Love & Death

by Max Wallace

  Counting Dylan, who watched the intervention but did not participate, three of the people in the room, including Courtney, were junkies themselves. “Who the fuck are all of you to tell me this?” Kurt responded indignantly, calling them “hypocrites.” As biographer Charles Cross recorded, Kurt then proceeded to describe in explicit detail what he had witnessed of the heavy drug use by most of those present in the room. From the coke-filled music industry schmooze fests he had attended to the daily heroin habit of his wife, the irony was not lost on Kurt. According to Danny Goldberg, “His big thing was that Courtney was more fucked-up than he was.” Kurt stormed out, declaring that nobody in the room had any right to judge him.

  Courtney was terrified that Geffen and Gold Mountain would follow through on their threats to drop him; this would severely jeopardize the extravagant lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. She saved her ultimate pressure tactic for the next day. If Kurt refused to seek treatment, she would limit his access to Frances Bean. Knowing he could not risk losing his baby, he finally agreed to check into the Daniel X. Freeman Clinic—also known as the Exodus recovery center—a rehab facility in Marina Del Rey, California, long favored by rock stars and other celebrities.

  In September 1992, at the height of theVanity Fair controversy, Kurt had detoxed at Exodus once before, an experience he found “disgusting.” He described it to his biographer Michael Azerrad: “Right away, these forty-year-old hippie long-term junkie type counselors would come in and try to talk to me on a rock and roll level, like, ‘I know where you’re at, man. Drugs are real prevalent in rock ’n roll and I’ve seen it all in the seventies. Would you mind if David Crosby came in and said hello? Or Steven Tyler?’ Rattling off these rock stars’ names. I was like, ‘Fuck that. I don’t have any respect for these people at all.’ ” That time, he had left a few days before the treatment ended, exasperated by unremitting group therapy sessions and twelve-step meetings. Seeking treatment back then had been all about convincing child welfare authorities that he was cleaning up his act.

  On March 30, Kurt flew to Los Angeles to begin his 28-day treatment at Exodus. He was assigned Room 206 and went through an intake session with a nurse, who attempted to determine the extent of his addiction. The next morning, he attended an individual therapy session with a counselor, Nial Stimson, who later recalled that Kurt “was totally in denial that he had a heroin problem.” Stimson tried to make him understand the seriousness of the Rome incident, but Kurt told him, “I understand. I just want to get cleaned up and out of here.” Meanwhile, Courtney was attempting her own withdrawal a few miles away at the five-star Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, where a doctor was supervising a treatment plan called “hotel detox”—supposedly meant to shield celebrities from the media spotlight of a public rehab center.

  That afternoon, Jackie Farry, one of Frances’s nannies, brought the baby to the clinic to visit Kurt, who played with his daughter for about twenty minutes. Kurt complained to Farry about his battles with Courtney over Lollapalooza. The next day, Jackie brought Frances to visit again, and this time Kurt played with the nineteen-month-old baby for almost an hour, tossing her in the air and making her giggle—Frances Bean’s favorite game.

  After they left, Kurt went outside and smoked a cigarette with another rock star resident, his friend Gibby Haynes of the Butt-hole Surfers. Haynes told him about a friend who had recently escaped Exodus by jumping over the wall in the backyard. They both laughed at the story because Exodus wasn’t a lockdown facility and there was therefore no reason to escape. Anybody could just walk right out the front door anytime they wanted.

  Later that evening, at 7:25P.M., Kurt told a nurse he was going outside to smoke a cigarette, this time alone. It wasn’t until an hour later that the Exodus staff noticed him missing. He had scaled the same wall that he and Gibby Haynes had joked about earlier in the day.

  Seven days later, his body was found in the room above his garage. Much of what happened in the interval has remained a mystery for nearly a decade, but over time, several missing pieces of the puzzle have materialized, offering the opportunity to paint a clearer picture of what happened that week.

  At 8:56 on the morning of April 8, Officer Von Levandowski of the Seattle Police Department was cruising alone in his patrol car when he received a dispatch on his police radio to investigate a dead body at the Lake Washington Boulevard estate belonging to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. When Levandowski arrived, the electrician, Gary Smith, led him to the deck above the garage. Through the French doors, the officer saw a man with long blond hair lying on his back with a shotgun across his body. The butt of the gun was between the victim’s feet, and the muzzle was at mid-chest level. Levandowski, who had recently been called to the house to investigate a domestic dispute involving Kurt and Courtney, immediately recognized the victim as Kurt Cobain. A few minutes later, a fire truck arrived at the house, dispatched by the Seattle Fire Department at the officer’s request. Outside, it was raining steadily. Firefighters climbed onto the deck and broke a pane of glass on the French doors to force entry. Inside, one of them felt for a pulse and confirmed that Cobain was “dead on arrival.” The firefighter asked for an I.D. from a wallet that was lying on the floor about two feet away from the body. Levandowski removed a Washington State driver’s license identifying the victim as Kurt Donald Cobain, date of birth 02/20/67, and laid it out beside the body. (Many media accounts falsely reported that Kurt had removed the driver’s license before shooting himself, so that whoever arrived at the scene could identify the victim even if the gunshot made his face unrecognizable.) Two more officers had arrived by now, and both proceeded to photograph the scene, one with a Polaroid, the other with a 35 mm camera. Officer Levandowski placed a call to the Homicide Division.

  As he waited, Levandowski surveyed the 19-by-23-foot room, which clearly had once been used as a greenhouse but now contained no real signs of plant life, except for an overturned potted plant in the corner, and dirt-lined planting trays set up along the walls. The victim was wearing jeans, black running shoes, and an unbuttoned long-sleeved shirt over a black T-shirt with Japanese lettering. To the right of the body was a Tom Moore cigar box containing syringes, cotton, a spoon “and other items of narcotic paraphernalia.” On the floor were a hat, two towels, $120 in cash, a wallet, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and a pair of sunglasses. To the left of the body lay a brown corduroy jacket and a beige shotgun case, on top of which was one spent shotgun shell. A box of twenty-two unused shells was found inside a brown paper bag at the base of Kurt’s left foot. (It had originally contained twenty-five shells.) Inches from Kurt’s head, next to a large drying puddle of blood, was an opened can of Barq’s root beer, three-quarters full. A paper place mat covered with red handwriting, stabbed through with a pen, lay on a stainless steel planting tray at the north wall. On reading it, Levandowski wrote in his report that it “was apparently written by Cobain to his wife and daughter, explaining why he had killed himself.” (See page 283.)

  Inside the pocket of the corduroy jacket was a receipt for the purchase of a Remington 20-gauge shotgun, serial #1088925. The receipt, for $308.37, was made out to Dylan Carlson and dated March 30, 1994, the day Kurt left Seattle for Los Angeles.

  Before long, three SPD detectives had arrived to secure the scene, along with three members of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, including Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne, who had already been assigned to conduct the examination of the body. With difficulty, Hartshorne removed the shotgun from Kurt’s left hand, which had gripped the barrel so tightly that its impression could be seen on his palm. The damage to the interior of the mouth, Hartshorne noted, revealed that Kurt had been shot there. There was one live shell in the shotgun chamber, and another in the magazine, indicating that the gun had been loaded with three shells, including the spent cartridge that had apparently fired the fatal shot. The victim was cold, in the early stages of putrefaction, suggesting that the body had been dead for some time. There w
ere puncture marks on the insides of each elbow.

  Hartshorne took photos of the body and then emptied the pockets: $63 in cash and a piece of notepaper with “Seattle Guns, 145 & Lake City” written on it. In the left front pocket, he found an address book, miscellaneous papers and another note, which read, “Remington 20 gauge, 23/4shells or shorter, set up for light shot.” In the same pocket was a used Delta plane ticket, dated April 1, seat 2F, in the name of Cobain/Kurt—the ticket he used to fly from L.A. to Seattle after he left Exodus a week earlier.

  After Hartshorne had finished examining the scene, he arranged for the body to be removed to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, where he would conduct the autopsy to determine the cause of death. This was standard procedure, though his parting statement to the assembled officers—including Sergeant Cameron, who had arrived an hour earlier—was not: “This is an open-and-shut case of suicide. The victim died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

  The media, alerted by a radio report that a body had been found at the Cobain estate, had begun to gather outside shortly after 10:00A.M. Within minutes of Hartshorne’s pronouncement, the world would learn that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide at the age of twenty-seven. His fans were shocked by the news, but, after what they learned from Courtney Love the next day, nobody was surprised.

  When theSeattle Times published a story by award-winning investigative journalist Duff Wilson a month later detailing some curious inconsistencies about the case, it failed to cause much of a stir. The repeated assertions by Nikolas Hartshorne and Donald Cameron that the death was a “textbook case of suicide” had done their job. Most people had by then accepted the death as just another rock-and-roll tragedy—a self-destructive junkie who had crashed and burned. Besides, he had attempted suicide once before. Hours after his body was found, Courtney was telling anyone who would listen that the Rome overdose in March had in fact been a suicide attempt, not an accident as previously claimed. In Rome, she revealed, he had also left a note. The only difference this time was that he had succeeded.

  But Wilson’s findings were nagging him. His sources in the SPD had tipped him off to a number of facts about Cobain’s death that just didn’t add up. Among the most glaring was the fact that a subsequent police investigation found there were no legible fingerprints on the shotgun, the shotgun cartridge or the pen that was found stabbed through the note. But it was the note itself that raised the most questions. Despite the fact that police on the scene had immediately described it as a “suicide note,” those who had seen it said that it didn’t mention suicide at all. More disturbingly, the only part of the note that might have alluded to such a fate appeared to have been added at the end, in a completely different style of handwriting.

  To add to the mystery, somebody had attempted to use Kurt’s credit card between the time the medical examiner said Kurt died and the discovery of his body. The police never determined who was using the credit card, missing from Kurt’s wallet when he was found.

  But an even more troubling detail had been disclosed in another Seattle newspaper three weeks earlier. Nikolas Hartshorne had completed his autopsy the day Kurt’s body was found and immediately announced that the pathological examination had confirmed his initial verdict—that Kurt Cobain had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Because Washington State law classifies autopsy results as private medical records, Hartshorne’s office refused to reveal the details of his findings. But on April 14, veteran reporters Mike Merritt and Scott Maier of theSeattle Post-Intelligencer, who had cultivated enough sources over the years to obtain the unobtainable, filed a story claiming that a source in the medical examiner’s office had leaked them the results of Cobain’s autopsy. A small technical detail stood out. Toxicological tests indicated that Cobain’s body contained traces of diazepam (Valium) and had a blood morphine level of 1.52 milligrams per liter. Although Nikolas Hartshorne was a medical doctor, he, like most doctors, had very little background in the complex field of pharmacology and opiates, and so this measure failed to resonate. For anyone in the field, however, the statistic spoke volumes.

  4

  Like hundreds of thousands of teenagers around the world, Rochelle Marshall was devastated when she heard the news about Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Like many of them, she and her friends started asking questions after the murder theories began to circulate. Unlike most of them, however, her mother was in a position to provide answers.

  “My daughter was very disturbed at first. She was a big fan of Cobain,” recalls Denise Marshall. “Then after a while, she started saying she wasn’t sure he had really killed himself, and I told her, ‘Well, a lot of people feel that way about a suicide because they just can’t believe it, or they don’t want to believe it.’ But she said this was different. She wanted me to look into it.”

  Marshall was well suited for the task. As a deputy coroner in Colorado, she has investigated hundreds of deaths, including countless suicides and murders. During her years as a forensic medicolegal investigator, she says, she has learned one important lesson: “Things aren’t always as they appear at first.” After reading our first book and a myriad of other information about Cobain’s death, including the police reports, Marshall has come to her own conclusion about what happened. “I’d bet a year’s salary that he was murdered,” she declares. “There’s just not enough evidence to rule it a suicide.”

  Marshall explains that a number of factors have led her to this conclusion. “There are too many red flags. There’s just so many questions about how the case was handled,” she says. “When I read the police reports, I was amazed at how many things they did wrong. For example, the first officer on the scene handled the body when he reached into the victim’s wallet to take out his driver’s license. That’s a big no-no. You’re supposed to wait for the deputy coroner or medical examiner to arrive so that you don’t contaminate the scene. You never touch the body.”

  She is particularly disturbed about what she believes was a rush to judgment by both the police and the deputy medical examiner, who each concluded the death was a suicide while they were still at the scene.

  “That in itself is ridiculous,” says Marshall. “I don’t know of any case that’s an open-and-shut case of suicide, and that’s what they all did in this case: they immediately ruled it a suicide. You just don’t do that. You wait for all the test results to come back and you investigate the circumstances before you rule. That’s just how it’s done.”

  Even in this situation, with a suicide note at the scene and the shotgun still in the victim’s hand?

  “That’s one of the things I’m concerned about,” she responds. “In the majority of suicides, there is no note. I’m always a bit suspicious when there is one, at least suspicious enough to take a closer look. And I’m particularly suspicious after reading the so-called suicide note in Cobain’s case. That’s hardly a typical suicide note from my experience. I have a lot of questions about the handwriting on the note. You know, nowhere in the note does he say he wants to die. He just doesn’t like what he’s doing, and he wants to change his life. I don’t see it as a suicide note, and I think it was really unprofessional for them to judge on it so early.”

  None of these factors, however, convinces Marshall that Cobain was murdered. It’s the heroin levels that she claims are the clincher. “When I saw the blood morphine results of the toxicology tests—1.52 milligrams per liter—I immediately said to myself, ‘How could he have pulled the trigger?’ That just didn’t make sense. With that much heroin in his system, it would have been virtually impossible.” (When heroin enters the bloodstream, she explains, it is instantly transformed into morphine—thus, the discussion of blood morphine levels rather than heroin levels.)

  Marshall relates how, suspicion piqued, she began to dig through county records in an attempt to find any autopsy whose subject had blood morphine levels near Cobain’s. “There were none even approaching those kinds of levels,” she said. “As a matter of fact, when I sta
rted searching further through the state, I just couldn’t find any cases with those levels. The amount of blood morphine in Cobain’s blood was truly amazing. With levels that high, he just wouldn’t have been conscious long enough to pull the trigger.”

  Howcould Kurt have shot himself after injecting that much heroin? While researching our first book, we put the question to the deputy medical examiner, Nikolas Hartshorne. Tolerance levels were the mitigating factor, he explained. A severe addict like Cobain has a much higher tolerance than the average user; the opiates would therefore have taken longer to render him unconscious. “He was a serious junkie,” said Hartshorne. “His system could process higher amounts of heroin than [that of] the average person.” Hartshorne’s supervisor, Dr. Donald Reay, who was King County’s chief medical examiner at the time, concurred. “It is really an issue of tolerance: how much is this person used to,” said Reay. “If a person has gradually over months or years increased the dose, a person could function with that amount of drugs.”

  Denise Marshall is unconvinced. “Certainly, tolerance does play a factor, there’s no doubt about it. I won’t argue with that,” she says. “But I don’t care what your tolerance level is. His morphine level was so high that I really question anybody having a tolerance that high. I’ve seen some really amazing amounts, and I’ve seen them live through it, but I’ve never seen anybody with his levels. It’s just staggering. If tolerance was that important, you wouldn’t have so many heroin addicts overdosing all the time, and with levels significantly lower than what Cobain had in his blood.”