Toward the end of April 1997, Andrew Cunanan flew to Minneapolis. He hadn’t bothered to buy a return ticket to San Diego. “Cunanan was going on this one-way trip to kill off his past,” former FBI agent Brad Garrett told ABC News. Cunanan met his first victim, Jeffrey Trail, in San Diego when Trail was in the U.S. Navy. They had been close friends. Trail was a graduate of the Naval Academy, and one of his sisters told The New York Times that Cunanan idolized him. Trail had moved to Minneapolis and was working for a gas company. Cunanan’s motive for brutally beating his friend to death with a hammer before rolling him up in a carpet remains unclear. He told friends in San Diego before his flight he had “unfinished business” with Trail, according to Newsweek.
Afterward, Cunanan drove his ex-boyfriend David Madson to a secluded lake near Minneapolis where he shot him in the head with a pistol he’d stolen from Trail. Madson was a 33-year-old architect originally from Wisconsin who often helped older neighbors. “His legacy will be his love for life, his family, his many friends, and especially his Dalmatian dog, Prince,” Madson’s mother Carol told the Star Tribune in 1997. Cunanan’s motive for this murder also remains a mystery. He left Minnesota in Madson’s car following the killings and headed to Chicago.
