Robert Wells' real name was Robert "Bobby" Worley. His body was found in the closet of an apartment on West 140th Street in Harlem in October of 1993 after the death of the apartment's resident, drag queen Dorian Corey.
From Atlas Obscura (see link below):
"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. Despite the technical hurdles posed by decay, mortician and detective Raoul Figueroa managed to extract fingerprints from the corpse. The body was identified as Robert “Bobby” Worley, born December 18, 1938. 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. By most accounts, he was estranged from his family and hadn’t been seen since the mid- to late ’60s. Coupling this with Figueroa’s pull-tab dating method, detectives concluded the shooting must have happened at least 20 years prior."
From New York Magazine (see link below):
"Bobby Worley's brother Fred turned out to be a small, charming, unfailingly courteous man in his early sixties. He lived in the basement apartment of a building on Edgecombe Avenue where he was the superintendent. It was a once-handsome building with apartments with waitscoting and parquet wood floors.
Worley and Bobby were from a family of seven children. Their father, Eddie senior, took care of the ice plant for the city of Fairmont, North Carolina, where most of his family still lives today. Bobby was the baby of the family.
Fred Worley came to New York with his wife and young son in 1956. His brother followed sometime later. "I didn't even know he was here at first, "Worley said. "He didn't come right to me."
Bobby Worley was released from Sing Sing in August 1966. Sometime after that - in 1967 or 1968 - he came to live with Fred Worley and his family in the Bronx. By that time, he had changed his name to Bobby Wells and fathered a son. Worley tried to talk to his younger brother about his "life-style choices." But liquor got in the way. "He used to drink vodka straight from the bottle. It was an everyday thing."
After about three months, Bobby Worley disappeared. "He got attracted to a woman who lived next door," Fred Worley said. "They had a run-in, and he roughed up one of her kids a little bit, a boy about 7. She said 'I'm going to call the police.' When he heard the word police, he took off. That was the last I saw him."
Almost 25 years later, Fred Worley got a call saying his brother had been found dead. Did it surprise him? "Not really," he said. "I stayed in the same place another seven or eight year, and my family stayed in the same place. So when none of us heard from him, we figured something had befallen him." After they got word about his body, they let the city bury their brother in potter's field on Hart Island.
"Do you know if he ever got involved with transvestites?" I asked, not expecting the answer I got.
"Oh yes," he said matter-of-factly. "I think they had a relationship, he and this transvestite. I didn't know this was in him until one night when he was living with me. He was obviously stewed; he called our house well after midnight thinking he was calling his transvestite friend, and he talked and talked and I listened."
"Did she have a name?"
"Yes, yes..." He was searching for the name but not coming up with it.
"Dorian?"
"Dorian, that was it. That is who he thought he called."
"You're absolutely sure?" I was afraid he was just trying to tie up all the pieces.
"I'm absolutely sure about that."
"Absolutely?"
"Yes. From what I gathered," Worley said, "they'd had a little spat and my brother was trying to put some emollient on the problem."
I asked if it was possible his brother had tried to beat her up.
"I think he was pretty macho, yes," he said. "I'm pretty sure that he acted out his violence with her, but I have no firsthand knowledge."
"Maybe he went too far once?"
"That could be," he said. "That very well could be."
Sources:
"The Drag Queen and the Mummy" by Edward Conlon, in Transition, no. 65 (1995), pp. 4-24, publisher Indiana University Press on behalf of the Hutchins enter for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935316
"A Famous Drag Queen, a Mummy in the Closet, and a Baffling Mystery" by Julianne Tveten, in Atlas Obscura.
"The Drag Queen Had a Mummy in Her Closet," by Jeanie Russell Kasindorf, in New York Magazine, May 2, 1994.
