Tag: 2.03

‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Recap: Andrew Cunanan Commits His Most Vicious Crime Yet

Before Andrew Cunanan killed Gianni Versace, he murdered four other innocent people in cruel, vicious ways. His third and fourth victims, Lee Miglin and William Reese, are the subject of the Jan. 31 episode. The episode opens in May 1997. Marilyn Miglin (played by the incredible Judith Light) returns to her Chicago mansion from a work trip to find her house empty. Her husband, Lee, is nowhere to be found. She notices a half-eaten ice cream carton and a liter of Coke sitting on the counter. She immediately knows something is wrong. A half-eaten ham and bloody clothes are found after searching the house.

When a police officer asks if anyone has looked in the garage, her friend opts to go and help. They find Lee’s Lexus is missing. Suddenly, the friend’s piercing scream fills the house. The stoic Marilyn whispers to herself, “I knew it.”

The episode then flashes back to one week earlier to when Lee and Marilyn are attending a special dinner. Marilyn gives a speech about Lee and practically bursts with pride about him. She’s so proud of how far he’s come — from being a coal miner’s son to one of the most successful real estate moguls in the midwest. He’s a self-made man to a tee. Lee also helped Marilyn achieve her dreams of running a beauty line. “He is my partner in every sense of the word,” Marilyn says. But is there a secret side to the great Lee Miglin?

Marilyn interrupts a secret phone call Lee is having with Andrew, and Lee keeps mum about who he was talking to. The next day, Marilyn heads off on a business trip. Lee seems overwhelmed with something, and Marilyn asks Lee to come along. He stays behind. Alone in the house, Lee’s free to wander. He sits at the same vanity Marilyn takes off all her makeup every night. He goes to pray and cries, “I try. I try.” Is Lee itching to reveal his true self?

‘This Is Me’

Andrew arrives at the house, and Lee ushers him in. They clearly know each other. Andrew stumbles around the house, and Lee asks him if he can stay the night. While Lee is trying to show Andrew a drawing of his beloved Skyneedle, a proposed building that would have become the tallest building in the world, Andrew points a gun directly at Lee. He puts it away before Lee notices it.

Andrew is stunned that Lee doesn’t want to name the Skyneedle after himself. It’s not about the fame for Lee, but for Andrew, that’s everything. Andrew plays right into Lee’s vulnerability: his desire for men. Andrew and Lee passionately kiss, and Lee admits that he finally feels “alive.” Lee notes that Andrew is not like most escorts. Andrew takes it a step further. “I am not like most anybody,” he says. Lee replies, “You make it seem so real.” Andrew’s been a star on his own stage for his entire life, so this is child’s play for him.

Andrew takes Lee out to the garage to “make a mess.” Andrew is in complete control. He tapes up Lee’s face and ties his legs together. He punches Lee in the face, drawing blood. “I’ve killed two people, Lee,” Andrew says. “Two people that were very close to me. I know it’s hard to believe. The intellectual Andrew. Well read, well spoken Andrew. Well dressed. But here I am. This is me.”

Andrew tells Lee exactly how he’s going to humiliate him. When they find Lee’s body, he’ll be wearing ladies panties and be surrounded by gay porn. “I want the world to see the great Lee Miglin is a sissy,” Andrew seethes. Andrew knows that Lee is terrified of being disgraced, and that’s exactly what he plans to do. Andrew doesn’t waste any time hitting Lee over the head with a heavy bag of concrete. He retreats back into the house with blood all over himself after killing Lee. He rips up Lee’s Skyneedle drawing and watches it burn.

A Good Name

The superintendent in charge of the case doesn’t want any details leaked. Marilyn reveals that $2000 has been stolen, as well as jewelry, gold coins, and clothes. The superintendent wants to talk privately with Marilyn about the gay porn found near Lee’s body. Marilyn refuses to see any other motive other than a random killing. “He won’t steal my good name,” Marilyn says, talking about Andrew. “Our good name. We worked too hard making that name.” Lee and Marilyn’s son, Duke, is an aspiring actor and will be seen in Harrison Ford’s Air Force One. Superintendent Rodriguez brings up Andrew’s name to Marilyn and Duke. Marilyn and Duke claim they don’t know him at all.

An officer notices a red jeep near Lee’s house. The car is quickly connected to the homicide of Andrew’s first victim, Jeff Trail. There’s a phone in Lee’s car, the one Andrew stole, so the police can track him. Andrew is already in New York. He steps inside Versace’s store and envisions the life of luxury he’s always wanted. He picks up a book about South Beach. Is this the moment he decides to go to Miami?

Marilyn has yet to openly grieve Lee’s death, and she knows people are judging her. Marilyn doesn’t want anyone to think her marriage to Lee was a sham. She loved him, and he loved her. She finally does break down to Lee’s business partner. “We had a fairy tale life,” she says. “We didn’t even fight.” Marilyn promises that she will fight to make sure Lee is not disgraced.

Andrew discovers that the police are tracking his phone and tries to get rid of it. When he realizes he can’t, he pulls into a national cemetery in New Jersey. He waits for everyone to leave and comes across the caretaker, William Reese. Andrew draws his gun and says he’s here to steal William’s truck. He takes William down to the basement. William begs for his life, but Andrew kills him anyway. He steals William’s truck and drives away without even blinking.

Marilyn finally does show her grief publicly on HSN. “He believed in me,” Marilyn says through tears.  “We were a team for 38 years. And I miss him very much.” Marilyn knows that Lee would not have wanted her to wallow in grief. He would want her to push forward with her dreams, and that’s exactly what she’s going to do.

‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Recap: Andrew Cunanan Commits His Most Vicious Crime Yet

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Recap: The Little Red Light

Editor’s Rating: ★★★★☆

This is going to be less of a recap and more of a For Your Consideration” ad for Judith Light. Give her all the Emmys. Give her every last one: Supporting Actress in What Used to Be Called a Mini-series, Guest Actress in Anything More Than 30 Minutes and Less Than Two Hours, Best Reality Television Show Host Who Is Not RuPaul. She has earned every single one of them in her turn as Home Shopping Network perfume maven Marilyn Miglin. (Here is the real-life Marilyn, for those of you who have never ordered anything through a television screen.)

The episode starts with Marilyn walking into her Chicago townhouse (which is decorated much like The Townhouse, New York’s historic gay piano bar, which should have been a clue) and she instantly knows that something is wrong. There is ice cream melting on the counter and a ham hock with a knife stuck in the middle of it on her husband’s desk. The mood is creepy as she enlists the help of some friendly neighbors to investigate the house. The scariest thing, though, isn’t that the house is empty and something obviously disturbing happened. The scariest thing is that the Miglins have a weird chapel in their basement, complete with a sectional. Why would someone need to sit on a sectional in his own home crypt? I guess to repent for his closeted homosexuality.

Anyway, Marilyn sits at the kitchen counter, clacking her nails in a way that’s reserved for tense television dramas and female villains in children’s movies. Eventually her neighbor finds her husband Lee’s body in the garage. “I knew it,” she whispers, sending shivers down my spine and getting awards nominations like quarters coming out of a slot machine. God, Judith Light is so good.

This episode is oddly structured, however. It’s clear that the series is moving backwards, starting with the titular assassination and then finding out how the fashion designer and his spree killer got to that fateful moment. It’s also simultaneously following the manhunt for Andrew Cunanan both before and after Versace’s murder. In that way, each episode is a little bit like a whirlpool, going both forwards and backwards intermittently. Lee Miglin gets the same treatment as Gianni Versace, stringing the details of his encounter with Andrew out over the course of the hour while simultaneously showing the aftermath. Miglin is this episode’s Versace and there’s no Versace at all. (Ricky Martin’s bare ass was definitely missed.)

The other weird thing is that we see Andrew kill Lee before we find out why he wants to do it in the first place. We see Andrew as a menace who terrorizes a man in his own home, as a total monster. But there needs to be more to the story than that, right? Anyway, Andrew shows up to meet Lee while Marilyn is out of town and Lee has a sense of foreboding about his favorite sex worker calling him out of the blue and telling him he’s going to stop by the house.

The two have a less than entertaining evening, where Andrew skulks around the house, asking Lee about his plans. Lee shows him the drawings for the Sky Needle, what he hoped would be the tallest building in the world, and Andrew gets upset that Lee doesn’t want to have his name on it. He can’t imagine anyone doing anything for a reason other than getting recognition. He knows he wants to leave his mark on the world, but he’s just not sure how he’s going to do it.

“I’m not like most escorts. I’m not like most anybody. I could almost be, a husband. Or a partner. I really could, almost,” he tells Lee, as if he’s asking for a ring. As if he’s asking for legitimacy and the entré into polite society that he’s always craved but been denied. This is where things get murky, though. I’m just assuming these things because we don’t know enough about Andrew or his motivations to know for sure.

Finally, Andrew tapes Lee’s head up in duct tape just like he did his john in Miami in last week’s episode. This seemed like a specific kink for that john, but it’s actually something Andrew likes to do, something that gets him off. “You’re so dominant out there and so pathetic in here. But you like being pathetic, don’t you?” he asks Lee while lording over him. Is it that Lee likes to be pathetic or that Andrew likes to be dominant? That he likes to be in control over these rich men who pay him for sex?

Andrew’s ultimate anger seems to be a coupling of Lee not wanting to marry him and Lee wanting to stay in the closet. Maybe he thinks that if Lee came out, he could get what he wants, or maybe it’s his perverted idea of a political statement. Andrew thinks that men who aren’t brave enough to live life honestly should be punished. We know this because he threatens Lee by telling him that his body will be found in women’s underwear, surrounded by gay porn magazines. Or maybe this is meant to be the ultimate humiliation, outing his secret lover to the world.

That plan is thwarted when the police, obviously in the Miglins family’s back pocket thanks to their years of donation, refuse to disclose any details about the murder. “He won’t steal my good name. Our good name,” Marilyn says. “We worked too hard to make that good name, and we made it together.” Marilyn is still clutching onto the illusion that her husband was faithful, good, and, most of all, straight.

Through this swirl of story, we learn all about Lee and Marilyn’s marriage and how they helped each other become moguls and prominent residents of Chicago society. They even had kids together and Marilyn thought that they were truly partners. She had no idea that he was hiring hustlers on all of his business trips. Or did she? Was that “I knew it” less about the body and more that something weird was going on with Lee all along?

Marilyn continues to insist that her husband was killed so that his car could be stolen, and that it was a random act of violence. Ironically, the random act of violence happens later, when Andrew figures out he’s being tracked by the gigantic Zack Morris cell phone in Lee’s car. He finds a red pickup somewhere in South Carolina, follows the driver home, and shoots him in point blank in the head while he pleads for his life. That is the “random killing” of the episode’s title, not the plotted-out bashing of Lee Miglin’s head with a sack of concrete.

This episode really digs into the conflicted emotions and motivations of all the people affected by these crimes. It’s as much about Marilyn Miglin as it is about anyone else, and how her life was forever altered because of all of these men, many of whom she never even met. Just like last year’s O.J. chapter, ACS is at its best when it’s trying to find the humanity in everyone, even the most despicable of creatures.

The episode started with Marilyn, so it’s fitting that it ends with her too, sa she publicly mourns her husband’s death to sell pheromone perfume on national television. She tells a story: When she started her broadcasting career, a friend told her to “think of the little red light as the man you love.” She stares into the little red light of the camera and closes her eyes. With that, chills rushed throughout my body, and Emmys erupted from the sky like a blizzard that had been building for weeks.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Recap: The Little Red Light

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Fact-checking Episode Three

The second season of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology series, titled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, explores the titular designer’s brutal 1997 murder at the hands of serial killer Andrew Cunanan. We’re walking through all nine episodes with Miami Herald editorial board member Luisa Yanez — who reported on the crime and its aftermath over several years for the Sun-Sentinel’s Miami bureau — in an effort to identify what ACS: Versace handles with care versus when it deviates from documented fact and common perception. The intention here is less to debunk an explicitly dramatized version of true events than to help viewers piece together a holistic picture of the circumstances surrounding Versace’s murder. In other words, these weekly digests are best considered supplements to each episode rather than counterarguments. Below are Yanez’s insights — as well as our independent research — into the veracity and potency of events and characterizations presented in the grisly third episode, “A Random Killing.”

What They Got Right

The Lee Miglin murder
“The Miglin murder was always the thing that made the murders come alive,” says Yanez. “Before that, I don’t even remember having any knowledge that there was a guy who killed two other men, but with Miglin, he was well known. This was somebody prominent in the community of Chicago. Things changed after Miglin. People are really looking for Cunanan now. This is not just a guy killing people he knows. Now he’s a spree killer.”

How Cunanan killed Miglin
The degree to which Miglin and Cunanan were acquainted and/or lovers remains a point of contention (as you’ll see below), but the grittiest details of Miglin’s final moments ring true. In a 1997 Washington Post interview, a medical examiner summed up that there was no indication of “ritualistic torturing” of the Chicago businessman’s body. And though the use of a cement-mix bag to crush Miglin’s ribs may have seemed a bit on the nose, it apparently was one of his weapons of choice.

The car phone mistake
“It’s the first example of the police kind of blundering,” Yanez says regarding Chicago and Philadelphia cops’ failure to track down Cunanan via the pinging car phone in Miglin’s Lexus. (Though in fairness, the FBI was arguably more guilty of dropping the ball later on than Miami PD.) “I remember the beeping phone. That came out at the time.”

The Sky Needle
We couldn’t confirm whether Cunanan burned the design specs, or if Miglin had bragged to Andrew about his passion project, but Lee was indeed working for years on a looming Chicago skyscraper he dubbed the Sky Needle. (The name intended, no doubt, as a rebuke of Seattle’s Space Needle, much as its height would have eclipse Sears Tower.) Alas, Miglin’s plans to develop the world’s tallest building were thwarted by a weak Chicago office-space market, and those honors now belong to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Marilyn Miglin’s reaction
It’s impossible to confirm whether Miglin’s cosmetics-queen wife had suspected all along that Lee was gay. But according to Yanez, the rest of Judith Light’s embodiment of the widowed millionaire scans as on-point. “It was always, ‘We don’t know who this person is. He was a complete stranger. He wouldn’t have known [Cunanan] that way. He wouldn’t have called anyone like that to the house.’ They never allowed the notion that this was someone that he knew.”

What They Took Liberties With

The Miglins’ ties to Cunanan
There has been speculation for years, even from the FBI, that Miglin (and perhaps even his son, Duke) had some kind of ongoing relationship with Cunanan. But as reporting at the time asserted and Yanez explains, “It was never confirmed. The Miglin family played a role in keeping his private life private. The same way whether [Cunanan and Versace] knew each other or not — you can’t really get a grasp on it — it was the same way with Miglin. That was all part of the Cunanan lore.” Still, Yanez confesses that it’s enticing to wonder aloud, “I don’t know how he would have known Miglin, but then again, how did he find him so quickly in Chicago?” (For what it’s worth the Washington Post observed that Miglin’s home was only a few minutes from the neighborhood’s main nightclub district.)

The William Reese attack
In one “Random Killing” sequence, Andrew pulls into a New Jersey state park, gun in backpack, anxiously ready to ditch Miglin’s Lexus and carjack an innocent victim. That all checks out. But what’s curious is the episode’s suggestion that he initially descended on an older woman, only swerving when William Reese showed up in his red pickup truck. “That’s artistic license,” Yanez insists. “We do know the murder of convenience is Reese. That somebody had said, ‘Oh, he almost carjacked me,’ no, nothing like that. I guess they’re just trying to show how randomly he picked Reese.”

Cunanan’s visit to a Versace store
There’s no doubt that Andrew swept through New York between murdering Miglin and making his way to Miami. It’s laid out in detail — down to his having attended movie screenings of Liar Liar and Devil’s Own — in the FBI files (see: pages 322-323). But nowhere has any official account included an indulgent tour of Versace’s namesake Manhattan boutique. “Yes, he had gone to New York, but it was very brief,” Yanez says, adding that bogus calls and dead-end leadsnotwithstanding, “there was never any actual sighting of him except for what the phone showed.”

William Reese’s final words
As the show did with Gianni Versace in the premiere episode, it appears to have fabricated Reese’s last utterances for dramatic effect. Reese did indeed leave behind a wife, Rebecca, and preteen son, Troy, though whether he begged to be reunited with them is something only Cunanan could have known. In an unfortunate twist, Troy — who appeared on-camera for a Dateline interview just last spring — was recently arrested on charges of criminal intent to commit involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child under 16, statutory sexual assault, unlawful contact with a minor and criminal use of a communication facility. “I’m sure Cunanan’s responsible in some way for that,” Yanez laments.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Fact-checking Episode Three

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: The Grisly Miglin Murder

And now for something completely different. The first two episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace centered largely on the fashion designer and his murderer in Miami. But for the third episode, the entire Versace storyline disappears.

Instead, “A Random Killing” goes back to Andrew’s two previous murders, starting in Chicago. It feels rather disjointed from the first two episodes, with a new setting and new major characters, primarily Judith Light and Mike Farrell as the Miglins. Really though, the entire episode feels like a showcase for Light, who is mesmerizing in every scene and, by far, the best thing about the entire series so far.

Meet Marilyn Miglin

The episode starts in May 1997 in Canada where Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) is on a home-shopping network. She’s a cosmetics magnate, the Queen of Perfume, a confident and strong woman. When she returns home to Chicago her husband Lee (Mike Farrell) doesn’t pick her up from the airport.

At their home she senses that something is wrong and some neighbors arrive to investigate. Marilyn waits, stone-faced, as the neighbors and cops search the house. When the cop and a neighbor go into the garage, a car is missing and we hear the neighbor scream. Marilyn, sitting inside, whispers to herself “I knew it.” It’s immediately clear that this is a woman who is always in control.

The show jumps to a week earlier, with Marilyn and Lee Miglin at a political fundraiser. They are the ultimate power couple: he’s a real estate tycoon and she’s a cosmetics queen, the charming, driving force behind their partnership.

Lee and Andrew

After Marilyn leaves for her Canada trip, Andrew Cunanan visits the Miglin home. Lee is deeply religious and a closeted homosexual, a painful combination for him as he’s plagued with shame. But he can’t resist the allure of Andrew, the charming, attractive young gay escort. The two obviously have a history together, but the show doesn’t explain it.

That’s going to be an ongoing theme over the series: introducing new characters who have a rich and detailed history with Andrew, but not actually explaining it until a few episodes later. Get used to it.

Andrew almost shoots Lee, but first the old man wants to show him blueprints for the Sky Needle, which he plans on being the tallest building in the world. Lee fantasizes about going to the top and having none of the tourists know that he built it. Obviously this offends Andrew, whose greatest fear in life is being invisible.

Andrew’s indignation triggers him to take control, calling out Lee for trying to impress him and pointing out that their relationship isn’t real, it’s just a business transaction, although Andrew loves making Lee believe that it could be real.

Andrew’s Third Murder

Andrew takes Lee to the garage and says “I’m in control now.” He shoves a glove in Lee’s mouth and then proceeds to tape up Lee’s entire head, which seems to be his M.O. Their kinky S&M games get very disturbing as Andrew ties up his legs and starts choking him. Andrew punches him in the face and brags about how he’s already killed two people who were very close to him.

It turns into a serial killer monologue as Andrew explains that after he kills Lee, he’s going to dress him in women’s panties and leave gay porn around the body so he will be disgraced in death. The murder is then shown. The whole scene is uncomfortable, especially when you stop to think that this is based on a true story and Lee Miglin was a real person who was actually murdered. It makes the graphic nature of these scenes unpleasant to watch.

The Police Investigation

We’re back to after the body was discovered. Marilyn is in full spin-mode, explaining to the superintendent of police that it was clearly a robbery. She emphasizes that the culprit stole unusual gold coins which should be easy to trace if anyone tries to pawn them (well, maybe not so easy given how we saw that unfold in the first two episodes). Marilyn tells the story the way she wants it to be, making it very clear that she will not allow any potentially scandalous details to get out.

Just like when Donatella said that she wouldn’t let Andrew kill her brother twice by having the press invade his personal life, Marilyn insists that she won’t allow the killer to take away her good name. Sadly, this idea probably contributes to why Andrew could stay free for so long, because the actual details of his crimes were covered up to hide the shame of being a closeted homosexual back in the late ‘90s. We also get random factual details, like Lee and Marilyn’s son being an aspiring actor who was in the Harrison Ford movie Air Force One.

The cops find the car Andrew left behind, reported stolen from Minnesota and connected to someone named Jeff Trail (that’s a tease for next week’s episode). Also, the new car Andrew stole from Lee has a phone that automatically tuned on when the car was started, so the police can ping it and track him.

Andrew’s Fourth Murder

They figure out he’s going to New York City, where we see Andrew visit a Versace store, the only real connection to the designer in the whole episode. Unfortunately, a radio news show reports about the police using the car phone to track the killer, which has to be some of the most irresponsible journalism ever. And of course Andrew hears it.

Andrew ditches the car in New Jersey after following a man to a cemetery. He takes the man hostage and kills him. Ironically, this one actually is a random killing and this poor man was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Andrew takes his red pick-up truck (the one we’ve seen Andrew take to Miami in the first two episodes) and heads to Miami, ending right where the second episode started with him.

Marilyn Goes Back to Work

The episode ends as it began, with Marilyn Miglin on the home-shopping channel, this time after the news of her husband’s death. She delivers a powerful, emotional speech about how her husband believed in her dreams and treated her like an equal. It’s about the fifth or sixth scene that is just a beautiful acting showcase for Judith Light, whose performance alones makes this entire episode worth it.

How did you feel about the Miglin storyline?

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: The Grisly Miglin Murder

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ recap: Lee Miglin’s terrible ending

We gave it an A

It’s a Versace episode without Versace. Week three takes us back a few months before Cunanan’s most high profile murder to his second-most high profile murder: that of wealthy Chicago real-estate developer Lee Miglin.

It takes some time before this episode even gets to Cunanan. Instead, we’re given a brief slice-of-life picture of the marriage between Lee and his wife Marilyn, a Home Shopping Network star. Marilyn returns home from a trip to promote her perfume on television to find that her husband isn’t at the airport to pick her up. And so instead she takes a cab, and returns home to eerie silence and the unmistakable sense that something isn’t right. The house is set like a stage, with creepy tableaus — ice cream melting on the counter, a hunk of deli meat in Lee’s office, stabbed with a knife. Marilyn enlists the neighbors and calls the police, who tell her what she already knew. Lee is dead.

Flashback to a week earlier, when Lee and Marilyn were at a fundraiser for Illinois governor Jim Edgar. Marilyn’s speech introducing her husband as a guest of honor gives us a clear picture of who he was and sort of relationship they had. He was wealthy and powerful. He and Marilyn were a partnership, working together to grow their individual careers. “Without a hint of cynicism, my Lee is the American dream,” Marilyn says to the full banquet hall.

Of course, the façade falls when they return home, but only slightly. This isn’t a marriage of convenience, but it’s not one of passion either. Not long after Marilyn leaves town for her television appearance, Lee invites over a certain young male escort: Andrew Cunanan. From their interactions, it’s obvious the two men have had a relationship for a while — Lee mentions that he’s wanted to show Cunanan his plans for the “Sky Needle” building for some time, and Cunanan kisses him deeply enough for Lee to be able to pretend that theirs isn’t just a financial transaction.

It’s at the Miglin house that we get see one of Cunanan’s most distinctive habits return: He loves to eat with his prey, stuffing his face with no regard for whether they’re eating too or whether they’re comfortable. It’s a disruption of social patterns (food is something to be shared, enjoyed together), almost an act of aggression on Cunanan’s part.

The real aggression comes a few moments later, when the men move to the garage and Cunanan initiates the most disturbing sequence we’ve seen on the show thus far. The interaction begins with the cadence of a consensual BDSM encounter until it becomes terrifyingly obvious that Cunanan has something awful in mind. When Miglin is fully bound, with duct tape around his face and cords around his ankles, Cunanan punches him hard enough in the face to break his nose and reveals that he’s killed two men already, and that he’s planning on killing him as well, leaving his body in women’s underwear, surrounded by gay porn. “What terrifies you more, death or being disgraced?”

Cunanan crushes Miglin’s ribs with a bag of concrete and stabs him with a gardening tool. He tears up the drawing of Miglin’s dream architecture project — the Sky Needle, 500 feet taller than the Sears Tower — and burns it at the altar where Miglin had prayed earlier that day. He leaves the meat with the knife in the study. He seems to spend the night.

The police arrive when Marilyn calls, and when they find the body, they understand that the situation surrounding the murder makes the case more sensitive than most. Marilyn — stoic and dry eyed in her interactions with the police, graciously bringing them free sandwiches — bears no anger when she hears that her husband was found surrounded by gay porn. It clearly belonged to the murderer. “That’s all I’ll allow that man to steal from me,” Marilyn says. “I won’t let him steal my good name. Our good name.” She and her awkward milquetoast son (a Hollywood actor, she brags) are staunch in their approach that this was just a random killing, and that Andrew Cunanan had no relationship with her husband aside from being the stranger who took his life.

The police traced an abandoned car a few blocks away to Cunanan, already wanted for two other murders, and because he stole a car from Miglin that had an attached phone, they are able to trace his movements and see that he’s making his way to New York. At least, they’re able to trace him until that strategy leaks to the paper. Cunanan hears from a news story on the radio, while driving Lee Miglin’s car, that the police are tracking the suspect through Lee Miglin’s cell phone. He snaps off the car’s antenna, but he knows that’s not enough. He need to swap out cars.

Cunanan pulls into a rest stop and watches for victims, waiting until he sees a man driving a red pickup truck. When the man starts driving away, Cunanan follows him, shadowing him through a graveyard as if the scene weren’t ominous enough. Finally, the man goes into his home, and Cunanan follows with a gun drawn. “Stay calm,” Cunanan says. “No one’s going to get hurt. I’m here to steal your truck.”

The man is terrified, and polite. He shows Cunanan the car keys and walks down to the basement to let Cunanan lock him downstairs. He gets on his knees when Cunanan asks, and he’s telling him about his wife and their son when Cunanan shoots him, point blank, in the head.

If any viewer had any sympathy or affection for Cunanan up until this point, this episode stripped that away entirely. He is terrifying and merciless, but not just merciless — cruel. The final moments of the episode are given back to Marilyn Miglin, back on the air, talking about how much her husband meant to her. Maybe she’s just speaking to the cameras, maybe their entire marriage had been something for appearances, but when she talks about their partnership of 38 years, it comes across as heartbreakingly genuine. There are many kinds of marriages. Theirs might have had secrets, but it would be flippant to dismiss decades of friendship and affection for Lee’s brief and fatal fling with Cunanan. Cunanan isn’t anyone’s partner. He is a taker. He takes food, and cars, and reputations. He takes lives. He is someone who consumes and never gives anything back.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ recap: Lee Miglin’s terrible ending

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 3 Spotlights Andrew Cunanan’s Less Famous Victims

One of the most surprising things about The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is how much time the show is spending not just with Andrew Cunanan, but with his less famous victims. Prior to murdering Versace, Cunanan had already killed four men in a killing spree spanning several states, and this week’s episode (in-keeping with the show’s reverse Cunanan chronology) centers on his third victim, Lee Miglin, and briefly on his fourth, William Reese.

“A Random Killing” commits so thoroughly to fleshing out the character of Miglin (Mike Farrell)—a Chicago real estate tycoon whose ties to Cunanan remain ambiguous to this day—that Gianni Versace and his family don’t appear in the episode at all. Let’s get into five talking points from tonight’s hour.

1) Cunanan’s breath-play antics last week were a callback to his third murder.

Remember the nameless elderly man Cunanan seduced and then very nearly smothered with masking tape in last week’s episode? Of course you do. That startling sequence makes a lot more sense in light of this episode, which takes place several weeks prior and sees Cunanan murdering Miglin in a very similar fashion. In real life, it was never proven whether Miglin and Cunanan knew each other prior to the murder (the FBI considers it likely they did, which the Miglin family staunchly denies), but in the show, Miglin’s depicted as a deeply closeted regular client of Cunanan’s—and a pretty heartbreaking character in his own right.

2) Cunanan’s self-loathing emerges in his cruelty to Miglin.

Though the murder itself was brutal—a police officer notes that every one of Miglin’s ribs was broken—it’s the viciousness of Cunanan’s words that really stand out in this episode. Despite knowing theirs is purely a business relationship, Miglin seems quietly besotted with Cunanan, who in turns seems repulsed. Miglin is touchingly eager to tell Cunanan about his plans to build a 125-story tower (the tallest in the world) in Chicago and name it The Sky Needle. “I’ve wanted to share this with you for a long time,” he tells Cunanan, who all but sneers in his face, mocking both Miglin’s ambitions and his clear emotional investment in their relationship.

Later, when Cunanan brutally kills Miglin and leaves his body to be found in a deliberately humiliating fashion—wearing women’s underwear and surrounded by gay porn—I was reminded of the scene early in Episode 1, when Cunanan claims to be straight and casually throws out the F-word (“I mean, what are we supposed to call them? Homosexuals sounds so scientific.”) He doesn’t just want Miglin dead—he wants him outed and humiliated, remembered as “a pansy.” There’s so much internalized homophobia in Cunanan, and it almost feels like Miglin seals his fate when he admits to having real feelings for him—moments before Cunanan calmly confesses that he’s already “killed two people who were very close to me.”

3) The tower conversation tells you everything you need to know about Cunanan’s worldview.

Miglin is excited about the Sky Needle because he imagines families visiting together and children thrilled to ascend the tallest tower in the world. Cunanan, though, hones in on the fact that the hypothetical tower would loom over the Sears Tower, “so you can look down on the Sears Tower Observation Deck.” To Cunanan, there’s nothing more powerful than the idea of looking down on people.

The contrast between these two worldviews really comes into focus, though, when Miglin describes his fantasy of being able to visit his tower and “just roam among people, unannounced. They wouldn’t know who I was!” But the notion of being anonymous is so galling to Cunanan that he flies into a sudden rage, affronted by Miglin’s insistence that the tower is not about him. “Of course it’s about you—it’s the Lee Miglin Tower!” To Cunanan, there is no value in building anything for any reason other than putting your name on it.

4) Did a local radio station really scupper the Illinois police’s investigation of Cunanan?

Miglin is an immensely powerful figure in the community, and as such the police are all over this case, managing to track Cunanan for some time using the car phone in the Lexus he stole from Miglin. But when a local radio station runs a news item giving that information away, Cunanan is able to ditch the car—claiming his fourth victim in the process—and evade justice for another two months.

Apparently, this happened in real life, too. Here’s how it went down, according to Maureen Orth’s Vanity Fair article “The Killer’s Trail” (her book Vulgar Favors is the source material for this season of American Crime Story):

An activated car phone in [Miglin’s] Lexus was used three times the following week in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia police confirmed a news report of the attempted phone calls, angering Chisago County sheriff Randall Schwegman, who told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Everyone who was working on [the case] was outraged. Once he heard that, he’d have been a fool to use a phone after that.”

5) William Reese is the only victim not to have an episode to himself.

But he does get a death scene that’s surprisingly affective for its brevity. Unlike Cunanan’s other victims, there was no apparent personal connection between Cunanan and Reese, and investigators concluded he was killed solely for his truck. After giving Cunanan his keys, Reese calmly and politely begs for his life before being shot execution-style in the back of the head.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 3 Spotlights Andrew Cunanan’s Less Famous Victims

’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Explores ’A Random Killing’

A review of tonight’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story coming up just as soon as I have a role in Air Force One…

Despite the impressive performance by a nearly unrecognizable Max Greenfield, Versace episode two was so focused on Andrew Cunanan’s various sociopathic tics that I was nearly ready to cut bait on the whole season right there. Instead, I moved on to “A Random Killing,” and it was there that the strengths of Tom Rob Smith’s approach to the story started to outweigh its weaknesses.

Cunanan himself remains a bit too one-note, despite good work by Darren Criss, and despite all the different guises he adopts. But in journeying backwards through his life, and through the murder spree he committed on his way to committing this season’s central crime, Versace in turn gets to explore the lives of his other victims, and to understand some of the forces that both put them next to Cunanan and inspired him to kill them.

The title refers to the Miglin family’s public stance on why Cunanan killed real estate tycoon Lee Miglin(*) — to this day, they insist Lee and Cunanan never met — though the episode instead applies it to its other murder, of caretaker William Reese, who had the bad luck to be driving a truck Cunanan wanted to steal after he realized law-enforcement could track the phone in Lee’s car.

(*) Lee is played by Mike Farrell, best known for his long stint on M*A*S*H as easygoing, mustachioed Army doc B.J. Hunnicutt, and whose environmental work inspired one of my favorite random Simpsons jokes.

The bulk of the action is in Chicago, depicting not only the murder of Lee in all its macabre details — including the ham Cunanan left sitting out — but the extremely comfortable closeted lifestyle Lee had arranged for himself. His relationship with Marilyn — played spectacularly by Judith Light, who checks so many of Ryan Murphy’s usual casting boxes, it’s a wonder this is the first time they’ve worked together — is presented mostly as a business arrangement. She feels affection for him, and he for her, but there’s a remove even when they’re speaking sweetly to each other, and when Lee’s body is found, Marilyn’s first response is to whisper, between quivering lips, “I knew it.”

That the closeted Lee was a wealthy, powerful, and very public figure in the ’90s made him extra-vulnerable to the approach of a manipulator like Cunanan. And Cunanan, in turn, finds great cause to resent this man who can enjoy all the trappings of a socially acceptable hetero lifestyle and also hook up with guys like him when nobody’s watching too closely. Having already committed two other murders (alluded to here, to be depicted in future episodes), he no longer has any reason to hold in his envious rage, and the type of sex games he likes to play — which we also saw with the tourist he nearly suffocated in episode two — give him complete control to do whatever he wants to potential victims. He doesn’t just want to kill Lee: he wants to out him, and he wants Lee to understand this right before he dies, when he’s helpless to do or say anything to prevent it.

The aftermath of the horrific crime continues to show the many ways that law-enforcement bungled the Cunanan manhunt, in large part because they underestimated the ongoing threat a gay killer posed. Even if they’d been dismissive of his earlier victims, the Miglin family was well-connected enough that the search should have been nowhere as laid-back as it was; instead, they gave him enough rope, and didn’t keep a tight enough hold on the news about the car phone, that he was able to slip away again and murder William Reese in the process.

It’s all maddening and ugly. And for this week, anyway, it lived up to the potential of all the tools Murphy, Smith, and company have given themselves for the project.

I’ll check back in a few weeks. In the meantime, how’s everybody feeling about Versace so far?

’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Explores ’A Random Killing’

Get Ready For Judith Light On Tonight’s ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’

Through two episodes, you may think you have a good idea of the story that The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is telling you. The tragic opulence of the Versace lifestyle, gay chameleon Andrew Cunanan moving through the gay underworld of Miami and beyond, Penelope Cruz as Donatella upholding the family legacy through grief and pride. Was Versace HIV positive? How well did he and Cunanan know each other? Did Donatella really hate Gianni’s longtime lover? Was the police investigation botched? These are all the questions that seem to be driving the show through two episodes. Well, starting tonight with episode 3, titled “A Random Killing,” The Assassination of Gianni Versace steps towards becoming the show that it’s really about. And it does so featuring one of the all-time best single-episode performances in a Ryan Murphy series from Tony- and Emmy-winning actress Judith Light.

“A Random Killing” steps away from the Versace story entirely, focusing on Andrew Cunanan’s encounters with Chicago real-estate tycoon Lee Miglin. If you know the Cunanan story, you know Miglin was his third victim, murdered in his Chicago home. Whether Miglin knew Cunanan before his death — whether the two were sexually involved leading up to and including the day of Miglin’s death — has been a point of speculation that has been vigorously denied by Miglin’s surviving family. Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith clearly have their own take on the story and don’t really mince words about it. But we also get the character of Marilyn Miglin, Lee’s wife and home-shopping cosmetics queen.

Marilyn, as played by Judith Light, is a quintessential Ryan Murphy character. She’s a perfectly put-together older woman who, by episode’s end, is holding her life together by the tips of her impeccably manicured fingernails. She keeps up appearances but she’s haunted by something she refuses to put a name to. In the real world, we can make up our own minds about whether Lee Miglin was gay or closeted or having sexual relationships with male escorts. In Murphy’s depiction of the story, Marilyn Miglin’s vehement denial of the circumstances of her husband’s life (and death) double as a vehement defense of her own life.

It’s also somewhat wild that it’s taken this long for Ryan Murphy to loop Judith Light into his stable of actors. She’s pretty much everything he tends to value in a performer: older actresses who haven’t been well served by the television (and movie, though Light has kept her career on TV and the stage for the most part) roles being offered to them. Light got nationally famous starring opposite Tony Danza on the ABC sitcom Who’s The Boss?, but before that, she was a two-time Daytime Emmy winner for the soap opera One Life to Live, where she played a character who, in her most notorious and well-remembered storyline, has a courtroom breakdown confessing her secret life as a prostitute.

In the years since Who’s The Boss?, Light’s career might have gone the way of many sitcom stars of the ’80s, but the fact that she held on, returned to her Broadway roots, won a couple of Tony Awards in the process, had that great role as a publishing matriarch on Ugly Betty, and has recently been such a strong presence on Transparent, it all adds up to the perfect Ryan Murphy muse: a steel-spined actress of a certain age who’s experienced the best and the worst of the entertainment industry and has come out on the other side. It’s all there in Light’s performance as Marilyn. She gets a monologue at the end of the episode that would make her a shoo-in for a Guest Actress Emmy Award, if only the guest-actress categories included limited series. Maybe it’s time they should, because between Robin Weigert’s brief but brilliant work as the therapist on Big Little Lies last year and Light’s work this year, there is some phenomenal acting that is slipping through the cracks.

And while Judith Light’s award-worthy acting is a big reason to tune in to tonight’s episode, you should also be there for when the series makes its pivot. It’s not that the Versace case ceases to matter, but it becomes less of the focal point of the show. Versace’s killing was the last in a string of murders. And while, in real life and on the show, it’s not easy to string one constant motivation for Cunanan’s actions throughout all five murders (rumors at the time that Cunanan had been diagnosed HIV-positive and was acting out of vengeance against men he’d slept with have been debunked), Murphy and Smith have done a good job laying the groundwork of a homophobic society. Starting tonight, we begin to see the insidious role that the closet plays in the Cunanan murders. Here’s where the show stops being a B-minus true-crime story and starts becoming an A-grade tragedy.

Get Ready For Judith Light On Tonight’s ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’

TV tonight: A harrowing episode of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story
FX, 10 ET/PT

The unsettling second season of American Crime Story is slowly revealing the story of spree killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), and this episode focuses entirely on one of his earlier victims, Chicago real estate magnate Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell). The episode, one of the best of the season, is occasionally hard to watch. But Judith Light puts in an exceptional performance as Miglin’s devoted wife Marilyn, whose hard exterior is broken by the violent crime. Of all nine episodes, this one feels almost like a short film, more about Lee than his killer.

TV tonight: A harrowing episode of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’