Versace Chef’s Frantic Call to 911 Is Released
With a woman screaming hysterically in the background, Gianni Versace’s chef breathlessly told a 911 operator the fashion designer had been gunned down and wondered: “Who would have done something like that?”
The 911 call, released Monday, captured chef Charles Podesta’s frantic efforts to get help July 15 after staffers inside Versace’s oceanfront mansion heard “three or four loud pops” and found the designer in a pool of blood.
At one point, the dispatcher asked Podesta whether Versace was breathing.
“We don’t know--he’s not moving,” he said as the woman screamed in the background.
Two-and-a-half minutes into the call, Podesta asked the dispatcher: “Why aren’t they here yet? My God, we’re only a minute or two away.”
The dispatcher tried to calm him down, and less than 30 seconds later sirens could be heard wailing as police converged on the villa.
Versace was shot twice in the head at close range as he opened the gates to his home on fashionable Ocean Drive. He died at a hospital minutes later.
Within hours, suspected serial killer Andrew Phillip Cunanan, already wanted in four killings in Minnesota, Chicago and New Jersey, was identified as the chief suspect. A nationwide manhunt ended when Cunanan killed himself Wednesday on a houseboat 2 1/2 miles from Versace’s mansion.
On Monday, the houseboat caretaker who heard shots and called police received a $10,000 reward from New York City’s Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project.
Fernando Carreira accepted the check in New York from the group’s executive director, Christine Quinn, who acknowledged the call did not result in an arrest and conviction, but “we decided not to stand on details or fine print.”
Miami Beach Police Chief Richard Barreto said officials still need to check out Carreira’s story and make sure he had no association with Cunanan before they decide whether to give him their $45,000 reward.
In other developments Monday, a mortuary in Cunanan’s native San Diego County said his body would be cremated in Florida. A statement released by Glen Abbey Memorial Park & Mortuary said no service was scheduled there.
