by Maureen Orth
THE AUTHORITIES WOULD never knowingly get so close to Andrew again. “Everyone who was working on [the case] was outraged,” Chisago County Sheriff Randall Schwegman told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “I still believe that precipitated Reese’s death,” says Sergeant Steve Wagner. “He had to get rid of the car then.” Andrew pulled into an information booth located at the Delaware Memorial Bridge, a major crossing between Delaware and New Jersey, thirty miles south of Philadelphia. He asked for material on historical sites and was provided with a packet that included information on Fort Mott State Park. The park is adjacent to Finn’s Point National Cemetery, in Pennsville, New Jersey, a remote Civil War burial ground that would soon have its tranquillity shattered.
23
Whispers
LEE MIGLIN’S ELABORATE funeral earlier that Friday was covered locally as a major news event. Had the funeral not been steeped in sensationalism and senseless tragedy, it would not have attracted such attention; the ordinary citizen in Chicago had probably never heard of Lee Miglin before his death. But the media turnout was so heavy that even reporters from People magazine and Time were among the crowd behind a barrier across the street from Holy Name Cathedral.
The family had requested that the new archbishop of the Chicago diocese, Francis George, Cardinal Bernadin’s successor, say the funeral mass, but he had been installed only that week and was not available. Even so, more than a thousand mourners filled the historic church, which was filled with orchids, dozens of them sent over from the annual spring floral display at Marshall Field, the department store where Marilyn Miglin had once modeled. At the service Marilyn Miglin said of the deceased, “Let’s never forget the spirit and the light of the great guy I call my friend.”
In those first days after the killing, it took a tremendous effort for close friends to steel themselves against the rising tide of rumors. Nevertheless, many were startled by the family’s composure. “Duke Miglin never shed a tear,” claims Paul Beitler, “the whole time, not one tear for his father.” Sugar Rautbord counters, “They’re so private, people could mistake it—that elegant privacy—for coldness. It’s not. They’re very dignified.” Within two weeks of her husband’s death, Marilyn Miglin went back on the Home Shopping Network to sell cosmetics. She said she felt safe in the studio. The ladies who watched her sent in thousands of cards, but privately she was shattered.
“She turned this into an event, to watch her like a soap opera,” says Paul Beitler. “She told me, ‘I have to go back on. I have a responsibility to these people; I have to do it. They all want to know, to see me.’ I was incredulous.”
The family had had a private memorial mass the previous Tuesday, shortly after giving a press conference. Paul Beitler, who had acted as the family spokesperson, considered Lee the father he had never had. Intense and emotional, Beitler had fought in Vietnam, and he compared the crime scene and the aftermath of Lee’s murder to being in combat. “I saw people’s lives destroyed in front of me.”
Beitler’s “hot” demeanor on television and in person could be disarming, even off-putting. He was criticized for gravitating toward the camera too often, even though, according to one observer, he looked like a “deer caught in the headlights.” But his loyalty to Lee Miglin was never questioned. Beitler couldn’t believe it when Marilyn did not invite him to the family visitation before the cremation. “I was not able to pay my last respects.” It was the beginning of a painful rift, which he says he does not understand to this day. But a close business associate of Marilyn’s explains that when a person is so devastated, logic does not always prevail. “She was angry that he’s alive and Lee’s dead.”
AT FIRST, BEITLER was the avenger, out to quash any doubts about Lee Miglin’s heterosexual identity and to cut off press and police speculation about any sort of relationship between Andrew and Lee. “Our plan was to shut it down, go into seclusion, not answer questions,” says Beitler. “Geraldo’s producer called. Tom Brokaw called through his producer the night they found Lee’s car.” In fact, Beitler learned from the media that Miglin’s car had been found. But as events unfolded, Beitler was by turns hurt, then confused, then tortured. He struggled to understand what had really happened to Lee. In the process, his relationship with Marilyn Miglin broke down completely. “Marilyn treated me very badly. She is not my friend.”
Problems began right after the announcement of Andrew’s connection to the Jeep. The Miglin family dug in—denying that Andrew had ever met Lee or Duke Miglin. At the same time, some of the Chicago police apparently felt that they were not getting a whole lot of cooperation from the family, even though the Miglins, thanks to Beitler’s longtime links to the mayor, were being treated with kid gloves. “My recollection,” says Paul Scrimshaw, the Miami Beach lead detective on the Versace case, “is the Chicago cops saying that the Miglins were not cooperating at all.” But Paul Beitler says that Miglin-Beitler was cooperative. The company conducted an exhaustive search of its phone records and correspondence and uncovered nothing tying Lee Miglin to Andrew Cunanan.
The new buzzword was “random,” as in “This was a random crime.” Beitler insisted day after day, “We can say with absolute certainty neither Duke nor anyone in the family knew Cunanan.” Over and over, Mark Jarasek, the spokesman for Miglin-Beitler, denied on behalf of the family any connection between Lee or Duke and Andrew. “Duke Miglin never heard of Cunanan, has never met him, doesn’t know him.” Or, “Beitler and Miglin’s family have vehemently stressed that neither Miglin nor his son, Duke, who lives in the Los Angeles area, ever knew Cunanan, Trail, or Madson.”
Privately, Mark Jarasek asked Duke to tell him the truth. At the house, he recalls, after Madson’s Jeep had been discovered, “I took him into a private room. I sat him down and I asked him point-blank, because a TV reporter had come to me with the question and I blew the reporter off. We had both of Cunanan’s names. I said, ‘Do you know this person? Have you ever heard the name? Duke, it doesn’t matter to me, and I’m not going to say anything, but I’ve got to know. This is serious.’ I told him it was serious for him, for the company, for the family. It was odd—the way he said no reminded me so much of his dad. It was uncanny. The way he said no was exactly the way Lee would say no.”
Jarasek reiterated how important his answers were. “I made it very clear to him, because I’m the person defending the whole thing. If something turned up later, it would be a hell of a lot worse than being truthful at this point.” Once again, the answer from Duke was “No, I am not gay or bi. I have not had a sexual experience with a man.” Jarasek says he “absolutely believed” him. Paul Beitler, however, never felt he could pin Duke down or get him to confide in him. “Duke would never answer my questions. He was always very evasive with me. He would never sit down and talk with me. I never got five minutes of Duke’s time. Marilyn became withdrawn and snippy.”
Nevertheless, to the press Beitler painted a picture of Andrew swinging in off the expressway, going up busy Rush Street, parking the Jeep around the block from where Lee Miglin lived on Scott Street, then happening onto the alley where Miglin’s garage was, and by chance encountering Lee. Then in a split second, Andrew presumably decided to murder him brutally with the available tools at hand.
Police knew that that was not necessarily the case. Betsy Brazis, the Miglins’ tenant, had told them that she had seen the red Jeep with Minnesota plates parked in front of her house on East Division Friday afternoon. She saw it again shortly before midnight on Friday night, after it had been moved a few spaces up the street. Then she saw it on Saturday, parked on Astor Street, where it was found on Tuesday about midnight. Two other neighbors also said they had seen the Jeep parked on Astor Street on Saturday—and perhaps had even seen the killer himself.
At 7:30 that Saturday morning, David Arnold was out walking his dog when he came upon a man sleeping on the passenger side of the Jeep, with his baseball cap pulled down. Arnold and the dog stopped about a foot away. “We just walked up, took
a look at him, and entertained waking him up,” Arnold says. “He looked like somebody who had had a rough night in the bar area. He looked unshaven. When I saw a photo of [Cunanan] on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, I said, ‘Definitely, that’s the guy.’” Arnold adds that, since the neighborhood is “immediately adjacent to the lake and a significant bar area, it’s not unknown to see nonresident cars.”
Jill Dryer was house-sitting that weekend for her neighbors, who live at the southwest corner of Scott and Astor—right where the Jeep was parked. On Saturday afternoon between 1 and 3 A.M. she was carrying several loads of clothes from her apartment on Astor, a half block away, to wash in her neighbors’ laundry. She too spotted the red Jeep with Minnesota plates. The windows were down. “There were two guys in the car—I only saw the one with his arm down on the ledge, eating a sandwich. The only reason he caught my eye is that he reminded me of this creepy person I know, and it gave me the chills.” She passed the Jeep several times, but she doesn’t remember what the other passenger looked like, other than that he was a white male. “We get a lot of people who camp out there—they park and go to the beach and use it as a stop. I thought, Oh God, losers. They’re using the Jeep for a hotel, and they’ve parked for the day in front of my house.”
Dryer is a waitress, and as she was walking home at 2 A.M., shortly after the murder, she was stopped by two policemen who asked her if she had seen anyone in a red Jeep. She told them yes, related her observation, and got an odd reaction. “They didn’t want to hear anything about it—two people in a Jeep,” she declares. “I was so furious. I said, ‘Do me a favor, check it out. There might be someone else dead in an alley.’ I described the guy before they showed me any photos. Then later they showed me photos and I picked [Cunanan] out. He was on the passenger side.” Dryer says she does not understand why the cops kept cutting her off, saying, “‘OK, ma’am, we’ve got enough.’ I certainly don’t want to accuse people of not doing their jobs. Maybe they thought because I couldn’t describe what the other one looked like, they dismissed me.”
In the unreleased Chicago police report, Detectives Lawrence Aikin and Charles Gorski omit any mention of Dryer’s seeing two people in the Jeep. They mention only that she believed the photo they showed her of Andrew “was the same person she observed sitting in the passenger side of the Jeep Cherokee which was parked on the southwest corner of Scott and Astor at about 2:00 P.M. on 3 May 1997.”
For potential trial purposes, according to prosecutor Nancy Donahoe, the police and the state’s attorney appear to favor another eyewitness’s account, which is at odds with those of Arnold and Dryer. Rather, it bolsters the random-killing theory the Miglin family is pushing. Lisa Douglas says that she and her mother were leaving Bloomingdale’s, at Michigan and Walton, on Saturday afternoon about 5:00 or 5:15, when they were approached by a clean-shaven, dark-haired man. He looked like a “well-to-do foreign student,” and he asked in an indeterminate accent, “Where’s the Gold Coast?” He was carrying a laminated map and booklet. According to the police report, Douglas told him this was the Gold Coast. He just looked at her, so she pointed north and told him to go up Michigan a few blocks and turn left. She had to wait there for about ten minutes, and he continued to lean against the building. Douglas identified the man as Andrew Cunanan.
But if he was clean-shaven, where did the whiskers in the Miglins’ bathroom sink come from? Moreover, Andrew knew the Gold Coast and Chicago. He used to chat about the city to Stella Kalamaras, the owner of California Cuisine in Hillcrest, whose husband had once owned a restaurant in Chicago.
Furthermore, there was one person who was not telling the police what she knew. Betsy Brazis, a tanned and fit brunette, did tell detectives that she had seen the Jeep parked in front of her house Friday night and on Astor Street on Saturday. However, Brazis says, “I saw other things that I never divulged to the police, because they did not ask me direct questions. I didn’t respond out of respect for the Miglins.”
Brazis had recently been divorced from a surgeon, her daughter was about to graduate from college, and she had moved into the $6,000-a-month duplex attached to the Byers’ only two weeks before. Just before moving in, she had cut her hand and had to have more than forty stitches. It was not a tranquil period. “I was trying to deal with my own life. I wasn’t getting involved in the Miglin case. I don’t need to be on TV. I don’t need that kind of notoriety.” And she certainly did not want to cause any trouble for the Miglins, who, after all, were her landlords. Later, however, she did cross swords with Marilyn Miglin over her lease and she wrote her a letter telling her that out of respect she had not mentioned everything she knew about the murder. She never got a reply.
On Friday night, May 2, Betsy Brazis was home alone with her dog, Mimi, a long-haired Chihuahua. A girlfriend from North Dakota would be flying in for a visit the next day, so Brazis was getting Mimi accustomed to her new home and taking her out frequently. Like the Byers, Brazis had a view of the Miglins’ kitchen and garden, and she too was accustomed to seeing her landlords, Lee and Marilyn, having dinner in front of their big picture window in semi-darkness.
Sometimes when Brazis was out in her graveled yard with the dog, she would run into Lee. They usually nodded and spoke a few words. Just after dusk Friday, Lee passed her in the alley but didn’t say anything. “I know Lee saw me in the backyard. I thought it was a little strange he didn’t say anything—not that he would,” she recalls. “He was with a young man with dark features wearing a baseball hat. I couldn’t see the faces. It had to be dark.”
Several hours later, Brazis saw Lee Miglin and the younger man talking together in the kitchen, where many more lights were on than usual. She did not get a close enough look to be able to identify Andrew Cunanan. Only after seeing Andrew’s picture “a zillion times on TV” did she think that he was the one with Miglin that Friday night, but she couldn’t be positive. Throughout the tumultuous days following Lee Miglin’s murder she kept her secret. “I wasn’t going to go there. I didn’t speak of these things. I told my daughter.” Betsy Brazis is positive, however, that on Friday night Lee Miglin was not alone. On several occasions, other neighbors claim, they had also seen Lee in the alley with a young man, though apparently not the man Betsy saw that night.
Betsy Brazis had another eerie experience that weekend. At 3:30 Saturday afternoon she was out again with Mimi, and the dog kept sniffing and growling at the service door to the Miglins’ garage, not far from where Lee Miglin’s body was found. “She wouldn’t leave the side door alone,” Brazis recalls. “I said, ‘Mimi, get away. There must be something dead.’”
But Brazis heard nothing, and she believes the main garage door was closed. “Lee didn’t usually leave the garage door open. I never recall the garage door being open.” She too remembers seeing the kitchen blinds drawn, as Stephen Byer did, which prompted her to think that the Miglins must be away. Early Sunday morning, however, she says, “the gate was wide open.”
Like the Byers, Betsy Brazis’s life was disrupted long after the murder. “It was the buzz, wherever I went, for weeks.” Male reporters would stop her on the street, asking her where she got her hair done. “It was ridiculous—just to strike up a conversation.” She says that the reporters asked a lot more questions than the police did. She kept remembering oddities—how a few weeks before the murder she had run into the Miglins in the alley, walking toward their garage. Marilyn rarely said hello, but on this occasion she stopped to explain that they were on their way to a photo shoot. “That’s why Lee’s wearing makeup,” Marilyn said. “I don’t want you to think he always wears makeup.”
Betsy Brazis was not entirely surprised to find that Lee’s murderer was gay. She had long heard the rumors about Lee that by now were sweeping the Gold Coast, although they had never been substantiated. “Don’t take this to mean Cunanan or Miglin never met,” says Bob Long, media spokesman of the Chicago FBI, “but we never were able to come up with any information that Cunanan a
nd Miglin knew each other, and we were really looking for it.” Brazis, a nurse, had lost her brother to AIDS, and for years she had led an AIDS-education support group. Before she ever moved in across the alley, she says, she had heard Lee Miglin’s name discussed in the group she was leading. “He was a well-known bisexual man. Because of his money and power, nobody would speak of it in social circles. I’ve done AIDS work for fifteen years—it was just known,” Brazis says. “Lee’s name would come up occasionally as a gay ‘straight’ man.”
In Las Vegas, where he was now working, Ron Williams, whom Andrew used to take to dinner in Hillcrest, heard about Andrew’s suspected connection to Lee Miglin’s murder and was amazed to learn that Lee had a son named Duke. He remembered Andrew saying in 1994 that he could be backed in business whenever he wanted by a rich older Chicago investor that he named Duke. “I was shocked,” Williams says. But Ron Williams was never contacted by law enforcement, so he too kept his recollection to himself.
In New York, Jack Shaffer, a Park Avenue real-estate financier who had worked with Miglin-Beitler on previous deals, and his partner, John Bralower, were also stunned to hear that Lee Miglin had been murdered and that Andrew Cunanan was the prime suspect. A few years back, they had run into the Miglins in the Los Angeles airport. Their flight to New York had been delayed for a couple of hours, and they were in United Airlines’ Red Carpet Lounge. The Miglins were on their way to Hawaii for a family Christmas, and were waiting for Duke to join them. He finally arrived with a friend, who made a great impression. “If you saw him, you were meeting a very unusual individual,” says Shaffer. He didn’t remember the friend’s name, but as soon as he and Bralower saw Andrew Cunanan’s picture, they concurred immediately: That was the friend of Duke’s whom they had met at the L.A. airport. “I know that that’s the guy whose picture’s been all over.” But memories can be hazy and Duke, of course, has always maintained he never met Andrew and it has never been proven he has. “I just know that’s what I know,” says Jack Shaffer. Still, he admits that he and his partner could not swear to it in court.