Wednesday’s episode of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace flashes back to the disturbing start of Andrew Cunanan’s multi-city murder spree—when Cunanan killed two friends, Jeff Trail and David Madson, in Minnesota. Because there were no witnesses to the crimes—and everyone involved is dead— there is no way to know exactly what transpired in April 1997 inside Madson’s apartment, where Trail was found murdered, or on the drive approximately 60 miles north to Rush City in May, where Madson was found dead.

“Tom Rob Smith, the writer, had to invent a lot of what had happened based on what we knew from the crime scene and we knew about Andrew and David,” American Crime Story executive producer Brad Simpson explained on Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast this week. “We know there was this murder and then we know they were in a car together, and we know that David begged for his life at the end, but we had to fill in what might have happened during that time.”

The puzzling sequence of events has always left one burning question—why didn’t David Madson escape in the days after Trail’s murder? In June 1997, Newsweek plainly stated that “Madson’s role remains hard to figure out. He apparently made no effort to leave.” Even more confounding, “neighbors saw the two men walking Madson’s dog the day after Trail’s murder.”

Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth addressed this mystery in her 1997 reportfor this magazine. Gregg McCrary, senior consultant of the Threat Assessment Group and former supervisory special agent of the F.B.I.’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, said that Cunanan’s influence over Madson was “to a degree Stockholm syndrome,” explaining, “these sexually sadistic offenders have that ability to control people—not necessarily physical control. Many times it’s just out of fear.”

“They have a sixth sense of who they can manipulate and control,” McCrary said. “Their interpersonal skills are so strong, and their ability to target these victims, to understand their needs, to meet these needs and fulfill them, are so developed that in return these victims always feel obligated.”

Even before Trail’s murder, Cunanan had given Madson reason to fear him—claiming to have connections to the mob and “bragg[ing] about getting someone killed the day the person left prison, because he had ratted on a friend of Andrew’s.” Cunanan and Madson had met in a San Francisco bar in 1995, when Cunanan spotted the handsome architect and sent him a drink. Orth reported that the relationship escalated over the next year, but cooled off in the fall of 1996 when Madson suspected Cunanan of what Newsweek called “shady dealings.”

When Cunanan flew to Minneapolis, friends of Madson’s said the architect seemedunhappy about picking Cunanan up at the airport. Another friend told People that Cunanan was still besotted with Madson. Madson, on the other hand, “thought Andrew was a little shady, secretive…David didn’t want to be alone with him.” According to Orth, however, Madson was “a peacemaker who avoided confrontation” and “wanted to save people”—personality traits that also help explain why Madson acted the way he did.

“Those six days where David was with Andrew was the most fascinating part of this story to me because, I mean, what do you do as a human essentially being kidnapped after seeing something like that?” Cody Fern, who played Madson, told Still Watching. “How do you get through six days?”

Smith said that one eyewitness offered context about the duo’s relationship in the days after Trail’s murder: “An eyewitness saw the two of them walking together and David had been crying and Andrew was chatting at him really quickly. So that really gave the sense of one person who’s distraught and one person who is trying to cajole them into going on the run together.”

Fern said that, to prepare for the role, he read over 50 postcards and letters that Cunanan sent Madson—illustrating Cunanan’s eery detachment from reality. “Andrew would write to David when he was traveling or pretending to travel. He was in France or he was in Prague. The way he communicated through the letters it was very clear they had a special relationship. Not knowing everything that comes later it was the beginning of a beautiful love story.”

In “House By the Lake,” Smith scripts a scene where Madson actually gets the opportunity to escape. After Cunanan and Madson leave Minneapolis in Madson’s Jeep, they stop at a roadside bar and restaurant to get sustenance. Captor and hostage sit, listening to Aimee Mann perform live, and Madson eventually makes his way to the bathroom—where he finally gets a moment alone.

“The key image for me in the entire piece is when David Madson almost escapes,” said Smith. “He’s in the restroom of a bar and he looks out the window at the world and he sees the world passing him by. You’d think when you’ve been kidnapped by a killer that freedom is going to be a thing that’s incredibly exciting—you’re desperate to get to.”

But to Madson, the greatest tragedy of these final hours was that, as a gay man in the 1990s, the outside world does not offer a much better alternative. Smith explains:

“He looks out the window and thinks, ‘What am I escaping to? Disgrace? Hatred? There is no freedom.’ The world that is beyond this window that in every other thriller he would have climbed out of and run screaming for help—there is no help. The people coming to arrest Andrew Cunanan would also arrest him because there’s no way they would believe he had nothing to do with Jeffrey Trail’s death. ‘They’ll hate me like they hate him because they hated me before.’”

Months later, Jean Rosen, the owner of the Full Moon Bar & Restaurant where the real Cunanan and Madson ate lunch the afternoon of May 2, remembered seeing the men.

“Madson seemed jumpy. He looked over his shoulder every time the front door opened,” reported the L.A. Times. “But whatever he feared, it didn’t seem to be his companion.”

Versace: Why David Madson Didn’t Try to Escape Cunanan

At this point TV viewers tuning in to Season 2 of American Crime Story will have sensed that something’s up. Promotional materials promised a glitzy, pulpy dive into the high-fashion world of the Versace family and a grisly murder in sunny Miami. But after two episodes with nary a Versace in sight (don’t worry, they’ll be back), audiences must have realized that producer Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith actually had a different—and, in my opinion, better—show in mind. The star of Episode 4 is not any of the A-list names like Penelope Cruz, Ricky Martin, and Darren Criss or even one of Ryan Murphy’s regular players like Finn Wittrock. Instead, the breakout here (and, perhaps, of the series) is 30 year-old Australian newcomer Cody Fern playing Andrew Cunanan’s second, most personal, and misunderstood victim: David Madson.

Speaking with Vanity Fair’s podcast Still Watching: Versace, Fern admits that this episode and American Crime Story as a whole represent a bait and switch in order to get audiences to care about Cunanan’s less famous victims and the plight of gay men, more broadly, in the 90s. In this episode specifically, Fern and Smith are determined to redeem Madson who was, for so long, erroneously accused of being Cunanan’s accomplice rather than an innocent casualty.

Last month at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour, when asked about the slightly deceptive title The Assassination of Gianni Versace, both Ryan Murphy and Tom Rob Smith were quick to defend it. The People vs. O.J. Simpson, they pointed out, wasn’t a show primarily about O.J. Of course, they’re right. Along with a searing look at racism, sexism, and the rise of reality TV in the 90s, the main takeaway from American Crime Story’s first season was the redemption of maligned prosecutor Marcia Clark.

Madson, of course, is not nearly as well-known as Clark and that, Fern argues, is what makes Season 2 even more extraordinary. “Everyone was ready for this to be a huge, splashy, fashion drama,” Fern tells Still Watching “but [Ryan Murphy] really honors the victims who came before. Four people who aren’t fashion designers but who had a family and were loved and were brought into the sordid world of Andrew Cunanan and went down because of it. [Their] stories are equally as vital as Gianni Versace’s. For Ryan to really focus on those stories is incredibly brave and does great justice to those people.”

Madson’s mysterious role in Cunanan’s murder spree baffled law enforcement for over a year (and beyond). Why would an innocent man go on the run with a killer and stay with him for six days? For a detailed breakdown of the main clues and theories swirling around Madson’s role at the time, you can go here. But for Smith and Fern, Madson’s driving concern in his final days was clear: internalized gay shame. It’s true that American Crime Story had to do a lot more theorizing than usual in this episode—with both Cunanan and Madson dead there is no way to know exactly what happened on their six-day journey. (We do know, however, that Aimee Mann never serenaded them in a Minnesota dive bar.) Smith tells Still Watching: Versace: “There’s a dilemma [with this episode]. You are, ultimately, joining dots rather than dealing with transcribed or videotaped evidence. I tried sticking to the fundamental truth which was that a) Andrew was a liar and was trapping David and b) David was full of love and ambition and wasn’t involved in the killing in any way.”

Fern admits those six days on the run were the most fascinating to him. “What the series deals with is not only how the police bungled the investigation because of homophobia at the time, but also this internalized of gay shame. David is dealing with a shame that’s been following him around his whole life.” As the show depicts, Madson was out to both his immediate family and his Minneapolis friends and co-workers, but what the episode theorizes is that he wasn’t ready to to be out to an entire world of strangers.

Smith calls David the hero of Episode 4 and used his own life experience as a gay man to extrapolate what Madson might have been feeling. He tells Still Watching:

Andrew’s cleverness is that he plays on a very deep-seated fear which we’ve always felt as gay men and women that if somehow you open the door to our private lives, everyone looking in is going to be shocked and appalled and we’ll be disgraced and exiled. Now, suddenly, by killing Jeffrey in that apartment that lingering nightmare becomes true because David knows that if he opens the door to that apartment the world is going to be shocked and appalled. They’ll think he was involved somehow. It’s going to be very hard for David to extricate himself from the trap that Andrew’s sprung around him.

Smith’s efforts to redeem Madson entirely in the span of an hour may have resulted in a bit of white-washing of this particular character. The real Madson was a bit older than Fern (and a good deal older than the baby-faced Fern looks here). According to Maureen Orth’s well-researched book Vulgar Favors, Madson was a beloved but forcefully charismatic person who dated a good deal and was hardly the Midwestern babe in the woods this series would sometimes have him be.

Neither Fern nor anyone in the cast reached out to the surviving family members of Cunanan’s victims while filming the series—though Ricky Martin, at least, has since been in contact with Versace’s life partner Antonio D’Amico. It was conscious choice they made as a group out of sensitivity to such a great loss. However, the Madson family, specifically, was at the forefront of Fern and Smith’s minds as they constructed this episode. “There was a cloud of suspicion over David,” Smith explains. “The police declared him to be the killer at first and the parents really struggled to clear his name. Such a gross injustice.” Episode 4 of American Crime Story rescues Madson not only from ignominy, but from anonymity as well. Anyone watching this episode and Fern’s irresistibly vulnerable performance won’t soon forget Andrew Cunanan’s second victim—even if he didn’t have a name you’d find on a fashion label.

And as Fern points out, the reverse chronology of American Crime Story acts as another kind of redemption for David Madson. It’s no spoiler to say that Fern as Madson will return for a few more episodes as the season spools back in time and we learn how he and Cunanan first met and fell in love. “There was something nice about leaving this man, David Madson, with a moment of beauty rather than a moment of terror,” Fern explains to Still Watching. “The way we remember David in the series is not the way we see him in Episode 4.” Smith notes that by the end of this hour of television “there’s a sense of David being an inspirational figure rather than someone who people have forgotten.”

To find out more about the true story of David Madson and Andrew Cunanan, you can listen to the full interview with Smith and Fern as well as past guests Maureen Orth, Ricky Martin, Max Greenfield, and Judith Light by subscribing to Still Watching: Versace on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice. New episodes air every Wednesday night.

American Crime Story: Gay Shame and the Redemption of David Madson