“She was laying there peaceful, like she was asleep, but I touched her and just felt death. ”
The image of Stacey Blahnik’s lifeless body has been revisited by partner Malik Moorer every day for the past three months.
On top of grappling with the murder of his longtime girlfriend, Moorer’s grieving process has been stunted by suspicions, accusations and lack of closure: At press time, a suspect and motive for Blahnik’s killing remain elusive.
Before the murder
Moorer and Blahnik were together for seven years and, while they had their ups and downs, Moorer said they were planning a life together.
He purchased a home on Manton Street in South Philadelphia one year ago, where the couple lived with their five dogs.
While he and Blahnik shared a life, they sometimes traveled in different circles. Moorer said he tried to pick up as many hours as he could at his food-services job at Hahnemann Hospital and often didn’t have time for the parties and clubs that Blahnik frequented.
Blahnik served as the house mother for House of Blahnik and was a mentor to the organization’s younger members.
Outside of the ballroom community, Blahnik was involved with prostitution, which Moorer contended many in the trans community get involved with.
Although Moorer said he was somewhat aware of this aspect of her life, he didn’t fully learn the extent of her sex work until after her death.
But he said he loved Blahnik for who she was.
“Underneath it all, she was a sweet person, a very good person. Sure, we’d fight sometimes like all couples, but then there’d be those five minutes where she was just sweet, and that was her. That was who she really was. And I loved her for that.”
October 11
On the night of Oct. 10, Moorer and Blahnik slept in separate bedrooms, as Moorer had to wake early the next day for work and Blahnik wanted to stay up and watch television.
He called her on his break shortly before 11 a.m. the next day and said she sounded normal. Moorer worked a double shift that day and wasn’t able to call again on his afternoon break, but said Blahnik updated her Twitter account in the early afternoon.
Moorer left work around 9 p.m. and took the Broad Street Subway home, noticing as he approached that the front light was on and the mail was still in the mailbox, both of which he said were unusual.
When he went upstairs to look for Blahnik, he found her laying facedown on a pillow in bed and realized she was dead after feeling her cold skin.
He called two friends and the police and went with the officers who arrived on the scene to Police Headquarters at Eighth and Race streets for questioning. Moorer said he was detained for nearly 16 hours, left alone for several of them. When he was released the following day, police kept his shoes and clothes for testing, and he had to go home in socks.
“As bad as it was being at the police station that long, at least I didn’t have to see them bringing her out,” he said. “I don’t think I would have been able to handle that.”
The aftermath
The medical examiner determined that Blahnik died of strangulation, and the perpetrator used a pillowcase. Even after investigators announced that Moorer was not a suspect in the murder, he said suspicions continued to plague him since the tragedy, providing ample fodder for community gossip.
“Within 15 minutes of when I made the first phone calls, I got a call from Atlanta from someone asking if it was true. Within a half-hour, if you looked outside the house, it looked like a block party, with how crowded it was with everyone out there,” Moorer said. “And it wasn’t for support, they were there to gossip. And when people starting saying I did it, I sucked it up at first and tried not to get mad. I tried to put myself in their shoes and say you know, they didn’t have the whole story so they had to create the story and try to make sense of it and fill in the blanks.”
After police stated that Moorer was not involved in the murder, however, he said he received only a few apologies from friends and community members who had contributed to the rumor mill.
“When you start rumors, what happens when you find out the truth? You can’t take the rumors back. With a rumor I might be able to influence 500 people, but it’s harder to get the truth out when it comes out. It’s damaging.
“As much as this community is discriminated against, we discriminate against each other,” he added. “If you have five gay people in a room, three or four would have something bad to say about one of the others. I never really realized it before because I always tried to stay out of that stuff, but now I’m the one being talked about. I haven’t been able to really grieve properly yet because before I could even start grieving, I had to defend myself.”
Coping mechanisms
Moorer said the accusations have left him ostracized.
He was shunned by Blahnik’s family, and his name was omitted from the obituary.
“This is the loneliest I’ve ever felt. I wouldn’t wish this loneliness on my worst enemy,” Moorer said.
He said he often watches a video the couple took on his phone of the two of them relaxing and joking at home, and frequently listened to an old voicemail from her, until he lost it when he got a new phone.
Moorer keeps a candle lit in the house surrounded by several pictures of Blahnik and the Serenity Prayer. He cleaned off the teddy bears and stuffed animals that well-wishers left on his doorstep and keeps them in their bedroom. And, each night, he’s slept in the same bed where he found Blahnik.
Moorer is moving to a new house this month, but said the past three months of living on Manton Street have been a difficult but necessary part of the grieving process.
“It’s been hard to deal with but I think it was easier than packing up our stuff and going to stay with somebody else,” he said. “This was the first home I owned. This person took my dream away from me. It was my dream to be self-sufficient and to take care of my family, and Stacey and our dogs, they were my family. I couldn’t leave that. This was the last place where she was at, and I didn’t want to leave that.”
He has begun counseling but said the effects of the murder have carried over to all facets of his life.
“I used to get crazy hours at work but sometimes now I turn down hours because part of me I guess feels like if I hadn’t been working a double that day, I may have been able to stop this from happening,” he said. “And I was working so much, and so much was going on, that I feel now like I didn’t know what was going on with Stacey. So I’ve been feeling like I shouldn’t be away from home as much as I used to be. But it’s a big thing to be moving now. That’s the first step. The second is getting the person who did this.”
The investigation
When Moorer spent more than half a day at the police station, he did hear some antigay comments from those on the force, which have stuck with him throughout the investigation process.
“Some of the cops were throwing around the words ‘queer’ and ‘faggot’ when I was there,” he said. “I don’t think it was directed at me, they were just using it kind of in passing. So it just made me think that if they think that way, are they really going to give this the attention it needs? I don’t want them to rush it because if you rush something, it could be done sloppy, but it does need to be dealt with.”
Moorer has been in frequent contact with the police and recently spoke to detectives working on the case, who he said gave him confidence that they were investigating thoroughly, and he noted LGBT liaison Deputy Commissioner Stephen Johnson has been very responsive.
Moorer said he was dismayed, however, when the city recently announced it was putting up a $25,000 reward toward the capture of the so-called Kensington Strangler, who is accused of raping and killing three women, and is thought to be targeting sex workers and drug addicts. The city’s contribution brings the total reward money to $37,000.
“That was a $25,000 reward for a city that’s supposedly broke, but not a dollar for Stacey? Why not?” Moorer asked. “Who knows what somebody else knows? It’s not like this is the same person, but people will come out of the woodwork, maybe for even $1,000. Money talks.”
Mark McDonald, the mayor’s press secretary, said city-sponsored rewards are “fairly infrequent,” adding that the Kensington Strangler and Blahnik murder are different cases.
“They differ in pretty clear ways in the sense that the city is looking for an individual who has killed more than once,” he said. “There’s DNA evidence that points to the same individual in these multiple cases, so on the basis of that and the danger that this denotes, this reward situation was established. It’s the serial nature of the matter that led to this element of the strategy to get this person off the street.”
Community response
Without reward money from other outlets, Moorer suggested that LGBT community members and the organizations that represent the community could pitch in to raise a reward.
“When does the gay community stick together and say, ‘OK, we’re going to put up a reward for one of our own’? We’re always talking about rights and getting respected, but if we don’t respect each other and come together for one another, how can we expect others to?”
Since the murder, however, Moorer said he’s met with a lot of apathy from the local community.
He said he’s sent numerous e-mails and made phone calls to community leaders, with little response.
Within Blahnik’s circle of friends, Moorer said it seems like many have already moved on, an attitude he attributed to some of the shared issues in the LGBT community.
“So many people in this community were raised up and just kicked around their whole lives, rejected by parents and families. So if you don’t really love yourself, it’s hard to love those you’re surrounded by. There’s a word some people use: They say they ‘live’ for someone. They live for this person or for that person. But that’s not love. When you truly love someone, you work to keep their memory alive,” he said, noting that Blahnik can best be honored by community members striving to emulate the best side of her. “I’m a firm believer that if we were able to bring back Stacey or other people who’ve passed, they’d have a different perspective and tell people, ‘Do this,’ or ‘Don’t do that.’ Some people have already gone back to doing what they were doing before she was killed. But you have to look at what was best in that person and celebrate it and look at what was bad and avoid that to really honor that person.”
Moorer said he has “no desire to become an activist,” but said he thinks Blahnik would want him to work for justice for her, which he is committed to doing.
“I was so in love with her when she died, and I’m still in love with her. So I’m not going to stop fighting for her. Her voice was taken away, so I’m trying to be that voice now.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].