Starting out as a freelance crime reporter in New York City in the late 1970s, she lucked out by being at the Bellevue Morgue the week that the body of
Sex Pistol Sid Vicious' girlfriend,
Nancy Spungen arrived DOA; she wrote about this two weeks later in
The SoHo Weekly News. Bardach's crime reporting includes a jailhouse confession of the first
Manson murder, committed by Bobby Beausoleil, the
Jon Benét Ramsey case for Vanity Fair (where she was the first to publish the ransom note), the murder of
Vicki Morgan, Alfred Bloomingdale's mistress, and the 2010 murder of Hollywood publicist
Ronni Chasen. Bardach chronicled the New York punk scene in the late 1970s-80s, conducting numerous interviews with musicians and personages from
Debbie Harry of Blondie (in the New York Times Magazine),
The Sex Pistols, artist
Winston Tong, filmmaker
Kenneth Anger, poet
Jim Carroll,
Klaus Nomi, the punk opera singer, etc. In the mid 1990s, she began her research into
Vivekananda, the 19th-century Indian
Hindu monk and spiritual titan who introduced meditation to the West. In 2011–12, Bardach published articles about Vivekananda in the Sunday
New York Times and The
Wall Street Journal, with eventual plans for a biography. ==Awards==