Fernando Carreira, the caretaker of a houseboat in which the body of the fashion designer Gianni Versace was found dead in 1997, says “remember everything” of that day when he stumbled on the man who was the most wanted man of the moment.
“Police found the body because I called them,” Carreira said in an interview with the local Miami channel10 broadcast today, reminding him in detail how one afternoon in July of that year saw Andrew Cunanan, the killer of Versace, In a houseboat in Miami Beach.
“When I saw the lights on, I said to my wife, ‘Someone’s already come,'” he told the media from his apartment in this southern Florida city, a few blocks from where the mansion was owned by the designer. Whose facade was shot dead on July 15, 1997 by Cunanan, a serial killer who was wanted by the FBI.
Carreira recalled that before the discovery he took out his gun, which he still has today, and took a few steps inside the place when he heard the sound of a shot coming from the room where police, alerted by him, would later find the corpse of Cunanan.
“I thought it was someone who tried to shoot me and failed,” the man told the channel, amid several newspaper clippings of the time about that fact that 20 years ago shocked the fashion industry.
On the day after the discovery of the body, US authorities announced the end of the search for Cunanan and Carreira later obtained rewards from charities for his discovery, money of which, he confesses, there is “nothing” as a result of “bad business.”
From being a nondescript caretaker of a houseboat located on Collins Avenue, Carreira happened to attract the world focus for being the man who put the index in the place where he hid the serial killer and responsible for the death of the couturier, who died By shot at close range when he was not yet 51 years old.
Twenty years after the event, the man again opens the doors of his apartment to some local media and is again in the spotlight due to the event that marked the recent history of South Florida and shook Versace’s native Italy.
The iconic figure of the couturier is still in force and in fact is the center of the series “Versace: American Crime Story”, currently in production and that emphasizes the days before his assassination on the steps of the entrance of his mansion in Miami Beach, now called Villa Casa Casuarina.
In the ten-chapter series, which has been filmed in part in South Florida, including the mansion erected on iconic Ocean Drive, Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez portrays Versace, while Ricky Martin, Darren Criss to Cunanan and the Spanish Penelope Cruz to Donatella Versace.
The series will be released in 2018.
