And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (53 page)

Frank pulled into the driveway. We got out and made a dash for the house.

“There they are!” shouted someone.

“Wait, folks!” cried someone else. “We need a live feed for the late news!”

“Just your reaction!”

Frank waved them off. We slammed the door on them. The bell rang immediately. He opened the door, firmly stated “No comment,” and closed it. Someone on the porch cursed.

I wanted to scream at them, “Go away and leave us alone! Have you no compassion? Can't you see what's happened to our family?” But I kept quiet. Anything I said or did would be captured by their minicams and sent out live over the air.

Besides, they wouldn't understand. To them, this was a big story, a sensational death. As Julia Cass of the
Inquirer
later put it to me, “It was sex, drugs, rock ‘n' roll, and murder—the perfect culmination of the punk movement.”

Our friends and family greeted us inside our refuge. We decided to watch the late TV news and see what was being said about us and our daughter. We turned the set on in the den and sat down.

We didn't have long to wait. Nancy's death was the lead local news story. The news was far worse than I could have imagined. “Punk girlfriend” Nancy Spungen hadn't been beaten to death, as
I'd assumed. She'd been stabbed in the abdomen with a seven-inch hunting knife.

Stabbed
. A big, ugly knife had been plunged into my baby's stomach. There was blood. There was pain. I winced, chest aching. It was more real now, more awful.

Sid had been arrested and charged with the murder. A filmed report from outside the Chelsea Hotel showed Sid being led out by the police, wearing handcuffs, real handcuffs this time. He was pale and dazed. There were scratch marks on his face.

“I'll smash your cameras,” he snarled at the press.

According to Manhattan Chief of Detectives Martin Duffy, Sid had awakened at 10:50 a.m., still feeling the effects of Tuinal, a depressant he had taken the night before.

Nancy was not in bed next to him. Rather, the bed was covered with blood. Her blood. A trail of it led from the bed to the bathroom. Nancy was on the bathroom floor, under the sink, clad only in her fancy black underwear, a stab wound in her stomach. She'd bled to death.

The Chelsea Hotel switchboard, the police spokesman advised, received an outside call at about this time asking that someone check room 100 because “someone is seriously injured.” It was not clear if the call had come from Sid.

Hotel employees went up to the room to find signs of a struggle, and Nancy's body. Sid was not in the room. He returned a few minutes later, before the police got there.

Hotel neighbors reportedly heard Sid tell police, “You can't arrest me. I'm a rock ‘n' roll star.”

One of the arresting officers reportedly replied, “Oh, yeah? Well, I play lead handcuffs.”

An unidentified friend of the couple, the TV newsman reported, said he had been out with them that night until four a.m., at which point Nancy had begged him to come back to the Chelsea with them because Sid was “acting strange.” Sid had, the friend said, pressed a hunting knife against Nancy's throat. “He beats her with a guitar every so often,” the reporter quoted the friend as saying, “but I didn't think he was going to kill her.”

Then the news broadcast cut to our house for a live report. There were the cameras and reporters we'd just seen. There was our house, the one we were hiding in as we tried to mourn our dead child.

A reporter stood out front, saying we were inside, in seclusion, and had no comment to make.

Sid would be arraigned the following day.

We turned the television off, stunned into silence by the grisly details of Nancy's murder. I hated violence. Movies with blood and gore in them were abhorrent to me. I avoided them. This I could not avoid. This was real life. It didn't feel like it. It was inconceivable that this was really happening. But it was.

The phone rang almost immediately. Frank picked it up. Someone shouted into the phone, “She was a no-good twat!” and then hung up. Frank put the phone down, shaken. It rang again. A different caller hollered, “Cocksucking cunt bitch!” and hung up. Frank took one more of these awful, hateful calls before he decided to leave the phone off the hook.

We were bewildered by this turn of events. My God, Nancy had not murdered anyone.
She
was the victim. Yet, somehow, the murder suspect and his victim were interchangeable in this case. The media had made Nancy and Sid into personifications of the punk movement. Some people identified with them. Others hated them. Her murder seemed to stir up both sides.

In death, Nancy was bringing out people's anger, just as she had in life.

It was unnerving. We decided to call the phone company the next day and ask for an unlisted number.

Frank peered out the window. The reporters were gone. All clear. Our friends filtered out and the four of us went to bed, numb and drained.

Frank and I just lay there holding hands. The only words of comfort we could give each other were “I love you.” After a while Frank began to cry again. I cradled him in my arms and he sobbed and moaned uncontrollably like he had before in the foyer. I cried some more on the inside. I still couldn't cry on the outside.

Nor could I sleep. I was thinking about what we'd have to do tomorrow. I was inching further and further out onto the high wire, trying to hold on to my balance, trying not to look down. Fear kept me awake until just before dawn.

The police precinct house in New York was on East Fifty-first Street between Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue. We left the car in a lot a few blocks away and walked over.

The world felt different. It looked and sounded uglier and crueler than it had before. But
it
hadn't changed. I had. I was different. My world was different. I felt very cut off from the activity on the streets around me. I felt numb.

When we got to the station, Frank took my hand and we went inside. It was a dreary place. It smelled.

We approached the desk sergeant, who was chattering with a plainclothesman.

“Press cleared out, huh?” the plainclothesman said.

“Yeah,” said the desk sergeant, who seemed not to notice us standing there.

“Some nutsy story, huh?” said the plainclothesman. “Nutsy rock star. Nutsy broad. Jesus, what kind of broad would wanna fuck a guy like that.”

“Dunno,” said the sergeant, shaking his head.

“A slut, I guess you gotta figure,” the plainclothesman said, “your basic druggie slut.”

I wanted to scream “That's my daughter!” but the words stuck in my throat.

“Excuse me,” Frank said, voice quavering slightly.

“You see the hair on that sonofabitch?” continued the plainclothesman, ignoring Frank. “What a fuckin' weirdo.”

“Looks like he stuck his finger in an electric socket,” agreed the desk sergeant.

They both had a hearty chuckle. Then the sergeant noticed us. Frank cleared his throat, asked where we'd find Detective Brown. We were directed upstairs.

Lieutenant Brown was a thin man in a rumpled green suit. He was in his late forties. Shock registered on his face when he saw us standing there in his office doorway. I don't know what he expected Nancy Spungen's parents to look like, but we were not it. Frank wore a dark suit and tie. I wore a somber business outfit. We looked very respectable.

Then he adopted a look of genuine sympathy.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I realize this is hard for you.”

We sat down. Two other detectives squeezed into the tiny office. They questioned us for about an hour, asking about Nancy's drug background, relationship with us, with Sid. They asked us if we knew who their friends were. We told them whatever we knew and they were kind enough not to push us. When they asked if we could pinpoint the last time we'd spoken to Nancy, I told them about our phone conversation the previous Sunday, when she confessed to me that Sid had been beating her, and that she might leave him.

“Was she afraid of him?” one detective asked.

“Nancy wasn't afraid of anyone,” I replied.

Then I told them what happened when Sid got on the line, that instead of his usual passive, polite manner he was rude and belligerent—a different person.

“What was he angry about?” Detective Brown asked.

“Money,” I replied. “They needed money and he wanted me to send some.”

“Hmm,” Brown said. “We'd been led to believe they always carried large amounts of cash on them. In the thousands.”

“Maybe they did when they had it,” Frank said. “But they didn't have it. They were broke.”

“Are you sure about that?” Brown asked.

“They asked us for money,” I said.

The three detectives exchanged a look. Apparently this was a valuable piece of information. (Later there would be some speculation that Nancy had been murdered by a third party, a robber
who was after Sid's bankroll. There was no such bankroll. I don't know who thought it existed or upon what basis, but evidently it was someone who'd spoken to the police.)

Detective Brown lit a cigarette, sat back in his chair. “You folks must have a million questions of your own. Now it's your turn. Fire away.”

“Did she have any pain?” I wanted to know.

“She died right away,” he told me.

“How many wounds?” I asked.

“Just the one.”

“Do you think Sid did it?” Frank asked.

“He
said
he did right when we got there. Of course, he was also totally out of it. A good lawyer will say he was out of his head with grief and get it thrown out. Can't take a confession like that to court. We're working on it, though. We'll build a case.”

“Did he say why he did it?” I asked.

“He said, ‘Because I'm a dog. A dirty dog.' I'll tell you, he was pretty incoherent. Still is. We got him out at the drug detox ward on Riker's Island. Our theory right now is it was a lover's quarrel that went too far. Seems to go with what we know about their relationship. It appears she bought the knife. On Tuesday. Place in Times Square.”

“What will happen to him?” I asked.

“His hearing's this afternoon. His manager is flying over for it.”

“Nancy was his manager,” I pointed out.

“His ex-manager then.”

“What will happen at the hearing?” Frank asked.

“He'll probably be let out on bail.”

“What if he comes after us?” I asked, stricken with sudden and to me very real terror.

“I wouldn't worry about that, Mrs. Spungen. I doubt you're on his mind. Even if you were, there's no reason to believe he'd want to kill you.”

But I did worry.

We had no more questions.

“Okay, here's what's gonna happen,” Detective Brown said. “We're gonna drive you over to the medical examiner's office to identify your daughter's body. Then we'll take you over to the DA's office. More questions, I'm afraid. But we'll take good care of you. It won't take long. Then you can go home to your family.”

We squeezed into an unmarked police car with four different
plainclothesmen, all of them well fed. They joked about how small and poorly equipped the car was—it had no siren or radio. They did their best to keep us amused and to keep our minds off the terrible business that lay ahead. They were kind men who had seen the worst of life and knew what we were going through.

The New York City medical examiner's office is housed in a forbidding glass and tile building on First Avenue in the East Thirties, next to the sprawling Bellevue Hospital complex.

It was very cold inside. We were left on a bench in a large waiting room with about twenty others who were there to identify their dead. Some were crying. Others seemed to be in shock. At one end of the room there was a door. Every few minutes it would open and some poor grief-stricken soul would emerge, an officer at his side for physical support. Those of us who sat waiting would look up apprehensively, wait for the officer to call out the next name on the clipboard. Then one of us would get up and go through that door while the rest of us settled back to wait again. New people arrived in the waiting room for everyone who left it. A lot of people die in New York in one day.

Frank and I sat in tense silence. My chest still ached. Now my stomach did, too. I don't think I blinked once.

After about an hour the woman next to me struck up a conversation.

“I just got here from Texas,” she said, clutching a tissue in her white-knuckled hand. “My son. He's been missing. They asked me to fly up and see if it … if it's him.”

I nodded.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“My daughter. She was murdered.”

She nodded in sympathy. I noticed several other such conversations going on in the waiting room. Total strangers were exchanging information, sharing the vigil. All of us faced the same experience. All of us had to go through that door.