October 13, 2025 • 56 mins
Room 100 chronicles the tragic story of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, punk rock’s very own Romeo and Juliet. Through a wealth of archival material, plus new and exclusive interviews from rock luminaries such as Television guitarist Richard Lloyd, iconic photographer Robert Bayley, and PUNK magazine co-creator John Holmstrom, critically acclaimed true-crime writer Jesse P. Pollack’s book is the first to be solely devoted to popular music’s darkest hour―the murder of Nancy Spungen. Did Sid kill the love of his life in a drug-induced stupor, or had Nancybe en the victim of a robbery gone wrong? Was there a death pact? Did the police ignore crucial evidence? This comprehensive journalistic account will be the definitive book on one of rock ‘n roll’s most intriguing and enduring mysteries.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's the Opperman Report, and now here is Investigator Opperman.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Okay, welcome to the Opperman Report. I'm your host, private
investigator Ed Ottaman. You can get a hold of me
at Opperman Investigations and Digital Friends a consulting if you
reach out to me through my email Opperman Investigations at
gmail dot com. We have a returning guest today, mister
jesse P. Pollock. I had this guy on years and
(00:30):
years ago. I think we would recognize each other. I
had him on about the Acid King, about Ricky Casso,
the Acid King, say you love Satan, that guy, and
now we have them coming back to them about the
Sat Nancy and the night punk Rock Dyede Room one
oh one. Mister jesse P. Pollack, are you there?
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yes, I am. Thank you so much for having me
back at and for being so patient with me. The
years since the Acid King have been a little bit
of a whirlwind, but I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah. People might think we're but I really tried to
get this. I came up, tried to saw on Instagram,
on the JESSEP. Pollock Instagram and I just I reeled
Juliane as best I could.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Oh it was it was nothing personal either. It's just
again like the timing never seemed to be right. And
there was a little bit where I was kind of
burnt out from doing any sort of like interview appearances,
and so I took a sabbatical for a little bit.
But for better or worse, I'm back.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I felt like a bill collector was trying to get
all the dodging my calls, my letters. But Jesse, before
we get into room one on one sitting Nancy, and
then I punk back to and I didn't want to
touch on the answer king a bit, but tell us
bite yourself, reminding audience, who is Jesse P. Pollack Well.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
I was born and raised in the Garden state of
New Jersey, and I first cut my teeth as a
journalist writing for Weird New Jersey magazine, which comes out
twice a year. Chronicles everything from true crime to conspiracy theories,
the paranormal, weird, sort of outsider art, personalized property, that
(02:09):
sort of thing. And I guess my real entrance into
the world of true crime came through the Genetta Palma case,
which was this strange, unsolved murder that happened in Springfield
and Union County, about two towns over from where I
grew up in Clark and Railway, and we started getting
(02:30):
letters of the magazine in the late nineties just talking
about like, oh, yeah, have you guys ever heard about this,
you know, this supposed hitchhiker that was found on an
altar in the woods in the earlier mid seventies. I
don't know, it might just be an urban legend. I
think there was some part about a dog bringing an
(02:52):
arm home or something. And this is pre Google. I
think like maybe info seek and ask Jeeves were around,
and there was no Internet presence for this story at all,
so we just kind of figured it was one of those, like,
you know, the Tales of the Hookman kind of urban legends.
So we printed the letter and it just kept flooding
(03:14):
in like oh yeah, no, I definitely remember hearing about that.
That blah blah blah blah. And a couple of years
after that, someone finally wrote in with a very cryptic
letter that just said her name was Jeanette de Palma
and she was found on an altar, So we finally
had a name to go on. And my co author
(03:35):
on my eventual first book, Mark Moran, the co editor
of Weird New Jersey. He took that name and was
able to nail down the timeframe and found all of
the original newspaper coverage through microfilm at various libraries, and
he put together this seven page spread in issue twenty
two that really talked about like all of the scary
(04:01):
undercurrents of this case. It was very like Twin Peaks
meets True Detective. It was this sixteen year old girl.
She left home on I believe it was a Tuesday
afternoon in the summer seventy two. She was going to
go meet up with friends in Berkeley Heights and never
came home. And six weeks later, just like the quote
unquote urban legend said, a dog that was roaming the
(04:24):
woods bordering a nearby rock quarry it's called the Hudai Quarry,
brought home a decomposed arm to its owner, and this
kicked off a police search, and eventually they found the
rest of her on top of this hill bordering the quarry.
And for I want to say, a week or ten days,
(04:45):
the details of it were literally just that she vanished
for six weeks, we found her in the woods, and
this is all we know. And then right around the
end of September, all of this scuttle button began to
hit the major newspapers, not just the Star Ledger and
the local Springfield papers, but the New York Post, the
(05:08):
New York Daily News. I believe the New York Times
may have even had an article about it, saying that
there was an element of possible black magic, witchcraft, and
or Satanism involved in this. There were all of these
anonymous quotes they're always anonymous, saying like, oh, yeah, no,
we found an arrangement of sticks and stones around the
(05:29):
body that hinted towards an occult involvement. There were rumors
that detectives were bringing a quote unquote which to the
crime scene to evaluate these symbols that were allegedly found
around her. And then after a few weeks of this,
the case just hit a dead end. You never heard
anything about it again. It was never solved. And it
(05:51):
would have been two thousand and no two thousand and
four that Mark had done his article about this weird,
creepy story. And somewhere around twenty eleven, I was getting
ready to move. I was leaving the East Coast for
the Midwest and packing up all of my old weird
New Jersey back issues, and I found that one and
I'm flipping through it. I'm like, oh, yeah, that story
(06:13):
was really spooky. Someone must have written a really good
book about this case by now, and sure enough, no
one had. And I really wanted to read a book
about this case. So I figured, well, if no one
else has written a book about it, I guess I'm
going to have to. So Mark and I teamed up,
and one of the first major hurdles of bringing this
(06:38):
book to life the book that eventually became Death on
the Devil's Teeth was the Springfield Police Department kept insisting
to us there's no case file, there's no evidence left,
and they maintained that it had been destroyed in nineteen
ninety nine when Hurricane Floyd hit New Jersey. They said
that the evidence room at the police department was under
(06:59):
eight feet of water. So it was this weird thing
where we're like, okay, well, where do we go from here?
There's really no hard documentation other than the original newspaper articles.
So we decided we're going to have to build our
own case file from scratch. And the way that we
did that was going through that original newspaper coverage and
(07:20):
finding names, finding locations things that were pertinent, and reaching
out to people and asking them what they remembered. And
thank god we did it when we did, because within
about three years, i want to say, about ninety percent
of these people passed on. So we interviewed a lot
of the original investigators, family members, friends of Jeanette's, people
(07:42):
that were parishioners at this strange church that she went
to that we later found out was largely responsible for
the occult rumors in the case. And we put this
book together, and the one common thread that we found
among the people that we were interviewing in the Springfield
area was no one believed the story about the case
(08:04):
file going missing. Some people were very reasonable about this belief, like, no,
that doesn't make sense. There would have been copies stored
at the prosecutor's office, they would not have kept it
in the basement, blah blah blah blah blah. And other
people went full on off the deep end saying, no,
they're just saying that because it was the police chief's
(08:25):
son that killed her and there was a whole cover
up and all this stuff. And of course we looked
into that and found out the police chief's son was
living in Florida at the time, he had nothing to
do with it, but it made for a really interesting
and compelling part of the story that Mark and I
just could not let go. And eventually, after about nine
or ten years of us really dogging the Springfield Police
(08:48):
Department in the Union County Prosecutor's Office for a copy
of this case file through the Freedom of Information Act,
they eventually relented and gave it to us. So it
turned out, yeah, it was a BS story. The case
file still existed, the evidence all still existed. One of
the more messed up things that was a revelation regarding
(09:10):
us getting this case file a couple of years after
the book was published, was we found out the very
same week that the Springfield Police Department was telling us Nope,
all the evidence and the files were destroyed. They were
actually re cataloging and rephotographing all of the evidence and
shipping it off to the Prosecutor's office. And we know
it was the same week because we were given the
(09:33):
evidence intake forms through the Freedom of Information Act, and
it was literally the signature of the detective who was
running off to his desk to emails and say, no,
it doesn't exist. Anymore right after he was literally photographing
it that week, So we don't know why they did that.
There's no real smoking gun in the case files that say, hey,
(09:53):
this is why the cops would have covered up this
supposed occult murder of a teenager. But it led to
some very interesting twists and turns that eventually resulted in
a second expanded edition of the book, which came out
a couple of years ago. I reckon if any listeners
are not familiar with this case, I would recommend getting
(10:14):
that one from Amazon and not the original twenty fifteen edition.
But that whole case led to eventually Simon and Schuster
asking me to cover the Ricky Casso story, which we
discussed the last time I was on the show. Another
proto satanic panic case from Long Island in the eighties,
where you know.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
A second, yeah, slow me down with with this swoman
here and the Devil's tea. Now with the ship a
family that was you know about bothering the place. Hey's
you know what's my daughter's killer? Is that kind of thing?
Speaker 1 (10:48):
They were bothering the police all the way up through
the eighties, saying like listen, you know you've given us
no updates. Now the press has been running with this
weird occult angle what really happened here, and they just
kept blowing the family off, just saying there's nothing here,
there's no answers. The family ended up hiring a private investigator,
(11:11):
and the private investigator died of a sudden heart attack
before he was able to get any information. So the
family just kept kind of hitting roadblock after roadblock, which
was why they were initially hesitant to speak with Mark
and I when we told them, listen, we really want
to do a book to get some of the real
facts out there, because maybe it'll shake something loose, maybe
(11:33):
someone will read something in the book and remember a
detail that might solve this case. And eventually they I
guess they saw that we were coming at it with
goodness in our hearts and we weren't trying to exploit them,
and they worked with us on this. But yeah, for decades,
the police told them there's nothing we can do. We
can't help you, there's no updates, we can't show you
(11:54):
one of the evidence that the police really shut them out.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Now and also to and I'll pri itt to be
was saying, you were telling me about how the case
file was missing. We were talking about this case, so
we were talking about the room war on one case
with Nancy and the sid Nancy.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Both of them, what is going on with you man? Missing?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Every time Jesse Pollocks shows up, suspicious bro It is
very strange.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Even with the Ricky Casso case. While they the it
was kind of a oh, serendipitous moment. I guess. The
Suffoc County Police Department was going through a little bit
of a scandal when I was working on the Casto books,
so they were making an effort to appear as transparent
as possible, so they were very easy to get that
(12:42):
case file from. But there were other elements involved with
it where stuff was being hidden. Like we talked about
on the show many years ago, Ricky hanged himself in jail,
much like Epstein, as far as the official story is concerned, did,
and the whole story there was, oh, it was just
(13:04):
you know, the fifteen minutes in between checks he did it.
He was just that quick, and there was nothing that
could have been done. And I just kept getting bounced
back and forth between the authorities in Riverhead where the
lock up was, and the Suffccounty Police Department, and eventually
someone in Suffolk County or right Riverhead said, well, listen,
(13:26):
if any of those files from our internal investigation still exist,
they're probably upstate somewhere. Who knows where they are? And
I said, okay, well wear upstate, tell me and they
were like, fine, probably at this office. And I got
a hold of a clerk up there, and I guess
enough time had passed where whoever was, you know, running
(13:47):
the safekeeping of these files didn't care, or they may
not have even heard of Ricky Casso by this point,
depending on how old they were, But they were like, oh, yeah,
here you go. Here's a copy of the internal investigation.
And it turns out they're internal and investigation had discovered
that no, the officer at the correctional facility or the
(14:09):
county lock up, whichever, was not checking every half hour
like he was supposed to. I don't remember if he
had supposedly fallen asleep or not. But they found out
it was their fault, that there was negligence, and that
they had recommended a review of the policies and there
was going to be retraining. But they swept that all
under the rug. That report never made its way to
(14:31):
South of County. It never became a part of the
official case file and sure as heck never made it
to the media. So yeah, whether it's serendipity or not,
there does seem to be a common through line with
these cases that I choose to chronicle where there is
an element of case files quote unquote disappearing.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Now, let me ask you this because since I had
you on last time, there was a I saw a
documentary film about Rucky Casso, and I believe you were
involved in it, and it kind of changed story. That's
saying that now they don't or even do yourself, you
don't believe that it was motivated by Satanism.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Well, I never really believed it was motivated by satanism,
solely the issue that was happening with that story. And yes,
to answer your question, I co directed that documentary with
Dan Jones and Real Real, long story short. The reason
that we did that was we had multiple offers from
people associated with the Oxygen Network and at one point
(15:30):
Netflix and then Investigation Discovery, and they all wanted to
option the rights to the books so they could do
their own docuseriies. But the more and more I got
into negotiations with these people, they made it very clear
that they wanted to turn this into this kid was
a devil worshiper and this was a Satanic sacrifice, even
though I had just written a four hundred and thirty
(15:51):
page book saying no, that's not what happened and here's why.
So I got it in my head where I was like,
the only way this story is going to be told
accurately in a visual medium, as if I'm actually involved
in it, and I know how to work a camera,
I know how to edit things, and I know a
lot of other talented people that know their way around
a camera. So why don't we just raise a modest
(16:14):
budget and go out to Northport and film it ourselves.
And we did so. The big thing, again was that
the police and the media were trying to make this
out to be that this, this boy, Gary Lowers, was
dragged into the woods of Northport, kicking and screaming by
(16:34):
a hundred cult members in robes, chanting next to a
roaring bonfire, and that all of these people had witnessed
it and kept their mouths shut, and there were incantations
and blah blah blah blah, And it turned out no,
it was four teenagers, Gary included that you know, went
up there to hang out. They did a bunch of PCP,
(16:56):
and it turns out it was a fight over storm
drugs several weeks earlier that amounted to a fifty dollars debt.
They beat Gary up, they stabbed him to death, and
then they covered the body with leaves and twigs and
left him there. But the real eerie part about that
is the story didn't end there. It was for about
(17:16):
eleven days Ricky Casso and his friend Jimmy Treano were
leading tours up to this body because they were straight
up telling all of their friends, yeah, we killed him,
and their friends were saying, no, you didn't, You're just joking.
And their response, for whatever reason was, oh, you don't
believe us, Come see, And they brought dozens of people
(17:39):
to see Gary's remains rotting for nearly three weeks before
someone finally spoke up and called the police. And to me,
that was the interesting part of this story. It wasn't
the gory details of the murder or even the satanic
panic aspect of it, so much as how does a terrible,
(17:59):
dark secret lay buried like that for nearly a month
in this supposed you know, wonderful bedroom suburb of Manhattan
where all these nice, good and decent, you know, blue
collar folks live. It became almost like a Stephen King story. Honestly,
you know, this this portrait of a town that was
(18:20):
befallen by darkness. Except in this case, it wasn't a
supernatural darkness. It was just the mundane horrors of the suburbs,
if you will.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
When you went back to revisit the story and you're
actually up there in the town filment, did you want
to cross any new information?
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Not anything particularly ground breaking, but it was. It was
very interesting being able to actually sit with the people
and go to the locations as opposed to just talking
on the phone or sitting in a cafe in Northport
a couple of years prior when I was working on
the book. Like one of the more eerie things that
happened was and this lent itself, unfortunately to the whole
(19:02):
Satanic ritual aspect of it. But Casso had been arrested
two months before the murder for trying to dig up
a grave in Northport. There was a mix up with
the story. This is another thing about Northport. Again, It's
like this supposed really nice community where all these wonderful
people live with their families. But there were two separate
grave robbing incidents in nineteen eighty three nineteen eighty four,
(19:24):
and they kind of got mushed together by the press.
The first one was a friend of Ricky's that stole
a skull from a mausoleum to sell to a head
shop in Manhattan for six hundred bucks. Ricky heard about
this and went six hundred bucks that's easy money, and
tried digging up a colonial era grave on another side
of town. And then, of course, when Ricky got arrested
(19:46):
for this supposed satanic ritual murder, the story got melded
together into and Ricky Casso dug up a skull just
two months ago and was arrested for it. Well, I
tracked down the cop that arrested Ricky for it, and
he was like, yeah, yea yeall, meet Shitt the graveyard.
I'll show you where the grave was and we can
talk all about it. And he ended up running late
(20:08):
that night because he wasn't feeling well. So by the
time he finally arrived to this graveyard, which again is
literally just a patch of woods with about maybe twenty
five thirty graves from the seventeen hundreds that are still
left over, ones that haven't been destroyed, and it's pitch black.
There's no lights in there. You know, it's off of
(20:28):
a small county highway off of twenty five A, but
there's no natural light getting in there. So I'm standing
in the dark next to these graves where you know,
devil worshiping teens supposedly used to hang out, waiting for
this cop. And he finally shows up and he's like, yeah,
come here, and we're talking about all this, and there
was a moment that really stuck out as creepy to
(20:50):
me as soon as it happened. Like we were talking
about how some kids used to come back, you know,
after the murder happened, and you know, leave graffiti and
carve things in the trees, and I was asking him
if he remembered that, and he just kind of scoffed
at it, like, yeah, Ricky lives. That was one of
the things that people used to write on the trees
and the sidewalks after Ricky killed himself. And in that moment,
(21:13):
standing in the dark in this graveyard, I was like,
I don't like the way he said that not that
I'm standing up for this murderer, but I was just like,
it seemed kind of like tempting fate. And then the
next day I got a phone call from him. Hey,
as soon as I got home last night, I had
a heart attack. I'm in the.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Hospital, so get out here.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Yeah. So I was like, don't be mocking Ricky anymore
because I don't know what's going on here. But yeah,
that was some of the eerier things that happened while
working on the film as opposed to the preparations for
the book.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
And I'm real quick on Ricky again. There was an
older fellow that was like a Vietnam vet that seemed
to be training these younger kids, and the couch and
stuff like that. Any new information I had.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, I actually got the case file about him. Everyone
called him Pagan Pat Patrick Toussant was his real name.
And there were all of these stories about how supposedly
Pat may have been there that night when Gary Lowers
was killed, and that Pat had been murdered for knowing
too much about it. You know, the supposed called the
(22:18):
Knights of the Black Circle, who were literally just a
gang of teenage pot dealers from another town. They didn't
even live in Northport Village. They were from East Northport,
a few miles away. But that's a whole other kettle
of fish. But you know, that was another thing that
came up during the writing of the book. It's oh
the Knights killed Pat. He was murdered. I got a
hold of the case file. He had been seen all
(22:40):
morning the day that he died, brown bagging it by
the railroad tracks at East Northport train station. He had
been sighted by a cop for public drinking only about
a half hour I think before he died. And it was, unfortunately,
literally just a case of he either deliberately laid down
on the train tracks or he passed out and came
(23:01):
to fall there and a train ran him over. So
that's where his story began and ended. But yeah, if
you talk to the kids from back then, it's pretty
much common knowledge that, yeah, well, you know, this guy
wanted Ricky to join him on this night trip to
the Amityville Horror House and you know, have a ritual there.
(23:22):
And that might be true, but I don't think that
was the main motivation for Ricky trying to dig up
a skull. Like all the paperwork that I got from
the police department and others that knew him said that
the kid just wanted fast cash.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Well, don't get me involved with that amity real horror thing,
because I did to be an all those people and
the son, and they all hate each other, they all
have words straining orders of each other. That he's a
total hunks.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
I tell you what, though, I'll give you. I'll give
you one little story and your listeners, your listeners will
find this amusing, and I promise it's a quick story.
But that that cop that I just told you about
that had the heart attack while I was riding in
a car with him doing some research and tracking down
some leads with him about the story. You know, that
(24:06):
part came up the whole Amityville ritual supposedly, and he goes, yeah,
let me tell you a little something about that, because
he was a Suffolk County cop, he wasn't a Northport cop.
And he was like, I've held the rifle. I believe
it was a Marlin or something like that, and he goes,
you know, one of the things that we used to
do with the new recruits when they would join the
Detective Bureau is we would take them down to the
(24:28):
evidence room and we would show them that rifle. And
I said to him, I was like, you know, I'm
not one of these people that like, don't get me wrong,
I kind of believe in the supernatural because I've had
experiences that I would chalk up to, Hey, maybe it
was ghosts. But I'm not entirely sold on the story
that was presented through the book in the film. But
(24:49):
with that being said, I did mention to this cop.
I said, you know, the one thing that has always
really stood out to me is very eerie is how
this guy was able to go from room to room
shooting his siblings and his parents and no one woke up.
And he was like, yeah, that one we were never
able to figure out either. And I said, because that
(25:12):
rifle is loud, right, Like I have a vintage you
know rifle in my house and I and I have
test fired it a few times and it sounds like
a cannon. And he goes, yeah, no, it's loud. I
have fired a Marlin rifle before. And I said, well,
how do you explain that this is you know, small
rooms and hallways. It should have been echoing. I mean,
(25:32):
you know, Grant, the neighbors didn't even hear anything. How
do you think that happened? And he goes, don't know.
We were never able to figure that out. So that
still chills me.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Didn't that file go missing to Jesse?
Speaker 1 (25:44):
No? That fine? No, Actually I got some Uh, I
got some photos.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
If I call them up, then I going to say
the final right, you were there.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Who knows it might be missing now, But I mean
it got out to the public at some point because
those crime scene photos are out there.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, okay, so now, but you just were working on
all this kind of a cold kind of stuff and
what made you di while with sen Nancy.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Well, what had happened was there was another murder that
took place in New Jersey in the early eighties. It
actually coincidentally recently got resolved, but it was a very
famous unidentified body case called the Princess Doe case, and
weird New Jersey had had covered it for years. I'd
heard about it all the time when I was a kid.
(26:28):
Long story short for your listeners. She was a teenage
girl who was found with her face bashed in along
the creek edge running along a cemetery in Blairstown, New Jersey,
and some of you horror film officionados may recognize that
name as where they filmed the first Friday the thirteenth.
So they never figured out well up until recently, but
(26:53):
at the time that I became involved in it, they
had never figured out who had done it, why, who
this girl was. She was the first case that was
put into the FBI computer system for unidentified and Missing people.
In fact, unsolved Mysteries was born because of this case.
(27:16):
Because I believe her name is Terry dun Muir. I'm
so sorry if I'm pronouncing her name wrong. But she
had done an HBO little documentary special on the Princess
do case in the early eighties, and after producing that,
she decided, well, what if we did this as a
weekly thing with other unsolved cases. And that birthed unsolved mysteries.
(27:37):
So it's a very, very fascinating case. And I went
to my agent and I said, listen, I have been
researching this case for years. I have probably forty five
hours worth of audio tape of recorded interviews I did
with the original detectives and detectives that have taken the
case over, and I have a lot of documentation through
the case file, and blah blah, blah blah, and he said, Jesse,
(28:00):
I'm sorry, but I just don't think I can get
that book sold that it's not like the Janet case,
where you know, there's this other mysterious element with the
case file being missing. Like I hate to say this,
but I think this is just another unsolved local case
that no one really is going to care about. And
I said, well, yeah, my agent's name is Eric. I said, Eric.
(28:21):
That puts me in kind of a bind, because you know,
when you're trying to pitch a book to these publishers,
it's a very fine line. It's well, we don't want
a famous case because there's already ten million books about this,
But if you pick a case no one knows, then
they say, well, no one's ever heard of that. Who's
going to buy a book about that case? And he
said to me, he goes, well, if you could write
(28:43):
a book about any case, any case in the world,
which would you pick? And I said the CID and
Nancy case And he goes, really, I said, yeah, that
one's always fascinated me because there's no real resolution there.
I mean, Sid died before he ever went to trial,
and then the case was just quietly closed no one
really knows what happened in Room one hundred of the
(29:04):
Chelsea Hotel that night, and he goes, I want to
read that book. I think I can get that book sold,
and sure enough he did. And that was all the
way back in I want to say, April twenty eighteen,
and I got right to work writing that, and then
the pandemic happened, which slowed everything down, and then you know,
(29:26):
there was the release of the Acid King film. So finally,
after many years of stops and starts, Room one hundred
came out in April about three months ago. Four By
the time, people are listening to this and yeah, that
was another one where it was, oh, yeah, this is
(29:46):
the NYPD telling me this. Because of course, the first
thing I did was, Okay, this is a story I'm telling.
Let me get the cold hard facts. I'm going to
try and get the case file from the NYPD. And
the first thing they told me was, oh, yeah, we
looked for it. We're so sorry it's missing. And I
didn't think there was anything ne farious there. I figured
it's the NYPD. They've got millions of case files. This
(30:09):
is from nineteen seventy eight and it's twenty twenty at
this point that I'm asking for it, and actually may
have been like twenty nineteen, and I was like, okay,
well it got lost in the shuffle somewhere along the way,
or it could have been like the Jack the Ripper files,
where some retiring cop decided to take the file home
as a souvenir. That happens a lot in older cases.
(30:31):
And I kind of gave up hope, and I said, okay, well,
I'm just gonna have to do what I did with
Janette and reinterview everyone who's still alive, which sadly was
not a lot of people. I mean, you know, let's
face it, a lot of people were doing heroin and
living very dangerous lifestyles in that community back then. And
somewhere around January twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, somewhere
(30:55):
in that timeframe, I got a random email at six
in the morning saying, hey, it's your lucky day. We
just happened to find it by accident looking for something else.
Here you go. And the biggest revelation there was, you know,
for people that are familiar with the Sid Vicious and
Nancy Spungen's story, it's oh yeah, no, the cops thought
(31:17):
they had their man. Immediately they arrested Sid. As far
as they were concerned, it was an open and shutcase,
and the guy odeed and died when he was out
on bail. Turns out no, in the case file there
were at least three suspects, and I mean hardcore suspects.
People that they interrogated, people that they ran their prints
(31:39):
through the system, stuff like that. So Room one hundred
goes into all of that, the possibility that, hey, this
may not be just a simple story of this heroin
addled rock star stabbed his girlfriend to death in the
middle of the daze one night. It turns out there's
a very good possibility someone else did it, and the
(32:00):
and YPD was entertaining that possibility, at the very least
until Sid himself died a couple months later.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
You know, Jesse, before we get too deep into this,
you know, I got to tell you something. Just say,
in the past week, I was involved with the National
Inquirer and the Drudge Report. I was telling I was
telling people online this is hey, and I was just
a National Inquirers on the Judge reput and they saying, well,
what is the National Inquirer what is. They don't even
know what the Dreuagure report it is. I know they're
very young, Okay, So I'm telling you, Matt, and I
(32:28):
was already like a singer in high school when this
happened in New York City. I was staying out there
all the time. Then what we said and what do
you call? Chelsea would tell and stuff. So we're telling you.
I'm tell people who was sid Vicious, who was Nancy Sponge,
and who wore the sex Pistols? What were things like
that in those days?
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Well, going all the way back to the mid seventies,
the sex Pistols were a controversial punk rock band that
were I mean, it's it seems so tame now, it
really scared people back then. These were these grubby kids
from Shepherd's Bush, England that you know, had spiky hair
(33:05):
sometimes they dyed it, you know, green and red and
all these colors, and they had safety pins on their
clothes and they would spit on stage when they played,
and you know, they were criticizing the British government in
their songs. It was it was basically, you know, England's
equivalent to the Ramones at the time, like we had
over here in New York, and I mean these guys,
(33:26):
it was like, you know what we saw with Ozzie
and ac DC during the Satanic Panic. It was they
are going to ruin society, They're going to corrupt your
children and blah blah blah blah, and it is kind
of laughable. But the you know, the conservative right wing
element of society really did get a bit of an
upper hand there with that theory. Once the bass player
(33:46):
of the Sex Pistols was arrested for stabbing his girlfriend,
Nancy Spunkan to death in the Chelsea Hotel in October
nineteen seventy eight. Now by this point, the Sex Pistols
had dissolved at the end of a really disastrous American
tour in January nineteen seventy eight, and Sid was living
(34:06):
pretty much in squalor in the Chelsea Hotel. I mean,
the Chelsea Hotel was once a real symbol of opulence
in Manhattan, but by the seventies, like I really hate
to say this, because there were some really wonderful artists
and performers living and working out of that hotel at
that time, but he wasn't living on those floors. He
was living on the first floor where all of the
(34:28):
junkies and thieves lived. And I mean to call it
a hotel room is almost a misnomer. I mean it
was literally just a bedroom and a bathroom. It was just,
you know, a box with a bed in the middle
of it. This wasn't like what you would think, Oh,
this guy that's on the front cover of Rolling Stone,
like he must live in like a really cool like
Brownstone or something in Manhattan now And it's like, no,
(34:51):
he's he's living in an efficiency.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
He had even Billy Idol, who is you know, very successful,
live in a you can walk right up and realized
Morbell within the village and I learnt the walk up.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Yeah, I mean a lot of these people were very
accessible and in this case possibly too accessible. I mean
a lot of people that I interviewed that lived on
the same floor at the Chelsea at the time said that,
you know, forget not locking the door. Sometimes Sid and
Nancy would not out with the door wide open. Anyone
could have gone in there. And it was also another
element in this case that was not sufficiently explained even
(35:30):
at the time. It was the NYPD acknowledged that same
week because they were asked by I believe his name
is Michael. I'm blanking on his last name. But a
reporter from Rolling Stone had done a piece on the
murder and point blank asked the NYPD was there anything
missing from the room, and they said, actually, yes, there
(35:51):
was no money found in the room except for ten
dollars that was in Sid's jeans, which is very strange
because Sid had just gotten paid up words of I
want to say, six to nine thousand dollars for a
recent string of shows at Max's Kansas City, and according
to the paperwork records from the sex Pistols management company,
(36:15):
Glitterbest Limited, Sid had just been paid a royalty check
of about twelve thousand pounds, so there should have been
a lot of money in that room, and certain people
that had been in that room only a few hours
before Nancy died said yeah, no, Nancy had a lot
of about eight hundred dollars alone that I saw because
(36:36):
she was trying to get me to buy dilauded pills
with it. And for those who don't know, dilauded is
synthetic morphine. Essentially, it's a painkiller they give to cancer patients.
That's how strong it is. And at least three people
saw a ton of money in that room only hours beforehand.
(36:56):
But when Sid is arrested around eleven in the morning
following day, all that is found in that room is
ten dollars in his jeans. So at the very least
a robbery occurred there. So if Nancy was murdered by
someone other than Sid, that's the most likely motive. And
it would have been very easy because again, these people
(37:17):
were accessible. Anyone could just walk into the Chelsea and
if it was one of the nights that they were
just leaving the door open because they were on the nod,
well there you go.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
You know, even if you closed the door, it was
very CONTI to prop up a chair against the door
knob and stuff like that. Air building exactly air conditioning
in that building, you know, and you had taken your
life in your hands right when you walked down a minute.
It wasn't that it's like a project.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
It was scary. In fact, it was the hotel from
I believe the professional with Gary Oldman, who coincidentally played
Sid Vicious in the Alex coxfilm. In the eighties, the
Chelsea Hotel was basically the go to Manhattan hotel for
about twenty years for filmmakers that were like, we need
a really grimy and dangerous looking hotel, so they would
(38:07):
film at the Chelsea. Now it's real ritzy, but back then.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Now you go on Wikipedia that the list of artists
and the musicians and writers and stuff who stand at
the Chelsea just or even actors to it, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Oh, it's staggering. Dylan, Thomas Hendrix was there for a bit,
Janis Joplin, all of these people. In fact, there's a
great bronze plaque right outside the front door, and of
course they leave Sid's name off of there, but fans
just keep going back and etching his name into it.
That I think they just gave up and said, we're
(38:39):
just gonna leave it fine. Let people remember that Sid
was here. But you know, that's the other interesting thing
about the Chelsea is, I hate to say this, a
lot of the business they've gotten over the last forty
something years coming up on fifty now, has been people
want to go and see where Sid and Nancy lived
and died, and they don't want to acknowledge it at all,
(39:01):
to the point where they have told three different stories
over the years about that room. One of them being well,
the room was destroyed. We literally bricked over it. It
doesn't exist anymore. Another version of the story was we
turned it into a broom closet for the maids. And
I can't remember the third story because it wasn't as
it wasn't told as often. But it turns out, no,
(39:24):
the room still exists. They kind of shortened it a
little bit. They knocked out a wall and pushed it
further into the room, but it's still there. They just
changed the name to Room one on one. So they're
very embarrassed of it because it doesn't fit in with
this whole chic rebranding they're doing. And hey, I understand it,
but at some point you also kind of have to
(39:45):
acknowledge that they have profited handsomely over the years due
to the cit and Nancy connection.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
What did you come up with like alternative theories? Because
I believe, I say, said, they can't even remember what happened.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, And that's the strange thing too, because as far
as a statement goes, for Sid, all we really have
are like a very brief summary in the case file,
you know, the quick typed up one paragraph thing. You know.
At first, Sid said he didn't remember anything, and then
he said she must have fallen on the knife. And
then he said, I must have stabbed her. And then
(40:19):
all of like the big details over what the cops
say Sid said was what came out during the grand jury,
and the transcripts for certain sections of those hearings are
online thanks to the work of the Smoking Gun. And unfortunately,
that detective his name was Gerald Thomas, who interrogated Sid
(40:39):
that day, did not do things quite well. I mean,
this is a high profile murder case, this is a celebrity.
Did Gerald Thomas take Sid down to NYPD headquarters and
you know, break out a video camera or at the
very least a tape recorder to audio record this interrogation. Nope,
he took him to a vacant room on the second
(41:00):
floor where no one else was. And that's supposedly when
Sid's story magically changed from I don't remember what happened
to yeah, I must have stabbed her. I must have
stabbed her. And then of course, the second Sid gets
back down to the first floor, he's like, no, I
don't remember what happened. What are you talking about? So
(41:21):
all we have to go on with this confession that
was admitted into court is the word of a detective
who was chided by the judge during the grand jury
hearing for exaggerating and making things up. So it's another tricky, dark,
murky story, and it's very frustrating because it's on Sid's
(41:42):
Wikipedia page. You see it mentioned in documentaries that oh,
Sid at first tried saying you didn't remember, but then
he ultimately confessed, and it's like, well, a cop says
he confessed, but no one else witnessed this confession. It
wasn't recorded, it wasn't videotaped, so I wouldn't say that's
a real, ironclad confession. And everyone else that was in
(42:04):
Sid's life until the day he died that following February
said when we asked him what happened, he said he
didn't remember. All he knew was he woke up, the
bed was soaked in blood, and all of the money
that was in the nightstand was gone.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
They don't believe it or not. They didn't videotape confessions
back in those days. They didn't videotape interrogations, and very
often they didn't record it me. You know, they didn't
start I didn't see my first video recorded intargation to
a Central pro client. That was the first time we
saw it, and we said, well, if they confess I'm bitter,
they must be guilty. It's an ever stand it befook.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Well, and that's a weird thing like in New York. Yes,
but I would have to go back into my notes
from when I put two and two together about this
several years ago working on the book. But I did
find some taped confessions audio and video going all the
way back to like the set the early seventies, and
these were in like places that had a much smaller
budget than the NYPD. It's just like, really the NYPD's
(43:01):
budget in the late seventies, like they couldn't send someone
down a radio shack to get one hundred and fifty
dollars Sony pressman recorder or a reel to reel or something.
It's like, you've got a celebrity here. This is going
to be world news. Like, if you're going to get
a confession, you want that to be ironclad and not. Oh, well,
we've got a detective who is kind of a loose
relationship with the truth saying no, I swear it happened.
(43:23):
So oh and now what.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
About this detective. Did he ever write a book or
was ever at the yet?
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Uh No. And the problem is with a name like
Gerald Thomas, I could not find him. I spent six
years looking for him, and there's like nine million Jerry
Thomas's living in Manhattan. But he never gave an interview
to the press about this. And in fact, one of
the more damning things is his partner that responded to
the Chelsea Hotel that day was asked a couple days
(43:49):
later by a reporter, Hey, is it true that Sid
eventually confessed to this? And he said no, No, he
never confessed. This is the guy's partner telling that to
a report order on the record. Meanwhile, his partner is,
you know, admitting this supposed confession into evidence in the
grand jury trial, which ultimately results in you know, Sid
(44:13):
being charged with Nancy's murder. So it's I hate to
make this out to be like, you know, hey a cab,
all cops are liars and all this stuff, but in
this particular case, the case against Sid was not ironclad.
And I mean by the fact alone that the NYPD
was still looking into people while Sid's at rikers. Obviously
(44:35):
they didn't believe what Detective Thomas was saying about this confession,
if they're still interviewing people and going, hey, you need
to run their prints against the prince we recovered from
that room, because we think that this guy may have
done it. Now, granted, two of those three people they
did clear. But in that case file in the interview
(44:55):
notes for the third person that they interviewed, who was
a tuin All dealer, It worked at Max's Kansas City.
At the bottom they wrote case is still open. Suspect
to be reinterviewed. They did not believe his story, and
unfortunately he skipped town. They couldn't find him again after that,
(45:16):
and then shortly after that Sid's dead. So knowing that
those files exist regarding this third suspect and the other
two suspects that came before him, that's not a real
great endorsement in Jerry Thomas's detective work, you know what
I mean?
Speaker 2 (45:31):
How did he get bailed up? Wasn't it like Nancy's
mother will build him out or something like that, or
provided him with the heroin what's that start?
Speaker 1 (45:37):
No, the story there was he made bail because the
sex Pistols former manager Malcolm McLaren flew to New York
with the bail money and got him out, and he
ended up back in jail for a little bit because
in December of seventy eight, he went to a nightclub
called Hurrah to see a band called Skayfish and in
(46:00):
the middle of the show, he got into an altercation
with Patty Smith's brother Todd, and ended up smashing a
glass beer glass into Todd's face and Todd required stitches.
So yeah, ol, Sid kind of went back to jail
for a bit for that, but eventually he was let
out on bail in early February of seventy nine, and
(46:24):
within twenty four hours he died of a heroin overdose
heroine that the mother Sid's mother purchased for him, which
is a whole other weird, shadowy story. You have other
authors that are out there claiming that, oh yeah, Sid's
mother before Sid died, confessed to me that she deliberately
gave him a hot shot to kill him, you know,
(46:44):
a second dose of heroin to kill him in the
middle of the night because she thought he could not
you know, last in jail and blah blah blah, and
it's all bull. I mean, I have Sid's autopsy report,
I've got photos of his arms. There's only one track
mark in his arm, and it's from the hair when
that he did earlier in the day in front of
at least three witnesses that saw him shooting up. So
(47:06):
that was a big reason why I wanted to write
this book. There are so many myths and legends out
there that fall apart under the slightest amount of scrutiny,
and a lot of people who don't know any better
see it as concrete, like, no, that's what happened. You know,
Sube's mother killed him, and it's like, no, that's that's
not true. So time will tell if my book puts
(47:26):
a dent in any of these pieces of lore or
anything like that. But it was a big motivating factor
for me. It's just like, no, that part of the
story isn't true. And here's why.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Well, the book just came out in April, right, yeah, fifteenth.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
The text day, Yeah, my birthday as well, Happy birthday.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, and then it starting out like four point seven stars,
so it seems to be well received. And how has
been I received? Like the true crime geneminity that are
so difficult to athletes.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Among the people that I have spoken to who have
read it, just you know, your general punk rock and
true crime fans. They've all told me they're like, wow,
there's so much here that I thought I knew, but
I you know, I was wrong, and it's you know,
really well written. But the greatest compliment for me has
been to get emails and phone calls from people who
(48:20):
actually knew Sit and Nancy and were friends with them
and lived this whole you know, birth of punk rock,
and for them to call me up and say, I
just got done with reading your book and you told
it as it happened. I had so many memories floodback
to me while reading your book because you just captured
the time so well, and you gave Nancy a fair
(48:43):
shake and presented her as a human being and not
you know, the second coming of Yoko Ono, who deserved
to die and all this. Hearing stuff like that from
people who actually lived it means the most to me. Like,
don't get me wrong, like the four point seven stars, like,
that's great. I'm glad people are enjoying it, but it
is very special to hear from people that were like, no,
(49:05):
these were my friends and I was there and you
got it right. Thank you. It's it makes it all
worth it because it was a long road writing this book.
This was the longest time I ever spent on a
single book. It was almost six years. So at the
end of the day, it's all worth it. You know,
writers don't really get into it for the glory, because
(49:27):
there isn't really a lot of glory to be had anymore,
certainly not financial glory at the very least. But writers,
especially nonfiction writers, get into it because these stories get
under your skin and you want to go out and
re research things to see was this told properly? Is
their new information out there? What can I lend to
(49:47):
the historical record here? And to know that I offered
up something that was deemed worthy by those that were
actually there, it just means the world to me. So
that that's been the reception for the book that I've
really hung on to. You know, if you know some
random person doesn't like the book, that's fine. You know,
(50:08):
there's people out there that think Stephen King's a Kromi writer.
They're wrong, but those people do exist. But as far
as I'm concerned, the people that I actually chronicle in
the book told me I got it right, So I
know that I did a good job. And if people
like the book is entertainment beyond that great, And if
they don't, I'm I'm sure there's plenty of Patricia Cornwell
books out there to entertain them.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
So Patricia hoope, was it?
Speaker 1 (50:33):
Yeah, right in the middle of my show, just a
little tea, you know, it's like, hey, let's just Tricia,
you know, hey, let's just destroy a priceless piece of
artwork to lend some credence to my half big Jack
the Ripper theory. You know, it's fine. Oh yeah, I
don't know if you know about all of that. Yeah,
(50:53):
she had this this whole theory that she wrote a
book about for Jack the Ripper, that it was this
artist I believe his name is Walter Sicker this time.
Oh yeah, and she said it was him, he did it,
and his paintings are proof. She destroyed one of his
paintings looking for forensics, and it turns out hitting yeah,
and this was a painting that was valued at like
one point three million dollars. You know, the guy's dead,
(51:13):
he's not painting any more stuff. So but uh, and
then it turns out like she wrote three hundred pages
saying like this this was the Ripper, I have solved it.
And then a guy read her book and like looked
into some travel records and found out, yeah, he wasn't
even in England when Jack the Ripper was killing. So
it's like, I throw shade at true crime writers like that,
(51:35):
whose entire case theory can be destroyed in less than
ten seconds.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
So well, I think your next thing, you didn't random
by check the Ripper.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
If I had something to offer, I would love to
write something about Jack the Ripper. I find that case
endlessly fascinating. But at this point it's like, unless we
get some new, real concrete information, I don't know if
there's anything anyone can add to it. And that was
another one of the cases that I was a too
earlier where the case file is incomplete because so many
(52:04):
detectives from Scotland Yard were taking pieces of at home
as evidence decades late, sorry taking home a souvenirs decades later,
because they were like, oh, yeah, this is never gonna
get solved, and I worked on this famous case, so yeah,
I'll take a couple morg photos home from me or
a couple of witness statements. So it's honestly a miracle
that we know anything concrete about that case because so
(52:26):
much disappeared for so many years.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
Yeah, I worked with this PI in Brooklyn as a kid,
and he had the Ley Holiday's arrest record. No kidding,
Oh in it all kinds of stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
Over this. So lit'sten.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
I'm not going to be able to have you back
for another ten years. So what are you working on next?
Speaker 1 (52:48):
No, you can have me back on whenever you want.
Now the time is freed up a little bit. Honestly,
I'm taking a little bit of a break from true
crime just because it's been a very intense ten years
and I'm kind of getting back to my sort of
weird New Jersey roots talking about the paranormal a little bit.
So I'm currently working on a book for the History
Press that's all about the mothman sightings that occurred in
(53:11):
Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the mid nineteen sixties. So
it's just kind of like a oh, let me take
a nice little detour into a spooky story that isn't
hurting anyone to talk about this because it's you know,
true crime is a tricky thing, ed, you know, I
think what we're doing is honorable if we have our
hearts in the right place. We're shining a light on
people who were victimized, people who had their lives taken away,
(53:35):
their families left behind, that had their lives irreparably harmed.
And it could still be a tricky thing because you know,
you get a royalty check from a publisher every six months,
and you go, well, am I taking blood money? Like
I know the family is cool with it, but just
after ten years of like soul searching with that and
dealing with television producers that have no scruples about exploiting
(53:59):
victims and their love ones, I'm just like kind of
need a little bit of a break from that world.
I'll come and hang out with you, because you're cool,
But like other people that I've dealt with, like I
said at the Oxygen Network, people who have straight up
asked me to lie on TV because it would be
good for ratings, I'm just kind of done with it.
I want to get into something that's a little more fun,
like Halloween kind of spooky stuff. So that Mothman book
(54:22):
will be out in a couple of years, and who
knows what will happen there. I mean, it's kind of
like if the right case comes along where a family says, listen,
we trust you to look into this because we think
the story needs to be told. Will you help us.
I'll do it, But as far as like actively looking
for stories, I'm kind of taking a break from that
(54:43):
just because it's the genre has become a little weird.
We're kind of back in where the genre was in
the eighties, the whole exploitation era, and it's just not
sitting well with me right now.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
We have been talking to Jesse P. Pollett. You could
find him at JP author on U No No j P. J.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
Pollock auth j Pollock author.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Jake Pollock author JP. He's cool tip check him out,
poll out there and otherwise. The books we've been talking
about our sid Nancy and the Night Punk Died with
One O one debt on Devil's Teeth, The Strange Murder,
The Acid King, and also Weird New Jersey Presents a
true crime flows mist It.
Speaker 1 (55:25):
Oh yeah, the special issue that we did for Weird
in New Jersey. That was a fun one. If you
can track down a copy of that. We went back
and took, oh, look at the entire Weird New Jersey
archive and said all of the true crime stories that
fascinated people. Let's put them all into one special issue.
So that went out of Prince several years ago. So
if you can still find out.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
Bedle of it right there, I'm looking at it.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
Oh it's still up on Kindle. Excellent. I wasn't sure
it was still there. Beautiful.
Speaker 2 (55:52):
I got a commission on everyone you sell bro there,
Jesse pollock Man, thank you so much, Brok.
Speaker 1 (55:57):
Thank you so much. Ed.
Speaker 2 (55:58):
Good night, t
It's the Opperman Report, and now here is Investigator Opperman.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Okay, welcome to the Opperman Report. I'm your host, private
investigator Ed Ottaman. You can get a hold of me
at Opperman Investigations and Digital Friends a consulting if you
reach out to me through my email Opperman Investigations at
gmail dot com. We have a returning guest today, mister
jesse P. Pollock. I had this guy on years and
(00:30):
years ago. I think we would recognize each other. I
had him on about the Acid King, about Ricky Casso,
the Acid King, say you love Satan, that guy, and
now we have them coming back to them about the
Sat Nancy and the night punk Rock Dyede Room one
oh one. Mister jesse P. Pollack, are you there?
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yes, I am. Thank you so much for having me
back at and for being so patient with me. The
years since the Acid King have been a little bit
of a whirlwind, but I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah. People might think we're but I really tried to
get this. I came up, tried to saw on Instagram,
on the JESSEP. Pollock Instagram and I just I reeled
Juliane as best I could.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Oh it was it was nothing personal either. It's just
again like the timing never seemed to be right. And
there was a little bit where I was kind of
burnt out from doing any sort of like interview appearances,
and so I took a sabbatical for a little bit.
But for better or worse, I'm back.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I felt like a bill collector was trying to get
all the dodging my calls, my letters. But Jesse, before
we get into room one on one sitting Nancy, and
then I punk back to and I didn't want to
touch on the answer king a bit, but tell us
bite yourself, reminding audience, who is Jesse P. Pollack Well.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
I was born and raised in the Garden state of
New Jersey, and I first cut my teeth as a
journalist writing for Weird New Jersey magazine, which comes out
twice a year. Chronicles everything from true crime to conspiracy theories,
the paranormal, weird, sort of outsider art, personalized property, that
(02:09):
sort of thing. And I guess my real entrance into
the world of true crime came through the Genetta Palma case,
which was this strange, unsolved murder that happened in Springfield
and Union County, about two towns over from where I
grew up in Clark and Railway, and we started getting
(02:30):
letters of the magazine in the late nineties just talking
about like, oh, yeah, have you guys ever heard about this,
you know, this supposed hitchhiker that was found on an
altar in the woods in the earlier mid seventies. I
don't know, it might just be an urban legend. I
think there was some part about a dog bringing an
(02:52):
arm home or something. And this is pre Google. I
think like maybe info seek and ask Jeeves were around,
and there was no Internet presence for this story at all,
so we just kind of figured it was one of those, like,
you know, the Tales of the Hookman kind of urban legends.
So we printed the letter and it just kept flooding
(03:14):
in like oh yeah, no, I definitely remember hearing about that.
That blah blah blah blah. And a couple of years
after that, someone finally wrote in with a very cryptic
letter that just said her name was Jeanette de Palma
and she was found on an altar, So we finally
had a name to go on. And my co author
(03:35):
on my eventual first book, Mark Moran, the co editor
of Weird New Jersey. He took that name and was
able to nail down the timeframe and found all of
the original newspaper coverage through microfilm at various libraries, and
he put together this seven page spread in issue twenty
two that really talked about like all of the scary
(04:01):
undercurrents of this case. It was very like Twin Peaks
meets True Detective. It was this sixteen year old girl.
She left home on I believe it was a Tuesday
afternoon in the summer seventy two. She was going to
go meet up with friends in Berkeley Heights and never
came home. And six weeks later, just like the quote
unquote urban legend said, a dog that was roaming the
(04:24):
woods bordering a nearby rock quarry it's called the Hudai Quarry,
brought home a decomposed arm to its owner, and this
kicked off a police search, and eventually they found the
rest of her on top of this hill bordering the quarry.
And for I want to say, a week or ten days,
(04:45):
the details of it were literally just that she vanished
for six weeks, we found her in the woods, and
this is all we know. And then right around the
end of September, all of this scuttle button began to
hit the major newspapers, not just the Star Ledger and
the local Springfield papers, but the New York Post, the
(05:08):
New York Daily News. I believe the New York Times
may have even had an article about it, saying that
there was an element of possible black magic, witchcraft, and
or Satanism involved in this. There were all of these
anonymous quotes they're always anonymous, saying like, oh, yeah, no,
we found an arrangement of sticks and stones around the
(05:29):
body that hinted towards an occult involvement. There were rumors
that detectives were bringing a quote unquote which to the
crime scene to evaluate these symbols that were allegedly found
around her. And then after a few weeks of this,
the case just hit a dead end. You never heard
anything about it again. It was never solved. And it
(05:51):
would have been two thousand and no two thousand and
four that Mark had done his article about this weird,
creepy story. And somewhere around twenty eleven, I was getting
ready to move. I was leaving the East Coast for
the Midwest and packing up all of my old weird
New Jersey back issues, and I found that one and
I'm flipping through it. I'm like, oh, yeah, that story
(06:13):
was really spooky. Someone must have written a really good
book about this case by now, and sure enough, no
one had. And I really wanted to read a book
about this case. So I figured, well, if no one
else has written a book about it, I guess I'm
going to have to. So Mark and I teamed up,
and one of the first major hurdles of bringing this
(06:38):
book to life the book that eventually became Death on
the Devil's Teeth was the Springfield Police Department kept insisting
to us there's no case file, there's no evidence left,
and they maintained that it had been destroyed in nineteen
ninety nine when Hurricane Floyd hit New Jersey. They said
that the evidence room at the police department was under
(06:59):
eight feet of water. So it was this weird thing
where we're like, okay, well, where do we go from here?
There's really no hard documentation other than the original newspaper articles.
So we decided we're going to have to build our
own case file from scratch. And the way that we
did that was going through that original newspaper coverage and
(07:20):
finding names, finding locations things that were pertinent, and reaching
out to people and asking them what they remembered. And
thank god we did it when we did, because within
about three years, i want to say, about ninety percent
of these people passed on. So we interviewed a lot
of the original investigators, family members, friends of Jeanette's, people
(07:42):
that were parishioners at this strange church that she went
to that we later found out was largely responsible for
the occult rumors in the case. And we put this
book together, and the one common thread that we found
among the people that we were interviewing in the Springfield
area was no one believed the story about the case
(08:04):
file going missing. Some people were very reasonable about this belief, like, no,
that doesn't make sense. There would have been copies stored
at the prosecutor's office, they would not have kept it
in the basement, blah blah blah blah blah. And other
people went full on off the deep end saying, no,
they're just saying that because it was the police chief's
(08:25):
son that killed her and there was a whole cover
up and all this stuff. And of course we looked
into that and found out the police chief's son was
living in Florida at the time, he had nothing to
do with it, but it made for a really interesting
and compelling part of the story that Mark and I
just could not let go. And eventually, after about nine
or ten years of us really dogging the Springfield Police
(08:48):
Department in the Union County Prosecutor's Office for a copy
of this case file through the Freedom of Information Act,
they eventually relented and gave it to us. So it
turned out, yeah, it was a BS story. The case
file still existed, the evidence all still existed. One of
the more messed up things that was a revelation regarding
(09:10):
us getting this case file a couple of years after
the book was published, was we found out the very
same week that the Springfield Police Department was telling us Nope,
all the evidence and the files were destroyed. They were
actually re cataloging and rephotographing all of the evidence and
shipping it off to the Prosecutor's office. And we know
it was the same week because we were given the
(09:33):
evidence intake forms through the Freedom of Information Act, and
it was literally the signature of the detective who was
running off to his desk to emails and say, no,
it doesn't exist. Anymore right after he was literally photographing
it that week, So we don't know why they did that.
There's no real smoking gun in the case files that say, hey,
(09:53):
this is why the cops would have covered up this
supposed occult murder of a teenager. But it led to
some very interesting twists and turns that eventually resulted in
a second expanded edition of the book, which came out
a couple of years ago. I reckon if any listeners
are not familiar with this case, I would recommend getting
(10:14):
that one from Amazon and not the original twenty fifteen edition.
But that whole case led to eventually Simon and Schuster
asking me to cover the Ricky Casso story, which we
discussed the last time I was on the show. Another
proto satanic panic case from Long Island in the eighties,
where you know.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
A second, yeah, slow me down with with this swoman
here and the Devil's tea. Now with the ship a
family that was you know about bothering the place. Hey's
you know what's my daughter's killer? Is that kind of thing?
Speaker 1 (10:48):
They were bothering the police all the way up through
the eighties, saying like listen, you know you've given us
no updates. Now the press has been running with this
weird occult angle what really happened here, and they just
kept blowing the family off, just saying there's nothing here,
there's no answers. The family ended up hiring a private investigator,
(11:11):
and the private investigator died of a sudden heart attack
before he was able to get any information. So the
family just kept kind of hitting roadblock after roadblock, which
was why they were initially hesitant to speak with Mark
and I when we told them, listen, we really want
to do a book to get some of the real
facts out there, because maybe it'll shake something loose, maybe
(11:33):
someone will read something in the book and remember a
detail that might solve this case. And eventually they I
guess they saw that we were coming at it with
goodness in our hearts and we weren't trying to exploit them,
and they worked with us on this. But yeah, for decades,
the police told them there's nothing we can do. We
can't help you, there's no updates, we can't show you
(11:54):
one of the evidence that the police really shut them out.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Now and also to and I'll pri itt to be
was saying, you were telling me about how the case
file was missing. We were talking about this case, so
we were talking about the room war on one case
with Nancy and the sid Nancy.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Both of them, what is going on with you man? Missing?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Every time Jesse Pollocks shows up, suspicious bro It is
very strange.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Even with the Ricky Casso case. While they the it
was kind of a oh, serendipitous moment. I guess. The
Suffoc County Police Department was going through a little bit
of a scandal when I was working on the Casto books,
so they were making an effort to appear as transparent
as possible, so they were very easy to get that
(12:42):
case file from. But there were other elements involved with
it where stuff was being hidden. Like we talked about
on the show many years ago, Ricky hanged himself in jail,
much like Epstein, as far as the official story is concerned, did,
and the whole story there was, oh, it was just
(13:04):
you know, the fifteen minutes in between checks he did it.
He was just that quick, and there was nothing that
could have been done. And I just kept getting bounced
back and forth between the authorities in Riverhead where the
lock up was, and the Suffccounty Police Department, and eventually
someone in Suffolk County or right Riverhead said, well, listen,
(13:26):
if any of those files from our internal investigation still exist,
they're probably upstate somewhere. Who knows where they are? And
I said, okay, well wear upstate, tell me and they
were like, fine, probably at this office. And I got
a hold of a clerk up there, and I guess
enough time had passed where whoever was, you know, running
(13:47):
the safekeeping of these files didn't care, or they may
not have even heard of Ricky Casso by this point,
depending on how old they were, But they were like, oh, yeah,
here you go. Here's a copy of the internal investigation.
And it turns out they're internal and investigation had discovered
that no, the officer at the correctional facility or the
(14:09):
county lock up, whichever, was not checking every half hour
like he was supposed to. I don't remember if he
had supposedly fallen asleep or not. But they found out
it was their fault, that there was negligence, and that
they had recommended a review of the policies and there
was going to be retraining. But they swept that all
under the rug. That report never made its way to
(14:31):
South of County. It never became a part of the
official case file and sure as heck never made it
to the media. So yeah, whether it's serendipity or not,
there does seem to be a common through line with
these cases that I choose to chronicle where there is
an element of case files quote unquote disappearing.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Now, let me ask you this because since I had
you on last time, there was a I saw a
documentary film about Rucky Casso, and I believe you were
involved in it, and it kind of changed story. That's
saying that now they don't or even do yourself, you
don't believe that it was motivated by Satanism.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Well, I never really believed it was motivated by satanism,
solely the issue that was happening with that story. And yes,
to answer your question, I co directed that documentary with
Dan Jones and Real Real, long story short. The reason
that we did that was we had multiple offers from
people associated with the Oxygen Network and at one point
(15:30):
Netflix and then Investigation Discovery, and they all wanted to
option the rights to the books so they could do
their own docuseriies. But the more and more I got
into negotiations with these people, they made it very clear
that they wanted to turn this into this kid was
a devil worshiper and this was a Satanic sacrifice, even
though I had just written a four hundred and thirty
(15:51):
page book saying no, that's not what happened and here's why.
So I got it in my head where I was like,
the only way this story is going to be told
accurately in a visual medium, as if I'm actually involved
in it, and I know how to work a camera,
I know how to edit things, and I know a
lot of other talented people that know their way around
a camera. So why don't we just raise a modest
(16:14):
budget and go out to Northport and film it ourselves.
And we did so. The big thing, again was that
the police and the media were trying to make this
out to be that this, this boy, Gary Lowers, was
dragged into the woods of Northport, kicking and screaming by
(16:34):
a hundred cult members in robes, chanting next to a
roaring bonfire, and that all of these people had witnessed
it and kept their mouths shut, and there were incantations
and blah blah blah blah, And it turned out no,
it was four teenagers, Gary included that you know, went
up there to hang out. They did a bunch of PCP,
(16:56):
and it turns out it was a fight over storm
drugs several weeks earlier that amounted to a fifty dollars debt.
They beat Gary up, they stabbed him to death, and
then they covered the body with leaves and twigs and
left him there. But the real eerie part about that
is the story didn't end there. It was for about
(17:16):
eleven days Ricky Casso and his friend Jimmy Treano were
leading tours up to this body because they were straight
up telling all of their friends, yeah, we killed him,
and their friends were saying, no, you didn't, You're just joking.
And their response, for whatever reason was, oh, you don't
believe us, Come see, And they brought dozens of people
(17:39):
to see Gary's remains rotting for nearly three weeks before
someone finally spoke up and called the police. And to me,
that was the interesting part of this story. It wasn't
the gory details of the murder or even the satanic
panic aspect of it, so much as how does a terrible,
(17:59):
dark secret lay buried like that for nearly a month
in this supposed you know, wonderful bedroom suburb of Manhattan
where all these nice, good and decent, you know, blue
collar folks live. It became almost like a Stephen King story. Honestly,
you know, this this portrait of a town that was
(18:20):
befallen by darkness. Except in this case, it wasn't a
supernatural darkness. It was just the mundane horrors of the suburbs,
if you will.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
When you went back to revisit the story and you're
actually up there in the town filment, did you want
to cross any new information?
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Not anything particularly ground breaking, but it was. It was
very interesting being able to actually sit with the people
and go to the locations as opposed to just talking
on the phone or sitting in a cafe in Northport
a couple of years prior when I was working on
the book. Like one of the more eerie things that
happened was and this lent itself, unfortunately to the whole
(19:02):
Satanic ritual aspect of it. But Casso had been arrested
two months before the murder for trying to dig up
a grave in Northport. There was a mix up with
the story. This is another thing about Northport. Again, It's
like this supposed really nice community where all these wonderful
people live with their families. But there were two separate
grave robbing incidents in nineteen eighty three nineteen eighty four,
(19:24):
and they kind of got mushed together by the press.
The first one was a friend of Ricky's that stole
a skull from a mausoleum to sell to a head
shop in Manhattan for six hundred bucks. Ricky heard about
this and went six hundred bucks that's easy money, and
tried digging up a colonial era grave on another side
of town. And then, of course, when Ricky got arrested
(19:46):
for this supposed satanic ritual murder, the story got melded
together into and Ricky Casso dug up a skull just
two months ago and was arrested for it. Well, I
tracked down the cop that arrested Ricky for it, and
he was like, yeah, yea yeall, meet Shitt the graveyard.
I'll show you where the grave was and we can
talk all about it. And he ended up running late
(20:08):
that night because he wasn't feeling well. So by the
time he finally arrived to this graveyard, which again is
literally just a patch of woods with about maybe twenty
five thirty graves from the seventeen hundreds that are still
left over, ones that haven't been destroyed, and it's pitch black.
There's no lights in there. You know, it's off of
(20:28):
a small county highway off of twenty five A, but
there's no natural light getting in there. So I'm standing
in the dark next to these graves where you know,
devil worshiping teens supposedly used to hang out, waiting for
this cop. And he finally shows up and he's like, yeah,
come here, and we're talking about all this, and there
was a moment that really stuck out as creepy to
(20:50):
me as soon as it happened. Like we were talking
about how some kids used to come back, you know,
after the murder happened, and you know, leave graffiti and
carve things in the trees, and I was asking him
if he remembered that, and he just kind of scoffed
at it, like, yeah, Ricky lives. That was one of
the things that people used to write on the trees
and the sidewalks after Ricky killed himself. And in that moment,
(21:13):
standing in the dark in this graveyard, I was like,
I don't like the way he said that not that
I'm standing up for this murderer, but I was just like,
it seemed kind of like tempting fate. And then the
next day I got a phone call from him. Hey,
as soon as I got home last night, I had
a heart attack. I'm in the.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Hospital, so get out here.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Yeah. So I was like, don't be mocking Ricky anymore
because I don't know what's going on here. But yeah,
that was some of the eerier things that happened while
working on the film as opposed to the preparations for
the book.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
And I'm real quick on Ricky again. There was an
older fellow that was like a Vietnam vet that seemed
to be training these younger kids, and the couch and
stuff like that. Any new information I had.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, I actually got the case file about him. Everyone
called him Pagan Pat Patrick Toussant was his real name.
And there were all of these stories about how supposedly
Pat may have been there that night when Gary Lowers
was killed, and that Pat had been murdered for knowing
too much about it. You know, the supposed called the
(22:18):
Knights of the Black Circle, who were literally just a
gang of teenage pot dealers from another town. They didn't
even live in Northport Village. They were from East Northport,
a few miles away. But that's a whole other kettle
of fish. But you know, that was another thing that
came up during the writing of the book. It's oh
the Knights killed Pat. He was murdered. I got a
hold of the case file. He had been seen all
(22:40):
morning the day that he died, brown bagging it by
the railroad tracks at East Northport train station. He had
been sighted by a cop for public drinking only about
a half hour I think before he died. And it was, unfortunately,
literally just a case of he either deliberately laid down
on the train tracks or he passed out and came
(23:01):
to fall there and a train ran him over. So
that's where his story began and ended. But yeah, if
you talk to the kids from back then, it's pretty
much common knowledge that, yeah, well, you know, this guy
wanted Ricky to join him on this night trip to
the Amityville Horror House and you know, have a ritual there.
(23:22):
And that might be true, but I don't think that
was the main motivation for Ricky trying to dig up
a skull. Like all the paperwork that I got from
the police department and others that knew him said that
the kid just wanted fast cash.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Well, don't get me involved with that amity real horror thing,
because I did to be an all those people and
the son, and they all hate each other, they all
have words straining orders of each other. That he's a
total hunks.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
I tell you what, though, I'll give you. I'll give
you one little story and your listeners, your listeners will
find this amusing, and I promise it's a quick story.
But that that cop that I just told you about
that had the heart attack while I was riding in
a car with him doing some research and tracking down
some leads with him about the story. You know, that
(24:06):
part came up the whole Amityville ritual supposedly, and he goes, yeah,
let me tell you a little something about that, because
he was a Suffolk County cop, he wasn't a Northport cop.
And he was like, I've held the rifle. I believe
it was a Marlin or something like that, and he goes,
you know, one of the things that we used to
do with the new recruits when they would join the
Detective Bureau is we would take them down to the
(24:28):
evidence room and we would show them that rifle. And
I said to him, I was like, you know, I'm
not one of these people that like, don't get me wrong,
I kind of believe in the supernatural because I've had
experiences that I would chalk up to, Hey, maybe it
was ghosts. But I'm not entirely sold on the story
that was presented through the book in the film. But
(24:49):
with that being said, I did mention to this cop.
I said, you know, the one thing that has always
really stood out to me is very eerie is how
this guy was able to go from room to room
shooting his siblings and his parents and no one woke up.
And he was like, yeah, that one we were never
able to figure out either. And I said, because that
(25:12):
rifle is loud, right, Like I have a vintage you
know rifle in my house and I and I have
test fired it a few times and it sounds like
a cannon. And he goes, yeah, no, it's loud. I
have fired a Marlin rifle before. And I said, well,
how do you explain that this is you know, small
rooms and hallways. It should have been echoing. I mean,
(25:32):
you know, Grant, the neighbors didn't even hear anything. How
do you think that happened? And he goes, don't know.
We were never able to figure that out. So that
still chills me.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Didn't that file go missing to Jesse?
Speaker 1 (25:44):
No? That fine? No, Actually I got some Uh, I
got some photos.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
If I call them up, then I going to say
the final right, you were there.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Who knows it might be missing now, But I mean
it got out to the public at some point because
those crime scene photos are out there.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, okay, so now, but you just were working on
all this kind of a cold kind of stuff and
what made you di while with sen Nancy.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Well, what had happened was there was another murder that
took place in New Jersey in the early eighties. It
actually coincidentally recently got resolved, but it was a very
famous unidentified body case called the Princess Doe case, and
weird New Jersey had had covered it for years. I'd
heard about it all the time when I was a kid.
(26:28):
Long story short for your listeners. She was a teenage
girl who was found with her face bashed in along
the creek edge running along a cemetery in Blairstown, New Jersey,
and some of you horror film officionados may recognize that
name as where they filmed the first Friday the thirteenth.
So they never figured out well up until recently, but
(26:53):
at the time that I became involved in it, they
had never figured out who had done it, why, who
this girl was. She was the first case that was
put into the FBI computer system for unidentified and Missing people.
In fact, unsolved Mysteries was born because of this case.
(27:16):
Because I believe her name is Terry dun Muir. I'm
so sorry if I'm pronouncing her name wrong. But she
had done an HBO little documentary special on the Princess
do case in the early eighties, and after producing that,
she decided, well, what if we did this as a
weekly thing with other unsolved cases. And that birthed unsolved mysteries.
(27:37):
So it's a very, very fascinating case. And I went
to my agent and I said, listen, I have been
researching this case for years. I have probably forty five
hours worth of audio tape of recorded interviews I did
with the original detectives and detectives that have taken the
case over, and I have a lot of documentation through
the case file, and blah blah, blah blah, and he said, Jesse,
(28:00):
I'm sorry, but I just don't think I can get
that book sold that it's not like the Janet case,
where you know, there's this other mysterious element with the
case file being missing. Like I hate to say this,
but I think this is just another unsolved local case
that no one really is going to care about. And
I said, well, yeah, my agent's name is Eric. I said, Eric.
(28:21):
That puts me in kind of a bind, because you know,
when you're trying to pitch a book to these publishers,
it's a very fine line. It's well, we don't want
a famous case because there's already ten million books about this,
But if you pick a case no one knows, then
they say, well, no one's ever heard of that. Who's
going to buy a book about that case? And he
said to me, he goes, well, if you could write
(28:43):
a book about any case, any case in the world,
which would you pick? And I said the CID and
Nancy case And he goes, really, I said, yeah, that
one's always fascinated me because there's no real resolution there.
I mean, Sid died before he ever went to trial,
and then the case was just quietly closed no one
really knows what happened in Room one hundred of the
(29:04):
Chelsea Hotel that night, and he goes, I want to
read that book. I think I can get that book sold,
and sure enough he did. And that was all the
way back in I want to say, April twenty eighteen,
and I got right to work writing that, and then
the pandemic happened, which slowed everything down, and then you know,
(29:26):
there was the release of the Acid King film. So finally,
after many years of stops and starts, Room one hundred
came out in April about three months ago. Four By
the time, people are listening to this and yeah, that
was another one where it was, oh, yeah, this is
(29:46):
the NYPD telling me this. Because of course, the first
thing I did was, Okay, this is a story I'm telling.
Let me get the cold hard facts. I'm going to
try and get the case file from the NYPD. And
the first thing they told me was, oh, yeah, we
looked for it. We're so sorry it's missing. And I
didn't think there was anything ne farious there. I figured
it's the NYPD. They've got millions of case files. This
(30:09):
is from nineteen seventy eight and it's twenty twenty at
this point that I'm asking for it, and actually may
have been like twenty nineteen, and I was like, okay,
well it got lost in the shuffle somewhere along the way,
or it could have been like the Jack the Ripper files,
where some retiring cop decided to take the file home
as a souvenir. That happens a lot in older cases.
(30:31):
And I kind of gave up hope, and I said, okay, well,
I'm just gonna have to do what I did with
Janette and reinterview everyone who's still alive, which sadly was
not a lot of people. I mean, you know, let's
face it, a lot of people were doing heroin and
living very dangerous lifestyles in that community back then. And
somewhere around January twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, somewhere
(30:55):
in that timeframe, I got a random email at six
in the morning saying, hey, it's your lucky day. We
just happened to find it by accident looking for something else.
Here you go. And the biggest revelation there was, you know,
for people that are familiar with the Sid Vicious and
Nancy Spungen's story, it's oh yeah, no, the cops thought
(31:17):
they had their man. Immediately they arrested Sid. As far
as they were concerned, it was an open and shutcase,
and the guy odeed and died when he was out
on bail. Turns out no, in the case file there
were at least three suspects, and I mean hardcore suspects.
People that they interrogated, people that they ran their prints
(31:39):
through the system, stuff like that. So Room one hundred
goes into all of that, the possibility that, hey, this
may not be just a simple story of this heroin
addled rock star stabbed his girlfriend to death in the
middle of the daze one night. It turns out there's
a very good possibility someone else did it, and the
(32:00):
and YPD was entertaining that possibility, at the very least
until Sid himself died a couple months later.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
You know, Jesse, before we get too deep into this,
you know, I got to tell you something. Just say,
in the past week, I was involved with the National
Inquirer and the Drudge Report. I was telling I was
telling people online this is hey, and I was just
a National Inquirers on the Judge reput and they saying, well,
what is the National Inquirer what is. They don't even
know what the Dreuagure report it is. I know they're
very young, Okay, So I'm telling you, Matt, and I
(32:28):
was already like a singer in high school when this
happened in New York City. I was staying out there
all the time. Then what we said and what do
you call? Chelsea would tell and stuff. So we're telling you.
I'm tell people who was sid Vicious, who was Nancy Sponge,
and who wore the sex Pistols? What were things like
that in those days?
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Well, going all the way back to the mid seventies,
the sex Pistols were a controversial punk rock band that
were I mean, it's it seems so tame now, it
really scared people back then. These were these grubby kids
from Shepherd's Bush, England that you know, had spiky hair
(33:05):
sometimes they dyed it, you know, green and red and
all these colors, and they had safety pins on their
clothes and they would spit on stage when they played,
and you know, they were criticizing the British government in
their songs. It was it was basically, you know, England's
equivalent to the Ramones at the time, like we had
over here in New York, and I mean these guys,
(33:26):
it was like, you know what we saw with Ozzie
and ac DC during the Satanic Panic. It was they
are going to ruin society, They're going to corrupt your
children and blah blah blah blah, and it is kind
of laughable. But the you know, the conservative right wing
element of society really did get a bit of an
upper hand there with that theory. Once the bass player
(33:46):
of the Sex Pistols was arrested for stabbing his girlfriend,
Nancy Spunkan to death in the Chelsea Hotel in October
nineteen seventy eight. Now by this point, the Sex Pistols
had dissolved at the end of a really disastrous American
tour in January nineteen seventy eight, and Sid was living
(34:06):
pretty much in squalor in the Chelsea Hotel. I mean,
the Chelsea Hotel was once a real symbol of opulence
in Manhattan, but by the seventies, like I really hate
to say this, because there were some really wonderful artists
and performers living and working out of that hotel at
that time, but he wasn't living on those floors. He
was living on the first floor where all of the
(34:28):
junkies and thieves lived. And I mean to call it
a hotel room is almost a misnomer. I mean it
was literally just a bedroom and a bathroom. It was just,
you know, a box with a bed in the middle
of it. This wasn't like what you would think, Oh,
this guy that's on the front cover of Rolling Stone,
like he must live in like a really cool like
Brownstone or something in Manhattan now And it's like, no,
(34:51):
he's he's living in an efficiency.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
He had even Billy Idol, who is you know, very successful,
live in a you can walk right up and realized
Morbell within the village and I learnt the walk up.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Yeah, I mean a lot of these people were very
accessible and in this case possibly too accessible. I mean
a lot of people that I interviewed that lived on
the same floor at the Chelsea at the time said that,
you know, forget not locking the door. Sometimes Sid and
Nancy would not out with the door wide open. Anyone
could have gone in there. And it was also another
element in this case that was not sufficiently explained even
(35:30):
at the time. It was the NYPD acknowledged that same
week because they were asked by I believe his name
is Michael. I'm blanking on his last name. But a
reporter from Rolling Stone had done a piece on the
murder and point blank asked the NYPD was there anything
missing from the room, and they said, actually, yes, there
(35:51):
was no money found in the room except for ten
dollars that was in Sid's jeans, which is very strange
because Sid had just gotten paid up words of I
want to say, six to nine thousand dollars for a
recent string of shows at Max's Kansas City, and according
to the paperwork records from the sex Pistols management company,
(36:15):
Glitterbest Limited, Sid had just been paid a royalty check
of about twelve thousand pounds, so there should have been
a lot of money in that room, and certain people
that had been in that room only a few hours
before Nancy died said yeah, no, Nancy had a lot
of about eight hundred dollars alone that I saw because
(36:36):
she was trying to get me to buy dilauded pills
with it. And for those who don't know, dilauded is
synthetic morphine. Essentially, it's a painkiller they give to cancer patients.
That's how strong it is. And at least three people
saw a ton of money in that room only hours beforehand.
(36:56):
But when Sid is arrested around eleven in the morning
following day, all that is found in that room is
ten dollars in his jeans. So at the very least
a robbery occurred there. So if Nancy was murdered by
someone other than Sid, that's the most likely motive. And
it would have been very easy because again, these people
(37:17):
were accessible. Anyone could just walk into the Chelsea and
if it was one of the nights that they were
just leaving the door open because they were on the nod,
well there you go.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
You know, even if you closed the door, it was
very CONTI to prop up a chair against the door
knob and stuff like that. Air building exactly air conditioning
in that building, you know, and you had taken your
life in your hands right when you walked down a minute.
It wasn't that it's like a project.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
It was scary. In fact, it was the hotel from
I believe the professional with Gary Oldman, who coincidentally played
Sid Vicious in the Alex coxfilm. In the eighties, the
Chelsea Hotel was basically the go to Manhattan hotel for
about twenty years for filmmakers that were like, we need
a really grimy and dangerous looking hotel, so they would
(38:07):
film at the Chelsea. Now it's real ritzy, but back then.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Now you go on Wikipedia that the list of artists
and the musicians and writers and stuff who stand at
the Chelsea just or even actors to it, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Oh, it's staggering. Dylan, Thomas Hendrix was there for a bit,
Janis Joplin, all of these people. In fact, there's a
great bronze plaque right outside the front door, and of
course they leave Sid's name off of there, but fans
just keep going back and etching his name into it.
That I think they just gave up and said, we're
(38:39):
just gonna leave it fine. Let people remember that Sid
was here. But you know, that's the other interesting thing
about the Chelsea is, I hate to say this, a
lot of the business they've gotten over the last forty
something years coming up on fifty now, has been people
want to go and see where Sid and Nancy lived
and died, and they don't want to acknowledge it at all,
(39:01):
to the point where they have told three different stories
over the years about that room. One of them being well,
the room was destroyed. We literally bricked over it. It
doesn't exist anymore. Another version of the story was we
turned it into a broom closet for the maids. And
I can't remember the third story because it wasn't as
it wasn't told as often. But it turns out, no,
(39:24):
the room still exists. They kind of shortened it a
little bit. They knocked out a wall and pushed it
further into the room, but it's still there. They just
changed the name to Room one on one. So they're
very embarrassed of it because it doesn't fit in with
this whole chic rebranding they're doing. And hey, I understand it,
but at some point you also kind of have to
(39:45):
acknowledge that they have profited handsomely over the years due
to the cit and Nancy connection.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
What did you come up with like alternative theories? Because
I believe, I say, said, they can't even remember what happened.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yeah, And that's the strange thing too, because as far
as a statement goes, for Sid, all we really have
are like a very brief summary in the case file,
you know, the quick typed up one paragraph thing. You know.
At first, Sid said he didn't remember anything, and then
he said she must have fallen on the knife. And
then he said, I must have stabbed her. And then
(40:19):
all of like the big details over what the cops
say Sid said was what came out during the grand jury,
and the transcripts for certain sections of those hearings are
online thanks to the work of the Smoking Gun. And unfortunately,
that detective his name was Gerald Thomas, who interrogated Sid
(40:39):
that day, did not do things quite well. I mean,
this is a high profile murder case, this is a celebrity.
Did Gerald Thomas take Sid down to NYPD headquarters and
you know, break out a video camera or at the
very least a tape recorder to audio record this interrogation. Nope,
he took him to a vacant room on the second
(41:00):
floor where no one else was. And that's supposedly when
Sid's story magically changed from I don't remember what happened
to yeah, I must have stabbed her. I must have
stabbed her. And then of course, the second Sid gets
back down to the first floor, he's like, no, I
don't remember what happened. What are you talking about? So
(41:21):
all we have to go on with this confession that
was admitted into court is the word of a detective
who was chided by the judge during the grand jury
hearing for exaggerating and making things up. So it's another tricky, dark,
murky story, and it's very frustrating because it's on Sid's
(41:42):
Wikipedia page. You see it mentioned in documentaries that oh,
Sid at first tried saying you didn't remember, but then
he ultimately confessed, and it's like, well, a cop says
he confessed, but no one else witnessed this confession. It
wasn't recorded, it wasn't videotaped, so I wouldn't say that's
a real, ironclad confession. And everyone else that was in
(42:04):
Sid's life until the day he died that following February
said when we asked him what happened, he said he
didn't remember. All he knew was he woke up, the
bed was soaked in blood, and all of the money
that was in the nightstand was gone.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
They don't believe it or not. They didn't videotape confessions
back in those days. They didn't videotape interrogations, and very
often they didn't record it me. You know, they didn't
start I didn't see my first video recorded intargation to
a Central pro client. That was the first time we
saw it, and we said, well, if they confess I'm bitter,
they must be guilty. It's an ever stand it befook.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Well, and that's a weird thing like in New York. Yes,
but I would have to go back into my notes
from when I put two and two together about this
several years ago working on the book. But I did
find some taped confessions audio and video going all the
way back to like the set the early seventies, and
these were in like places that had a much smaller
budget than the NYPD. It's just like, really the NYPD's
(43:01):
budget in the late seventies, like they couldn't send someone
down a radio shack to get one hundred and fifty
dollars Sony pressman recorder or a reel to reel or something.
It's like, you've got a celebrity here. This is going
to be world news. Like, if you're going to get
a confession, you want that to be ironclad and not. Oh, well,
we've got a detective who is kind of a loose
relationship with the truth saying no, I swear it happened.
(43:23):
So oh and now what.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
About this detective. Did he ever write a book or
was ever at the yet?
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Uh No. And the problem is with a name like
Gerald Thomas, I could not find him. I spent six
years looking for him, and there's like nine million Jerry
Thomas's living in Manhattan. But he never gave an interview
to the press about this. And in fact, one of
the more damning things is his partner that responded to
the Chelsea Hotel that day was asked a couple days
(43:49):
later by a reporter, Hey, is it true that Sid
eventually confessed to this? And he said no, No, he
never confessed. This is the guy's partner telling that to
a report order on the record. Meanwhile, his partner is,
you know, admitting this supposed confession into evidence in the
grand jury trial, which ultimately results in you know, Sid
(44:13):
being charged with Nancy's murder. So it's I hate to
make this out to be like, you know, hey a cab,
all cops are liars and all this stuff, but in
this particular case, the case against Sid was not ironclad.
And I mean by the fact alone that the NYPD
was still looking into people while Sid's at rikers. Obviously
(44:35):
they didn't believe what Detective Thomas was saying about this confession,
if they're still interviewing people and going, hey, you need
to run their prints against the prince we recovered from
that room, because we think that this guy may have
done it. Now, granted, two of those three people they
did clear. But in that case file in the interview
(44:55):
notes for the third person that they interviewed, who was
a tuin All dealer, It worked at Max's Kansas City.
At the bottom they wrote case is still open. Suspect
to be reinterviewed. They did not believe his story, and
unfortunately he skipped town. They couldn't find him again after that,
(45:16):
and then shortly after that Sid's dead. So knowing that
those files exist regarding this third suspect and the other
two suspects that came before him, that's not a real
great endorsement in Jerry Thomas's detective work, you know what
I mean?
Speaker 2 (45:31):
How did he get bailed up? Wasn't it like Nancy's
mother will build him out or something like that, or
provided him with the heroin what's that start?
Speaker 1 (45:37):
No, the story there was he made bail because the
sex Pistols former manager Malcolm McLaren flew to New York
with the bail money and got him out, and he
ended up back in jail for a little bit because
in December of seventy eight, he went to a nightclub
called Hurrah to see a band called Skayfish and in
(46:00):
the middle of the show, he got into an altercation
with Patty Smith's brother Todd, and ended up smashing a
glass beer glass into Todd's face and Todd required stitches.
So yeah, ol, Sid kind of went back to jail
for a bit for that, but eventually he was let
out on bail in early February of seventy nine, and
(46:24):
within twenty four hours he died of a heroin overdose
heroine that the mother Sid's mother purchased for him, which
is a whole other weird, shadowy story. You have other
authors that are out there claiming that, oh yeah, Sid's
mother before Sid died, confessed to me that she deliberately
gave him a hot shot to kill him, you know,
(46:44):
a second dose of heroin to kill him in the
middle of the night because she thought he could not
you know, last in jail and blah blah blah, and
it's all bull. I mean, I have Sid's autopsy report,
I've got photos of his arms. There's only one track
mark in his arm, and it's from the hair when
that he did earlier in the day in front of
at least three witnesses that saw him shooting up. So
(47:06):
that was a big reason why I wanted to write
this book. There are so many myths and legends out
there that fall apart under the slightest amount of scrutiny,
and a lot of people who don't know any better
see it as concrete, like, no, that's what happened. You know,
Sube's mother killed him, and it's like, no, that's that's
not true. So time will tell if my book puts
(47:26):
a dent in any of these pieces of lore or
anything like that. But it was a big motivating factor
for me. It's just like, no, that part of the
story isn't true. And here's why.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Well, the book just came out in April, right, yeah, fifteenth.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
The text day, Yeah, my birthday as well, Happy birthday.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, and then it starting out like four point seven stars,
so it seems to be well received. And how has
been I received? Like the true crime geneminity that are
so difficult to athletes.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Among the people that I have spoken to who have
read it, just you know, your general punk rock and
true crime fans. They've all told me they're like, wow,
there's so much here that I thought I knew, but
I you know, I was wrong, and it's you know,
really well written. But the greatest compliment for me has
been to get emails and phone calls from people who
(48:20):
actually knew Sit and Nancy and were friends with them
and lived this whole you know, birth of punk rock,
and for them to call me up and say, I
just got done with reading your book and you told
it as it happened. I had so many memories floodback
to me while reading your book because you just captured
the time so well, and you gave Nancy a fair
(48:43):
shake and presented her as a human being and not
you know, the second coming of Yoko Ono, who deserved
to die and all this. Hearing stuff like that from
people who actually lived it means the most to me. Like,
don't get me wrong, like the four point seven stars, like,
that's great. I'm glad people are enjoying it, but it
is very special to hear from people that were like, no,
(49:05):
these were my friends and I was there and you
got it right. Thank you. It's it makes it all
worth it because it was a long road writing this book.
This was the longest time I ever spent on a
single book. It was almost six years. So at the
end of the day, it's all worth it. You know,
writers don't really get into it for the glory, because
(49:27):
there isn't really a lot of glory to be had anymore,
certainly not financial glory at the very least. But writers,
especially nonfiction writers, get into it because these stories get
under your skin and you want to go out and
re research things to see was this told properly? Is
their new information out there? What can I lend to
(49:47):
the historical record here? And to know that I offered
up something that was deemed worthy by those that were
actually there, it just means the world to me. So
that that's been the reception for the book that I've
really hung on to. You know, if you know some
random person doesn't like the book, that's fine. You know,
(50:08):
there's people out there that think Stephen King's a Kromi writer.
They're wrong, but those people do exist. But as far
as I'm concerned, the people that I actually chronicle in
the book told me I got it right, So I
know that I did a good job. And if people
like the book is entertainment beyond that great, And if
they don't, I'm I'm sure there's plenty of Patricia Cornwell
books out there to entertain them.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
So Patricia hoope, was it?
Speaker 1 (50:33):
Yeah, right in the middle of my show, just a
little tea, you know, it's like, hey, let's just Tricia,
you know, hey, let's just destroy a priceless piece of
artwork to lend some credence to my half big Jack
the Ripper theory. You know, it's fine. Oh yeah, I
don't know if you know about all of that. Yeah,
(50:53):
she had this this whole theory that she wrote a
book about for Jack the Ripper, that it was this
artist I believe his name is Walter Sicker this time.
Oh yeah, and she said it was him, he did it,
and his paintings are proof. She destroyed one of his
paintings looking for forensics, and it turns out hitting yeah,
and this was a painting that was valued at like
one point three million dollars. You know, the guy's dead,
(51:13):
he's not painting any more stuff. So but uh, and
then it turns out like she wrote three hundred pages
saying like this this was the Ripper, I have solved it.
And then a guy read her book and like looked
into some travel records and found out, yeah, he wasn't
even in England when Jack the Ripper was killing. So
it's like, I throw shade at true crime writers like that,
(51:35):
whose entire case theory can be destroyed in less than
ten seconds.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
So well, I think your next thing, you didn't random
by check the Ripper.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
If I had something to offer, I would love to
write something about Jack the Ripper. I find that case
endlessly fascinating. But at this point it's like, unless we
get some new, real concrete information, I don't know if
there's anything anyone can add to it. And that was
another one of the cases that I was a too
earlier where the case file is incomplete because so many
(52:04):
detectives from Scotland Yard were taking pieces of at home
as evidence decades late, sorry taking home a souvenirs decades later,
because they were like, oh, yeah, this is never gonna
get solved, and I worked on this famous case, so yeah,
I'll take a couple morg photos home from me or
a couple of witness statements. So it's honestly a miracle
that we know anything concrete about that case because so
(52:26):
much disappeared for so many years.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
Yeah, I worked with this PI in Brooklyn as a kid,
and he had the Ley Holiday's arrest record. No kidding,
Oh in it all kinds of stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
Over this. So lit'sten.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
I'm not going to be able to have you back
for another ten years. So what are you working on next?
Speaker 1 (52:48):
No, you can have me back on whenever you want.
Now the time is freed up a little bit. Honestly,
I'm taking a little bit of a break from true
crime just because it's been a very intense ten years
and I'm kind of getting back to my sort of
weird New Jersey roots talking about the paranormal a little bit.
So I'm currently working on a book for the History
Press that's all about the mothman sightings that occurred in
(53:11):
Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the mid nineteen sixties. So
it's just kind of like a oh, let me take
a nice little detour into a spooky story that isn't
hurting anyone to talk about this because it's you know,
true crime is a tricky thing, ed, you know, I
think what we're doing is honorable if we have our
hearts in the right place. We're shining a light on
people who were victimized, people who had their lives taken away,
(53:35):
their families left behind, that had their lives irreparably harmed.
And it could still be a tricky thing because you know,
you get a royalty check from a publisher every six months,
and you go, well, am I taking blood money? Like
I know the family is cool with it, but just
after ten years of like soul searching with that and
dealing with television producers that have no scruples about exploiting
(53:59):
victims and their love ones, I'm just like kind of
need a little bit of a break from that world.
I'll come and hang out with you, because you're cool,
But like other people that I've dealt with, like I
said at the Oxygen Network, people who have straight up
asked me to lie on TV because it would be
good for ratings, I'm just kind of done with it.
I want to get into something that's a little more fun,
like Halloween kind of spooky stuff. So that Mothman book
(54:22):
will be out in a couple of years, and who
knows what will happen there. I mean, it's kind of
like if the right case comes along where a family says, listen,
we trust you to look into this because we think
the story needs to be told. Will you help us.
I'll do it, But as far as like actively looking
for stories, I'm kind of taking a break from that
(54:43):
just because it's the genre has become a little weird.
We're kind of back in where the genre was in
the eighties, the whole exploitation era, and it's just not
sitting well with me right now.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
We have been talking to Jesse P. Pollett. You could
find him at JP author on U No No j P. J.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
Pollock auth j Pollock author.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Jake Pollock author JP. He's cool tip check him out,
poll out there and otherwise. The books we've been talking
about our sid Nancy and the Night Punk Died with
One O one debt on Devil's Teeth, The Strange Murder,
The Acid King, and also Weird New Jersey Presents a
true crime flows mist It.
Speaker 1 (55:25):
Oh yeah, the special issue that we did for Weird
in New Jersey. That was a fun one. If you
can track down a copy of that. We went back
and took, oh, look at the entire Weird New Jersey
archive and said all of the true crime stories that
fascinated people. Let's put them all into one special issue.
So that went out of Prince several years ago. So
if you can still find out.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
Bedle of it right there, I'm looking at it.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
Oh it's still up on Kindle. Excellent. I wasn't sure
it was still there. Beautiful.
Speaker 2 (55:52):
I got a commission on everyone you sell bro there,
Jesse pollock Man, thank you so much, Brok.
Speaker 1 (55:57):
Thank you so much. Ed.
Speaker 2 (55:58):
Good night, t
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.