Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Doubts remained about the possibility of an association between the Miglin father and son and Andrew Cunanan. To help Duke’s image, Sugar had hoped to stage an impromptu walk down the street by Duke Miglin and a girlfriend that could be captured by the press. A model the gentlemanly Duke had dated in Los Angeles had come to Chicago to visit. But the idea was nixed as being too contrived. Although the two had gone out for a year, they had never been intimate.

  Lee Miglin remained the most perplexing of all of Cunanan’s victims. Certainly Duke Miglin, who had reportedly been in San Diego the day before his father was murdered, was someone Andrew would have liked to brag about knowing. He was Andrew’s type—rich, blond, handsome—and he drove a fast car and flew airplanes. But what about his father? It certainly would be easier all around if the police were never to find out.

  Paul Beitler is convinced that Lee would never have known Andrew Cunanan or questioned his son about his friendships. “Lee and Marilyn were not people who would jump into their son’s life enough to ask, ‘Are you having a relationship with a girl?’ But you know, Lee never walked around either and said, ‘Here’s a picture of my son. Isn’t he good-looking? With this girl?’” Beitler, however, can’t understand why a very wealthy, attractive young man would live on the beach with a male roommate. “One, he didn’t need it for the money. And two, it certainly doesn’t help your heterosexual advantage.” Beitler feels sure that Lee did not lead a double life. “Lee was not gay. I can tell you he was effeminate, but he was not gay.” In fact, Beitler says, “Lee used to run around and make gay jokes here in the office all the time—clumsy, stupid jokes. He’d tell a joke that was bashing a gay.”

  Beitler was distraught for months after Lee’s murder. He couldn’t sleep at night for thinking about what therapists he had contacted said: “You can’t believe this is a random event.” Yet the family had a great stake in protecting its reputation, and they had a lot of help in doing it. Marilyn Miglin cherished and publicized the call she had gotten shortly after Lee’s murder from Michael Jordan’s mother, who had endured widespread doubt about the official position that her own husband’s murder was motivated simply by car theft. “My husband was killed by a random murderer too,” she told Marilyn. In Chicago, with the exception of the Virgin Mary, what mother had more clout? It’s quite understandable that Marilyn Miglin would cling to her beliefs and make them known in the face of such a shocking tragedy.

  Professionals who study the psyches of serial killers had grave doubts that Lee Miglin’s killing was random. “Totally unnecessary overkill” is the way William Hagmaier, head of the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit of the FBI—the behavioral-science-and-profiling unit—describes the more than forty facial contusions, the slit throat, and the broken ribs that Andrew inflicted on Lee Miglin. “There was a tremendous amount of overkill. Those are the kinds of things you see sometimes in homosexual murders—this tremendous stabbing over and over … If Miglin is a total stranger, then Miglin reminds him of somebody else that he had a tremendous amount of anger toward. Or maybe Miglin isn’t a total stranger,” Hagmaier theorizes. “For somebody to spend that kind of time, to put that kind of effort into this, there’s usually something much more personal there.”

  “With a city the size of Chicago, the chances of him just happening to go down that alley behind Miglin’s town house and then seeing him in the garage—how remote is that?” asks special agent Steve Kives, the FBI agent in charge of Cunanan’s case for the profiling unit. Kives speculates that there was “some type of prior knowledge somehow of Miglin … The chances of Andrew just blowing into Chicago and finding Miglin are pretty damned remote.” Kives adds, “There was an allegation also that maybe Andrew did know the son and had a liaison with him. It may only be an allegation. But if that were the case, he may have gone to Miglin’s looking for the son.”

  Hagmaier speculates that the brutality could have been triggered by “alcohol or drugs,” or “maybe he just saw a particularly masochistic or sadistic movie,” which could have been an immediate triggering event, as opposed to a longer, thought-out motive. “This could be like living out a fantasy from some movie or book that he’s read. Ted Bundy used to do that with his victims. He’d dye their hair, he’d cut their hair different ways, he put different clothes on them, because he was reenacting covers of detective magazines.”

  The fact that Andrew repeatedly struck the faces of both Jeff Trail and Lee Miglin indicates to experts that the Miglin crime was also personal, not random. “Given the facial battery,” says Hagmaier, “usually there’s more likelihood the person was known to him. Everybody has hands and feet, but what angers you most is the mouth. That’s where the venom comes from. Usually people who are angry with people, it’s because of something they said, particularly if there was any kind of passion or romance involved. They try to disfigure the face because, ‘This is the face that laughed at me. This is the mouth that made me feel bad.’”

  Chicago boasts one of the first members of a metropolitan police force to have graduated in profiling from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Captain Tom Cronin, who has since been promoted to commander, head of the Forensics Services Division and in charge of all Chicago crime scenes, did not work on the Miglin investigation, but he is considered the force’s expert on serial killers. Months after the murder, as we walk around the block on which the Miglins’ town house stands and make several forays into the alley to look at the garage where Andrew murdered Lee Miglin, Cronin explains how a profiler might assess the scene.

  “We try to understand victimology—knowing about the victims helps you learn about the killer,” Cronin tells me. “How did the killer get the victim into this vulnerable position? How does he not know Mr. Miglin, working in his garage, is not carrying a .357 Magnum? When killers target people, they target people they can overpower. This is not Mr. Stranger Danger. If he doesn’t know Lee Miglin, how does he know he doesn’t carry a gun in his garage? Look at this neighborhood—iron fences, hedges, all put up to keep people out. You don’t see too many people who live here walking around. At night you can hear a pin drop here. Two blocks away, it’s crazy.”

  What struck Cronin first was the considerable distance of Miglin’s garage from his house. In fact, the garage really belongs to the Byers’ duplex. It is located diagonally across the alley, about thirty yards from the Miglins’ backyard. There are three parking spaces on an apron just outside the Miglins’ iron gate, which would seem to be the logical place for their cars to be parked. “How does one know I park my car in that garage if I live right behind a place with three parking spaces? I’m a mad serial killer and I find this garage open. Now how do I know he lives diagonally across the alley? I’m about to kill you. You’re gonna die, and you give all the information?”

  Cronin says that the way Miglin was killed combined with the fact that Andrew then felt comfortable at the scene “suggests more than a casual knowledge of the household. Do you get that kind of intimate knowledge when you are torturing someone? Does it suggest prior knowledge? It certainly makes a reasonable person believe the information he got was not so off the cuff.”

  “Maybe he had a gun pointing at him,” I say, even though Lee Miglin was not killed with a gun. But how could Andrew have tied Miglin’s ankles with a double knot while holding a gun on him? Did he have Miglin tie himself ? Questions pile upon questions.

  “One of the things that strikes me,” says Cronin, “is that he purposely leaves a trail—connect the dots, find me. It’s his ego saying, ‘I don’t want to not get credit.’ Serial killers do that, usually in a much more subtle way. Keeping a picture of your friend in one car and leaving the Jeep around the corner, for example. He probably would have loved to put the Jeep closer, but that was the closest he could find a parking space, and they almost didn’t get it—it took four tickets.” Cronin concludes, “He wants credit—he’s playing a game to see if someone can connect the dots, to see if someone can put
this puzzle together. He can’t be sure of the intelligence of those putting the puzzle together: ‘Put the connection together, folks, when you find this rich guy dead in Chicago.’

  “He thinks he has to be more obvious when he wants you to connect the dots. He says ‘real-estate tycoon’ to one guy, and ‘going to Chicago on business’ to another. He’s thinking, if you put Chicago and rich real-estate tycoon together, and then I’ll put my Jeep nearby, hopefully they’ll connect to: Oh! It’s got to be the same guy!”

  Hagmaier agrees. “He didn’t have to leave those vehicles behind. He could have burned them; he could have stashed them. He knew they were going to be found—he was just buying time.” Hagmaier explains that, even if a killer begins with a motivation of anger or jealousy, it often becomes something else. “As most serial murderers materialize and accelerate, the motivation changes from a personal crime to more of a power thing. In other words, ‘I can play God with anyone I want and I want everyone to know that.’”

  “These guys are very cunning predators,” says Gregg McCrary, the former supervisory special agent of the Behavioral Science Unit. “They have the ability to cut a victim out of a herd—much like those nature documentaries you see on TV, where the tiger picks one zebra to hunt. They have this innate ability to sense who’s vulnerable.”

  At the end of our walk, Cronin tells me, “I never believe in ‘random’ with a guy who is leading us all along, leading us with his behavior. He wants us to make a connection between Minneapolis, Chicago, New Jersey. Why would he do something random now?”

  Officially, Andrew Cunanan’s killing of Lee Miglin was declared random, and it stayed that way. “According to our investigation, we have no concrete evidence to indicate it was anything but a random crime,” says now former Police Superintendent Matt Rodriguez. “We know Cunanan committed it—we are certain beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet we have no motive, no explanation for it based on our investigation.”

  As I began piecing together the story, the Miglin motive remained a closed issue to the Chicago police. “I don’t have anything to discuss. I don’t think it’s necessary to discuss this case,” says Commander Joe Griffin, who led the investigative unit. “We did as much as we could to find a motive. I’ll leave it at that.” Even a year later, Chicago detectives who worked on the Lee Miglin murder are reluctant to talk about the possibility of a prior association between Andrew Cunanan and Duke or Lee Miglin (or both). “Mrs. Daley showed up there with flowers at the time of the death. The governor’s wife came. The outpouring of political people was overwhelming. She’s a very political person, and she’s got a lot of money,” a ranking Chicago police officer tells me. “All you have to do is upset Mrs. Miglin and we could wind up guarding fish out at Wolf Lake.”

  A very high city official puts it even more plainly: “The case is closed. There’s nothing in the file. His employees loved him. The church loved him. His wife loved him. The case is closed.”

  The case has never been closed in my mind. When I first started crossing the country after the murder of William Reese, I began talking to many of the same people the FBI were also interviewing, as well as many people they missed. It didn’t take long to find out about the association that would soon emerge as being tragically significant—an association that the FBI was reportedly told about as well.

  For as his friends had already chronicled to me, Andrew had repeatedly mentioned knowing one of the most famous and successful openly gay celebrities in the world: Gianni Versace. After he assumed his new identity as a serial killer, that presumed association apparently weighed heavily on Andrew’s mind.

  PART

  THREE

  27

  Escape

  ANDREW SHOT DOWN I-95 in Bill Reese’s stolen vehicle without being spotted. In Florence, South Carolina, he stopped to steal a license tag—SKW 263—in a Wal-Mart parking lot near an intersection of I-95 and South Carolina State Highway 20. The owner of the license plate never even reported it missing—he thought he had lost it. By May 11, Andrew had arrived undetected in Miami Beach, having covered 1,100 miles in two days. His first order of business was to find a place to stay.

  The pink-and-red-trimmed Normandy Plaza Hotel, a mostly single-occupancy place on Collins Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street, was a few miles north of South Beach. With its framed pictures of Marilyn Monroe, who supposedly once stayed there, its stuffed alligator head, and its peeling linoleum floor, the Normandy Plaza was on the other side of the moon from the paradise-on-steroids that “SoBe” has become to gay travelers, but it did front on the ocean and was within walking distance of a gay nude beach. Andrew pulled up and parked Bill Reese’s red pickup right in front of the hotel, and it stayed there for several weeks. He had found his escape.

  ON MAY 12, three magazine articles of particular interest to Andrew hit the newsstands. Both Time and Newsweek featured him as the suspect in four murders; Time called him a “gay socialite” and Newsweek an “upbeat party boy.” The third article was in Vanity Fair, which Andrew read religiously every month. The June issue carried an article by Cathy Horyn that spotlighted Donatella Versace, the sister of Gianni, and showed off their voluptuous South Beach villa, Casa Casuarina. It included a vignette of a family picnic at the gay beach across the street from the mansion served by staff who had to wheel everything over in carts. For the Versaces, munching their sandwiches for a reporter to observe, the idea that such displays might make them a target probably didn’t occur to them. They were merely feeding the ever ravenous publicity beast.

  The beast, however, was a Frankenstein that had created not only them but also South Beach itself. South Beach has become the gay pleasure capital of the western world, where the crumbling Art Deco decay is juxtaposed with the gleaming facades of the terminally hip, meticulously restored hotels, some of which have no clocks, no chairs, no desks, nothing to remind visitors of mundane existence. The whole economy bobs on a sea of international drug money, and out on the street pensioners on walkers mix it up with nouveau riche Latinos, German and Russian Mafia, and crews of international fashion shoots. On Ocean Drive, where Gianni Versace’s ostentatious villa is the only private residence, fifties Via Veneto meets Bourbon Street. Here, in season, which is November through April, hundreds of models flood the outdoor cafés and restaurants, and perfect physical specimens are as common as the tropical downpours that send the Speedos streaking off the beach. Certain gyms are regularly trolled for newcomers to audition for gay porn movies. Indeed, many poor, beautiful boys, north and south, no longer aspire to Hollywood, but choose to come to South Beach in hopes of being discovered and put into a homoerotic ad campaign.

  With forbidden, seething Havana waiting to open up nearby, South Beach is a riot of loose luxe and easy sleazy, where dancing the night away amid hundreds of tanned, undulating bodies is a standard prelude to hot, anonymous sex. In the wee hours of a typical night at Warsaw, the first big gay nightclub in South Beach, the scene is dominated by buffed bodies that don’t seem real; they look pumped up, airbrushed, and retouched. Woe to the also-rans in these places. “Versace used to go out to clubs all the time, in the early days,” says Tom Austin, the acute chronicler of the SoBe scene, first for the Miami Herald and now for the glossy Ocean Drive magazine. “It was at another gay club, Paragon, that one night Versace spotted a go-go boy dressed as an angel and began to beckon to him. At first the go-go dancer said, ‘Get away, old man.’ Then Versace pointed to his chest and mouthed, ‘Versace.’ The boy hopped down from the stage.”

  Versace even used to employ a doorman from Warsaw, Jaime Cardona, to be his procurer. Cardona would take boys to the back door of Casa Casuarina to be auditioned. “Versace is central to the mythification of this place,” says Professor Ralph Heyndels, a gay Belgian who teaches French history and literature at the University of Miami and lives in South Beach. “All these models look Latin. That was his preferred type—Cuban boys. South Beach is the Latin gay capital of the world. So many boys from all ov
er South America are dreaming to get to the U.S.A. So they jump on a plane and all of a sudden one Versace or another will adopt them, and in that sense it is much more than Hollywood. For young boys it is much more alluring than Hollywood.” Tom Austin says, “The whole point of South Beach is sex. Never has there been such an accumulation of sex and money, or sex for free, in history.” One’s priorities, says Heyndels, are based on desire. “Desire renders you more vulnerable. This country, the U.S., is always about organizing around your work. Here gay culture is driven by desire in the immediate sense.” Dana Keith, former Versace fitting model, now concierge at Hotel Astor, favored by the hip and Hollywood, explains the scene by saying, “What is the vibe of the room? What is the level of the drugs? How many cute guys are there? It’s a pretty mixed-up sense of priorities.”

  “The cycle of the dominant South Beach culture is this: (a) go to the gym, (b) go to the beach and plan for the evening, (c) go to the clubs, and (d) trip on Ecstasy with friends who have successfully completed (a), (b), and (c), thereby establishing oneself in an untouchable circle of gods,” Ocean Drive magazine editor Glenn Albin wrote in 1995 in Out magazine. “These circles are then broken into further categories of professionals, waiters, and those doing steroids—though on the dance floor, Ecstasy clusters (groups of three to five shirtless men joined like an enzyme) often blur the distinctions the later it gets.”

  “We have the most intense nightlife in the country,” says “Queen of the Night” Tara Solomon, who writes a column for the Miami Herald. “People take nightlife very seriously. People dress to go out. There are more genetically blessed people in South Beach than in all the world. That’s never more apparent than in the clubs.”