Exciting experiences, full of imagery, detail, and insight. Discover the true soul of Miami Beach!
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Miami Beach, FL
33109,33139,33140,33141.
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Twenty years ago, South Beach, Florida was not a place that catered to early risers. It was a beach-cavorting, nightclub-dancing, hedonistic scene ruled by a fashion crowd of models, musicians, actors, and bohemians—so long as said bohemian looked good on Rollerblades wearing a G-string. But within this indolent world there were driven, ambitious people, and none more so than the unofficial mayor of South Beach himself: designer Gianni Versace. On the morning of July 15, 1997, the 50-year-old Italian founder of a glamorous fashion empire was up by 6 a.m. He made calls to Milan, did some more work, then slipped out of his mansion and headed to News Café, just three blocks from his home.
A regular at the buzzy Ocean Drive restaurant, Versace bought a coffee, exchanged greetings with the manager, scooped up issues of Vogue and The New Yorker, and headed back to Casa Casuarina, the opulent palatial villa he’d spent millions acquiring and renovating. He walked up five marble steps and slipped his key into the lock on the iron gate.
At that precise moment, a dark-haired man wearing knee length shorts, a gray tank top, a baseball cap, and a backpack surged up the same marble steps. Andrew Cunanan shot Gianni Versace, twice, execution-style. Then he turned around and casually walked away.
Cunanan, 27, described by his own mother as a “high class homosexual prostitute,” was already a wanted man—a suspect in four murders in three states—and had gone into hiding in Miami more than two months earlier. Police soon identified him as Versace’s murderer, and the frantic hunt for a man the media called a serial killer dominated the news cycle.
