MINNEAPOLIS - Twenty years after the biggest case of his life, Lee Urness still remembers it vividly.
The hunt for Andrew Cunanan captured the attention of the nation after he murdered five people beginning in Minneapolis and ending in Miami with the sensational murder of Gianni Versace.
"It was the hardest case I ever worked and the most consuming,” said Urness. “It was 79 days straight that we worked on this case.”
Urness was a special agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension that worked with Minnesota’s FBI Fugitive Task Force. He helped lead the manhunt from Minneapolis.
“It was a 24-7 job and all the calls would come to me,” he said.
Investigators say Cunanan started his deadly odyssey killing friends Jeffrey Trail in Minneapolis and then days later David Madson in Chisago County. Over the next few months, he would kill two others -- one in Illinois and the other in New Jersey before gunning down fashion designer Gianni Versace in front of his home in Miami.
Two decades years later, Trail’s family is remembering Jeffrey as a loving man who served in the Navy.
“He was hilarious, smart, funny good hearted brother,” sister Lisa Stravinksas told KARE 11.
While some criticized the investigators' efforts in finding Cunanan, Stravinksas said her family always appreciated law enforcement keeping the family updated on the frequently changing investigation.
"The challenge was of course to find him before he harmed someone else. And I totally failed at that. And a case like that I took very personally,” said Urness.
He recalled the challenge of tracking Cunanan in a time when internet was sparse and cell phones were rare. They had one finger print of Cunanan and no criminal history to go on.
"Today Andrew Cunanan would not last one week as a fugitive with our smart phone technology. It would be so different but it was like the dark ages back in 1997,” he said.
They came close to capturing him in New Jersey when he was driving a stolen Lexus, he said. They were tracking the car’s cell phone, but he believes Cunanan knew that after hearing news media report investigators were on to him.
“He then stopped at the exit in New Jersey and was seen ripping the cell phone out of the Lexus, destroying it,” he said.
About a week after gunning Versace down in broad daylight, Cunanan killed himself on a houseboat in Miami using the same gun he killed some of his victims.
"That was the biggest relief that I had in anything in my life,” he recalled.