The sky was unusually bright that night, the air humid and sultry, embracing the light. Amanda Milan had pulled a trick for an escort agency, then stopped by Times Square to join an early-morning coffee klatch with a group of transsexuals who sometimes gathered at McDonald's on Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street to trade laments over Styrofoam cups.
Amanda was a tall black transsexual, with a long hair fall that masked the broad cut of her chin and a welcoming smile dabbed with glossy red lipstick. She had ample breasts (with the help of D-cup implants), and much of the time she could "pass" as a woman. But around the Port Authority, people recognized "the girls" who hung out by the Duane Reade drugstore, and Amanda was something of a celebrity in that circle.
Amanda kissed her friends goodbye at about 4 a.m. and then crossed Eighth Avenue, hoping to catch a cab in front of the bus terminal. Her friends watched her go, and continued to watch as a man approached her.
Dwayne McCuller, a 20-year-old black man from the Bronx, had been standing on the street corner for at least an hour, witnesses said. Maybe his plans for the night had fallen through. Maybe he was bored. And maybe, when he saw Amanda pass by, frustration began to swell in his throat. He said something to Amanda that her friends couldn't hear because of the street noise.
Then one of her friends heard him yell at Amanda, "Get your fucking drag queen ass away from me." Someone else heard him say, "I know what you have between your legs."
Amanda was the kind of person who stood up to thugs and people who hurled insults, said friends. If a guy was looking at her funny, she might walk up to him and say, "Do you have a problem?" She wasn't going to stand there and be degraded. Someone said they heard her challenge him to fisticuffs: "I'm a man too, you want to fight?" Or maybe: "Put up your wife beaters and fight me like a man."
No one can confirm the exact words exchanged at the beginning of the scuffle, but the event unfolded like this, according to later police reports:
"I'll shoot you," McCuller allegedly said, and he may have then backed away. "I have a gun. I ought to punch you in the face and hit you."
Amanda began to walk away, too. Eugene Celestine, a 26-year old security guard from Queens, N.Y., whom Amanda's friends say they had seen around the Port Authority, piped up. "Yo, I got a knife," he said, according to police reports. "Give it to me," McCuller responded.
Amanda was now halfway across the street. McCuller grabbed the knife from Celestine's hand and ran after her. Her friends, still across the avenue, screamed to Amanda, trying to warn her. But soon he was upon her. As she reached the corner of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, he plunged the knife into her throat. Amanda fell to the ground in front of the Duane Reade, where she began to bleed to death.
A young Puerto Rican man from the Bronx took off his shirt and wrapped it around Amanda's neck to stop the bleeding. He rocked her in his arms, saying, "Baby, don't leave us" as others stood and watched. The police arrived on the scene at 4:20 a.m. and rushed Amanda to St. Vincent's Hospital in Chelsea, where she was pronounced dead on June 20, 2000, at 10 minutes before 5 a.m.
Amanda Milan, who was 25 when she was killed, was born Damon Lee Dyer, and grew up as a boy in Chicago. She came out as a transsexual about eight years ago, said friends.
For the past several years, Amanda lived in an apartment at Central Park West and 103rd Street with her dog, Ashley, a Pomeranian. She also traveled quite a bit — to Milan and Paris and London — where she worked as a high-class escort, according to her closest friends, and hung with a fashionable crowd.
"We had other friends who were transsexuals, but models, just one notch from superstardom," said Patra, a Jamaican transsexual who lived in Amanda's building on 103rd Street and says she spent a great deal of time with her. "There was Portia, who married a German count, and other girls who were modeling with Naomi and Cindy Crawford. We're not talking about average-looking girls; we're talking about bombshell beauties. Amanda was often described as a full-figured Beverly Johnson look-alike."
Amanda's two closest friends were Kim, a young Puerto Rican transsexual who worked at Show World, and Simone, an African-American transsexual who worked for a time at Screw magazine. The three were as thick as thieves for about 10 years, said friends and often traveled overseas. Then, two years ago, Kim went to England and then to Australia, where she was found at the bottom of a cliff, her body mangled. The medical examiner identified the body by the serial number on her breast implants, said Patra.
About six months later, Simone left town with a boyfriend who had invited her to live with him in San Francisco. But less than a month after she departed, word arrived in New York that she too was found dead, thrown from a fifth-story window.
Amanda was devastated by the losses, said Patra. And she began to fear for her own life because, she would say, "things happen in threes." Six months after Simone's murder, Amanda was dead too.
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