by Max Wallace
She then tells Grant that she is “having dinner at Nikolas’s house” when she returns to Seattle on February 16 and she will ask for the autopsy records then.
A month before this conversation took place, Courtney had given an interview toRolling Stone magazine in which she claimed that Kurt had left her another, hitherto unmentioned letter before he died:
It’s kind of long. I put it in a safe-deposit box. I might show it to Frances—maybe. It’s very fucked-up writing. ‘You know I love you, I love Frances, I’m so sorry. Please don’t follow me.’ It’s long because he repeats himself. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll be there, I’ll protect you. I don’t know where I’m going. I just can’t be here anymore.’
Grant was intrigued, not least because the note appeared to confirm that Kurt was not planning to kill himself at all, but rather was leaving Courtney. Her cooperation on the autopsy report promised, Grant takes the opportunity to ask her about the second note.
GRANT“What about the other note? You mentioned inRolling Stone about another note that he wrote to you.”
COURTNEY“It’s like a letter and it’s not really, like, a suicide note. It’s like, it seems more like, it was, like, in a sealed envelope, and it was just, like, to me, and it seems like he wrote it in rehab.”
GRANT“Where’d you find it?”
COURTNEY“It was in my bedroom, under my pillows.”
GRANT“Under your pillows?”
COURTNEY“Yeah, and I didn’t tell anybody about it but Rosemary, and I told Sergeant Cameron about it; I let him see it.”
GRANT“There’s only one problem with that, Courtney.”
COURTNEY“What’s that?”
GRANT“I looked under your pillows.”
COURTNEY“Well, uh…”
GRANT“Just like we looked under your mattress.”
COURTNEY“It was there.”
GRANT“That’s how I found the Rohypnol, between your mattresses. That note wasn’t under the pillows on the bed.”
COURTNEY“Tom, it was, and I showed it to Sergeant Cameron, and he can prove it. I own it. I’ll show it to you. Whatever you—if you want to see it.”
GRANT“Yeah, I’d like to see it. I’d like to see it. But what I’m telling you is, it was not there the night before the body was found, or the night before that. Because we, you know, you can ask Dylan about this, we picked the pillows up. We were looking for drugs. We looked under the mattresses. That’s where the Rohypnol was. There was no note in an envelope.”
In the same December 15Rolling Stone interview, Courtney claimed that in his so-called Rome suicide note, Kurt had written, “You don’t love me anymore. I’d rather die than go through a divorce.” Grant asks her about this note.
COURTNEY“It’s not very nice. It’s mean to me.”
GRANT“Did it say anything suicidal?”
COURTNEY“It says something definitely suicidal on the first page. It said—it’s mean to me—it says, like, ‘Dr. Baker says I have to choose between life and death. I’m choosing death.’ That’s a quote on the note.”
Grant is clearly shaken by this revelation. Courtney has repeatedly told friends and journalists that Kurt left a suicide note in Rome. This is how most people have come to the conclusion that his suicide in Seattle was merely a successful second attempt after the first failed attempt in Rome. But this passage about Dr. Baker, a psychiatrist who treated him at Canyon Ranch, clearly refers to Kurt’s decision to continue using drugs rather than revealing an intention to kill himself. Dr. Baker had told Kurt that he had to stop using heroin or it would eventually kill him. In the note, Kurt appears to be saying he has chosen to continue his drug use rather than stating an intention to kill himself. Is this all there was to the so-called Rome suicide note?
Grant asks her if this is the only thing Kurt wrote about suicide in his Rome note, remembering that Courtney already told him on April 3 that in the note, “Kurt says he’s leaving me.”
COURTNEY“It talked about wanting to die rather than going through a divorce.”
GRANT“Do you still have the note?”
COURTNEY“No, I burned it.”
GRANT“You burned it?”
COURTNEY“When he gave it back to me the day after Kristen died, Sergeant Cameron advised me, ‘This will never do you any good, or your family,’ so I burned it.”
GRANT“Why would somebody tell you to get rid of that?”
COURTNEY“Because it wasn’t really nice. It talked about getting a divorce.”
At this point in the conversation, Courtney goes off on a tangent about the blood at the scene when Kurt’s body was found.
COURTNEY“One thing that bothered me when I went up there—because I don’t think [Kurt died] on the third for two reasons, because when I went in the room…I laid in that blood, there was only one clump of it. You know that photograph they ran on the cover of the [Seattle]Times? Well, the way Kurt’s laying, where the feet is, that’s where the blood was.”
GRANT“That doesn’t make any sense either. How could there be blood at his feet and not at his head?”
COURTNEY“Somebody wrote something on the Internet about ‘arcing blood.’…The only thing that bugs me is why is his blood where his feet are?”
GRANT“That’s not the only thing that bugs me.”
COURTNEY“Why is his blood where his feet are? Why is that the only place where there’s blood?”
GRANT“I’ve never heard that before from anybody.”
COURTNEY“That’s where it was, Tom. You saw it. You were with me, I think. It’s all a fucking hallucination. Weren’t you there?”
In retrospect, Grant believes she was trying to plant a red herring to lead him down the wrong path: “I think Courtney wanted me to start talking publicly about the blood, about all kinds of garbage that can be easily disproved, so that I would ruin my credibility the way this guy on public access has done.” He is referring to a Seattle man named Richard Lee, who has hosted a weekly cable public access TV show calledKurt Cobain Was Murdered since April 1994. Lee has been widely derided as a “crackpot” for his own bizarre theory, which suggests that Courtney murdered her husband, and the crime was then covered up by Geffen Records and the city of Seattle. One of Lee’s central arguments is the lack of blood at the scene when Kurt’s body was found.
Grant ignores Courtney’s questions about the blood and tells her that if she really wants to allay his concerns, she can take a polygraph exam and ask Michael “Cali” Dewitt to take one as well:
COURTNEY“[Cali’s] fucked me over. I know that in your job, paranoia is reality, but in my world, paranoia is also reality…. I believe you when you tell me that [Cali] knows something. I truly believe that in my heart. I know he does, you know he does, and I don’t know what the hell it is, but I think he might have heard the gunshot is what I think…that’s what my gut instinct tells me…I think he heard the gunshot.”
GRANT“Would Mike be willing to come down and take a polygraph?”
COURTNEY“For you?”
GRANT“Courtney, here’s the bottom line. The truth is really easy to get to. I’m just after the truth. If Cali can get down here and take a polygraph, we can clear this up before it goes any further. Let’s get him down here and get a polygraph done, and then he’s off the hook.”
COURTNEY“You think [Kurt] was forced down or something. He only had about sixty or eighty dollars’ worth of heroin in his body [when he was found dead].”
GRANT“Well, here’s what can bring this to a real quick end and solve all your problems. If I have a copy of the coroner’s report and if Cali comes down for a polygraph, this thing will be brought to a real quick end. It’s as simple as that.”
COURTNEY“I’ll do a bloody polygraph for you, if you keep it secret. I don’t know why—I love him so much.”
GRANT“You love who?”
COURTNEY“My husband. I love Cali, too, by the way.”
GRANT“That’s why we can help Cali
. If we can get Cali cleared through a polygraph, then he’s out of it, and believe me, then I’m going to start looking like a fool and nobody’s going to pay any attention to me anymore.”
COURTNEY“He’s with my daughter right now. I want him to be able to stay up there and not deal with this right now. I’m not going to turn around and call him at home and say ‘go to Tom Grant’s office.’…I don’t think Cali is lying, because he’s my friend. I hired him and I also pay him a lot of money, and he’s one of my best friends, so I don’t think he would lie to me, but hemight be lying to me.”
Grant believes her next statement indicates that she is getting ready to let Cali take the fall for her if things start to sour, if the police start to close in on the truth:
COURTNEY“Mike was bad. I found [heroin] spoons in his room. He watched my child sometimes when he was on drugs, and Kurt was furious; he was firing Mike because he kept doing drugs. Kurt liked to have notes when he talked to someone, and I have a note he wrote, it’s pretty lengthy, it’s all the reasons why Cali can’t be our nanny anymore because he’s continuing to do drugs, and yada yada….”
Grant pinpoints this conversation as especially significant: “I think she was trying to get it into my mind that maybe Cali killed Kurt because Kurt was about to fire him,” he explains. “She was planting Cali’s motive in my mind.”
In January1995,an eleven-year-old boy from Ile d’Orléans, Quebec, is found hanged in the basement of his family home. At the boy’s feet, his father finds a note reading, “I’m killing myself for Kurt.” In the obituary, his mother pleads for other children not to listen to the “negative music” of Nirvana.
Nearly nine years have passed since Grant first publicly accused Michael “Cali” Dewitt of engaging in a conspiracy with Courtney Love to kill her husband. In 1995, we challenged Grant to show us any evidence at all pointing to Cali’s involvement. Why was he accusing Cali rather than Dylan Carlson of playing a part in the conspiracy? we demanded. After all, it was Dylan who bought the shotgun and who apparently lied about the greenhouse.
“No, I ruled out Dylan as an accomplice early on,” explains Grant. “When I was going around Seattle with him looking for Kurt, he kept saying how he didn’t understand why Kurt married Courtney: he was bad-mouthing her. And after Kurt died, he repeatedly said his friend wasn’t suicidal. It wouldn’t make any sense if he was involved. I reached a conclusion that Dylan was being used by Courtney, but that he wasn’t part of the planning.”
Is Grant now ready to be more forthcoming about his reasons for citing Cali’s involvement?
“The only thing I’m willing to say at this point is that there was a conspiracy between Courtney and Michael Dewitt, and there may be others involved,” he responds. “Remember, I never said I can solve this whole case all by myself or single-handedly prove that Courtney or Cali killed Kurt. There’s still some questions that need to be asked. That’s where the police need to go around with a badge asking the questions. It’s too easy to blow off a P.I. People can’t get away with lying to the police so easily.”
Neither Courtney nor Cali has ever responded to Grant’s allegations, but Charles Cross’s Courtney-authorized biography offers some dubious details about Cali’s activities the week Kurt disappeared—details that appear at first glance to deflect suspicion from both Cali and Courtney. In this account, Cali is said to have wakened on the morning of Saturday, April 2, to find Kurt sitting on his bed. He claims he told Kurt to call Courtney and then drifted back to sleep, exhausted from a cocaine binge the night before. What follows is an account that stretches credulity: a description of Courtney’s repeated calls to the house later that morning as she tries to locate Kurt.
Back at the Cobain house, the main phone rang every ten minutes but Cali was afraid to answer it, thinking it was Courtney. When he finally answered, he told her he hadn’t seen Kurt. Still fried from drugs, Cali thought Kurt’s bedside visit was simply a dream.
Cross writes that two days later, Cali finally remembered that he had seen Kurt, and only then did he relay the news to Courtney. By the time Cross’s book was published, Tom Grant had already publicly disclosed the fact that when she hired him, Courtney had inexplicably failed to tell him that Kurt had been spotted at the house on Saturday morning. This new account provides a convenient explanation as to why not.
The problem is that it is demonstrably false. Grant interviewed Cali in May 1994, and in this conversation, the nanny confirms that he informed Courtney about seeing Kurt on the very same day he saw him, Saturday, April 2. Grant also interviewed Eric Erlandson the same month, and in this conversation, Courtney’s guitarist revealed that Cali told him he had seen Kurt on April 2 and informed Courtney about it that day. Moreover, Dylan Carlson told theSeattle Times on May 11 that he had received a call from Cali on April 2 saying he had seen Kurt and that Kurt was “acting weird.” The account in Cross’s book, therefore, has to be false. But where did it come from? Cross supplies no source. If it came from either Courtney or Cali, the implications are troubling.
Equally perplexing is another account in Cross’s book about Cali’s activities on April 7, the day before Kurt’s body was discovered. According to this account, Cali had been staying at the apartment of his girlfriend Jennifer Adamson, because he was “afraid to be in the Cobain house.” When Courtney found out about this on Thursday, Cross writes, she was “incensed,” and she demanded Cali return to look for Kurt immediately. So that evening, Cali and Jennifer drove to the Lake Washington house with a friend, arriving at “dusk.” They searched through the house, finding no sign of Kurt. This is when Cali jotted the note in which he accused Kurt of “being in the house without me noticing” and placed it on the stairs. Various media accounts, including Cross’s book, have reported that the TV was on in the master bedroom, tuned to MTV with the sound off, suggesting that Kurt had been in the house watching TV. (This is apparently what Cali is referring to in his note.) However, when Grant and Dylan Carlson searched the house the night before and again on Thursday evening, they found the TV turned on inCali’s bedroom, not Kurt’s.
Cross writes that after Cali, Jennifer and their friend, Bonnie Dillard, finished searching the house “with night falling,” the trio, “with a great sigh of relief,” got in the car and began to head down the driveway. As they were pulling away, Bonnie told Cali and Jennifer that she thought she had seen “something above the garage…. I just saw a shadow up there.” But Jennifer reportedly believed her friend was simply being “superstitious,” and so they didn’t turn the car around to check the greenhouse.
It is an eerie story and makes for fascinating reading. Unfortunately, it could not have happened. According to the SPD reports we obtained, a Graytop taxi was dispatched to the Lake Washington house on April 7, arriving at approximately 4:00P.M. The driver picked up a “white male in his 20s, 5’8–9", medium to thin build, some facial hair, and dark hair,” and drove him to the airport. This description is clearly Cali’s, as the SPD confirmed when they interviewed him a week later. Cali told police that he had indeed taken a taxi to the airport on the afternoon of Thursday, April 7, to catch a plane to Los Angeles because “Courtney accused him of hiding Kurt after he fled the hospital, so he flew to L.A. [on April 7] to tell her face-to-face that he wasn’t.” As a result, Cali—like Courtney—was in Los Angeles the day Kurt’s body was discovered.
So if Cali left the house by taxi at 4:00P.M. Thursday afternoon to go to the airport, it would have been impossible for him to have searched the house with Jennifer Adamson and her friend at dusk, “with night falling,” that evening, written the note and placed it on the stairs, and then left the house in Adamson’s car, as Cross describes in his account. According to the U.S. National Weather Service, the sun set that day at 7:47P.M., almost four hours after Cali’s departure for the airport.
Moreover, Cross writes that Courtney only learned on Thursday, April 7, that Cali wasn’t staying at the house and that she was “incensed” when s
he learned that he had been staying at the apartment of his girlfriend Jennifer Adamson. This is why she allegedly sent him back to the house to search for Kurt on Thursday. Yet her Peninsula Hotel phone records prove that she had repeatedly called Cali at Jennifer Adamson’s apartment many times that week, starting as early as Tuesday, April 5, suggesting that Courtney was already well aware Cali was no longer staying at the Lake Washington house. Another obvious fiction, but what does it mean?
Who is responsible for planting these falsehoods in Cross’s biography? Clearly, somebody who wants the world to believe that Kurt was still alive, but preparing to die alone in the greenhouse, after Cali left the house for the last time.
Three years later, Courtney would award the construction company owned by Cali’s father a very lucrative contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to renovate her Lake Washington house just before she put it up for sale. She had already secured a high-paying A & R job for Cali at Geffen Records.
Still, we have never seen a shred of convincing evidence proving that Michael Dewitt was involved in Kurt’s death. When we confront him about this, Grant is evasive: “The only thing I’ll say at this point is that this was a murder staged to look like a suicide. If I play my hand too early and reveal everything that I have before the police get involved, I suspect that evidence will suddenly disappear, stories will change and those involved will tidy up their trail.”
8
Vernon Geberth believes there is a formula for getting away with murder.
“If you want to stage a murder to look like suicide, it helps to leave a suicide trail,” explains the former commanding officer of the Bronx Homicide Task Force, who is considered America’s leading expert on staged crime scenes. “That is, it helps to plant the idea in people’s minds that the victim was already suicidal. That way, investigators will be predisposed to rule the death a suicide.”
