Two men found dead Wednesday inside a luxury suite at the Miami Beach hotel that was once the home of Gianni Versace apparently took their own lives nearly 24 years to the day when the fashion designer was murdered on the mansion’s front steps.
The bodies of Adam Rashap, 31, of Randolph, New Jersey, and Alexander Gross, 30, of York, Pennsylvania, were discovered by the hotel’s housekeeping staff on the eve of the July 15 anniversary of Versace’s slaying by Andrew Cunanan, a 27-year-old California man wanted in a cross-country killing spree.
A preliminary investigation ruled the deaths at the Villa Casa Casuarina “an apparent double-suicide,” Miami Beach police spokesman Ernesto Rodriguez said Thursday in an email, according to The Associated Press.
The scene was contained to the suite, and detectives are continuing to investigate.
The 50-year-old Versace was shot to death on the morning of July 15, 1997, after he returned home from the News Café, where he regularly ate breakfast, only a few blocks down Ocean Drive. Cunanan, who was suspected in the slaying of four men from Minneapolis to New Jersey, shot the unwitting fashion mogul twice in the head at close range then vanished.
Following a massive nationwide manhunt that lasted nine days, Cunanan killed himself in a houseboat where he had been hiding several miles from the opulent mansion. His death left authorities with few answers to what motivated the killing spree.
“There was no suicide note and no correspondence to reflect why he committed the crimes,″ then-Miami Beach Police Chief Richard Barreto said at the time.
In the mid-1990s, along with Giorgio Armani, Versace was considered Italy’s leading ready-to-wear designer and a symbol of Italian fashion.
The Casa Casuarina, a palatial Mediterranean-style mansion, was built in 1930 and was divided into apartments when Versace bought and converted the property in 1992. It has operated as a boutique hotel since 2015.
The hotel has become known as a premier destination in Miami for fine dining, parties, fashion shows, photo shoots and celebrity appearances. Early last month, Floyd Mayweather and Logan Paul faced off there ahead of their boxing match at Hard Rock Stadium.
Information provided by The Associated Press was used to compile this report.
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