Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Neither his white-on-white, patterned, tab-collared shirt nor his sleeveless white T-shirt showed signs of being cut through, but in fact, Miglin had been slashed numerous times in the neck and stabbed several times in the chest—two stab wounds, two inches deep, had penetrated his heart. Either he had not been wearing a shirt when he was stabbed, and subsequently Andrew “re-dressed” him, or his shirts were lifted up or pulled back for the attack.

  The weapon appears to have been either a tree-pruning pole thrown into the garbage container or the bloody screwdriver later recovered in Miglin’s stolen Lexus. Lee Miglin’s ankles were bound with an orange extension cord wrapped tightly around eight times and tied with a double knot. His mouth was gagged with a white garden glove with numerous black rubber dots. There were over two dozen blows causing bruises or lacerations to his head, face, and chin; the blood from these wounds soaked through layer upon layer of three-quarter-inch masking tape that had been wound around his head mummy-style, except for an opening at the nostrils and at the top of his head.

  Bruises do not usually form unless the victim is still alive. “He attacked him, I’m thinking, with an object—maybe with the handle of the bow saw found in the garbage container,” says Illinois State Attorney Nancy Donahoe, the prosecutor in charge of the “felony review” on the Miglin case. “The blood could be from hitting him—he attacked him somehow first.”

  Using the blade of the garden bow saw that he also subsequently dumped into the garbage, Andrew nearly severed Lee Miglin’s head with a seven-and-a-half-inch jagged gash, two inches deep, that wound around from the back of his neck to his throat. For good measure, Andrew also threw two bags of cement on top of Miglin’s chest and fractured every one of his ribs. Then he covered the body with plastic garbage bags and put brown paper on top of those. Although not mentioned in the police report, a small Oriental throw rug was reportedly on the very top. The cement bags were found lying against the corpse.

  There was massive internal hemorrhaging, yet despite all the brutality, no defensive wounds were present. Those close to Lee Miglin do not believe that he would have put up a fight. “Lee always said if anybody tries to rob you, give the person what they ask for and never trigger him, never give him an opportunity to shoot you,” Paul Beitler recalls.

  Because the missing black suede Ferragamo was later found in the trunk of the Lexus, one theory was that Andrew had originally tried to get the body into the trunk after knocking Lee Miglin out, or after killing him. But there was very little blood in the Lexus trunk, briefly prompting speculation that Andrew had surprised Miglin when he didn’t have his hearing aids on—and kept him in the trunk while he entered the house. The blood was never tested to see whose it was. There was also a one percent carbon-monoxide level found in Miglin’s blood—far above the normal level, especially for a nonsmoker like Miglin, though he could have been breathing contaminated air from one of the leaky heaters that commonly caused trouble in the neighborhood.

  One theory is that Andrew may have tried to put Miglin in the trunk to try to asphyxiate him. Or maybe he wrapped him first, leaving holes for the nostrils, and then beat him. But why were openings left for breathing if the purpose was murder? Was he tortured? If so, why? There is also speculation that perhaps Andrew was in the house before 2:15 in the afternoon, possibly as an invited guest.

  Finally, Miglin’s murder could have involved an element of sexual sadism, perhaps some form of fantasy fulfillment. Certainly the wrapping of Miglin’s face resembled the latex masks Andrew seemed so intrigued with from watching S&M pornography, the masks he told Steven Gomer he was so fond of for rough sex. But Miglin’s clothes were not mussed except for the zipper of his jeans. Though the jeans appeared to have been ripped open, the zipper could also have been damaged in transport from the crime scene.

  Whatever happened, there’s ample evidence that Lee Miglin’s killer never had to struggle with his victim or hurry through his crime. By holding Miglin at gunpoint, Andrew could have learned that no one was expected home until the next day. But would Miglin have also told him—could he even have predicted—that no one else was coming over? Could it be that Andrew was invited to spend the night there? The family believes Andrew played the Miglins’ telephone answering machine with a message from Marilyn Miglin telling which flight she was arriving on, although that too is omitted in the police report, which has never been made public.

  FOR THREE DAYS, until early Wednesday morning, the police had no suspects. Both the family and close associates knew of no one who would want to kill Lee. “We’re all grieving the loss of my father,” a dry-eyed Duke Miglin said, shortly after he rushed into the house at 6:30 P.M. Sunday, having just arrived from California. “We don’t know any details of what happened and we’re still trying to get in touch with some members of the family.” His sister, Marlena, was vacationing in Italy with her husband and could not be immediately found, but high-profile friends of the couple, like Sugar Rautbord, started coming over right away to comfort Marilyn.

  First they huddled in Marilyn’s opulent office on Oak Street while police technicians were dusting the house for fingerprints, putting black powder everywhere. Sugar found Marilyn Miglin alone in her office, guarded by the police. “Marilyn’s office has a glass dome over it, so the sunlight streams directly down upon her,” Sugar recalls. “And Honey the dog was seated by the side of her desk.” (Honey was later the target of much anger from Marilyn Miglin for not having barked any of her usual warnings, and was banished for months to the country.) At that moment, though, Sugar was immediately struck by “this place so full of order—the desk is so neat, the office is immaculate, everything is perfect. It’s almost as if there is no room for any kind of chaos.”

  Marilyn was behaving very calmly and had not yet cried. “These are not people who cry in their sleep, who show their grief and sadness. These are people whose lives are in order,” Sugar explained. “Marilyn stood up from the desk and we embraced and she started to weep. The policeman said, ‘She needed to cry.’ I didn’t know what I was crying for, but I was crying because something so terrible had happened. Something like murder doesn’t belong in a place where light is being refracted off the crystal chandelier and the fragrances have been mixed and you’re almost in a staged setting of perfection.”

  Meanwhile, police who were questioning neighbors were gossiping about bits and pieces of the evidence. Betsy Brazis, another Miglin tenant, who had just moved into the other half of the luxe duplex town house where the Byers lived, got a description of the Miglins’ bedroom and bath. “The police couldn’t believe it. They said whoever murdered Lee had spent the night, had slept in the bed, and was relaxed enough to take a bath, to shave, and to leave the sink full of whiskers and a dirty bathtub. They said, ‘We think it’s a black man because of the texture of the hair in the sink.’ Don’t you think that’s a little racist?” Betsy Brazis said.

  At the same time, Marilyn and Sugar had come back to greet Duke, who looked “totally numb.” As soon as they entered the house, “There was a different, greasy smell in the house, like an oil the killer used,” Sugar said. “You could smell evil had entered that house.” Then Marilyn took Sugar on a “terrible House of Horrors tour,” decrying the violations everywhere. “We went into the bathroom and she said, ‘What do you do? Do you hurt somebody? Kill somebody? And then you cut your hair?’

  “All this dark, coarse, curly hair was on the bathroom floor. The policemen were there and she said, ‘Sweep this up! Get this away!’ Very kindly, they said, ‘No. You can’t touch anything.’ And both of us bent down and stared at this dark curly hair on the bathroom floor. Lee had gray hair and Marilyn had blond hair. Everything in that house was white and sunny, and all of a sudden it’s like something dark and awful and swarthy and greasy had moved into the house. There were greasy fingerprints on the wall walking up to the stairs.” Sugar Rautbard noticed a picture was askew that masked a wall safe.

  Because no one could touch th
e refrigerator or the kitchen counter, Sugar picked up the phone and called nearby Gibsons Steak House and told them what happened. “They started to cry—the guys who own the restaurant. Within twenty minutes they came over with all kinds of food.” Marilyn was worrying, “‘Well, has that policeman had something to eat? This one?’ Part of her was being in control, elegant and precise. She wasn’t ready to fall into the abyss. But slowly you could see it etching its way into her face—this terrible look of shock and sorrow. I don’t think I have ever felt such a sense of a house being invaded by evil before.”

  Within twelve minutes of the first radio call by police signaling that a body had been found, the first TV truck pulled up to the murder site. A millionaire getting murdered is a big local story anywhere, and the Chicago media are very competitive. The Miglins weren’t just rich—they were social, they knew the mayor, Marilyn had hosted a fund-raiser for the governor. Within a few hours reporters and police were swarming.

  Although it had taken the Chicago police a while to respond, they were now blanketing the site. Reporters from Fox News and the local TV stations were leaning on neighbors’ doorbells, begging for any shred of information. Stephen Byer got fed up and released his pet sharpei/pit bull and his Doberman into the gated front garden. “These newspaper reporters and press people just scattered. I don’t know if they thought the dogs would jump over the fence or what, but they literally ran away.”

  The first day, stories in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times were filled with details about the crime scene that astounded the Minneapolis police when they read them—they claim they would not have told so much. Readers learned things only the killer knew—the position of the body under the Bitter, pruning shears as a possible weapon, the wrapping in masking tape. Marilyn Miglin herself was also far more forthcoming than the family would be just a few days later, telling the Sun-Times that the killer had possibly stayed overnight: “‘My first thought is, why does someone think they have the right to take someone else’s life and so horribly at that,’ said Miglin, adding that she was ‘horrified that whoever did this evil, evil thing also apparently spent the night in our home.’”

  Tuesday’s Sun-Times incorrectly led with the story, attributed to police sources, that Lee Miglin was “run over by a car at least five times … and garbage was dumped on his body.” It also reported correctly that his throat was cut with a saw blade and that the gun found in the bathroom was a nonworking replica. (The copy of the black semiautomatic Beretta had actually come out of Duke’s room, where it had been mounted on the wall.)

  In Chicago, the police chief is known as the police superintendent, and the then superintendent, Matt Rodriguez, was almost voluble: “There are aspects of the homicide that indicate there was some torture,” he told the Sun-Times, declining to get into specifics. He also confirmed for the paper what Marilyn Miglin had already told their reporter: that her husband’s face was “bound up like a mummy,” and that her husband never would have left the dirty dishes found in the kitchen, which she took as a sign that the killer may have spent the night.

  Rodriguez went on to tell the Sun-Times that the killing “looks quite unprofessional. However, it looks so unprofessional that maybe it is professional.” One sign of obvious unprofessionalism was the theft of the car. “When one takes a vehicle that is registered to a victim, you immediately are putting yourself in jeopardy if you happen to be an offender,” he told the paper.

  But the Sun-Times could only get so much information out of the police department. Significantly, Commander Joe Griffin of Area 3, the politically appointed officer in charge of the investigation, would not comment beyond acknowledging the homicide of “an elderly gentleman.” Griffin was so tight-lipped he later became the scapegoat for the lack of cooperation displayed by Chicago police toward other jurisdictions. And in the same story the reporters Fran Spielman and Phillip J. O’Connor described reaching Superintendent Rodriguez’s boundaries of disclosure:

  Rodriguez repeatedly talked about how the killer had made himself comfortable in the home. When asked how the killer did this, Rodriguez said:

  “Very frankly the specificity of your question and any response on my part would jeopardize the future investigation. Things that occurred there are best left unsaid right now by police officials because, in fact, they may contribute to a successful investigation and the arrest of an offender.”

  Asked if blood were found in the home, Rodriguez said, “I don’t want to respond to that question.”

  Asked if the killer stayed with Miglin before the murder or remained in the home after it, Rodriguez said, “I can’t say for certain if there was any occupancy by the killer before the killing. There is an indication the person or persons occupied and used the victim’s apartment. And that is all I can really say.”

  But that was a lot.

  To an alert reader, the superintendent’s repeated references to how comfortable the killer felt in the Miglins’ house could easily be interpreted as the police believing that Miglin may have known his assailant. Most murders are committed by someone known to the victim—not a stranger. There was no forced entry. And of course the dog, which neighbors said barked frequently at strangers, did not bark and was not harmed.

  Certainly the crime scenes of both the garage and house suggested someone who was not just randomly killing for money and a car to escape in as fast as he could. “A robber gets in and out quickly,” says Nancy Donahoe. “Can you say the same about Cunanan? No.” Miglin’s murder, states Medical Examiner Dr. Edmund Donoghue, was “very controlled and purposeful. He wanted control.” The medical examiner’s office was not comfortable with the idea suggested by Superintendent Rodriguez that Miglin had been tortured. Asked how long it would have taken to kill Lee Miglin, with the tying, the wrapping with tape, the almost four dozen wounds, the cleanup—bloody rags were also thrown in the garbage container—Dr. Donoghue says, “Just a few minutes if he flew like the wind.” But Andrew didn’t fly anywhere—he hung around.

  And what about the racy bikini underwear seventy-five-year-old Lee Miglin was found wearing? Dr. Donoghue saw no suggestion of a double life for Miglin. “She was high fashion—she probably bought it for him,” he explained. Asked how he would respond if his own wife brought home underwear like that for him, Dr. Donoghue did not hesitate: “That would never happen.”

  Nevertheless, there were signs that would lead many investigators to consider the possibility of a sexual element to the crime. The sadistic aspects were consistent with a pattern prevalent among serial killers, whom experts say often need to act out their sadistic fantasies and repeat them till they get it right. According to Gregg McCrary, senior consultant of the Threat Assessment Group and former supervisory special agent of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, such killers typically have “compliant victims—they begin with sex partners who were complying with their fantasies. They get someone to go along with bondage and torture until the victim won’t go along anymore, so the sadistic offender is not satisfied. By the time they reach their late twenties and early thirties, they’ve developed their sadistic fantasies. They’re really vibrant at this point, and they need to act out these things, and they can’t find people to go along with them. So now they find an unwilling victim to abduct, rape, or murder. There’s a much higher rate of homicide if torture is acted out against the will of the other individual.”

  McCrary says motives here can be mixed—both sexual gratification and the extortion of money. What was done to Lee Miglin, for example, “is a window into [the killer’s] fantasy.” Even the psychological motives can be mixed. A killer’s savaging of a victim’s face indicates a “very personal” impetus, he says. “The destruction of the face is many times the personality of the victim—they want to destroy the person outright.” Putting the victim in a mask, on the other hand, represents depersonalization. But while Miglin was masked, his face was also brutalized. The autopsy report notes fifteen facial bruises.

  ON T
UESDAY, PAUL Beitler, responding to persistent questions searching for a motive to the killing, told reporters, “This was not a gangland hit.” But he probably raised more questions than he answered when he added, “Everyone has their personal opinion about what happened … But it had nothing to do with business.” The family had called a press conference to ask the public for help with leads to the killer. Although observers felt that the family’s body language was oddly stiff and awkward with each other, going before the cameras was nothing they shied away from. Marilyn told reporters: “What can you say about a man you loved passionately for thirty-eight years, who exemplified courage and honor and dignity and a code of ethics beyond what anybody I know has had?”

  Until Tuesday midnight, police were stymied. Some officials were appalled that Superintendent Matt Rodriguez had used the word “torture,” and that it had been falsely reported that Lee Miglin had been run over. Police questioned Stephen Byer—had he seen any strangers? Betsy Brazis told the police she had seen a red Jeep parked in front of her house on East Division, one street over from the Miglins’ house, on Friday night. On Saturday she noticed it had been moved around the corner to East Astor.

  The more rumors ran rampant—whether or not the murder was a Mafia hit, whether or not Lee Miglin knew his killer—the more the police lid on the investigation was tightened. The police were both bowing to the wishes of a powerful family and attempting to avoid potential legal perils. “You have to understand the outpouring of love and how the police protected her,” Sugar Rautbord said of Marilyn Miglin. Another high-profile murder was also, apparently, never far from the minds of the law enforcers. “Police in Chicago are very closed-mouth,” says Paul Beitler. “Can you blame them given the Simpson debacle?”