Christopher Dorner — nine days of vengeance ended in a burning cabin

On February 12, 2013, in a vacation cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains above Big Bear Lake, California, Christopher Jordan Dorner died of a single self-inflicted gunshot wound as the building burned around him. He was thirty-three. A former Los Angeles Police Department officer who had been fired in 2008, Dorner had spent the preceding nine days hunting current and former members of the department and their families, guided by a manifesto that named roughly forty people as targets. By the time he was cornered, he had killed four people and wounded three, and had triggered one of the largest manhunts in California history.

Dorner’s grievance was specific and documented. In 2007 he reported that his training officer had kicked a mentally ill suspect during an arrest; an LAPD Board of Rights concluded that the kicking had not occurred and that Dorner had made false statements, and he was terminated in 2008. He challenged the firing in court and lost, with a California appeals court affirming the dismissal of his petition in 2011. In early February 2013 he posted a long manifesto demanding that the department publicly admit it had fired him in retaliation, and announced what he called asymmetric warfare against police and their relatives.

The violence began on February 3, when he shot Monica Quan and her fiancé Keith Lawrence in a parked car in Irvine. Quan was the daughter of Randal Quan, the retired LAPD captain who had represented Dorner at his disciplinary hearing. Four days later Dorner ambushed officers in Riverside, killing one and wounding another, before his burned pickup truck surfaced near the Big Bear ski resort. The discovery converted a regional alarm into a mountain manhunt, and for several days the search found nothing.

The end came on February 12, when Dorner — who had been hiding in a condominium near the command post the whole time — tied up a couple, stole a vehicle, and was spotted. A gunfight with San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies left one deputy dead and another gravely wounded. Surrounded, Dorner did not surrender. Deputies fired pyrotechnic tear-gas canisters into the cabin; it caught fire; a single shot was heard from inside; the structure burned to the foundation. Remains recovered from the rubble were identified as Dorner two days later, the death ruled a suicide.

Andrew Cunanan — five killings, a national hunt, a quiet end on a houseboat

On July 23, 1997, in the upstairs bedroom of a houseboat moored on Indian Creek in Miami Beach, Florida, police found Andrew Phillip Cunanan dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, ending a three-month manhunt that had spanned four states and put him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. He was twenty-seven. The pistol beside him, a Taurus he had taken from his first victim, was the same weapon used to kill three of the five people who died in his spree, including the Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, shot eight days earlier on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion.

Cunanan, an articulate, well-educated San Diego man who had lived for years on the support of wealthy older companions, began killing on April 27, 1997, in Minneapolis, where he beat his friend Jeffrey Trail to death and hid the body in the apartment of his former boyfriend David Madson. Within days Madson too was dead, shot and left near a Minnesota lake. The violence then moved east: Chicago real-estate developer Lee Miglin was tortured and killed, and a New Jersey cemetery caretaker, William Reese, was shot for his pickup truck.

The killing of Versace on July 15 transformed a multi-state homicide investigation into an international news event. Despite Cunanan’s presence on the Ten Most Wanted list and saturation coverage of his face, he was not caught through detective work or a tip from the public. He had been hiding for weeks in Miami Beach, at one point in plain sight, before retreating to an empty houseboat whose owner was abroad.

He was found because a caretaker checking the vessel heard a gunshot. Police surrounded the houseboat, fired tear gas, and entered to find Cunanan already dead by his own hand. He left no explanation. His motive — what drove an educated man with no prior record of violence to kill five people across the country in three months — was never established, and the case closed with its central question unanswered.