Vicious has always been the prime suspect in Spungen's murder; the hunting knife that provided Spungen with the single stab wound to the stomach that ended her life was traced to Vicious, who claimed that he had no memory of the murder, as he was drugged up beyond belief and only noticed Nancy's condition when he woke to find her on the bathroom floor, surrounded in blood.

Vicious was never brought to trial for the murder- he died of a heroin overdose while out on bail. Vicious' mother, who committed suicide in 1996, always believed that her son was innocent, and asked film maker Alan Parker to help her prove it, which he hopes to do with his new film, "Who Killed Nancy?"

"I just wanted to clear his name," Parker says. "Of course I wasn't there, I can't swear on the bible he didn't do it, but people involved have always told me to keep digging, keep digging and when you do dig it just does not add up."

Parker's film points out a list of shady characters who might have been responsible for Spungen's death, including a drug dealer named Rockets Redglare, a drug addict named Michael, and Spungen herself. "To me, she just did it herself because that's what people like that do, like teenagers who cut themselves," Howie Pyro tells Parker.

Though the film will most likely present more questions than answers, it will succeed in furthering the Sid and Nancy mythology; an extremely screwed-up love story that people seem to romanticize more and more as time goes on. And much like the documentary Kurt and Courtney, Parker's film will ensure that people on both sides of the mystery will have more to discuss, and Sid and Nancy's names will continue to be forever connected, in love or in misery.

Documentary Claims Sex Pistols Singer Sid Vicious Did Not Kill Girlfriend Nancy Spungen [Telegraph]

Spungen came from a suburban Philadelphia household, and she was so disruptive as a child that her mother Deborah wrote a biography about Nancy after her death, called And I Don’t Want to Live This Life: A Mother’s Story of Her Daughter’s Murder. From Deborah's point of view, Nancy was an unreasonable, mentally ill child who "trashed" her life. If you look at things from Nancy's point of view, according to friend and photographer Eileen Polk, "Like most kids who are 17, basically her statement was, ‘I hate my family'…All the things that she loved and thought were important in the world, they told her were stupid. I think she had a really stifling middle-class upbringing.”

Polk has more to say about Nancy:

She was blatantly honest about [using drugs to meet musicians]: She bought drugs for the bands. She was honest about being a prostitute as well, which I thought was refreshing. The punk scene, like any other scene, had its little hierarchies. There were groupies that had been around for a long time because of their looks. In order to be a groupie you had to be tall and skinny and have fashionable clothes. There were a bunch of girls like that on the scene. And then here comes Nancy. She’s not trying to be cute or charming. She wasn’t telling people she was a model or a dancer. She had mousy brown hair and she was a bit overweight. She basically said, ‘Yeah, I’m a prostitute, and I don’t care.’ 

Legs McNeil offers that Nancy wasn't the only outrageous person on the scene, and adds that Nancy "wasn’t any more fucked up than Dee Dee [Ramone] or me. Joey [Ramone] was paranoid schizophrenic. Joey pulled a knife on his mother. We were all a little disturbed.” But as Schoemer notes, Nancy remained an outcast, perhaps because she was so sexually and generally aggressive. Because she didn't fit the groupie mold, Polk said that she was generally shunned. To this day, even though Sid Vicious confessed to Nancy's murder, people don't believe he killed her. "Everyone has a different theory: drug deal gone awry, robbery, or just a mistake that came from having too many knives around," Schoemer says. "Bassist Howie Pyro, who was with Sid the night he died, believes Nancy might have been so desperate for attention that she stabbed herself, thinking Sid would come to her rescue, but that he was too stoned."

If she had been a less aggressive or better liked woman, would people have believed that Sid killed her? Sid died of an overdose four months after Nancy's 1978 death, so he'll never tell. There's a movie currently in production about Nancy's death called Who Killed Nancy?, and it seems the question remains hanging in the air.

The Day Punk Died [NYM]