The Villa Casa Casuarina At The Former Versace Mansion in Miami Beach. (Photo by Vadelmavene, from Wikimedia Commons – Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. | Two men apparently killed themselves, police said, in a suite at the Miami Beach hotel that Gianni Versace turned into his mansion, nearly 24 years to the day after the fashion designer died on the building’s front steps.
Their bodies were found by housekeeping July 14, the eve of the anniversary of Versace’s slaying by a suspected serial killer. A preliminary investigation ruled it “an apparent double suicide,” Miami Beach spokesman Ernesto Rodriguez said in an email July 15.
The scene at The Villa Casa Casuarina was contained to the suite, and detectives are still investigating the deaths of Adam Rashap, 31, of Randolph, New Jersey, and Alexander Gross, 30, of York, Pennsylvania, police said.
According to the Miami Herald, some calls to their families went unanswered and were not returned. In two instances, family members said they didn’t want to speak.
Police cleared up a few details to the Herald July 15, stating “[b]oth men were shot in the head in the hotel’s ‘Villa Suite,’ indicating an apparent double suicide, or murder/suicide.”
“I don’t know the order or sequence,” police department spokesman Ernesto Rodriguez told the Herald.
Police made no mention of a motive and made no indication that a suicide note was found, according to the Herald. They also made no indication whether the location or the Versace murder itself had any connection to the deaths of Rashap and Gross.
Versace was gunned down on the morning of July 15, 1997, as he returned home from the News Cafe, a few blocks down Ocean Drive. Andrew Cunanan, who was suspected of killing four gay men from Minneapolis to New Jersey, shot him twice in the head at point-blank range.
Following a massive nationwide manhunt that lasted nine days, Cunanan, 27, killed himself in a houseboat where he had been hiding several miles from the mansion. His death left authorities with few answers to what motivated his 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 Villa Casa Casuarina 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.
