Love & Death

by Max Wallace

  …like John Lennon, you hear his breath. And you can have it. And if you really love that person, then you take them into your life and you make it better with them. In a different way Kurt Cobain is a good example. It was just his own fucked up life, but how many millions of people related to it? It’s a beautiful thing when a collapse occurs between our own personal needs and what’s in the air.

  In another interview, she toldMetro magazine that she paints portraits of “people I love,” including Kurt Cobain. And, although she may be one of the keys to clearing up the mystery of Kurt’s disappearance, Peyton has never discussed the events of that night nor confirmed that she is the Elizabeth referred to in the phone message.

  The phone records reveal another interesting fact. On April 1, the day Kurt left Exodus, Courtney called the rehab center’s patient pay phone six times, presumably speaking to Kurt on each occasion.

  “That’s one of the things that Rosemary was most concerned about when she gave me the phone records,” recalls Grant. “She said Courtney told her she had only spoken to Kurt once that day. She wondered why Courtney had lied to her about this. My own reaction was to wonder why Courtney never told me that Kurt had left her a message the night he left Exodus with a phone number where he could be reached. You’d think that would be something she might be expected to tell the guy she had just hired to find her missing husband. But she never said a word to me about it.”

  According to Charles Cross’s Cobain biographyHeavier Than Heaven —authorized by Courtney—she was “on the phone every moment trying to find someone who had seen Kurt after Saturday.” Her phone records, however, testify to a more self-serving series of calls: repeated anonymous calls to the request line of L.A. radio station KROQ to play the single from her forthcoming album,Live Through This.

  Grant and his assistant, Ben Klugman, spent the next few days tracking down the various phone calls Courtney had made and trying to match names with numbers. They discovered she had called drug dealer Caitlin Moore twice on Monday, April 4, and had been in almost continuous contact with Cali, the nanny, throughout the week, although the baby was with her in Los Angeles.

  When Grant contacts Carroll to report his findings two days later, she is still fixated on Kurt’s suicide note, revealing that she has a lot of “unanswered questions” that she has no idea how to go about answering.

  Grant asks her how she feels about the suicide note. Carroll tells him that she feels “exactly the same way” she felt when she first saw the note: “He didn’t write it.”

  Grant tells her that in his mind, he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Kurt did write it. But he points out that this still wouldn’t necessarily mean it was a suicide note.

  He asks Carroll whether she has read the article about Kurt’s death in that week’sUs magazine. She says she hasn’t seen it. Grant tells her the article contains a quotation supposedly taken from the suicide note, in which Kurt is said to have written: ‘I can’t live my life like this any longer.’ That line is not in the suicide note, he tells Carroll, who replies that “of course” it’s not.

  The only people who know what’s in the suicide note, Grant says, are Courtney, himself and the police, so he speculates that the magazine had to have obtained the false quotation from Courtney herself. Grant says that Courtney wants the public to falsely believe that Kurt had talked about suicide in his note. Carroll agrees.

  Then Grant tells her that he’s “at the same place.” He still feels that there is a possibility that Kurt committed suicide.

  For nearly a decade, Grant has been vilified for his role in the investigation of Cobain’s death. He has been called everything from a “lunatic conspiracy theorist” to a “publicity hound” to an “opportunist” who came up with the murder theory to “cash in.” Yet in the decade since Kurt’s death, he has refused countless financial offers from tabloid TV shows, including a significant offer fromInside Edition, and he has never attempted to write a book. “If I take any money or try to write a book about the investigation, my credibility will be shot,” he told us. “Courtney will come out and say, ‘You see, he was just after the money.’ I’m never going to get myself in a position where she can say that.” In late 1994, engrossed in the Cobain investigation, he turned down a major case in Hawaii, one that would have netted him between $25,000 and $100,000. After he nearly went broke in the mid-nineties because he had abandoned all his other casework, he started selling a “Cobain Case Manual”—a photocopied summary of the events—for $18 over the Internet to keep up his overhead, but these sales do not bring in any significant income, especially since he has allowed a number of websites to post the manual on the Internet for free. “I’d rather see that the information gets out there,” he explains. Clearly, he isn’t in it for the money. “I would have made a lot more money working in a McDonald’s for minimum wage than I have made on this case,” Grant says. Still, the skeptics persisted in their attacks. If he isn’t doing it for the money, he must simply be a nut. After all, everybody knows Cobain killed himself.

  Now, as we listen to this extraordinary taped exchange between Grant and Carroll from April 1994, a number of things become clear. The tape proves that it was not Grant who first called the suicide verdict into question, but Courtney’s own close friend and attorney, a woman so close to Kurt and Courtney that the couple had designated her as their daughter’s legal guardian should anything happen to them. Moreover, even after Carroll repeatedly raised the possibility that Kurt might have been murdered, Grant remained unconvinced, arguing, “I still think there’s a possibility it’s a suicide.”

  Grant recalls his feelings: “I’ve never really been big on conspiracy theories…. When I h ear somebody else talk about a conspiracy, I usually scoff…. But by that point, I was certainly beginning to think there was a very real possibility that Kurt had been murdered. If Kurt’s own close friend and lawyer believed it, I thought there had to be something to it.”

  On April 20, Grant calls SPD homicide detective Steve Kirkland to find out, among other things, whether the police have made any progress determining who had been using Kurt’s canceled Seafirst MasterCard during the period when he was missing. Credit card records indicated that on Sunday, April 3, a charge of $1,100 was denied around mid-afternoon: this was followed by a series of rejected cash advances ranging from $2,500 to $5,000. There were two unsuccessful attempts to purchase $86.60 worth of goods on the morning of Monday, April 4, and an attempt to buy $1,517.56 worth of unnamed goods at 7:07P.M. the following day. More mysteriously, a charge of $43.29 was attempted on Friday, April 8, at 8:37A.M. , at a time when Kurt was certainly dead—and only three minutes before the body was discovered. Who was trying to use the card, which was missing from Kurt’s wallet when he was found?

  When Grant spoke to Kirkland, asking whether the police had any leads, the detective was dismissive, admitting once again that the SPD never took its homicide investigation seriously. “Your investigation is into things that our investigation doesn’t even apply to,” Kirkland tells Grant. “You’re maybe concerned with what he was doing, where he was, and all that. I’ll tell you, Tom, truthfully, our homicide unit doesn’t even respond to suicides…. We’re involved with this thing because it is Kurt Cobain.”

  To this day, Seattle police have never determined who was using Kurt’s card. Because Courtney had it canceled, the bank company could not trace the exact whereabouts of the transactions, only the date and time they were rejected. When Ben Klugman called Seafirst Bank to trace Kurt’s credit card activity, he was told that the transaction records do not reflect the time of the attempted transactions, only the time they were logged in to the computer. The SPD later cited this to explain the apparent use of the card after Kurt was already dead. However, the bank official, Steve Sparks, also told Klugman that the discrepancy in the logged transaction time is “no more than about fifteen minutes.” Therefore, it still does not explain the postmortem credit card use.

  In addit
ion, the bank official cleared up another puzzle resulting from the notations on the credit card records. After each declined transaction, the records read “card not present,” which has led many to speculate that perhaps another member of Kurt’s entourage had the card number and was attempting transactions by phone. But the Seafirst official explained to Klugman that when the merchant slides the card through the reader and the transaction is refused, the card number is then entered manually to double-check that the machine has read the correct number. When that happens, the transaction is automatically logged as “card not present.”

  There may be logical explanations for each of the transactions, but the police reports indicate that the SPD did not even try to investigate who was using the card. More troubling is the fact that they have never explained what happened to Kurt’s credit card, which has never been found. In 1995, after Grant publicly revealed the credit card discrepancies, a reporter forThe Orange County Register called Sergeant Cameron to ask him whether he had investigated the missing card. Cameron’s response is telling: “We’re not going to comment until we figure out what Grant’s after.”

  Back on April 20, Grant proceeds to describe to Detective Kirkland examples of Courtney’s puzzling behavior during the time Kurt was missing as well as some of the inconsistencies in her story. That week, Grant had met with the alarm company supervisor, Charles Pelly, who had arrived at the Lake Washington estate shortly after his employee phoned to report the discovery of Kurt’s body. Pelly told Grant that, when he saw Kurt’s dead body in the greenhouse, it looked like his hair “had been combed.” Grant now asks Kirkland if he can see the police photos to see what Pelly was referring to. The detective refuses his request. Pelly also told Grant that Courtney had suddenly on April 7 issued instructions for the electricians to begin wiring the greenhouse with a motion detector on Friday, the day Kurt’s body was found.

  “When you think about it, why was she suddenly so anxious that day to put a motion detector on this tiny upstairs room that nobody even uses? I realize now that when Dylan and I failed to find Kurt’s body on Thursday as she had intended, Courtney made sure the electrician had an excuse to go up there and find the body,” Grant recalls.

  He had not yet made this leap of logic at the time of his conversation with Kirkland, but, as he shares some of the suspicious information he has gathered to date, the detective is clearly uninterested. There is a “rock stars will be rock stars” weariness to his tone: “I’ve been in homicide eight years, my partner’s been in homicide thirteen years and Cameron’s been in homicide for twenty-five years, and I am firmly convinced Kurt Cobain killed himself. There is nothing there to indicate that he did not.”

  GRANT“And you think none of this other stuff has any relevance whatsoever?”

  KIRKLAND“I don’t know how many times you’ve dealt with Courtney.”

  GRANT“I’ve spent a lot of time with Courtney in the last couple of weeks.”

  KIRKLAND“I don’t think Courtney knows what she’s doing from today until tomorrow, and just because Courtney says she did something yesterday, I wouldn’t necessarily believe it.”

  The next time Grant speaks to Rosemary Carroll, she has some news: She tells him that a reporter from theSeattle Times is investigating the possibility that Kurt’s death might not have been a suicide, but that Dylan Carlson and Courtney had conspired to have him killed. Grant asks her whether she has the name of the reporter. She tells him that the Seattle chief of police had told this to Courtney’s Seattle attorney, Allen Draher. She said the Seattle police had apparently “pooh-poohed” the possibility. Carroll then urges Grant to contact her husband, Danny Goldberg, about their mutual misgivings over the suicide verdict. She says she wants her husband to realize that she “is not completely insane” for raising doubts about Kurt’s suicide. Grant is hesitant, saying that Goldberg is known to be very supportive of Courtney and singing her praises to the media, but Carroll is insistent, telling Grant that’s just what Goldberg “says publicly.” A few days later, Carroll calls Grant to find out how his meeting with Goldberg went.

  Grant tells her that their encounter was unproductive, explaining that he couldn’t really reveal to Goldberg a lot of his strongest evidence for fear of incriminating Carroll. Citing an example, Grant says he couldn’t tell Goldberg that Carroll had given him Courtney’s Peninsula Hotel phone records as well as the “Get Arrested” note. Grant says he can understand Goldberg’s skepticism and reveals that he is also somewhat skeptical about the whole thing. The last thing he wants to do, he tells Carroll, is to create some “conspiracy theory like they did with Kennedy, and like they try to do with everybody, if it’s not there.”

  Carroll asks whether Grant told her husband about some of the incongruities that she had observed about the case. She is particularly skeptical about the claim that Kurt was with Dylan when he bought the shotgun. Carroll believes Dylan concocted the story.

  But Grant tells her he thinks it was a waste of time talking to Goldberg because it was obvious that Goldberg doesn’t want to hear anything Grant has to say.

  Since he last talked to Carroll, Grant has hired two document examiners to analyze the unsigned note he and Dylan had found on the stairs of the Lake Washington house. Their conclusion was that Cali had written it. Grant shares his impressions with Carroll, explaining that when he picked up the note from the stairway of the Lake Washington house, he thought it sounded “phony.” Carroll concurs, telling him that she also thought the note sounded “terribly phony.”

  Grant tells her it sounded like “a set-up letter,” explaining that when he found the note, he had no doubt that Cali had written it, but that it still looked strange to him. The note just didn’t make sense.

  Carroll agrees. She believes it wasn’t a sincere letter and says she believes Cali wrote it because he “knew that Kurt was dead.”

  They continue to talk about Cali’s potential role.

  Grant believes Cali might have found Kurt’s dead body in the greenhouse and taken the credit card out of his wallet without reporting what he had found.

  Carroll says she had thought exactly the same thing.

  By the time of their next conversation, theSeattle Times had published the first article to appear in the media detailing unanswered questions about Cobain’s death. “Kurt Cobain’s death a month ago wasn’t the open-and-shut suicide case Seattle police originally indicated,” the article began, before detailing some of the inconsistencies. In this article, Dylan Carlson, asked why he didn’t look for Kurt in the greenhouse when he went searching with Grant on April 7, tells theTimes reporter that he didn’t know there was a greenhouse above the garage.

  “For all the times I’d been there, I didn’t even realize there was a room above it associated with the house,” Dylan is quoted as saying.

  When Grant calls Carroll after this article is published, he tells her that Dylan had denied knowing the greenhouse was even there.

  “That’s a lie,” Carroll responds.

  That day, Grant callsTimes reporter Duff Wilson to let him know what Dylan had told him about the greenhouse on April 8 after they heard Kurt’s body was found, that it was just “a dirty little room above the garage” where Kurt and Courtney stored lumber. Dylan subsequently receives a call from Wilson asking about the apparent contradiction, which prompts Dylan to call Grant. He is clearly upset. He says the article implies that Dylan was concealing something because Grant said he knew about the room above the garage.

  Grant reminds him of their conversation immediately after the radio reported Kurt’s body had been found in the greenhouse. When Grant asked, “What’s the greenhouse?” Dylan had replied, “It’s the room above the garage.” To this, Grant asked Dylan why they had never looked there.

  Dylan recalls the conversation and says it was because he had never “thought of it” and that he had never actually been inside the greenhouse.

  Grant notes that Dylan had indeed told him that he had been up there,
but that he said there was “just some stuff stored up there and that it was just a small room or something.”

  Dylan’s memory refreshed, he says, “Well, yeah. I said it wasn’t part of the house.”

  In fact, recalls Grant, Dylan had told him that he had once “walked around the greenhouse.”

  “Yeah,” Dylan agrees.

  When Dylan accuses Grant of implying to theTimes reporter that he knew about Kurt lying dead in the greenhouse and didn’t tell anybody, Grant explains that he was simply talking about what happened after Courtney asked him to “check the greenhouse….”

  Dylan denies it. Courtney didn’t say anything to him about “that place.”

  Grant tells him that he had spoken to “other people” who said they were with Courtney when she asked Dylan to check the greenhouse.

  Again, Dylan denies it, but Carroll sticks to her story.

  “Wow! It’s obvious that they’re lying,” she says to Grant later, when he reports this conversation.

  Meanwhile, the media has published a number of demonstrably false accounts of the events surrounding Kurt’s death, relying on anonymous sources, each of whom revealed new facts bolstering the idea that Kurt had committed suicide. On April 12, for example, theLos Angeles Times reported that after Kurt left rehab, “One report had him buying a shotgun and calling a friend to ask the best way to shoot yourself in the head.”Esquire reported that, before leaving rehab, he had called Courtney at the Peninsula on April 1 and told her, “No matter what happens, I want you to know you made a really good record.” In addition, a number of reports were already claiming that Kurt’s death was the result of a suicide pact between him and Courtney. On April 26, theGlobe wrote, “Incredibly, at exactly the same time Kurt blew his brains out, police say his wife, Courtney Love, shot herself up with a toxic cocktail of heroin and Xanax.”