Love & Death

by Max Wallace

  As Grant and Carroll discuss this array of false reports, they agree that Courtney must be leaking the false information to the media.

  Carroll says it’s “amazing” that she can do this.

  Was Grant convinced yet? “It’s difficult to say for sure when I finally came to the conclusion that this was a murder, and that Courtney was involved,” he recalls. “After a while, I had uncovered enough information to remove my last few doubts. Some of them will only come out in court.”

  By May 8, Grant was finally ready to put Courtney on notice about his suspicions. He sent her a letter hinting for the first time at his doubts:

  Dear Courtney,

  I’m sure you know by now that my investigation has been somewhat more active than you might have been aware of. The purpose of this letter is to clarify my position regarding our working relationship.

  You may recall our trip to Carnation on Thursday, April 14th. I mentioned during the drive that I was beginning to turn over some “rocks” that I wasn’t sure you’d want turned over. I asked you if you wanted me to continue digging. Kat, who was in the backseat, said, “Oh yeah, she wants to know everything.” You responded, “Yeah, Tom, do whatever it takes. I want to know everything that happened.” Your instructions were clear, so in the days and weeks that followed, I proceeded to “do whatever it takes.”

  As the investigation continued, my attempts to get at the truth often seemed to be deliberately hindered. While reading some of the articles being written in newspapers and magazines, I discovered the information being released to the press was inaccurate and often cleverly misleading.

  I consider the circumstances surrounding your husband’s death to be highly suspicious. My investigation has exposed a number of inconsistencies in the facts of this case as well as many contradictions in sound logic and common sense. I’m required to report findings such as these to the police, so on Friday, April 15th, I spoke with Sgt. Cameron about some of what I’ve learned so far.

  As I’ve experienced in past cases, police detectives don’t often welcome the work of outside investigators. I’ve learned it’s somewhat idealistic and naive to think the truth might be more important than professional pride.

  I’ve decided to continue working on this case until I see it to its conclusion, without additional charge. Attached you will find an invoice which accounts for the charges billed for our services, including time and expenses. As you can see, prior to my return to Seattle on April 13th, these charges exceeded the retainer amount. However, please consider your bill paid in full. There will be no further charges.

  As I pursue the truth regarding the events surrounding your husband’s death, your cooperation and assistance will be appreciated, but not required.

  Sincerely,

  Tom Grant

  THE GRANT COMPANY

  “I just figured Courtney would hit the roof after she received this letter,” Grant recalls.

  Instead, he receives a somewhat unusual call a few days later from Courtney, who is in Ithaca, New York, at the time, staying at a Buddhist monastery. The last time he had heard from her, on April 25, she had called Grant from an Arizona “health and well-ness” detox resort called Canyon Ranch, where, she told him, she was sleeping with her old boyfriend Billy Corgan, lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins. “Billy’s so nice,” she said. “What am I supposed to do? It feels right.” This call came only about two and a half weeks after Kurt died, at a time when Courtney was being portrayed in the media as a deeply grieving widow overcome with depression about Kurt’s death. The same week that she was with Corgan at Canyon Ranch,People magazine reported, “For now, Love is with Frances Bean in Seattle in the quiet lakefront home where Cobain died three weeks ago. ‘She’s grieving and trying to absorb everything that’s happening to her,’ says a friend. ‘She’s doing as well as can be expected, considering.’ ” Years later, after Grant’s revelation had already been widely circulated, Courtney came up with a slightly revised version about Corgan’s visit, telling a reporter from theChicago Tribune, “After Kurt died, Billy came out to the Canyon Ranch and he like took care of me for a couple of days, but it wasn’t like sex. I kept trying to make him fuck me, but he wouldn’t fuck me. Everybody thinks we had something, but I was so fucking high that I would have made the maid fuck me.” Yet three months after her stay at Canyon Ranch,Entertainment Weekly reported, “Her friends insist that she has not used drugs since entering detox just prior to Cobain’s suicide, and she has been encouraging others in her entourage to clean up, even helping a few, including one of Frances Bean’s former nannies, get into rehab.”

  Now, after she receives Grant’s May 8 letter, Courtney calls him again:

  COURTNEY“Tom, is this the most insane case that you’ve had for a long time?”

  GRANT“It’s pretty bizarre. It’s probably even more bizarre than you realize it is.”

  COURTNEY“How do you mean?”

  GRANT“There are so many crazy twists and so many things going on here.”

  COURTNEY“I mean, it’s just so weird that I called you and I thought he was suicidal and now he’s dead.”

  Instead of formally cutting off ties, as Grant expected she would do after receiving his letter, she asks whether he can do some investigative work for her on issues completely unrelated to Kurt’s death.

  “I realized that she was trying to buy my silence,” he recalls. “She was pretty transparent about that. At first, I thought of refusing the work, but then I figured that, as long as I was working for her, I’d have inside access to her world, I’d be able to keep speaking to Rosemary and I’d be able to keep tabs on Courtney.”

  Among the assignments Courtney gave Grant during this period was to conduct surveillance on a well-known rock musician she was dating at the time; she wanted to know if he was cheating on her. (Grant has asked us not to name the musician out of respect for the privacy of the individual.) At one point, Courtney told Grant that a psycho fan had broken into the musician’s room and splattered bloody tampons on the walls. The same fan had also left the musician a threatening note, with a reference to a nearby mental institution—suggesting that a crazy woman had been responsible. Courtney asked Grant to track down the perpetrator, explaining that her boyfriend suspected Courtney herself of having written the note and vandalizing the room.

  “A couple of weeks later, Courtney finally admitted to me that it was actually her who had splattered the tampons around the room and written the note,” Grant recalls. “Normally I wouldn’t even mention this because it has nothing to do with the Cobain case, but I realized that the phony note could represent a pattern of behavior that may be significant.”

  One of the enduring mysteries of this case concerns Kurt’s whereabouts between the time he was spotted at the house by Cali on April 2 and the time he died, which, according to the coroner’s report, was probably two to three days later. There are only three known sightings after Kurt left the Lake Washington house on April 2. On the evening of Sunday, April 3, he was spotted having dinner with a “thin woman” at Seattle’s Cactus restaurant. Earlier the same day, he had bumped into Nirvana’s manager, John Silva; soon after, Kurt met a woman on the street named Sara Hoehn, who said he was in a foul mood over a report that forty thousand fans had lined up that morning in L.A. to buy tickets to an Eagles concert. Various Cobain biographies quote unnamed sources who claim to have seen or spoken to Kurt later in the week, but there is not a single confirmed sighting after April 3. A Michigan man named Brad Barnett told us that he had met Kurt in the park near his house on Monday, April 4, and that Kurt had brought him into the greenhouse, where they struck up a conversation about literature. (We have since seen evidence proving that Barnett’s account was false, including wildly conflicting accounts of what he claims happened.)

  Seattle police later claimed that Kurt had spent time that week at his house in Carnation because fresh tire tracks had been spotted by a neighbor. Cobain biographer Christopher Sandford reports that sl
eeping bags were found at the Carnation house along with an ashtray filled with recently smoked cigarettes, some Kurt’s brand—Winston Lights—and some Marlboro Lights (not Courtney’s brand) with traces of lipstick. Sandford reports that on the table was a black drawing of the sun above the words “Cheer up.” But Tom Grant says that when he drove to Carnation with Courtney and Kat Bjelland the week after Kurt’s body was found, they found no such drawing. Grant believes that Courtney planted the story as another red herring. However, it is unclear why Courtney would want people to believe that Kurt was with a woman that week if it wasn’t true. Her conversations with Grant reveal that she seemed certain Kurt was having an affair with Caitlin Moore and that she was intensely jealous. A friend of the couple told us that he heard Courtney yelling at Kurt, “You’re fucking her, aren’t you, you bastard?” just after he returned from Rome. Yet it is possible that it wasn’t Caitlin Moore who was the object of Kurt’s affection during this period; Courtney may have blamed the wrong woman. Sandford writes that Kurt sent a young art student several love notes, a hand-drawn valentine and an invitation for the woman to join him in a Seattle hotel. When she declined, he allegedly phoned a dozen times a day and sent her a message stating, “I’m not obsessed with you. I just wanted to talk to you about conceptual art.”

  While he was working for Courtney on miscellaneous assignments, Grant finally managed to speak briefly to the nanny, Michael “Cali” Dewitt, who admitted to him that he had seen and talked to Kurt on April 2 when he appeared in Cali’s bedroom the morning after he fled rehab. Cali also confirmed that he had informed Courtney about the sighting the same day and later wrote the note that Grant and Dylan found on the stairs.

  Meanwhile, the copycat suicide phenomenon that mental health professionals had feared after Cobain’s death didn’t appear to be materializing. After Daniel Kaspar went home and killed himself following the Space Needle vigil, American treatment centers recorded no marked boost in teenage suicides, although youth crisis hotlines did experience a significant increase in calls from teens depressed about the death of their idol. Some professionals speculated that the American media’s treatment of the death—replete with interviews quoting celebrities who harshly condemned Kurt for taking the “coward’s way out”—played a role in keeping copycat suicides to a minimum. Rush Limbaugh may have contributed in an odd way, too, by calling Kurt a “worthless shred of human debris.” American families were widely urged to talk to their teenagers about Kurt’s death.

  But, while America breathed a sigh of relief for its young, other countries were not so fortunate.

  Just after midnight on July 2, 1994, an eighteen-year-old Edmonton boy named Bobby Steele puts the Nirvana song “Endless, Nameless” on the stereo and presses theREPEAT PLAY button. Minutes later, he lifts a 12-gauge shotgun from his father’s collection and loads three shells. Dressed in a Nirvana “Sliver” T-shirt, he takes out his little black diary and begins to write: “July 94. I just can’t live anymore. If you just think a lot, you just stop knowing that life has a purpose…I am not intoxicated or high…. I just feel bad. It’s been the most painful 84 days in my life.”

  Eighty-four days earlier, Bobby learned that his hero, Kurt Cobain, had killed himself with a shotgun. A few weeks later, a teenage friend of the family’s named Greg had locked himself in his car with the engine running and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Bobby and his sister believed he had never gotten over Kurt’s death.

  Now Bobby finishes writing the words in his diary, ending with a veiled reference to the passage in Kurt’s suicide note, in which he wrote, “So remember, it’s better to burn out than fade away.” Instead, Bobby writes, “It’s better not to spark at all. Rob Steele.”

  He signs the note, then snaps a Polaroid of himself with a Kurt Cobain poster in the background. He then takes another picture of himself reclining on his bed with a copy of Nirvana’sIn Uteroabove his head. He aligns the photos on the bed and then positions himself on the floor so that when his body is found, he will look like Kurt in the greenhouse photo. With the death-haunted words of “Endless, Nameless” playing in the background, he positions the muzzle of the shotgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

  In the months he remained in Courtney’s employ, Grant would sometimes bring up nagging questions about Kurt’s death. Although Courtney encouraged him to continue probing, he believes she was actually sabotaging his investigation.

  “Whenever I started talking to people close to Courtney about Kurt’s death, she’d hire me to do another job,” he recalls. “It seemed that she really had very few options at this point. Getting angry would just create more suspicion.”

  During this period, Grant took every opportunity he could to glean information about Cali and others without arousing Courtney’s suspicion. At one point, Courtney provides a candid, somewhat shocking admission about the pervasive presence of drugs in the household:

  “I don’t know if you know this,” she tells Grant, “but I spent thirty grand putting Cali through rehab. Didn’t work. Brought him over to England to be a roadie and he ran off, totally fucked me over. He ran off with this girl, a thirty-seven-year-old drug addict who was shooting $400 worth of heroin and coke a day…. Kurt loved [Cali], he was one of the few people that Kurt didn’t have a bad thing to say about, but about two months before Kurt died, Cali was doing drugs and taking care of my baby, and I went into complete denial about it, and I told myself he was only doing speed and that he was probably only doing speed during his night off, and I was totally deluding myself. He was totally doing heroin full blown. René [Cali’s friend] was not ever allowed to watch Frances and then I found out later that René had watched Frances a number of times when Cali went to the store completely on heroin. I can tell you from personal experience that I’ve been on heroin and been around my daughter. I mean, the nanny was in the room, but what if she had gone through a fucking window, you know? I mean, there’s a reason why people get their children taken away, and I think it’s totally appropriate. That might sound hypocritical coming from somebody who uses drugs on occasion but, fuck, it’s just really awful. One night, Cali turned to me and I said, ‘I hear you’re doing IV drugs,’ and he goes, ‘Well,you do them.’ And I’m like, ‘What are you now, my brother?’ ”

  Courtney was clearly becoming uneasy about Grant’s suspicions, but she never went so far as to order him off the case. During one conversation, calling from Montreal, she tells him, “I don’t mind that you’re attributed to the Cobain case, you’re a good P.I. I’ve met six and they’re all sleazebags, you know, and you’re the first one that’s come through for me, you know what I mean?”

  As Grant proceeds with his investigation, the suicide note continues to haunt both him and Rosemary Carroll. Carroll still doesn’t believe Kurt wrote it, and she wonders why Courtney has never let her see the note: “She showed the note to Seth [Lichtenstein, another of Courtney’s attorneys], but she wouldn’t show it to me, which, at the time, I found rather odd,” she says to Grant, who, for his part, continues to be suspicious about the roles of Cali Dewitt and Dylan Carlson.

  GRANT“The main thing that I’m trying to do and the only time I’ll ever put a rest to this—I don’t care if it goes on for the next five or ten years—is if I get a real accurate handle about what happened with Cali and Dylan. Courtney for some reason is trying to keep me from Cali.”

  CARROLL“Well, we know what the reason is.”

  GRANT“I really need to speak to him about some things.”

  CARROLL“Do you know where Cali is?”

  GRANT“Oh, Cali moves all around. I talked to him a few weeks ago and he copped an attitude with me a bit, and I had a feeling Courtney said to him, ‘Oh, you don’t need to talk to Tom.’ Every time I get close to Cali, it seems she ships him off to rehab or something.”

  CARROLL“Oh, that’s why she shipped him off to rehab. I couldn’t figure it out, because it was a big thing, it was costing her a fortune because she sent his girl
friend with him.”

  GRANT“I told Courtney, when she’s in L.A., I want to meet together with her and go over some of this stuff with her, and I’m gonna tell her how bad things look for her. Because if the press get a hold of this before I can finish it up and tie up all these loose ends and figure out what went on, if the press gets a hold of all these bits and pieces, they’ll write conspiracy books and magazine articles all over the place, and she’s going to be the villain in this thing. And she may not be a villain.”

  Meanwhile, copies ofLive Through This —hurriedly released by Geffen on the Tuesday after Kurt’s body was found—were flying off the shelves and getting very positive reviews in the American music press. But Courtney’s new success was temporarily overshadowed on June 16 when Hole’s bass player, Kristen Pfaff, was found dead in her bathtub, apparently of a heroin overdose.

  On October 16, 1994, a storage locker attendant in Langley, British Columbia, makes a grisly discovery: the bodies of three teenagers slumped in a 1987 Plymouth, its engine still running. Michael Coté, Stephane Dallaire and Stephane Langlois, each eighteen years old, had driven over three thousand miles from Quebec to B.C. to end their lives in this locker, slowly inhaling the exhaust fumes from their car. In the car’s tape deck, stuck in thePLAY position, is a Nirvana tape. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pull the boys out of the automobile, they discover a journal in a triple-ringed binder with the words “The Last Trip” on its cover. In sixty pages of tormented text and drawings, the three teens describe their cross-country odyssey and look forward to their deaths at the end. On the last page, in Dallaire’s handwriting, are the words: “When Kurt Cobain died, I died. The way I would have liked to have died is by a bullet in the head and with the same firearm that Kurt Cobain used. But it’s too late now. Goodbye.”