This Musician’s ‘Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Cameo Is So Haunting

American Crime Story has been jumping timeframes and locations to tell the full story of The Assassination Of Gianni Versace (executive producer: Alexis Martin Woodall). So while Gianni Versace is nowhere to be found in the Feb. 7 episode, “House By The Lake,” Andrew Cunanan’s alleged first victims in his cross-country spree are. Spoilers follow. After murdering Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock), Darren Criss’ Cunanan goes on the run in Minnesota with architect David Madson (Cody Fern). As Madson considers fleeing out of a bar’s bathroom window, Cunanan takes in a performance by a singer with an acoustic guitar. If you thought the singer looked familiar, there’s a good reason for that. Because it’s Aimee Mann in American Crime Story doing this low-key and slightly surreal cameo.

The Assassination Of Gianni Versace (film editor: Shelly Westerman) primarily takes place in 1997 and in real life, Mann was already an established musicianat that time. Her career started off with the band ‘Til Tuesday in the ’80s and in the ’90s, she was releasing solo music. By the year 2000, Mann had already released three albums as a solo artist and was nominated for an Academy Award for her music in the film Magnolia. But in American Crime Story’s version of events in 1997, Mann is just a lone cover singer in a Minnesotan dive bar off the highway.

Although American Crime Story Season 2 started in Miami Beach, Florida, the setting of Minnesota is important to “House By The Lake.” It is desolate by the rural lake where Cunanan kills his former lover Madson at the end of the episode — far different than the vibrant city of Miami Beach where Versace lived. And Mann’s performance of The Cars’ “Drive” drives that point home.

Yet, the focus isn’t on the special guest star for the scene. Instead, the camera mostly stays on Darren Criss to show how Cunanan is emotionally impacted by the singer. Trail and Madson, respectively, are the “best friend” and “love of my life” that Cunanan told Ronnie about in Episode 2. (These descriptions also match how TIME reported on Cunanan’s relationship with the two men.) Unlike other alleged victims Versace, Lee Miglin, and William Reese, Madson and Trail were a significant part of Cunanan’s personal life. So is it any wonder that he gets emotional when he hears Mann sing, “You can’t go on/Thinking nothing’s wrong, ohh no/Who’s gonna drive you home tonight?”

While the lyrics are moving, there’s actually a far more fascinating connection between “Drive” and The Assassination Of Gianni Versace. Model Paulina Porizkova, who’d go on to marry The Cars’ lead singer, is featured in the 1984 music video for the song. According to New York Magazine, Porizkova was the face of Versace four years later in 1988. It’s a point of contention if Cunanan had even ever met Versace, but the model in the “Drive” music video truly did know the fashion designer.

As for if Mann had any sort of relationship with Versace, that doesn’t appear to be the case. And while Mann has never collaborated with Ryan Murphy before, she’s no stranger to TV and film. Her voice appears on a number of soundtracks, but she has also appeared in projects ranging from The Big Lebowski, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Portlandia. She even showed up on Comedy Central’s Corporate as the well-balanced Peg Peterson just two weeks before singing on American Crime Story.

It’s most likely that American Crime Story recruited Mann because she’s an acclaimed singer-songwriter. But the one connection she does have to “House By The Lake” is the setting. Although Mann isn’t from Minnesota, her sister, Gretchen Seichrist, is based in Minneapolis. The Star Tribune reported that Mann performed with her sister in the Minnesotan city in 2010. Yet, Mann’s unnamed bar singer in American Crime Story isn’t in Minneapolis, the city highlighted at the beginning of “House On The Lake.” Instead, she performs closer to where Madson’s body would be found.

As The New York Times reported, Madson was discovered at East Rush Lake in Chisago County on Saturday, May 3 — nearly a week after Trail was killed. The lake in Rush, Minnesota, is only approximately 60 miles away from Minneapolis, according to Google Maps. But its isolated location makes it feel likes it’s further away from civilization. And while Mann’s solo singer at a lonely bar highlights that isolation, her performance also simultaneously conveys a feeling of being trapped. Because even when he has the chance to escape, Madson is still ensnared by Cunanan.

Mann’s cameo in American Crime Story was less Stevie Nicks in American Horror Story and more bar singer in True Detective Season 2. Her identity doesn’t necessarily matter to the plot because what’s important are the emotions she brings up for Cunanan and the viewers. As the final moments of “House On The Lake” blur the line between fantasy and reality, Mann’s dream-like performance manages to have the same effect. And her beautifully painful rendition of “Drive” will haunt you long after the episode.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Episode 3 Review: By The Lake House

This week, we continue to work our way backwards through Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree, going to Minneapolis in April of 1997, a week before he killed Lee Miglin. Once again Gianni is absent from the story named for him, though we all know true crime cares more about perpetrators than victims, and so far it has paid off for American Crime Story.

Unlike last week, this week’s murder comes right away. Or at least, the first one does. Andrew murdering Jeff is immediate, calculated, and blocked so it isn’t shown on-screen. But the sound and the blood-spatter are bad enough. They use scene blocking strategic framing to hide the murder, hiding Jeff’s mangled dead body with the dog the way another show would jokily obscure nudity.

Going backwards like this is an interesting choice. The obvious advantage is starting the first episode with the death of Gianni Versace. One thing we lose, ironically, is the sense of Andrew becoming a killer. This way, it feels like he always was one, like it was some sort of dark destiny for him, to the point where his not murdering the john in episode 2 was a bit of a surprise. This episode tries to walk us back to a time when murder wasn’t Andrew’s default. It’s marginally successful at that specific task, though superb at others. When Andrew tells David no one else will get hurt it feels obviously untrue, but when Andrew tells David that he will never hurt him, Darren Criss sells it: Cunanan might even believe his own lies.

Cody Fern gave an excellent performance here as David, as did Finn Wittrock with his brief, restrained performance as Jeff, a man who was both terrified and certain he was worrying for nothing. David’s fear is palpable as he backs away from Andrew in his own apartment, runs from him in his final moments, or in more reserved moments like interacting with neighbors outside while fearing what Andrew will do to them. The best moments, though, are his interactions with his father, and seeing him realize that everything about killing Jeff was calculated. It naturally begs the question: how did Andrew make the leap to someone who carries out such grisly, intentional murders?

There’s something brutal about watching another person Cunanan victimizes call 911 and then hang up. Whether he believed Andrew, or simply sensed that he was unstable and becoming agitated, David complied and hung up. Andrew directly engages with how homophobia would color David’s interactions with the authorities, praying on very real fears of the time. David’s use of gay marriage being illegal as a way to brush off the over-eager Andrew is another sign of the times.

It’s painful to watch the cold, controlled way Cunanan uses genuine fear of homophobia to his advantage, particularly when it’s juxtaposed with a story of David and his father, who ultimately stood by him when he came out. Once again – or rather, for the first time – Cunanan intentionally leaves his victim’s gay porn out for law enforcement to find, which feels a bit like the impulse of many perpetrators of domestic violence (which this surely is) to decide that if they can’t have their partner, they will ruin them, one way or another.

I’ve got to think one of the only things as terrifying as being told your child has been murdered is being told they are a murderer, and both happened within a week to David Madson’s parents. But they knew their boy – we see that David’s inclination to call his father when he was in trouble was a good one. It also makes his imaginary safety with his father particularly poetic. His father surprised me by not forcing hunting onto his son any further, and by not giving him a hard time for not liking it. Coming out didn’t go quite as well, though also not as terrible as I imagined. His father didn’t approve, but he still loves his son. Sadly, this is what passes for “taking it well” in the 90s.

Darren Criss continues to wow as Andrew Cunanan, and this week we see a few different shades of the killer. After killing Jeff, Andrew treats David the way one might treat a scared loved after saving them from a violent intruder, reassuring him and gently guiding him toward next steps. But here, Andrew is the intruder.

There is an echo of David’s squeamishness around hunting with his father in the way Andrew tells him to turn away when he rolls up Jeff’s body in the rug. Andrew has cast himself as protector, and later as gleeful boyfriend on his first road trip as a couple. As David points out, there’s a very fuzzy line between when Andrew knows he’s lying and when he falls for himself. He seems to wrestle with that, or perhaps the realization that he will need to kill David, as Aimee Mann covers Drive by The Cars at a roadside bar. David sees through Andrew’s lies and Andrew can’t live with that, even if that means murdering the man he thought he loved.

More so than in the prior episode, ACS shows us how law enforcement falls short. From the beginning, they make assumptions that buy Andrew more time, rather than investigating. It’s unclear whether these shortcomings are motivated by any prejudice or simply the universal neglect that is corner-cutting assumptions. These assumptions lead them to jump from the theory that David is the victim to David as killer, ignoring the only real evidence they have in two character witnesses, David’s work colleague and apartment building manager.

★★★★☆

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Episode 3 Review: By The Lake House

Why ‘Versace’ Profiles Cunanan Victims David Madson and Jeffrey Trail

Andrew Cunanan began his killing spree in early 1997, when he murdered his friends David Madson and Jeffrey Trail. The two men take center stage in the fourth and fifth episodes of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which detail Trail and Madson’s slayings, deaths that happened months before Cunanan gunned down fashion designer Gianni Versace on the front steps of his Miami mansion.

Screenwriter Tom Rob Smith, who penned every episode of the FX anthology’s second season, said he structured the season to juxtapose the similarities and differences between Cunanan (Darren Criss) and Versace (Edgar Ramirez), and how both men dealt with societal homophobia in extremely different ways. One thrived as a fashion designer, the other turned into a conartist/serial killer.

“If you look at the crimes themselves, they express various facets of homophobia. They’re very different,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter. “You have the murder of Jeff, which is clearly about someone who should have had this brilliant military career. He was the perfect soldier, utterly dedicated, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was just such a travesty. You have people who went to give their lives for their country and to say to them, ‘We don’t want your life.’ Or, ‘Your life is meaningless to us.’ It seems to me irrational and cruel, and it destroys people. [Next week’s DADT episode] is about how he was killed in a way before he was killed. In this sense that the real killer of Jeff was that policy.”

He continued, “And then you have a very different facet of homophobia with the second victim, David. You had this brilliant young man caught up in a murder, and so ashamed of who he is that he just can’t say to Andrew, ‘I need to go to the police now.’ Why doesn’t he break from that guy much sooner? It’s because he just knows, ‘If I go to the police, they won’t believe me.’ That’s heartbreaking.”

Cody Fern, who plays Madson, said his character struggled with an internalized shame that prevented him from standing his ground against Cunanan.

“David is dealing with the shame of what he’s been carrying around, having hidden, and ultimately feeling like maybe he’s complicit in Jeff’s death,” Fern told THR. “Is that something to do with that thing that’s inside of him that society finds ugly, particularly at that time?”

In next week’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” episode, Trail’s backstory is told through the lens of his military service, and juxtaposed with Versace’s public coming out. Finn Wittrock, who plays the Navy veteran, said the fact that his character was a dedicated soldier trying to serve his country makes his story even more heartbreaking.

“He was a young man trying to make some kind of change, but he also just wanted to do his best,” he said. “He really believed in being in the service. He believed in being in the Navy and he actually believed that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was hurting America.”

The way Trail is portrayed in the series is absolutely true, according to Vulgar Favors author Maureen Orth, who wrote the book on which Smith based his ACS season. The reason Trail left the Navy in real life, however, is different than what the series purports.

“He was a really straight arrow, great guy, and he came from a lovely family, and that’s all very, very true — his background and how much he loved the military,” she said. “But by the time he left the Navy I think he was done with it.”

Although Orth said Cunanan thought Madson was the love of his life, Madson didn’t reciprocate those feelings. And both Madson and Trail were worried about Cunanan’s behavior before their deaths.

“Both Jeff and David began feeling very uneasy, and Andrew was spiraling down into drugs and S&M pornography,” she said. “People didn’t want to be around him, and they were rejecting him. And after he had lavished so much material things on both of them and they never said no, for the most part. He felt very used, I guess.”

Trail was the first person Cunanan killed, and Wittrock told THR he thinks it was a turning point for him.

“I think in some sad way, he was sort of the beginning of the end. I think Andrew had a bit of a fascination with him that wasn’t quite reciprocated from Jeff’s point of view,” the actor said. “This is, of course, me speculating on his character, but then it begins the downward spiral of his psychosis and his mania.”

Why ‘Versace’ Profiles Cunanan Victims David Madson and Jeffrey Trail

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Fact-checking Episode 4

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 fourth episode, “House by the Lake.”

What They Got Right

The killing spree beginning in Minneapolis
“When Versace’s killed and we know right away it’s this guy named Andrew Cunanan, we start going backwards too,” Yanez recalls of she and her colleagues’ reporting at the time. “We find out it all begins in Minneapolis, and it was confusing because these two guys are friends of his. Things began to be pieced together and also got kind of discombobulated. We found out that [Jeffrey] Trail had been the first, and then the [David] Madson thing, it was always, ‘Did he go with Cunanan voluntarily and then something happened?’ His murder was always confusing. Was he a Patty Hearst or was he really forced the whole time? But once Versace was killed, we pay attention to those Minneapolis murders.”

The police making homophobic assumptions
Yanez remembers how police and investigators were susceptible to stereotyped hunches because Cunanan, Trail, and Madson were gay. “The fact that they were gay murders plays a role,” she says, “because basically you could say this was a domestic dispute, a lover’s triangle.

Cunanan’s motive
“Everybody that he kills, they always had something that he aspired to,” Yanez says. “I think he liked the life Madson had. He was going up in the world, and so was Trail. Miglin was rich and well-known and Versace was famous and adored. He went and killed people who had things he wanted. Once these two people who he saw as his road to that turned his back on him, he killed them.”

A case of mistaken identity
Police on the scene in Madson’s loft (which, incidentally, was located at 286 N. 2nd Avenue, not 837 as depicted in ACS: Versace, and was already an infamous locale) did indeed believe Trail’s body to be David’s initially. “At first, we all heard everybody thought the murder victim was Madson rolled up in the carpet,” says Yanez. “And then it was like, ‘Oh no, it’s the other guy.’ [They were] trying to figure out how it all fits — ‘So the victim doesn’t live here, and the person who lives here is missing, and then there’s another person.’ The whole thing was very confusing for police, and the story from Minneapolis was changing.” Ultimately, a telltale duffle bag with Cunanan’s information set investigators on the right path, although the delay in uncovering that evidence still haunts the real Sgt. Tichich. “It was kind of embarrassing to me,” he told CBS Minnesota in 2017.

Trail’s tense relationship with Cunanan
Reporters spoke with Jeff’s older sister, Candace Parrott, not long after his death, and she confirmed that Cunanan had become something of an intrusive presence, though he was too nice to simply discard him. A mutual friend of Cunanan and Trail’s added to the L.A. Times that Jeff was leery of Andrew after a falling out. Parrott also mentioned Cunanan’s physical emulation of Trail, which might explain their similar sweats-and-jeans attire in the episode. Even though, as the Star-Tribune details, Trail was actually wearing a flannel and navy T-shirt at the time of his death.

Cunanan’s tall tales about Mexico
Yanez backs up the idea that Cunanan would allege to running drugs across the Mexican border, as he claims in this episode. “We did hear he had done that to make money,” she says. Cunanan definitely had steroids on him at the time of Trail and Madson’s murders, and friends of Cunanan’s told the Star-Tribune that he’d bragged about being involved in the testosterone trade. Though, as Yanez cautions, “You can never really nail down anything he’d ever done, illicit or normal.”

Madson’s broken buzzer
It was true that Madson or someone else in the loft had to head downstairs and let visitors in. According to the Star-Tribune, he simply never programmed the buzzer to do as it was intended, that it was merely “a running joke among his friends. Someone always has to go down to the lobby.”

What They Took Liberties With

Trail and Madson’s relationship
“In real life, it’s implied. In the show, it’s sort of, ‘He knows about us,” offers Yanez regarding Trail and Madson’s potential romantic connection. Trail was also seriously involved with Jon Hackett, his boyfriend at the time, who happened to turn 22 that tragic Sunday. But Star-Tribune’s January 1998 report confirmed that, anecdotal reports aside, Trail and Madson were only known to be acquaintances.

Cunanan and Madson’s road trip
The suggestion in “House by the Lake” is that Andrew and David were on the road for several days, with David kept captive by force but also hesitating to escape on at least one occasion. Some details of that account roughly scan: The two were supposedly spotted at a bar, though the establishment’s owner told the L.A. Times that they had lunch on an outside deck, as opposed to watching Aimee Mann perform (but you knew that) inside at night. And the journey did end with Cunanan brutally killing Madson beside a lake with bullet holes in the back, face, and right eye. But the actual doctor who performed Madson’s autopsy believed he was slain far sooner. Adding to the confusion was a parking receipt found in Madson’s car from a Chicago garage dated April 30. “I remember [them] going back and forth,” Yanez says of the mystery receipt and debate over whether Cunanan and Madson had traveled to the Windy City and then back to Minnesota. Equally unclear is whether Cunanan traveled to Minneapolis in the first place with premeditated murders on his mind. “The sense was they were spontaneous,” Yanez remembers. “He’d never killed before, so something happens. It’s some sense of betrayal that makes him snap.”

Prints the dog
For whatever it’s worth, Madson’s dog was a Dalmatian according to both neighbors’ and families’ accounts. Though per the Star-Tribune, Madson and a man believed to be Cunanan were spotted walking Prints together after Trail’s murder, and Madson was noted to be acting strangely.

Madson’s private life
Neither Madson nor Trail was necessarily out to all their loved ones, but “House by the Lake” conflates the two men to form an empathic composite embodied by Madson. “We thought he was openly gay,” Yanez recounts about Madson. “Here he struggles with it, it’s a big conflict in his life.” In fact, by the mid-’90s, Madson had already done considerable work in, and given lectures on, AIDS education and advocacy as both a graduate student at University of Minnesota and after academia. Meanwhile, Trail’s sister shared with People that Jeffrey — a military veteran — was reticent to come out as gay to his parents after struggling to feel comfortable with his sexuality.

Who spotted the body?
Madson’s coworker Linda was at the scene when Trail’s body was found, but when CBS Minnesota revisited that day with both Linda and building manager Jennifer Wiberg last year, it was revealed that Wiberg first happened upon Trail rolled up in the bloody carpet. “There was blood all over,” she told the radio station. “I remember seeing dark hair sticking out of the top of the carpet, later mentioning that it didn’t look like David’s hair.”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Fact-checking Episode 4

‘American Crime Story’ Recap: Andrew Savagely Murders A Friend & Former Lover

This episode starts out on April 27, 1997, exactly one week before Lee Miglin’s murder. Andrew is in the midst of an argument with David Madson, his former lover. Andrew is acting closed off and robotic. David goes downstairs to get their friend Jeff Trail. David tells Jeff that Andrew proposed. Jeff seems indifferent to Andrew. “He knows about us,” David says to Jeff, who doesn’t believe it. Jeff never wants to see Andrew again. He’s just here to get his gun back from Andrew. But Jeff walks right into his own grave. Andrew attacks Jeff with a claw hammer the second he walks through the door. Andrew hits him over and over again. Jeff’s blood spatters everywhere.

David watches it all go down in horror. Afterwards, Andrew calmly walks over and hugs David. He tries to comfort David. Andrew pulls David into the shower to clean him. “Are you going to kill me?” David asks. Andrew says no, but you can tell David doesn’t believe him. David starts to freak out and wants to call the police. David gives Andrew some space, but when he walks into the living area later, Andrew still hasn’t called. Andrew starts spinning a narrative that could implicate David in the crime. This is David’s apartment, and David is the one who brought Jeff up in the first place. David calls 911, and that’s the first time Andrew seems uneasy. He quickly pulls his gun out and waves it in front of David, which pushes David to hang up the phone.

Andrew says the police will see two suspects, not two victims. David just wants to call his dad. Andrew manipulates David every which way and won’t let him leave. David suddenly realizes that walking the dog could be his way out. As David and Andrew try to leave the apartment, they both realize Jeff’s body is still lying there after Andrew slaughtered him. Andrew doesn’t waste any time grabbing a rug and rolling Jeff’s body up in it. Andrew tells David to look away. David helps him move Jeff’s body across the apartment. Andrew cleans up the blood, and David just watches completely shell-shocked. Andrew stresses that no one else will get hurt as long as David stays by his side.

David’s co-worker Linda comes to check on him after he doesn’t show up to work. When the landlord opens the door, David and Andrew are gone. Detectives Tichich and Jackson arrive. They think the body is David’s body. Linda tells them about Andrew. When she says David’s hair is blond, Tichich checks the body and finds the victim as brown hair. Tichich thinks it’s actually Andrew! He believes David is still alive and the police don’t have a search warrant for the apartment, so the whole case could be compromised. The detectives think David is the killer. But David’s never been a killer. David has never been able to take a life. The body is taken the coroner, and the police finally figure out that Jeff is the one who’s dead.

Andrew acts like nothing is wrong now that he and David are on the run. He says that he knows Lee Miglin in Chicago. “He owes me,” Andrew admits, before adding that Lee will give them money to get to Mexico. David worries about how this will impact his parents. When the police confront his parents, they’re adamant David had nothing to do with Jeff’s murder.

Andrew and David stop at a bar. David thinks about escaping through the bathroom window, but it’s almost as if he’s accepted his fate. Meanwhile, Andrew is crying over a performance of The Cars’ “Drive.” In these brief moments, the broken Andrew finally reveals himself as a lonely and desperate man. David comes back to the table and holds Andrew’s hands.

David looks back on the moment he told his dad he was gay. His dad didn’t agree with David’s lifestyle, but his love for his son meant more than his pride. “I love you more than I love my own life,” David’s dad told him.

David wakes up in his car in the middle of the woods. Andrew is off in the distance. At a diner, David talks about when he met Andrew. He wanted to live like Andrew once upon a time. But now he knows it was all lies. David confronts Andrew about killing Jeff, who had figured out the kind of man Andrew really is. Andrew is still living in a dream world and refuses to accept reality. David embraces his anger. He knows that Andrew wanted him to watch Jeff die. He pushes Andrew to his breaking point. Andrew points the gun at David’s chest and starts rambling about their future. This new side of David didn’t fit into Andrew’s plan.

Andrew pulls off near a lake and points his gun at David. He wants David to convince him why he should let him live. David is shaken to his core. “Why couldn’t you run away with me?” Andrew asks. This life that Andrew has envisioned isn’t real. They have to go to the police. David gets his chance to escape and runs inside a nearby trailer. When he runs through the door, he sees his father. In reality, Andrew shoots David square in the back as he tries to escape. He doesn’t stop there. As David gasps for breath, Andrew shoots him again in the eye. Andrew lies with David’s body for a while, and then leaves David there to rot.

‘American Crime Story’ Recap: Andrew Savagely Murders A Friend & Former Lover

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Actor Explains Why David Madson Didn’t Run

[Caution: Spoilers about Episode 4 of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story ahead!]

FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is now, and for the foreseeable future, the story of how Andrew Cunanan became one of the FBI’s most wanted during his 1997 murder spree. That story becomes especially disturbing in Episode 4, “House by the Lake,” which includes the gruesome depiction of Jeff Trail’s (Finn Wittrock) murder, filmed more or less exactly as it happened according to the source material Vulgar Favors.

More will be explained later in the series, but Jeff, a clean-cut Naval alum who was closeted for most of his life, befriended Andrew (played by (Darren Criss) in San Francisco. Over time, he got fed up with Andrew’s constant lies and manipulation and tried to cut him off. Andrew and Jeff were also friends with David Madson, a man Andrew dated briefly who eventually tried to cut him off for the same reasons. Jeff was the first person Andrew killed. It was his most barbaric attack too, ambushing him in David’s apartment as depicted. But the terror didn’t stop there. For several days after killing their friend Jeff, Andrew took David Madson (Cody Fern) on the run with him, and David made no known attempt to call authorities or escape.

As Ryan Muphy did with The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, Versace makes decades-old events, the outcomes of which are already public knowledge, feel like they’re happening in the exact moment. Darren Criss’ intoxicating performance makes Jeff’s murder and David’s unforced captivity urgent and believable too — so much so that it’s almost impossible to watch the scenes play out and not hope, scream or pray that David runs. Of course, no one can know what was said between them in some of the moments portrayed — whether Andrew constrained David with explicit threats or by psychological manipulation will forever remain a mystery. But the tragic truth is that David died at Andrew’s hand. From April 27, when Jeff was murdered, until David’s body was found May 3, David stayed with the man who later killed him, likely terrified. But why didn’t he run? For Fern, the question was central to playing David on screen.

“I think it’s such a complex bag of questions,” he told TV Guide. “He was Andrew’s lover. He’d experienced something traumatic — he was in shock. He was afraid for other people’s lives as much as he was afraid for his life.”

David and Andrew met in December of 1995, according to Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors. Their relationship was built on fraud and manipulation from the start: Andrew was living with an older rich man, Norman Blachford, during a good chunk of their relationship, so he didn’t let David call him or send mail with a return address. Andrew plied David with gifts though, as he did many people, and indulged his S&M fantasies with David until Andrew’s increasingly rough sexual demands became a source of strife between them. They broke up in the spring of 1996, but Andrew kept David’s picture taped to his refrigerator door. When his life began to crumble as a result of constant deception and drug use, Andrew became fixated on the idea that David was his only love. As it happens, Andrew wasn’t David’s only unstable lover, either: a previous ex had become a stalker, calling David as much as 120 times a day and eventually being jailed for violating a court order to stay away. In any case, Madson was a “peacemaker,” Orth wrote, a man who loathed violence and avoided confrontation. He frequently talked his way out of things.

Vulgar Favors’ intensely researched study of Andrew and David gives it license to theorize why David didn’t try to flee. Andrew knew David avoided confrontation and was squeamish around violence. Orth even speculates that the handcuffs and leg restraints Andrew enjoyed could’ve been used to hold David captive. More than likely though, Andrew simply kept David paralyzed with fear. Experts in the book said that Andrew could’ve easily convinced David that he’d be a suspect if he went to police, which is exactly how Versace depicted depicted their relationship. A law enforcement official said that the brute force shown in the murder would’ve easily convinced David that Andrew had power over him, instilling a fear that’s common in violent abusive relationships. The intense fear of retribution — even after a break — makes the Stockholm syndrome theory in David’s case not at all surprising. Other issues were at play too.

“He was also a man dealing with an intense amount of shame in the 90s,” said Fern. Though David’s father told Orth he never treated his son any differently after David came out to him, his religious beliefs mandated that David’s sexual orientation was a sin he disapproved of. Though David wasn’t religious in the traditional sense, he absorbed his dad’s values. After the initial shock wore off, “[David] is asking himself, ‘Is his man redeemable?’” Fern said. “He’s asking himself, ‘How am I complicit in this? I let my friend in — I brought him into the apartment. This my fault.’”

When he was found, David had been shot three times. Orth quotes a sergeant as saying David probably got taken by surprise: he had defense wounds on his hands and his body had apparently been dragged about 20 feet from where his killing took place. It’s possible David was methodically plotting an escape — perhaps sweet-talking Andrew while psyching himself up to make a bold move. That thinking, Fern said, informs the scene with Andrew where David calls himself a coward and then attempts to commandeer the Jeep’s steering wheel in a moment of desperate bravery. “The important thing to remember is that this is a man going through something more intense than anyone could ever imagine,” Fern said.

It’ll remain a tragic unanswered question, rooted in both men’s deeply embedded shame and guilt over their sexual orientation, and fears how people would perceive them no matter what they did. “That was the whole journey of the character,” Fern said. “The whole character arc is about that question. Why didn’t [David] run?”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Actor Explains Why David Madson Didn’t Run

“ACS: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace” Episode 4 Recap: “House By The Lake”

I wish I was not the kind of fool who roots for a happy ending because The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story keeps putting my heart in a vice. This week’s “The House By The Lake” was another visually distinct episode that started out in Minneapolis, and followed architect and nice man David Madson (Cody Fern) on the run with Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss).

The start of the episode was such a classic horror show. It was immediately tense, and Cunanan was so looming. I realized that I hate him so much now, which is impressive considering how likable Darren Criss normally is. Every interaction between Madson and Cunanan inside that ominous ‘90s apartment feels like it goes on forever, and it reminded me of the uneasy gut feeling Get Out built up, where you can’t help but yell at the screen, “Run!” I just wanted the tension to end so badly.

I lost some respect for Cunanan’s charisma in this episode since he is actually not that great of an emotional manipulator. Not that emotional manipulation is such an admirable skill, but I sense Cunanan takes pride in it. The ugly truth of this episode is that Cunanan is actually just physically threatening Madson the entire time. Some moments feel like more gentle coercion maybe, but a significant amount of the episode takes place at gunpoint. Later, when Cunanan is trying to be sweet and offer Madson the carrot instead of the stick, I just wanted to slap the glasses off his handsome face. It got to the point where it was therapeutic for me to have Madson as my onscreen surrogate, getting madder and madder at him until the very end.

I keep harping on this because I’m brilliant and always right, but women are yet again the ones who follow their intuition and check on Madson’s apartment. Maybe we were meant to feel the detective’s judgment of homosexuality, but it also felt to me like there was a subtle distrust of the women by the cops, when in fact, they appeared to be helpful. Without them, it could have taken way longer to start the investigation. I also just thought the cops were garbage because who would ever say, “your friend’s the killer” after taking a few quick glances around a loft? Ass. Plus, his comments to Madson’s parents that there’s a great deal they don’t know about their son were incredibly condescending and ultimately inaccurate, but I appreciate that American Crime Story frequently revisits the sometimes antagonistic relationship between victims, their families, and the police. All parties are human, and the system is imperfect.

The rest of the episode reminded me of Misery on wheels. After the moment when Cunanan tells Madson that he should start thinking about his new life, I realized what an insane hostage experience Madson is having. Why would he want a new life? His life seems good. He’s working as a hot shot architect in a more hip version of the American Psycho apartment. I would almost go as far as to say that Cunanan might have misjudged the extent of Madson’s loneliness and loyalty to him, judging by how much resistance he gets from him at each step of the journey.

A beautiful shining oasis of calm in this episode came when I realized it was Amy Mann singing that gorgeous cover of The Cars’ ”Drive.” She was so casual, almost as if she’s rubbing it in your face that being fabulous isn’t hard for her. We also see Cunanan cry, which terrifies me, but is also a dirty trick that got me to think maybe I’ve been wrong about him. When Madson woke up alone in the next scene, for one naive moment, I was hoping Cunanan had let him go.

I thought Cody Fern did a masterful job of playing David, who was a real lover of Andrew’s. I thought he looked incredibly young, and it turns out he was only 33 when he was murdered. He was absolutely someone with a full life ahead of him, and the scene where he presented his achievements to his dad while also coming out to him reminded me of the “Best Little Boy in the World” hypothesis, or the idea that some gay men will seek out traditional and measurable successes in a potential attempt to deflect attention away from their sexuality. A little digging into Madson’s real life revealed that he had applied and been accepted to both architecture and law school. Cunanan told his friend’s that Madson was the love of his life, which must be taken with a grain of salt because of his compulsive lying, but it is interesting that he’s one of the only love interests we’ve seen so far that was roughly a peer. But as soon as you start to like someone in this series, they’re gone. Given the frantic pace, Cunanan’s red Jeep is starting to feel like the only recurring character I can count on.

I was caught off guard but not mad when the episode slipped into surrealism for its big finish. When Madson is drinking coffee with his father, I knew he was dead, but I still left 1% of my heart open to the possibility that he got away, or that someone else was inside the trailer. I think true crime does a darkly magical thing: you know what’s going to happen and it still manages to be shocking and painful.

“ACS: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace” Episode 4 Recap: “House By The Lake”

ACS: Versace Recap: Hammer Time

Finn Wittrock’s appearance on Wednesday’s American Crime Story: Versace was over as quickly as it began. (Don’t worry, we’ll see him again next week.)

This week’s installment — the second in a row to be completely devoid of all things, you know, Versace — turned back the clock yet again, this time to a week before Andrew Cunanan drove to Chicago and killed Lee Miglin.

At this point, he was living with a handsome young architect named David Madson — played by Cody Fern, the latest in a series of phenomenal guest stars — but we quickly learned there was trouble in paradise. In fact, David had recently turned down Andrew’s marriage proposal, leading him to suspect that David was in love with a guy named Jeff, played by Wittrock. To be fair, David and Jeff did have feelings for one another, but I hardly think Jeff deserved to be bludgeoned to death with a hammer and rolled up in a carpet.

Yet that’s exactly what Andrew did, planning out the whole evening so that David would appear to be the one who let Jeff into his apartment. “They’re not going to see two victims,” Andrew argued when David tried to call the police. “They’re going to see two suspects.” And when that didn’t work, Andrew resorted to Plan B, letting his gun do the talking.

Andrew had essentially taken David captive at this point, forcing him into the life of a fugitive on the run. But they never made it to Mexico, no sir. After David attempted to steer their truck off the road, Andrew pulled over, giving David a head start before pumping his chest full of lead. Tragic as it was, though, there was something beautiful about the portrayal of David’s death; in his final moments, he imagined entering a cabin and seeing his father, finally connecting to a man with whom he’d had a complicated relationship in life. (Andrew cradling David’s corpse, on the other hand, was notably less beautiful.)

Prior to his murder, David gave Andrew the full dressing down audiences have been waiting for, telling him that his entire life is a lie, an act, which is why no one would ever truly get close to him. The two also had an honest — as honest Andrew could be, anyway — conversation about shame, which David thought he might fear even more than death.

ACS: Versace Recap: Hammer Time

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 4: Feline Intuition

By now, it seems clear that the most compelling characters in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” are neither the slain fashion designer, shot to death outside his Miami Beach mansion in 1997, nor Andrew Cunanan, the psychopath who killed him.

Instead, that distinction belongs to more transient characters: in Episode 3, Marilyn Miglin, the widow of a Chicago real-estate developer whom Cunanan murdered; and now in Episode 4, David Madson, a semi-closeted Minneapolis architect who has the misfortune of attracting Cunanan’s amorous attention.

Unlike “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” this second season of “American Crime Story” lacks larger-than-life characters like Marcia Clark and Johnnie Cochran, with their operatic personalities, ambitions and clashes. Cunanan’s homicidal outburst captured headlines, but largely because of the fame of his final victim. His earlier victims remained mostly obscure.

As “Versace” moves backward in time, it attempts to draw out those victims’ lives — and in the case of Miglin’s husband and Madson, their closeted sexuality is a unifying theme. Whether the portrayals are accurate is for others to decide — several relatives of Cunanan’s victims have criticized the series and “Vulgar Favors,” the book by Maureen Orth on which it is based. But I admit, almost grudgingly, that it has worked powerfully as a narrative frame for portraying the victims, even if their killer’s motivations remain a mystery so far.

Just as Judith Light, portraying a widow in denial about her husband’s homosexuality, was the breakout star of the last episode, so Cody Fern, as David Madson, stands out in this one. His journey of self-discovery is both literal — Andrew coerces David into joining him on a road trip after killing David’s secret lover — and symbolic. David realizes who he is, and what he is running from, only when it is too late. It is the stuff of tragedy.

The episode begins in Madson’s warehouse-size loft apartment, which is lined with gray-metal shelves. David and Andrew have been bickering, and while their relationship isn’t exactly explained, a romance gone sour is implied. The buzzer rings; downstairs is a man named Jeff, whom Andrew has asked over, much to David’s irritation.

Andrew sends David downstairs to let him in. In the lobby and elevator, we learn a lot:

• David tells Jeff that Andrew proposed marriage, calling David “the man of his dreams” and “his last chance at happiness.”

• David says that he declined, noting that gay marriage isn’t legal, but that Andrew thinks Jeff is “the reason I said no.” Jeff is surprised that Andrew knows that Jeff and David have been together. “He has this feline intuition,” David says.

• Jeff says that Andrew took a gun from Jeff’s apartment, and that he has come to get it back.

As we are processing all this, the two men enter the apartment, and what happens next is a murder with a claw hammer too vicious and grisly for me to watch.

Terrified and stricken, David seems to go numb. He asks why Andrew killed Jeff; Andrew replies, “I lost control.”

David calls 911, but Andrew compels him to hang up by saying that if the police arrive, they will both go to prison, disingenuously eliding the fact that it was he who set all this in motion. He goes on to argue that homophobia makes justice impossible anyway. “When the police open the door they’ll see two suspects, not two victims,” he says. And when David insists he is no killer, Andrew replies: “They won’t believe you. They hate us, David, they’ve always hated us. You’re a fag.”

Queer people have a term for such self-serving cynicism: Chutzpah.

As he’s forced to flee with Andrew, David comes to see the journey as a symbol for a life of evasion: “I’m playing over everything the police are going to find out about me, and I realize I’ve been doing this my whole life: playing over and over the moment that people found out about me.” On the road later, he adds: “Was I really afraid, when I got in this car with you, that you were going to kill me? Or was I afraid of the disgrace, the shame of it all. Is that what I’m running from?”

In David’s hometown, Barron, Wis., his stunned parents learn from the Minneapolis detectives that a stranger named Jeffrey Trail was murdered in David’s home, with 27 blows from David’s steel claw hammer. The detectives tell them about another stranger, named Andrew Cunanan, whose friends in San Francisco have described as reliable, intelligent, generous. David’s father insists his son is innocent.

“I can see with certainty, there’s a great deal you don’t know about your son,” the detective says. But as we soon learn in a heart-wrenching scene, he probably knows more than the detective assumes.

In one of several flashbacks, David is shown speaking with his dad in the garage. It’s a workingman’s garage (in an earlier flashback, the two of them had gone hunting), and David has graduated from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, at the top of his class. He tells his father he is gay.

“I won’t lie and say that it doesn’t make a difference,” the father responds. “You know what I believe. And maybe this isn’t what you wanted to hear. Maybe you wanted to be told I don’t have a problem with it. I can’t say that. But what I can say is I love you more than I love my own life.”

It is a bittersweet moment, one that in its overall contours many lesbian and gay people may recognize. That someone with reasonably tolerant parents in the mid-1980s could nonetheless feel such shame and self-loathing says a lot, by implication, about those who lacked such emotional support.

We get another look at how crushing that shame and self-loathing might be, when Andrew and David stop at a roadside bar. As David ponders escaping from the bathroom, Andrew is brought to tears by a singer’s rendition of the Cars’ 1984 song “Drive,” a rare moment of true emotional vulnerability from him, his pain brimming to the surface. David, whether because he feels he can’t escape or won’t be believed, forgoes the chance to save his own life and returns to the table with Andrew. Perhaps their need for human connection is mutual.

In a diner the next day, David recalls how Andrew dazzled him when they met at a bar in San Francisco, a year and a half earlier. “What’s this man going to see in me, a small-town boy?” he remembers thinking. They ended up in a $1,000-a-night room at the Mandarin Oriental. David continues:

I remember thinking: How hard do I have to work to live like him, like Andrew? ’Cause I’ll do it. Except it was all a lie. You’ve never worked for anything. It was an act. Is that why you killed Jeff? You loved him. It was so obvious. But he figured you out in the end, didn’t he? It took him a few years but he finally saw the real you, and you killed him for it.

Andrew tries to change the subject, promising David that they’ll lead a glamorous life in Mexico. He can’t stop lying.

Back in the car, David arrives at a further, belated discovery — that Jeff was set up, that Andrew planned all along to kill him in David’s presence. “Why are you always talking about the past?” an enraged Andrew asks. “We had a plan. We had a future.”

They pull over. David’s fate is sealed.

Episode 3 argued that denial could be a tool of survival. Episode 4 points out that recognition — of oneself, of the true character of others — can exact a lethal price.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 4: Feline Intuition