"I always saw him as being the child to Nancy as mum. She was one of those doting people, and he had never had that in his life." Predictably, Nancy's overbearing presence soon led to friction with the band. Lead singer John Lydon (then billed as Johnny Rotten) "would plead with him to get rid of her, but to Sid she was like a crutch," writes Morris. "When they were together he was like a kitten, but without her he would go crazy." In time, says Nils Stevenson, the Sex Pistols' tour manager, Sid came to "dislike everything-- except heroin and Nancy." Things came to a head in 1978, on the Pistols' only major tour. Throughout the American concert dates, Sid "was erratic," according to Morris. "No one knew why. It seemed he missed Nancy. Sometimes he wouldn't eat at all. He'd drink heavy and take lots of drugs." Fed up, John flew back to Britain halfway through the tour. Nancy joined Sid in New YorkCity.
After the couple moved into the Chelsea Hotel in August, their relationship took an even stormier turn. "There was a violent episode four days before she died," says Deborah Spungen. "She said he'd been hitting her. 
I spent the next days worrying. And then she didn't call. And never called again."
On the morning of Oct. 12, responding to a report of a domestic dispute, police entered their Chelsea Hotel room and found Spungen, clad in blood-soaked bra and panties, crumpled under the bathroom sink, dead of a single, deep stab wound to her abdomen. Sid, in a drugged haze, was charged with her murder and released on $50,000 bail. In several telephone calls to Deborah Spungen after his arrest, Sid "never said he was sorry," she recalls. "He never said anything about it happening at all." Ten days later, Sid attempted suicide, slashing the full length of his forearm with a knife and reportedly screaming, "I want to be with my Nancy! I want to be left alone!"
After Nancy's death, Beverley flew to Manhattan to be with her son who, despite a stint in rehab, was still nursing his drug habit. On Feb. 1, 1979, fearful that he would be arrested in a drug buy on the street, she bought a supply of heroin for him, and was with him in the Greenwich Village apartment of a friend that night while he injected it. Afterward, "I swear to God he appeared to have a pink aura around his whole body," she remembers. The next morning, when she brought him a cup of tea, "he was lying there quite peacefully. I shook him until I realized he was very cold and very dead."
Late one night, a few dayslater, Beverley climbed the wall to a cemetery outside Philadelphia and, against the wishes of the Spungen family, scattered her son's ashes in the snow over Nancy's grave. Although authorities never officially determined whether Sid's death was by accident or design, Anne Beverley has little doubt. As evidence, she offers the worn piece of paper on which Sid scrawled a poem, simply titled "Nancy," to his departed love: "You were my little baby girl/And I knew all your fears/Such joy to hold you in my arms/And kiss away your tears/But now you're gone/There's only pain/And nothing I can do/And I don't want to live this life/If I can't live for you."
