“Trouble in Room 100”
At about 11 a.m. on October 12, 1978, the desk clerk at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City received a call from outside the hotel. A man, who did not identify himself, told the clerk, “There’s trouble in Room 100.” The clerk sent a bellboy to check it out, but before he returned, the front desk received another call, this one from Room 100. “Someone is sick,” a different male voice said. “Need help.”
In the meantime, the bellboy entered Room 100 and found the scantily clad, blood-smeared body of a 20-year-old woman in the bathroom. The platinum blonde lay face-up on the floor, her head under the sink. She wore only a black bra and panties, both items soaked with blood from a one-inch knife wound in her lower abdomen. The bed was also extensively stained with blood.
The desk clerk called for an ambulance which arrived with a police escort. After the paramedics confirmed the woman was dead, police checked the room and found drugs and drug paraphernalia as well as a blood-stained Jaguar K-11 folding knife with a five-inch blade and a black jaguar carved into the handle. The victim had been living in Room 100 with her drug-addicted boyfriend whom police located in the hallway soon after their arrival.
The couple had been living in Manhattan’s famous bohemian haven, the Chelsea Hotel, which at various times had hosted such illustrious guests as Eugene O’Neill, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, Jane Fonda, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan, among many others. The couple had registered as Mr. and Mrs. John Ritchie, though they were not married. John Simon Ritchie was the man’s real name, but he was better known as Sid Vicious, punk superstar and former bass player for the infamous British band, the Sex Pistols. His deceased companion’s name was Nancy Spungen, a.k.a. ‘Nauseating Nancy.’
Vicious was wandering the hallways, crying and agitated, when police arrived. His face was battered, but the bruising indicated that the beating had happened some time before police arrived. When his next-door neighbor came out of her room to see what was going on, Vicious reportedly said to her, “I killed her… I can’t live without her.” He was also heard muttering through his tears, “She must have fallen on the knife.” A known heroin addict, Vicious was obviously high. Officers attempted to arrest him, but he resisted. Police subdued him and put him in handcuffs. Later that afternoon he was charged with second-degree homicide in the death of Nancy Spungen. (In New York first-degree homicide is reserved for the killings of police and court officers in the line of duty.)
The news of Spungen’s death and the murder charge against Vicious reverberated through the ranks of young people who defiantly called themselves “punks.” Vicious’ many fans saw him as nothing less than the embodiment of the punk philosophy — aggressively nihilistic and intentionally rude and offensive in all situations. His physical appearance underscored his beliefs — dyed spiked hair, rail-thin body, knock-kneed posture, worn black-leather motorcycle jacket, and his trademark dog chain and padlock around his neck. Punk was the antithesis of civilized middle-class values. Doing drugs, wearing tattered clothes and safety pins in facial piercings, living in squalor, and never paying more than a dollar for anything were not just lifestyle choices, they were part of the punk ethos. Spungen and Vicious had come to New York and the Chelsea Hotel in particular to enhance their status as punk royalty. But in the end they became the stuff of tragedy, the punk Romeo and Juliet.
The Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, took one look at Sid Vicious and knew he had to have him in the band. Vicious was punk personified and a good match for the band’s frenetic green-haired lead singer Johnny Rotten. When the Pistols’ original bass player, Glen Matlock, left the band in February 1977, Vicious was given the slot. There was just one problem — Vicious couldn’t play the bass. (He had played drums in his previous band, Siouxsie & the Banshees.) But that was just a minor detail, and his lack of musical ability actually reinforced the band’s iconoclastic message. Who cared if they were musically capable? They certainly didn’t. Their cacophonous songs emphasized rebellion over musicianship. As for Sid’s bass playing, the band’s guitarist played bass on the Sex Pistols’ recordings and Sid’s amplifier was turned down during live performances.
Nevertheless, for a brief period in the late ’70s, the Sex Pistols were the band of the moment, and they rode their carefully crafted repulsiveness all the way to the bank.
Born on May 10, 1957, John Simon Ritchie was given his biological father’s name in the hope that Mr. Ritchie would marry his mother, Anne Beverley, and live with them. When the boy was a toddler, mother and son moved to the Mediterranean island Ibiza off the coast of Spain where they waited for Sid’s father to join them. He never did, and the flamboyant Anne grew deeper in debt as the years dragged on. She moved back to London with her young son and took a job working nights at a jazz club in Soho. Her elderly landlady babysat for her much of the time while she struggled to support herself and her son. Being a single mother was an exhaustive ordeal for her, and along the way she developed a heroin habit.
Young John grew to be a shy teenager with a self-destructive streak and relish for rebellion and anarchy. A poor student, he drifted in and out of school until he finally landed at Hackney College where he studied photography for two terms before dropping out. He became part of London’s burgeoning punk scene, which was centered around McLaren’s Kings Road boutique, Let It Rock. McLaren sought him out for the Sex Pistols because he was the real thing. While the other band members were primarily concerned with making music, Sid Vicious, as he was now known, seemed more interested in cultivating his rough-edged alienation and turning it into a celebrity punk persona.
Before Vicious joined the Sex Pistols, the band included drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones, bass player Glen Matlock, and Irish-born lead singer Johnny Rotten, who earned his stage name for the state of his teeth, according to RollingStone.com. The band had a loyal following and a growing reputation for inciting mayhem whenever they played in public. In 1976 their first single, “Anarchy in the UK,” was released. They were asked onto Thames TV’s Today show where they snarled and hurled curses at the provocative host. Their expletives on the show lost them three concert dates, but their fame skyrocketed. They became known more for their outlandish behavior than their music.
In March 1977, the Sex Pistols signed with a new record label, A&M Records, and as a publicity stunt, they signed their contracts in front of Buckingham Palace with the press on hand to cover the event. Their relationship with A&M didn’t last long. By the spring of that year, the band had signed with Virgin Records and released the single, “God Save the Queen.” The record sleeve featured a picture of Queen Elizabeth with a safety pin through her nose. The record was promptly banned in the United Kingdom. Two more singles were released — “Pretty Vacant” and “Holidays in the Sun” — followed by their infamous album “Never Mind the Bullocks — Here’s the Sex Pistols,” which shot up the charts despite the fact that many retailers refused to sell it. Authorities continued to ban their performances, fearing violence and vandalism perpetrated by the band’s fans. Though the band was often prevented from performing, public curiosity swelled, and they became an international phenomenon. Everybody, it seemed, had heard of them, but only the hardcore devotees had actually heard their music.
Bullocks
The band traveled to the United States in January 1978 for an eight-concert tour that proved to be the last hurrah for the Sex Pistols. Frayed nerves, hard feelings, and excessive drug use led to the dissolution of the band after their last date at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. This was the largest audience they’d ever had, and by far their worst performance. Fed up with the direction the band had taken, Johnny Rotten ended the concert by asking the crowd, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” The next day he resigned. A week later drummer Cook and guitarist Jones departed for Rio de Janiero to record on their own.
Sid Vicious returned to England with his girlfriend, soul mate, and constant companion, Nancy Spungen, a headstrong American whose influence over Vicious had contributed to the breakup of the band. They had met in London in 1977. Pamela Rooke, a friend of Sid’s at the time, said that Johnny Rotten “would plead with him to get rid of [Nancy], but to Sid she was like a crutch.” According to Rooke, Spungen had traveled to England “with the express wish… to bed a Sex Pistol… Sid was easy meat.”
to Live This Life
Born on February 27, 1958, Nancy Spungen had been raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her mother Deborah, in her book And I Don’t Want to Live This Life, remembers her daughter as difficult almost from birth. She threw ferocious tantrums that scared her parents and cried more than any child should. She was given her first sedative when she was three months old. At age four, she saw her first psychiatrist. When Nancy was 11, she attacked her mother with a hammer because she wouldn’t take her to a museum. Nancy’s tantrums grew more violent, and she would “smash rooms to pieces.” She was often overheard saying, “I want to die.” She first tried drugs at age 13, and two years later she was a heroin addict. Her behavior was so out of control, doctors refused to treat her, and she was finally diagnosed as schizophrenic. By the time she was 17, her parents couldn’t take it any longer, and they asked her to leave home.
Nancy’s drug use spiraled once she was on her own, and to support her habit she worked as a prostitute. Usually clad in black leather, her wild curls dyed platinum blond, she burst onto the punk scene and managed to offend people who were going out of their way to be offensive. She became known as ‘Nauseating Nancy,’ a tag that didn’t seem to upset her. According to Pamela Rooke, “She was unbelievably thick-skinned, one of the most unlikable people I’ve met. Everybody could see through her — except Sid.”
Soon after they met, Sid and Nancy became inseparable. In an odd codependent way, each provided what the other craved. Besides being enthralled with the sex, Sid found a mother in bossy Nancy, and Nancy found someone who wanted to be bossed. They were made for each other. But eventually their relationship took precedence over everything else in their lives, including the Sex Pistols.
Nancy threatened to become the punk-rock Yoko Ono, managing to infuriate the entire band. Johnny Rotten begged Vicious to dump her, but the only person Sid listened to was Nancy. According to Nils Stevenson, the band’s tour manager, Vicious came to “dislike everything — except heroin and Nancy.”
hotdog
When they relocated to New York, they chose the Chelsea Hotel because of its reputation as a sanctuary for serious artists and musicians, but the hotel’s glory days had long passed, and most of the guests were more interested in getting high than pursuing their muse. Sid and Nancy’s stay there had an inauspicious beginning. While in a drug haze, they set the mattress on fire in their original room and had to be moved to Room 100.
It didn’t take long for their new room to become a cluttered mess because they kept all their belongings on the floor in Harrods’ shopping bags. Their kitten Socks prowled the room, sometimes hiding behind Sid’s gold record which sat on the floor propped against the wall. With $10,000 in their pockets, allegedly given to them by manager McLaren before they left for New York, the couple went on a drug holiday, scoring heroin on the streets while developing a taste for the barbiturate Tuinal and Dilaudid, a synthetic morphine.
Nancy, who declared herself Sid’s new manager, got him a few gigs at Max’s Kansas City, a popular Manhattan rock club. The gigs generated some cash, but the dates were a disaster. Fans flocked to see the famous former Sex Pistol, but what they got was a strung-out junkie who more often than not could barely stand up. According to David Dalton in his book El Sid: Saint Vicious, Nancy frequently had to “yank him back up onto his feet.” His set list included an excruciating version of the Frank Sinatra hit, “My Way,” which was included on a live recording released by Virgin. As Malcolm Butt writes in his book Sid Vicious: Rock’n’Roll Star, Vicious looked like a “pensioner” at Max’s Kansas City and was “merely going through the motions.” For her part, Nancy did her best to antagonize the press and alienate anyone who tried to help them.
Vicious
The couple made an effort to kick their habits by signing up at the Spring Street Methadone Clinic, but it was a sour experience for Vicious, who suffered frequent beatings from other addicts. His smart mouth and recent fame didn’t help matters, making him a target for abuse. Eventually he and Nancy started taking methadone in addition to their other recreational drugs.
A worsening kidney ailment exacerbated Nancy’s foul moods and temper tantrums, and Sid was at the end of his rope. When they could summon the strength, they took to beating one another, though she seemed to carry more scars than he did — mainly bruises and cigarette burns.
After not seeing her parents for some time, Nancy decided to pay them a visit with her famous boyfriend. Sid and Nancy traveled from New York to suburban Philadelphia to stay with Deborah and Frank Spungen. It was an awkward visit for the Spungens, who treaded lightly around the punk couple, but Vicious stayed on good behavior as Nancy uncharacteristically gushed over how good it was to be home. Deborah Spungen found her daughter’s boyfriend surprisingly “subdued.”
Rock ‘n’ Roll Star
“My initial impression was that he simply wasn’t very bright,” she writes in her book. Nevertheless, Sid’s comments did raise a few eyebrows. His reaction to the Spungens’ aluminum-sided suburban home: “It’s a fucking palace.” His opinion of steak and corn served on the patio: “The best fuckin’ food I ever ate.” The visit ended without major incident, but Deborah felt that the Nancy she hugged goodbye wasn’t her daughter anymore. “I felt as if I were holding a stranger.”
Sid and Nancy took the train back to New York where scoring drugs had become their major preoccupation. As their physical conditions deteriorated, so did their relationship. The beatings increased. At one point Sid bashed her in the jaw with a guitar, leaving a large bruise. It wasn’t the first time he had used his guitar to beat her, an unidentified friend of the couple told the New York Post‘s Deborah Orin. But Nancy laughed it off in a phone conversation with her mother. As long as she was high, she felt no pain, but she failed to recognize the seriousness of such abuse.
Vicious now felt more vulnerable than ever. Though he already owned a collection of knives, he felt the need to have a larger weapon to protect himself from the street people who picked on him. Nancy bought him one. On Wednesday, October 11, 1978, Nancy purchased a five-inch folding hunting knife with a jaguar carved into the handle at a Times Square knife shop and gave it to Sid as a gift.
At about 9:45 p.m. on the night Nancy gave Vicious the knife, the couple dropped by Room 119 at the Chelsea where their friends ‘Neon’ Leon Webster and Cathi O’Rourke lived. As reported by David Hershkovits and Lesley Vinson in the Soho Weekly News, Neon Leon felt that Vicious was despondent that night, holding his new knife close to his face as he muttered, “I have no more self-confidence. I’m ugly. I can’t play bass.” Nancy had brought along her prized collection of Sex Pistols clippings and Vicious’ beloved leather jacket and asked Neon Leon if he’d hold onto these items for her. Vicious leafed through the clippings, commenting on how good he used to look. As reported by Ann Bardach in the Soho Weekly News, Vicious told the others that “he had no future.”
Nancy taunted him, telling him to stop fooling around with the knife. She flexed her bicep and said, “Feel my muscle. I’m strong. I carried Sid up from the restaurant. I can carry him, but he can’t carry me.”
Vicious and Nancy left Room 119 at about midnight. Sid forgot his knife on the bed, and Nancy returned to retrieve it.
At 2:30 a.m., Rockets Redglare, a punk hairdresser, received a “frantic phone call” at his apartment in Queens. Nancy pleaded with him to bring her some “D-4s” (the street name for Dilaudid) and hypodermic needles.
Loud knocking on Vicious and Nancy’s door at 3 a.m. woke the woman next door in Room 103. A man in the hallway was heard shouting, “Let me in. Let me in. I’m not playing.” The woman in 103 did not get up to investigate and fell back asleep.
look
Fifteen minutes later Rockets Redglare arrived empty-handed, telling Vicious and Nancy that he was unable to find any D-4s. According to Redglare, Nancy was wearing a shirt over black panties. Sid was sacked out on the bed in black pants and a sweater. The couple was already high on the sedative Tuinal, which had slowed them down physically, but did not satisfy their craving for Dilaudid, which they intended to take intravenously.
Nancy was so desperate, according Redglare, she showed him her handbag. “$50s and $100s spilled out on the floor,” he later said. She told him she’d pay double the price if he could get her 40 Dilaudids. She said that she had $1,400 to spend on drugs that night.
Neon Leon Webster, who was in his room, heard loud knocks coming from down the hall at about 4:15 a.m. A half-hour later he heard something fall on the floor in the hallway, “something that made a metallic, tinny sound. Maybe a knife.”
Shortly before 5 a.m., Rockets Redglare left Sid and Nancy’s room and spotted ‘Steven C,’ the couple’s “regular Quaalude and Tuinal dealer,” getting on the elevator in the lobby. At about the same time, the guest in Room 228 called the front desk to complain about all the noise coming from downstairs. The desk clerk sent a bellhop named Kenny to check it out, and he found Vicious wandering the halls, making a ruckus. Vicious challenged Kenny, who was black, using racist language. A fight ensued. Kenny beat Vicious into submission, bloodying his face. As Vicious lay on the floor, he looked up at the bellhop and said, “Is this what you do to a drunk?” At 5:15 a.m., the bellhop returned to the lobby. He didn’t stick around to see where Vicious went.
At about 7:30 a.m., the sound of a woman moaning woke Vera Mendelssohn, a 48-year-old sculptor who lived in Room 102. She believed the moaning came from the room next door, Room 100. Mendelssohn later described the sound as “coming from a person who was alone.” She said she was “very frightened” and stayed in bed rather than getting up to investigate. The moaning eventually stopped, and Mendelssohn went back to sleep.
Two hours later Herman Ramos, the clerk on duty, received a phone call from outside the hotel. “There’s trouble in Room 100,” the unidentified caller said. Ramos sent Charles, the bellhop who had replaced Kenny for the day shift, to check on Room 100. Moments later Sid Vicious called the front desk, saying “Someone is sick… need help.” Ramos called for an ambulance.
At 10:30 a.m., Vicious was seen in the hallway, heading toward his room. Fifteen minutes later the paramedics and police arrived. They found Nancy’s body in the bathroom and determined that she was dead, then called for homicide detectives. The officers on the scene located Vicious in the hallway and held him for questioning. According to author Malcolm Butt, by this time Vicious had taken enough Tuinal to kill a horse.
Vera Mendelssohn came out of her room when she heard a commotion in the hallway. She saw Vicious surrounded by policemen. According to the Soho Daily News, she said, “His face looked battered.” He was distraught and crying, moaning “Baby, baby, baby.” When he noticed Mendelssohn, he said to her, “I killed her… I can’t live without her.” Mendelssohn was so “stunned,” she couldn’t recall afterward if he’d said, “She fell on the knife,” or “She must have fallen on the knife.”
Vicious was taken to the Third Homicide Division on 51st Street where he was questioned and made a statement, confessing to the murder of his girlfriend.
“I did it because I’m a dirty dog,” he allegedly told police. Early that afternoon he was charged with murdering Nancy Spungen. At 5:20 p.m., Nancy Spungen’s body was removed from the Chelsea Hotel in a green body bag.
The next day at his bail hearing, Vicious could barely stand. He was dressed entirely in black and wore black shoes without socks. The proceedings took 10 minutes, and bail was set at $50,000. He was then taken to the prison facility at Riker’s Island and admitted to the prison’s detox unit.
Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren worked to raise Vicious’s bail, going first to Virgin Records and telling them that he had plans to make new Sid Vicious recordings for them. Vicious was desperate to be released because he wanted to attend Nancy’s funeral. Understandably, the Spungen family didn’t want him there, and he probably would have been horrified to see her in repose wearing her green high-school prom dress, her hair dyed back to its natural chestnut brown.
On October 16, 1978, Virgin Records wired McLaren $50,000 to secure Vicious’s release. He hired the prestigious law firm Prior, Cashman, Sherman, and Flynn to defend Vicious. The next day Sid’s mother, Anne Beverley, flew to New York from England, raising the money to buy her trans-Atlantic ticket by selling the rights to her story to the New York Post. She took a room at the Hotel Seville on Madison Avenue so that she could care for her son after he was released.
Within a week, Vicious, despondent over the loss of Nancy, tried to take his own life by overdosing on methadone and slashing his arm. His mother discovered him and called for help, saving his life. Once again he tried to kick his habit, but he used up his methadone allotment too soon and had to suffer for days in painful drug withdrawal until the clinic would give him more. On October 28, he made another attempt to kill himself, slashing his wrists with a razor blade and a broken light bulb, screaming, according to author Malcolm Butt, “I want to join Nancy, I didn’t keep my part of the bargain.”
This time McLaren called for paramedics, but before they arrived, Vicious tried unsuccessfully to throw himself out a window. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital where he spent several days in detox before being discharged to his mother’s care.
By December, Vicious had found a new girlfriend, actress Michelle Robinson, but by all accounts she was no substitute for Nancy in his heart. Together they made the punk club scene in Manhattan, Vicious frequently obnoxious and belligerent. On December 9, 1978, he got into a fight with Todd Smith, brother of punk-rock poet Patti Smith, at a club called Hurrah’s, cutting Todd Smith’s face with a broken bottle. Having violated the terms of his parole, Vicious was arrested and sent back to Riker’s Island where he spent seven more weeks in the prison detox unit.
Vicious was released on February 1, 1979, and he immediately went back to heroin, this time supplied by his mother, according the New York Post. At a party celebrating his release at Michelle Robinson’s Greenwich Village apartment, Vicious shot up and soon demanded more. His mother doled out another dose from her purse, and within 20 minutes he collapsed on the bed. Friends offered to take him to the hospital, but he refused to go. He drifted off and was left alone in the bedroom. Sometime during the night he woke up, found his mother’s purse, and took the rest of the heroin. The next morning he was found dead.
A court of law never determined Sid Vicious’s guilt or innocence in the death of Nancy Spungen. Friends and relatives knew that he beat her and that they sometimes beat each other. It’s possible that he stabbed her in a fit of rage, his judgment clouded by his addiction.
But the couple also often spoke of taking their own lives, and just weeks before Nancy’s death during their visit to the Spungens in Pennsylvania, they had mentioned that they probably wouldn’t live long. During one of his suicide attempts after his arrest, Vicious did cry out that he hadn’t lived up to his part of the “bargain.” Is it possible that he and Nancy made a suicide pact, but in his drug haze he was unable to take his own life?
It has also been suggested that Nancy Spungen’s killing was the result of a robbery gone bad. Rockets Redglare claimed that Spungen had cash spilling out of her bag in the early morning hours of October 12, but the next day police investigators found no sizeable amounts of cash in the room. Upon leaving the Chelsea Hotel at about 5 a.m., Redglare saw the mysterious ‘Steve C’ in the lobby. According to author Malcolm Butt, Steve C was a “local drug dealer” with a “history of mental illness.” Perhaps Steve C or someone else entered Room 100 while Vicious was unconscious or out wandering, attempted to take Spungen’s money, and killed her when she put up a fight.
It might also have been a revenge killing. Spungen was not well-liked, and Butts claims that she had had an argument with a Puerto Rican drug gang the day before she died. Perhaps someone she had disrespected wanted payback.
Sex Pistols’ lead singer Johnny Rotten never believed that Vicious was guilty. “Sid isn’t capable of killing her,” Rotten told Melody Maker in an October 1978 interview. “It’s not possible.”
The true circumstances of Nancy Spungen’s death may never be uncovered, but its notoriety as what one policeman called New York’s “first punk rock murder” will never fade. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen will be remembered forever as the punk Romeo and Juliet — tragic in love and tragic in death.