Doomed to Fail - Ep 25: Twisted Ties and Fashionable Demise: The Mayerling Incident & Andrew Cunanan

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

This week Taylor starts us off with the mysterious murder-suicide at Mayerling, a hunting lodge that’s more like a palace outside of Vienna. In 1898 Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and his 17-year-old mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera died, changing the course of history and leading to the ruin of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and a little thing called WWI). Then, Farz brings us to Miami via a killing spree that ended in the death of one of the most famous fashion designers of the 90s, Gianni Versace, by the coward Andrew Cunanan. Motives remain unclear - why did Cunanan go on a murder spree across the country only to gun down an icon at 9am on a weekday? Let’s discuss! https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpodMayerling Photos via the public domainGianni Versace via https://www.discogs.com/Andrew Cunanan via the Irish SunCasa Casuarina via wikipedia Some sources: Mayerling: Pact of Rudolf the Crown Prince of Austria and Mary Vetsera- Did it change History?The Darker Side of Vienna - Europe Up CloseTwilight of an Empire Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast where we explored two red flaggy relationships, one historic, one true crime, and point out all the little markers that could have prevented something usually negative from happening. I'm Fars. I'm joined here with my co-host. Taylor, hi, Taylor. Hello. So Taylor, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and why you like to cover historical red-fly-new relationships and events? Yeah. Yeah, I'm Taylor Pinero and I try to do a little bit more historical, trying to go back time when I can, try to go all over the world. A lot of it is because I love history and there's so many amazing stories that were just not taught. I definitely feel like I was

totally, I don't know, what's the word, like stilted by the American education system because I had a terrible history teacher and they made it really boring and that's super unfair because there's so many fun things that happened. So I like to do relationships when I can find them, but also like big famous disasters like I did the Hindenburg and things like that. Is stilted the combination of jilted and stunted? I think so because it like made it seem boring and also I feel like I could have used it more in my life because people don't change or the same people we've always been, you know, so even people don't change things from 2,000 years ago, they happen today every freaking day. Exactly. Exactly. That's awesome. And I am a fanatic of true

crime, mostly because I like to think about how these people can do the things that they can do, going into like the deep recesses of whatever thought patterns are created and how they're created and why things happen the way they do is always really interesting for me. So that's kind of where my passion and this on the side of things lies. The reason we decided the red flagged relationships is just mostly because Taylor would examine my relationships and say, as far as you see the red flagged destiny. I'm like, yeah, I see him. It's still fun. I'm still going to do it. It's like, this should be a podcast because you're probably not the only one. So that's how we're going to. I'm like, as far as you tend to like a little bit of crazy and you're like, no, I don't. I'm like,

I think that you do. Yeah. Yeah. Taylor nailed it for sure. So. how's your week start a week been or week weekend then taylor good we are going to a like i don't know what's lower than there's professional baseball minor league baseball and like one notch below i think that's the kind of baseball game we're going to after this so we're going to palm springs to the palm springs i don't know they're all but playing their baseball stadium but the kids get to go out on the field and they get to have their like baseball signed by the players and stuff so it'll be quite That's really fun. I love those games because they're so cheap.

They're really inexpensive. Yeah, you feel like it's a community all out there doing their thing. Like I had a floor seats one time at Madison Square Garden at a New York Liberty game. And like, yes, it was the WNBA, but also I had floor seats at Madison Square Garden. It was dope. Yeah. Yeah, I'm all for it. Very accessible.

Yeah. I woke up this morning and I read a Facebook post that completely ruined me. It was for this dog rescue called Austin Animal Center that said five of these gorgeous dogs. They're like two to five years old. We're going to be put down in the next week if someone is a step up and foster them. And because my life's not busy enough, I went and filled out the application. I reached out to them directly and asked if I can foster. Apparently I got to ask like really, really, like just in time when somebody else had already asked.

and they were pairing the dogs, one of the dogs with that family. So all the dogs were off the kill list for next week, which is fantastic. And in the next week or two, I'm probably going to be a foster dad. Aw, that's awesome. Yeah. That's very cool. So usually the format of the show is that Taylor or I go first. We usually interchange one of the other.

Who goes first this week, Taylor? I think that I do. Sweet. Then in that case, I'm going to tell you what my drink is. And then we'll segue to the historic story. So my story, or my story and my drink are from my old shopping grounds, Miami, Florida. So I'm going with a cafe con lece, which is just Spanish for coffee and milk. It is not good.

It is, it is, it is like just piles of sugar with like a couple of drips of coffee in it. People love this stuff in Miami. I think they also call it Cuban coffee, but it never was my thing. Again, Miami is known for stimulants, so that's a good one to have. So that's what I'm going to go with. Cool. Well, I can't wait. I have a drink that I've never heard of, but I want to share with you.

It's actually a soda called Alm-Duddler, ALM-DUDL-E-R, which is Austria's national drink. So Austria, the country is where we are going to be going today. And that's the only, the only thing more popular than Al-Duddleer is Coca-Cola. So, Austrian fucking love it. Cool. I'm going to talk about the Meyerling incident. Have you heard of that? He repeated the Meyerling? Myerling incident. Never heard of it.

It is the murder suicide of Rudolph, the crown prince of Austria, and his 17-year-old mistress, Mary Vistera. Cool. Yeah, never heard of it. Cool. So I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on this, and I write a book called Twilight of an Empire. So I'll put my sources in in the notes as well. But there's two things that I want to start with before we get started to start like thinking about like where we're going with this one of them is there's so much like there's so much sex in politics and sometimes we don't care like with the kennedy is like we don't give shit we're like whatever you know with the clintons we were like we kind of care but like nah nothing like super weird happened but sometimes it changes the course

of history so in do you remember in 2004 there was a u.s senate a republican running for u.s. Senate in Illinois named Jack Ryan, not Jake Ryan from, that sounds really familiar. So Jack Ryan was running in 2004, in 2004 against a Democrat, and he was going into a seat that a Republican had retired from. He was, he had just gotten a divorce from actress Jerry Ryan. She's in Star Trek. So like you might, if you look sharp, you'd recognize her. She's pretty. The story's starting to resonate more. Keep going. So in their divorce filing, there were custody documents that were hidden from the public, but they became public. In those custody documents, Jerry had said that Jack had tried to take her to sex clubs

in different parts of the U.S. and in Europe. And she didn't want to go. She didn't want to perform publicly in these sex clubs. And so that was ultimately led to their divorce. And that was in their custody papers because she was using that to gain more custody of the kids. So he was probably going to lose his campaign anyway. Like Jack probably wasn't going to win.

But he left the campaign and another Republican end. So the Democrat won in the landslide, 70-30, and that Democrat was Barack Obama. Oh, my God. That's so cool. Yeah. So he definitely, with his little sexual deviance, he definitely boosted Obama's a campaign. And that was in 2004 when he became a senator, Illinois. And four years later, you know, he's president. Well, what was the big, the huge boost was obviously getting to be a U.S. Senator was a huge deal. but he also gave the keynote at the DNC's convention. And that, like, launched him into, like, the national stratosphere.

So that's great. That's a really good way to tie that together. That one asking his wife to go to a sex club results in Obama being president. That's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. So do you remember when Gmail was hard to get, you had to get invited? So I would get invited that I could invite five people and they could invite five people. There was a dude and his name was something very that was already taken, like John Smith.

So he was trying to get like John. Smith at Gmail and he couldn't get it. So he was watching the DNC speeches while he was trying to figure this out. And he saw Barack Obama. It was like, oh, I've never heard of this guy. Let me grab barack. Dot Obama at gmail.com. And he grabbed it and he gets like 100 million emails a day. That move.

So funny. Anyway, there's that. There's sex and politics. Always been a thing. And this matters because similarly, when Rudolph, our main person in this story, he was heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And when he died, his cousin became heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And his cousin was Franz Ferdinand.

So that's the life-changing person who became heir to the throne. Because as you know, Franz Ferdinand gets assassinated World War I. Yeah, whenever you mention somebody getting killed who's Australian royalty, I was like, okay, this is going to end in a lot of death for a lot of people. Yeah, absolutely. So the other thing that we should start talking about is incest, which I know, talked about a bunch in these royal families is just so much of it and i i mean obviously i have no idea what they could possibly be thinking but in my mind and what i know about genetics which is

almost nothing but enough to know that like things aren't going to go great if you continue to you know intermarry in between families like how is that better than having like smart people from other families come in you know what i mean like that just that concept doesn't make any sense to me Okay, so in the first time in history where you will hear me say this, I think I'm going to defend incest in this case. Please do, because I don't get it. Because I think that if you're like in this royal position where literally everybody is beneath you, like you engaging with them is like a travesty, all you have that are your peer group is like your relatives. Like what else do you have? But yeah, yes. But like it's not going.

well it doesn't go well i'm not saying it's good i'm not saying it's good it's it's like i can understand it is what i'm saying yeah but i mean so rudolph the the crown prince of austria he's a hapsburg so i do want to talk about the hapsburgs i think later i'll go further further back but essentially the hapsburg started in 1273 rudolph the first of hapsburg is elected king of germany lots of happened they also still exist there's still hapsburgs but they're less in bred now but like Some of the things like France Ferdinand himself said, quote, with us, man and wife are always related to each other 20 times over. The results are that half the children are idiots or epileptics. Yeah, the clues were there.

It's not great. Yeah. If you look, you can see it. Rudolph's parents were first cousins. His grandmother, those were sisters. And his, so his wife, him and his wife ended up having the same grandfather. It's very confusing. It's like who you can't even draw a family tree like this.

Right. It's so confusing. Some of the history, there was Charles, the second of Spain. He was Charles the Bewitched or Charles the Mad. He was the last Habsburg ruler of Spain, one in 1661. But he has so many disabilities. He had severe physical deformities. They have that prominent jaw, that like big Habsburg underbite, you know?

And his tongue was so swollen. He could like barely eat or talk. Yeah. Which is so gross. Like so terrible. The mind of misery. He was infertile, had a range of health problems. The jaw, the Habsburg jaw and lip is like a distinct facial feature.

You can see it in portraits throughout. history. It also, there's a lot of times, like, nature does, nature intervenes and puts infertility in the, in the lines because they're like, yeah, nature's like, you can't do this anymore. Yeah, guys. So a lot of people can't have children, which I guess is for the greater good. And also, it reduces the genetic diversity. So it means they have more susceptibility to inherited diseases and it weakens their health. Because if you have like the same genes on top of each other, top of each other, you're not bringing you anything else that can like protect you from other things. Right. Makes sense. Yeah. I'm a doctor. So I get that like they don't understand

genetics and I get that like what you're saying, how like you think everybody else is beneath you, but like, come on. I don't understand how this can be better. So Ferdinand the first is another one around this time. He could barely speak. Trans Ferdinand's father, Carl Ludwig, was a religious fanatic who terrorized his families. And then also for for Rudolph himself, his mother's line was from Bavaria, they were also not great. They were also pretty inbred. She had a cousin who believed she had swallowed a piano made of glass and like wouldn't stop talking about it. Another dude believed he was a hero in a Wagner opera and he would like have picnics outside in the snow and talk to people who weren't there and like just like really weird eccentric things. And they're rich.

Like if you're like going to go crazy, go crazy in a castle. Yeah, there's a lot of mental illness, obviously, a lot of in reading. Okay. Yeah. And also there's a lot of depression. So like depression and other and other things are happening too. And so this is like compounding into this, these people. So now we're in the late 1800s in Vienna in Austria. This story is not a love story. Like, it's a tragedy, but it isn't a love story. This isn't like Star Cross lovers or anything. And we'll get into that. But I'll make that clear. There's a bunch of movies that were made in like the 60s and 50s and 60s. There's one with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer. And they look so good together. I don't know if you've ever seen, can you picture that? Have you ever seen them in

war and peace? No. What does that name? Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer. Oh, yeah. Audrey Hepburn, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. And they were married in real life and in, I don't know, in war in peace for anyone who knows, like, Balkansky is the fucking worst and he's the person that Mel Farre plays. They just look so beautiful together. I'm Team Pierre. She ends up with Jane Fonda's dad, what's his name? But anyway, they still look great together. And then there's another one where Omar Sharif plays Rudolph. Do you know who he is? Yeah.

You know how I said earlier in this podcast that I don't believe eyes or the window to your soul? Is Omar Sharif the one that gets past for that? He is. Because Omar Sharif's eyes are always like wet with like romantic pain and desire. Like imagine him in like the last scene of Dr. Javago and you like, his eyes are like always just like really wet. Yeah. Which is like part of the reason why I hate eyes. But I also feel like if I'm going to see anyone soul with their eyes, it's Omar Shrives.

Did he die recently? Yes. Yeah, it's pretty recent, right? Yeah. When he died, I read the tweet that someone was a server at a restaurant, and they were serving him, and they were like, I'm so sorry to tell you to, like, bother you. But Dr. Javago changed my life.

And Omar Sharif took their hand and said, it changed mine too. Yeah. I love that guy. Okay. Anyway, watch those movies if you want to cry for seven days. Where we are now, we're in Vienna. Vienna at this time is very. romantic. It's a very romantic city. It's in Austria. They have tons of museums, tons of old houses. It's

the house of the Habsburgs for generations for centuries. Everybody is just like very, very, very romantic. Like they believe that they are. And part of that culture, there's a lot of suicide. It's like a big thing. It happens all the time. So like some people are like, you shouldn't really go out in the morning until they've cut down the bodies that are hanging from the trees from last night because like every day someone dies by suicide. Servants will, you know, die by suicide. Servants will, you know, die by suicide if they, you know, break a plate. Children will, children die by suicide if they fail a lesson. Everyone's being very, very, very dramatic. So it's a whole thing and the people are really thinking about it a lot. So that's kind of one other things happening in Vienna.

Our main people that were talking about, Rudolf Franz Karl Yosef was born on the 21st of August in 1858. His parents were Emperor Franz Yosef Joseph, the first of Austria and Duchess Elizabeth of Bavaria, but they called his mom's sissy. His father, the emperor, Franz Josef, he was born in 1830. It's a weird time to be an emperor because this is like things are starting to modernize. If you're a part of a dynasty from like the 1200s, you know, it's a totally different world. There's some compromises that he has to deal with as different parts of the empire want to be free. This is, you know, we're like 50 years after like the U.S. and France have had like their revolutions. So he did make some compromises,

but he was also a very, very, very stern father. He tried to make his son, Rudolf tough by like waking him up by like shooting shooting in his bedroom like wake up booboo you know like and like have him running the snow and like do things that he considered to be very manly he was also like very conservative and his son grew up to be a little bit more like of a liberal which always usually always goes yeah his mother cissy was born on oh so one more thing sorry emperor franz joseph didn't die until 1916 he died of sickness so he died post world war one wow he done much later his mom rudolph mom sissy she was born on december 24th 1837 in Munich, Bavaria. She was a daughter of a Duke and a princess. She had, she was very beautiful.

And what also I think is interesting about these people in this story is it's that precipice between paintings and photographs because they have the traditional, like, huge beautiful portraits that are painted of them and like huge regal stuff. And then there's also photographs of them because it's like the beginning of when you could have photographs, which is interesting and cool. So are the portraits and the photos, they align? They do. Cool. Which is good to know, I guess, for all of history. Yeah.

Yeah. So Sissy is very beautiful. She has really long hair. There's a portrait of her holding her hair. And she's like holding it like a baby. She's not so much hair. It's like a very intimate portrait that the emperor loved. And she did all this like stuff for her face and body.

And not that I don't do this because I will put like any face oil on my face. I will, I'll do it seven times a day. Like absolutely. But she would do things like in the morning. She'd take a cold bath at night. She'd take an olive oil bath. She would sleep with like rags soaked with apple cider vinegar around her waist to keep her waist slim. And in photos of her, her waist is like, I mean, obviously corseted, but you could like put your hands around her and touch each other, like that kind of a waste.

And she just like did all this stuff to remain youthful. She had a daughter who died in infancy. So, you know, that happens a lot. She tried to write poetry, was passionate about the arts. But she was also very controlling of her son. She loved him a lot, but also like wanted him to kind of straighten up and like become a good heir to the throne. I won't get to this, but Sissy, she is the empress of Austro-Hungary, and in 1898, she's walking in Geneva with a friend, and an Italian anarchist stabs her in the heart and kills her while she's walking down the street. I'm not going to say that's common, but that seems like a common thing to have happened back then.

Did a Rasputin get stabbed in the stomach just randomly by someone? Maybe, but he deserved it. Fair enough. So Rudolph, the son of Sissy and Franz Diof, he's a playboy. they can do whatever he wants like you can when you're like a prince and he has dozens of affairs that are very very obvious like it's very obvious and he's super sexually active they say he might have had up to 30 illegitimate children which is like too many and also doesn't make sense the bloodlines like he's having kids all all over the place so where do they go you know it has

to be like the right weird bloodline right which i think is done and like do you watch wait did you watch house of dragon i can't remember if you did no i never got around to that one so like one of the sons obviously a bunch of them are like do do this and one of my friends was like it's very convenient that in the Game of Thrones world that you are guaranteed to have the hair color of your father because

like it's hilarious it's hilarious they're like oh it's like kids with white hair they must be so-and-so's you know like it's just really funny. Taylor hold on with speaking of series watching series have you seen any of the new black mirror I'll watch the first two

okay it gets good I mean those are really good and it keeps you any better the last one of the series there's a whole section where this woman is watching that Rara Rasputin

No way song yeah it was like yeah I should and one of the main characters is one of the lead singers in that song that came and anyways whatever I'm not going to ruin it but it's fun it's very fun

okay I'll get there I can't watch I can watch like two a week before my like brain explodes So I watched the first two. They get intense. They get really intense. But they were good. He had all these kids.

Whenever he breaks off an affair, he has someone deliver like a silver cigarette box to her like to signify that it's over, which I think is hilarious. And like, imagine being like you have, you like are somewhere and like you pull your cigarette box out of your purse and like someone else is the same one and you just like look each other and laugh because you know that you both had an affair with this guy. That would be nice. That's a good way to break up with someone. That's a gift.

There's a gift. A breakup gift. He just like has a room of them, you know. So in 1881, Rudolph marries Stephanie of Belgium, and they have a daughter, Elizabeth. So they have one child, but again, it's not a man. So they need to have a man to be able to have an heir, to have a boy. But Rudolph gets, I mean, riddled with STDs. Of course.

You know, some sources say it's gonorrhea. Some say it's syphilis. He probably has both. Either one, he gives it back to his wife, and it makes her unable to have any more children. So they will not have an heir. we just like I think an STD could make you sterile

I guess I mean I'm sure they could have had super SDGs back then too yeah I mean it's just so awful I remember yeah I mean most of it has been so gross

down there for everyone you remember what Taylor no I was going to say I remember this is stupid I remember I stopped I stopped because it's a dumb story but I was in London studying abroad and I was

studying like diaspora and people coming up to the UK and I was in a center for immigration and I was walking with a bunch of people and I was at the back of the line with one of my friends and a door kind of slammed in our face and there was a big poster on it that said could you have gonorrhea? And we were both like, I don't think so. That's like a real awakening moment of like what is going on? Is this like destiny or something fate? Like does someone slam this door on my face on purpose? Could I have? I don't know. So I do not. I

did not know. But that was funny. So anyway, I told that story. Thanks for me. Can you tell that story for us? Because you started with I remember, and we're talking about these heads? Anyways, whatever. Anyway, so in 1888, Rudolf asks one of his girlfriends, Mitzie Casper, to do murder suicide with him. He's like, come on, it'll be romantic. And she's like, no, you know, I'm not doing that with you. Also in 1888, he meets another lady at court, Mary Vesterra, who is 17. So Mary's 17, Rudolph is 30 And their affair is like very obvious Like everyone knows

In the Omar Sharif movie I couldn't watch the whole thing I found like a clip of them doing the waltz on YouTube but like they're dancing Everybody's just like oh Like we fucking know these two are hugging up You know like annoyed There's also in one of the palaces in Vienna

There's a staircase that leads up to Rudolf's bedroom It's called the Vester staircase Because she used to sneak up that staircase to see him Sometimes she would sneak up wearing only a fur coat with nothing underneath, which is very scandalous for the time. Mary herself was a baroness. So Baroness Marie Alexandrine von Vestra was born in 1871 on March 19th. Her mother was a pill and wanted her to be rich.

So she was like, I have these daughters. The only reason I have these daughters is that they will marry well and give me like the money and power that I want. So this was not Mary's first rodeo. She's 17, but she's like been in these affairs with older rich people for a while. her mom's been trying to, like, get someone to marry her. She was, I thought this was, like, really funny that she had to go, she went to school in a convent called the Institute for Daughters of the Nobility. Like, imagine what you learn there.

Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So her mom was actively helping with this affair between Mary and Rudolph. Like, everybody, everybody knew there were other people actively helping as well. So here's what happened. Here's the Myerling incident. on January 29th, 1889, so they haven't even been together a year.

They won't know each other for a few months. Rudolph excuses himself from a dinner with his family, and he heads to Myerling, which is a hunting lodge outside of Vienna. Hunting Lodge in that, like, it's a palace. Yeah, it makes sense. You know, I watch... It's like a Murdof thing where the hunting lodge was like 6,000 square feet. Exactly, exactly.

I watched... There was a show called Versailles that I watched a couple of, and there's one where, like, the king's like, I'm going to go to Versailles, and his brother's like, oh dad's hunting lodge you know like you do one day we're going to have that life taylor so he heads to myerling with mary on january 30th the next morning rudolph valet lochek goes to wake him up and the door is locked he can't get it open he ends up using a hammer and like putting his hand through and unlocking it from the inside and opening the door

when he gets in there mary's body is laying on the bed she's probably naked she only brought one off it probably naked or wearing the car underclothes and she had been shot in the head and there was, like, blood everywhere, and she was pretty far into Brighamortus. Rudolph's body was leaning over the bed with a bullet in his head, and there was a mirror next to him, so he might have been trying to do a thing, like, that they had, someone else had done recently where you, like, use a mirror to shoot yourself, like, kind of like, see, to you can see the back of your head or whatever. He might have been trying that. There was also, like, blood coming out of his mouth, and his skull was shattered.

So she was in, like I said, she had been dead before him. There is a lot of speculation about what happened, and that's kind of going to be the thing that happens after this, but in Twilight of the Empire, the book that I read, it sounds like Mary was sitting up holding a handkerchief, so possibly crying on the edge of the bed when she was shot in the back of the head and then fell over. So he may have just like impulsively shot her in the head. With the bodies, there were some suicide letters. There were a couple of them. More were actually found in 2015. They've been put into a safety deposit box in 1926 by a relative, and they weren't found until 2015 which is cool and those there were letters like from mary to her mother

and they said things like i'll be much happier in death because i can be with him we cannot be together in life we be together in death and so was a suicide rudolph rudolph shot himself and then the bullet went through her head no no no he killed her hours before he killed himself did she want to die probably but probably in like a state of we have to die to be together yeah like if you if it would have been like hey baby you should think about this then she probably won't enough you know but it was like a very like emotionally heightened

experience for everyone that they were in because can you know because because she was more advanced like rig and mortis than he was they know that she died a lot earlier than he did so he shot her and then like started her body for several hours there's probably a point of no return for him also because now he's a murderer you know not that they couldn't have hid that somehow but he's just like kind of going crazy in this room by himself but we'll talk more about like what might have happened in the room

in a little bit so nobody knows what to do because this guy's the heir to the throne he's definitely dead everyone's kind of like trying to figure out how they tell the emperor and initially they they're like oh she must have poisoned him and then killed herself because they can't imagine that he would do it so they use that story when they tell the emperor and Empress. Mary's poor mother, even though she was trying to tell off her daughter, you know, technically, she can't find her daughter. And she's like, been looking for her all over town. She finally goes to the palace and asks the emperor, and the empress tells her that her is dead in like a very cold, a cold way to let her know. They said that he died of a heart attack.

They said that he died of like, of like a sickness. Their official story from the emperor and empress changes several times in the first day or two because they're not sure what to do. eventually they do say that he died by suicide because it's just hard to ignore poor mary this is crazy so mary's body they take it and they throw it in the closet and put clothes on top of it and just kind of hide it for now because they don't know what to do her uncles her mom's brothers come and get her come and get her body the people in the palace are like in in myerling the lodge are like you have to pretend she's still alive like you have to pretend that she's still alive when you're taking her out of hair so that no one sees you leaving with a dead body that would be too suspicious so they make them

wash her body, get her dressed. She had like a ice skating outfit, which is like, who knows what that means? But like just like a pretty simple dress and like a jacket. They put that on her body and they try to carry her out. But her head keeps falling down and her body keeps something because she's dead. So they stick a broomstick up her shirt, not up her body, but like up her shirt and kind of like tie her head to it and have to carry her out that way. Was this the inspiration for Weekend at Bernice? God, I don't think so.

It could have been. It's awful. It's awful. So they bring her to a church in Highlandquites, which is nearby. They don't want to bury her because it's a suicide. Everyone's very Catholic. They don't want to bury her, but the uncle's convinced them to let her be buried there in a simple pine box because she was in like a state of mental distress when she died. Also, I don't believe that she killed herself. I think he killed her. You know, later, her mother exhumed her body and buried her in like a nicer cemetery. During World War II, that cemetery was destroyed by the Soviets. And they best. all the bodies when they robbed them. So they, like, robbed her grave and, like, just smashed her bones. Then her bones were re-buried. In the 50s, they exhumed her again to look for a bullet wound in her skull

because, like, people were kind of like maybe she wasn't shot, even though she definitely was. And you couldn't tell anymore because the bones had been crushed. You know. Where was she? Was she shot in the back of the head? Yeah. Then why would they think it's a suit?

Who could do that to themselves? I know. They're just trying to, like, make sounds of what just happened, you know? Yeah. They're trying to protect the air. Yeah. And so in the 90s, a man, the 1990s, a man was obsessed with a Myerling incident. He tricked the cemetery into giving them her remains. He could study them. So he took them again. And he ended up getting arrested and giving them back. But like poor Mary's body was just like treated like garbage. At this point, one of us could have part of her skull. It sounds like you're doing really easy, easy, breezy with it.

Yeah. she also just like after that after this people didn't start talking about mary until later when people started talking about the demise of the empire so she was just like disappeared like she used to be like in the society papers and people were friends and then one day she was gone people just like stop talking about her because they were trying to hide what had happened rudolph's body was taken and they had to reconstruct his skull for a state burial there's pictures of it he has like a big bandage over his head because his skull was like destroyed and they had to get special permission from the pope to bury him with his family, like, not just like the church, but like the actual pope had to be like it was okay. And they got the permission because they said that he was insane when he had died by suicide, which was he shot in the back of the head too? No. Okay. He shot himself in the temple. Okay, I was going to say, there's some questions that don't sound like they were being asked, but it sounds like maybe they were. Yeah. Yeah, no, he was definitely, he definitely shot himself in the face. He was probably bipolar, it sounds

like so he was like you know super high high high super low lows and he was probably in like a high high of being excited about this idea of like going to to death with his lover and the same time like also being like super low and like suicidal so he definitely had a lot like going on people didn't want this to be the case like they didn't want it to be a murder suicide because it's so awful and like confusing and it like destroyed the line and all these things there's a couple conspiracies and things that people think might have happened. So some people, and this is what they've been kind of speculating on for like hundreds of years, they think that maybe it was a political conspiracy. And Rudolph was most likely talking to the Hungarian side of the empire more than he should

have been and about to go against his father in some ways. So he was like also involved in like those shenanigans. So like someone could have killed him for that. Other theories were like maybe it was an accident like maybe just like playing with his gun and shot her because like that happens in america right now so don't give me that face as far as that happens all time but i mean like okay so it happens with like kids or with like drunk hillbillies when you're like with your lover in like this regal like you're not just like hey let's play let's play catch with the with the revolver that's fair also but he was definitely drunk oh okay well you know again details is he that helps I'm sorry. I've got to tell you they were drunk this whole time. And the, so. Now it's sounding like an Alabama story. I get it now. Yeah. So people were like, well, maybe the gun discharged and then shot them both at the same time. They went through him and then hit her. That's crazy. That could never happen. I guess like, well, whatever. I'm saying that no. No. Some people were said that when they saw him, he had glass in his skull. So they said that she had smashed him over the head of the champagne bottle in a rage and then killed herself. It doesn't make sense, obviously, because we know she died hours before him. So he definitely, she definitely died. She definitely died.

first. Another theory that people thought for a long time was that maybe she had a abortion and died from complications of that, but like a complication of abortion is not getting shot in the head. Yeah. That's not how that works. So what it probably is, and what I've been saying it all the time, like it's fun because of the conspiracies, but what it is is a murder or suicide. He was in an unhappy marriage. He wanted to do something dramatic. And she was just very, very vulnerable. She's 17 years old. Like this prince is telling you that he loves you, that he can't live with out you, you know, all the things. So maybe they got into some sort of argument when they were in the room together. Maybe she was pregnant. And he was like, well, great. I also have,

I have another, this is my 31st illegitimate child. Like, fuck you. And I'm not going to marry you still. You know, and they were fighting and maybe like that was a thing. Maybe he went there to break up with her. And like she like wouldn't take it. And she like wouldn't accept it. So he shot her. And then was so upset and worried and all of that that he ended up shooting himself. He was never going to get divorced. He was never going to marry her. It's only really a mystery because people want it to be, you know, because you don't know what happened in that room. And that is so fascinating that you're like, what causes these two people to have him shoot her and then wait for so long by himself? Like, some people said the room's covered in blood. Some people said the room's

covered in like smashed glass and it was like disarray. So for like hours, he's what, drinking and throwing glass around and the door is locked and everyone else is asleep and no one knows he's doing this. And then he you know that he dies so it's i think the mystery of what actually happened i don't think is very mysterious like he killed her and then himself but i think that the mystery of like the why will never be answered and like what it was like and it was like last minutes of her life and then like the last hours of his where he's not by himself you know our stories are going to be so similar yeah yeah again we don't coordinate any of this i have no idea what i was going to talk about she has no idea what I'm going to talk about.

We just hop on and just go with it. But like we have a lot of through lines on these two stories. Oh, so crazy. Crazy. So after this, Rudolph's uncle was supposed to be the next in line, but he didn't want to be. So his son, Franz Ferdinand, became the next in line. Franz Ferdinand was not the emperor when he was assassinated. He was just the heir to the emperor.

But as we know, that started off World War I. And one of the YouTube videos I watched, they were like, we can't say that if this had happened that there would not have been a World War I. But they do feel comfortable saying that Rudolph would not have been where Franz Ferdinand was when he was shot. He wouldn't have been that involved in politics the way Franz Ferdinand was. It might have been, it might have been different. Rudolph's wife, Elizabeth, was kind of shunned by the family. Everyone was really mad at her. She went off and ended up, they lived their life in the different part of Europe. And she was involved in just like, she's, she's buried in the family in the family plot.

his daughter, Elizabeth, she married the Archduke, Franz Salvatore of Austria-Tuxkini. They had 10 children. So some of their children didn't die until like the late 1970s. So some of Rudolph's grandchildren lived until the 70s, which is wild because like I said, like it's just this, that time is such a, I think like a marker between like modern and like what we think of like as like history, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And that's and that's it. So it's a tragic, not love story, because they were barely together.

You know, it's like a love story, but it's like a thing that happened that changed history for a lot of people. So what's the red flag? I think that he was married and had raging CDs and had 30 illegitimate children and that her mom was trying to essentially sell her to him. Okay. So you're saying that if somebody's married and has 30 illegitimate children, maybe like, look the other way. If you're dating someone and they're pre-ordering a goodbye gift when they rick up with you, then that's a red flag.

If you open a closet in your boyfriend's house and it's just 50 candelabras saying, thanks for the good times, just dip immediately. It's not going to end well. One of them has your name engraved in it and you're like, oh no, I'm about to get broken up. That is a good idea. That is like, I'm not saying I'm going to do that, but I'm not. I'm not going to do that.

If you break up with Fars, you get cigars and jars with Fars. Yes. Instead of a cigarette case. Yes, you get a jar of cigars. And I'm sourced from China. Yeah, my friend George suggested this. So thanks George, because it was cool, listen to. And the book I read, The Twilight of an Empire was really, really good.

I recommend it. Nice. Nice. Very cool. Well, we will transition over to the true crime side of the story. And like I said, I'm going to be partially in Miami, but that's not like the end-all be-all of where this, all this originated. It's just where this culminated in the way that it's most famously remembered. Taylor, have you ever been to Miami?

Yes. What did you think? It was fine. It was humid. I think I went a leaving spot for a cruise, was it called? I did like a Caribbean cruise. So I think we drove down to Florida because my friend Lonnie is giving her mom's car to her uncle. So we drove the car to the uncle in Miami.

me, and then we flew home after the cruise. Nice, nice. Yeah, Port of Miami. That's where all, like, basically every major cruise line has a port there. It's very, very cool. You can drive by on the causeway and see all the ship stocking. So, like I mentioned, I lived in Miami, and I'll be honest, I have like a weird love-hate relationship with it, because on the one hand, I think that if you're out for a carefree

weekend, it's probably one of the best things in the world to be in. Just do whatever you want. Nobody cares. If money flows easy, do your thing. On the other hand, which was my case, I was a broke collar. student. I didn't have any money. And then when you see all this opulent display of wealth all around you, you're just like, man, I'm a loser. I have no way to compete against these people all around the Lamborghinis. I remember that picture outside of your Facebook from like 20 years ago

where you were in front of the Lamborghini. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was Miami. And one thing that I remember thinking of myself was that I remember going to work at like 8 o'clock in the morning on like the weekdays and you see like most beautiful people from all around the world just rollerblading around the ocean and you're just like what am i doing for my what am i doing here totally that's funny and like the conclusion i reached was like this is not a place that you come to build yourself up this is a place you come to after you build yourself up that is a lesson that the main antagonist of this story did not learn he went to miami and he made a name for himself there so Any guesses who I might be talking about?

The only thing that I don't know the name, but are you, is it the guy who killed Versagyi? Andrew Cananan. Is that it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You got me at, at, he came to Miami with nothing and tried to build himself up there.

Because that's what I remember from the American crime story. Yeah, which I'm going to discuss at length here. So today I'm covering Andrew, Andrew Kuhnan. She's going to call him Andrew, because that's kind of tough, who basically is like a very, very emotionally disturbing individual who did a lot of really really terrible things and the world is better for him being dead so i'm going to start with that for usual the people that for usual no love lost in these stories for you keep going no not at all Andrew has been done to death by this point and i totally get that but one of the things that i want to tell you focus on in this story was mostly

Andrew himself because really what everybody thinks of is johnny versacchi right and the Netflix okay so for example you just mentioned it there's an amazing Netflix. The guy's named Darren Chris plays Andrew Kriannon. It's awesome. It is so well made. It's so well done. But even that, do you remember what it was called Taylor? Was it, it's not, it's not American Crime Story? So it's called, that is part of the title, yes. Oh, I don't remember the rest of it. It's called the assassination of Johnny Versace, colon American Crime Story. Okay, cool. So it's all focused around Versace and like less so. around all the other stuff that was going on with him although they do cover the murders that

happened but really it's a question like who is this guy and why did he do the things that he did yeah so that's what i wanted to kind of fall into and one of one of the places i started i actually went through a pretty in-depth research on the department of justice and the fpi's websites on classifications of serial killers versus spree killers because andrew falls into this weird unique procession of true crime monsters because he's both like he's kind of both and a lot of sources like the majority of sources like i would say like 60% to 40% call him a spree killer whereas 40% would call him a serial killer he would have cooling off periods and then he had periods of just rapid succession killing of a bunch of people which is the spree

right that's the spree but you have several sprees what are you he didn't he had a spree a cool off and then one murder okay so so he fits the definition of both so first For example, he killed five people over the span of three months in total. Wow. Six days separate murder one and murder two. One day separates murder two and number three. Five separate three and murder four. In nearly two months separate four and five.

So random. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I'll get to like the four and five one because he was like, he was just living his life. He was doing a sick of Miami. Like he was having a gruevy time. like and it was like what happening what was the impetus and nobody knows and we're going to make some

conjecture here but nobody's really sure the other thing i kind of dived into on this on the fbi's website had to do with he didn't really have the same traits as a killer as a bundy or a gasey or domer where there was like a sexual impulse behind the killing he would kill out of opportunity an impulse so when we talk about serial killers for example we talk about product versus process killers, Andrew was neither. He didn't love to kill, which is the process part of a process killer, nor did he kill to collect a body to do whatever they're going to do with, which is the product side of a serial killer that we're most familiar with. That's one distinction on the serial killer side. It actually goes further, and this is where the Department of Justice

kicks in around the classifications that go beyond just product and process, which is there's four the categories. There's visionary, mission oriented, hedonistic, and power control oriented. As you learn more about Andrew Psyche, power control seems like the classification that makes the most sense when trying to understand what his motivations were. Do you have examples of the other ones? So visionary is for, no, visionary I actually don't. Mission oriented is one of the best example of, which is like I'm doing this because God told me to do this. So anytime like someone kills a bunch of prostitutes, it's like you were sinful so I had to do this for Jesus. Like that's like the most common one. I want to say visionary was John Liss, where he just thought that this was the best thing for his family to kill all of them once.

He didn't, this thing is like, you just like it. You just want to do it because it's just awesome. So the power control piece is the one that fits the bill with Andrew the most. And that was basically getting pleasure out of exerting control over a helpless victim, which he did to one guy really, really badly. And that's kind of like where we kind of wrap up part of like his psyche. going a little bit further than that, I'm just going to come out and just be a total contrarian and say, Andrew was just a total prick. I'm just going to start with it right there. They always are. He, okay, this is going to be a little, I'm going to get some backlash on this.

He reminds me of like every Iranian I grew up with who was just obsessed with like looking amazing and like how they present themselves in the world. And like, you need to know I'm better than you. If you don't know that I'm better than you, then what am I doing? Like, that's exactly the vibe I get off. this guy. It has been said that he's a narcissist, but he, that was never a clinical diagnosis and, you know, obviously he's dead, so we're never going to actually know what that was true or not. It was also said that he had a strong desire to be the center of attention. Chris Darren actually portrayed him exactly as I read about him, which was just the guy's dressed the nine and talk about how amazing his life is. I wrote down that if he was alive right now, he would be an

Instagram influencer who would be buying followers from overseas ClickFar. Like, that's the guy we're talking about. He sounds like an insult, like Andrew Tate, you know, like someone who's like... He's gay and he got a lot of play. Fine. Yeah. He can be insult vibes, but that's fine too. It's not that.

It's a need to belong. It's a need to be the biggest, greatest, flashiest star out there. That's where, that's where this is right from. And in cells like just to shut in, right? They're like nerdy shut-ins who can't get out and hang with people. Like, that's not what this is. this guy actually got was a little bit too out there hanging out with people because he actually well later he legitimately met johnny versaci like organically like he was in that crowd to where

he could do stuff like that so like i literally just mentioned andrew came out as gay in high school which obviously you know good for him that couldn't have been easy back when this would have been like the late 1980s and this was obviously not an easy choice because his mom and him got into a really really serious fight it got physical andrew basically assaulted her at one point and he ended up moving out. Like, he left his family home and moved out and settled in San Francisco in the Castro district. I alluded to this just now, which he had a knack for befriending wealthy older gay men, which I'm going to go with like red flag number one for the older gay men because it was never to their benefit that he was friends with them, really. Andrew Wood's basically

using these men in leveraging their wealth to live up to his own self-image of himself, which again, if you haven't seen the Versace story on Netflix, Chris, Darren, or Darren Chris, plays this guy incredibly well. And that was basically the same. Make friends with whoever had the resources and use them up and then dish them and then dish them move on to the next guy. In 1990, many, many, many, many years before what ends up happening ends up happening, Andrew actually does meet Johnny Versace, which I'm going to do a little bit of a dive

into who he was. I know he's been done to death, but what the hell? We're here already. Versace was a fashion designer who created the luxury brand for Sachi in 1978. it became a brand for celebrities because it was like a red carpet thing remember jalo's green dress yeah okay so that was versacchi the first big one of these was elizabeth hurley wearing like some like really sexy black dress at the academy awards and that was so it just kind of popped off with celebrities when it pops off with celebrities it pops off with everybody

who was trying to be a celebrity yeah it expanded really quickly into 1500 stores eventually long after versachi's johnny's death it was sold off to michael core's company who was the current owner of the brand. So I wrote down here that like Johnny Versace and if you've never seen a picture, this guy, go take a Gander because this guy was a like exactly everything Andrew was faking being. Yeah. An Uber successful, incredibly wealthy, world renowned artist, designer, celebrity, and he was gay. Which like when you look at it from like your architect, like what can I be in this world? Like that's who you want to be if you're someone like Andrew. it was i thought it was potentially part of the reason of why what ends up having ends up

happening is because he was trying to basically destroy the thing that he could never achieve himself is what i think personally in 1990 again seven years before all this went down apparently versaci was in san francisco and met andrew andrew would have been 21 years old this time and in the netflix series this is not true in the netflix series it's like super played up how they they were like playing cat and mouse and playing coy with you like it was like a lover's thing like they went out to dinner in the movie

like none of that happened like that's what Andrew told you will happen but the people who were actually there said that's not exactly what happened apparently it was a split moment where they were passing each other Versace seemed to recognize him and asked if he knew him from a party at his late Como estate and Andrew said thanks for

remembering me and then he was never there for sure so yeah I was like dude a If you, what is a Versace party like? Like how many drugs are being just passed around? I was going to say, I just like, I don't know. I just can't imagine that much cocaine in one spot. Yeah, exactly.

It's like, it's like, he just looked like a generic guy and it's like, maybe I know you from this, maybe he was hitting on it. Who knows? But like it definitely was, he definitely wasn't there. It could have just been like a random thing to like play out. Like, look, if I had a late Como house, I would also be asking random girls if I recognize that for my late Como estate party. 100 percent i was going to say i'm both sides you'd be like uh yeah it was there also like

oh hey were you at that like wonderful beautiful lavish parties that i have all the time george cluny was there remember him he was there he's at a really cool party yeah yeah we always we do pranks because he's he's there with us all time so by early 1997 Andrew had had a few on again off again relationships and it began using match and alcohol quite frequently by this point it was kind of becoming known in the San Francisco gay scene that Andrew was kind of a shithead. He had apparently maxed out credit cards for a couple of these wealthy guys. It was basically just supporting himself in between other rich men by just selling drugs, basically. And he was just a grifter in general. At this time,

we're going to introduce two men who become key figures at the start of Andrew's murder spree. One is David Madsen, who Andrew would later call the love of his life and who lived in Minneapolis. The other is Jeffrey Trail, who also lived in Minneapolis, and had some involvement with Madsen that Andrew did not like. They were obviously gay as well. They're in the same gay scene, basically. Andrew flew to Minneapolis on April 24th to stay with Madsen and hang out with Trail at some point. It sounds like Trail really didn't want Andrew there. From everything I read about this, it seems like Andrew was one of those guys where, like, you had to be super stern when you set boundaries with them.

otherwise they're just like habitual line-stepers. Trailer even told people that he really needed to have a serious conversation with Andrew and that Andrew kind of scared him. And part of the reason why Andrew scared him was because Trail was one of the people in the San Francisco gay scene that was telling everyone, this guy's a grifter. He's trying to steal your shit. Like that's all he's in for the in full of this. And news of that apparently got back to Andrew that that Trail had done this.

Andrew had grown obsessed that Trail was also in relation with Madsen, who had like, mentioned, he called the love of his life. And this freaked trail out because Andrew's a meth addicted alcoholic at this point. So not great. On April 26th, so two days after he's in Minneapolis, he's been saying in Madison's house, Andrew tells Trill to come to Madison's apartment because on an earlier visit that Andrew had gone to Trill's house for he had stolen his gun and he wants to give it back to Trail. Red flag number two. That is like, okay, I know that I don't like guns that's like another reason not to have a gun is like someone could steal your gun and no one's going to hand you back or stolen gun okay okay yeah so exactly so like that that's why i

put breath on over too if your gun is ever stolen the only way to deal with that is to call the police and tell them the serial number of that gun and if you know where it is tell me they go get it you don't go get it no no no no no no no no no no no no no no you don't meet that guy in a parking lot, don't give back to you. No. No, it's like, what's the logical, like, why would you still, it's like you sold for a good reason. Nobody steals a gun for a good reason. They steal it to wipe the serial numbers off to go kill a homeless man.

Like, that's all you do with a stolen gun. Trail goes to this apartment. And as we see in the Netflix show, very accurately portrayed, Andrew beats him to death with a hammer in front of Mattson. This was an impulse thing. This was not like a calculated, deliberate serial killer. This was like, he just pissed him. them off and just like you grab the first thing in front of him just bashed his skull in and madsen was there to see the

whole thing much of his bad luck i think at this point my take on this and netflix's take on this was that madsen was basically scared shutless he was like i don't know what to do these guys unhinged these guys out of his mind he's he's drunk as shit he's high as fuck like i don't know what to do he just killed the guy with a hammer from my house and he helped him roll trail's body up in a rug that they then put behind their soap the sofa so that's i feel like when you were like in the past episodes even like would you help someone hide a body you know but i feel like this is the case where i'd be like so scared of this person that i just saw kill someone i wouldn't be like excuse me i'm going to call the police you know i feel like there's definitely a chance i'd be like cool cool cool cool cool

cool cool cool cool let's all this body you know like you don't want to die so hey i'm in this with you man i'm in this with you we're going to be fine let's roll this body up together let's chop it up you want to chop it up we chop it up i got i got a hacksaw yeah yeah yeah you do not want to in front of guy in your house and in this state. Madsen stopped going to work because he just witnessed a man get beat to death in his kitchen with a hammer. So that raised some alarm bells. And a co-worker decided to go to Madsen's house and check on him. And at which point he finds Trell's body. At that point, Andrew Madsen already hit the road. And they'd taken Madsen's Jeep to flee the scene,

essentially. So for several days, police try to find the two of them. And basically, there's a bunch of leads coming in. People saw them here. They had dinner at this place, whatever. They would see them all of the place. They didn't catch them completely because on May 3rd, Madison's body was found near Rush City, which is about an hour north of Minneapolis. Andrew had shot him with a gun he stole from a trail and thrown his body out of the car. So that's room number two. Which like, okay, there's no cell phones. Like maybe when you're at a diner, you just run away. I don't know. I don't know what you do. You can't blame that guy. I mean, we already like, like, we know about it.

So, like, something happened. Yeah. Yeah. The same day that police find Madison's body, Andrew arrives in Chicago in the now stolen Jeep. And he arrives at the home of Lee Millen, Milan, I think. M-I-G-L-A-N. Lee's a really curious one. Again, there's some conflict here between what Netflix says and what people think.

But basically, Lee was a super rich real estate tycoon. He had a net worth of $50 million at the time that he died. Whoa. And again, Lee was like a 72-year-old married man of 40 years with two kids. Nobody knows why Andrew went to this guy's house. There's no evidence of why he would have pinpointed this house to actually drive to a knock on the door. There was no forced entry. There was none of that.

Lee's family finds it really, really insulting that people suggest they knew he. each other because the assumption is that Lee was living a secret life doing gay things on the side of being like this real estate tycoon executive. Netflix made the editorial decision that they for sure had a relationship. They had a relationship. That's the reason why Andrew knocked on that guy's store that night. The one indication that this wasn't kind of like a run-of-the-mill murder for Andrew was the way he killed him. So again, you have a beating to death of a hammer, you have a shot to death in the back of the head. In this case, he tied up Lee's legs and arms,

and his body was wrapped in taping plastic. His ribs had been completely broken and he'd been stabbed either 40 or 20 times depending on the source that you look at in his chest. Ultimately, he was killed because Andrew took a hacksaw to his throat, like almost decapitating him. But you didn't know him? So that's the thing.

It's like, why would you do something that insane to a total stranger? That's why people are like, we think he knows him, but we're not sure. There were some stories that were told where Andrew had told people that he had, he knew a rich family in Chicago whose kid was named Duke. And Lee has a kid named Duke. And so people are like, how would they have even mixed? And the family themselves, like, the only way they could have mixed would have. have been a gay bond a gay relationship and that's yeah and to them they're like of course that's not the

case our dad was like you know married to my mom and like who knows how would he have met like did yeah that's just that's so weird yeah yeah i don't even know this makes sense okay so andrew ditches the jeep uh madison's jeep outside of outside of lease house and steals his lexas and at this point Andrew gets put on the FBI's top 10 most wanted list so six days later and Andrew would shoot a guy named William Reese. He managed a cemetery. He just went up to him and shot him in the back of the head. And he stole the stolen Jeep was found outside of Lee's house. So he needed another car. He ended up stealing William Reese's vehicle, some red Chevy truck or something. This was on May 9th that he did this. So he only killed him for the truck. There was no connection. There was no, there was no stealing of money or anything like that. It was just for the truck. Using Reese's. vehicle, Andrew drove to Miami, Florida and rented a hotel room. He basically just lived in Miami for about two months out in the open, despite being on the FBI's top 10 most wanted list. Again, it's my, Miami's a great place to escape. Everybody's running away from something.

That's true. No one really gives a shit. Yeah. In 1992, Johnny Versace had purchased a mansion called Casa Casuarina. I think I nailed that. It is now more commonly known as the Versace mansion. It is located on the main drag of South Beach, which is called ocean drive only because i knew you would ask this taylor i did zillow it oh you did and it's expensive so the current estimate of value is 36 million dollars what was that what was the address again yeah yeah yeah yeah wrote that down too it's one one one six ocean drive okay baby beach right yep so i do want to tell you that i'm looking this up did you are you going to get to the fact that two men were murdered in a murder suicide there in 2021.

What? No. I just linked to a founded a Vanity Fair article called Two Men Founded Dead in the Versacee Mansion. It said police are still investigating. This was from July 15th, 2021. But it was a day ahead of the 25th anniversary or the 24th anniversary of Versace's murder. There were two men, 31-year-old Adam Rashop of Randolph, New Jersey, and 30-year-old Alexander Gross of York, Pennsylvania were found dead by gunshot ruins. So I don't know if it was, is it potentially murder or suicide, potentially double suicide.

But I mean, I mean, it's a million dollar house. It is, is look at the pictures of this thing. Like I was trying to put it into ways I could describe it. And really the only way I could describe it is if you've ever seen like Versace's style of clothing that he designed, the house just looks like Versace's house. Exactly. The one way you'd be like, oh, it looks like, oh, wow. It has like a big open courtyard.

in the middle yeah like your eyes don't even know where to look there's gold trim there's detailed tile mosaics if you look at the pool that's called the million mosaic pool because there's literally a million tiles being used to create the mosaic there's columns statues pools it's just opulent in a way that would be super distasteful if anybody but a fashion designer live there it'll be dissucile wow it's a lot so i'm gonna start with red flag number three and red flag number three is the mansion itself. I've never been inside the mansion when I was living in Miami, but it's almost impossible to be in Miami and not drive or walk by it. Ocean Drive, the street that it's on, is where all the restaurants and bars of South Beach are on, and a lot of the clubs.

It is the street closest to the most beautiful white sand beaches Florida has to offer. To drive the point home of how publicly located this mansion is, if you street view the address, Again, 116 Ocean Drive, you won't see the house. Do you know why you won't see the house, sailor? Because of a fence? Because there is a giant Miami tour bus, stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic, blocking the Google Maps car from taking a picture of the house. That's how packed this thing is, and that's how not private this thing was.

Someone listed, they initially listed the house for sale for $125 million when the first, and ended up selling for $41 million. So they've really overestimated the amount of money that they're putting for sale for this house. It also is, I love also a thing about Zillow that I love is they do the rents estimate. The rents estimate is $196,000 a month. Sounds about right. So right now, Taylor, it's actually a hotel. And it is, it got converted into a, so it has a really rich history.

If you look at the house, the house was created by an heir to the standard oil fortune. And then transition into a hotel. then Versace bought it and converted it back to a house then it went back to a hotel then it got conveyed again at $41 million was what you're reading there and it's the villa

Casa Casarina now yeah I think they're trying to everybody knows the history they don't need to rub it in with like calling it the Versace mansion you know we should stay there and then also at Lizzie Borden's house

so like I was actually kind of surprised like okay $900 a night is a lot but it's on a Friday Saturday day in Miami directly like that's as much as a fountain blue in Miami would be and you're saying in like the most pristine property in the city so I don't know I don't know price wise I thought it was like actually fairly reasonable for what it was going back to the red flag so what I'm saying is that if you are a certain social class the entire world wishes they were part of

just be a little bit more elusive than literally having the most obvious home in the world in the most public place in the world yeah so I get it So for some reason that nobody can really make sense of, on July 15, 1997, Versace walked from his front door to a newsstand and on his way back at 845 a.m., he's very, very publicly shot in the head by Andrew at the entrance of his house. Again, no clue why that was the day, that was a time.

That was, again, he was living his life in Miami, like doing his thing. That's why I don't get up before nine. I hate the mornings. It's your point. Dangerous. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah.

What's weird is that every, another murder, he tries to evade things, right? Like, he steals the car, he goes to a different city, he does whatever. And like I say, just mostly living in a normal life in Miami still, like, why this guy, why at this time is so elusive? Obviously at this point, Versace died immediately. And the public, because it was so public, people gave chase to Andrew. Police were immediately in the area, and a manhunt began. They called it the biggest manhunt in American history at that time, but we don't, I don't know, I didn't go through it. We will if that was accurate or not.

The day after the murder, a boat owner at a marina nearby in South Beach, called the police and said somebody had broken into a boat at the marina, like a next door boat or something. Police really didn't care. They didn't really show up. They didn't really think that much of it. It wasn't until a week later, so on July 23rd, when a houseboat sitter, so basically people who check on boats when the owners aren't using them, visited a boat and found the door was open and it looked like somebody had been living there. though the caretaker at that point knew that the actual owners of the houseboat hadn't been there since December of the previous year. So the caretaker then recalls hearing a gunshot from one of the rooms, leaves and calls the police. The police and the FBI dissent on this thing.

They start trying to talk to Andrew. They're like trying to convince him to come out. If I remember correctly, it said, like this was like a standoff that lasted eight hours. Andrew was already dead. Andrew killed himself when they walked in. Like there was nobody to talk to. And they just were, like, not wanting to go inside and get blasted. So he shot himself in the head, obviously.

But the question around, like, why he ended up choosing, okay, the first kill, pure rage impulse. Second kill, I got to get rid of the witness. Third kill, I need money. I need resources. I'm going to go to this guy's house. Fourth kill, I need a car. I'm going to steal his car. This one's the one where it's just like, I think it was literally just, he was just a loser who envied people that.

he could not be. And Johnny Versace was the highest personification of like what he could never be. Yeah. Some people thought it had to do with HIV status. So Johnny Versace or well, he did have HIV, but that's not the relevant part. The relevant part is that people had mentioned that Andrew thought that he had HIV and that he had said he's going to take out his revenge on older men who like do this to younger men. And there was like some thought. But he was autopsy. He didn't have HIV. But people were like, no, he thought he did. Like he never got tested, but he thought he had HIV. So, like, maybe that was a piece of this too. I don't know. That's like, I mean, that's like, I don't know what you're saying before, but, you know, people killing sex workers because they gave them an SCD.

And it's like there's two, too involved in that tango, my friend. Well, yeah, nothing about a psycho, psyche actually follows logic. One thing that I read, you know, it reminded me a lot of actually John Lennon about Mark David Chapman. was just like just another nothing nobody loser who needs to take down somebody who's creating in the world because that was something i'm saying it's easier to what is that saying those who cannot build seek to destroy and that's the only one i really know is when in in the wedding planner when jennifer lopez says those who can't wed plan that is actually pretty that's my number one of those that i remember hey two jala references in our andrew canaan episode so

and then and then largely this ended up getting uh forgotten because one of the attendees is johnny's funeral died like less than a month after this happened you know what that is no princess ziana uh she went to the funeral no way She went to the funeral and... Damn, the 90s were wild. Dude, it was like a week or two after that is when she died. I remember when I was at my friend Julie's house eating pizza and I was so sad. Yeah, I remember too.

I was with my parents. We did our little summer trip to Vail or... Oh, my God. So, yeah, yeah, that was a wild month. But because of that, you know, so much of this got like just sunk. Like, people stopped paying so much attention to us because then Princess Sane was a big story. So... Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's our story around Andrew Q. Nannan. What a tragedy. That's just like, that's just so, like, that your life can be taken away by, like, any random crazy person in, like, two seconds. Like, you've done, like, you didn't do anything, like, for that specific thing to happen to you. It just happens because you're, like, in the right place. Or, like, if he hadn't, like, gone and gotten the paper, you know, or, like, hadn't

a hard sell past nine, like, you should, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's just so many, so many things that, you know. It could, like, little things that lead up to it and make that happen. Yeah. I'm an asshole. Yeah.

Awesome life. The coolest house. The best, every, like, and some random idiot just can just you get in the head. You're just, like, covered in gold and, like, I don't know. Man. He was effortlessly cool. I will say, Johnny Versace, when you look at his pictures, you're like, damn. Like, that is a world famous designer.

Like, you can just, he's got an air about him. I can't, yeah. I mean, his sister's still alive, still doing Versaqi things. I guess even though he said Michael Coors bought it. So she is still the creative director. Donatella Versace is still the creative director. And the vast majority of Johnny's estate actually was bequeath to his niece, Allegra, Versace, who is Donna Tella's daughter. Oh.

Yeah, it's estimated her net worth right now is about $800 million. And she's 36 years old. Nice. Yeah, every, well, when my sister had her baby, my brother, Kincaid, who is, who is gay and not going to have children, was like, now my estate is divided into three. Because he's dividing his estate amongst businesses and nephews. That's the dream. You've got to have that some, a rich person in your family leave you something. If you look at the guy who played Johnny Versace, it is like crazy. It's real good.

Yeah. He nailed. I mean, you look at it side by side. Wow. I see, I find a picture of, whoa, I heard that dog. Is she okay? She upset that she's getting a sibling. She doesn't know she's giving a sibling yet. I haven't told her.

Uh-oh. Divide up, it's going to divide up your estate. My estate. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So many Medusa had medallions. Oh, yeah, so many. It's so, it's so like black with gold on top of it is my picture of it.

It's just decadence, opulence. It's like just, yeah. Tell her Versace's husband's really cute. Yeah, I would imagine she could attract a fairly attractive person. There's something to international fame in obscene wealth that weirdly draws people to you. I don't really get it. What is it? I don't know.

What could it be? What is that mystery? That mysterious, that's rich. That's our stories. Taylor, is there anything you want to sign off with? I know you have it's almost six and you have to go to a baseball game. Yeah, I'd be there at 545. I've been there in two hours. It's in Palm Springs. So yes, I do have to go because I have to get ready and find a baseball for the players to sign for the children. You know, like you do. I forgot that we're not on the same time zone. No, it's almost four. But still, I still do you need to get ready. Yeah, no. This is your first time listening. Thank you. We have social media at doomed to fell pod on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and we're also doomed to fell pod at gmail.com. If you have any feedback or suggestions, we're looking for historical, true crime relationships with red flags, tragedies with red flags, things that could have been avoided, or just some crazy-ass stories from the past. We'd love to hear it because I think, like I said before, there's so many cool stories. There's so much we don't know. There's so much that we can all learn from, learn from the past and share with each other. So I'd love to tell more. Love it. Awesome.

Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Taylor. Thank you. Bye, all.