Nancy was born across the pond in Philadelphia, the eldest child of Deborah and Frank Spungen, Ivy League graduates who knew they wanted a family but hadn't planned to start when

Nancy was born across the pond in Philadelphia, the eldest child of Deborah and Frank Spungen, Ivy League graduates who knew they wanted a family but hadn't planned to start when Deborah was still finishing up at Penn. But she graduated on time, when Nancy was 4 months old, and she and Frank went on to have another daughter, Suzy, and a son, David.

Through the prism of tragedy and a mother's sorrow decades later, Deborah remembered Nancy, even as a baby, having "discomfort inside her. She was never content, never relaxed. She had an unbelievable amount of energy, most of which she consumed by crawling...She hated confinement."

Seeking to distinguish her daughter's short, tumultuous life from the more sordid groupie junkie narratives in circulation, Deborah wrote in her 1983 book And I Don't Want to Live This Life: A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder that Nancy "had wanted to die since she was eleven years old."

She had suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts at an early age, cutting herself with razor blades before descending into heroin addiction as a teen. And Deborah wrote that she "really knew" that Nancy would die young—but she thought drugs would kill her, that a call from the cops would come, but it would be about an overdose. "Nancy would be in a bed in a private room, conscious," and the family would have a chance to rush to her side to say goodbye. "Nancy's death was dignified in my fantasy," she wrote.