by Max Wallace
Alden then told us that Hoke had actually revealed to him the name of Kurt’s killer and that he planned to reveal it in his forthcoming book. We asked him if he was afraid that by divulging the information, he might share Hoke’s fate.
“The information is locked in a safety-deposit box and will be made public if anything happens to me,” he said.
In our first book, we call Alden “Drew Gallagher” because he asked to remain anonymous. We found his claim that Hoke told him the name of the killer dubious, and we said so. But six months after we spoke to him, an abrupt two-second slip of the tongue in Broomfield’s newly released documentary brought Alden’s claims into focus for us once again.
It occurs in an interview with Hoke taped on April 11, 1997, at the Riverside, California “Mentors Ranch”—a small compound owned by the band’s bassist, Steve Broy. Broomfield had been escorted there by a man named Lomas, better known as the pimp for Divine Brown, the prostitute who set off a notorious Hollywood scandal in 1995 when Hugh Grant was arrested while availing himself of her services. Although Broomfield is notorious for paying his subjects, Hoke had refused money, asking only that the director buy him a drink. When Broomfield arrives at the ranch and asks Hoke about Courtney’s offer, it results in the following filmed exchange:
HOKE“She offered me fifty grand to whack Kurt Cobain. When she offered me money, goddamn, I wish I would have taken it, man. But I know who whacked him.”
BROOMFIELD“How were you going to whack him? Did she tell you how to do it?”
HOKE“Yup, blow his fucking head off.”
BROOMFIELD“But where were you going to find him to do it?”
HOKE“Well, she mapped it out, up there in Bellevue, right outside Seattle. I know right where their house is, I know what garden to pop him in, I just didn’t think she was serious.”
BROOMFIELD“But did she tell you how to do it?”
HOKE“Yeah, blow his fucking head off, and make it look like a suicide.”
At this point in the conversation, Hoke—clearly intoxicated—appears to reveal something he shouldn’t have:
HOKE“But I told Allen, I mean, my friend [laughs nervously]—I’ll let the FBI catchhim —that’s just the way it’s done, end of story. Hey, fifty grand does a lot of talking.”
Hoke makes no other mention of his friend “Allen,” who, he appears to imply, had actually done the killing. Eight days after the interview, Hoke was dead—run over by a train about a mile from where the Broomfield interview took place.
By the time Broomfield’s film was released, our book was already at the printer and it was too late to follow up on Hoke’s disclosure or investigate the circumstances of his death. We assumed we were finished with this case forever. Four years later, however, we came into possession of a tape that would plunge us right back into the Cobain investigation and force us to reevaluate everything we thought we knew about the case.
We had never put much stock in Brent Alden’s claim to know the name of Kurt Cobain’s killer. By 2002, his book had still not appeared, and we assumed he had made up the story. Then, through an L.A. music source, we happened to obtain a copy of the actual interview that Alden had conducted with Hoke at Al’s Bar in Los Angeles on April 18, 1997. On it, Hoke can be heard telling Alden of Courtney’s $50,000 offer, when he suddenly blurts out something else:
HOKE“You see, I actually know the actual killer who killed Kurt Cobain.”
ALDEN“Who is?”
HOKE“His name’s Allen Wrench.”
Could this be the same “Allen” that Hoke had let slip during his interview with Broomfield? We had never even heard of Allen Wrench, but a quick Internet search uncovered the website of a California band called Kill Allen Wrench (a.k.a. “Punk Rock’s Most Important Band.”) The site is surprisingly elaborate for a minor rock band. It comes complete with pages of band lore, lyrics, downloadable songs, animated skeletons and an exhaustive gallery of frequently updated free porn. The band, it declares, is about “all four rock essentials: Satanic Worship, Alcoholism, Spousal Abuse, and Self Destructive Drug Use!” In transcribed interviews and texts, there is much talk of groupies and sluts who will do “anything” for these “punk rock legends.” One member bemoans in an interview what “a load of crap punk rock has become” because some punks have had the temerity to complain that porn is bad. The songs include no fewer than two about El Duce (a.k.a. Eldon Hoke)—one describing how the Mentors’ leader has been reduced to panhandling and “fucking chicks that are ugly and mean,” and the other, replete with references to train tracks and trains, describing him as “feeling no pain.” Papering the site are concert photos of Allen Wrench himself in devil’s horns, pentagrams and slatherings of red glop. It appeared we had found our man.
It took us several weeks to arrange an interview, but in December 2002, the band’s publicist, “Jimmy Soprano,” informed us that Wrench was willing to talk. He arranged a telephone interview.
Wrench started off cautiously in that first phone conversation. As part of the Riverside music scene, he said, he had known Eldon Hoke for years and “Duce” was one of his best friends. When we asked him why Hoke would have claimed that he killed Kurt Cobain, Wrench replied, “I have no idea.” He then told us that he was the last person to see Hoke alive: “I drove him to the liquor store that night, but I dropped him off in front of the store and then I went to pick up this chick. I never saw him again. Later, I heard that he got run over by a train a few minutes after I dropped him off.”
Hoke rats out Wrench; Hoke winds up dead. The last person to see Hoke alive is the man he’s just named as Kurt’s killer. Isn’t this scenario somewhat suspicious? we asked.
“Look, if I were to admit to you that I killed Cobain, I’d end up in prison, and I’m not going to risk that,” Wrench replied. “That’s why they’ll never find the guy who really killed Kennedy. Nobody would be stupid enough to come forward and admit to the crime. They’d end up either dead or in prison. It’s still entirely possible the [Cobain] case could be reopened. It used to be that homicide had a statute of limitations in the U.S., but now it doesn’t anymore. If I said, ‘Hey, I whacked Cobain,’ a hundred years from now, when I’m 135 years old, I can still be put in jail for fucking whacking Cobain.”
We said we understood his reluctance. But off the record, would he tell us the real story? “Nobody will ever know how he died,” he responded. “That’s the fun of it.” We persisted: there must be some reason why Hoke named him as Kurt’s killer. He paused and then said abruptly, “OK, off the record, I whacked him, as long as it’s off the record.”
Whoa! It was a telephone interview, so we couldn’t study his face for signs of irony. Was he being flippant or facetious? Probably, but we needed to meet him in person to size him up and gauge his personality and credibility. It didn’t take long for the opportunity to present itself. He offered to show us the “scene of the crime.”
It’s March 2003, and we are having a beer with Allen Wrench at a Riverside steakhouse called the Spunky Steer, a place Wrench has chosen for its proximity to the train tracks where Hoke had met his end. In the three months since we last spoke, we had dug a little into Wrench’s background and discovered that he was a master of Brazilian jujitsu and had won the U.S. national judo championship (blue belt division) in 1997. The irony was not lost on us. Kurt had had a horror of jocks all his life. Was it possible that the last face the sensitive poet had seen on this earth was that of this martial arts fanatic? Whatever the case, we were reluctant to meet this man on our own, so we took along some protection in the form of an actor friend and martial arts master named Dan DiJulio, who was best known for playing Dan Aykroyd in the ABC-TV movieThe Gilda Radner Story.
We had always assumed that the name Allen Wrench was made up because it is also the name of a common household tool. But in our preliminary background check, we discovered that this was in fact his real name, that he had been born Richard Allen Wrench on August 4, 1967, six months after
Kurt himself was born. Beyond that, we knew little. In our telephone conversation, he claimed that he had been arrested “a few times” for assault, drunk and disorderly conduct, and various other offenses. But on our own, we found little more menacing in his police record than disturbing the peace and driving without a license.
The man before us at the Spunky Steer was a tall, powerfully built individual, dressed in the rock T-shirt, shorts and sneakers of the neater sort of California punk. Clean-cut, slightly balding at the temples and with an aura of grinding strength, he could have easily passed for a U.S. marine. Soon we discovered that he was also very articulate and highly intelligent. In short, he no more fit our stereotype of a hired killer than Eldon Hoke himself had when we met him seven years earlier. By the time Wrench finished telling his story, however, we weren’t so sure.
Wrench first met Eldon Hoke in 1992, when Mentors bassist Steve Broy (a.k.a. Dr. Heathen Scum) graduated from college and moved to Riverside to start a job as an engineer: “I was a musician myself, and so Heathen Scum and Duce and I would hang out and jam together at the Mentors Ranch, which was the name of the house that Dr. Scum bought in Riverside,” Wrench says. “It wasn’t really a ranch, but there was some land and some animals there, so we called it that. Anyways, we all became pretty good friends. Duce was basically homeless, so when he didn’t have anything going on in L.A., he would come up to Riverside and crash at the ranch.”
Wrench’s eponymously named band didn’t form until two years after Hoke’s death. Before that, he said, he spent most of his time practicing his martial arts: “That’s my weapon of choice. I have a collection of guns, combat arms, stuff like that. But I prefer to use my hands.” Since the band was formed in 1999, they have produced three albums on Wrench’s own label, Devil Vision Records, but his music, he says, doesn’t pay the rent: “We press about 2,500 copies of each album, but we end up giving most of those away.” Odd jobs here and there, along with the odd gig, get him through the month.
What’s with the satanic imagery? we ask.
“That’s just satire in the great tradition of El Duce himself,” he explains. “We’re not satanists or anything like that. We just like to stir things up with our music.”
We decide to cut to the chase. Was Kurt Cobain’s death a murder or suicide?
“Suicide all the way.”
Why?
“Because I’m not going to incriminate myself. You see, the perfect assassinations always look like suicides. A good assassin would be like a military sniper. They know the game, they’re not fucked-up by ego. They’re cold and calculating. Look at Robert Blake: he was a dumbass. Look at Phil Spector. If you’re going to be in that game, I think you have to have a little bit of intelligence. Some people buy into what they think it takes to kill somebody, which I don’t think is that big a deal or difficult to do. They’re just not smart about it; they’re not realistic about what will happen when somebody ends up dead.”
Did you ever meet Courtney?
“I never met Courtney. [Laughs] Why don’t you ask her if she ever met me? That’s a better question. I think Courtney Love is the victim of some bad publicity on this one. I don’t think she’s going to have any problems because the great thing is that the story sounds so far-fetched that it sounds totally unbelievable. My thing about Courtney Love is that I think she’s being wrongly accused. I don’t have any problem with her whatsoever and I don’t think she has a problem with me. But you know, to you or me fifty thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money, but to a guy like El Duce, who thinks that if you have five dollars you’re rich, it would be a pretty appealing offer. But I don’t think he could ever do it. As far as hitting up Duce to knock somebody off, I don’t think anybody would think that he would do it. But logically, he knows a lot of people in the kind of guttery underground of L.A. He would probably know someone. So that would probably be the inclination, that would probably be the strategy if Courtney actually indeed approached him…. Duce wasn’t a professional hit man. I don’t think he would have the intestinal fortitude to pull that off. [Laughs]”
Again, we ask Wrench why Hoke would have named him as Kurt’s killer if he wasn’t involved. We also want to know exactly when he found out that he had been named.
“That was somewhat problematic. I found out about Duce naming me from a guy named Lomas [Divine Brown’s pimp], who’s an infamous crackhead. He called me up. When I found out that Duce named me in the documentary, it kind of concerned me a bit, so I went over and talked to him about it. After I found out I was named in theKurt and Courtney movie—I mean, what a horrible thing to say—I said, ‘Hey, Duce, what the hell’s up?’ I wasn’t very happy about Duce naming me as Cobain’s killer. I wasn’t too pleased with that. We had little arguments back and forth. He apologizes. He didn’t mean to do it, things like that.”
Why did he say he named you?
“He didn’t tell me anything in particular. He just said it was accidental.”
If it’s not true, why would he say it?
“Well, you could argue the fact that he wasn’t even talking about me because he doesn’t mention my last name, he just says, ‘Allen.’ It could be any Allen.”
What happened next?
“Well, Duce being a total out-of-control alcoholic, he asked me for a ride to the liquor store. I drop him off at the liquor store around eightP.M. and then I took off. I never saw him again. Then I heard that he wandered into the path of a train.”
Wrench had referred to Hoke’s death as a suicide several times in the course of the conversation. We ask him whether he thinks Hoke was suicidal.
“He seemed fairly distraught when I dropped him off,” Wrench says. He bursts into a sudden maniacal laugh.
What was it that had made him so distraught?
“I think it was naming me in theKurt and Courtney movie. I was fairly pissed off.”
Were things OK between you by the time you dropped him off at the liquor store? Had you forgiven him?
“After I got home and read the newspapers the next day, it was OK,” he says, laughing. “Problem solved.”
From the first, Wrench had engaged in this kind of creepy denial-cum-admission—a coy wink-and-a-nod display where everything was verbalized except the “I did it.” For some reason, he seemed towant us to believe that he had killed Kurt Cobain and Eldon Hoke. We still weren’t buying it. On the phone, he had admitted to us off the record that he was involved in Cobain’s death. Later, when we asked him on the record why he had told us this, he said he had been simply playing with our heads. Ultimately, we decided his near admission of responsibility in their deaths seemed just the type of prank this grand Guignolesque rocker would pull.
What was behind his bravado? To test his opportunism, we ask him how much money he wants to appear in our documentary. “I’m not motivated by money; you can buy me a case of Pabst,” he replies. When he gets up to go to the bathroom, we consult with our “bodyguard.” It seems we had all come to the same conclusion: Wrench was probably acting this way to gain notoriety for his band.
When he returns to the table, Wrench offers to take us outside and show us the exact location where Hoke had “bought it.” The restaurant is in a little strip mall situated in an industrial section of Riverside, just off the highway. As we exit the Spunky Steer, he points left to a small row of stores about fifty yards west, on the other side of the mall exit: “That’s where the liquor store used to be. That’s where I dropped Duce off that night.”
He then points to the tracks directly across a small field from the restaurant: “Say there was something underhanded going on here. Say there’s an investigating officer who suspects he was murdered. He would say, ‘Fuck, look at this parking lot. There would be a million witnesses.’ But if you come with me, I’ll show you something. Let’s walk up here.” He leads us about thirty-five yards east, past some trees onto the field next to the tracks. “Here’s a nice industrial area. With the noise of cars passing by on the highway, you w
ouldn’t hear any signs of a struggle.” We arrive at a section of the tracks. “That’s the spot. This is where El Duce committed suicide. You see, if you’re up there at the intersection waiting for the light to change, you can’t see us. On the other side, it’s all industrial. A nice little spot.”
He resumes where he left off inside, hinting strongly that Hoke’s death resulted from foul play: “You see, if it had happened at the lights up there at the crossing, there might have been witnesses to see what happened. But over here at night, nobody could have seen it. The thing about train wrecks is that they kind of make it difficult for a forensic investigation. It’s not like you have a body to examine. They can find no signs of a struggle. A lot of times when you’re hit by a train, they have to take a trash bag to gather the pieces because there’s nothing left of the fucking body. Then they call the fire department to hose off the train because there’s nothing left but fucking juice. Let’s say you have this alcoholic bum who gets hit by a train, who’s sleeping by the tracks drunk and just stumbles in front of it. Who’s going to ask questions? An investigator who’s investigating the death, they look at the blood alcohol level; there’s nothing left of the body, but they can take a blood sample from the tracks and still measure his blood alcohol level. An accident investigator would look at this, and everything would point to an accident.”
We are standing at least eighty-five yards from the liquor store where Wrench claims he dropped Hoke off that night. Between the store and this spot, there is an intersection and railroad crossing. If Hoke had been heading home from the liquor store, it stands to reason that he would have crossed the tracks at the intersection. We ask Wrench why he would have wandered an additional fifty-five yards past where, once over the tracks, he would have had to cross a busy highway.
He has a ready explanation: “You have to remember that as a homeless person you’re not going to have the same mind-set, where you say, ‘Hey, I have to get home because my fucking wife or girlfriend is waiting for me.’ The homeless lifestyle isn’t really—actually, Duce wasn’t really homeless; I think of him more as a hobo, kind of traveling, checking out the world. Here’s what people don’t understand. I’ve walked out of clubs a hundred times with Duce and we can’t find our car and he’s like, ‘Oh cool, let’s get a cardboard box and sleep right here.’ That was his mentality. That’s the beauty of it. Nobody will ever know if his death was an accident, suicide or murder.”
