‘Party Monster’ Michael Alig Dead of Suspected Heroin Overdose

Former club promoter and “Club Kid Killer” Michael Alig was found dead by an ex-boyfriend of a suspected heroin overdose in his Washington Heights apartment in Manhattan Thursday.

Alig, whose notorious murder of friend and fellow promoter Angel Melendez inspired the 2003 movie Party Monster starring Macaulay Culkin, became a cautionary tale about life in the big city.

In March 1996, Alig and another friend, Robert “Freeze” Riggs, got into a beef with a small-time drug-peddling pal, Angel Melendez, while they were all on ketamine. Alig recalled to The Post how he and Riggs beat Melendez to death, then dismembered his body and tossed the parts into the Hudson River.

They were eventually caught and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

According to the New York Post:  The 54-year-old former scene fixture-turned-slay convict was discovered by an ex-boyfriend just before midnight in his Washington Heights pad, authorities said. Alig’s ex “was there and saw him unconscious and called 911,” a police source said. “[Alig] was on his side.”

Detectives recovered several zip-lock plastic bags, apparently containing heroin, from the home, as well as drug paraphernalia, officials said.

Alig was known in his heyday as the self-proclaimed “King of the Club Kids,” a group of outrageously dressed, drug-fueled hedonists staging the most sought-after nightclub parties in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The Post in an exclusive interview in 2014 how he grew up as a gay person in South Bend, Ind., wearing Izod — and felt as if he had finally come home after arriving in the Big Apple in 1984.

He moved to New York City to attend Fordham University — and quickly met a fellow student called Ludovic who changed the course of his life.

The young man, the boyfriend of famed pop artist Keith Haring, took Alig to a party that his beau was throwing at the now-defunct Area club on Hudson Street.

Ludovic wore underwear and white body paint as he swept the pair past the uber-choosy doorman.

Once inside the joint, Alig said, he was hooked.

“[I was] a misfit from the Midwest who came to New York City in search of acceptance, opportunity and a whole lot of fun,’’ Alig recalled to The Post.

“As a gay teen coming to terms with my sexuality, I was overwhelmed and exhilarated. It was liberating,’’ he wrote of the wild scene, which included androgyny icon Grace Jones partying among about 300 other people.

“Talk about being in the right place at the time,’’ Alig said. “While the rest of the country was entrenched in depressing Reaganomics and [the anti-drug campaign] ‘Just say no,’ downtown New York nightlife was having a moment.”

What a moment it was.

“Fabulous” was the word of the day. The wilder, more eccentric the makeup, hair and costumes, the better — and no one was held in more esteem in the hierarchy of alien-looking club-hoppers than a gender-bending man with an entourage.

Alig dropped out of school and joined the circuit, donning his own version of garish makeup and outlandish outfits to host parties at the Tunnel, Limelight and other nightclubs.

He became part of the scene’s exclusive, trend-setting group known as the “Club Kids’’ who were “paid merely to show up and bring a bit of fabulousness to the mix,’’ Alig recalled.

But with the excess-fueled fame and fortune came dangerous trappings, too, including drugs.

Alig began ingesting heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine with the best of them, as well as heavily boozing.

Alig spent 14 years in jail before being released in 2014.