Journalism takes you to some strange places. Alas, to date in my career, I have yet to be asked to review a luxury hotel or a Michelin-starred restaurant. Instead, my lot is to probe the creeps and the criminals, the dregs and the drag queens. Today’s specimen, the convicted child rapist and popular drag queen, Darren Moore (full name Darren Haydn Meah-Moore), ticks every box.
When the entertainer’s body was found in an alleyway in Cardiff city centre in January 2023, his death prompted a frenzy of speculation. The BBC ran multiple pieces on the investigation and even covered a vigil held at Windsor Place, Cardiff.
‘It’s rocked the community, that’s all I can say, no one’s safe anywhere’, his friend, Richard Smith, told a BBC reporter. Drag performer Myky Webb warned it was ‘very worrying for Cardiff as a city and for queer people in Cardiff on the scene, to think that this kind of thing still happens in 2023’. Rob Llewelyn said he had watched Moore sing in Cardiff over the past 20 years. ‘Everyone in the gay community knew him, he was just liked by everyone’, Llewelyn said.
The unspoken assumption in the BBC’s reporting was clear: that the dead gay man, who was found in a luminous green dress, blonde wig and diamante heels, had been the victim of a hate crime. Amid the public outpouring, popular children’s drag entertainer Aida H Dee helped raise funds for Moore’s funeral. On the day of the funeral, Cardiff Council and the police went so far as to close roads across the city to accommodate a horse-drawn cortège.
Now, two years on, an inquest has revealed the truth about Moore’s death. And it is grisly. The coroner ruled that this, er, beloved pillar of the community might have died from an allergy to dog semen. I don’t think I have ever written a sentence as grotesque – so that’s a first.
The 39-year-old certainly went out with a bang. He had been on a night out in Cardiff, performing under one of his monikers – Crystal Couture and CC Quinn. He had ‘spent time… with two men’ before leaving a nightclub. Shortly before 6am, he encountered a man walking his dog. The pair went to an alleyway together. The dog went with them. The last man to see Moore alive said he and Moore had sex, before Moore ‘encouraged’ the dog to ‘join in’. The coroner found that ‘at some stage between 5.52am and 6.38am, the man’s dog penetrated Darren’. Although he couldn’t confirm precisely which of the men had goaded the dog, he added that it would have been ‘almost impossible’ for the dog to have performed the act without ‘guidance and encouragement’ from a human. The second man said Moore later fell asleep in the alleyway. This is where he was found dead the next morning.
As no one in recorded history has died from dog ejaculate, it was not possible for the coroner to confirm that this was definitely Moore’s cause of death. Nonetheless, he found that he was not able to rule out the dog’s semen – and Moore’s allergy to dogs – as a possibility. The official cause of death was registered as ‘sudden death in a man with bronchial asthma in the cold who had consumed alcohol and in a temporal association with sexual activity including intercourse with a dog’.
Hellbound and Down 