Though the idea has now fallen out of favor, some posited that Corey was “protecting” the real murderer. Why might she have committed murder? What was her relationship to Robert Worley? How and why was the body preserved and not disposed of? Despite a lack of evidence or sources who are still living (many queens who knew Corey have succumbed to either disease or violence), these questions have provoked a number of theories. Considered in tandem with the circumstances of the discovery, plenty of questions remain. Yet it’s apparent, from her interviews and an alleged silence about her life with Worley, that Corey was also guarded. “Then you think, you’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name…If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.” “Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world,” she says in the film. In contrast to the grandiosity of aspiring models and housewives, she had a self-possessed cadence and world-weary observations, which endeared her to a comparatively mainstream audience.
The most extensive video footage of Corey is from the 1990 Jennie Livingston documentary Paris Is Burning, an examination of the aforementioned ball culture in interviews, she was witty, realistic, and unflappable. What stands in starkest contrast to the gruesome implications in her closet, perhaps, is Corey’s demeanor. “You lend money to your friends-not very much money-and advice…sometimes, if someone got evicted or whatever, you might take them in,” she explained on a 1991 episode of the Joan Rivers Show. Her experience led her to mentor and support young queens as the mother of her drag family, the House of Corey. In the Harlem drag ball scene-where veteran drag queens and their young breakdancing and voguing counterparts participated in tongue-in-cheek pageants to showcase humor, irony, and ambition through performance-Corey was a stalwart diva. A graduate from the Parsons School of Design, she had a knack for graphic design, which she parlayed into repute as a costumer. Superficial cues might dictate that Dorian Corey had little reason to engage in violent crime. Coupling this with Figueroa’s pull-tab dating method, detectives concluded the shooting must have happened at least 20 years prior. By most accounts, he was estranged from his family and hadn’t been seen since the mid- to late ’60s. The only extant records from Worley’s life were criminal he’d been arrested for raping and assaulting a woman in 1963 and served three years in prison. The body was identified as Robert “Bobby” Worley, born December 18, 1938. Encased within the layers, detective Raul Figueroa observed, were detachable pull-tabs from flip-top beer cans, whose prime in the United States ranged from the 1960s to the 1970s.ĭespite the technical hurdles posed by decay, Figueroa managed to extract fingerprints from the corpse. Peeling through multiple layers-first the bag’s fabric, then taped wrappings of what was likely Naugahyde, a type of faux leather, and plastic-detectives revealed a grisly sight: a partially mummified body in the fetal position, its formerly brown complexion now purple and yellow, its ears mere cartilaginous vestiges, its blue-and-white boxer shorts tattered, with a bullet hole in its head. Without inspecting further, Taylor called the police. Resigning to her powerlessness to find the zipper, Taylor handed a pair of scissors to one of the men, only to learn that what the curious mass lacked in portability, it made up for in distinct malodor. I couldn’t lift that thing,” Taylor told New York magazine in 1993. They rifled through fabric, feathers, and sequins before they encountered a large closet, where, Taylor said, the sight of a musty green-plaid garment bag folded over on the floor piqued their collective interest. Accompanied by two men searching for Halloween costumes, Taylor, a fellow New York drag queen and caretaker of Corey in her final days, was hoping to sell them a small fraction of Corey’s wardrobe. IN OCTOBER OF 1993, LOIS Taylor entered the Harlem apartment of Dorian Corey, a drag performer and dressmaker who’d died of AIDS two months earlier at the age of 56.
Dorian Corey in a still from Paris is Burning. Sequined gowns weren’t the only thing stashed in Dorian Corey’s wardrobe.