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’ve been 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 has been 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 season finale, “Alone.”

What They Got Right

The Manhunt
For however law enforcement fell short of corralling Cunanan after his previous four killings, Versace’s death brought out all the literal big guns (and helicopters and so on). “It was an out-and-out manhunt like you would see in a movie,” Yanez recalls. “Everybody was very nervous. It was checkpoints, tips coming in. It was intense. I don’t think it’s ever been as intense as that week was for looking for somebody in south Florida.”

Andrew Cunanan’s suicide
While the premiere featured a potential inaccuracy in precisely how and where Versace was shot, “Alone” plays it straight with Cunanan’s fateful moments. Despite a recent ABC News retrospective that suggests Andrew shot himself in the chin, numerous reports — most notably, that of the Dade County Medical Examiner — verify that he placed the gun directly into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The houseboat
The idea that Cunanan stumbled on a bottle of expensive Champagne while he squatted wasn’t implausible (though that particular item was absent from the FBI’s inventory, ditto for dog food), as the houseboat’s owner, German businessman Torsten Reineck, reputedly enjoyed the finer things. Reineck, who was in some legal trouble overseas, never attempted to rehabilitate his Miami property, which eventually began to sink due to damaged plumbing. As Yanez reported back in ’98, the “dangerous eyesore,” as she put it then, was demolished. Today, Yanez can confirm that Cunanan left Reineck’s houseboat a wreck, and that Andrew was essentially filthy and unshaven as seen in “Alone.” “In fact, he left it a bigger mess than what they show,” she says. “He really trashed it up. There’s food containers, that area where he was taking care of that wound. The way he looks — that dirty underwear — that’s to a T.” The one detail added for effect, she adds, was Andrew putting a bullet hole through the TV.

The houseboat’s caretaker
Sort of. Fernando Carreira, who looked after Reineck’s ocean-moored property, was understandably spooked by the sound of a gunshot after entering to check on a possible intruder. Though given Cunanan’s desperation, it was probably wise for the then-72-year-old Portuguese caretaker to bail and call the police. As Carreira — who briefly sank his reward money into an ill-fated entrepreneurial effort, the legacy of which lives on via eBay — noted in a recent interview with Sun-Sentinel, “I thought the shot was for me.” Or for that matter, his wife, who was with him at the time, even if she didn’t make it onscreen in “Alone.” But by and large, Carreira’s crucial involvement went down as depicted, unless you want to split hairs over the ease with which he removed his .38 from its holster.

Marilyn Miglin’s reaction
While seething at the FBI’s failure to bring down Cunanan, Lee Miglin’s cosmetics-magnate widow Marilyn Miglin could only refer to Andrew as “that man.” And per a Chicago Tribune profile on Marilyn in April 1998, she indeed could only muster pronouns in lieu of properly uttering his name.

Mispronouncing Cunanan
If Marilyn couldn’t even breathe “Cunanan,” much of the police and media had their own struggles saying it right — a fact that, as “Alone” implies, was yet one more blow to Andrew’s hopes for household fame.

Andrew’s wig
At one point in “Alone,” Andrew passes an FBI poster of himself featuring several possible likenesses, one of them with what appears to be a blonde wig. “Yes, that is true,” Yanez says (and it was, as you can read here). “There was a point where they were saying he liked to dress like a woman, and there were posters that did show him looking like a woman.” One can assume this was included to underscore the kinds of stereotypes that law enforcement trafficked in while pursuing him.

What They Took Liberties With

The houseboat’s address
By all accounts (see: here, here, and here), Reineck’s infamous houseboat was located at 5250 Collins Avenue, yet “Alone” references the address more than once as being at 54th and Collins. This discrepancy is strangely consistent with Assassination of Gianni Versace’s MO when it comes to residences: As noted in earlier fact-checks, the precise address for both David Madson’s Minneapolis condo building and the notorious Normandy Hotel deviated slightly from what was scripted. A best guess would be an effort by producers to protect the privacy of those locations’ current occupants, even if the show may compel more people to seek them out.

The near encounter on another boat
Cunanan is widely believed to have boat-hopped before finding his ultimate hideout in Reineck’s house. “Alone” zeroes in on one such stop, during which Andrew comes virtually face to face with the boat’s owner, who rushes out and urges her husband Guillermo to call the cops. Yanez notes, “There had been incidents of somebody pilfering food and breaking into places, that people found something and something was askew and they called the police. But we never knew exactly if that had been him.” One of those people was purportedly Guillermo Volpe, who owned a small sailboat called the Maru and told cops he found evidence that someone —maybe Cunanan — had slept in there and stolen a novel, and that he later spied Cunanan reading said novel nearby. Interestingly, a paperback book titled Hawaii was among the items FBI agents claimed from Reineck’s home. However, the suspenseful scene of Guillermo’s wife getting within steps of a trigger-happy Cunanan? That is, seemingly, a fanciful exaggeration.

The stolen Mercedes
We could not conjure, nor could Yanez recollect, anything to support Cunanan having stolen a woman’s white Mercedes, only to turn around and bail on the car after hitting a police checkpoint. If anything, the scene somewhat mirrored Versace’s opening stroll down the beach that opened this season, in addition to communicating the manhunt’s escalation and how Andrew was effectively trapped. Not to mention, he always did allegedly daydream about wanting to own a Mercedes.

The media coverage
There was absolutely a swarm of newspaper and magazine writers in and around Miami Beach that whole week, as well as outside Reineck’s houseboat the night Cunanan’s body was brought out on a gurney. As Yanez recalls, “There were reporters from Italy, Japan, Sweden. The media was a huge pack, and it was astounding, the reaction to his murder, the nerve it touched.” But she does point out one wrinkle the show missed. “They don’t touch on this at all, but there was a great confusion at the end,” she explains. “Earlier in the day, we hear there’s somebody at the houseboat and everybody goes over there. And then the police came out, after they had this standoff and there was a shot heard, and said, ‘No, there’s nobody here.’ So a lot of the media left, and then they called us back and said, ‘No, it’s him. He’s here.’ So there was some weird confusion.” As it happens, reports from the timeback up Yanez’s recollection that police were initially coy after the SWAT team was deployed (and per the FBI dossier, they did flood the houseboat with tear gas). “There was a first thought that the gunshot that the caretaker hears is [Cunanan] killing himself,” Yanez continues. “But the caretaker at first says, ‘He fired at me,’ but there might not have been evidence of that later on. It was a mess that night. Maybe they wanted to notify the Versace family first and didn’t want to tell the media. We were there all day.”

Andrew’s call to his father
Yanez had never heard of any call being placed from Cunanan to his dad in the Philippines as police closed in, nor were we able to corroborate any such conversation between them. It’s even a stretch for “Alone” to capture Andrew readying a passport for exile abroad, since FBI deputy director William Esposito told media that Cunanan did make a mystery call — to a friend (whom, enticingly, he would not name) whom he hoped could secure him a passport. Supposedly, the FBI only found out about the correspondence after interrogating other individuals who ran in Cunanan’s circles. Regarding Modesto’s attempts to exploit Andrew’s name, those were covered in last week’s roundup.

Marilyn’s news conference
Apart from the Chicago Tribune interview mentioned earlier, Marilyn rarely spoke publicly about her husband Lee’s death. One exception was an emotional press conference shortly after his murder in May 1997, an event that “Alone” repositions to coincide with Andrew’s waning days on the houseboat, the beginning of a This Is Your Life–style series of televised pieces vivifying the pain he’d brought to victims’ loved ones and his own, including his long-suffering motherMary Ann. We were unable to unearth footage of David Madson’s father Howard as portrayed on a news program, though he was vocalafter news spread of Cunanan’s suicide. Yanez reflects generally on how hard the Madson family tried to “clear his name, [that] he was a victim too, not a co-conspirator. But with Cunanan’s death, that was left hanging.”

Antonio’s suicide attempt
It is true that Antonio was more or less exiled to Lake Como by the surviving Versaces, allowed to live in one of the homes controlled by the company but otherwise estranged. And in an interview with the Guardian, he acknowledges having entered a lengthy depression. He stops short, however, of saying that he tried to kill himself in the immediate aftermath of his lover’s death. According to those close to Antonio, the loyalty of friends like Elton John helped him through the grieving period.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Fact-checking the Season Finale

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 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 the results of our dogged research into the veracity and potency of events and characterizations presented in episode eight, “Creator/Destroyer.”

What They Got Right

Andrew’s father
Modesto “Pete” Cunanan was no angel. The Navy vet-turned-stockbroker and father of four did, according to court records, embezzle a couple hundred thousand dollars, ditch his family, and flee to the Philippines. He even briefly returned to the U.S. after Andrew’s death to seemingly capitalize on his notoriety. There’s less evidence to support the story that he swindled an elderly woman named Vera out of her savings, invoking the ire of her burly grandson, but the FBI was definitely onto him, and by 1988, he was outta there. At least until he returned nine years later and attempted to capitalize on his son’s notoriety.

Andrew as the favorite child
We’ve already confirmed that Cunanan lorded over his family’s master bedroom, but what about his father demonstrating outright preferential treatment relative to his three siblings? Look no further than the testimony of his brother Christopher and sister Elena, who both remarked on Andrew’s favored status in a 1997 ABC interviewwith Diane Sawyer. They even verify that he was gifted with a Nissan 300ZX from dad — though Modesto purchasing it years in advance appears to be a touch of, well, driver’s license.

The high-school yearbook
There’s no way to know if Andrew told off a homophobic jock before unbuttoning his top and loosening his tie, but his yearbook spread did absolutely feature him more or less shirtless and beaming. And his much-dissected senior quote did invoke Louis XV and read, “Après moi, le deluge,” or “After me, the flood.” There is, however, some discrepancy in accounts of his superlative that year. Maureen Orth and the New York Daily News, among others, reported it then as “Least Likely to Be Forgotten,” while most current coverage asserts it was “Most Likely to Be Remembered.” And Newsweek claimed that Andrew was voted “Most Likely Not to Be Forgotten.” Less up for interpretation is his eventual status as one of the FBI’s Most Wanted.

What They Took Liberties With

Gianni’s mother
“Creator/Destroyer” would have it that Gianni’s dressmaker matriarch, Francesca, identified his gift for design while he was still a boy and defied anyone who steered him from his passion for fashion. That’s a bit ideal, even in Gianni’s memory. During a 1994 interviewwith Charlie Rose, Versace told an anecdote about how, even in his teen years, his main aspiration was to compose music like Burt Bacharach or Gershwin. However, he continues, “My mother say, ‘No, you stay with me.’ Something was in my blood, in my family.” He was certainly not spiteful, but to say he only had one goal all his life and that his mother championed whatever his whims would be a slight exaggeration.

Andrew and Elizabeth’s meet-cute
Elizabeth Cote was indeed Andrew’s friend, she did anoint him godfather to his kids, and even videotaped a plea for him to cease his killing jag. But by Orth’s own account, the pair met in junior high, not at a high-school kegger. Not to mention, reporting by then-Sun Sentinel journalist and current Miami Herald staffer Luisa Yanez — who has contributed her insights on and off to this column all season — notes that Andrew wore that fabulous red jumpsuit to his prom, as opposed to some local rager. Though interestingly, Yanez and her co-author Sergio Bustos also second what “Creator/Destroyer” puts forth about Cunanan having already had at least one older male benefactor by his senior year.

Andrew’s bedtime reading
We were unable to uncover any evidence that Modesto lullabied Andrew with passages from The Art of Conversation. The most widely read tome with that title wasn’t actually released until 2008, while other publications with the same title, like Peter Burke’s more academic reference, weren’t yet in circulation when Andrew was a youth. Let’s assume Art of Conversation was a stand-in, for whatever reason, for Dale Carnegie’s touchstone How to Win Friends and Influence People. Ultimately, we get it: Art of Conversation is the kind of book his dad would model his personality on and try to instill lessons from in his prized protégé.

Modesto molesting Andrew
First, there’s Modesto gently taking Andrew by the hand and leading him softly up the stairs to his new room while the children are outside pondering there whereabouts and mom looks concerned. Then, far more bluntly, Modesto looms over Andrew in bed, encouraging him to channel the same silence he bravely mustered after burning his foot on a heater (a story relayed to Orth by Modesto) years back. And then the lights go out. Yikes. We have uncovered nothing to support the implication that Andrew was sexually abused by his father, though shortly after his death, the Washington Post did repeat an unconfirmed report that Andrew — using his DeSilva pseudonym — may have called into a hotline for victims of abuse by Catholic priests. Nor were we able to find anything outside of accusations by Mary Ann Cunanan and Andrew’s godfather, Delfin Labao, in Orth’s book corroborating that Modesto was physically abusive with her (ditto recollections from Pete and Delfin that Mary Ann was hospitalized with postpartum depression).

Andrew and Modesto’s Manila showdown
Several sources cited Mary Ann’s divorce filings to confirm that Andrew visited Modesto in the Philippines soon after his father fled the States. Those same sources also quote Mary Ann in the court papers as claiming her boy came back in short order, repulsed by Modesto’s “squalid living conditions.” Their dramatic confrontation, which culminate in the episode with Modesto berating his son as a “sissy boy” and Andrew showing a flash of violent impulse by warding his father away with a kitchen knife, is by all indications pure plotting. Like many of ACS Versace’s more melodramatic asides, this confrontation filled a need, in this case suitably disorienting the character of Andrew to an extent where he’d go adrift in search of love and acceptance, but become triggered by the slightest betrayal.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Fact-checking Episode 8

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. Yanez was on assignment and unavailable this week (she will return for episode eight), but below is a summary of our independent research into the veracity and potency of events and characterizations presented in episode seven, “Ascent.”

What They Got Right

Donatella’s dress
Donatella may have creatively emancipated herself from Gianni by 1992, but she made her biggest splash that year by fashioning her brother’s risqué bondage dress. Her arrival at that year’s Vogue anniversary gala was indeed headline news, whether or not one ultimately thought Helena Christensen and Christy Turlington wore modified versions of the provocative piece better. It is also true that critical opinion about Versace’s S&M look was polarized, although in retrospect, it’s clear that — par for Gianni’s career — he was ahead of his time.

Gianni grooming Donatella to run Versace
Whether it was due to his illness or simply being a long-term planner, Gianni very much prepped his younger sister to run the label. As a CNN style editor told People nearly 20 years ago, “Before his death, Versace had already begun ceding a bigger role to his sister… He wanted more time to play.” As Donatella recently recalled, the abrupt transition to power following Gianni’s murder was marred by her drug abuse and grief. Although given that the company was valued at more than $1 billion dollars as of 2014, it’s apparent that — as her brother anticipated — she eventually rose to the occasion.

The cancer timeline
A slight caveat here: The chronology of Gianni’s reported bout of inner-ear cancer is rather murky. “Ascent” pegs 1992 as the period in which he began suffering unbearable symptoms, and 1993 as when Donatella shared news of his condition with employees. In a 2006 New York interview, she referred obliquely to how the cancer had decimated him during “the last two years of his life” before it went fully into remission, though without a precise moment of diagnosis. Yet a New Yorker feature than ran shortly after Gianni’s death suggests he fell ill in ’96 (though it may have been conflating what Orth’s later reporting alleged was a separate bout with cancer in his cheek around that time). Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal ran a profile on the Versace business in 2003 that stated Gianni was “stricken with a rare ear cancer in 1995.” Short of obtaining official medical records, we’re inclined to defer to a a 1997 New York Times obit, which not only published that the ear cancer was identified in ‘93, but supported the assertion with a quote from Versace about how ”There were a lot of tests and scans and treatments that were hard.” In turn, that would authenticate ACS’s timeline of his malady as fairly precise.

Merrill Lynch in Manila
In this case, it would be apt to credit the Cunanan character with telling the truth, albeit couched in a falsehood about his father resuming successful financial work overseas. When he insists that Merrill Lynch has had offices in Manila in the Philippines since 1957, predating the corporation’s Tokyo HQ, he isn’t fibbing. An informational web page on Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Asia Pacific operations confirms that its “presence in the region dates back to 1957 when we opened offices in the Philippines and then in Japan.” If you’re ever in the area, here’s where you can visit for yourself.

Cunanan’s ex-wife
Sort of, at least based on an interview that Miami PD conducted with Andrew’s close friend Steven Nauck. A police-file summary of key Cunanan facts and rumors leads off with the notion that Cunanan “possibly has an ex-wife and child” and “divorced approximately 7-8 years ago.” (Nuack also mentioned an ex-lover named none other than David Gallo.) While dining with Norman and friends after the opera, Cunanan says his ex was named Lizzie, and proceeds to pass around a wallet-size pic of his friend Elizabeth. Since no marriage certificate for the two, nor any confirmation from Cote, has ever surfaced, we can deduce that Nuack was repeating a lie Cunanan spread to many in his orbit — including, perhaps, his ill-fated benefactor Lincoln Aston. (more on him further down).

What They Took Liberties With

Mr. Mercado
As discussed last week, all empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that Cunanan worked for a substantial period of time at his local San Diego Thrifty pharmacy. Far as why “Ascent” depicts the location as Mercado Drug Store, whose namesake owner lectures Andrew about wasting his time with glamorous magazines and daydreams, one might assume the show had difficulty securing use of Thrifty’s name and likeness. But that’s not the case, according to executive producer Brad Simpson. “This [Thrifty] franchise was owned by Filipino Americans and was located in an area near San Diego — National City — that has a large Filipino immigrant population,” he wrote in an email. “We did not seek to use the Thrifty name.” Like so many of Cunanan’s own tales, Mr. Mercado is just “a dramatic invention.”

The escort service dressing-down
The scene of Andrew being degraded and rejected by a mercenary escort-service owner who “can’t sell a clever Filipino, even one with a big dick” served its purpose, i.e. motivating Cunanan to set out on his own in search of wealthy older men he can seduce. But there’s nothing to verify that such a specifically humiliating encounter occurred. In fact, Orth reported that Cunanan was in the employ of an escort service circa the early ’90s, working in both California and Florida. Contrarily, a cringingly dated Washington Post story subsequent to Cunanan’s death on Andrew and other “trophy boys” puts forth that he was primarily an independent contractor. Either way, the job interview portrayed in “Ascent” appears to be more of a storytelling contrivance than concrete catalyst.

Andrew and David’s instant tryst
Once more, “Ascent” takes liberties with Orth’s source material, which concludes its second-hand account of Andrew and David’s San Francisco meet-cute by affirming they had a “nonsexual sleepover.” Given the episode’s explicit themes of gay alienation and the necessity of keeping sexual liaisons a clandestine matter, the images of Cunanan and Madson showering and laying together (presumably) post-coitus may have been a kind of rebuke — a refusal to castrate their intimacy. As for their place of lodging, however, the Mandarin Oriental is more than plausible. According to the FBI, it was one of his favored hotels. All of this presupposes, of course, that Orth’s anonymous eyewitnessto the pair’s supposed first brush is to be believed. Interestingly, at the dinner scene in question, Andrew introduces his friend Eli to David — as in (more than likely) Eli Gould, an attorney pal of Cunanan’s whom Orth claims was present when Andrew allegedly crossed paths with Versace in 1990.

Lincoln Aston’s murder
A la the escort-service scene, Andrew looking on as Kevin Bond bashes Lincoln’s head with a stone obelisk (that part is, gruesomely, accurate) does what it needs to: earmarking the first instance when Cunanan is riveted by bloodlust. But did he actually observe the killing, nevermind cover for Bond, a deranged loner who was eventually convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years? Firstly, per the testimony of Aston’s friend James Michael Hays, Aston met his future assailant at a club called Caliph, not Flicks. Although more broadly speaking, The Advocate and others reported accounts that Cunanan and Aston were intimate with each other, but also — along with Norman — immersed in a secretive gay social club known as Gamma Mu. This conflicts, however, with Cunanan’s friend Nuack telling Miami PD he was unaware of Andrew and Lincoln being more than platonic. In any event, we came up empty in our efforts to find a shred of documentation that Andrew watched in horror and then calm collectedness as Bond committed his savage act. Regardless, he was still on course to replicate it at David Madson’s apartment exactly two years later.

Andrew’s assault of his own mom
Did Cunanan get so fed up with his mother’s clinginess that he slammed her into and fractured her shoulder blade? As “Ascent” would have it, he did just witness a brutal murder, awakening his latent, violent tendencies. And it all fits Orth’s narrative, which attributes detail of the incident to quotes from Mary Ann’s parish priest. It’s a sensational scene, but one with no additional corroborative evidence. What’s undeniable is the damage Cunanan caused his doting mother in the wake of killing five men, and the far-from-globe-trotting circumstances he left her to get by in on her own.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Fact-checking Episode 7, ‘Ascent’