Andrew Cunanan spent his last moments on a bed in a nearly windowless houseboat dressed only in gray boxer shorts and sporting a scruffy beard, the gun police believe he used to kill three other men pointed into his mouth.
When Cunanan pulled the trigger and the gun fell to his lap, he likely took with him the answers to the crush of questions he raised while allegedly killing five men in four states. Police found no suicide note, no diary of a life on the lam.
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But the bullet that ended the manhunt for Cunanan also loosened some of the details of the killer’s fugitive run that began in April in Minnesota. They gave an intriguing glimpse into a flight that often seemed as uneventful as a sightseeing trip, yet was punctuated with moments of desperation and violence.
On Thursday, investigators around the country tipped their hands, revealing that Cunanan called an acquaintance, pleading for help getting a phony passport, and that he was seen in Chicago developer Lee Miglin’s neighborhood before Miglin’s slaying, sleeping in a Jeep stolen from another victim.
They also disclosed how excruciatingly close to Cunanan they had twice come: The FBI manhunt had brought agents to Gianni Versace’s neighborhood just hours before the designer was killed, and a sailboat burglary last week had brought the search for Cunanan to the very waterfront neighborhood where he died Wednesday.
Investigators even said they know Cunanan saw two movies in New York: “Liar, Liar” and “The Devil’s Own.”
They offered a detail this tiny: There was a plate of empty pecan shells in the houseboat where he ended his life and his killing spree.
Still, the new information only threw into relief how much more authorities need to learn about Cunanan before they can even begin to grasp why he killed and how he eluded police for so long.
“My reaction is sad because there are a lot of matters we wanted to clear up,” said Chicago Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez. “I was hopeful the key to answering some of those questions might be Cunanan himself.”
In taking his own life, Cunanan might have committed one final injustice–frustrating efforts to make clear-cut sense of his cross-country rampage.
What triggered his alleged killing binge? Did Cunanan plan it or did something inside him suddenly snap? What was the “business” he spoke of needing to take care of in Minnesota before the spree began there? What was the “dark side” of Cunanan that one victim had confided to friends that he feared?
Were his alleged attacks on Miglin and Versace spur-of-the-moment decisions or were the two targeted for assassination?
And perhaps most perplexing of all: What demons inside Cunanan propelled him on an ever downward spiral, from a carefree if eccentric prep school kid to an outlandish male hustler to a fugitive chased across half the nation?
The details that trickled out Thursday were tantalizing, though they reveal less a portrait of a spree killer than they do a line on a map. For the first time, police revealed some of the sketchy details they have been able to piece together of Cunanan’s fugitive trail.
From information provided by investigators, this time line emerged:
After the Miglin killing, Cunanan apparently headed to New York, according to receipts investigators have found.
One was for a low-rent New York hotel called the West Side Club. It was dated May 5, the day after Miglin’s body was found in the garage of his Gold Coast town home.
Cunanan also went shopping that day. Investigators found a receipt from the Original Levi’s Store on East 57th Street in New York.
Two days later, Cunanan took in a movie in Lower Manhattan. He went to another the next day. A third movie stub found by police couldn’t be read.
The next day, Cunanan was allegedly driving Miglin’s stolen Lexus in Philadelphia. Police there picked up a signal from the car’s cell phone, but were unable to track the car down.
The following day, he drove across the Delaware River into a remote federal cemetery in New Jersey, where he allegedly killed an employee for his red pickup truck.
Cunanan then headed south and by the next day, May 10, was in Florence, S.C., just off Interstate Highway 95. There he stole a license plate that he slapped on the pickup.
The FBI believes he reached south Florida on May 11 and on the following day, under an alias, checked in to the Normandy Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach.
He laid low for nearly two months. But by the beginning of July, the FBI was beginning to home in on the Miami area. “I knew he was in south Florida prior to the Versace murder,” said Paul Philip, an FBI spokesman in Miami. He declined to elaborate.
On July 11, four days after Cunanan pawned a gold coin, a worker in a sandwich shop called police, saying Cunanan was in the store. By the time police arrived, the man was gone.
“There is no doubt in my mind that was Mr. Cunanan,” Jim Chambliss, chief investigator in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said Thursday.
By the morning of July 15, investigators looking for Cunanan were in Versace’s trendy South Beach neighborhood, conducting interviews.
But just after breakfast, Versace was slain on his doorstep, and the best glimpse police got of the killer was from a grainy surveillance camera video that showed a man fleeing down an alley.
Within 48 hours, Cunanan called an acquaintance, desperately seeking a passport, said William Esposito, deputy FBI director.
Esposito said the acquaintance did not volunteer the information to investigators until approached by the FBI. The person told agents that Cunanan was looking for false identification so he could obtain a passport and flee the country.
Cunanan and his friend discussed at least 10 possible names as candidates for Cunanan’s false identification, Esposito said.
Meanwhile, Cunanan seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Reports of sightings flooded in from around the nation, yet none could be confirmed.
One, though, led police close to Cunanan, investigators acknowledged Thursday. Last week, a sailboat owner reported that his boat had been burglarized. The man said he suspected a vagrant who looked like Cunanan. Police descended on the marina and began knocking on doors in the neighborhood.
That neighborhood included the houseboat where Cunanan was apparently holed up in his final days.
Inside, Cunanan had electricity, running water and a television. “He was (at the boat) a good bit of the time since the Versace murder,” Philip said.
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The two-story houseboat is located on a stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway known as Indian Creek. It belongs to Torsten Reineck, a Las Vegas club owner. That Cunanan picked that houseboat was doubly unlucky for Reineck: He is wanted in Germany on charges of fraud and tax evasion involving a gambling hall. He was interviewed Thursday by FBI agents in Las Vegas.
The houseboat is moored directly across Miami Beach’s main drag, Collins Avenue, from luxury hotels and condominiums with names such as Imperial House, SeaCoast and The Alexander.
It’s a place where thousands of tourists, buses, cabs and limo drivers pass each day, and the houseboat is parked along a dock where residents fish or fuss over their boats each day.
Yet, Cunanan was apparently able to go unnoticed inside a houseboat–painted blue and white with rusted wrought-iron trim and a white fountain out front–that from outward appearances is slightly tired and shabby.
One neighbor described it as “a big blue box on a barge.”
The houseboat doesn’t have many windows, and those on the first floor are covered by shutters.
Bridgette Andrade, 37, described herself as a friend of Reineck’s. “It’s beautiful (inside), very open,” she said. “If the caretaker wouldn’t have showed up, he could have been there for months.”
On Wednesday, the boat’s caretaker did stop in. He suspected an intruder was aboard and called police, keeping an eye on the front door.
When, after a standoff, a SWAT team finally entered the houseboat, they found Cunanan in the second-floor master bedroom.
He was propped up on two pillows. The gun was on his lap.
There was evidence that Cunanan might have been in the houseboat for some time. A plate of pecan shells lay on the table in the living room. Clothes, many of them dirty, were strewn about the lower level of the houseboat.
A police affidavit filed in Florida court also revealed that police found a small safe near Cunanan’s body. The affidavit also said “there is probable cause to believe the safe may contain more evidence related to the five homicides.”
The safe will probably not, however, contain the answers to all the mysteries swirling around Cunanan. In hindsight, they began to build long before his life of crime did.
Cunanan’s life in San Diego was built on a pile of fiction. An inveterate name-dropper and braggart, Cunanan created a persona as a worldly, fun-loving aristocrat.
In San Diego’s predominantly gay Hillcrest neighborhood, he used the alias Andy DeSilva and was known as a smart, sophisticated jet-setter with a seemingly limitless bank account and no apparent job.
Those who knew him said Cunanan had become the gay equivalent of a mistress, living off a series of rich older men.
Late last year, after the last of those benefactors dumped him, Cunanan’s high-flying lifestyle finally began to tumble.
While Cunanan had no criminal record, at least one former lover, David Madson, confided to friends that he broke off the relationship because Cunanan had a “dark side” that made him nervous.
It apparently was an accurate and chilling observation.
In April, Cunanan told friends that he was moving to San Francisco but first had to head to Minnesota to wrap up some “business” with Jeffrey Trail, a friend who had recently moved to Minneapolis. By coincidence, Madson, too, had moved to the Twin Cities.
It was Madson who picked Cunanan up April 25 at the airport, and the two former lovers spent at least some of the weekend together.
But in a development that has yet to be fully explained, police also believe Cunanan spent Saturday night alone at Trail’s apartment while Trail was elsewhere. It was then that Cunanan might have stolen a .40-caliber gun belonging to Trail that authorities said was used in three of the five killings.
The next night, Trail joined Cunanan and Madson at Madson’s loft. Neighbors heard a ferocious argument. On Tuesday, Trail’s body was found wrapped in rug. He had been bludgeoned with a claw hammer.
On May 3, Madson’s body was found by a fisherman on a small lake north of Minneapolis. Madson had been shot twice in the head, most likely with the gun stolen from Trail.
The same day, Cunanan allegedly arrived in Chicago in Madson’s stolen Jeep Grand Cherokee and parked the vehicle in the Gold Coast neighborhood about a block from Miglin’s home. The next day, Miglin’s body–his chest crushed, his body riddled with puncture wounds and his face carefully wrapped in masking tape–was discovered in his garage.
Miglin’s Lexus was gone–and Cunanan was heading east.