by Max Wallace
Approximately an hour after Kurt jumped over the Exodus recovery center’s patio wall, he called Delta Air Lines and booked Flight 788 to Seattle, leaving from Los Angeles International Airport at 10:20P.M. When he arrived at the airport around 9:30P.M., he was recognized by a number of fans while checking in at the Delta ticket counter. He graciously chatted and signed autographs for almost fifteen minutes. Before boarding, he called ahead to his car service, Seattle Limousines, to inform them he’d be arriving at Seattle/Tacoma International Airport at 12:47A.M.
During the two-hour flight, Kurt sat next to Duff McKagan, bassist for Guns n’ Roses (a band, incidentally, Cobain despised). Kurt told McKagan, also a recovering heroin addict, that he had left rehab and was “going home.”
When the plane landed in Seattle, Kurt’s driver, Linda Walker, was waiting at the airport. She drove him directly to his Lake Washington estate and dropped him off in the driveway at approximately 1:30A.M.
The house’s only occupant while Kurt and Courtney were in L.A. was Michael “Cali” Dewitt, Courtney’s old boyfriend from California who had been hired as a nanny for Frances Bean, despite his longtime cocaine and heroin habits. Cali had apparently invited a girlfriend, Jessica Hopper, to visit while she was on spring break from her Minneapolis boarding school. As a result, Jessica was present just after 6:00A.M. the next morning when Kurt walked into Cali’s room and sat on the end of their bed. On waking up and seeing Kurt, the two immediately urged him to call Courtney because “she was freaking out.”
Cali later insisted that Kurt picked up the phone and called Courtney at the Peninsula but could not get through to her room. A year later, Courtney told a slightly different story in an interview withSpin magazine, claiming that Kurt unsuccessfully tried to call her at 8:54A.M. :
There was a block on the phone for everyone but him. I did not sleep. I called the operator every couple of hours to make sure, in case they changed shifts. They all knew that if Mr. Cobain called, put the fucking call through to me. At 8:54 AM, I was not asleep. He called, and for six minutes he tried to get through, and could not. For him to argue for six minutes on the phone is crazed. I cannot imagine him arguing for six minutes. He did, though. And what that told him is that I was on their side, that I had a block on the phone for him. And I did not. Kurt’s whole plan was to try to wear everyone down, but he could never wear me down. I think, though, that at that very moment he thought I had given up on him.
It is a poignant story. But when the reporter fromSpin, and later we, contacted the Peninsula Hotel, the management denied the incident had ever taken place. No attempted calls were placed to Love’s room that morning, the hotel insisted, nor did Courtney leave instructions that Kurt’s calls were to be put through. The hotel, in fact, logs each call received, as well as every call made from the rooms. These phone records provide a clear picture of what happened next.
Just after 7:00A.M., Kurt called for a Graytop cab, which picked him up fifteen minutes later. Jessica and Cali claim they never saw him again. Later that day, according to Peninsula Hotel records, Courtney made eight separate long-distance calls to Cali’s private number at the Lake Washington house, some of them lasting for several minutes. Yet when she hired Tom Grant the next day to find her missing husband, she inexplicably failed to tell him that Kurt had been seen at the house the day before.
“It made no sense whatsoever,” recalls Grant. “When she hired me, she made it seem as if she had no idea where he had gone: she didn’t even know if he was in Seattle. When I found out that Cali had actually seen Kurt at the house on April 2, I wondered what possible reason could she have had for withholding that information from me, the guy she supposedly hired to find him. What’s even stranger is that she wanted us to stake out Caitlin’s apartment, but she never asked us to keep a watch on the Lake Washington house, even after she finally told me a couple of days later that Kurt had been there. That’s probably the first time I sensed that something wasn’t right about this case.”
Monday, April 4
Monday, April 4, starts with a telephone discussion between Courtney and Grant about his retainer. Money’s not a problem, she tells him: “I mean, money is a problem if we get a divorce and I don’t have my publishing deal, but that’s not going to happen for quite some time.”
She tells Grant about her recent fights with Kurt, resulting from his decision to pull out of that summer’s Lollapalooza tour. Nirvana, she explains, had been offered a percentage of the gate receipts that would have netted the band an estimated $9 million. She gripes furiously about the financial repercussions of his decision, revealing that Kurt had recently told her that he didn’t even want to be in Nirvana. If Kurt wants to turn up his nose at $9.5 million for Lollapalooza, she says, “We [Hole] could have fucking played Lollapalooza and gotten the cash; that’s the part that pisses me off!” Now, because Kurt had pulled out, Hole won’t be invited to play Lollapallooza even if they sell two million records, she fumes: “I mean, he would have got $9.5 million, and I would have only got about $100,000, but at least I would have sold some records, and now he’s fucking that up.”
When she is finished criticizing her husband, Courtney takes aim at the other members of Nirvana, who she feels are getting too much money for their contributions. She describes Dave and Krist as “total losers” who made more than $3 million for songs that they didn’t write a note on. “Even his band has turned against him,” she says, revealing that neither of his bandmates had attended the recent drug intervention. She has particularly harsh words for Krist, who she calls “the stupid one,” telling Grant that, after the intervention, she asked Krist to keep an eye on Kurt. Instead, she claims, he hotwired Kurt’s car and attempted to drag him to rehab against his will. “You just don’t do that,” she says.
Courtney is still obsessed with the notion that Kurt is with Caitlin Moore. Grant has refused her request to place a bug in the drug dealer’s apartment, so she asks a friend to do it, a longtime customer of Caitlin’s. Courtney calls her friend and lets Grant listen in on the conversation. The friend tells her that he had already been to Caitlin’s apartment and there was no sign of Kurt, but that Caitlin had been frequently leaving her place for hours at a time. He says Caitlin claimed that Kurt hadn’t been around lately.
Courtney asks whether Caitlin knew Kurt had left rehab. Her friend says she did, leaving Courtney to wonder how she had heard the news. “Caitlin hates Dylan, so I wonder how she’d find that out. It wasn’t on the news.” Courtney offers her friend $500 to put a bug in Caitlin’s apartment, explaining, “Frances needs her dad.” She tells him she just wants to find out if Kurt is safe, insisting that she has no intention to narc out Caitlin.
Courtney suspects that Caitlin is supplying Kurt with money to stay at a motel because she doesn’t believe that any of Kurt’s other friends are supporting him. “You know how dumb Kurt can be,” she says. “I mean, he’s brilliant but he can’t even get himself a cab.”
She tells her friend that she doesn’t want to bust either Kurt or Caitlin. “If he wants to be alone and he’s leaving me, I’m not going to bother him,” she says. She just wants “to find out where the fuck he is.” If he wants a divorce, Courtney continues, she will accept that: “I just want to make him happy, and drugs are not going to make him happy.”
Courtney insists that Kurt has never cheated on her, but she clearly believes that Kurt is involved with Caitlin. “If he’s fucking her, look out,” she tells her friend, “but you know he can be so fucked up, it’s possible, right?” She reveals that Kurt cheated on two of his former girlfriends, and that he slept with another woman who used to get him drugs, although he swore he never would. Kurt’s “pretty asexual,” she says, and he’s still wearing his wedding ring, so “I’m not really worried, but…”
By this point in the tapes, as she ranted repeatedly about the drug dealer, it seemed to us that Courtney’s obsession with Caitlin Moore was based on little more than paranoia. Not a single friend o
f Kurt or Courtney that we spoke to believed that Kurt was having an affair with Caitlin. Yet it becomes clearer with each conversation we listen to that Courtney’s jealousy, justified or not, played a considerable role in her actions during the week that Kurt was missing. However, it is possible that she is on firmer ground in her suspicion that Caitlin was helping Kurt hide during some of this period.
Of all the drug dealers that ever hit Seattle, Courtney tells her friend, Caitlin Moore is “the most Satanic because you know she likes the rock clientele.” She believes Caitlin was the most logical person for Kurt to turn to after he left rehab because he knows she would never “narc him off to anybody.”
She asks her friend whether he knows where in the apartment Caitlin keeps her phone, telling him he has two options. He can stick the bug directly on the phone or somewhere in the house.
One way or another, Courtney vows, she is going to know whether Kurt is in town by midnight that night. “If he’s not in town, forget it,” she says. “We’re still getting a quarter million dollars for our publishing. I’m on my way. I’m not going to let Kurt stop me.” She tells her friend thatRolling Stone magazine has just agreed to put Hole on the cover so “I can’t let Kurt pull me down.” She swears her friend to secrecy, saying that she knows planting a bug is a bad thing to do, but asks him whether he would rather see Kurt Cobain dead. Caitlin wouldn’t care, says Courtney, “just as long as she’s got his sperm in her mouth.”
When Grant arrives at the Peninsula for a meeting with Courtney that afternoon, she tells him that earlier in the day, she had called the Seattle Police Department pretending to be Kurt’s mother and filed a missing person’s report. “They would never have taken me seriously if I filed it in my own name,” she says.
The police report in question, purportedly filed April 4 by a Wendy O’Connor, reads:
Mr. Cobain ran away from California facility and flew back to Seattle. He also bought a shotgun and may be suicidal. Mr. Cobain may be at location for narcotics. Detective Terry SPD/Narcotics has further info.
Courtney’s unexplained—and illegal—action in fabricating the report leaves Grant shaking his head: “Notice how she planted the idea early on in the mind of the police that he may be suicidal,” he tells us later.
Tuesday, April 5
Grant spends the rest of Monday and most of Tuesday calling Seattle motels to determine if anybody has checked in under one of Kurt’s aliases, which include “Simon Ritchie” (the real name of Sid Vicious). On Tuesday, at 2:50P.M., Grant believes he has found his man. The Western Evergreen has somebody registered under the name of Bill Bailey, Kurt’s favorite alias. He offers to check it out, but Courtney tells him not to bother. She says she will take care of it.
“A little while later, she told me she had called the room and it turned out it wasn’t Kurt staying there,” Grant recalls. “I had no reason at the time to doubt her word.”
By this time, he has subcontracted a Seattle P.I. named Ernie Barth to establish surveillance on Caitlin Moore’s apartment. Grant did not yet know that Kurt had been spotted at the couple’s Lake Washington house by Cali on Saturday morning. But when he asks Courtney why she hadn’t requested surveillance of the house, she replies, “Cali’s there. He’ll tell me if Kurt shows up.”
And yet Cali is not there. “We later learned that Cali stopped staying at the house after Monday,” Grant recalls. “After that, he stayed at the apartment of another one of his girlfriends named Jennifer Adamson. And Courtney was well aware of this because, when we obtained her Peninsula phone records, they showed that she placed several calls to Cali at Jennifer’s apartment throughout the week. So she knew Kurt had been to the house, she knew Cali was no longer staying there, yet she wouldn’t let us set up surveillance there. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Wednesday, April 6
Three days after Courtney hired him to find her husband, Grant still has not made any progress, nor has the Seattle P.I. he has subcontracted to search for Kurt. Now, back at the Peninsula, he offers to fly to Seattle to conduct his own search. Courtney gives him the OK. Three of her friends are in the room at the time, one of them a heroin dealer. Another friend, Jennifer Shank, asks why Courtney doesn’t go herself. Courtney replies, “I can’t. I have business I have to take care of here.”
An hour later, his flight to Seattle booked, Grant bids the group farewell. As he heads out the door, Courtney shouts, “Save the American icon, Tom!”
Grant arrives in Seattle, rents a car and checks in to his hotel before heading over to the apartment of Kurt’s friend Dylan Carlson at roughly 11:30P.M. Courtney has already asked Carlson to assist Grant in the search. The two plan to drive to the Lake Washington estate, but first they stop at a café. Here, Dylan tells Grant that he and Kurt had purchased a shotgun on March 30, the day his friend left for rehab. Kurt wanted the gun registered in Dylan’s name, he explains, because the police had confiscated all his guns a few weeks earlier after the couple’s domestic dispute: “He was afraid of intruders, and he wanted the gun for protection for when he returned from rehab. I think there had been a burglary or something at the house recently.”
Courtney’s warning in mind, Grant asks Dylan if he thinks Kurt might be suicidal.
“No. Not at all,” Dylan replies. “He’s under a lot of pressure, but he’s handling things pretty good.” He admits that Kurt and Courtney have been having “troubles” lately and then says, “I don’t know why Kurt married her.”
They pass Caitlin Moore’s apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, where P.I. Ernie Barth is keeping watch in his car from across the street. Grant introduces himself and asks if Barth has any leads, but there has been no sign of Kurt in the last forty-eight hours. Grant asks Dylan whether it might be worthwhile to contact Kurt’s mother in Aberdeen, but Dylan dismisses the idea: “No, Kurt wouldn’t go there. He doesn’t get along with his mom.”
It’s raining hard as the pair pull up to the Lake Washington house shortly after 2:00A.M. The plan is for Dylan to go to the door alone so he doesn’t alert Kurt to Grant’s presence. Five minutes later, he returns to the car. There is no answer, but the alarm is on. Neither knows the code, so Grant asks Dylan to call Courtney and ask her how to get in. After a few minutes on a nearby pay phone, Dylan returns to the car and reports, “Courtney’s calling the alarm company to get them to turn off the system. It won’t be a problem.” A few minutes later, they return to the house and climb in through an unlocked kitchen window. Grant’s tape recorder is still running.
On the tape, there is the sound of footsteps as the two tramp through the house. Grant says, “I’m going to follow you through here because you know where everything is.” Then Dylan can be heard calling, “Hello, Kurt? Kurt, are you here?” They search the house thoroughly, but there are no signs of Kurt or anybody else. Dylan says, “I’ve never seen the house so clean before.” A television with the sound off illuminates an upstairs bedroom; Dylan says it’s the nanny’s room. Courtney has instructed Grant to search for any evidence that Kurt has been there, including drug paraphernalia, so he and Dylan proceed to search under the mattress. They find something, a pill package with little individual bubble packets.
DYLAN“Here’s something.”
GRANT“What’s that?”
DYLAN“It’s Rohypnol.”
GRANT“That doesn’t mean he’s been here, huh?”
DYLAN“No, these are what he OD’d on in Rome.”
GRANT“Would [Courtney] want us to take those?”
DYLAN“Yeah.”
GRANT“Are those drugs illegal if we get stopped?”
DYLAN“No, no, they’re prescription from England. They’re over-the-counter. They’re sold there as sedatives for sleeping illness.”
When Kurt’s body was eventually found in the greenhouse a day and a half later, the medical examiner concluded that he had been dead for at least two days, pinpointing the probable time of death as the night of April 5 or the morning of April
6. So at the time of Grant and Dylan’s search, Kurt is lying dead less than twenty-five yards away.
Later, the media were scornful of Grant’s detective skills, after he failed to find Kurt’s body. Why didn’t the seasoned investigator check the greenhouse?
“The truth is,” he says, “I didn’t know it was there. It was raining very hard that night, and a floodlight was shining from the garage, and in those conditions it was impossible to see that there was a room up there.”
We were somewhat skeptical of Grant’s explanation the first time we heard it, convinced this was an excuse he was using to rationalize his own sloppy investigation. But in December 1995, we visited the house at night under similar weather conditions and confirmed that on a dark, rainy night, the greenhouse room was indeed invisible.
Thursday, April 7
The two men have decided to resume their search. Shortly after noon, Grant stops to pick up Dylan at his apartment. Another of Kurt’s friends, Mark Lanegan, lead singer of the Seattle grunge band Screaming Trees, has agreed to help them look. Grant is anxious to establish contact with the drug dealer Caitlin Moore to determine if she has seen Kurt at any time since April 1. Grant proposes that Dylan and Mark—both regular clients of Seattle’s best-known dealer—pay a visit to Caitlin’s apartment under the pretext of scoring some heroin.
When they arrive at the Capitol Hill apartment building, Grant hands Dylan a microcassette player to clandestinely record the visit. About forty-five minutes later, the two emerge in what Grant describes as a “heroin haze.” The tape reveals that, after scoring hits for himself and his friend, Dylan asked Caitlin whether she had seen Kurt recently, to which the dealer replied that she hasn’t seen him all week.
