by Maureen Orth
America’s Most Wanted had company. A tabloid TV crew, finding the gate to the Miglins’ garden open, marched right in and started filming the family seated around the kitchen table. The Chicago Tribune tracked Norman Blachford down via satellite phone as he and a friend, Peter Cooper, the former director of Project Lifeguard, were trying to escape by sailing for London on the QE2. Blachford refused to comment, so the Tribune had its London correspondent waiting on the dock like a chauffeur, holding up a sign saying, “Norman Blachford,” because the bureau there had no idea what he looked like. Although Blachford did not approach the reporter, the intrepid journalist tracked him down in his London hotel room, where Blachford told him in no uncertain terms to back off.
Everybody wanted a piece of the story—with one notable exception. In Andrew’s hometown paper, the conservative San Diego Union-Tribune, he was the invisible man. Six weeks after reporting the mass suicides at the Heaven’s Gate cult in Rancho Santa Fe, the Union-Tribune actually ran an obituary on Lee Miglin the day after David Madson’s Jeep was discovered, but it made no mention of Andrew Cunanan.
“That story was very sensitive around here,” says longtime Union-Tribune financial writer Don Bauder. David Copley, the forty-one-year-old heavy-set son of the paper’s owner, Helen Copley, was widely rumored to have been an acquaintance of Andrew’s. Robbins Thompson and others say that they had attended a party at David Copley’s house with Andrew, but Copley denies that he ever met him. When the Union-Tribune finally printed its first story on Andrew, on Thursday, May 8, it mentioned “authorities in several states looking for a San Diego man,” but it was buried on page A9, included no interviews with any of Andrew’s many nearby friends and acquaintances, and was sourced mostly by Chisago District Attorney Jim Reuter.
UNLIKE JEFF’S FUNERAL, which the media had ignored on Monday, David’s funeral in Barron on Thursday attracted a swarm of TV cameramen. But they were mostly kept out. By this point the Trail and Madson families had been overwhelmed. For ordinary Americans, unused to the limelight, being caught up in the blinding media glare at the moment of their greatest sorrow is bewildering and often alienating. At David’s funeral, the Madsons’ neighbor from two doors down, an off-duty policeman, showed up in full uniform at the church and barred the door. “In a little town like this, when a tragedy happens, the whole community just kind of wraps its arms around the community,” says Cynthia Madson, David’s sister-in-law. Even so, both families felt obliged to seek the advice of media consultants.
Lisa Stravinskas’s law firm and David’s employer were helpful. “When I saw [the homosexual-love-triangle story] on the Chicago news, I called my boss,” says Lisa. “He recommended a media adviser for the firm, who graciously gave us her time and gave us pointers. She recommended that unless you talk to everyone, don’t do it. Have a family statement and give them something a little personal so they’ll leave you alone.” The Trails followed her advice.
In Barron the townspeople sternly made the media feel unwelcome—so different from the case in Miami and San Diego later, where palms on all sides waited to be greased. “They went to businesses downtown and got kicked out,” Howard Madson says. “They tried to set up in the church parking lot. The highway patrol, the Barron County Sheriff’s Department, and the city police absolutely cordoned that thing up there like you couldn’t believe. At the cemetery, when we drove in, I looked and there were, way back in the woods, two highway patrol cars and policemen all over the place. They protected us without even telling us.”
The police were also making sure Andrew did not return. But the Madsons saw their efforts in a more personal way. David’s brother, Ralph, says, “The town knew David Madson and grieved, not just for David but for the family, because of the commitment the family has made to this community over the years—I like to think for the respect for my mom and dad. They just knew we needed to grieve.”
In addition to their grief, the Madsons were filled with anger—stung and outraged that David was being tied to Andrew in any way. They objected to the idea that Andrew and David had been lovers, to any suggestion that David had been involved in S&M, and mostly to the very notion that David might have been implicated in Jeff Trail’s murder. For these transgressions they blamed Tichich and the media. Ralph particularly objected to David’s being referred to as Andrew’s lover. He eventually came to accept that that might be true, but he wanted “a time line” attached to the term. He categorized the media as having two approaches. “Number one, we want to tell the victim’s side. The second thing is, ‘Well, I’m going to write it anyway. So if you want to tell your side of the story, fine. But no big deal, I’m going to write it anyway.’ We went through this with the press so many times. It’s a type of blackmail.”
At the same time, the family cherished letters that poured into them from David’s coworkers and friends, telling of acts of David’s kindness and recalling his humor. His employer had its own memorial, and Minneapolis friends, who gathered at the Monte Carlo Room restaurant the night after the funeral in Barron to eulogize David, presented the Madsons with an album of remembrances. Little old ladies who still knew David as Harold Hill, “the Music Man,” who had delivered groceries to them even on holidays, pressed cards into the Madsons’ hands at the wake on Wednesday night. “All came with a card and two dollars,” for a memorial fund, says Howard Madson, “which is really a lot to all of them, because they’re on Social Security.”
The family took great solace in these generous gestures and brandished them as proof that David was not who “they”—the police and the press—were suggesting he was. “Most of David’s friends were straight,” his mother insists, as if some other, sinister world had been visited upon her child. The Madsons, who had always respected authority, were now having their illusions shattered. “Until you walk in our shoes, you can’t understand it,” Howard Madson says. “It’s difficult for us to separate fact from fiction too, because we’re no different from you, and we’re being treated as though we are possibly hiding a criminal.”
Howard and Ralph Madson drove to East Rush Lake to see the place where David’s body had been found. There they erected a handmade wooden cross with the epitaph BLESSED TO BE A BLESSING TO OTHERS. “It’s a strange thing that always presses on you—that thread [of David’s giving] that goes through everything he did,” says Howard Madson. “This Cunanan thing is so far away in our imagination. How the hell could this have happened?” Yet for whatever reasons—shame, fear, anger, or legal considerations—the Madsons did not reach out to the Trails, who were also suffering. Instead, they vowed to clear David’s name.
On Friday, May 9, members of both the Trail and Madson families were in Minneapolis. The Madsons had asked permission to go into David’s loft to look for personal papers—bank statements and the like. Tichich was to be there, because he wanted to see if he could eliminate David as the owner of a bloody white Banana Republic T-shirt found in the loft, in the plastic bag with the murder weapon. Evan Wallit, Karen Lapinski’s fiancé, had told Tichich that Andrew had recently purchased some T-shirts and had given one to him.
But David was a clotheshorse, so of course he owned some Banana Republic items. The possibility of clearing David was foreclosed in much the same way that the Ferragamo shoes found in the loft with blood on them could not be positively identified as either Andrew’s or David’s. They were almost the same size, and both wore Ferragamos. There were still a few piles of clothes strewn around in the sleeping area of David’s loft that had not been checked, and they were left unexamined as were two dop kits in the bathroom. More police mistakes.
The visit was hard on the Madsons. They found that David had already purchased and wrapped Christmas presents for his nieces and nephews. Whether Sergeant Tichich realized it or not—and he seems not to have—they were becoming more infuriated with him by the minute. At one point Ralph Madson opened a drawer and saw a letter postmarked December 1996, which had been returned to the sender. It was addressed
to Andrew Cunanan in La Jolla, California. According to Ralph, he turned to Tichich and said, “You may want this.”
“Why?” Tichich asked.
“It’s a letter from David to his killer.”
“We don’t know that he killed him,” Tichich replied.
Ralph insisted: “Maybe there’s some writing from David to Andrew or something.”
Tichich took the letter, but Ralph felt he was getting a distinct message from the policeman. “I was really being made to feel, like, ‘This is none of your damned business. I’m the cop. Don’t tell me how to do my job,’” he says.
Ralph Madson is nothing if not confrontational. Next, he says, he demanded of Tichich, “Who’s using the word ‘lover’ to the press? Man to man, tell me. Come on. I’d like to know.”
Tichich first said “a friend” and then admitted “Miss Salvetti.”
Ralph jumped to the conclusion that he was being lied to. “Monique had not talked to the press at all,” he insists. But Ralph misunderstood. She certainly had told the police that Andrew and David had had an intimate relationship. The police had passed that information on to the press via the police PR office.
Now Ralph, who had not met Tichich in person before, clearly felt he needed to get a few things off his chest. “You were wrong about David, weren’t you?” he demanded, referring to Tichich’s claims that David had been involved in Jeff’s murder. “You were dead wrong,” Ralph reiterated. “It’s David who’s dead now!” Then he turned on his heel and walked out.
Relations between the police and victims’ families are often complicated, and it is not unnatural for the surviving family to vent their frustrations on law enforcement. In this case the Madsons felt more than aggrieved, yet Sergeant Tichich says he really doesn’t understand why they have it in for him. “I had two or three conversations that I thought were just fine with Howard prior to David’s body being discovered, and all of a sudden he stopped talking to me and I had no hint or clue in any way that there was ever a problem between him and me. I have been mystified since this happened.”
“We don’t spend enough time with victims’ families,” says Sergeant Wagner. “The problem is just time. When we are focusing on suspects, normally the families are not kept abreast, and they have this tremendous desire for knowledge, to know everything. Some things we can say, others we can’t.”
Wagner later sent the Madsons a sympathetic letter assuring them that David was a wonderful person, which they took as vindication for the perceived stings from Tichich. But Wagner defends his fellow investigator. “His mind is always working. You have to have different personalities. Tich is rough on the edges, but he digs real deep.”
While Tichich was at David’s loft on Friday with the Madsons, he got beeped by Jerry Davis. Davis and Jon Hackett were at Jeff’s apartment with Dr. and Mrs. Trail and Jeff’s sister, Sally. They had found something. The Trails had come in for a memorial service for Jeff in Minneapolis. Like the Madsons, they wanted to hear as much as they could about what had really gone on with regard to Jeff’s murder. At the memorial service the following day, Stan Trail, who had had a good relationship with his son, would say that he realized after Jeff left the house at age eighteen that there was a lot he didn’t know about him. They lost touch. Jerry Davis, meanwhile, trying to make things as comfortable as he could for the Trails, filled them in on anything he could to ease their pain. But they never asked him a single question about Jeff being gay.
While at the apartment and going through Jeff’s things with the Trails, Jon Hackett made an important discovery. On the top shelf in Jeff’s closet—police had never searched there—he found a gun case and a metal military ammunition box with three holsters and an empty magazine. There was also a bill of sale for ammunition purchased in California in 1994. The gun itself was missing, but earlier in the week the .40 caliber shell casings had been found in the ground near where David had been shot. The police believed they had made a match. “As soon as we got that—that Chisago had received shell casings at the scene which marked the caliber of their gun—that discovery was a big deal,” says Wagner. “We didn’t have the gun, but we knew it was .40 caliber, and it’s an unusual gun.” He added, “We wanted to keep that information secret. It ended up in one of the Chicago papers.”
Except for dusting for fingerprints, the police had never completely searched Jeff’s apartment beyond the room where Andrew had stayed, nor had they picked up Andrew’s eyeglasses, which he had left behind there. The day of the dusting, a neighbor who lived above Jeff saw the police and told them she thought she had seen Andrew out in front of Jeff’s apartment, alone, the Monday night after Jeff’s murder. But since she had come forward only after there had been so much publicity about the case, Tichich wasn’t satisfied that her sighting was genuine.
When Tichich, whom they were meeting for the first time, arrived at Jeff’s, the Trails wanted to discuss Jeff’s murder with him. Jerry Davis, who had earlier had words with Tichich over the detective’s request for help in finding out about Andrew’s airline ticket, says he got upset again. Tichich began describing the murder in such graphic terms that at one point Ann Trail “got up and could barely walk. She had to catch herself on the table and leave the room.” In Davis’s opinion, “He was just way too blunt for somebody whose parents are sitting there, when their son was just murdered. Instead of just saying there was blood on this shirt, he said, ‘When Jeff was getting bludgeoned with the hammer, blood just spattered.’”
Davis was frustrated that Tichich couldn’t even figure out how to operate Jeff’s answering machine—which caused Davis to spend several unwanted hours driving to and from Jeff’s house twice to help him. The Trails, however, did not share Davis’s opinion of Tichich. “He was graphic,” Ann Trail says, “and it did upset me. But it didn’t offend me. He was showing us what happened.” The Trails had no quarrel with Tichich, who believed he was just doing his job.
FOR ANDREW, IT was time to move again. On Friday he barely missed getting caught. At 1:30 P.M. and again at 3 P.M. on Thursday, May 8, the tracking tower for Ameritech Cellular phone had informed the FBI and the Chicago police that the telephone in Lee Miglin’s Lexus had been activated in the Philadelphia area. Chicago authorities informed the Philadelphia police, desperately hoping to be able to pin-point Andrew’s whereabouts. The next morning, Friday, the Chicago Tribune ran a story—which reporter Andrew Martin says was based on a law-enforcement leak in Chicago—saying that Andrew had used the cell phone and was being tracked.
Yet the Chicago police denied in the same day’s Minneapolis Star Tribune that Andrew had used Miglin’s cell phone. The Minneapolis paper did, however, quote Philadelphia police as saying that a description of Miglin’s car and its license number were being broadcast every hour to all the squads in the City of Brotherly Love. “I think the description was made by the Philadelphia police and broadcast on their radios, which are not encoded,” says Philadelphia FBI spokeswoman Linda Vizi. “‘Be on the lookout,’ that’s how the media picked it up.” That’s how some media picked it up, but nothing happened right away.
Complicating this version of events is the movie ticket stub later found for The Devil’s Own on Thursday night in New York City. If Andrew was correctly tracked in the Philadelphia area and also saw The Devil’s Own in New York, that would mean that he left New York, drove south to Philadelphia, then turned around and went back to New York—at least an hour and a half away in the opposite direction. Wherever he was on Friday, however, he bought the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today, of which only the Times had a short item about him.
Thursday night a Chicago network affiliate had also carried the information that there was an all-points bulletin out for Andrew in Philadelphia. Other media soon asked the Philadelphia police for confirmation of the APB and the cell phone monitoring story. A Philadelphia police spokesperson confirmed that Miglin’s cell phone had been activated on Thursday. Both before and after the
confirmation, all-news radio in Philadelphia broadcast to the world that Miglin’s car phone had been activated in the Philadelphia area. Other TV stations also carried the news. Meanwhile, also on Friday, Sergeant Todd Rivard got another top-secret call from Lee Urness, who was heading the Cunanan investigation. “Don’t tell your wife, don’t tell anyone,” Urness cautioned Rivard. “We got him on the hook.” Apparently Urness, in Minneapolis, was completely in the dark about the leak.
“I was just pulling into a food store and talking on the phone to Lee Urness,” says Rivard. “I walk into the store and there it is. It was on the news.” In fact, the Lexus phone had been activated Friday afternoon at 2:28 P.M., 2:30 P.M., and 2:33 P.M. in southern New Jersey, in the vicinity of the small township of Pennsville, not far from where five major thoroughfares—including two interstate highways—converge.
Clearly Andrew was also listening. This unfortunate leak out of Chicago, followed by the police confirmation of it, was probably the most serious blunder of the entire manhunt. The consequences of the widespread media coverage, swift and direct, were later revealed in the inspection of the Lexus. “The phone antenna was completely torn out, so he obviously heard it right away and tried to dismantle the cell phone,” says Rivard. The antenna was later found broken in two on the floor of the backseat. The actual power box for the phone, which allowed the signals to continue to be emitted, was in the Lexus trunk; Andrew never found it. The FBI later found holes in the lining of the Lexus roof, indicating that Andrew had frantically searched for a way to disconnect the phone. “Apparently he couldn’t,” says former FBI Deputy Director William Esposito. “That’s when he decided to ditch the car.”