- [Voiceover] February the 1st, 1979.
Punk hardman, Sid Vicious wakes up
in a New York jail, charged with murder.
But in spite of the charge, he'll soon be a free man.
- He was released into the custody of his mother,
who then, what, goes out and buys drugs for her son.
- He was trying on clothes, playing air guitar,
jumping around.
- Both hands were just dripping with blood.
- He wanted her to inject into him,
and she said no, she wouldn't do that.
- [Voiceover] In 24 hours, Sid Vicious will be dead
from a fatal overdose of heroine.
- I was part and parcel of supplying him
with something which probably was
responsible for killing him off.
- [Voiceover] February the 1st, 1979.
Sid Vicious is held at the Reikers Island
Detention Center, just across from Manhattan, New York.
This is the beginning of his last 24 hours alive.
For Sid, this is a living nightmare.
He's charged with murdering his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen,
but has no recollection of the attack.
He'd been out of his mind on drugs,
but all he remembers is that when he woke up,
Nancy was dead.
Now one thought terrorizes him,
did he do it?
For 55 days, Sid, a heroine addict
has gone through the agony of withdrawal.
On top of all this, he's been
subjected to humiliating attacks.
- He apparently was raped, he was abused,
he was beaten up.
Everything that is your worst nightmare
that would happen to you in prison.
I mean, how could anybody cope with that?
- [Voiceover] At dawn, Sid is woken and taken from his cell.
He's hoping the nightmare is over,
and that he'll never have to return to prison.
His lawyers believe they can beat the murder charge
and later today they'll make their case
to get him out on bail.
Sid's hearing is scheduled for noon.
- I was dealing with a 21-year-old kid,
you know, transplanted from the UK to the United States,
in a big problem.
- [Voiceover] As Sid leaves Reikers Island behind him,
the clock is ticking on his final day.
Step back three years to London, 1976.
It's the summer that Britain found punk.
- It was a fashion thing, it was a music thing,
and I just think that everybody just locked
onto the same vibe at the same time.
I think that's what it was all about,
that's what punk was,
and I don't really think...
I mean, OK, we had a dwarf, there was hell, you know.
Yes, there was a lot of gay guys there, yes, there were a
few sort of like lesbians, yes, there were some hookers.
It was this whole mix.
But that was London at the time.
I mean, you know, this was what was going on.
Everyone was young, we were all doing really strange things.
- It was very outrageous for that time,
I mean we really pissed a lot of people off,
just because of the way we looked.
- [Voiceover] Back then, Sid Vicious was a shy 19-year-old,
called John Simon Ritchie.
- He looked more like a sort of James Dean character.
He had that slicked back hair,
big, sort of studded wrist band.
Sid had this shy, little boy, lost, um...
childlike quality I think he had about him.
- [Voiceover] Ritchie was drawn to
the emerging punk scene and started hanging
out at the Sex clothes shop on King's Road.
- It was a place where something magical
might happen if you hung around long enough.
And I think that was always a kind of,
gave everybody a sense of purpose
to dwell and to make that pilgrimage
from wherever in the UK to this store.
- [Voiceover] John Ritchie was one
of the many punks who made that pilgrimage.
- I always liked him, I have to say.
There was something warm about him.
He was just very genuinely, just a nice person.
So yeah, he stuck around, I mean,
I think he was probably stealing the
clothes as much as anybody else was.
- [Voiceover] John Ritchie was close to punk's inner circle.
One of his best mates was John Lydon,
the lead singer of the notorious band, the Sex Pistols.
- He pushed himself into the scene, you know,
so that when the paper started to write about
the Pistols and the whole punk thing, y'know,
he was one of the first things that were mentioned.
He went hand in hand with the sort of growth
of punk and particularly of Pistols.
- He didn't quite know what he wanted to do,
but he just knew he was waiting to fit in somewhere.
- When the group did set out to play
in a number of pubs around London,
this tall, somewhat stalwart creature did show up
and we nicknamed him.
- [Voiceover] Lydon was given the name
Johnny Rotten, after his bad teeth,
while Ritchie was given the name Sid Vicious,
not because of any violent tendencies,
but after Lydon's pet hamster, Vicious.
It was all a bit of a joke.
- Yeah, he was around, you'd see him.
I just thought he was a bit of a burp, to be honest.
- Sid was a complete marshmallow, really.
You know, it's like, like playing with children
and playing games and he loved all of that.
And he was a big softy.
- [Voiceover] Now the shy and slightly goofy
John Simon Ritchie had a new name,
Sid Vicious.
He'd spend the rest of his life trying to live up to it.
Sid has 20 hours left to live.
He's escorted from Reikers Island
to the New York Criminal Court.
He's been accused of murdering
his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen,
but his lawyers are certain they can get him out on bail.
They argue that Sid is innocent
and that Nancy was probably killed
by a drug dealer who wanted to steal her money.
- There were a number of other people
who lived in the area, in the hotel,
and who were supplying drugs to these people
who had opportunities and access to these people.
And it was not unlikely that someone
could have come in and attempted to assault them.
We were very optimistic that the prosecution
would not be in a position to prove beyond
a reasonable doubt that he was responsible.
- Sid was gonna get off, we all hoped.
Bailey was gonna do an excellent job.
His bill was gonna be astronomic.
And Sid was gonna play Las Vegas
and pay for it, that was it.
- [Voiceover] But first, Sid's lawyers
have to get him out of jail.
They persuade the judge to release him,
but only if someone can stump up Â£30,000 in bail money.
- I had the money, it wasn't a question,
I was not gonna use it, I used it immediately.
- [Voiceover] At 10 am, Sid is released.
- He was certainly relieved to know
he was being released.
The last thing that I said to him was,
I'll be in touch with you, just be careful.
- [Voiceover] Sid is free and his lawyers
set about preparing his defence,
but in less than 19 hours, Sid will be dead.
Two years earlier and punk was declaring anarchy in the UK.
Some saw it as a threat to the
very foundations of civilization.
The Sex Pistols were at the front line of the movement,
and Sid was in the crowd at every gig,
living up to his new nickname.
- Whenever we played, there would seem
to be some kind of altercation going on,
which seemed to be Sid trying to get
a bit of the limelight for himself.
- [Voiceover] Sid was determined to make his mark
and create his own brand of anarchy.
In one incident he attacked a rock critic with a bike chain,
just because he'd given his favorite band a bad write-up.
- Just be completely destructive
and then he would get really pissed,
really out of it, start lunging around.
You know, usually, if he did start a fight,
he was the one that got off worse, anyway.
- Sid was one of these extraordinary people
who could have had the words "Willing Prey"
tattooed on his forehead, 'cause that's what he really was.
- And it seemed to me, he had this
slightly masochistic quality about him
that he liked to start a fight
so maybe in the end he would get an eyed-in
and he did get eyed-in from quite a few people
that he picked on, and he picked on the wrong blokes.
- He had a gift for provocation.
He did invent that strange kind of dance
that became known as the the Pogo.
- [Voiceover] Sid's violent outbursts got him noticed
and eventually won him his dream job.
When bass player, Glen Matlock, left the band,
McLaren chose Sid as his replacement.
- Sid was the most perfect choice to move into that part,
I mean, as much as he really couldn't play anything.
But hey, listen, it didn't matter, did it,
it was all about the image.
- Becoming a Sex Pistol, I mean,
it was probably a dream come true, in a way.
From being their number one fan,
he was now in the band.
- There was no question you
couldn't take their eyes off him.
He shone so much more brightly than anyone else.
When he ever boarded the stage,
the audience would always squeeze
themselves over to the left side,
because all they wanted to do was
be as close as possible to Sid.
And Sid would spend sometimes half
the show constantly talking to them.
- [Voiceover] Within months of joining the band,
Sid had become the main attraction,
turning his stage act into a bloody side show.
- I can just remember at one point,
him sitting on the bar and he was just covered in blood.
I think he'd just broken the bottle
and he'd just started slashing himself.
- I used to like, put cigarettes on my arm
and watch them burn down and I used to slice that open.
You know, used to rip coke cans in half
to get the jagged edge so you could
get a real nice cut and stuff.
Um, and I'd never seen Sid doing any of that
until he'd seen me doing it.
- [Voiceover] Charles Wells is a juvenile
psychologist who studied Sid's life.
- People in the audience would look at him horrified,
what kind of person would do this?
And their response feeds his sense of self,
as being different, as being special.
He's focused his energies and his efforts
on creating an identity, one which doesn't seem to
be true to who he perhaps really was.
He is trapped by this,
because in the end it's what people want to see.
They don't want to see who you really are.
- [Voiceover] The quiet, shy John Simon Ritchie
had transformed himself into
the ultimate punk icon, Sid Vicious.
Sid has 17 hours left to live.
He's out on bail, expecting a hero's welcome.
But McLaren, who's organized Sid's release,
isn't there to meet him.
He's in London, being sued by John Lydon
for control of the Sex Pistols.
- I regret not having been there,
but you know, I had a bloody huge court case
mountain on my head at the same time.
And you couldn't be in both places at once,
it was really hard.
- [Voiceover] In fact, as Sid walks free,
he's met by just his mum and an old friend, Peter Kodik.
- I can recall that moment so well,
because I think now when I look back on it,
I'd have preferred him to stay in Reikers Island.
- [Voiceover] Sid's had a crippling
heroine addiction for a year now.
In prison, he was denied access to the drug,
now he's only got one thing on his mind.
- Walking down the street, it was like,
I think he kept saying, "Did you get it?
"Did you get it, mum?
"Did you get it?"
"Yeah, Sid, yeah, Sid."
"OK, OK, OK, walk faster, faster."
- [Voiceover] Sid is anxious to get to his mother's hotel
a few blocks from the courthouse.
Just before his release, his mum
told the papers that what Sid was looking
forward to the most was a giant ice cream.
But in a bizarre act of motherly love,
she's bought her son what he really wants.
Heroine.
It's only an hour since Sid was released on bail
with a murder charge hanging over his head.
In 16 hours, he'll kill himself,
or that's how the story goes.
But according to one eye witness,
Sid didn't kill himself.
He was killed by someone else.
Sid Vicious has 16 hours left to live.
He's been released on bail accused of murdering
his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
Sid's body is clean of drugs for the first time in years,
but not for long.
Sid's with him mum and a friend, Peter Kodik.
His mum's bought him heroine he's now desperate to inject.
- He was released into the custody of his mother,
who then, what, goes out and buys drugs for her son.
You know, it's unbelievable to me
that that would have happened.
- Because of heroine as being an addictive substance,
in some ways it keeps Sid
in the relationship with his mother
and perhaps prevents him from truly
separating and achieving independence.
- [Voiceover] For as long as they can both remember,
Sid and his mum have taken drugs together.
Soon those drugs will kill her only son.
Sid Vicious was born in South London on May 27th, 1957.
His father left home when he was two years old.
In his absence, Sid forged a strong bond with his mother.
She was more of a friend than a parent
and she came to dominate Sid's life.
- She was poor and she had a kid,
so it wasn't even like she was a single working mother.
She was just, it was just Sid and Anne, you know?
And she was kind of a hippie or a beatnik, I suppose.
Free spirit.
- [Voiceover] Sid's mum led a chaotic life
moving from place to place and doing
whatever she had to to survive.
- And then she moved to Ibiza, Spain for a little while,
and took Sid with her.
- Because she'd been part of the hippie movement
back home in England, she would
charge sailors to roll joints,
that was her way of hustling a couple
of quid to keep the kid in a slightly better life.
- One of the possible consequences
is again finding it difficult to develop a clear identity.
If a young person has never stayed in a place long enough
to establish long enough relationships with peers,
then they will miss out on that
and it will be some, perhaps more difficult
for them to say, you know, "Who am I?"
- She heard a rumor from a friend of hers,
that if you were heroine dependant
or drug dependant, you could get a free flat,
you could be moved up the housing list in like, no time.
So she just literally said she was
heroine dependant and she got this flat.
Of course, the downside to that is,
you're living in a world surrounded
by heroine dependant people.
- [Voiceover] By the time Sid was seven,
his mum was addicted to heroine.
- I visited his house, where his mother lived,
his mother was a dope dealer.
It was quite clear, she was always
in the kitchen cooking up something or other.
- It would have been a very obvious and regular sight
to come home and find mum flaked
across two mattresses with a syringe in one arm.
- I mean, my first memory of him is
sort of, like, people emptying pills into his hands
and him just shoving it in his mouth
and then asking what the pills were.
- [Voiceover] Seeing his mother use a needle,
encouraged teenage Sid to experiment.
- Some people were taking Speed or amphetamine sulphate
and some people were experimenting with it.
And because mum's got things like
old, metal syringes that you've gotta boil wash
and you can use a hundred or a thousand times.
He's turning up and going, "Actually, man,
"you get a better kick out of it if you inject it."
- He'd take mass amounts of anything,
he used to take downers, speed, dexies,
bombers, blues, amphetamine sulphate
which was of course the drug of choice of all punks
and everything and we all used to take loads of that.
- Anything that would be stuck in front of him,
Sid would inject.
That's what I said, it could be tuinal,
it could be speed, cocaine, heroine.
The more things the better, really.
- Some images are completely burned on my memory
forever from that period and one of them
is Anne's boyfriend selling Sid drugs,
heroine, literally in front of me.
I thought, y'know, that was it,
as far as I was concerned, I mean,
there was no clearer picture of what it was all about.
- [Voiceover] By his own admission,
Sid injected speed up to fourteen times a day.
- It's highly significant that his mother
was a heroine addict in the past.
The adults in a childhood relationship act as models
and for instance in a home where
there is a lot of open drug use,
then this will become normal for that child.
- [Voiceover] Despite the unconventional upbringing,
Sid and his mother were very close.
But her inability to say no to her son would end in tragedy.
Sid has thirteen hours left to live.
He arrives at his mother's hotel,
eager to take the heroine she bought for him.
- He was back out, faced with the things
he was faced with before.
Often addicts talk about their drug
as their best friend, their lover.
- [Voiceover] Sid and his mum know he's taking
a massive risk injecting a large dose of heroine.
Especially now his body's clean.
- One can see his mother supplying
him with drugs as an act of care.
Perhaps she recognized the pain he was in
psychologically and emotionally
and was doing what she could to take the pain away.
There is association with happier times in his life,
the times that he's used with his lover, Nancy.
And there could even be a recreation of that
in using it with other people who
he counts as his close friends and his family.
- [Voiceover] Michael Baden is a heroine expert
and the coroner who carried out the autopsy on Sid's body.
- With 55 days, he wouldn't have had
any tolerance left and he would have had to
have started off at a low dose of heroine.
It's very common for people who have
been addicted to heroine who go to jail,
if they're not careful, on their first dose,
they can die.
- What had been sold to her was absolute rubbish.
- [Sid] What's that?
- [Anne] I'm sorry, son.
- [Sid] It's rubbish!
- I'm sorry, son.
- Sorry, you think I wanna hear sorry?
Shut up.
- Which left him even more disappointed and even more angry.
Everything that he was waiting for,
this big hit that was waiting for,
after he got out of the court wasn't gonna happen.
- [Sid] Peter, you know how I like your photography?
- [Voiceover] Desperate for a fix,
Sid turns to his friend, Peter Kodik.
- [Sid] Sort me out, yeah, Peter?
- [Voiceover] As a rock photographer,
Kodik knows the New York drug scene
and Sid knows he can be relied upon
to source high-grade heroine, paid for by his mum.
- [Sid] That's what I wanna hear, brilliant.
- I said I'd see what I could do
and I'd see him later on that evening.
Probably he must have given me, I'd say
between, let's say, $100 - $150.
- [Voiceover] Kodik leaves to score the heroine Sid craves.
Sid waits with his mother.
Even though she now seems happy to supply her son
with the drug, she wasn't the one that got him hooked.
For that, Sid can thank the other woman in his life,
Nancy.
Two years earlier and just weeks after
joining the Sex Pistols, Sid's notorious antics
have put him at the forefront of punk.
One night he ended up crashed out on the floor
with his mate Johnny Rotten and
an American groupie, called Nancy Spungen.
- She rolled over to John and tried to f--k him
and I think he wasn't cooperative
and so she rolled the other way and Sid was.
And I think that was it really.
Sid lost his virginity to Nancy
as a second choice I have to say.
- [Voiceover] Nancy had come to London
on a mission to bed a Sex Pistol,
and now she'd got one, she wasn't going to let him go.
- [Sid] Hey do you wanna write a pornographic movie?
Give us a hundred pounds.
- Sid was immature, he was very insecure.
And she was ideal for him, you know,
because she was one saying that
"You're the star, you're the star."
Which when you're insecure is what you need.
- [Nancy] Sid was like really showing it out,
and John was being like nothing.
You know, he just wasn't giving it any more.
- [Voiceover] Once more, Sid had put his
trust in a habitual drug user.
Nancy had been a heroine addict from the age of 14.
- I think she just had one thing on her mind all the time.
It was like where her next fix was coming from,
more than anything else.
- [Voiceover] Sid had been injecting
Speed with his mum for years.
Within days of meeting Nancy,
he took heroine for the first time.
- Nancy's influence was twofold.
One, she told him he was great,
and second, she told him he was
even better when he'd take smack.
- [Man] Sid?
- The heroine took ahold.
Yes, that sort of changed his personality
as obviously it would and he took to it,
unfortunately, like a duck to water.
- One might imagine that in that relationship,
he was able to find acceptance of himself
as a man, perhaps,
and this would of course
increase his level of attachment
and devotion to her.
- Nancy would sort of say to Sid,
"You know, I'll have this but you can't handle that much."
You know, that kind of thing, so he'd be like, "Yes, I can."
- [Nancy] Sid, damn you!
- [Voiceover] Within a month, Sid was hooked
and using heroine everyday.
- There wasn't anything I could do,
but to see it happening was like
seeing somebody come down with
a fatal disease in front of your eyes.
- [Voiceover] Sid had finally broken
his dependency on his mother and replaced her with Nancy.
But with Nancy came heroine,
the drug that would eventually kill him.
- What was the next question?
What was the next question again?
- [Voiceover] It's early evening.
Sid Vicious has nine hours left to live.
Sid and his mum, Anne, take a cab
across New York to a small apartment in Greenwich Village,
where she's arranged a party to celebrate
his first day of freedom.
- So, what was it like in there, man?
- It's Reikers.
- [Voiceover] The apartment is owned
by Michelle Robinson, 22-year-old actress.
Sid started sleeping with Michelle
shortly after Nancy's death.
She was one of the last people
to spend time with Sid before
he was detained at Reikers Island.
Also at the party is Eileen Polk,
a New York punk who's a friend of Sid's mum.
- We were all in the bedroom when the party started out.
He was hopeful, in the early part of the day,
that he'd be acquitted and he'd be able
to be playing music again, put a band together.
With Sid and Anne it wasn't like mother and son,
it was like they were partners in whatever,
crime, the hell they were creating,
whatever it was.
She was his friend more that his mother.
She cared about him a lot and took care
of him when she could, like a mother,
but she was considered one of the gang.
- [Voiceover] At 8 PM, while Peter Kodik searches
the streets for heroine, Anne cooks
her son's favorite meal, spaghetti bolognese.
Sid had been in good form all afternoon.
- He had been so positive.
While we were cooking dinner, he was trying
on clothes, playing air guitar, jumping around.
It was like the Sid that I knew
was always there deep inside, but
circumstances made it hard for
that good humored person to come out,
especially in the recent past.
- It's one of the things in treating
depressed people that you always watch for.
Because if you see that their mood
suddenly starts to get better,
one of the things that you have to be very suspicious of
is that they haven't decided that
they're really going to kill themselves,
because their mood usually picks up when they do.
They're no longer in confusion and in conflict.
- [Voiceover] But around midnight,
Peter Kodik and a friend arrive at the party.
- The atmosphere changed,
the atmosphere of the party changed.
- [Sid] Peter, you naughty little girl.
- [Voiceover] Kodik has kept his promise and scored.
Sid can finally take the high quality heroine
he's been craving all day.
Just a year earlier and Sid's escalating
drug use was taking it's toll.
Sex Pistols were beginning to fall apart,
and everyone blamed Nancy.
- I'd have everyone coming up to me and going,
"That bitch, that slag, why the hell doesn't she fuck off?"
She was a hooker, she was a drug addict,
she was the worst possible influence for Sid.
And then Sid would come say, "She's great,
"she's really beautiful."
- [Voiceover] In a botched attempt to get Sid off drugs,
Malcolm McLaren sent the band on tour.
- This is how unscheming Malcolm was.
Malcolm felt Sid was taking smack
because the band weren't gigging,
and Sid was just bored and he was frustrated.
So Malcolm thought we have to get some gigs for the band,
so he sent them to Holland.
To keep Sid off smack, he sent him to Holland,
which is the most dumb thing you could do.
- Well, it's always difficult to cope
with people who are heroine addicts,
particularly if you're not and you don't
have a lot of experience in that world.
- He was good at promoting the controversy,
I think that was it, but I don't think
in any other area, he knew what he was doing.
He might have thought he wanted
to be a rock and roll manager,
but he certainly wasn't acting like one.
- There was nothing fatherly about me,
I was very much a Machiavellian, mischievous kid, myself.
I was not the obvious manager.
I manage the record industry world was terrified of me
as a manager because I actually adored mismanaging.
We tried to cold turkey him in Holland.
- Every night, people had to be with Sid
all the time to stop people giving him smack.
And it was something we really dreaded,
because he'd be like, become petulant, he'd get stroppy,
like smack addicts do when they can't get their fix.
- We would not allow him to go to the toilet
without a roadie present.
Boogie, another roadie, had to smash the door in,
only to see Sid sitting on the toilet, saying,
"You can't even have a s--t in peace!"
- He went from having that very charming naÃ¯vete,
to being a right pain in the ass.
- [Voiceover] More often than not,
Sid got his way and took more heroine.
So when the band returned to London,
McLaren came up with another plan,
he'd remove the supplier, Nancy.
- We beat up his girlfriend, Nancy,
I have to be honest with you.
Wrapped her up, threw her in the back of this car,
and the roadie, Roadent, I think it was,
job was to drive her straight to Heathrow
and put her on the first flight back to the US.
- It was Boogie, Sophie and me
trying to hustle Nancy into a cab.
- [Voiceover] Soon, the kidnap attempt ran into trouble.
- She kind of managed to break open the back door of the car
and roll out into the curb as a policeman came strolling by.
And she was just screaming, "I've been kidnapped!
"By the Sex Pistols! Help!"
- [Voiceover] McLaren's efforts were in vain.
In January, 1978, in a haze of heroine
and bitter disputes, the Sex Pistols split.
Sid and Nancy were now free
to follow their path to oblivion.
- The effect on Sid of the band splitting up
was probably felt more deeply and more suddenly,
more deeply than anybody else.
On the night that this happened,
Sid went off and OD'd.
Sid was turning blue on a mattress on the floor
and I picked him up, I started walking him around the room,
and he started to come back.
- [Voiceover] Sid Vicious has just four hours left to live.
It's past midnight and Sid's been
waiting to inject heroine all day.
At last, Peter Kodik prepares his fix.
- I knew the stuff was quite good,
because the person I'd got it from
I knew, and they'd said, "Be a little bit careful,
because this is quite good stuff."
So I knew it was quite strong,
the heroine that had been picked up.
I think I sort of opened the packet
and showed him what I had got,
and his initially reaction would probably be,
"Oh, well, I'll take the whole lot."
- [Sid] Beauty, you beauty!
- Go easy.
I said, "No, no, no, this is good stuff, I've been told,
"it's very strong, be really careful."
So of course, you know, you tell your buddy that,
but they still do probably too much.
- One can keep on taking drugs,
in order to get rid of the pain,
to get rid of the memory, and this itself can lead to death
but that may not be conscious intention of the individual.
- A little bit of heaven.
- It was fine for about 10-15 minutes,
then you know, he got up, he threw up.
He went to the bathroom, he threw up again.
Anne's sort of, I think, oblivious to it all.
She got a little bit worried maybe,
you know, when Sid was throwing up,
but she was used to that before,
she'd probably seen Sid throw up a million times before.
- [Michelle] Sid? Sid!
- [Peter] Michelle, go make some tea.
'Chelle, go make some tea, please!
- My first thought was, oh, he's fallen asleep or something,
but then I realized, right away, that he was overdosing,
he started turning blue and it was pretty scary.
- If somebody takes an overdose of heroine,
he can manifest the effects of sleeping
of having fluid get in his lungs,
even have froth coming out of his mouth.
The heroine acts to depress the brain function,
they can't breathe right.
- It was like, oh my god, you know, he's taken too much.
The basic thing was to keep him up,
moving around, not let him lapse in or fall asleep.
You know, you had to keep him going,
pump some liquids into him.
- I had a conversation with Anne in the living room,
where I said, "Look, we're about three blocks
"from St. Vincent's hospital, do you think we should
"do anything, bring him to the hospital?"
And she said, "No, absolutely not, the press'll find out,
"they'll make another circus out of it,
"and he'll go back to Reikers Island."
- [Voiceover] Anne's insane gamble
with her son's life pays off, and finally,
Kodik manages to bring Sid round.
- He came out of it,
and the first thing he said, when he came out of it was,
"I'm sorry I scared you all."
- [Voiceover] Sid recovers quickly, but the party is over.
- The overdose made me very nervous
and it wasn't what we had planned,
we didn't want to have a heroine party.
I talked to Howie and Jerry Only,
and we said, "Let's get out of here."
- [Voiceover] Sid has barely survived a heroine overdose,
but already he's thinking about his next hit.
- [Peter] What do you need?
- [Sid] Will you get me another hit?
- [Voiceover] After the Pistols split,
Sid and Nancy became inseparable.
She declared herself his manager.
They moved to New York and set up
home at the Chelsea Hotel.
They filled their days taking heroine
and hanging around at Manhattan's punk clubs.
- When I first met Sid with Nancy at Revenge,
they seemed happy and then over the course
of the next six weeks or so, you could see
that he was not doing well.
I'd see him out at CB Jeebies and he'd just be sitting there
with his head hanging and Nancy would be
handing him one drink after another.
- [Voiceover] Then, just 48 days after moving to New York,
Sid's world fell apart.
- Sid's like, you know, out of it,
and then the next thing he woke up,
when Nancy's dead on the bed, with the flick knife
that Sid had bought that day, sticking out of her stomach.
And he knew nothing about it.
Nancy was lying dead, the murder weapon,
Sid's five-inch flick knife,
but Sid couldn't remember a thing.
They'd been on a drug binge with random hangers-on
taking tuinal, a barbiturate, methadone,
Quaaludes, and heroine.
- He may very well have been completely obliterated,
he may even have been unconscious at different points
based on the amount of drugs he ingested.
Not just heroine, there was tuinal and other things,
that had been used and abused.
- [Voiceover] Sid claimed to have no idea
whether he killed Nancy or not.
From that moment, Sid spiraled into depression.
Not knowing whether he murdered his girlfriend
would haunt him for the rest of his short life.
Sid Vicious has just three hours left to live.
He's been charged with the murder
of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen,
but claims he was so out of it,
he doesn't know whether he killed her or not.
It's the early hours of the morning
in Michelle Robinson's apartment.
Sid has just survived an accidental heroine overdose,
but now he wants to take more.
- [Sid] Will you get me another hit?
- [Peter] No, you've had enough for now, buddy.
I told him that was it, there wasn't any more left,
you know, because he kept,
"Oh, where's the rest of it, where's the rest of it,
"I wanna do more."
"Sid, you've had too much," blah blah blah.
You know, "be careful."
So he obviously knew I had some more,
so I had to give him a little bit more.
The second amount that I gave him wasn't that much.
- [Voiceover] Within two hours of his near fatal overdose,
Sid injects more heroine.
- There was no frame, there were no goalposts.
He never saw a red light, he only saw green.
Danger wasn't something that he'd ever consider.
And he never, ever thought that his life was important.
- [Voiceover] This time Sid takes a small amount.
As the drug takes hold, he begins to talk.
It's the last conversation Kodik will have with Sid.
- You know, we spent, like, the last two hours,
you know, talking about what he's gonna do,
you know, he was due to go up to record his album,
which was gonna finance all the lawyer's fees, et cetera.
We talked a little bit about Nancy and stuff like that.
You know, he was fine.
- [Voiceover] After checking on Sid,
Kodik makes plans to leave the apartment.
- What heroine there was left, I gave to his mother,
and I said, "Look, as far as Sid knows,
"there's no heroine left, OK, it's all gone.
"Give him this in the morning."
She's like, "Fine, fine."
I said, "You promise, Beverley,
"you promise you won't do this?"
"Yes, yes, I promise."
- [Voiceover] Kodik gives the leftover
heroine to Sid's mum and leaves.
- All I know is when I left the house,
at about 2 o'clock, he was fine.
- [Voiceover] Kodik is one of the last people
to see see Sid alive.
His heroine intake is now being rationed,
and he's making plans for the future.
There's nothing to suggest that in less than two hours
he'll be dead.
Four days after being arrested for Nancy's murder,
Sid was released on bail for the first time.
In the days after Nancy's death,
Sid was racked with guilt over what he might have done
and sliding into a deep depression.
His mother, Anne, and the Sex Pistols manager,
Malcolm McLaren, became so concerned
they asked forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Steve Teich,
to assess Steve's state of mind.
- It seemed he had a much longer depression
going on, from his childhood about being
treated second class by a society.
He seemed to have no sense of purpose.
The Sex Pistols had broken up
and Nancy's death was overwhelming him.
I mean, his coping strategy had been heroine.
- [Voiceover] The Sid Vicious tough-guy persona
was being tested to the limit.
Facing a murder charge, the faÃ§ade was falling apart,
and more than ever, it seemed that
Sid was capable of anything.
Psychiatrist, Steve Teich, suggested that
McLaren or his mother keep Sid under constant surveillance.
- I recommended that they watch him.
That one of the two people with him
watch him all the time.
- [Voiceover] But they didn't.
- The mother had gone off and scored dope for Sid,
around Union Square that night, 14th street.
It was easy to score dope in those days
around that vicinity.
And Sid had taken a lightbulb from the toilet
and had gashed his hands, you know.
And his hands were sort of reaching out
like this as we came through the door,
and dripping, both hands were just dripping with blood.
- I got another call that he had cut himself,
and would I come back over to the hotel.
So I went back over there, and indeed,
he had slashed his arm, lengthwise,
from his wrist all the way down to his elbow area.
And they had it compressed, so the bleeding was contained,
that wasn't a danger, but it was quite clear
that he was now at a different level.
- It was clear that Sid was not stable.
Also, his mother seemed to be having problems,
she was bruised, they'd obviously in a fight together.
She just couldn't look after him,
but maybe nobody could at that point.
I'm not sure.
- And so we talked and decided that
we had to put him in the hospital
and called emergency medical services to come over.
- In New York, if you call an ambulance,
immediately along come the police,
and in this instance, Sid being such a high
profile character, it was gonna be a rough ride.
- When he saw the police, he ran for the open window,
and I grabbed him, just held him,
and then the police came in.
I think the cut wasn't a suicide attempt.
I've seen people, particularly in prison
when I was working there, that cut themselves,
and the usual report is that they're in such pain,
they cut themselves essentially to let the pain out.
And I think that was much more of what was going on there,
but nonetheless it was dangerous.
- [Voiceover] Sid was taken immediately to
the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.
Steve Teich was deeply concerned about Sid's state of mind,
and recommended he received longterm psychiatric care.
But that didn't happen.
Sid refused to stay, and was released from Bellevue.
In the weeks that followed, Sid repeatedly
gave interviews to the press, where he spoke
of his desire to kill himself.
In one interview, he claimed
he wanted to be six feet underground
and be at peace with Nancy.
Unsurprisingly, this led the world to think
that he ultimately took his own life.
It now appears that this was not the case.
Sid Vicious now has just minutes left to live.
The party at Michelle Robinson's apartment is over.
Sid is in bed with Michelle, while his mother,
Anne, sleeps in the next room.
Sid has somehow managed to hands on the heroine.
What happens next has been a closely
guarded secret for twenty-seven years.
Some have speculated that Sid committed suicide,
but for the first time, Sergeant Richard Houseman
of the New York Police Department
reveals what he was told when he investigated Sid's death.
- Michelle says she was in bed with him,
they were engaged in love-making,
and that he decided to get high.
She didn't wanna let him get high,
so in the meantime, he started to cook the drug up,
and wanted her to inject it into him,
and she said, no, she wouldn't do that.
- [Sid] Just help me out a bit, would ya?
Go on.
- [Michelle] I can't do it, no, I won't.
- [Sid] It just takes a second.
- [Michelle] I just won't do it.
OK, fine.
- [Voiceover] Unable to cope with Sid's demands,
Michelle leaves the room.
- She came back out here into the front room
and then the mother, she told the mother what had happened,
and the mother then said, "Well, I'll go in and see him."
So the mother went in.
- Sid's mother died of an overdose in 1996,
but before she died, she made a
remarkable confession to journalist, Alan Parker.
Faced with Sergeant Houseman's testimony,
Parker has agreed to reveal her secret.
- Anne told Michelle to wait in the living room,
while she went to speak to her son.
Because he'd OD'd he was in a very
sweaty, shaky, horrible state and
he could reapply the tourniquet,
fill the syringe, or inject himself again.
So she did.
She reapplied the tourniquet,
and she filled the syringe, and she reinjected him.
And being a heroine addict herself,
she knew exactly what to put inside that syringe
that basically would have been enough drugs
to kill two people, never mind one.
- [Voiceover] With Sid's mother dead,
we'll never know the precise motive
for her actions on that day.
But Parker believes she deliberately
killed her own son as an act of mercy.
In spite of the confidence of his lawyers,
she knew Sid was terrified he might be sent back to Reikers,
and so she took matters into her own hands.
- [Alan] And I only believe she did what she did
because there was still that tingling thing at the back
of her mind, and at the back of his mind,
that he might not get off, and he might end up
being in prison for 20-odd years.
- [Voiceover] Michelle Robinson was outside the room,
so there were no witnesses to Anne's actions
and the authorities were unable to prosecute.
With Sid dead, the case of Nancy's murder was closed.
For the New York Police, Sid was the only suspect.
- It's a difficult thing to have to come to terms with,
because you know I was part and parcel
of supplying him with something
which probably was responsible for killing him off.
- If I regret anything, I regret not having been there.
- Sid was her child, you know, he never grew up.
He never really had the chance to.