by Maureen Orth
Rivard wanted to get the body identified as soon as possible, so he sent deputies out to tiny Rush City with Polaroids of the corpse to see if anyone recognized it. No one did. At about 7 P.M. the body was removed from the site. Processing continued into the night. In the grass, near the tire marks, the casing for a .40 caliber Golden Saber bullet was found. Another would be found with a metal detector a few days later, buried a few inches in the ground. A search for the murder weapon in the shallow waters of the lake, both by boat and by a scuba diver, turned up nothing.
Saturday night, Bob Tichich turned on the Channel 9 nine o’clock news. Unlike the Minneapolis police, who played their murder case close to the vest in hopes of catching David unawares, the Chisago police immediately publicized their discovery. When Tichich saw the story of an unidentified white male found on the shore of East Rush Lake, he quickly got in touch with Todd Rivard and they compared notes. The physical description Rivard gave him matched David Madson, and the fact that he was shot with .40 caliber bullets seemed to cinch the matter.
Rivard called Jon Hermann of the BCA, who volunteered to get photos of David from the Minneapolis police and compare them with pictures the BCA crime lab had taken in Chisago that afternoon. Wagner was on “dog watch”—the late-night shift—and Hermann told him that the probable time of death was late Friday. That would mean that David and Andrew had been together for five days after Jeff Trail’s murder, but no one had seen them. A few hours later Hermann called back. He was certain the body was David Madson but positive identification would have to wait until Monday morning at the autopsy. Wagner requested permission to tell the Madson family.
ON SATURDAY, HOWARD Madson had another go-round with Tichich, who sarcastically told him David and Andrew were together on the French Riviera. Ralph Madson went to work at the hardware store that day, but he couldn’t function. He recalls a customer asking for a gallon of orange paint to be mixed. “The first gallon was green. The second one was blue. The third one was brown. Finally, I turned around and said, ‘I’ll have to get someone else to help you.’ We couldn’t tell anybody—what do you say?” That night he went to bed at 11 P.M. His wife, Cindy, was crying. “Ralph, I have a very bad feeling now,” she told him. “Let’s just try to get through another night,” he answered. About 2:15 A.M. the phone rang.
“Ralph, this is Sergeant Wagner.” Ralph sat up on the edge of the bed. “This is the kind of phone call I don’t like to make. We found David, and David’s been murdered.”
“That son of a bitch. He got him. That son of a bitch.” Ralph turned toward his wife. “David’s dead.” She began to cry softly. “I want to make sure I heard you right. David has been murdered?”
“Yes. Is it OK if I call your sister?”
“Yes. But tell her don’t call Mom or Dad. You’ve got to give me time to get over there.”
Ralph called his pastor, who lived nearby, to come and help break the news to his parents. The two houses are separated by a field, and before walking over, the two men knelt and said a prayer for strength. When they arrived, the back door was locked, so Ralph pounded on the front door. His father came downstairs in his pajamas. “Dad knew—he knew what I was there for. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he knew the reason I was at his house with the minister at two-thirty in the morning was to tell him David had been murdered.”
About 6 A.M., Ralph walked out to the field again and wrote a prayer. He gave it to a neighbor who was going to his church and asked him to read it and to give it to the other churches in town as well. “And that’s how our community found out about David.”
Shortly after he got off the phone with Ralph, Wagner asked that a criminal advisory be put out nationwide for Andrew Phillip Cunanan aka DeSilva—that he should be considered armed and dangerous; that he was wanted in connection with two murders in Minnesota; that he might be driving David Madson’s red Grand Jeep Cherokee, license 543 LUG. Wagner also wanted to change the “pick up” advisory on David Madson’s Jeep. It was now to be listed as “stolen” in the national supercomputer for missing vehicles that all police departments can tap into. It wasn’t until the following night, Sunday, at 11 P.M., when he went back on dog watch, that Sergeant Steve Wagner called the Minneapolis airport police for the first time to see if an Andrew Cunanan or an Andrew DeSilva had left on any flight from Minneapolis in the last week. Within twenty-four hours the answer came back: negative.
For almost a week the emphasis of the search had been on the principal suspect, David Madson. With his murder, gears were abruptly shifted. But valuable time had been lost.
ON MONDAY MORNING, while the Madson autopsy was going on, Tichich and Wagner called Monique Salvetti and asked her to come from St. Paul, where she worked, to the Old City Hall building in downtown Minneapolis. They wanted her help in identifying the black duffel bag found in David’s apartment, the one filled with the empty handcuff and leg-restraint boxes, the steroids, pornography, a holster, and .40 caliber bullets. They had always thought the bag was David’s—indeed, many of Tichich’s basic assumptions about the case had been shaped by the bag’s contents.
“Have you looked at the identification tag?” Monique asked, indicating a label enclosed in a grip around the handle. When she opened the tag in front of Tichich, there was the name of its owner: Andrew DeSilva. “Oh, wow, I’m very embarrassed,” she recalls Tichich saying. “I guess you didn’t have to come down here after all.”
Todd Rivard, meanwhile, was assisting at the autopsy performed by a tri-county medical examiner, Dr. Lindsey Thomas, in Hastings, Minnesota. Apart from the shock of their son’s murder, the Madson family was still reeling from the idea that David could have been considered capable of killing Jeff Trail. Now they had to contend with the fact that, for whatever reason, David had stayed with his murderer for almost a week. They couldn’t believe it. But the evidence coming through convinced the Chisago authorities that he definitely had. On Sunday, Rivard had received a call from a woman who owned the nearby Rush Lake Resort. She said that while she was out working in her yard the previous Thursday, she had heard two gunshots coming from the direction of the area where David was found. She knew the difference between rifle and pistol fire, she said, because she was a hunter. She had not seen a red Jeep, however.
In Illinois, the Trail family was both curious and confused. Who did kill Jeff ? Was it Andrew, or David, or Andrew and David? When they heard the news about David, they were shocked and saddened. Nobody bothered to ask them, but as soon as the Trail family learned that David had been shot with a .40 caliber gun, they assumed that the police must know that Andrew was using Jeff’s gun. Yet in the first week after Jeff’s murder, the Minneapolis police hadn’t checked whether Jeff had even owned a gun.
During the autopsy, Dr. Thomas took samples of blood from David and retrieved lead fragments from his brain. From the medical examiner’s point of view, the use of the .40 caliber gun was unusual. Because of its heavy size, a .40 caliber is especially deadly. Moreover, the Golden Saber bullets left behind in the duffel bag and used in the murder weapon are designed to turn into a mushroom shape once they strike their target; that way they inflict more damage as they rip through the body.
She also took a sample of vitreous humor from David’s eye. As the cells of the eye decompose, they release potassium, which can be used to measure normal potassium levels in the blood. The higher the level of potassium, the longer the body has been dead. After a week, the vitreous dries out altogether. But Dr. Thomas did not test the fluid, which was simply preserved. Some medical examiners test it routinely; others use it only when they need multiple gauges to determine time of death, particularly if the time of death is in doubt. “I don’t know why,” Dr. Thomas says when asked why she didn’t test the vitreous humor. “I guess because it’s so unreliable—I would never use it in court.”
Larvae from the maggots found in David’s mouth were also preserved, since they too have an exact life cycle and are considered a rel
iable measure if other factors, such as accurate climate data regarding where the body was found, can also be determined. The bugs were not tested, either, because the procedure is costly, few entomologists do it, and there didn’t seem to be any real need for it. Dr. Plunkett and Todd Rivard saw David’s body themselves, and it looked fresh. Moreover, the lady who owned the Rush Lake Resort had reported hearing gunshots on Thursday.
As for the exact time of death, “there really is no good way to do it,” says Dr. Thomas. “Quincy could do it on TV, novelists can do it. In all honesty, the most accurate is when was the person found? When was the person last seen reliably?” She adds, “It’s so dependent on what the weather’s like; that’s the trouble. If it’s warm, the body decomposes quickly; if it’s cold, somebody can stay fresh-looking for days. It depends on the ground cover and the position of the body.”
On the autopsy report Dr. Thomas placed the time of death as Friday, May 2. The Madsons refused to believe it.
That same Monday, the Chisago investigators talked to Monique at length about Andrew and David, and she considered them “very professional.” The Chisago police began interviewing many of the same people that the Minneapolis police had. Karen Lapinski told Rivard that she had seen S&M paraphernalia in Andrew and David’s hotel room in Los Angeles, and that Andrew had told her he had had a relationship with Jeff. The Chisago police were going down the list of potential witnesses just as Minneapolis had done the week before. Now there were three police departments involved in the case, not counting the BCA.
In San Diego, Norman Blachford told the San Diego police that he couldn’t supply much information about Andrew’s personal life. He believed that Andrew’s parents lived in Rancho Santa Fe and also had a home in New Jersey, and that his sister was an anesthesiologist in Minneapolis. He did give police the name of a San Francisco travel agent, however, who told police he had sold Andrew a one-way ticket to Minneapolis. The agent also recalled the two tickets Andrew had bought for David Madson to fly to Los Angeles at the end of March. The Amex numbers used to purchase the tickets led Tichich to discover that Andrew had run up $20,000 on two credit cards, and that his credit had been shut down.
Then Arthur Harrington called the San Diego police. He said Andrew had mentioned having a seven-year-old daughter, an ex-wife in San Francisco, a sister who was a doctor in Minneapolis, and a brother who made canoes in Hawaii. Erik Greenman told San Diego police that he had gone through Andrew’s personal effects over the weekend and had collected a box of things that might be useful in locating him, including some serial numbers for guns, cocaine, and pharmaceutical drugs. “The most useful information out of that box was it gave us an idea of all the money he had gone through,” says Sergeant Wagner. Police found all the vehicle papers for the Infiniti and learned he had sold it for cash, plus receiving the $15,000 from Norman Blachford.
“We compiled a huge list of phone numbers from scraps of paper and gave that to the fugitive task force,” says Lieutenant Dale Barsness of the Minneapolis police. “I believe every one got followed up on by the FBI. A lot of these people were being driven underground and didn’t even want to live in their apartments because of fear.” Erik had told Minneapolis police that news of Madson’s murder made him fear for his life. Stan Hatley also called the Minneapolis police and said the same thing, adding that he had seen Andrew and David together on Friday night before Jeff’s murder. Stan contacted Outfront Minnesota, a Minneapolis gay and lesbian project against violence, seeking guidance on how to protect himself. He went underground for a while and moved to a small town in Louisiana. Norman Blachford, preparing to sail on the QE2, had been warned by police that Andrew was on the East Coast—and that he shouldn’t go where he could be found.
Panic became a common reaction. Andrew had known so many people in the gay community, and now many of them were beginning to wonder, Am I next?
20
Miglin
ANDREW CUNANAN HAD gotten way ahead of the police and he stayed ahead of the law until he chose to end his life. Even before Jeff Trail’s body was positively identified, Andrew had driven all night to Chicago, over four hundred miles away. From 6 A.M. to 7 P.M. on Wednesday, April 30, he parked Madson’s Jeep in a garage near the tony, expensive Gold Coast area. With its graceful town houses, luxurious apartment buildings overlooking the lake, its proximity to chic shopping and lively nightlife areas, the Gold Coast was of course familiar turf to Andrew. He claimed to have visited Chicago on any number of occasions.
One of those people who had heard about Chicago from Andrew was Ron Williams, back in San Diego in 1994. Andrew had a crush on Ron Williams and used to confide in him. In a nice way, Ron had urged Andrew to get a life and to stop catering to the pretty boys, to stop buying all the drinks. Why didn’t he get a job?
Andrew told him that apart from his family, he did have options, “an older friend, an investor,” says Williams. “Andrew said he had an investor by the name of Duke in Chicago. He said he didn’t know what he wanted to do but this good friend was willing to help him—to back him in business when he decided to go into business. He never said there was a relationship, but a good friend, very successful in Chicago.”
Andrew’s father, Pete Cunanan, also claimed that Andrew told him about a rich family he spent the weekend with in Chicago several years before. “First he met the son in New York and then the son took him home for a weekend—it was for some holiday. He mentioned what an impressive family they were.” Rob Davis, David Madson’s former boyfriend, was never told the name of the sugar daddies Andrew claimed were supporting him in November 1996, but he did tell Davis that one was a big real-estate tycoon and he did talk about recently being in Chicago. Rob Davis also heard from David Madson that Andrew said he was being kept by “a real-estate tycoon, an older man.”
The same day that Andrew arrived in the Windy City, Marilyn Miglin, a fixture on the Home Shopping Network, was leaving for Canada to sell her self-named line of cosmetics and fragrances on TV. Marilyn Miglin had told her husband of thirty-seven years, real-estate mogul Lee Miglin, age seventy-five, that she wouldn’t be home until Sunday. By all accounts they were a devoted couple, with two grown children, Marlena and Duke. They lived on tree-lined East Scott Street, in two town houses that had been joined by a large kitchen in the rear with a picture window overlooking a garden. Their house was just two blocks west of the lake, and walking distance to her beauty institute on Oak Street. The institute was almost directly across the street from the Gianni Versace boutique.
The Miglins, though not well known to the average Chicago citizen, were certainly known at City Hall. Paul Beitler, Lee Miglin’s partner in developing the vast real-estate holdings that made up Miglin-Beitler, says he was Mayor Richard Daley’s single largest contributor when Daley first ran for the office and lost in 1983. In 1989, Beitler gave $100,000 to the mayor’s first successful campaign. “I told Richie that Chicago should get rid of the Beirut-on-the-lake image.” Beitler was younger and brasher, the front man; Lee, although tough and thorough in negotiation, was more of a quiet workaholic. Says Beitler, “Wall Street ice veins he is not.”
Miglin-Beitler developed or managed prime pieces of real estate downtown. Indeed, the Richard J. Daley Civic Center Plaza, named for the current mayor’s father, was managed by Miglin-Beitler. They built the Chicago Bar Association Building and the forty-five-story Madison Plaza, the world headquarters for the Hyatt Corporation. Miglin himself built the world headquarters for National Can and developed much of the industrial park area near O’Hare Airport. At their height, Miglin-Beitler managed over thirty-two million square feet of other buildings throughout the Midwest—sixteen million square feet in the city of Chicago and neighboring suburbs. No one leaving O’Hare could help but notice the crowing billboard on the Kennedy Expressway complete with twinkling ruby slippers: “If Miglin-Beitler managed the Emerald City, she would have never left.”
Miglin-Beitler’s own offices were in the elegant fifty-
story white granite Cesar Pelli–designed skyscraper they built at 181 West Madison, at the corner of Wells Street; their Ayn Randian suite of offices boasted a luxurious conference room complete with a padded leather wall. Panels in the wall dramatically swung open to reveal, under glass, stark white spotlighted models of the World’s Tallest building—the “Skyneedle,” a nearly 2,000-foot-tall, 125-story skyscraper that had been Miglin-Beitler’s dream to build for almost a decade, but had never gotten off the drawing board.
Marilyn Miglin, as driven and ambitious as her husband, but far less retiring, was an officer of the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau and served on the state of Illinois’s Economic Development Board. She had made her civic mark as president of the Oak Street Association. The Miglins owned six pieces of commercial property on Oak Street where Prada, Armani, and Barneys, as well as Versace, are located, and she was instrumental in raising a million dollars toward its renaissance as the chicest shopping street in Chicago. The street had even recently been renamed Marilyn Miglin Way. In early April 1997, Marilyn Miglin had also been honored for her humanitarian work—providing cosmetic makeovers to burn victims—by a Jewish group hoping to raise money for a hospital in Jerusalem.
Although most people assumed they were Jewish, the Miglins were Catholics—she was Czech, he was Lithuanian—and were well known to the church hierarchy. Lee, born Albert Lee Miglin, one of eight children of a central Illinois coal miner, began his career selling stainless steel flatware door to door and premixed pancake batter out of the trunk of his car. His wife, Marilyn Klecka, was a leggy, onetime chorus girl who began by developing makeup that would not run while working up a sweat dancing. Despite her profession, she was extremely prim and not immediately attracted to Al, as he was known then. The couple would tell the story that on their first date she was so horrified by his kissing her that she ran inside and rinsed her mouth out with Listerine. Six weeks later they were engaged.