The True Story of Gianni Versace's Murder
Versace’s death lead to a nationwide manhunt. Cunanan was not found until days after the murder of Versace, where he was found dead 40 blocks away from Versace’s mansion. Today, there is a lot of speculation as to why Cunanan targeted Versace, as there is no reported evidence that they have met. However, they were both openly gay and were in similar circles.
to early risers. It was a beach-cavorting, nightclub-dancing, hedonistic scene ruled by a fashion crowd of models, musicians, actors, and bohemians—so long as said bohemian looked good on Rollerblades wearing a G-string. But within this indolent world there were driven, ambitious people, and none more so than the unofficial mayor of South Beach himself: designer Gianni Versace. On the morning of July 15, 1997, the 50-year-old Italian founder of a glamorous fashion empire was up by 6 a.m. He made calls to Milan, did some more work, then slipped out of his mansion and headed to News Café, just three blocks from his home.
A regular at the buzzy Ocean Drive restaurant, Versace bought a coffee, exchanged greetings with the manager, scooped up issues of Vogue and The New Yorker, and headed back to Casa Casuarina, the opulent palatial villa he’d spent millions acquiring and renovating. He walked up five marble steps and slipped his key into the lock on the iron gate.
At that precise moment, a dark-haired man wearing knee length shorts, a gray tank top, a baseball cap, and a backpack surged up the same marble steps.
Andrew Cunanan shot Gianni Versace, twice, execution-style. Then he turned around and casually walked away. Cunanan, 27, described by his own mother as a “high class homosexual prostitute,” was already a wanted man—a suspect in four murders in three states—and had gone into hiding in Miami more than two months earlier. Police soon identified him as Versace’s murderer, and the frantic hunt for a man the media called a serial killer dominated the news cycle.
While the police combed the Miami area, Versace’s shattered siblings, Donatella and Santo, flew in from Milan. They claimed Gianni’s body and returned to Italy, where, on July 22, 1997, one week after his murder, Versace was given a funeral fit for a prince at the Duomo, Milan’s soaring 14th Century cathedral.
With camera crews fighting for space outside, more than 2,000 people filed into the memorial, many of them wearing Versace: Naomi Campbell, his favorite model; Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld, his champions in the fashion industry; and Princess Diana, his most famous client. Elton John and Sting, his closest celebrity friends, closed the service with an emotional rendition of "The Lord is My Shepherd," a psalm chosen by Versace’s team. As the song concluded, the sounds of weeping echoed throughout the church.
The gunshots that ripped the sultry quiet of Ocean Drive that day have, in certain ways, never gone completely quiet. In its fusion of pitiless violence with the exclusive, rarified world of celebrity—an act that showed in an instant how defenseless the rich and famous can be—the crime has had nearly the same cultural impact as other high-profile murders, like that of Sharon Tate in 1969 by Charles Manson’s “Family" and the deaths of Beverly Hills couple Jose and Kitty Menendez in 1989.
But these horrific acts have motives attached to them, as psychotic and savage as those motives may be. In the case of Versace, however, the “why” has remained an mystery. Cunanan told not a soul his reasons for killing Versace and wrote nothing down. Rumors raged that he had gone on a killing spree to find out who infected him with HIV. However, an autopsy revealed that Cunanan didn’t have the virus. (Versace’s family members have always maintained that the designer did not have HIV.)
On July 23, 1997, less than two weeks after Versace was killed, the body of Andrew Cunanan was found in a houseboat off Miami Beach. He’d shot himself in the head with the same gun used to take the lives of three of his victims, including Versace. Cunanan’s suicide brought an end to the nationwide manhunt, but it marked the beginning of a two decade-long search for answers.
The forthcoming FX television series The Assassination of Gianni Versace—a second installment of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise—will attempt to fill in the gaps of this crime, shedding light on both the why and the how. Murphy is fascinated not only by the glittery world of Versace, but by the cultural forces that shaped Cunanan and made it difficult to track his killing spree.
“He wasn’t caught because he was targeting gay people, and people didn’t care,” Murphy told Entertainment Weekly. “The more I had read about it the more I was startled by the fact that [Cunanan] really was only allowed to get away with it because of homophobia.”
It’s not as though law enforcement didn't try. Police forces in Minnesota, where the first two men were killed, and Chicago, the site of the third murder, threw all possible manpower into investigating Cunanan’s crimes and trying to locate him. Even before he had resurfaced in Miami, the FBI put Cunanan on their Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, and the top-rated series America’s Most Wanted, dedicated an entire segment to the case.
Ever since he committed his string of horrific murders, the life of Andrew Cunanan has been studied for clues. He did not seem destined for criminal infamy. Cunanan came from a middle-class San Diego family. His father was a Philippines-born stockbroker of varying success and his mother an Italian-American homemaker who reportedly suffered from mental illness.
Cunanan’s most formative influence may have been the elite Bishop’s School in La Jolla, which he attended from 1981 to 1987. His parents struggled to pay the private school’s tuition, mortgaging their home so their youngest child could attend. Cunanan hid his true background from his classmates, and hinted that he came from privilege, even royalty. He made no secret of being gay while in high school and cultivated an outrageous, carefree persona of rich bad boy.
“Although Bishop’s strove to be nurturing, it only intensified Andrew’s underlying anger and already well developed penchant for pretending to be someone he was not,” wrote journalist Maureen Orth in her book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, which served as the key source for the forthcoming TV series. (In a recent statement, the Versace family has made it clear that they believe Orth's book to be "full of gossip and speculation" and Murphy's series to be "a work of fiction.")
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