Vulgar Favors Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History

Prologue The phone rang about one A.M., and my husband sleepily caught the receiver. "Is Maureen Orth there? Is this Maureen Orth, the writer?" The male voice was insistent. "Who's this?" "I want to discuss the article." A pause, then a click. "It sounds like him," my husband told me. "Who?" "The guy you're writing about." "What? You mean Andrew Cunanan?" "Weird," my husband said. Then he flopped over and went back to sleep. But by then I was wide awake. About ten days later, hours after Gianni Versace, the famed fashion designer and gay icon, was murdered, the phone rang again a little after one A.M. I was already booked on a morning plane to Miami to report the breaking story of Versace's murder, because the number-one suspect was Andrew Cunanan. By then I had been reporting on Cunanan for nearly two months forVanity Fairmagazine--his favorite publication. I also had learned that he had met Versace several years earlier and that he was suspected of killing four other people, including his best friend and the only man he ever said he loved. "Hello. Is Maureen Orth there?" My husband recognized the same gay male voice. "Who's calling?" But the person on the other end thought better of it. The long-distance background sound cut off abruptly. I will never know if I thereby lost the scoop of my life. Under any other circumstances, appearing inVanity Fairwould have been Andrew Cunanan's dream come true. By then, however, in early July 1997, he was about to become the subject of one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. Thousands of people would be looking for him, yet nobody knew where he was. Nine days later, Andrew Cunanan's body was found on what would become an infamous Miami Beach houseboat. Moreover, the aftermath of his crimes and his cruel and tragic journey through America would reverberate for months. What began in the media misleadingly as a "gay lover's quarrel," confined to a closed but "out" gay world, built as Cunanan's murders became more heinous and bold into a story that catapulted him to the forefront of the mainstream press--leading the evening news, on the cover of bothTimeandNewsweek.But before Andrew Cunanan killed Gianni Versace and gained worldwide notoriety, he had already traversed a gay parallel universe in America today--traveling from the seamy, drug-addled underbelly of the demimonde to the cultured and privileged world of the rich and the closeted. Andrew fit in anywhere. He could discourse about art and architecture, and he was a walking encyclopedia of labels and status. As a kept boy, he got all the way to the Gritti Palace in Venice and a house on Cap-Ferrat. But then he fell in love with a hardworking young architect and--ostensibly because the rich older man who paid his way wouldn't give him the model Mercedes he wanted--he walked out of the pampered world to which he'd always aspired. No matter how much Andrew Cunanan got, he always wanted more--more drugs, kinkier sex, better wine. Somehow he had come to believe that they were his due. And why not? He was always the life of the party, the smartest boy at the table. But at twenty-seven he was also a narcissistic nightmare of vainglorious self-absorption, a practiced pathological liar who created alternate realities for himself and was clever enough to pull off his deceptions. In the trusting or superficial circles in which he traveled, Andrew made himself indispensable. Lurking just beneath the charm, however, a sinister psychosis was brewing, aided by Andrew's habits of watching violent pornography and ingesting crystal meth, cocaine, and various other drugs so prevalent in some circles of gay life today--but not spoken of. "Anyone who has done crystal and been on a bad streak cOrth, Maureen is the author of 'Vulgar Favors Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History', published 2000 under ISBN 9780440225850 and ISBN 044022585X.