Evil is not supposed to visit places like East Scott Street, one of the richest blocks in the country. Money, privilege and state-of-the-art home security systems are usually more than enough to keep menace and mayhem away.
But it was on East Scott Street that a wealthy Chicago real estate developer's brutally beaten body, wrapped in plastic and paper, was found in his garage May 4. Authorities believe a darkly handsome Californian named Andrew Phillip Cunanan might be the country's latest serial killer.Cunanan, 27, is now the subject of an intense nationwide manhunt, now concentrated on the East Coast. He is said to have friends in New York City, and New Jersey authorities believe he killed his fourth victim in two weeks last Friday.
Cunanan, who is from San Diego, has no criminal record but is proving to be a crafty fugitive, and "there have been no known confirmed sightings," John Hagerty, a spokesman for the New Jersey Division of State Police, said Tuesday.
The authorities believe Cunanan has killed at least four men in a two-week cross-country odyssey of bloodshed that began in Minneapolis, then invaded the leafy quiet of East Scott Street and continued most recently a few days ago in an isolated cemetery in New Jersey, where the caretaker was shot to death, apparently for his red pick-up truck.
Near the caretaker's body was a dark green 1994 Lexus, which had belonged to the Chicago developer, Lee Miglin, 72, a fixture of the city's high-society scene for years.
It seems almost everywhere Cunanan has gone in the last two weeks, he is suspected of leaving behind a body and a stolen car. When the police descended on East Scott Street to investigate the death of Miglin, they found a red Jeep Cherokee parked outside the millionaire's three-story brick town house.
The Jeep had Minnesota license plates and was traced to a Minneapolis architect, David Madson, whose body had been found on May 3 lying in the grass on the edge of a lake about 50 miles from the Twin Cities.
Madson had been shot in the head with a .40-caliber bullet, the same caliber of bullet that killed the New Jersey caretaker, William Reese, 45.
Madson and Cunanan, according to a fugitive warrant issued in Minnesota, had apparently been lovers, and a couple of nights before the killing spree began the two men had been eating and dancing at a Minneapolis club, the Gay 90s.
A few days before two fishermen found Madson's body, police discovered the body of Jeffrey Trail, rolled up in a heavy rug in Madson's Minneapolis loft.
Trail was a friend of both men and had been beaten to death with a hammer. Police believe Cunanan killed Trail and then drove Madson to the lake and shot him to cover up the first killing.
In Chicago, police will not comment on what connection, if any, Cunanan had to the wealthy developer. However, a recent report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune said the owner of a gay book store in San Diego told a reporter that Cunanan was a close friend of Miglin's 25-year-old son, Duke, a struggling actor who lives in the Los Angeles area.
But the bookstore owner, Bruce Kerschner, said in an interview Tuesday that he had been misquoted and he did not know if the men knew each other. A spokesman for the Miglin family, Mark Jarasek, also denied that any member of the family knew Cunanan.
One reason for the speculation about a link between Cunanan and the Miglins is that there were no signs of a forced entry into the expensive home he shared with his wife on the city's near North Side, where police believe Miglin's killer beat him to death and then shaved and had a sandwich before fleeing in the developer's Lexus.
As police across the Eastern Seaboard searched for Cunanan, volunteers with the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project in New York spent Tuesday posting fliers bearing his picture on lampposts and in bars in Greenwich Village and Chelsea.
The Anti-Violence Project has received reports of two men resembling Cunanan, said Bea Hanson, the organization's director of client services.
The authorities have released a number of photographs of Cuna-nan, who is 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs about 185 pounds. In one of them, he has a hard, almost stern expression.
He is also smiling and looks very much like a man who could charm his way into someone's heart and wallet, which is exactly what his mother, Mary Ann Cunanan, told the Chicago Sun-Times he did for a living.
She said her son was "a high-class homosexual prostitute."