Cunanan considered Trail, a graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, to be his best friend, and referred to him as “my brother.” Madson, a rising architect, was the great unrequited love of Cunanan’s life. Two of Cunanan’s alleged victims, Jeffrey Trail, 28, and David Madson, 33, looked as if they had walked off a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box: from upright, loving, midwestern families, they were intelligent, handsome, and well liked. The sadistic savagery of those crimes reverberated throughout America’s gay communities. More than a dozen law-enforcement bodies, including the F.B.I., were seeking to question him not only about Versace’s murder but also about four others that took place between April 27 and May 9. In the end he reached an exclusive pinnacle that provided him with the celebrity he had always sought: he became America’s most wanted fugitive. Wherever he went, he craved the limelight and aspired to the top, whether through charm or falsehood. Cunanan’s story is a singular study in promise crushed. His wit was biting, his memory photographic. Or he could say of a work of art what year it had been painted, who had owned it through the centuries, what churches it had hung in. He could describe the texture and delicacy of the blowfish he claimed to have eaten at an $850 Japanese lunch. He tracked possible sugar daddies with care and would say with a pout that he didn’t know whether to fly to New York or Paris for dinner. A voracious reader with a reported genius-level I.Q., he coveted the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Until recently, Andrew Cunanan, 27, was just a gay gigolo down on his luck in San Diego.
He knew very well that the act of murdering Versace, the Calabrian-born designer whose flamboyant clothes virtually defined “hot,” who tarted up the likes of Princess Diana and Elizabeth Hurley but whose gowns also made Madonna and Courtney Love more elegant, would instantly catapult him to where he had always fantasized being: at the center of worldwide attention. The prime suspect, dressed in nondescript shorts and a baseball cap, came in close for the kill and then coolly walked away along Ocean Drive. Now the emperor lay dead, gunned down almost Mob-style on the steps of his lavish Mediterranean villa, shot in the head and face in broad daylight. In Miami’s pagan, over-the-top South Beach, particularly among the large gay contingent, Gianni Versace had been a tanned, adored idol.