by Maureen Orth
“We shared our records with [Chicago], which turned out to haunt us,” says Commander Griffin, speaking of the later decision made by Chisago to release all the paperwork it had on the Cunanan case. “They had no right to decide to do that. We weren’t sharing? That’s a lie! That’s ridiculous! That’s my statement on that.”
Asked if it is his conclusion that the murder of Lee Miglin was a random killing, Joe Griffin pauses for at least ten seconds before answering, “I just told you, I don’t care to talk about it.”
After explaining that Chicago police did not find evidence of Lee Miglin being gay or knowing Andrew Cunanan, Chicago Superintendent Rodriguez concedes that he can’t rule out the possibility of Lee Miglin being bisexual. “That could be,” he says. “I could not say anything with certitude with regard to sexual preference.”
A FEW DAYS before Pete Jackson, Gail Baez, and Sergeant Gregory Gordon went to Chicago, Bob Tichich called Monique Salvetti in to make a formal statement. She hadn’t seen him since she had identified Andrew’s duffel bag a week and a half earlier. As she recalls, “Sergeant Wagner starts to go back to all the information I’d given previously, and then after about ten minutes he says, ‘Oh, I should note it’s Wednesday, May 14, 1900 hours. Present are—’
“I said, ‘Wait a minute. Is this being taped? I didn’t realize that.’
“‘Oh, have we started the formal interview?’ Tichich asked. ‘I didn’t realize that either. Did you turn on the recorder?’
“‘No, I thought you did,’ Wagner replied.
“‘No, I thought you turned on the recorder.’”
Salvetti sums up, “It’s hidden mikes, everything.”
Meanwhile, in Chisago, a new development threw the investigation of the first two murders way off course. Jean Rosen, the owner of the Full Moon Cafe, a funky beer-and-burgers bar about eight miles from the site where David Madson was killed at East Rush Lake, told a Minneapolis BCA agent that she was convinced Andrew and David, driving a red Jeep, had come into her place on Friday afternoon, May 2. They had ordered two California cheese-burger baskets, drunk two bottles of Grain Belt beer, and left about forty-five minutes later. Her friend Michelle, who tended bar at J.J.’s Bowl and Lounge, a bowling alley a few miles away, had been there that day and could confirm it.
“I made a comment to Jean,” Michelle says, “‘I bet they’re gay.’ Just the way they carried themselves and looked at each other. What a waste. I thought the blond was very good-looking.” Although there was no evidence of recently eaten food or alcohol in David’s stomach at the time of his autopsy, Jean Rosen’s sighting bolstered the coroner’s resolve that David had been murdered on Friday; Todd Rivard agreed, despite the discovery of the Chicago parking stub showing that Andrew had parked David’s car there the Wednesday before Lee Miglin was killed, which Chisago authorities interpreted as evidence that Andrew and David had gone to Chicago together before driving back to East Rush Lake where David was killed. Nobody listened when Ralph Madson griped that David would never drink Grain Belt beer, and nobody seemed to pay attention to the fact that the clothes the women described David wearing did not match the jeans he was found in. Rivard maintains, “That lady at the Full Moon was very good. That was a good sighting.”
IN THE MEANTIME, San Diego police reopened the investigation into Lincoln Aston’s murder to make sure they had the right man. They concluded that Andrew had had nothing to do with it. The San Diego Union-Tribune ran wire copy on the story in the metro section, even reporting that some of Andrew’s friends in Hillcrest were going into hiding, but again didn’t bother to file a story quoting local sources. One of the many unforeseen consequences of Andrew’s rampage was its effect on his friends. A young bartender at Flicks, for example, got recognized by his father on Hard Copy in a group photo of Andrew’s friends. The father, who did not know his son was gay, cut him off.
Robbins Thompson was ripped out of the closet when his heterosexual roommate saw Andrew’s face on television as part of the “gay love triangle” murders and recognized him. “He was kind of blown away,” Robbins says. The roommate asked him to move out. Then Robbins was dropped by his partner in a construction business to rehab houses. “My worst fears are realized,” Robbins says his partner told him. “You’re gay.”
“It ruined my life. When my business partner left me, he basically cleaned out our accounts, took everything.” Robbins says he had to declare bankruptcy and start over from scratch. He went to live in Mexico, where he worked different jobs on the Titanic set, unsure what to do next, since his credit was wrecked.
Robbins could not shake the story. He went into a construction supply house, and the man behind the counter recognized him as “the guy who came out.” “I am pretty well known surfing,” Robbins admits. “I go to the beach and people are looking at me, and I don’t know what they’re thinking. I don’t know if they’re thinking anything. It is just the fact that they know all this stuff about you, and you don’t know about them.” It has been even harder with straight friends, whom he has resisted talking to about what happened. “It’s a fuzziness between you and them, because your friendship is not the same anymore.”
Yet despite the havoc Andrew was wreaking, he still had a certain amount of support. A number of people he knew proved less than willing to cooperate with authorities. When Michael Williams, Jeff Trail’s friend, attempted to get clear photos of Andrew for the police, he was turned down more than once. People who had supposedly been close friends of Jeff’s wouldn’t even attend the San Diego memorial service Williams organized for him, either out of fear “Andrew would show up and take everybody out,” or fear of being outed themselves. “I called a lot of people in the navy. Some had very good careers,” Williams recounts. “‘Would you mind getting up and saying a couple of words about Jeff?’ A number of them said no.” Those who braved going entered a back door guarded by police so as not to be seen by the press. Others flatly refused to believe that Andrew would murder anyone, even though they had also known Jeff and might have been expected to have some sympathy for him.
“Right after the New Jersey cemetery guy, an FBI agent asked me, ‘Has he had any direct contact with you?’” recalls Dominick Andreacchio, Andrew’s former frequent dinner companion. “‘Would you give him any money, and would you tell us?’ And I was, like, ‘I don’t know. I can’t answer that, because at this point it just seems like my friend is being framed.’”
Although the San Diego police department was cooperating with Minneapolis’s requests, Hennepin County prosecutor Gail Baez wanted Tichich and two other detectives to go to San Diego to see what they could learn. Once again, her request precipitated a confrontation. Tichich thought she was meddling in his case just because it was receiving national publicity. “I think what really irritated her was that I said, ‘Tell me why this case isn’t fatally flawed. Tell me why it isn’t.’ Based on the fact we have two sets of footprints in blood and the fact that Madson was dead and we didn’t have a videotape. We just have two people present in that apartment and witnesses who say they are both, as far as they could see, moving about freely. One wasn’t coercing or threatening the other one. ‘Tell me, how are we ever going to make this case in the absence of clear motive or somebody who provides some really concrete information as to why this happened?’”
“I don’t think any case is fatally flawed,” counters Baez. “You never know what’s going to turn up during the investigation. There’s always the possibility someone will confess. There’s always a possibility the person who did the crime could talk to someone else. There are many reasons you really shouldn’t rule out any case.”
Over Memorial Day weekend, three Minneapolis police detectives went to San Diego. They talked to Robbins, who invited them to Mexico, but Tichich, though he was impressed by Robbins’s ability to surf, wouldn’t cross the border without car insurance for Mexico. The Minneapolis cops were also scheduled to talk to Erik Greenman at Flicks, but they had to reschedule b
ecause Tichich didn’t want to go inside. They talked to agents at the San Diego FBI, to Arthur Harrington and Ken Higgins, and to Jeff’s close friend Jon Wainwright. Greenman showed them a picture of Liz Coté, whom Andrew had often represented as his ex-wife. The tiniest glimpse of a license plate on a white truck in the margin of the photo got the officers’ undivided attention. Maybe it was Andrew’s truck, they thought, but it turned out to be a dealer truck from Bud Coté. Their interviews didn’t get them any closer to solving the case, “but we just learned a ton,” says Tichich’s boss, Dale Barsness. They also considered new theories.
According to Barsness, “He [Andrew] wanted a long-term relationship with David Madson, but Madson doesn’t really know him—he’ll talk to Jeff Trail, and what will Trail say? He’ll have nothing good to say about Cunanan—he’s not very complimentary. Jeff Trail always said that Cunanan had a ‘very dark side’ to him. The point is this—it’s a love story. We see it all the time with heterosexuals: If I can’t have you, nobody will. So Andrew tells his roommate, Erik, ‘I’m going on one more run to Minneapolis to win Madson back.’ Then I think Andrew took Jeff Trail’s gun and Jeff saw his gun was missing. He’d check for it. What would be the most valuable thing in the house? If you think he’s shady, the last thing you want is somebody with your gun. So Jeff comes home and checks—his gun is gone!
“We’re theorizing he’s looking for his gun, he’s going to be pissed off. He’ll go directly over to David Madson’s. He storms up so Andrew Cunanan can’t take off with his gun. Jeff Trail confronted him about his gun. If Cunanan picks up the hammer, is it Madson who says, ‘Get the fuck out of here’? I have never worked a case in twenty-nine years with so many unanswered questions.”
Months after the killings, many of his questions remained unanswered. Barsness felt sure about one thing, however, concerning the Full Moon Cafe sighting that had helped determine David’s time of death. “I don’t believe it for a minute. I also don’t believe the medical examiner’s time of death for David Madson.”
The case was closed, Madson’s official time of death unchanged, when Barsness told me of his lingering doubts. But he didn’t need to convince me of his position. The day before we spoke, I had discovered proof that the sighting was bogus.
26
Cross-Purposes
THE SUNDAY AFTER Bill Reese’s murder, I personally became aware of Andrew Cunanan for the first time. The New York Daily News had run an interesting story about a “fun-loving social butterfly” voted “Least Likely to Be Forgotten” in high school who was wanted in a series of murders. It was not until the fourth paragraph that the story mentioned that Cunanan had spent much of his adult life “dating and living with rich, older men.” I immediately sensed that this was not an ordinary criminal; even his victims all appeared to be outstanding individuals. The story might be worth exploring for Vanity Fair, for which I was a special correspondent.
Within a week the editor gave me the go-ahead to begin reporting, and over the next few weeks I set out to learn as much as I could. By then each investigation had at least three law-enforcement entities on the case—not to mention the various prosecutorial offices in each state involved—although William Reese’s murder brought a fundamental change in strategy. Local authorities in both Minnesota and Illinois had ceded the search for Cunanan to the FBI, figuring that he was never going to return to their jurisdictions. It didn’t take long to figure out, however, that throughout the investigation unfortunate errors had already been committed that would continue to complicate the cases and would at times set the families of David Madson and Lee Miglin at cross-purposes, if not at odds, with the authorities investigating their murders.
In Minnesota, for example, police had shifted their focus to concentrate on working out a motive so that their prosecutors could present the strongest possible case when Cunanan was caught. Although Andrew was still at large, the police were finished with David’s loft as a crime scene. When the Madson family and Rich Bonnin went to the loft one day in late June to remove personal items, they discovered in the bathroom two dop kits that had been overlooked, one belonging to Andrew, the other to David. Andrew’s may well have contained DNA evidence such as beard stubble to match the stubble found in Miglin’s wash-basin in Chicago. Even more important, in a pile of clothes near the bed was a pair of blood-splattered Levi’s, size 36. David Madson wore size 32. By then every shred of evidence was crucial, because the police had not been able to match any of the fingerprints taken from the various crime scenes and vehicles.
“The pants were overlooked,” admits Tichich. “And the tag on the luggage was embarrassing also. But the shaving kit is something that I don’t think we should take criticism for, because how do you tell whose shaving kit it is?” I ask why they didn’t test both. “You can’t take everything in the apartment and bring it back here,” Tichich declares. “You just can’t do that.”
To his credit, Tichich tried to work with a renowned fiber expert to see if there was any way to find “fiber transfer,” that is, show if any fiber from the bloody Banana Republic T-shirt found in the plastic bag in David’s loft was also on the blood-splattered jeans. Since the Levi’s were size 36, and David was size 32, says Tichich, “that’s pretty good evidence that it was Cunanan who was wearing both garments with blood splatter on them. But even then the question becomes, Could Cunanan have been standing in close enough that he could have gotten blood splatter on him by watching Madson bludgeon this guy to death? So even that, though it sounded more promising, fell short of proving anything conclusively, really. So my point stands: What do we need? We need a video camera.”
This lack of incontrovertible proof was infuriating to the Madsons, who knew that David was incapable of murder. They set out on a campaign to clear David’s name and to repudiate what they considered the rush to judgment of the police, which they believed had colored the media coverage of the case. The family claims that they made up to a hundred unanswered telephone calls to the Chisago police, trying to get them to do tests that might clarify the time of David’s death, and in the coming months I would find myself a factor in their effort, learning through my reporting of procedures what they could use to help them in their quest.
At my suggestion they asked if the Chisago medical examiner, Dr. Lindsey Thomas, had done the test for vitreous humor—the eyeball fluid measuring potassium—which can be used as an indicator of time of death. She hadn’t—and once the doctor complied with their request to do so, the test results showed that the potassium levels in David’s fluid were high, which suggested that he had been dead longer than was first estimated. The vitreous-humor results boosted the Madsons’ confidence, but a much surer test would be to measure the age of the blowfly larvae found in David’s mouth at the time his body was discovered. Their development is temperature-dependent, so comparing their age with climatic conditions at the lake would give a fairly accurate estimation of time of death. By now, months had passed since David’s death, and trying to have that test done would become an arduous tug of war between the Madsons and Chisago County. The county did not want to spend the money on a closed case, particularly if it meant admitting that their officials had been wrong. Even the Madsons’ pleas to allow them to pay for the test went unanswered.
Later, on my first visit to the Full Moon Cafe, I found another flaw in the argument that David had lived for days after Jeff Trail’s murder. Jean Rosen had been interviewed by both the police and the media numerous times by the time she told me her story. She also told me where to find Michelle, the confirming witness who had also been there that day at the Full Moon Cafe. Rosen remembered some details that didn’t correspond with other evidence, such as Andrew’s having slicked-back dark hair (Andrew’s hair was shaved at that point), and both Andrew and David’s wearing Dockers or khakis (David, we know, was wearing jeans at his death). But the most significant revelation came from Michelle, who recalled after a little prodding that she had written a check to Jean Rose
n for thirty dollars on the day she saw the two men she thought were Andrew and David enter the Full Moon. I asked her to go home and look at the date on the canceled check. When I called her to verify the date, she told me the check was written Sunday, April 27, the day Jeff Trail was murdered, not Friday, May 2, the official time of David Madson’s death. Neither the Minnesota BCA nor the Chisago police nor anyone in the media had bothered to question her about that.
The coroner’s estimate was falling apart, but it died hard. According to Captain Stephen Strehlow, the officer in charge of the special investigations division and Tichich and Wagner’s boss, the Full Moon sighting “set up a chain of circumstances that weren’t valid, and we were trying to make them valid. It just throws you way off.” Therefore the charges, Strehlow says, “were never publicly disproven, and because of that other things happened. If you’re the coroner, for instance, and you’re asked to come up with time of death, and then you hear, unofficially or officially, that it looks like they were alive on this day [Friday] for sure—if you could call it either way, you go the way you think you have some support.” It would be over a year before the Madsons saw the official record change and their son exonerated.
THE CHICAGO POLICE didn’t think Andrew was coming back there either. They focused on trying to obtain matching fingerprints and on getting the Lexus back. Most of all, by the time I got involved, they wanted to keep the lid on the case. Later, as in Minnesota, I was able to learn things that challenged the police’s position, though their course had been set and never wavered. “The powers that be protect their own here,” Sugar Rautbord warned me. “Woe to them that mess with the powers that be.”