It was nearing nightfall, and the cemetery caretaker's wife was worried: her husband had not come home from work. She called the police, who headed out to Finn's Point National Cemetery, on a spit of New Jersey 30 miles south of Philadelphia. They arrived to find a grim tableau. The caretaker, William Reese, was there--with a bullet through his head. His red Chevrolet truck was missing. In its place, eerily, was a dark-green Lexus.
In isolation, the crime recalls a chilling campfire tale. But it appears to be anything but isolated. It may in fact be just one episode in a real-life horror movie, a cross-country killing spree that has triggered a nationwide manhunt. The police are looking for the man who may be driving that red pickup, a man who has been moving eastward, from San Diego to Minneapolis, Minn., to Chicago and now the New Jersey coast, using a series of stolen vehicles, a man who has been charged thus far with only one crime but about whom Philadelphia FBI spokeswoman Linda Vizi noted, "Everywhere he's been, there's been a murder."
The sequence, if officials are correct, began in San Diego's funky, gay-friendly Hillcrest neighborhood, with a 27-year-old who called himself Andrew DeSilva, but whose family knew him as Andrew Phillip Cunanan. Bespectacled and slightly paunchy, "DeSilva" liked to dance with his shirt off, treat large groups to dinner with cash and boast about his family's sugar plantation in the Philippines. He lived high, but no one seemed to know how he managed it. "Everyone knew Andrew," says one scene-maker. "He was a very outgoing, fun guy. There was a kind of patheticness about him, because good-looking gold diggers were drawn to him. But I never saw him in a bad mood." In late April, DeSilva/Cunanan told friends he was leaving town, starting with a trip to Minneapolis to visit a former lover named David Madson and another young gay man named Jeffrey Trail.
Visit them he did, say police. Trail, whom Cunanan had known in California, was found on April 29 rolled in a rug in Madson's Minneapolis apartment, a bloody claw hammer nearby. Madson, a promising architect who had lectured at Harvard, turned up four days later on a lakeshore 50 miles away, several 40-cal. bullets in his head and back. On Trail's answering machine, the police found a message from Cunanan inviting Trail to Madson's apartment. In the apartment, not far from the hammer, police discovered a nylon gym bag containing the kind of distinctive .40-cal. bullets used to kill the architect. The bag had Cunanan's name on it. Missing was Madson's red Jeep Cherokee.