Here’s what we know about David Madson’s life in the days leading up to his murder: On Friday, April 25, 1997, Andrew Cunanan took a one-way flight from his home in San Diego to Minneapolis to visit his old friend Jeff Trail and former boyfriend Madson. Although Madson wasn’t thrilled to see Cunanan, the young architect did reluctantly host his ex at his loft.

They were spotted at restaurants, bars, and clubs, but after dinner on Saturday, they parted ways. Trail, who had no desire to spend time with Cunanan, had left town with his boyfriend and invited Cunanan to stay in his empty room Saturday night. While it’s not clear whether Cunanan slept at Trail’s place, he was there Sunday morning and back at Madson’s the same evening. At nine that night, Trail got in his car to meet Cunanan at a coffee shop. By 10 PM, Trail was dead.

The coffee shop meetup hadn’t happened, so Trail had come to Madson’s building. Evidence suggests Cunanan killed his friend almost immediately after his arrival, landing his first blow with the door open. It’s possible Madson was home at the time, but in Vulgar Favors, the book this season of American Crime Story is based on, author Maureen Orth judges it “unlikely.” He didn’t show up for work Monday; a neighbor saw two men, one of whom appeared to be Madson, walking a dog that could have been Madson’s on Tuesday morning. The same day, concerned that he’d neither come in to the office nor called in sick, two women Madson knew through work knocked on his door. One thought she heard whispers.

An hour after another neighbor spotted Cunanan and a distraught-looking Madson approaching the building, the women returned with the lofts’ caretaker, opened the door, found the body, saw that the apartment was empty, and called the police. Because his acquaintances knew Madson was gay—and because Cunanan had left a bag containing gay porn videos, steroids, and bullets—Sergeant Bob Tichich’s first guess was that Madson was the victim, and the crime was “a gay thing.”

As Trail’s parents learned of his death (and, then, his homosexuality), Cunanan and Madson were on the run. On May 3, two fisherman in rural Chisago County, Minnesota, found Madson’s body near East Rush Lake. He’d been shot three times with a gun Cunanan had stolen from Trail, and sustained defensive wounds. It’s unclear how long Madson lived; Orth pokes holes in a coroner’s report that puts his date of death at May 2 and debunks a bar owner’s claim to have served Madson and Cunanan that afternoon. The sighting turned out to have happened on April 27, and the two men who visited the bar were, in all likelihood, an entirely different gay couple.

All of which is to say that most of last night’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode, “House by the Lake,” was invented by writer Tom Rob Smith. Which is fine! There’s nothing wrong with a docudrama using some artistic license. And in the case of this episode, many of the choices must have been made out of necessity—much of the hour finds Andrew and David alone, and two dead men can’t exactly go on record about their road trip.

So: Did Andrew purposely leave his porn stash at David’s loft? Were they on the road together for several days? Once they left Minneapolis, did Andrew intend for them to go to Chicago and then Mexico together? Did the plan unravel when David started poking holes in Andrew’s Natural Born Killers fantasy? The answer to all of these questions—not to mention the one about the scene where Aimee Mann covers The Cars’ “Drive” at a roadhouse—is “We don’t have the faintest clue.”

In keeping with the show’s running theme, Smith constructs a story about homophobia and the way Andrew uses it to manipulate another gay man. When David tries to call the police, Andrew convinces him that they’d see him as a perpetrator, too. “They hate us, David,” he says. “You’re a fag.” He’s not entirely wrong: the cops really do assume David’s queerness has something to do with the murder, and that Jeff’s body is initially presumed to be David’s and that David, not Andrew, becomes a suspect when police see he’s not the corpse—both of which really happened—imply that the straight world saw these gay men as virtually interchangeable.

The line between the crime of murder and the crime of homosexuality (sodomy didn’t become legal across the United States until 2003) blurs. When the fugitives leave a rest stop, with Andrew’s arm slung over David’s shoulder, a woman gives them a dirty look. David is convinced that she recognizes them as wanted criminals, but the implication is that she was simply revolted to see two gay men. Before and after that encounter, David has plenty of opportunities to escape. He and Andrew walk the dog together before leaving Minneapolis. They stop at restaurants. But David only tries to bolt when he’s alone, by the side of the highway or in the bathroom of the roadhouse, even when Andrew’s behavior becomes more threatening. The big question surrounding Madson’s murder is: Why didn’t he run? As Smith imagines it, he was more afraid of putting himself at the mercy of a homophobic world than he was of a known killer.

David’s fear of his own difference is echoed in the moment when he comes out to his father. He can only summon the courage to do it after winning a prestigious academic award, and though his dad tells David, “I love you more than I love my own life,” he also reiterates that his son’s lifestyle doesn’t jibe with his own beliefs and that the revelation does, in fact, change something about their relationship. (The stuff about David’s close relationship with his family is true, by the way.) You can imagine a lifetime of interactions like this convincing someone that, if even his adoring family sees him as somehow “other,” he had no chance pleading his case to police.

It’s a well-constructed episode. The conversations between Andrew and David are rich with psychological subtext, and even if Smith sometimes states the obvious, he’s careful not to repeat it too often. Actor Cody Fern plays David, by all accounts a kind, talented, and hardworking guy, with heartbreaking sensitivity. Each episode of Versace has had a slightly different feel, and this one was a psychological thriller. From the claustrophobic shots of hallways to the bleak, low-lit, industrial interiors of David’s loft to multiple scenes where Andrew startles him—and us—by appearing as if out of nowhere, it’s eerie from beginning to end.

But I’m kind of frustrated by the liberties it takes with David Madson’s life. He’s painted as a sympathetic character, sure, but is placing him in the loft at the time of Jeff Trail’s murder, when he most likely was not there, absolutely necessary? How about framing him as stupid enough to get back in the car, after the ill-fated diner pit stop, with a killer he’d just read as hard as Jeff once had? What was the point of that moment, in the elevator, when David nervously tells Jeff (who, in real life, spent most of the weekend with his boyfriend), “He knows about us”?

Of course Smith has a right to fictionalize. Even so, Madson wasn’t a public figure like Gianni Versace or Lee Miglin, and I felt sick thinking of how those scenes would look to his family and friends. So I’ll leave you with a quote from Bridget Read’s review of Versace for Vogue, which perfectly sums up my conflicted feelings on “House by the Lake”: “We don’t have to hold all creative works about real-life suffering to the standards of what would hurt or offend surviving family members, but after watching a fictional Cunanan—whose real-life counterpart craved perhaps nothing so much as the type of fame bestowed by a prestige TV series—sadistically torture and humiliate his victims in fine detail, it’s hard not to feel like maybe we should.”

The Fourth Episode of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Isn’t as Legit as It Seems

“So often, we are told the American Dream is dead,” the fragrance mogul Marilyn Miglin tells the crowd at a fundraiser in this week’s installment of American Crime Story. (At this point, it is hard to tell if I’m the one who’s heavy-handedly foreshadowing the next episode’s themes, or if it’s Ryan Murphy.) Played by Judith Light with alternating hopelessness and chill hauteur, she’s seen first in the kind of uptight pastel-pink suit jacket that can’t help but make a woman look a) like a business-savvy mom, and b) as though she thinks the g-spot is a nightclub in the seedy part of town. She is the wife of the real estate tycoon—and Catholic, closeted gay man—Lee Miglin.

There are no scenes with Gianni in this episode, and none with the Versace family, either. What we see instead is the startling murder that appears to be a killer’s stepping-stone to full psychosis; and a lavender marriage that does not appear to be an outright sham, but merely unconventional. When Marilyn, away on business, calls the house and does not get an answer from her husband, it’s unusual enough for her to worry. When she gets back home, she finds an open, dripping ice-cream carton—chocolate-flavored, as much a visual contagion in their ivory-on-cream-on-alabaster space as the pair of gloomy couches in Todd Haynes’s Safe. It’s a sinister enough development to leave her rattled.

By the time the opening credits roll, she has been widowed, and we’ve guessed that Miglin is another victim of Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan; and we’ve guessed, too, how they knew each other. Marilyn says only, in the softest voice and to herself: “I knew it.” How much Marilyn Miglin really knew is never made apparent to us. What is made apparent is that Marilyn and Lee, whatever their dynamic, loved each other. How many men, she asks the TV camera, in a dynamite appearance on a shopping channel not long after Lee is killed, support their wives’ ambitions? How many men lift women up, instead of bring them down?

Conversely, it is never clear if Cunanan kills Miglin and exposes him because he thinks that Miglin is a hypocrite for being closeted, or because he thinks that homosexuality is shameful, something to be punished and reduced to ridicule. “I want you to know that when they find your body, you will be wearing ladies’ panties,” he hisses, “surrounded by gay porn. I want the world to see that the great Lee Miglin is a sissy.” Just after we see Cunanan beside the body, we cut to him carving, and then eating, some great hunk of red meat on the Miglins’ spotless kitchen table; it’s designed to make us think, if only for a second, that he’s actually eating Lee. The trope that a cannibal can eat a great man and absorb his powers seems tailor-made for a social-climbing sociopath who steals from every wealthy man he kills. (Think, too, of wendigos, the mythic demons in the shape of men who eat men, designed to represent the very ordinary human flaw of greed.) He is as guilty of the very Catholic sin of covetousness as he is of the legal crime of murder.

After Marilyn refers to the rumored death of the American dream—just days before the actual death of her husband—she is moved to issue a rebuttal: “Except—look at my husband, Lee. One of seven children. The son of an Illinois coal miner. He began his career selling premixed pancake batter out of the trunk of a beat-up old car. And today Lee manages 32 million square feet of commercial property across the Midwest.” The message is as clear and keenly bourgeois as a cut-glass punch bowl: rags are honorable, an inspiring plot-point, when they end in untold riches and acclaim. It was hardly accurate to say before that there had been no sign of the Versace family in this episode, when its themes of modest origins, of betterment and growth and the anointing power of lovely or expensive things, were the cornerstones of Gianni’s myth—“[originally] from a small village in Calabria overrun with poverty and corruption,” says a recent piece in Numero, “Gianni Versace built a destiny that was the complete opposite [of] his humble beginnings.”

It feels worth mentioning that the episode is called A Random Killing. I had thought at first that this referred to Marilyn’s description of her husband’s death as a random robbery—her defense against the knowledge or suspicion that he had in fact been killed by a man he’d solicited for sex. In fact, the random murder comes in the last five minutes of the show, when Cunanan escapes the scene and realizes he needs a new car. Pulling over and then following a man into a church, he leads him down into to the basement. After listening to him say, politely, that he has a wife and child, that he would very much like it, sir, if he could only see them again, the killer shoots him point-blank in the back of the skull. It is the ugliest and most indelible scene so far in a story filled with brutal, memorable vignettes of pain; and by the time we know what’s happening, it’s far too late to turn our heads away—to disengage.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: More People Are Dead But the American Dream is Still Alive

So, are you hooked on this show yet? Honestly, the first two episodes worried me. I loved last week’s American Psycho tribute, but the early scripts still jumped around too much, introducing a huge cast of characters and cramming years’ worth of vignettes about Andrew Cunanan and Gianni Versace into less than two hours. All that exposition made it hard to get emotionally invested in any one story. As soon as you started to care about Gianni and Antonio, there was Andrew bellowing “Gloria” in a stolen truck, or some FBI dope confusing Versace with Liberace.

Last night’s “A Random Killing” was something entirely different—a spare, focused episode and easily my favorite so far. I’ll get to the fact-vs-fiction part soon (promise) but first we need to talk about Judith Light. Who else could’ve played Marilyn Miglin, the wife of Cunanan’s third victim and allegedly closeted Chicago real estate magnate Lee Miglin? She’s a complicated woman. The queen of HSN is sharp enough to realize something’s wrong in her marriage, yet she loves Lee for his belief in her. And yet, her reaction to his murder is so practical! She goes into crisis-PR mode, feeding the police narratives to obscure the reality that a halo of gay bondage magazines surrounded Lee’s body. But there’s pain under the surface. When she finally lets down her guard, the monologue Light delivers about being a “real wife” is heartbreaking.

Darren Criss gives the episode’s other great performance. It’s chilling to watch Andrew slowly turn on Lee, puncturing the romantic veneer of what is actually a business transaction before mocking his powerful prey as he wraps Lee’s face in tape. Does writer Tom Rob Smith sometimes overload his dialogue with symbolism? Absolutely—“Concrete can build, but concrete can kill” is just awful—but the most revealing exchange in a mostly excellent script takes place in Lee’s study, when Andrew psychoanalyzes his host’s plan to build a tower so tall that its observation deck will look down on the Sears Tower.

Andrew sees that the project is really an egotistical power move; Lee protests, unconvincingly, that he’s only thinking of how delighted kids would be by the view. Andrew has a knack for perceiving people’s hidden dark sides, which makes his relationships with the victims he knows personally fascinating. Look for more of that next week. On to the annotations…

Lee and Marilyn Miglin

They weren’t international celebrities like Versace, but Lee and Marilyn Miglin were well known and loved in Chicago society circles. As Marilyn helpfully points out in the episode, the couple’s story was a classic “American Dream” narrative: Lee was the son of an immigrant coal miner who talked his way into his first real estate job at age 31, rising quickly from there. As Maureen Orth reports in Vulgar Favors, the firm he founded with business partner Paul Beitler built many of downtown Chicago’s most prestigious edifices, including Madison Plaza and the Chicago Bar Association Building.

The Miglins also independently owned over two dozen properties in the city. But Lee’s and Beitler’s grandest ambition, to build a 2,000-foot tower called the Skyneedle that would have been the world’s tallest building, remained unrealized. (The Chicago Tribune published a fascinating article on the project shortly after Lee’s murder.)

Marilyn was a model-turned-makeup mogul whose eponymous cosmetics line—particularly, a perfume called Pheromone—became a Home Shopping Network sensation. Orth notes her complicated personality, citing an associate who observed, “She’s not a cream puff… Marilyn hides it till she needs to bring it out.” When she returned from her business trip to Canada to find her Gold Coast townhouse in disarray, she cryptically told her neighbors, “I know he’s dead and they’ll never catch him. They’ll never find who did this.”

The lack of emotion she displayed in the wake of Lee’s murder really was a topic of local gossip. Marilyn remarried in 1999, but her second husband, the businessman Naguib Mankarious, died soon after, while getting a facelift. A lawsuit caused her to file for bankruptcy in 2007. Nevertheless, she persisted. Over a decade later, Marilyn is still alive and hawking her wares on HSN. (Here’s a video from 2017.)

Lee’s Murder

The show’s account of Lee Miglin’s murder and its aftermath sticks pretty close to the facts. Yes, Marilyn returned to find a Coke can and an open carton of ice cream in her normally spotless kitchen, while neighbors spotted a ham with a knife stuck in it in the library and signs that a dark-haired man had taken a bath in one of the bathrooms. Lee’s body was found in the garage next to an assortment of gay porn magazines, fully dressed but wearing lacy Calvin Klein bikini underwear, his ankles tied with an extension cord and his face wrapped in masking tape.

What happened before the murder isn’t nearly as clear. Was Lee Miglin a closeted gay man? How did Andrew end up in his home? Did they already have some kind of relationship? An expert told Orth that there was likely a sexual element to the killing. Signs that Cunanan had hung around at the Miglins’ for a while after the crime suggested he knew Marilyn was out of town. And a neighbor named Betsy Brazis spotted Lee talking with a younger man in his kitchen shortly before his death.

An AIDS educator, Brazis also mentioned to Orth that “Lee’s name would come up occasionally as a gay ‘straight’ man” in the support groups she led. A local queer newspaper published an anonymous report that Miglin had been spotted in gay bars, although other Chicago journalists swore to Orth that they tried and failed to find evidence that he slept with men. Meanwhile, Orth plays up Lee’s stereotypically gay characteristics, from his neatness to his effeminacy. These descriptions are kind of uncomfortable.

But the investigation into Andrew’s motive never got far, in part because Chicago law enforcement and other local officials were personally invested in protecting the family’s good name. The murder was declared random. An anonymous city official told Orth, “The case is closed. There’s nothing in the file. His employees loved him. The church loved him. His wife loved him. Case closed.” Twenty years later, the suggestion that Lee was anything less than a heterosexual family man remains controversial. A recent Chicago Sun-Times headline reads, “Revisiting Chicago murder, FX series depicts Lee Miglin as gay, close to killer.”

The piece quotes American Crime Story executive producer Brad Simspon, who explains, ““Our writer, Tom Rob Smith, had to dramatize what we believe happened that weekend starting from the established facts of the crime scene. Based on the evidence, we believe that Lee and Andrew did know each other, and Andrew’s attack, as with all his victims except for William Reese [the man Andrew kills for his truck later in last night’s episode], was targeted and specific.” The implication is that homophobia not only prevented the truth behind Miglin’s death from coming out, but—along with that exasperating car-phone leak, which did happen—also contributed to the FBI’s failure to catch Cunanan before he killed again.

Duke Miglin

Wait, there’s more. Remember Duke Miglin, Lee and Marilyn’s 25-year-old “Hollywood actor” son? Evidence exists that he and Cunanan knew each other before the murder. Although Duke and Marilyn always denied having ever met him, acquaintances of the family told Orth that there was something off about their evasions. Shortly after Lee’s death, Andrew’s friends confirmed to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that he and Duke “spoke frequently.”

And, in an interview with Orth, two of Lee’s professional acquaintances related a memorable encounter with the Miglins at United Airlines’ Red Carpet Lounge at LAX, a few years before Lee’s death. “The Miglins were on their way to Hawaii for family Christmas, and were waiting for Duke to join them,” Orth writes. “He finally arrived with a friend, who made a great impression.” When they saw Cunanan’s photo, both confirmed that he was the man they’d met at the airport.

So, what happened to Duke? Well, despite his big break in Air Force One, he didn’t pursue his Hollywood dreams for long. Instead, he got married, had kids and got into the family real-estate business. Last year, Duke insisted to a Chicago ABC affiliate, “There was no relationship whatsoever. A lot of false things were brought up and they were very hurtful, very painful, for me personally and there were attacks on me as well that I really didn’t appreciate. And I still don’t.”

Analyzing Judith Light’s Amazing Performance in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’