American Murder Houses

by Steve Lehto

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  The General Wayne Inn is without question the oldest murder house in America, even though the one documented murder that took place there happened in 1996. It is also the murder house with the most history to it, the kind of history that lends itself to ghost stories. The inn was built in 1704 in Merion, Pennsylvania, less than ten miles from Philadelphia. A colonist named Robert Jones built the inn on land he bought for twenty shillings. The man he bought the land from had gotten title to it from William Penn.

  The first owner of the property named it the Wayside Inn, but it went through a series of name changes as time went by. After Jones died, the inn was run by a man named Anthony Tunis, and he named the inn Tunis Ordinary. At other times it was known as the William Penn Inn, for the original owner of the land, and Streeper’s Tavern, for Abraham Streeper, who was the proprietor in 1776. Streeper left the inn in the hands of his wife while he went off and fought the British. During the Revolutionary War, while the owner was off fighting, the inn saw a bit of action of its own. The inn had many important visitors and even ended up in enemy hands for a bit. General Wayne stopped by, and George Washington and General Lafayette visited the inn the day after Wayne was there. Just a few days later, members of the Continental Congress stopped in as they fled the advancing British. Shortly after they left, the redcoats rode into town and occupied Streeper’s Tavern. Skirmishes took place around the inn, and this is where some of the ghost stories originate: Some Hessian soldiers were said to have died there or nearby. As with many ghost stories, details of the deaths of the subjects are hard to nail down.

  After the Revolutionary War ended, General Wayne spent some time fighting Native Americans in the Northwest Territory. After his time out west, he traveled back to Merion and stopped at the inn. It was 1795 and, while General Wayne was basking in the glow of his recent campaign successes, the proprietor decided to name the inn after Wayne.

  General Wayne was born in 1745—forty-one years after the inn first opened—and fought in the American Revolution. His career was so illustrious that he is remembered today by many things that were named after him. Towns, forts, buildings, bridges—in some parts of the country the name is ubiquitous. There is Fort Wayne, Indiana, and an actual Fort Wayne in Detroit. Detroit itself is in Wayne County, which also contains the city of Wayne. There was even another General Wayne Inn, this one in New York, about a hundred miles from the one in Lower Merion. The New York one was younger, having been built in the 1780s, but by 2013 it was abandoned and slated for demolition.

  Many people wonder if General Wayne was insane; after all, they called him “Mad Anthony.” It turns out that the nickname was a reference to his famous temper. He notoriously got mad at people who were incompetent or who didn’t follow orders.

  The inn always appeared to be prosperous. Over the years it even housed a post office and a general store at one time or another, but its primary role was as a tavern and inn. In 1843, Edgar Allan Poe was said to have carved his initials in either a window or a windowsill at the inn.

  The General Wayne Inn—or “the Wayne,” as regulars called it—was still hugely successful in the twentieth century. Patrons packed the bar, and the restaurant was filled with customers and cigarette smoke. In 1970, a man named Barton Johnson bought it. People familiar with the story of the inn remember his ownership for two reasons. The inn was a moneymaker during the period, and Johnson loved to tell people the inn was haunted. By the late 1980s, the story was so well known that the television series Unsolved Mysteries ran an episode about it, trying to track down the ghost of a Hessian soldier. Later, the inn would appear on television again when America’s Most Wanted would run a piece on the Webb murder.

  In 1995, the General Wayne Inn was purchased by James E. Webb and Guy Sileo Jr. for a little under $1.3 million. They borrowed almost all of it from banks and used a $100,000 gift from Sileo’s father as a down payment. Webb would be the executive chef and Sileo would be the sous chef. They hired a talented young chef named Felicia Moyse to work for them. Webb and Sileo had worked together before, running a successful restaurant nearby. When they bought it, the inn was known for hosting big-band dances and for its old-fashioned menu. They hoped they could update the menu and atmosphere of the General Wayne Inn. For some reason, the updated menu didn’t translate into success at the General Wayne. The old-timers were scared off by the cutting-edge cuisine, and the younger crowd never got the message that the eighteenth-century inn was now a hip place to be seen.

  The business began losing money almost instantly. The partners had spent money remodeling the building, and everything in it was pledged as collateral on the loan. Sales were decreasing steadily in 1996 and the restaurant was not going to survive. While Webb saw the writing on the wall, Sileo did not. The two argued about the direction the business was headed. Webb wanted to leave Sileo and the inn and to start his own restaurant. Sileo started drinking while at work and was engaged in a relationship with a young employee. Webb told Sileo he was going to leave the partnership after the holidays, and Sileo became violent. The two actually came to blows in the days leading up to the murder.

  More troubling, Sileo approached Webb and demanded that Webb sign a statement that the $100,000 gift from Sileo’s father had been a loan and not a gift. It was an odd request; previously, Sileo had given documentation to creditors that the money had been a gift. Why the change in heart? It is unclear if Webb knew it, but if the money was a gift, it could not be recovered in a bankruptcy proceeding. The bankruptcy estate would have had no assets on Christmas Day 1996—the inn was insolvent—but if one of the men died, there would be $650,000 in life insurance proceeds to scrap over. That’s how it came to be that Webb was staring at accounting sheets filled with red ink when he was shot in the head.

  The next morning after Webb was shot, the inn’s pastry chef arrived for work and saw Webb’s truck in the parking lot. Assuming that he was just doing office work, she went about her business. A few minutes later, Sileo arrived and the chef told him that Webb was in his office but that she had not spoken with him yet. Sileo went upstairs and returned shortly to tell her that Webb was dead in his office. The pastry chef went upstairs and looked at the body but thought it looked like he had just fallen backward and hit his head. Later that day, Sileo told Webb’s wife that her husband had been “shot,” even though everyone who had seen the body initially thought he had simply fallen and hit his head.

  The police investigated, and at first their obvious suspect, Sileo, had an alibi. The young chef, Felicia Moyse, told investigators she was with Sileo at the time of the shooting. The police continued their investigation, looking for other possibilities. All evidence kept pointing back at Sileo. They discovered that Sileo owned a gun that was the same caliber as the murder weapon, but it was tested and it was not connected to the crime. Witnesses, however, told police that Sileo had said, “I really feel like I need to shoot someone,” more than once, in recent weeks. A bartender from another restaurant that Sileo frequented told police that Sileo had once asked him about extradition laws and wondered if the bartender knew of any good countries to “hide out if you wanted to kill someone.” Sileo had asked this just a month before Webb was killed.

  A grand jury convened and Sileo was called to testify. There he swore that he owned only the one gun of that caliber and that he had not shot anyone with it. Later, a police wiretap caught Sileo telling someone he had, in fact, owned two guns of that caliber. Sileo was tried and convicted of perjury and false swearing. At that point, the state decided to prosecute Sileo for the murder of Webb.

  The case had also provided other drama. One of the reasons that Sileo and Webb had fought was over the inappropriate relationship Sileo, who was married, was having with an employee of the inn. When he was first questioned by the police regarding his whereabouts on the night of the murder, Sileo said he was with Moyse, the young chef from the inn. As the investigation focused on Sileo, Moyse was Sileo’s lifeline. On February 2
4, 1997, Moyse shot herself in the head with a handgun belonging to her father in her parents’ bedroom. Moyse was Sileo’s only alibi witness.

  Sileo was prosecuted for the murder of Webb and on August 1, 2001, he was convicted of first-degree murder. During the trial it was revealed that when Webb was murdered, the life insurance company had paid the $650,000 from the policy taken on Webb’s life in favor of the business. $433,303 of it was used to pay off a small business loan and the remainder was placed into escrow, where it became the subject of bankruptcy proceedings that Sileo had initiated shortly after Webb’s murder. If the bankruptcy court had accepted the argument that the gift from Sileo’s father had really been a loan, then some of the money from the life insurance proceeds could have been given to Sileo’s father in repayment. Sileo filed a series of appeals, but they were denied by the higher courts in Pennsylvania.

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  The General Wayne Inn traded hands several times after Webb’s death. In 1999, the building sold for almost $1,000,000, but the new buyer had to invest another $200,000 in renovations. The last restaurant venture on the site closed in 2002. Many people were starting to believe that the building was cursed, if not haunted. The last person to operate the General Wayne Inn as a restaurant was Frank Cacciutti, who had run a very successful restaurant before trying one at this location. Business was dismal. It wasn’t until local papers ran stories that he was about to close that anyone showed up in any significant numbers. “We’re extremely busy tonight,” he told a reporter. “Everybody wants to watch the train wreck.”

  In 2003, an organization bought the property to convert it into the Chabad Center for Jewish Life. No longer operating as a restaurant, it became a place of education and outreach. Even though the local tax authority assessed the value of the inn at a million dollars, the selling price was reportedly $650,000. To convert it to its current use the organization invested more than a million dollars in the building, although the exterior was not altered. The building contains fourteen thousand square feet and still has a balcony on its second floor. Unlike the string of restaurants that had failed in the location, this enterprise is thriving. The name General Wayne Inn is still visible on the side of the building.

  The building is privately owned. It can be seen from the road.

  *“Was General ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne Really Mad?” ushistory.org/paoli/history/waynemad.htm

  *“General Wayne Inn in Merion to Close,” The (Philadelphia) Inquirer, July 19, 2002.

  *Chabad Center for Jewish Life at the General Wayne Inn, chabad.org/centers/default_cdo/aid/118357/jewish/Chabad-Center-for-Jewish-Life-at-the-General-Wayne-Inn.htm

  The Ultimate Random Murder

  ANDREW CUNANAN KILLS GIANNI VERSACE

  1997

  1116 Ocean Drive

  Miami Beach, Florida 33139

  On the morning of July 15, 1997, fashion icon Gianni Versace walked three blocks south from his Miami Beach mansion to the News Café, a popular restaurant and newsstand, where he picked up some magazines. The walk along Ocean Drive is a pleasant one; on the opposite side of the street is Lummus Park and a public beach that sits between the ocean and ten or eleven blocks of trendy and busy establishments along the way. The fifty-year-old Versace then walked the short distance home a few minutes before 9:00 A.M. and paused to unlock the huge iron gates that opened into his estate. At that moment, Andrew Cunanan, a fugitive on a cross-country killing spree and the subject of a well-publicized nationwide manhunt, walked up behind him and shot him twice, in the neck and head.

  Employees inside the home ran out when they heard the gunshots and found Versace lying lifeless on the front steps. They saw Cunanan running from the scene. A security camera trained on the gates had not been turned on at the time.

  Cunanan fled. He ran to a parking garage a couple of blocks away, where he had left a truck he had stolen from an earlier murder victim. He quickly changed out of the clothes he had been wearing and dropped them on the ground next to the truck. When police canvassed the area, they found the clothing and identified the truck, linking Cunanan to Versace’s killing. Later, police would be criticized for not spotting the truck earlier. It had been parked in the same spot, abandoned, for the two months that Cunanan had been hiding in Miami Beach before he killed Versace. Versace’s murder left several unanswered questions: Why had Cunanan targeted him and how had police not caught Cunanan in the weeks leading up to Versace’s murder?

  Giovanni Versace was a rock star in the fashion world. Born in 1946, he founded a company that marketed clothing, accessories, fragrances, makeup, and even home furnishings. By the 1990s, he was a household name and often spent time with the ultrarich and famous. His fashion shows were among the hottest tickets with the elite. And, on July 15, 1997—at age fifty—he was shot to death by a stranger on the front steps of his mansion in Miami, one of the most expensive residences in North America.

  Versace was born in Reggio Calabria, Italy, where he was first shown the world of fashion by his mother, who was a dressmaker. Although he helped her make dresses at times, he went to school to study architecture. Of the two vocations, it was fashion that called to him. He went to Milan to work in the fashion industry and founded his own fashion line. In 1978 he opened his first boutique, and by the 1990s his companies were making profits of $900 million annually.

  As his wealth increased, he acquired large homes in the United States and Europe. He bought a huge home known as Casa Casuarina on Ocean Drive, in Miami Beach, in 1992. The house had been built in 1930 and was modeled after a home in the Dominican Republic, said to be the oldest house in this hemisphere. Christopher Columbus’s family once lived in it; it was known as the Alcázar de Colón.

  When the man who built Casa Casuarina in Miami Beach died, the next owner bought it in 1937; his name was Jacques Amsterdam and he called it the Amsterdam Palace. When Versace bought the Miami Beach version of the Alcázar de Colón, he expanded it. He invested another $33 million in furnishing, remodeling, and updating it. The result was even more opulent. At roughly twenty thousand square feet, it contained ten bedrooms and eleven bathrooms. He added a courtyard, another wing, and a swimming pool. The estate was huge; it covered one third of the block it sat on. It was also the only residence on that stretch of Ocean Drive. It was surrounded by a tall iron-and-concrete fence and wall, which were twelve feet tall at points. The front of the property was marked by a pair of iron gates that opened onto Ocean Drive. Versace split his time between this home and others he owned in Europe.

  Andrew Phillip Cunanan was born in California in 1969. He was said to be of above-average intelligence, multilingual, charming, and openly gay. He grew up in an affluent family but his father, a stockbroker, ran into legal trouble and fled the country shortly after Andrew graduated from high school. Andrew began relying on older boyfriends for financial support. His rent, his car, and his living expenses were often paid by older gentlemen who were happy to pay them in exchange for dating Cunanan. He dropped out of college, worked as a gay prostitute in San Francisco, and became involved in making hard-core pornography, much of which was sadomasochistic in nature. He also tried breaking into Hollywood films. He auditioned for bit parts in movies and had no qualms about approaching famous people when he saw them at parties. Lisa Kudrow found herself cornered by Cunanan at a party, and Hugh Grant almost had Cunanan in one of his films, but the casting director passed on the unknown Cunanan.

  In 1997, Cunanan became convinced he had acquired AIDS. He got himself tested but never returned to find out the results of the test. He was so overwhelmed with the belief that he had the disease that he didn’t feel he needed to see the results. His mood changed, as did his behavior. He became depressed and starting using drugs. He gained weight and stopped worrying about his appearance. Cunanan had never been arrested before 1997 and had never appeared on the radar of law enforcement. That would soon change as he made his way onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list with a cross-country killing spree. />
  That year, he decided to visit a former boyfriend named Jeffrey Trail, who had moved to Minneapolis. While in Minnesota, Cunanan discovered that Trail was a friend of David Madson, another former boyfriend of Cunanan’s who also now lived in Minneapolis. What were the odds? Cunanan became jealous. He may also have been upset that the two men had managed to escape the world where Cunanan felt trapped. He arranged to meet with Trail and Madson at Madson’s apartment. An argument ensued and Cunanan began beating Madson with a hammer. Once he was dead, Trail helped Cunanan roll Madson’s body into a carpet. Cunanan then shot and killed Trail. The police didn’t have to work very hard to figure out who was behind the killings. They found Cunanan’s backpack at Madson’s apartment and a message from Cunanan on Trail’s answering machine. Identifying the killer was easy; catching him became the hard part.

  After shooting Trail, Cunanan fled Minnesota and traveled to Chicago. Within a few days, he had killed again. This time, the victim was a well-known real estate developer named Lee Miglin. It is unclear how Miglin and Cunanan crossed paths. There is no evidence that Cunanan knew Miglin or had ever met him before. Neighbors had seen Miglin earlier that day, and it is possible that Cunanan simply happened to pass by while looking for someone to rob. Cunanan tortured and killed Miglin, burglarized his house, and stole his car. With three murders in such a short time and in two different states, the FBI quickly placed Cunanan on their Ten Most Wanted list, and the media began broadcasting his likeness with descriptions of the crimes he was said to have committed. Cunanan fled the state in Miglin’s car and headed east. In Pennsville, New Jersey, he decided to hide out in a cemetery. At this point, he had heard news reports on the radio and knew the police were looking for him. At the cemetery, he encountered and killed the caretaker, William Reese. He abandoned Miglin’s car and stole Reese’s truck. He headed to southern Florida. Again, police would be able to recreate Cunanan’s steps quite easily. They canceled the alert regarding Miglin’s car and issued a new one for the truck Cunanan had now stolen.