The first victim, a 28-year-old former Navy lieutenant, was found wrapped in a rug in a loft apartment in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis, his head bashed with a claw hammer. The second victim, a 33-year-old architect, was found 60 miles north on the shores of East Rush Lake, shot once in the head.

The third was a real estate tycoon, a 72-year-old multimillionaire found in the garage of his Chicago townhouse, his throat slashed with a saw blade, his chest stabbed with pruning shears. The man's head was wrapped in masking tape, in mummy fashion but with a breathing hole left at the nostrils.

The fourth was the caretaker of a cemetery in Pennsville, N.J., an unremarkable man of modest means who was reported missing by his wife and was found by the police shot to death, lying in the burial ground.

Federal investigators believe all four deaths were the work of the same man, Andrew Phillip Cunanan, the 27-year-old fugitive who has now been named as the leading suspect in the slaying yesterday of the fashion guru Gianni Versace in Miami Beach.