by Max Wallace
Before settling in Minneapolis for good, however, Kristen made arrangements to visit Seattle one last time—just long enough to clear the things out of her apartment. For reasons she can’t rationally explain now, Janet begged Kristen not to go: “I felt something bad might happen. I just did not want her to go back. I had this strange inner feeling that told me not to let her go. But she wasn’t a kid anymore. There was just so much I could tell her. It was her decision.”
When Janet’s pleas fell on deaf ears, she asked her cousin Michael, a security guard, to accompany Kristen to Seattle to help her gather her belongings, and even purchased Michael an Amtrak ticket to travel there. But when Janitor Joe’s European tour was extended, and Kristen’s Seattle trip was postponed a week, her cousin couldn’t make it. Kristen asked her friend Paul Erickson, leader of the Minneapolis band Hammerhead, to come with her and help her move.
They arrived in Seattle on June 14. The next day, Paul and Kristen packed her furniture and other belongings in a U-Haul for the return trip to Minneapolis. They planned to set out the next morning.
After Paul finished helping Kristen pack up the U-Haul, he volunteered to spend the night in the truck to guard her belongings from thieves. There were said to be more heroin addicts per square foot in Kristen’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that year than in any other district in the United States; theft by junkies was rampant. Sometime that evening, Kristen called her Janitor Joe bandmate Joachim Breuer, who later said that Kristen sounded “as chipper and happy as she’d ever been. She couldn’t wait to get back to Minneapolis.”
Around 8:00P.M., Paul left Kristen alone in the apartment so she could take a bath. As he was sitting in the truck a few minutes later, he saw Eric Erlandson enter the apartment and then leave again roughly half an hour later. Paul returned to the apartment around 9:30 and knocked on the locked bathroom door. He heard Kristen snoring inside. He knew she often fell asleep in the bath, so he returned to the truck to sleep for the night.
When Paul awakened the next morning, he returned to the apartment to see if Kristen was ready to hit the road. He discovered the bathroom door still locked. When he knocked and got no response, he kicked down the door. Kristen was kneeling in an inch or two of water in the tub, unconscious. The phone had already been disconnected for the move, so he rushed to a phone booth around the corner to call 911. She was dead by the time police and paramedics arrived. In a cosmetics bag on the bathroom floor, police found what they described as “syringes and narcotic paraphernalia.”
On June 17, a spokesman for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office declared Kristen’s death accidental; he did not name the person who conducted the autopsy. When we obtained a copy of Kristen’s death certificate, it revealed that the task had been performed by none other than Nikolas Hartshorne, who listed the cause of death as “Acute Opiate Intoxication” caused by an accidental “[injectable] use of drug.”
“It seemed clear that the frequently self-destructive grunge music demimonde had claimed another victim,” concludedPeople magazine, a little out of its depth. The media were quick to blame the city’s notorious drug culture, but also its take-no-prisoners music scene. Rock stars died, they concluded, and curiously, they all seemed to die at the same age. More than one report noted that both Kurt and Kristen were twenty-seven when they fatally overdosed—the same age as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix when they met their own drug-related deaths a quarter century earlier.
But there was another intriguing coincidence. The fact that the two deaths involved someone close to Courtney wasn’t lost on those who were just beginning to have their doubts about the official verdict in Kurt’s death.
It is a muggy August night in 2003, and we are sitting at the bohemian Higher Ground Café in Buffalo. Janet Pfaff has agreed to discuss her daughter’s death publicly for the first time since Kristen was taken from her nine years ago. She has brought along some Kristen memorabilia: journals, photos and a platinum record presented to her posthumously by Geffen Records, commemorating one million units sold of Hole’s albumLive Through This. Accompanying Janet is Kristen’s twenty-eight-year-old brother, Jason.
“I’ll never forget how I found out Kristen died,” Janet says, her voice choking. “I had just come back from the grocery store, and my brother’s car was in the driveway, very unusual for the middle of the afternoon. My brother, Don, came out of the house and told me the news. I kind of fell to the ground. He told me it was an accidental overdose. I just couldn’t believe it. She had gone into rehab and got involved in religion. She stopped using drugs the day Kurt died. I talked to her every day. She said she was happier than ever being off drugs. That’s why I was so shocked that police said she died of a drug overdose. I just didn’t think it was possible because she hadn’t used drugs for so long.”
Janet recalls how Geffen Records relayed a message that the members of Hole would like to attend the funeral. She rejected the request outright. “I don’t know what’s going on in that Seattle scene,” she toldPeople in her only public statement about her daughter’s death at the time. “But something’s wrong, terribly wrong.”
Geffen president Ed Rosenblatt issued a public statement of sympathy in which he mistakenly implied that Kristen was still a member of Hole at the time of her death: “This is all the more tragic because she had gone through a drug rehabilitation program this past winter. She was in the process of moving back to Minneapolis to be with old friends until the Hole tour resumed.” Courtney issued her own statement, announcing that Kristen’s death would not force the cancellation of Hole’s upcoming tour: “I’m deeply anguished over Kristen’s death. We are obviously shaken by the tragedies affecting the band in the last months, but have decided to continue on.”
That week, against the family’s explicit instructions, a member of the band did show up at the funeral—Eric Erlandson—who, to the shock of the family and assembled mourners, draped himself over Kristen’s coffin just before it was lowered into the ground. He was immediately escorted out by security staff. An hour later, he showed up at the Pfaff house, looking strung out. They refused to let him in.
“He looked like he had done a lot of drugs,” Janet recalls. “I didn’t want a circus, and that’s exactly what he created when he threw himself on her coffin.”
Norm Pfaff had flown to Seattle immediately upon hearing of his daughter’s death; when he arrived, he met with Courtney and the other members of Hole. He later described this meeting to theSeattle Weekly: “There was no sign of the type of remorse you would look for in a person who’d lost someone they cared about. It could have been that Kristen died or somebody missed a bus.”
Meanwhile, Courtney had posted a message on an AOL Internet newsgroup about the recent tragedies in her life: “I’m begging you, pray for [Kurt] and Kristen…they hear it I know…. My friend has been robbed of her stellar life. My baby has no dad…. Please pray for Kristen’s mom.”
But prayers weren’t going to do it for the Pfaff family. They were already beginning to harbor suspicions about Kristen’s death. When Janet learned more about Kristen’s time in Seattle, and particularly of Courtney’s virulent jealousy over Kristen’s relationship with Kurt, she called Seattle police to report her misgivings, only to be rebuffed. “They told me they couldn’t investigate every heroin death in Seattle because in those days people were OD’ing every day, and they just didn’t have the manpower to investigate all the drug deaths that were taking place,” she recalls.
Indeed, Seattle police received the family’s fears with barely concealed weariness. When a few days after Kristen’s death theSeattle Times asked whether police were looking into the circumstances of Pfaff’s overdose or attempting to locate the source of the heroin, Captain Dan Bryant of the Narcotics Division told the paper, “Unless we had someone who knew her and was willing to testify and work with us, we really have nowhere to go. We won’t treat this case differently than any other case just because it’s someone with notoriety. We d
id attempt to locate the source of drugs in the Cobain case but were unable to come up with any meaningful evidence. That may well be true in this case, too.”
Soon afterward, the Seattle police returned a number of Kristen’s belongings confiscated from her apartment the day her body was found. Among these items was Kristen’s private journal, some of its pages inexplicably torn out. “I don’t know who removed those pages,” Janet says, “but I have my suspicions.” She has brought the journal along but won’t show us its contents. “They’re very personal,” she explains. “I’m still a grieving mother. It’s been so difficult for me and my family to cope with our loss. Maybe when I feel the time is right, I’ll release parts of her journal for the sake of her fans. Her death was very hard on them, too. I received messages of condolence from all over the world.” She does, however, consent to show us the very last words Kristen had entered before her death: “I’ll write it on my sleeve—I know how to live.”
“That does not sound like someone who wanted to die,” Janet says. “We had made plans to go back to Europe together so Kristen could show me all the great places she saw when she was on her last tour with Janitor Joe a couple of weeks before she died. That’s one of the reasons I’m suspicious. She had been off drugs for so long. Why would she all of a sudden start doing drugs again the night she was leaving Seattle?”
Janet says she dismissed the idea of a conspiracy at first: “Originally, I had some doubts of my own about whether Kristen really died of an accidental overdose. I wondered if she might have been murdered. But emotionally, I just wasn’t equipped to deal with that possibility, so I kind of let it go. At the time, the Seattle police convinced me that there wasn’t any reason to investigate because they told me there weren’t any signs of foul play.”
But the missing journal pages rekindled her doubts, and when she learned that Nikolas Hartshorne had conducted the autopsy, it was no longer possible to ignore them. “It concerns me and my family greatly that Dr. Hartshorne did the autopsy,” says Janet. “I’ve heard all about his close friendship with Courtney. It’s a conflict of interest. It scares me. I don’t want to accuse anybody of anything, but I have my concerns.”
Meanwhile, Tom Grant was having doubts of his own: “It seems that everyone who tries to get away from Courtney does not live to tell about it. Kurt wanted a divorce, and he dies. Kristen wanted to get away from Courtney, and she dies. Their deaths both involved lethal amounts of heroin.”
Over the years, Grant had never gone into very much detail about what he knew about Kristen’s death, but he had always hinted that there was more to the story than what he had so far publicly revealed. Finally, after some convincing, he takes out a tape from a conversation he had with Courtney about Kristen’s death on October 1, 1994.
On the tape, Courtney is discussing Kristen’s drug use: “When Kristen did drugs for several months, she had always done cocaine with her heroin. This is according to Patty [Schemel, Hole’s drummer]. I never did drugs with Kristen. I didn’t even know about the problem until she [entered rehab]. I knew that she had done drugs a few times before she came to town. I knew that she partied. I don’t think it’s called partying. I think it’s called totally self-destructive. I know what it is. It’s fucking trying to kill yourself, or numb yourself. Partying? Please! Patty did drugs with her, but she never did cocaine with heroin. She only did heroin.”
Courtney proceeds to talk about what she knows about the events on the night of Kristen’s death. She reveals that Eric had visited the apartment that night on his way to a date with Drew Barrymore and found Paul Erickson there. Kristen was already sleeping in the bathtub, she says, when Eric arrived. “Eric’s like, ‘I heard her snoring, I heard her breathing. I thought if they were breathing, they were OK.’ ”
At this point in the conversation, Grant says, “Eric’s the one who heard her snoring?”
“Yeah, it never gets attributed in the press, but I know exactly what happened that night,” she replies.
Grant asks where Kristen’s friend Paul Erickson was when Eric was listening at the door.
“He was in the apartment. It was a one-room apartment…. Eric said, ‘I’m going to go on a date. If she’s not out in twenty minutes, call my machine. I’ll check it.’ And then Paul goes to sleep. He wakes up at 9:30, and she’s dead. Paul went to sleep at 9:00P.M. I’m sorry, but people in rock bands don’t go to sleep that early.”
Then, bizarrely, Courtney begins to talk about Nikolas Hartshorne, who had conducted Kristen’s autopsy: “I’m going to say one thing. Nikolas, my rock-and-roll medical examiner, he did say one weird thing. He goes, ‘God, she’s pretty.’ This is a dead person he’s talking about! ‘God, she’s pretty.’ ”
Two months later, Courtney was asked about Kristen’s death during an interview with David Fricke ofRolling Stone. In this interview, published December 15, 1994, she claims that she was actually at Kristen’s apartment the morning the body was found: “I had to go over there and get Eric away from the body,” she tells Fricke. “Kristen was his lover for a really long time. He’d already broken down bathroom door after bathroom door for her. He’d kicked in drug dealers’ doors.”
When we press him, Grant is hesitant to talk about the significance of the fact that both Courtney and Eric were present in the apartment on June 16 while Kristen lay there dead, and the fact that pages were subsequently found missing from Kristen’s journal. “I can’t discuss that at this time,” he says.
Shortly after Grant originally went public with his theory about Kurt’s death, he had been contacted by Kristen’s brother, Jason, who had deep concerns about his sister’s overdose and suspected that Courtney was somehow involved. Nine years later, Jason says those suspicions are stronger than ever. After he heard about Grant’s theory, he explains, everything began to add up: “There’s too many coincidences here. First, Kurt dies, then Kristen. Both had fallen out with Courtney. Courtney is not the type of person you want to be enemies with. She has an explosive personality.”
We ask him how Courtney could have possibly played a hand in his sister’s death. Does he think Eric—Courtney’s ex-boyfriend—was acting in league with her, as many conspiracy theorists have suggested over the years? But Jason, himself a former heroin addict who now works as a drug counselor in Buffalo, says he doubts that Eric knowingly killed his sister. “Maybe the heroin was a final going-away gift from Courtney to Kristen, and she asked Eric to deliver it that night,” he speculates. “It could have been a dose of dirty (overly pure) heroin. The fact that Kristen was clean for so long combined with a dose of dirty heroin would have been enough to kill her.” Jason thinks Eric’s over-the-top emotional reaction to Kristen’s death may have had something to do with the guilt he felt for unknowingly playing a part in the tragedy. But he admits it is all speculation.
Kim Young, a Seattle musician who knew both Kristen and Courtney, finds the conspiracy theories a little far-fetched: “As much as I liked Kristen, I think it’s ridiculous to insinuate Courtney might have been involved. Give me a break. Kurt died a few months earlier, and Courtney was trying to promote her new record. I just don’t think she’s the type of person to do something like that. As crazy as Courtney is, why would she have wanted Kristen dead? I can understand why Kurt was better off dead to her, because he wanted a divorce. But do you think she would go out and kill Kristen just because she was leaving Hole? I don’t think so. She could have got any bass player on the planet to join Hole.”
Yet from her vista outside the scene, Janet Pfaff is more suspicious than ever. She is cautious about what she will say on the record because she says she doesn’t want Courtney’s “army of lawyers” descending on her. Her explanation is as elemental as fear itself: “She scares me. I really don’t want to have anything to do with her, so I’m better off not saying anything. She’s a person who I really do not want in my life. I want no connection to her.”
When Kristen Pfaff was found dead in her bathtub on June 16, 199
4, the news soon overshadowed another local tragedy that had been dominating the headlines of Seattle newspapers for more than a week. On June 4, an off-duty Seattle police officer named Antonio Terry was shot and killed in the middle of the night while driving home from work in an unmarked car. What made Terry’s death unusual was the fact that he was the first police officer killed in the state of Washington since 1987.
The name rang a bell for Tom Grant, but it was only when he obtained the Cobain police report that he paid closer attention. There, on the missing person’s report filed April 4 by Courtney in Kurt’s mother’s name, was a mention of Antonio Terry:
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 was always talking to me about her friend Detective Terry in narcotics and how she had scored ‘brownie points’ with him,” Grant recalls. “When I was driving up to Carnation with her and Kat Bjelland after Kurt died, I went into a 7-Eleven to get a drink, and when I got back to the car, she was speaking to someone on my cell phone. I asked her who she called and she said, ‘My friend Detective Terry.’ I didn’t give it much thought until I saw his name on the missing person’s report and realized he was the same cop who was killed a week before Kristen.”
Grant plays a tape of a conversation he had with Courtney on April 3. On it, she is talking about her pleas to the police to bust Caitlin Moore, whom she suspects is having an affair with Kurt. She tells Grant that she had once told a detective named Terry that she would “go in with a wire” to help entrap Caitlin. During another taped conversation, Courtney reveals to Grant that she is intimately familiar with the detective’s case investigations, claiming that “Terry was onto a really big crack ring that was also a big heroin ring” and that Terry told her that the heroin had come from Woodburn, Oregon.
