Facing Death

Homosexuality, so painfully concealed by some teenagers, was showtime for Cunanan. The only openly gay student in his class at the tony Bishop's School in La Jolla, an upscale San Diego neighborhood, Cunanan was ""flaming,'' says a former classmate. He was at the same time a good student and a cross-country runner, voted ""most likely to be remembered.'' Yet his laugh was nervous, and though the reverse snobs at Bishop ""almost competed to look poor,'' Cunanan did not advertise his own modest middle-class background.

Cunanan's mother claims that her son had read the Bible by the time he was 6, but it's likely that a more powerful inspiration was his father, Modesto. A former navy man who had been born in the Philippines, Modesto had become a stockbroker, but allegedly a crooked one. Accused of scamming his clients, he fled the United States in 1988, leaving his wife and four children basically broke. Cunanan, then 19 years old, followed his father - but soon returned, appalled, says his mother, by the squalor in which his father was now living.

There are hints of a family rough streak. Modesto's neighbors outside Manila told NEWSWEEK that Cunanan pere had recently burned the clothes of his live-in girlfriend after a fight. Cunanan fils once shoved his mother so hard that she dislocated her shoulder. But the Andrew Cunanan who emerged on the gay scene in San Francisco and San Diego in the late '80s was neither crude nor middle class. He was not even Andrew Cunanan. He was Andrew De Silva, a Hollywood CEO with a mansion on the Riviera. Or Lieutenant Commander Cummings, of Choate and Yale, importer of antiques. He wore blazers and ascots and smoked Cohiba cigars.

To pay for them, he seduced older men. He was not a cheap hustler, not even a ""high-class prostitute,'' as his estranged mother bitterly describes him. He was something more subtle and refined: a worthy companion. ""He knew about the arts, the right kind of fork to use, the right cognac to drink,'' says Nicole Ramirez-Murray, a San Diego social columnist. ""I remember one time people were talking about what Henry Kissinger was up to, and Cunanan jumped right in. He was in a class of his own as a gigolo.'' One target of opportunity was Gamma Mu, the exclusive fraternity of wealthy, mostly gay men who could bestow nice gifts, like the $30,000 Infiniti that Cunanan drove about town - before he had to sell it to raise cash.

The fun never lasted. And after Cunanan reportedly fell out in the fall of 1996 with an elderly gentleman who was a San Diego arts patron, the easy money dried up. Cunanan had begun selling drugs and, increasingly, consuming them. A lapsed jogger, he began putting on weight, while moaning to bartenders that he couldn't get dates. To barkeep Nigel Mayer at Flick's, a gay hangout in San Diego, he seemed tired and despondent. He was moving to San Francisco, he said one night last April, and, he insisted, ""I'm not coming back. People don't know me. They think they do, but they don't.''

Days before, he had been up in San Francisco, talking to an old friend, Steve Gomer, about ""the perfect relationship.'' Cunanan said that he had found it with a man he knew in Minnesota. ""Because,'' as Cunanan explained, ""he lets me do anything I want.'' He meant sexually: the conversation turned to a discussion of sex toys like latex masks used for bondage. ""The ones with the noses and mouths cut out?'' asked Gomer. ""Just the noses,'' answered Cunanan.