Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (41 page)

His sisters and brother recall that Andrew was very intelligent and pampered by their father. He had the master bedroom in the house and was given credit cards at age seven with which to entertain his friends. He was the family “star,” memorizing almost the entire contents of encyclopedias. They remember him as a happy and nonviolent child. They insist that their Catholic family suspected that Andrew was gay and would have accepted it if they had confirmed it.

Whether the family would have accepted it or not, the fact remains that Cunanan himself felt that he needed to lead a double and fractured life as a teenager. Moreover, it might have been worse: There is fragmentary evidence that he might have been sexually abused in his adolescence by a priest at the time he was serving as an altar boy. A sexual abuse hotline in 1996 logged calls from somebody using the same pseudonym that Cunanan later used, warning about a sexually abusive priest in San Diego. The priest was apparently charged, but not convicted, of abuse of other youths during the same period that Cunanan served as an altar boy. The evidence is admittedly tenuous, but nonetheless, entirely plausible.

Cunanan graduated from the prestigious catholic Bishop’s School, an elite preparatory school in La Jolla, a wealthy neighborhood of San Diego. His classmates remember him being openly and flamboyantly gay, once appearing at a school function dressed in a red patent-leather jumpsuit, a gift from a much older man who was his date. Cunanan was voted by his fellow students as “Least Likely to Be Forgotten” in the 1987 school yearbook. The young Cunanan was an above-average student, reading the Bible and teaching himself Spanish. He was already fluent in French.

In later years, some of the well-educated and professional people he encountered remarked that they were impressed by his brilliance and his ability to absorb information. He was a witty conversationalist and a pleasure to have at a dinner party. He could recall the provenance of a painting, from when it had been painted to the history of its subsequent owners; he was fluent in the intricacies of political issues and could describe the texture of exotic gourmet delicacies or what was the most luxurious hotel to stay at in Morocco or the best restaurant on Capri.

In 1988, Cunanan began studying at the University of California at San Diego, majoring in art history. He was full of hope and promise with the keys to a great future: a solid upper-middle-class background, wealth, prep school education, charm, vigor, and charisma. And then it suddenly collapsed.

Cunanan’s father, “Pete” Modesto was accused of embezzling $106,000 from the brokerage where he worked.
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Faced with a possible criminal indictment, with Andrew his youngest child now nineteen years of age, Modesto had few qualms about what he did next: He packed his bags and left for the Philippines, abandoning the family. Marie Ann divorced him and sold the house. After Modesto’s liabilities were deducted, $3,000 remained from the sale.

No doubt Modesto had underestimated Andrew’s capacity to overcome this disaster and continue with his promising future. Andrew dropped out of college and went to the Philippines to join his father. There he was overwhelmed by what he perceived as the abject squalor in which Modesto was now living. He returned to San Diego and moved in with his mother in a small $750-a-month rented condominium in Rancho Bernardo. During this period, Cunanan’s history shows some capacity for violence—he got into an argument with his mother and pushed her so violently against a wall that her shoulder was dislocated.

To get by Andrew worked sporadically as a discount drugstore clerk. Mostly, however, he sought out older men to replace the love and financial security his father had once provided him.

Between 1990 and 1996, Andrew Cunanan cruised the gay communities of San Diego and San Francisco, making his living as a upscale gigolo for refined, professional, older men. He was well known in the San Diego gay social set. Restaurateur Michael Williams said, “Andrew did his homework. He would investigate older, wealthy gay men who didn’t have families, and he would place himself in those circles. That was his living.”

On October 21, 1990, Cunanan encountered Versace at a reception at the Colossus nightclub in San Francisco, when Versace had designed costumes for the opera company. Versace apparently thought he had met Cunanan somewhere before, and they briefly exchanged words before Versace moved on. Despite all sorts of fragmentary reports that Versace had more contacts with Cunanan, other than the short encounter in San Francisco, there is no evidence of any contact between Cunanan and Versace.

Through the years Cunanan told fantastic stories about his life, claiming he was the son of a Hollywood movie mogul, spinning tales of his family’s wealth, and claiming ownership of sugar plantations in the Philippines and a villa in the French Riviera. Cunanan said his father was a Filipino general close to the fallen dictator Marcos and that he was bisexual as well, with a young lover whom Andrew claimed he resented. Cunanan said that he had a pilot’s license and that he was a personal pilot to a Filipino senator whom he flew in the senator’s decaying airplane, which was nicknamed the “Buddy Holly death plane.”

In later years he lived and socialized under assumed names: Andrew Phillip De Silva and, at other times, Drew Cunningham. Many of his acquaintances in San Diego did not even know that his real name was Cunanan. However, they remembered Cunanan picking up $1,000 dinner tabs and leaving $200 tips, smoking $10 Davidoff cigars, and never drinking anything stronger than cranberry juice. He was the center of attention and welcomed young gay men arriving in San Diego and fixed them up with contacts.

When not living off rich older men, he worked as a male prostitute through an escort agency that charged a paltry $140 a night, 40 percent of which Cunanan dutifully forwarded to the agency. But clients were very pleased with Cunanan, and he began to get cross-country referrals from the agency.

In 1996 Cunanan was living in La Jolla with Ron Grundy,
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a conservative retired millionaire and art collector in his sixties. Cunanan convinced Grundy to sell his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, and buy an oceanfront house in La Jolla. The house had been previously owned by an older friend of Cunanan’s, Lincoln Aston, who in 1995 was bludgeoned to death by another man.

From Grundy, Cunanan received an allowance of $2,000 a month and a $30,000 1996 Infiniti I30t automobile, and he was given plenty of free time to pursue his own friendships. He and Grundy often flew to New York for Broadway shows and spent the summer of 1996 in Paris and the south of France.

In September 1996, however, Grundy and Cunanan split. The exact circumstances of the breakup are obscure. Cunanan claimed that he left Grundy because he was too cheap—that he refused to fly first class and would not buy Cunanan a Mercedes 500SL he desired. Others report that Cunanan was upset by the split. In any case, Grundy let Cunanan keep the Infiniti. Cunanan moved into an apartment he shared with two roommates. He was now just eight months away from his first two murders.

While Cunanan performed as a gigolo to the aging millionaire Grundy, he was really in love with another man—thirty-three-year-old David Madson, whom he met in San Francisco in December 1995. Madson was a talented designer of retail banking centers for a Minneapolis company. He traveled all over the country, designing storelike banking facilities for malls and shopping plazas. He would become Cunanan’s second murder victim in April 1997.

Cunanan also formed a nonsexual friendship with twenty-eight-year-old Jeffrey Trail. Trail was a former U.S. Navy officer and small-arms instructor who had served on a guided-missile cruiser in the Persian Gulf and was in training with the California Highway Patrol when Cunanan met him. Cunanan, who had fantasies of being a naval officer himself, admired Trail and claimed that he was his best and oldest friend. It was a strange friendship, because Trail was straitlaced and a conservative opponent of drugs, while Cunanan consumed drugs liberally and was a flamboyant attention-grabbing liar. Jeffrey Trail would be Cunanan’s first murder victim.

By September 1996, Cunanan’s relationship had fallen apart not only with Grundy but with Madson and Trail as well. Madson had dropped Cunanan back in the spring when Cunanan began disappearing for ten days at a time, presumably to service Grundy. When Cunanan broke up with Grundy in September, he attempted to rekindle his romance with Madson, but was turned down.

Many say that Cunanan was quickly losing his youthful good looks and was growing fat and ugly, a kiss of death for any gigolo’s career. A testament as to how fat Cunanan was by the end is the police report mentioning Cunanan’s bloodied jeans at the scene of Trail’s murder. The formerly slim Cunanan was wearing size 36 jeans.

To continue maintaining his lifestyle, Cunanan began intensively dealing in drugs, mostly pharmaceuticals. He also started smoking crack cocaine. There is no crazier nor more deadly drug than crack. Crack really does all the things that antidrug crusaders for decades claimed other drugs did: makes you insane, paranoid, totally out of control, crazy-homicidal-suicidal.

In the summer of 1996, Jeffrey Trail had cut Cunanan off from his friendship. Cunanan told several people that Trail was angry with him because he became connected with Cunanan’s drug-dealing business and was forced to resign from the California Highway Patrol training program. Trail’s acquaintances vehemently deny this, stating that Trail was very conservative and would never become involved in drug traffic. Nonetheless, Trail’s sudden resignation from the highway patrol remains a bit of a mystery. Rejected by both Trail and Madson, getting tubby and disheveled, Cunanan began to disintegrate through the winter of 1996–1997. He had to sell his car to pay for his lifestyle, having racked up $50,000 in credit card debt.

Cunanan began a subtle mind game with Madson, telling him that Madson was his only path to reforming himself. Although they were no longer lovers, Madson continued to see Cunanan and meet with him in San Francisco. He told people that he couldn’t abandon Cunanan as he was trying to change his life around.

Both Jeffrey Trail and David Madson coincidentally then moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2,000 miles away from San Diego. Although Trail and Madson knew each other through their relationships with Cunanan, they were never lovers; each had their own boyfriends in Minneapolis. Cunanan was despondent.

On the Easter weekend of April 1997, Cunanan joined David Madson in Los Angeles. Madson was there to meet with two friends from San Francisco who were getting married soon. Madson was to give away the bride. Cunanan took two $395 rooms at the Chateau Marmont and insisted that everybody stay with him. The couple later remembered that Cunanan seemed to be in a manic state, promising to pay $15,000 for the wedding reception of a couple he had just met. Madson and Cunanan argued when Cunanan made sexual advances toward Madson.

Cunanan was beginning to slide into a disturbed state of mind. At a party given by Madson, Cunanan set fire to a pile of paper napkins at the table and walked away. After a screening of
Pulp Fiction
in San Diego, people noticed how animated and excited Cunanan was over the scene where a man has his head blown apart in the backseat of a car by a gunshot. On a beach he scooped up some live crabs and burned their eyes out.

Cunanan announced that he was moving to San Francisco to start a new life. He told several people that before moving, he needed to see Jeffrey Trail about some “unfinished business.” Cunanan went to the airport and purchased an airline ticket for Minneapolis. He had to plead and persuade the ticket clerk to put the purchase on his credit card—he was way over his limit. An acquaintance recalled, “Andrew said that he would call in a few days if he needed a ride home from the airport, but that call never came.” Nobody knew that that the ticket Cunanan purchased for Minneapolis was one-way.

Both Jeffrey Trail and David Madson were patient and accommodating with Cunanan on his visit. Trail described Cunanan as being like a “disliked relative” who had to be hosted out of obligation. On Friday, April 25, David Madson picked up Cunanan from the airport and took him back to his apartment, where he was going to spend the night. It was understood that Cunanan was in Minneapolis for the weekend and was going to fly home on Monday morning. Friday night, Madson and Cunanan met with friends for dinner. Cunanan had Madson show everybody a Cartier watch that Cunanan had given him “for being a great friend.”

On Saturday, Madson and Cunanan went out to dinner again, but Cunanan spent the night in Jeffrey Trail’s apartment, who left a key for him. Trail had told Cunanan that he wasn’t going to be able to see him much that weekend because his boyfriend, Jon Hackett, was celebrating his birthday. Trail spent Saturday night over at Hackett’s place, perhaps even as a favor to Madson, to take Cunanan off his hands for a night.

On Sunday morning, a friend of Madson’s called and asked how things were going with Cunanan. Madson said everything was fine and that Cunanan had stayed at Trail’s apartment but would be coming back tonight to his place.

On Sunday morning, Cunanan answered several calls at Trail’s apartment and took messages for him. He then returned to Madson’s apartment, presumably to spend the last night there before returning to California the next morning.

On Sunday afternoon, Trail appeared at a baseball game and then he and Hackett had dinner at home that evening. They decided to go dancing but before they left, Trail found a message on his answering machine from Cunanan, asking him to come by and see him at Madson’s apartment. Trail told Hackett he would go over and see Cunanan for about twenty minutes—they had something they needed to talk about. He would then meet Hackett at a nightclub between 10:00 and 10:30
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. The caller ID on Madson’s phone shows that Cunanan admitted somebody into the building, no doubt Trail, at 9:45
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. Trail failed to meet Hackett later that night.