Conspiracy Corner: The Murder of Kurt Cobain

By Brian Hess

In the fall of 1991 my high school installed video monitors in our home rooms. We’d assemble there, the teacher would take attendance and we’d have 10 or 15 minutes before our first class.

Usually, we’d watch some pro-social video by a company called Channel One: the history of NASA, the benefits of voting, whatever. One morning some joker turned the channel to MTV while our teacher was taking a coffee break. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came on and everyone shut up and watched the video.

I mean everyone.

The video was a complete mockery of everything we learned each day on the same tube: Cobain & Co. singing to kids in a high school gym about how things DON’T work out. In place of good civics b.s. we were given a look at the abyss — I’m not ok and you probably aren’t either (although you may not know it yet) — and what are you going to do about it?

The ‘voice of his generation’ label gets applied to a lot of people. Cobain was no different, and he’d be the last person to accept the label today. But he was influential, whether he liked it or not.

Less than three years later he was dead.

MTV again, April 1994. I was getting lunch at the Bike Shop at Wright State U. Another video monitor was blaring — this time about his apparent suicide. Kurt Loder talking about his suicidal threats, problems with the wife, etc.

Star to tragic icon in less than three years. The whole campus seemed in a daze. Hundreds of kids, strangers to each other, were talking about him and his music. Comforting each other. We couldn’t believe it.

I felt sad, and I wasn’t even a big fan. Something felt wrong, even then. Not just his death, but the means. Why would someone at the height of his success, his autonomy, kill himself? An accidental overdose makes much more sense. To shoot yourself with a shotgun? A man who’d been bullied and neglected all his life? Didn’t make sense.

Not a single media outlet questioned the story of suicidal Kurt and his heroin addiction. What most people didn’t know was the role his wife, Courtney Love — herself an inveterate junkie — played in the creation of this self-serving myth.

Cobain’s body was discovered by an electrician the morning of Friday, April 8, 1994. He had been contracted to install a burglar alarm at the Seattle home owned by Cobain and Love. Cobain’s body was found in a small room above their garage. He may have been killed as much as four days earlier.

Cobain had escaped a rehab facility and had been avoiding his wife for a couple of weeks. He had nearly died while in Rome in March. Love claimed it was a suicide attempt, while the Italian doctor claimed it was an accidental overdose of Rohypnol and champagne. There were rumors he was poisoned.

On Easter Sunday, April 3 Love hired Seattle private detective Tom Grant to find her missing husband and to keep tabs on him when found. (Love also called police claiming to be Cobain’s mother and saying she was worried for her missing son.) She told Grant Cobain was considering divorce and was also suicidal — a strange mix. Primarily, she was concerned about the use of his credit card, and she wanted him cut off from his own money.

Authors Ian Halperin and Max Wallace interviewed Grant for their 1998 book Who Killed Curt Cobain? Love tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent its publication. She also tried to prevent the documentary Kurt & Courtney (1998) which comes to the same murder conclusion as Halperin and Wallace. The authors followed up with Love and Death (2004), which formed the basis of the documentary Soaked in Bleach (2015).

The authors and filmmakers rely primarily on interviews with Grant and Rosemary Carroll, the entertainment attorney who represented both Cobain and Love and was godmother to their daughter, Francis Bean Cobain.

It’s compelling stuff, and not easily discounted. Tom Grant received pages of handwriting tracings made by Courtney Love from Carroll. Grant and Carroll both believed this was evidence Love was practicing copying Cobain’s handwriting before his death.

Cobain may have died as early as April 3 or 4, yet Seattle Police held a press conference the SAME DAY the body was discovered to declare Cobain’s death a suicide: April 8, 1994.

This is simply not done, folks. Ask Chief Weigle or Sheriff Riggenbach whether any death investigation would yield same-day results without further research, including extensive testing in the form of an autopsy or toxicology results.

There was an autopsy, but the results were sealed. When they were finally leaked years later they revealed a heroin dosage of 1.5 mg/liter in Cobain’s bloodstream at the time of death — three times the dose considered lethal with a HEAVY heroin user.

The effect of heroin, when injected, is immediate. In other words, Cobain would have been completely incapacitated after shooting up (and at the time of his death). There is no way he could neatly put away his drug kit, loaded his shotgun and then stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

It was a physical impossibility, according to Dr. Cyril Wecht. Wecht should know. He performed thousands of autopsies (including o.d.’ed junkies), and was both president of the American Academy of Forensics and the American College of Legal Medicine before his death last year at age 93.

Cobain was found gripping the shotgun barrel by his left hand. The gun was facing him, upside down. Police found a single shotgun shell casing to the left of his body.

The shotgun was a semi-automatic Remington model 11 20-gauge, a large and heavy weapon. The barrel end was also fitted with a Cutts Compensator which added six inches to the length.

Assuming he was somehow willing (and able) to inject three times the lethal amount of dope and grab the gun, there is no way Cobain could have put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his right hand.

He would have had to use his toe. That wasn’t the case, because he was found with his shoes on. Since the gun was upside-down it would have ejected to the right of Cobain. Unless it bounced off an obstacle — like another person standing there at the time.

If it ejected the casing at all, that is.

The model 11 is a variation on the Browning A5. It’s unique because the entire barrel retracts into the receiver, like an artillery piece. The stock needs a firm grip to recoil against. You also have to adjust the recoil springs and brass bushing based on the load: a light load with heavy springs won’t eject (he was killed with birdshot).

Neither will a heavy load with light springs. If your spring is worn it won’t eject with regularity, either. I once owned a 1949 model 11 with a Cutts Compensator in 12 gauge. A duck hunter on a couple beers would have a hard time with it, let alone an unconscious junkie.

Several people had access to the Seattle death house that entire week (4/4/94–4/8/94). Grant went there several times with DeWitt and checked every single room in the place. Every room except the one above the garage, that is, which DeWitt failed to mention to Grant the entire week they were searching together.

A letter written to Cobain by another friend showed up in the home between visits, proving others had keys to the house.

Love, who was staying in Los Angeles at the time, refused to travel to Seattle, and spoke to DeWitt several times over the phone out of earshot of Grant. (DeWitt was also a heavy heroin user who became an employee of Love’s after Cobain’s death.)

Cobain had become close with Kristen Pfaff, bassist for his wife’s band, Hole. They were both in rehab that spring, and by all accounts Pfaff was as kind as Love was toxic. Cobain had bought two plane tickets prior to his death. Many think the other one was for her. She’s not telling, though: Pfaff died of a (suspicious) heroin overdose two months after Cobain.

So why would anyone murder him?

Because he was worth more dead than alive. He planned to divorce Courtney Love and break up his band. He wanted to be a solo singer-songwriter and said so in interviews. Love was heir to music royalties nearing $1 billion upon Kurt Cobain’s death. She got them, too, since the guy didn’t have time to divorce her that spring before he ‘killed himself.’

Unfortunately, no one in any official capacity showed much interest in his very suspicious death. Lead detective Mike Ciesynski was approached by Tom Grant on April 8, 1994. He was told by Grant he had been at the house multiple times over the previous week and had knowledge of the principals involved. Ciesynski refused to see Grant.

Ciesynski later took an early retirement when he learned Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper was going to fire him for his role in a bribery and corruption scandal unrelated to the Cobain case. Stamper, who retired in 2000, has admitted the case was not handled well — most of the scene photos were not even developed in 1994 — and suggested it should be reopened.

Seattle Police did just that in 2014. They finally developed all the photos taken in 1994 and determined it was indeed suicide and their initial investigation was by the book.

I could go on, but you get the idea. In the words of Kurt