VULGAR FAVOURS

(BBC £8.99) ON July 15, 1997, the fashion designer Gianni Versace was shot dead as he returned from a stroll. His murderer was 27-year-old Andrew Cunanan, who had already killed four others in three months, before shooting himself a week after Versace’s murder.

At the time of the designer’s killing, Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth was working on an article about Cunanan. ‘Under any other circumstances,’ she writes, ‘appearing in Vanity Fair would have been Cunanan’s dream come true.’

Orth’s account of his scandalous life tells the story of a ‘beautiful child with an IQ of 147’, whose obsession with glamour, wealth and success would lead him into a sordid world of drugs, prostitution and violence.

Orth’s determination to uncover the truth about her subject took her to some of the darkest corners of American society. A television series based on the book airs next January.