Suddenly I realized what was frightening me. Each ring was taking me further and further from the fantasy I’d written to desensitize myself to Nancy’s inevitable death. As a result, I was moving further and further out onto an emotional high wire with no net under me. I could feel myself losing my balance. That’s why I was afraid.
Mercifully, the reporters and cameramen had temporarily gone on to another story when Frank and I left for the funeral parlor. Frank drove slowly. We held hands, not talking for a while. It was the first chance we’d had to be alone. It felt good.
“You know,” Frank said, “when I was driving into New York this afternoon, I was actually thinking about going to that hotel and getting her away from there and that guy. Dragging her out of there over my shoulder if I had to. Bringing her home.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said. “She would have gone right back.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. Still …”
“Don’t do that to yourself.”
He shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, letting out a deep sigh, “I guess she made it.”
I knew what he meant. “She didn’t see twenty-one,” I agreed. “She knew better than all of us. I still can’t believe it happened this way, though. Murder. What happens now? What will they do to us tomorrow?”
“Whatever we have to do, we’ll do. Don’t be afraid. I’ll be with you.”
“But then there’ll be a trial.”
“So there’ll be a trial. It doesn’t matter. She’s dead.”
“What if she’s not?” I asked, suddenly clinging to her existence.
“Huh?”
“What if it’s not her? What if it’s someone else? It could all be a horrible mistake. It’s happened.”
“It’s her,” he said softly. “We’ll see tomorrow.”
When we pulled into the funeral home parking lot, there was only one other car there. Inside it was dark and deserted. Rather eerie. Just the funeral director, us, and the dead. He took us into his office, offered his condolences, and got down to business.
The plot came first. We had no family plot. We arranged for one near where Frank’s parents were buried. It cost about two thousand dollars. It all cost. It seemed there was a rule or regulation for everything, each one designed with the purpose of lining someone’s pocket. We had to pay a fee to a New York mortician for securing the body from the medical examiner’s office and releasing it to our mortician—the New York City ME’s office would not release a body to an out-of-state mortician. We had to pay to transport Nancy to Pennsylvania. We had to pay a fee to open the gravesite. State law. So was paying for a concrete outer burial casing.
“For what?” I asked, in reference to the latter.
“To keep the wood from rotting,” he replied.
“Wood?” I asked, confused.
“The casket, Mrs. Spungen.”
I shuddered, decided to ask no more questions.
“Will you want it open or closed?” he asked.
“Closed,” Frank said.
“What will she wear?”
“Well, we don’t have anything of hers,” Frank said. “I suppose we could buy her a dress.”
“No, wait,” I broke in. “We have her prom dress. The green one.”
“Shoes?” the man said. “Have any of her shoes?”
I shook my head.
“We can take care of that. She needn’t wear any. We’ll cover her feet.”
“The dress,” I pointed out. “It’s rather, well, it has a bare midriff.”
“We’ll arrange it,” he assured me. “The next item is flowers. White flowers? Fall flowers?”
“Fall flowers,” I said. “Those were her favorite.”
“Fine. We’ll cover the casket with amber and copper mums. They look lovely. Then there’s the matter of the announcement in the newspapers, the paid advertisement.”
“We’ve having some problems with the press,” Frank said. “This is an unusual case. A murder. We don’t want them there.”
“I can’t keep them out,” he said. “But if you’re concerned about your privacy—”
“We are,” Frank and I said.
“Then we can wait and put the announcement in on Monday, the day afterward. Of course, that means you’ll have to personally contact anyone you wish to attend.”
“That’s all right,” Frank said. “We’d prefer that. We just don’t want this thing to end up a circus.”
“I understand. I hope you’ll understand though that if people want to come, they’ll come. A funeral home is open to the public.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I begged.
“Well, I can put you in a side room off the chapel before the service to protect your privacy. And then close off the six rows of the chapel immediately behind you so no one can bother you. How would that be?”
It seemed so unfair to have to be distanced from our friends and relatives like that. I wondered if anyone else had to take such a precaution.
We said that would be fine.
Then the funeral director went on down his checklist. He was trying to be as sympathetic and understanding as possible, but I found the whole business morbid and awful. Going over all of these details seemed so unnecessary. Frank was used to it. He’d done it before for his parents’ funerals. I hadn’t.
Then there was the matter of choosing a casket. He took us down a flight of stairs, flicked on a fluorescent light switch to illuminate an immense subterranean showroom filled with caskets—a macabre supermarket. Some were featured on individual pedestals. Some were raised to display the blue satin within. It was positively ghoulish.
I had never known a room like this existed outside of The Twilight Zone.
The director took us from one model to the next, explaining the relative merits, fingering the brass handles, running his hand lovingly over the fine satin wood just like the model on Let’s Make a Deal would caress the smooth, shiny hardwood dining set behind door number two.
He opened and closed each one for us, then gave us the price. They ran in cost from $1,200 to $10,000. When he had shown us all of them, he waited courteously for our decision.
“Which one do you want?” Frank said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t care.”
“Do you think she’d want something plain? Fancy?”
“Maybe we should wait,” I said. “What if she’s not dead? I mean, it’s not like we have any real proof. Just somebody telling me on the phone. It’s not like we’ve seen her.”
“I believe she’s dead,” Frank said. Then he took my hand and took charge. He chose an $1,800 model of cherry wood. Then we went back up to the office and the director added up the list.
The total cost of Nancy’s funeral was a little over $8,000. Frank told the man that would be fine. We didn’t have nearly that much money in our savings account, though if we had a dollar for every newspaper article that referred to us as “affluent” we’d have just about covered it.
We would get the money somehow. Have to.
We got home just before eleven. The street was once again jammed with cars and vans. Our house looked as if it had been seized by enemy troops. Reporters, photographers, and cameramen were everywhere.
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.
Chapter 23
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 aske
d.
“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.”
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 38
