Blondie guitarist Chris Stein sat down with Artist On Record and opened up about Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious and the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. He admitted that he doesn’t believe Vicious killed Spungen.
“I don’t think he killed her at all,” he explained. “I think he was just really depressed. That’s why he’s… Because he supposedly told the cops he did it but I think heroin is fucked up and it’ll make you depressed and disassociative and all this stuff. I think he was just it was almost like kind of suicide by cop. I think he was so bummed out at that point he just said, ‘Yeah I did it,’ but the word on the street always was that it was somebody else.”
Whether Spungen was actually murdered or not still remains a mystery as there are some contradictory statements from Sid.
One morning in 1978, Spungen was found dead in the bathroom of the hotel room she shared with her boyfriend. She had been stabbed, and Sid was the one who discovered her body.
Sid was arrested and charged with his girlfriend’s murder, but it’s still unclear if he was actually the killer. There were rumors that Spungen was stabbed with an 007 hunting knife. Sid also had the same knife, but police reports later identified the murder weapon as a Jaguar Wilderness K-11 knife.
After his arrest, Sid confessed by saying, “I did it… Because I’m a dirty dog,” first, and later claimed, “I stabbed her, but I never meant to kill her” following a fight. However, he later changed his story, saying he had been asleep.
The couple was known for locking themselves in their room and doing drugs for long periods. This upset the people around them, but still, he refused to leave her. His persistence caused his own death after hers, and the whole story is still a mystery.
