun and prepare to make his way through the house to go and
[1:01:49] find this intruder. But as he did, he heard a
[1:01:52] gunshot ring out from upstairs. Fernando panicked.
[1:01:56] Now he knew that the intruder was also armed.
[1:02:00] It wasn't worth trying to trying to confront them, trying to
[1:02:04] catch them himself. It just wasn't worth it.
[1:02:06] Fernando turned and ran the hell out of that house, but he got
[1:02:10] back into his car and he called the police and basically told
[1:02:13] them this whole situation, that there's an intruder in his house
[1:02:16] and he believes that they've just shot at him.
[1:02:18] That's a very, very serious case at the best of times.
[1:02:22] An active shooter in a house is very scary.
[1:02:26] That shit needs surrounding. You need SWAT teams and
[1:02:29] everything but. But what makes it even worse is
[1:02:32] that police already kind of knew that this was Andrew Cunanan.
[1:02:36] It had been about a week since he'd killed Gianni Versace, and
[1:02:39] so they were waiting for him to crop up any day now.
[1:02:42] And this sounded very characteristic of an Andrew
[1:02:46] Cunanan attack. And they knew that if it was
[1:02:49] him, this could be very, very dangerous, very, very scary.
[1:02:54] So they sent out the big dogs. They sent police, FBI agents,
[1:02:59] SWAT teams, bloody armed forces, absolutely everyone was sent to
[1:03:06] surround this house and make sure that they finally caught
[1:03:10] Andrew Cunanan. Once they arrived and they got
[1:03:13] stationed circling the house, they knew they needed to
[1:03:17] establish communication with the intruder inside the house
[1:03:20] because he was clearly armed, so entering the building wasn't an
[1:03:24] option. He could just shoot at them if
[1:03:26] they did. So negotiators start just
[1:03:29] shouting into the house and they're not getting any
[1:03:32] responses and they start using like big megaphone thingies.
[1:03:37] I had a very comical image in my head of them using like a big
[1:03:39] megaphone. I guess they have like police
[1:03:41] ones. Anyway, they were shouting up to
[1:03:43] him, no response whatsoever. There was no movement.
[1:03:47] There was no, there was absolutely nothing.
[1:03:49] When it was clear that the intruder wasn't going to shout
[1:03:52] back to them, someone even threw a phone into the houseboat
[1:03:56] window at the top. I don't actually know why or
[1:04:00] what the idea was there, but nothing happened.
[1:04:02] Anyway. For five whole hours, police
[1:04:05] officers were outside that houseboat trying to establish
[1:04:08] communication with this silent intruder.
[1:04:12] They hadn't heard a single peep come from that house the whole
[1:04:15] time. But of course, during this time,
[1:04:17] during the five hours the news had spread like wildfire that
[1:04:22] they thought they had, Andrew Cunanan surrounded.
[1:04:25] Every media outlet, every reporter, every journalist,
[1:04:28] every photographer wanted to get in on this story as quickly as
[1:04:34] it was happening. Everyone wanted to be the first
[1:04:35] ones to report on it. So reporters are flocking to the
[1:04:40] scene. Luckily police had already
[1:04:42] blocked off like a good few roads behind this houseboat so
[1:04:45] no one could get too close. But a couple of very, very
[1:04:50] wealthy media outlets decided to send over helicopters above the
[1:04:55] scene. Took a couple of photographers
[1:04:58] up there and get some photos and actually one of these helicopter
[1:05:02] journalists started a live broadcast of the scene on on the
[1:05:08] news, which this is actually a really dangerous thing for a
[1:05:12] situation like this because, well, he's locked himself in a
[1:05:16] house with TV's in there. He could watch the news.
[1:05:20] He could watch the police surrounding him and figure out
[1:05:24] like where they are, what their strategies are.
[1:05:26] I mean, I suppose it wouldn't do anything.
[1:05:28] He's one man versus the armed forces.
[1:05:32] It's dangerous. They should they can't give that
[1:05:34] kind of Intel to the intruder inside the house.
[1:05:36] So police are thinking we cannot let Andrew Cunanan see the TV,
[1:05:42] we can't let him see the news right now.
[1:05:43] So they cut the power lines to the houseboat so there's no way
[1:05:47] he could turn on a TV in there. And it was at this point that
[1:05:49] they decide to try and make entry.
[1:05:52] They throw a load of tear gas in through the windows and the
[1:05:55] doors and with all their protective gear on, they go
[1:05:59] inside. When they got up to the top
[1:06:01] floor bedroom, that's where they found Andrew Cunanan laying on
[1:06:05] the bed, already dead and cold. He'd been dead for a while.
[1:06:11] This whole time he had been dead.
[1:06:14] Turns out that shot that Fernando had heard was not
[1:06:17] someone shooting at him, but it was Andrew Cunanan shooting
[1:06:21] himself. Finally, his spontaneous reign
[1:06:25] of terror was over after five whole months. 5 victims, 6
[1:06:31] deaths including his own. And in fact he used the same gun
[1:06:35] to kill himself that he had used to kill a lot of his victims.
[1:06:39] He didn't leave a note or like a final message to the world or
[1:06:44] anything. No explanations.
[1:06:45] That was just it. And we still don't really know
[1:06:49] why any of this even happened in the 1st place.
[1:06:52] None of his crimes seem to have a motive.
[1:06:56] Well, I guess apart from the murders of Lee Miglin and Bill
[1:07:00] Reese. Those two, the motive seemed to
[1:07:02] be just convenience. He needed a new car.
[1:07:05] He needed a house to wash up and shave in.
[1:07:08] But it's those first two deaths and Gianni Versace as well.
[1:07:12] Like that is so random. Naturally, people have tried to
[1:07:16] speculate and theorize what his motives could have been.
[1:07:20] One of which was that Andrew Cunanan could have been HIV
[1:07:25] positive and trying to get revenge on the person that
[1:07:29] transmitted it to him. And this theory actually started
[1:07:33] from Andrew himself, kind of when he was alive.
[1:07:36] He had mentioned to his friends a couple of times that he was
[1:07:39] worried he might be HIV positive, but he hadn't been
[1:07:43] tested and he didn't know. But he was worried, he was
[1:07:45] scared, and he was angry at whoever could have potentially
[1:07:49] given him it because especially at that time, contracting AIDS
[1:07:53] or becoming HIV positive was more than just the health issue
[1:07:59] in itself. It was what that would do to you
[1:08:02] socially or like romantically. People didn't want to associate
[1:08:07] with people that were HIV positive.
[1:08:09] It was like social suicide, which is so sad.
[1:08:12] People didn't understand it then.
[1:08:14] But that was one thing that worried a lot of people about
[1:08:17] testing HIV positive was, you know, what other people would
[1:08:22] think and how they would treat them.
[1:08:23] So actually a lot of people didn't even get tested.
[1:08:26] So I guess the theory is that he just went around killing people
[1:08:30] that he'd slept with in the past just in case they were the one
[1:08:34] that gave him HIV. I don't know.
[1:08:35] There's no, there's absolutely no confirmation of any of that.
[1:08:39] And if anything, I mean, I personally don't believe this
[1:08:41] theory. When an autopsy was done on
[1:08:43] Andrew Cunanan's body, he was found to not be be HIV positive.
[1:08:47] So, umm, I don't know. I do think there could be some
[1:08:51] level of motive in that like ex partner theory, not necessarily
[1:08:57] HIV, but like maybe he had slept with at least the first two.
[1:09:01] I think I mentioned this earlier on, but some people think that
[1:09:04] his first two victims, Jeff and David might have been involved
[1:09:07] together. And so maybe the first killing
[1:09:10] was like jealousy and anger and then the next two were
[1:09:14] convenience. And then the last one, Gianni
[1:09:17] Versace, was for infant me at this point.
[1:09:20] He was a serial killer and no matter how he was caught or died
[1:09:25] or whatever, he was going to be found out.
[1:09:27] Everyone was going to find out that he was a serial killer one
[1:09:29] day. So might as well be the infamous
[1:09:32] one that murdered Gianni Versace.
[1:09:34] That's my own theory anyway. The one that confuses me the
[1:09:37] most is the first one of Jeff Trail, how he was murdered
[1:09:40] within 10 minutes of arriving at the apartment.
[1:09:43] But I think it makes sense that after the first killing, he just
[1:09:47] kind of devolved into it insanity.
[1:09:50] And by the 5th killing of Gianni Versace, he didn't have anything
[1:09:54] to lose. And so I think he was just
[1:09:57] insane at that point in time. And so, yeah, he continued.
[1:10:01] He just kept going with it. In the aftermath of Gianni
[1:10:03] Versace murder, his sister Donatella took over pretty much
[1:10:08] all of his, uh, roles within the company.
[1:10:11] And her daughter Allegra is actually the heiress of Versace.
[1:10:17] Gianni was absolutely obsessed with her and her younger
[1:10:20] brother, I believe. But she was his first, like his
[1:10:23] sister's first child and she was a little Angel to him and so he
[1:10:27] left his whole empire to her. Although she is, umm, older now,
[1:10:32] she's an adult and she does not like, uh, celebrity.
[1:10:35] She, you know what, I was reading up on her and she seemed
[1:10:37] so cool. She just likes to sit at home
[1:10:40] and watch Netflix and she is not interested in these big fashion
[1:10:45] shows and parties and being nun and doing interviews and stuff.
[1:10:48] So Donatella pretty much does all that.
[1:10:51] She's kind of the face of Versace these days, while
[1:10:53] Allegra does work there, but she is a private person who works
[1:10:57] behind the scenes and I respect that.
[1:11:00] Get your bag, girl. And that is all I have on this
[1:11:02] case. Thank you so much for listening
[1:11:08] to usual disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[1:11:10] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[1:11:13] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[1:11:16] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[1:11:19] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
[1:11:22] podcast app so that you get notifications when we post new
[1:11:25] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[1:11:28] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[1:11:31] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[1:11:34] production. See you next time.

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