DEATH AT EVERY STOP

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

It was nearing nightfall, and the cemetery caretaker's wife was worried: her husband had not come home from work. She called the police, who headed out to Finn's Point National Cemetery, on a spit of New Jersey 30 miles south of Philadelphia. They arrived to find a grim tableau. The caretaker, William Reese, was there--with a bullet through his head. His red Chevrolet truck was missing. In its place, eerily, was a dark-green Lexus.

In isolation, the crime recalls a chilling campfire tale. But it appears to be anything but isolated. It may in fact be just one episode in a real-life horror movie, a cross-country killing spree that has triggered a nationwide manhunt. The police are looking for the man who may be driving that red pickup, a man who has been moving eastward, from San Diego to Minneapolis, Minn., to Chicago and now the New Jersey coast, using a series of stolen vehicles, a man who has been charged thus far with only one crime but about whom Philadelphia FBI spokeswoman Linda Vizi noted, "Everywhere he's been, there's been a murder."

The sequence, if officials are correct, began in San Diego's funky, gay-friendly Hillcrest neighborhood, with a 27-year-old who called himself Andrew DeSilva, but whose family knew him as Andrew Phillip Cunanan. Bespectacled and slightly paunchy, "DeSilva" liked to dance with his shirt off, treat large groups to dinner with cash and boast about his family's sugar plantation in the Philippines. He lived high, but no one seemed to know how he managed it. "Everyone knew Andrew," says one scene-maker. "He was a very outgoing, fun guy. There was a kind of patheticness about him, because good-looking gold diggers were drawn to him. But I never saw him in a bad mood." In late April, DeSilva/Cunanan told friends he was leaving town, starting with a trip to Minneapolis to visit a former lover named David Madson and another young gay man named Jeffrey Trail.

Visit them he did, say police. Trail, whom Cunanan had known in California, was found on April 29 rolled in a rug in Madson's Minneapolis apartment, a bloody claw hammer nearby. Madson, a promising architect who had lectured at Harvard, turned up four days later on a lakeshore 50 miles away, several 40-cal. bullets in his head and back. On Trail's answering machine, the police found a message from Cunanan inviting Trail to Madson's apartment. In the apartment, not far from the hammer, police discovered a nylon gym bag containing the kind of distinctive .40-cal. bullets used to kill the architect. The bag had Cunanan's name on it. Missing was Madson's red Jeep Cherokee.

It turned up in Chicago. Lee Miglin, 72, was one of that city's more respected and better-known developers. A coal miner's son turned real estate baron, he had been a major player in Chicago's late-1980s building boom and was a generous philanthropist. His wife Marilyn, 58, was a successful and well-known cosmetics executive. On the morning of May 4, she returned from a business trip to find Miglin missing from their three-story brick row house in Chicago's Gold Coast district. Police searched the couple's garage across an alleyway, and found a grisly scene. Before killing Miglin, someone had wrapped him in plastic and brown paper and wound his face with masking tape, leaving only a hole for his nose. He was then repeatedly slashed and stabbed, and his throat was cut with a gardening saw. Afterward the killer or killers reportedly fixed a ham sandwich and shaved with the dead man's razor.

Miglin's death shocked even the most unshockable Chicagoans. Three days after the killing, Chicago police noticed the red Cherokee less than a block from the crime scene, accruing parking tickets. They called in its license number and learned its gory history. The killer had apparently traded the Cherokee for Miglin's green Lexus, now missing. On Thursday Philadelphia police got a call from their Chicago colleagues warning that the Lexus' phone had been activated in their area. The Philadelphia police went on alert, although, as a spokesman pointed out, "the guy [in the car] does not necessarily have to be the bad guy." That night, with the bulletin from Finn's Point, it became obvious the guy in the car was indeed the bad guy. He was now in the Chevy pickup, headed--where?

Andrew Cunanan has yet to be formally charged in any death but David Madson's, and the only publicly known evidence linking him to the last two deaths is the red Cherokee. Nonetheless, reporters located his mother, MaryAnn, in a central Illinois town and learned a little about his true identity. The Cunanans were once wealthy, as Andrew used to brag, but MaryAnn claims that in 1988 his father Modesto, a stockbroker, fled the country to avoid arrest on charges of misappropriating funds. MaryAnn Cunanan now gets food stamps. Before she stopped talking to the media, she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "No matter what he's done, he's my flesh and blood. I can't believe he could be a cold-blooded killer." She added a sentiment many would surely echo, about their own flesh and blood: "I hope he's not the next one."

--Reported by Cathy Booth/Los Angeles, Kevin Fedarko and Julie Grace/Chicago and Elaine Rivera/New York

With reporting by CATHY BOOTH/LOS ANGELES, KEVIN FEDARKO AND JULIE GRACE/CHICAGO AND ELAINE RIVERA/NEW YORK