What drives us to reconcile the unexplained with our desire to bring order to chaos? Making sense of the universe is nothing new, of course, but for a society that claims to be progressive and scientifically minded, we continue to believe in the most fantastic things in order to get down to the “real story.”

It’s why some of us continue to hunt for Bigfoot and Noah’s ark; or why that “shadowy image” poking out from above the hedges on the grassy knoll must be a “second shooter.” It’s also why Elvis has been spotted everywhere from Sydney, Australia, to Sin City, U.S.

“It’s cognitive dissonance,” says Dr. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the executive director of the Skeptics Society. “If we look at the death of somebody great, then the cause of death must be equally as great. If it isn’t, we’re uncomfortable with that.”

In short, we concoct theories to make ourselves feel better: Sam Cooke must have been bumped off by racist record-company executives intent on destroying the black singer’s emerging musical empire; Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain wasn’t suicidal — he was murdered for profit; Peerless soul singer/composer Donny Hathaway, who had rekindled his musical partnership with jazz/soul diva Roberta Flack, could not have taken his own life at the top of his game; and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was poisoned in 1791 by jealous competitor, Viennese court Kapellmeister, Antonio Salieri — a terribly misguided view solidified by the success of Milos Forman’s 1984 film adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play, “Amadeus.”

“In the case of Mozart, this theory derives from Salieri’s insane episode at the end of this life when he claimed to have something to do with Mozart’s death,” explains Cliff Eisen, a music professor at King’s College London (University of London). “It was a very compelling story, so Alexander Pushkin wrote his 19th-century play [‘Mozart and Salieri’]. But there is no real evidence for this.”

More fantastic tales were spun about the great composer’s death: Some believed that the Freemasons, a society to which Mozart belonged, knocked off Mozart because his opera, “The Magic Flute,” revealed too many aspects of the Masons’ secret rituals.

“I don’t think anyone is foolish enough to think that there is nothing Masonic about ‘The Magic Flute,’” says Neal Zaslaw, Herbert Gussman Professor of Music, Cornell University (dubbed “Mr. Mozart” by the New York Times.) “But the attempt to portray it as solely or primarily Masonic, I think, is misguided.”

It’s entirely possible that Mozart suffered from kidney failure, which, ironically, would mean he was poisoned (by his own body, not Salieri). “Since the death certificate was, as they were at the time, nonspecific, this has given rise to any number of diagnoses over the years,” says Eisen.

We may never have an answer as to what exactly happened to Mozart, but that won’t stop people from speculating.

“As general guidelines about [these mysteries], people prefer the good story as opposed to the truth,” says Gavin Edwards, contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine and author of Is “Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed.” “Just the fact that Courtney Love is a half-crazy shrew doesn’t mean she killed her husband.”

Many compelling mysteries in the world of music have captured the fanciful imaginations of the public. Here are some of them:

 Not all mysteries are easily explained away. Case in point: Saxophonist Wardell Gray, a promising young jazz man who’d worked (post-bop) with Benny Goodman and the Count Basie Orchestra, died in 1955, his body found in the desert outside Las Vegas. To this day, Nevada authorities (and conspiracy theorists alike) have failed to elucidate the circumstances of Gray’s death.

In more recent years, Philip Taylor Kramer, former Iron Butterfly bassist and rocket scientist, who worked on national defense missile-guidance projects, vanished (some thought quite literally) in 1995 after placing a bizarre and chilling 911 phone call from his Ford Aerostar van, alerting the dispatcher to his suicidal intentions and O.J. Simpson’s supposed innocence.

In the months leading up to his disappearance, Kramer was consumed and haunted by new-age spirituality and horrifying glimpses of the end of the world. Peter Olson, a former CEO of Kramer’s company, Total Multimedia (TMM), introduced Kramer to the best-selling fictional book by James Redfield, “The Celestine Prophesy,” in which the main character reaches the “ninth spiritual insight” — the ability to transform oneself into pure energy, and thus, vanish into thin air. (Ironically, Kramer’s dad, Ray, an engineering professor at Ohio State University, theorized and spent years attempting to prove that light was not the ultimate speed in the universe. To the naked eye, a person traveling at a speed faster than light would virtually disappear.)

Conspiracy theories were floated (everything from alien abduction to Kramer’s ability to harness gravity waves to instanteously traverse the infinite expanse of space), some flooding the burgeoning blogosphere of the Internet in the mid- and late-1990s.

Kramer’s remains were found in 1999 (inside his minivan at the bottom of Decker Canyon near Malibu, Calif.). Instead of quieting doubts of Kramer’s death, the discovery provoked new questions. The police’s investigation into Kramer’s death ruled it a “probable” suicide, but skeptics seriously doubt the official record.

The Bonanza-riffin’, snare-drum bangin’, El Paso, Texas,-based Bobby Fuller Four hit the Hollywood music scene with both barrels blazing. Though Fuller had begun his career as a Buddy Holly clone, he found his musical identity by the mid-1960s. 

Initially, it didn’t appear as though Fuller would make much of a splash. In 1963, when he and his band visited the offices of Del-Fi Records label head/producer Bob Keane, Keane sent them packing for lack of superior material. At the time, Keane scored over a dozen national Top 50 hits with acts such as Sam Cooke, Ritchie Valens, The Shadows and others.

“I liked Bobby’s songs, but he didn’t have a hit,” Keane tells Goldmine.

“[Keane] listened to all of our stuff, which no one else would do,” remembers Randy Fuller, Bobby’s brother, who played bass. “He said, ‘I think you have something here. Go home and practice for a year and come and see me.’ So, we did. We opened up our own teen club. It was really going well... it kept building. The Beatles weren’t out, yet, and we were drawing kids like you’d think we were The Beatles.”

After local success, Fuller and the band paid Keane another visit. “He came back a year later, and he had one song, and it was a monster.” (That song was “Let Her Dance”, which Keane refers to as Fuller’s “best record.”)

Fuller went on to record such classics as “Another Sad & Lonely Night,” “The Magic Touch,” “I’m A Lucky Guy” and the international hit -— and his signature tune — “I Fought the Law,” a song written by a former member of Buddy Holly’s Crickets, Sonny Curtis.

“You hear a thick reverberant sound on some of the sides Fuller did with Keane,” says Richie Unterberger, who wrote about Fuller in his book, “Urban Spacemen and Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of ‘60s Rock.” “They have a little bit of a Motown influence. Regardless of whether that was coming from Fuller or Keane, it was done without diluting the core of what made it appealing.”
But by July 1966, Bobby and the members of the band began to drift apart.

(Guitarist Jim Reese, for instance, had been drafted.) Keane met and spoke with Fuller on the afternoon of July 17, 1966, and they agreed to have a band meeting the following morning (Monday, July 18).

When Bobby never showed, Keane and the band thought he had blown them off. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Fuller’s body was found, mysteriously, slumped inside his mom’s Oldsmobile, doused with gasoline, just outside the apartment in which he lived with his mother and brother Randy. The doors of the car were unlocked and the windows were rolled up.

“For [my mother] to find him dead in a car with gasoline poured all over him?” says Randy Fuller. “It doesn’t sound like a son would do that who loved his mother.”

Bobby had apparently been dead for hours when the car had mysteriously turned up. According to the autopsy report, Fuller was found facedown on the front seat of the Oldsmobile with bruises on his chest and shoulder. A third of a tank of gasoline was also found in the car. Initially, the L.A. District Attorneys office had ruled the death a suicide.

“[Bobby] was saturated in gasoline, and that was about the weirdest thing that ever happened,” says Keane, who explains in his autobiography, “The Oracle of Del-Fi,” that the coroner’s report failed to mention that the gasoline can was actually empty when he picked it up. Allegations of cover up, shoddy police work and murder had surfaced.
“Nobody followed up on anything,” says Keane. “The cops shut down on it.”

“The police didn’t secure the scene, they didn’t take fingerprints, they just said, ‘Another crazy musician bit the dust,’” says brother Randy Fuller. “We don’t even know what they did with the [gas] can. Bob Keane said they threw it in the dumpster.” 

Randy admitted that he “wasn’t with Bobby those last few days,” but there is no way his brother would have committed suicide. “What led me to believe that it wasn’t suicide was that Bobby had too much going for him,” says Randy.

If Fuller didn’t commit suicide, then how did he die? It’s believed that Bobby had gone to a party the night before in which drugs were flowing free. “He was at a party, apparently, where they were using dope,” says Keane. “That is as much as we know. There is nothing sure about that, even.”

Keane believes Bobby had mixed with some celebrities — celebrities who were high on heavy-duty drugs. “Either the police had something to do with it, or there were some other celebrities at the party who didn’t want to be involved [in Bobby’s death],” says Keane.

A number of other theories surfaced soon after Bobby’s death, including murder for jealousy, revenge and bitterness. “There was jealousy,” says Randy. “People say that I was jealous of my brother, and that I did [killed him], you know? But, that is not true. We were brothers, and brothers do [have jealousy].”

Even Bobby Fuller Four guitarist Jim Reese was fingered in these conspiracy theories: he was seething with anger over the attention given to Fuller — not him. “There was a little rub there,” adds drummer Larry Thompson, who was in Fuller’s pre-Hollywood, El Paso, Texas band. “There was a Jaguar that he really liked, and he wasn’t making the payments to Bob Keane, so Keane gave the car to Bobby. That really pissed him off.”

Strangely, the day Bobby’s body was found, some shady characters were looking for Reese in connection with money he owed. “My mother always thought there was something funny there, but I didn’t want to get to blaming anybody,” says Randy. “Those guys were serious about it, though.”

 In the days (and decades) that followed Bobby’s death, some had suspected police, coroner and insurance agent corruption involving a life insurance policy taken out on Bobby. Though Keane admits in “The Oracle of Del-Fi” that he found no evidence for this, speculation is still rife, not the least of which because the official cause of death was changed from suicide to “accidental.” “Accidental death will pay an insurance
policy, but suicide won’t,” says Larry Thompson.

Blame shifted from one party to the next. Everyone from Keane to Keane’s financial backer Larry Nunes, who had invested in Stereo-Fi Corp, were being accused. (Most serious researchers call the Keane allegation ridiculous.) However, we may need to take a closer look at Nunes, who knew a girl named Melody. Melody was presumably dating Fuller, and some have even linked her to prostitution and organized crime. Did Bobby get caught up in something dangerous?

“I met this guy at a gig in the late ’60s, who said he knew my brother,” says Randy. “He looked like a hit man. He said, ‘I want to talk to you when the gig is over. I knew your brother.’ … He seemed like a sadist. He said he knew my brother well, but where did a guy like that know my brother? My brother didn’t hang around guys like [him], and neither did I. And if [Bobby] knew him it wasn’t the place to be.”

One source we spoke with said the mystery is “figure-out-able,” but to expose the truth would risk losing life or limb. This silence might remind some of the more recent East Coast-West Coast rap wars and the veil of secrecy surrounding the deaths of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.

“People don’t want to get near those cases for fear of what might happen if they open their mouths,” says Dan Del Fiorentino, historian at the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, Calif.

“My parents never lived to see [justice],” says Randy. “It is a hell of a thing. It never leaves you. Before I die, I hope someone says, ‘I did it.’”

Texan singing guitar player Blind Lemon Jefferson was one of the most successful male blues artists of the 1920s, recording such memorable songs as “Black Snake Moan,” “Matchbox Blues” (covered both by Carl Perkins and The Beatles) and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.”

Jefferson’s repertoire reflects a rich cultural diversity: He played everything from slide-guitar blues and spirituals, to ragtime and English folk music, which inspired the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Leadbelly (Leadbelly, in turn, was inspired to record the famous “Blind Lemon” as a kind of tribute, albeit in name only), even an episode of “Sanford and Son.” (The cantankerous junkyard dawg Fred Sanford sells off his old “Blind Mellow Jelly” records realizing too late how valuable they are.)

Some historians have even maintained that the African musical heritage of East Texas might point to the Lone Star State as one of the possible origins of blues as an artform. (Making Lemon a pioneer.)

“If we were going to look at where the blues developed first, for me, there might be stronger evidence for Texas than Mississippi,” says Alan Govenar, author and blues scholar, who co-developed the musical and stage production “Blind Lemon Blues.”

Yet, despite Lemon’s importance to the blues, details of the Texan’s life — and death — are sketchy and shrouded in mystery. Due to contradictory or the lack of any evidence at all, Jefferson’s date of birth (some sources say 1897, others 1893), whether he was completely blind, and if he had more than one wife, is, more or less, one big guessing game. What isn’t generally disputed, however, is the fact that he rode in a $700 Ford automobile (given to him by producer J. Mayo Williams); his savings account totaled a whopping $1,500 when he died in 1929; he rambled and busked throughout Texas (and nearby states Mississippi, Georgia and Oklahoma), sometimes alone, sometimes with Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly); and the owner of a Dallas-based shine parlor and record shop, R.T. Ashford, brought Jefferson to the attention of Paramount Records.

“They had a [shop] up there, and sometimes that would be where Lemon’d be playing,” says Essie Carter, a resident of Wortham, Texas, who was 94 at the time of this writing. “Sometimes he’d go in, and sometimes he’d be in front of it. I was young, but I remember him well, because we didn’t live too far from him.”

We can construct a loose bio from bits and pieces, but gathering precise info on how Jefferson died is beyond the grasp of scholars.

“One lead said that Jefferson was abandoned by his chauffeur and got lost in the cold and snow in Chicago,” says Robert Uzzel, author of “Blind Lemon Jefferson: His Life, His Death, and His Legacy.” “Mance Lipscomb [fellow Texan blues artist] said that the police weren’t going to care about another dead black man.”

The Wortham Journal published a news item, just days (presumably) after Lemon died, reporting that Jefferson “died of heart failure in Chicago and was shipped to Wortham for burial arriving here on Christmas Eve.” This is as close to an “official” version of Jefferson’s death as we will probably ever have. “No official record [of his death] has been found, and the oral accounts are contradictory,” wrote Alan Govenar in the Spring 2000 issue of Black Music Research Journal.

As if in accordance with the bluesman’s wishes, an honorary gravestone had been erected in the 1990s at the approximate spot of Jefferson’s burial site.

“One of his big songs is, ‘See That My Grave is Kept Clean’,” says Bruce Roberts, who spearheaded the project to erect the headstone. “Lemon made a lot of money, but when he was brought back to Texas there was nothing with the body. Some people felt that he had been used. Some people in the town resented what we were doing, saying things like, ‘Well, this should have been done a long time ago.’ They were right.”

Alton G. Miller was one of the most popular and successful bandleaders in the history of recorded music, cutting and/or scoring such big band hits as “In the Mood,” “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” “Tuxedo Junction,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Stardust,” “Moonlight Serenade” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

His clarinet-lead sound delivered Top Ten hits and gold records by the dozen. His disappearance over the English Channel during WWII shocked the world.

Miller (who had been stationed in England for six months), Lt. Col. Norman Baessell and pilot John Morgan boarded a plane headed for Bordeaux, France, just before 2 p.m. on Dec. 15, 1944, at an airfield (Twinwood Farm) in Bedford, England. Serious fog had prevented flights from taking off earlier in the day. (Miller reportedly had joked that even the birds were grounded.)

“Glenn was scheduled to take the SHAEF shuffle (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces) from Bobbington Field over to Paris,” says Alan Cass, curator of the Glenn Miller Archives at the University of Colorado, where Miller had been enrolled for a year and a half. “But his chances of even getting on a plane soon, even if the weather cleared, were slim. Colonel Baessell ran into Glenn and said, ‘Why don’t you come with us…’ Even though he was not crazy about flying, Miller was anxious to get to Paris, because he had to get ready to do … radio broadcasts back to the United States.”

Miller’s executive officer Don Haynes and the band were to fly to Paris as soon as they received clearance to do so. But when Miller failed to meet the band, they all knew something was wrong. The official investigation by the Army Air Force concluded that icing problems with the wings and/or the carburetor most likely caused the plane to crash into the English Channel.

“I heard the news on the car radio,” explains Paul Tanner, a trombonist in Miller’s civilian band. “I was back East at the time — it was quite a shock.”

Author George Simon, who knew Miller, wrote in his book, “Glenn Miller & His Orchestra: The Story of America’s Most Unforgettable Bandleader”: “Knowing the facts wasn’t hard,” wrote Simon. “But accepting them was — and still apparently is!”
“It’s the Amelia Earhart syndrome,” says Alan Cass. “It’s hard [to let go] when people are so well-known. When the orchestra was reorganized under ‘Tex’ Beneke, they would carry Glenn’s trombone everywhere they went. Even they felt that someday he would return to them. He’d just walk into a ballroom some time and take over.”

Crackpot theories surfaced, claiming that Baessell was entangled in black market activities and shot pilot Morgan and Miller to keep them quiet (landing the plane himself); Miller was knocked off for threatening to expose a gay cabal of military officers; Miller made it to France, was having an affair with a woman and was shot by the jealous husband; Miller died in a Parisian brothel in the arms of a prostitute; Miller survived the plane crash but spent the rest of his life as a vegetable; Miller was a secret agent for the U.S. military on a mission to rescue actress Marlene Dietrich from the Nazis.

“He wasn’t in those kinds of troubles at all,” says Paul Tanner, a trombonist in Miller’s civilian (pre-War) big band, who was 90 years old as of this writing. “There is no way any of that would be true.”

One major theory is given more weight than others, however: an aborted Royal Air Force bombing mission, one that ended in Lancaster bombers dumping their “cargo” in the English Channel. In an unfortunate coincidence, according to the theory, Miller’s plane was flying over the Channel at the precise time bombs were being dumped. Since pilot Morgan failed to file a flight plan, we have no way of knowing what path Miller’s plane took upon leaving Twinwood Farm.

Fred Shaw, a RAF navigator of those Lancaster planes, thought he knew. He maintained to his dying day that his squadron was responsible for downing Miller’s “kite.” “… I saw it flick over to port in what looked like an incipient spin,” Shaw said. “And eventually, I saw it disappear into the English Channel.” (It should be noted that Shaw’s memory of the entire event was jarred after seeing the 1954 movie, “The Glenn Miller Story.”)

Despite the fact that some experts have embraced Shaw’s theory (namely RAF historian Roy Nesbit), his version of events has come under fire from critics. Howard Roth, who was a USAAF Flying Fortress pilot during WWII, has spent a good deal of time debunking what he calls “misguided” information. “Nesbit … claimed that by digging deep he found a jettison area in the Channel prior to D-Day, when the Channel was a contested area,” Roth says. “Does anyone believe that there was a drop area in the Channel after D-Day with the supply traffic and supreme commanders traveling back and forth?” 

“Even on a clear day, how could you see a small plane, approximately, 3,000 feet below flying in the opposite direction?,” adds Marvin Negley, president of the Glenn Miller Birthplace Society in Clarinda, Iowa. “And why didn’t they drop their bombs on a secondary target of choice?”

In April 1999, Shaw’s flight log was auctioned at Sotheby’s and sold for approximately $35,000 U.S. The winning bid was placed by Colorado businessman William Suits. “I phoned to inform [Suits] that he was a victim of a scam,” explains Roth. “He then sent me copies of Shaw’s log, which only gave me irrefutable evidence that it was a scam… When I had seen [Shaw’s] mission map printed out of focus, I had reasoned that it was printed for no other [reason] than to confuse. It was as though he had drawn the map from memory.”

Suits defends his decision to purchase the controversial piece of Glenn Miller memorabilia. “A distress signal didn’t go off,” says Suits, “which means there was no time to set it off. If the plane crashed due to lack of deicing, it wouldn’t go down that quickly.”

Apparently, Shaw isn’t the only flyboy to believe he had something to do with Miller’s disappearance. In 2006, Clarence B. Wolfe, an army private in 1944, made claims that he shot down Miller’s small aircraft when it failed to identify itself.

Because of an oath he had taken with his commanding officer, Wolfe promised never to speak of the incident to anyone. He was silent on the subject until he published his book, “I Kept My Word: The Personal Promise Between a World War II Army Private and His Captain About What Really Happened to Glenn Miller.”

Experts have dismissed Wolfe’s story as fictional “garbage.” “There’s a lot of evidence that Glenn Miller was alive after September 1944, including recordings, broadcasts, and a Dec. 6, 1944 recorded Christmas message to his wife,” says Miller expert Ed Polic, author of “The Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band: Sustineo Alas/I Sustain the Wings.”

Another major theory to emerge over the last few years was spearheaded by Chris Valenti, radio and now Internet DJ who spins big band records. Valenti put an APB out for anyone with information about Miller’s disappearance. An unidentified caller told Valenti that Glenn Miller had died in a V.A. hospital from various wounds he sustained in, of all places, Ohio. But before Valenti could make this information public, he received an anonymous call issuing him a death threat.

“I said, ‘You know what? … This is BS at this point,” says Valenti. “I went on the air the next night, this is back in 2001, and said something to the effect that I found out some information about Glenn Miller that is astounding. I said Miller is a greater hero than we all thought, but my investigation stops right here … My life was just threatened… ”

But when some paperwork from the 1980s made its way to his desk (via book author, Wilbur Wright), Valenti rekindled his investigation. A letter from the New Jersey Department of Health, in response to a query sent by Wright, explained that “[t]he death of Alton G. Miller occurred in the State of Ohio.” (Valenti displays the letter dated from April 1987, on the Web page, http://glennmiller.us/MillerOhio.html.)

“I said, ‘My God! That is what the man told me a year and a half ago’,” says Valenti.
Valenti was determined to expose the facts as he saw them, when (just days prior to his scheduled March 1, 2003, broadcast) he received another “Sopranos”-type death threat. This time Valenti taped the incoming message: “If you value your life, no Miller story or else,” the man said.  

By this point, the New Jersey Department of Health had retracted its statement to Wright, claiming clerical error, but Valenti went ahead with the story anyway, airing the threat. During the broadcast, an anonymous caller, using the name Doctor X, claimed to have tended to Miller’s bodily wounds in a V.A. hospital in Canton, Ohio. According to the theory, Miller had a clandestine meeting with a spy when he was double crossed and shot.

“As a curator, I try to keep an open mind,” says Cass. “but … there is no evidence of Miller being murdered. … [He] was not involved in any espionage as a courier as some have suggested.”

Despite the gap between theorists and historians, there is one thing the experts agree on: Miller was an American hero. “You are not going to hear any Hollywood celebrity today say, ‘I’m going over to Iraq,’” says Valenti. “Miller gave up [a successful career]. That’s balls.”

Recently, the exploits of Amy Winehouse and her husband Blake Fielder-Civil have caused the media to draw shaky comparisons between this dysfunctional couple de jour and the Queen and King of train-wreck celebrity couples — Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. While comparisons certainly help to sell papers, it’s doubtful anyone will surpass Sid and Nancy on sheer destructiveness alone.

The subtext to Sid and Nancy’s co-dependent and twisted Romeo and Juliet-like romance was steeped in drugs, suicide pacts, mental illness and more drugs. In the early morning hours of Oct. 12, 1978, Spungen, girlfriend/tormentor to ex-Sex Pistol bassist Vicious, was stabbed (with Sid’s hunting knife) and found dead in the couple’s New York City apartment in the Chelsea Hotel.

Vicious was charged with second-degree murder and released on $50,000 bail. Not four months later, he overdosed on heroin and checked out himself. How did all of this happen?

Legend has it that Vicious (born John Simon Ritchie) taught himself to play bass in one evening by listening to The Ramones while cranked up on amphetamines. Incredibly, with little talent and practice time, he was tapped to join the band he’d idolized: The Sex Pistols.

Frontman Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) and manager Malcom McLaren thought it a coup to take in Vicious. After all, Vicious fit the image of the band perfectly: His pissed-off attitude, lack of playing ability and controversial wardrobe (his fondness for T-shirts with swastikas on them) was the very embodiment of the British punk rock movement.

When the bassist was at the vortex of a media blitz, he met Spungen — a drug-abusing, suicide-prone, one-time prostitute from a middle-class Pennsylvanian family obsessed with bedding a rock star ... any rock star. Spurned by other punkers and glammers in the New York City scene, she set her sights on Vicious.

“I didn’t like this girl,” said Vicious’ mother, Anne Beverley. “She was a bad influence on my Sid.”

Nancy’s mother, Deborah, explained in her book, “And I Don’t Want to Live this Life,” that giving birth to Nancy was difficult (the umbilical cord was wrapped around Nancy’s neck) and that her daughter needed blood transfusions after her birth. Lack of oxygen (as occurs when an umbilical wraps around the neck of a fetus, some medical professionals now believe) may cause mental illness and abnormal aggression.

Despite objections from within and without the band, the two became an inseparable, obnoxious, domestically violent, strung-out junkie couple, riding the rock-star gravy train. (Which, ironically, punk was supposedly fighting against.) People may have hated Nancy, but the real problem was, no one knew just how screwed up Sid was. (His punk persona was no act: He was born to a heroin-addicted mother and given to fits of uncontrollable violence and rage.)

By the time Vicious toured America with the Pistols in 1978, Sid was a mess. Apart from his “soulmate” Nancy,  and being hooked on hard drugs, he was screwing up on stage nightly. Of that time, Nils Stevenson, former Sex Pistols’ tour manager (now deceased), said Sid disliked “everything except heroin and Nancy.”

Rotten, reportedly, had had enough of Vicious’ shenanigans and the band in general, so he disbanded The Sex Pistols. Now floating free of his high-profile gig, Vicious set out upon a solo career, anchored by his ironic reading of the Frank Sinatra standard “My Way.”

It wouldn’t last long. Spungen was stabbed to death and Vicious fingered for her murder. For police of the Third Homicide Division (51st Street) and many other observers, this is an open-and-shut case: Sid, whom it is believed had a suicide pact with Nancy, was out of his mind on drugs and killed his girlfriend either in rage or in a “selfless” act of assisted suicide (but was too incapacitated to kill himself). Either way, he was a murderer.

Or was he?

In recent years, speculation has grown, much of which working to help clear Vicious’ name in connection with Spungen’s murder. According to Alan Parker’s book, “Vicious: Too Fast to Live,” Sid was too out of it to have committed the murder. Parker points the finger at actor and drug peddler Michael Morra (also known on the streets as Rockets Redglare), now deceased, as having stabbed Spungen to death while robbing the couple of some $1,500.

“Some believe a drug dealer who visited that night may have killed Nancy perhaps in a disagreement over money, while Sid was passed out,” says Ed Hamilton, author of the 2007 book, “Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with Artists and Outlaws in New York’s Rebel Mecca.” “I know that Dee Dee Ramone always said that it was a drug dealer who killed Nancy. He was good friends with Sid, and he could never believe Sid had done it.”

However, when Vicious was brought in and questioned by New York City police, he reportedly had admitted to killing Nancy, only to later recant this statement. Out on bail, Vicious, unbelievably, hooked up with a new girlfriend and wound up in jail again, this time for bar brawling. Vicious was set free again, but his days were numbered.
Though he remained clean for weeks, Vicious had a hankering for a hit. He scored some heroin (allegedly bought by his mother), but it was potent junk, so potent that he was not prepared for such a pure shot.

Anne found Sid in his bed, not moving. (The night before Sid wasn’t feeling well, but Anne panicked: If she took him to the emergency room doctors there would certainly find evidence of drug use, which would violate the terms of his parole.) Ultimately, Vicious, at 21 years of age, joined his lover in death, having OD’d on heroin in February 1979. He never stood trial for murder.

Was all of this planned? Some have speculated that Vicious was the victim of a “hot shot” — a lethal dose of pure heroin — supplied by Rockets Redglare, who may have had his own motives for not letting Vicious testify at his own trial. Did Rockets, who was seen leaving the Chelsea in the early morning hours of Oct. 12, do or witness the stabbing?

Rockets didn’t personally hand Vicious’ mother the drugs (he supplied them), but did he know who the intended user would be? (In the 1986 Alex Cox film, “Sid and Nancy,” a rude, pushy and shifty-eyed drug pusher played by Xander Berkeley (character name Bowery Snax) shows his outward disgust for Nancy. Was this portrayal far from the truth?)

“If this fix was, as Ann later claimed, supplied via Rockets Redglare, then not only had the dealer killed Nancy, but he had also just [gotten] rid of the only person in the frame for her murder, leaving him to go about his business innocent and free,” Parker said in London’s The Daily Mail in 2004.

In 2000, an alleged suicide note was found in Sid’s jeans reading: “We had a death pact. I have to keep my half of the bargain.” “With heroin you never know if someone had OD’d accidentally or on purpose,” says author Ed Hamilton. “Maybe the truth of Sid’s death comes down to the simplest most banal reason. Or, maybe, Rockets had something to do with it. At least, that is what some of the people around here think.”

Famous for producing such hits as “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” “Be My Baby, and “Then He Kissed Me,” among others, producer Phil Spector, was in his early 20s when he brought forth his “Wagnerian,” endlessly overdubbed, monophonic sound to popular records.

Spector’s “wall of sound” production approach buttressed the talents of artists such as The Crystals, Bob B. Soxx and the Blues Jeans, The Ronettes, The Righteous Brothers, Rolling Stones, The Ramones, Ike and Tina Turner, and even (controversially so) The Beatles. “From 1961 to 1965, [Spector’s] records made the charts 27 times … As a body of work, they were a cultural seed,” Mark Ribowsky claims in his book,
“He’s A Rebel: Phil Spector: Rock & Roll’s Legendary Producer.”

Dubbed “The First Tycoon of Teen” by Tom Wolfe in the New York Herald Tribune in 1965, Spector could do no wrong. That is until the tide began to turn on the brash, young music mogul as rock ’n’ roll had firmly established itself as youth rebellion. Despite collaborating with The Righteous Brothers on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” Spector was losing his touch. (It was “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” that, ironically, spawned the famous “wall of sound” description.)

Though he rescued abandoned Beatles tracks for what would become Let It Be, working with John Lennon on his solo material (most notably “Imagine” and “Instant Karma!”) and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and The Concert for Bangladesh, Spector had let his mounting paranoia and self-centeredness further isolate him from the world at large.

Hampered by a Napoleon complex, Spector overcompensated for his size by growing a reputation for being stubborn, overbearing, controlling and downright dangerous. Increasingly, he became known more for gunplay than airplay.

Guns were brandished at recording sessions and in private with Lennon, The Ramones, Deborah Harry and the Mamas and the Papas’ Michelle Phillips (who came forward in July 2007 with a frightening tale of Spector-imposed captivity at gunpoint) among others. And it was Spector’s love of firearms that led him to being indicted for the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson.

Clarkson, a knockout blonde who appeared in movies such as “Fast Times At Ridgemont High,” “Scarface” and Roger Corman’s “Barbarian Queen,” had just taken a job as a hostess for the Foundation Room (a V.I.P. room) at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip. After midnight on Feb. 3, 2003, Spector settled in at the Foundation Room and scoped out waitresses.

He and Clarkson struck up a conversation, and Spector invited Clarkson back to his house (dubbed the Pyrenees Castle) in Alhambra, Calif. Initially, Clarkson declined, but Spector convinced her to join him for a quick drink. It was a fateful move.

Around 5 a.m. (PST) on Feb. 3, Spector’s driver, Adriano De Souza, saw a confused Spector emerge from the house saying, “I think I killed somebody.” That someone was Clarkson, who died instantly from the .38-caliber weapon gunshot wound to the mouth.

The D.A. and police believe that Clarkson was attempting to leave Spector’s house but was held at gunpoint by the sexually snubbed producer. (Clarkson was found fully dressed, her pocketbook over her shoulder, seated in a chair in Spector’s foyer.) In November 2003, prosecutors charged Spector with murder.

Shortly after the tragedy, Spector told Esquire magazine that Clarkson had “kissed the gun” before she pulled the trigger. Spector’s defense experts floated the theory that the details of the crime scene did not prove murder, that it was, in fact, “accidental suicide.” Some have a hard time believing this.

“If Lana was going to commit suicide she would have done it like Elizabeth Taylor in ‘Cleopatra’ — she would have been laid out on the bed, perfectly made up,” says Edward Lozzi, Clarkson’s friend and former publicist.

“Is there even such a thing as ‘accidental suicide’?” asks Ribowsky. “I think that a lot of people have Lana Clarkson’s blood on their hands. This is something that [Spector] has been getting away with for years and years — almost murder.”

Spector, facing 15 years to life, walked scott free at the end of the first trial, due to a hopelessly deadlocked jury. (Ten jurors wanted to convict, two were unsure of Clarkson’s mental state.) As of this writing, a California court panel had decided that Phil Spector should be retried. No date has been set for the new trial.

“To me, Lana Clarkson will be the ‘Blonde Dahlia’ — receiving more fame upon her death,” comments Lozzi. “[The] media have created a whole new fame for Phil Spector. That is too bad, because now … you have to refer to him as an alleged murderer until he is proven guilty.”

Was it all a terrible accident? Was it a dangerous game taken too far? A spurned sexual advance ending in murder? If L.A. justice remains consistent, we may never have any definitive answers.