The Miami Herald, Inc.; Saturday, 26 July 1997.
Stephen Smith; Herald Health Writer

In the quest to make comprehensible the incomprehensible -- the murderous rampage allegedly executed by Andrew Cunanan -- succor was sought in certainty, in attaching reason to a frenzy of unreasonable acts.

So in the week after the assassination of Gianni Versace, media coverage swirled around the question of whether Cunanan was stricken with AIDS, whether a virus swimming in his blood provided the fuse for an explosion of violence.

And the pursuit for answers cast a spotlight on the nation's attitudes toward AIDS and toward gays as many in the media rushed to link the two. It was a naked reminder that 16 years after AIDS seeped into the national consciousness, the virus is still seen through a prism of fear and misunderstanding.

"What it says about attitudes toward AIDS and HIV is that [the disease is] still viewed in many people's minds as a gay plague, even though it's spreading so rapidly now through other communities," said Kim Mills, deputy communications director of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian political organization.

"The driving impulse is trying to get your mind around why someone would do this, and then the myths and the stereotypes begin to play in."

After Cunanan's body was discovered Wednesday, Dade medical examiners were expected to test for the virus. It was not immediately clear if the results would be publicly reported.

Autopsy reports are generally public record. But medical examiners in Florida have adopted conflicting positions on the confidentiality of AIDS test results performed as part of an autopsy, said Dr. Ronald Wright, University of Miami's director of pathology and former Broward medical examiner.

But there has been a stream of speculation and headlines, subtle and screaming. The New York Post yelped in one headline last week: AIDS FUELS HIS FRENZY. That was the banner front-page headline, next to a bare-chested picture of Cunanan.

Turn the pages, though, and the implication is far milder: "Andrew Cunanan is on a murderous rampage fueled by a fear of AIDS," the article begins.

Turning back the clock

Critics of the media coverage ask: Whose fear of AIDS are we really talking about? And what does that say about our understanding of the disease?

That AIDS should be implicated is made all the more ironic because drug cocktails have dramatically changed the outlook for people with the disease. No longer is it considered a sentence to misery and early death.

But the speculation about Cunanan turned back the clock, spawning calls to a hot line from people fretting that somebody they know with the AIDS virus might embark on a frenzy of killing.

"It miscasts the thousands upon thousands of people who have the disease but are actually making a life with it," said Marc Lichtman, chief executive officer of Health Crisis Network, Dade's largest AIDS service agency, which runs the hot line. "Are they angry they have it? I'll bet they are. Are they going out and murdering and killing? No, they're not."

Where it started

The story of Andrew Cunanan and AIDS is really the anatomy of a rumor.

Chatter about whether Cunanan was infected flew fast and furious in the hours after Versace's slaying, the kind of conjecture common in the wake of a big, breaking news story. The Herald, for instance, stated the day after the slaying that Cunanan was HIV-positive, a report based on police accounts widely disseminated in other media.

But in the days following the Versace killing, a time when sobriety usually triumphs over speculation, the guessing persisted.

The San Diego Union-Tribune provided a major boost to the tale of AIDS-as-motive when it reported Saturday that an anxious Cunanan sought out a man identified as an AIDS counselor earlier in the year.

"He was mentioning some of the things he had done sexually," Mike Dudley, who identified himself as a counselor, told the California newspaper. "I explained the things were sort of in the gray area and he should take greater precautions.

"He became agitated, and he got up and kicked the wall and said, `If I find out who did this to me, I'm gonna get them.' "

Dudley told the paper Cunanan had not answered the "$64 million question": Was he infected?

The Union-Tribune reported that Dudley was a counselor at a nonprofit agency called David's Place. The founder of David's Place, in an interview Wednesday, said that while he tries to help people with AIDS, his agency is first and foremost a coffeehouse.

"The biggest thing we do, and we're pretty proud of it, is we bring flowers to people with AIDS; we do it every weekend," said Rick Osborne, who started the coffeehouse five years ago.

Osborne, dubious of Dudley's story, also questioned why Cunanan would have needed information on how AIDS is transmitted -- he had led safe-sex classes for a San Diego AIDS initiative called Project Lifeguard, according to Osborne and earlier published reports.

An answering-machine recording at Dudley's house asked that the media leave him alone.

The Union-Tribune paper stood by its story Wednesday, and public safety editor Tom Mallory said that his reporters had been told by the volunteer coordinator at David's Place that Dudley was a counselor.

Whatever the reality, the story acquired a patina of veracity through re-telling -- and thus became a paradigm for how fact, near-fact and fiction can get melded.

Within hours of publication, the San Diego article began appearing in truncated form in newspapers across the country, crackling across The Associated Press wire service.

Information from police agencies from California to Florida provided no greater clarity in defining whether Cunanan was infected. The FBI hasn't disclosed anything. San Diego homicide investigators have said they'd heard rumors but have no substantive evidence.

And police in Minneapolis, where Cunanan was accused of killing two men, heard the same gossip but unearthed nothing definitive. When a police spokeswoman told that to one reporter last week, she said, her statement was grossly misconstrued. And by Saturday morning, her phone at home jangled with inquiries from dozens of reporters wanting to know why she had not told them that Cunanan had AIDS.

"I don't have a problem with the question being asked," said Penny Parrish, public information officer for the Minneapolis police. "We don't know the answer -- and if we did, we wouldn't, and couldn't, tell you."

She has heard the question from journalists all across the media spectrum, from leering tabloids to respectable dailies, and it has left her wondering where the dividing mark is between sensationalism and responsible reporting.

"If you can find that line," Parrish said, "let me know."

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