THE DAY VERSACE DIED
MURDER SPREE 20 YEARS LATER
Two decades after Gianni Versace’s murder, the killer’s motive remains a mystery.
Gianni Versace was up early on the morning of July 15, 1997. The 50-year-old Italian-born fashion designer followed his usual daily routine, stopping by Miami Beach’s trendy News Cafe to pick up a handful of magazines. By 8.45 AM, he had just returned home and was opening the wrought-iron gates of Casa Casuarina, his 10-bedroom Mediterranean-style mansion, when a young man approached him. What happened next is not clear, but seconds later the designer had been shot twice in the head at point-blank range and was bleeding to death on his own front steps. “He was in his prime,” recalls friend Hal Rubenstein. “He was like the sun. He made everything move, and suddenly he got ripped away. It was a tailspin time for everybody.”
Even now, 20 years after the shocking murder, the twisted plot of the serial killer who took Versace’s life is still a mystery. Twenty-seven-year-old Andrew Cunanan executed Versace and then killed himself on a houseboat as Miami law enforcement and the FBI closed in. Cunanan had killed at least four other victims in a three-month murder spree that seemed to have no consistent MO or connection between the victims. It’s a case that has been the focus of countless magazine stories, movies and television shows and is now slated for Ryan Murphy’s next season of American Crime Story (due to air in 2018). “[ Versace] was a quick murder, almost execution-style,” says Miami crime-scene investigations technician Berta Valdez, who helped process the scene. “One, two shots, and he was killed almost instantly. The other victims weren’t so lucky.”
Before shooting Versace in broad daylight, Cunanan had murdered Jeffrey Trail, 28, a former US Naval officer, along with David Madson, 33, an architect and Cunanan’s ex-lover, in Minneapolis, killing Trail with a claw hammer and then shooting Madson with Trail’s gun. He then killed wealthy Chicago real-estate developer Lee Miglin, 72—whose relationship with Cunanan, if any, remains a mystery—stabbing him more than 20 times with a screwdriver and cutting his throat with a saw. And on May 9 he fatally shot William Reese, 45, a caretaker at a Pennsville, New Jersey, cemetery. It was Reese’s truck Cunanan used to drive to Miami. “It was a shock,” says Reese’s son Troy, who was 12 when his father was killed. “Why did a serial killer choose my father’s cemetery to go to?”
What drove Cunanan is a question authorities still struggle with. “Investigators really didn’t have what they felt was a concrete motive,” says John Kelly, a criminal profiler and serial-killer expert. “I think he wanted power and control, he was looking to be famous, and by killing Versace, he got what he wanted—he became infamous.”
Known for his close family ties in addition to his elegant and creative fashion design, Versace had burst onto the fashion scene in 1978 with a celebrity clientele that ranged from Princess Diana to Elizabeth Taylor and Elton John. Just a week before his death, he’d won rave reviews for a couture collection he unveiled in Paris. After his murder his sister Donatella shouldered overwhelming grief plus the responsibility for the fashion empire’s future. “All this falling on her was brutal,” says family friend Rubenstein, a fashion writer and consultant. “But she was strong, she was fierce.” And though two decades have passed since the world lost the creative giant, the family still mourns—and passionately protects the Versace name. “He has a legacy that’s still vibrant, and that’s the true test of somebody’s greatness,” Rubenstein says. “You still think of him. And that’s pretty glorious.”
“By killing Versace, he got what he wanted—he became infamous” —John Kelly, criminal profiler