When something bad happens, we want to know why. The weirder and worse the event, the more we need to know. Such things can’t possibly be random and spontaneous. Someone or something needs to be responsible and held accountable.
Blame has to be assigned. And there had better not be any loose ends. If there are, that just opens the door wide open to conspiracy theories.
Along with flat-earth nutters, moon landing deniers, those who believe COVID-19 vaccines contain tracking nanochips, and people trying to tell us that 5G is killing the population, there’s a dedicated group who refuse to believe that Kurt Cobain took his own life on April 5, 1994. Every once in a while, another bunch pop up claiming that they know the truth about Kurt’s death. And it’s happening again.
Kurt’s body was found on the morning of Friday, April 8. An electrician who had been hired to do some work on the house Kurt shared with his wife, Courtney Love, at 171 Lake Washington Blvd. East, thought he saw something through the window of the backyard greenhouse. It appeared to be a body sprawled on the floor. When police arrived, they discovered Kurt dead of a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head.
I was on the air that day.
alancross · Kurt Cobain’s Death: Minute-by-minute announcements from April 8, 1994
In short order, his death was ruled a suicide. But even all these years later, there are still those who refuse to believe that.
A group of “unofficial private sector team of forensic scientists” — in other words, they’ve “done their own research” over the course of a whopping three days — say they have gathered enough evidence to prove that Kurt was murdered. They went through Kurt’s autopsy report, looked at records of crime scene materials, and consulted a specialist who knows something about gunshot deaths and drug use.
Their conclusion? His death is not consistent with an “instantaneous” gunshot.
So what happened? According to Michelle Wilkins and Brian Burnett, one or more people confronted Kurt and forced him to overdose on heroin so that he would be incapacitated. After that, they shot him in the head with the shotgun and placed the gun in his hands.
They then wrote a fake suicide note and left it in a potted plant. The motive? Unclear, but let’s not let that get in the way of good conspiracy.
Wilkins: “There are things in the autopsy that go, well, wait, this person didn’t die very quickly of a gunshot blast. The necrosis of the brain and liver happens in an overdose. It doesn’t happen in a shotgun death.” She says there were signs of oxygen deprivation.
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“To me, it looks like someone staged a movie and wanted you to be absolutely certain this was a suicide,” she says. ““The receipt for the gun is in his pocket. The receipt for the shells is in his pocket. The shells are lined up at his feet.” She and her people want the case reopened.
Oh, dear. Where to begin?
First, let’s review what was going on with Kurt at the time of his death.
Despite his musical intensity, Kurt was extremely emotionally fragile. He was an enthusiastic user of heroin, which he used to combat depression and his conflicted feelings about fame. Some of this came out in songs like I Hate Myself and I Want to Die. He was plagued by painful stomach issues that hadn’t been properly diagnosed.
Kurt also became combative and paranoid. Police were called to the home he shared with Courtney Love in Seattle several times. On at least one occasion, he’d locked himself in a room with his gun collection and was threatening to do harm to himself.
On March 4, 1994, there was a botched suicide attempt at the Westin Excelsior in Rome. After writing a suicide note, he wolfed down a bottle of Rohypnol chased with a bottle of Champagne. Only quick action by Courtney saved his life. Family, friends, business associates, and bandmates then held an intervention in late March, convincing Kurt that he needed to go to rehab. He reluctantly agreed.
Cobain’s paranoia had been increasing for weeks. Because his gun collection had been seized by police, on the day he was to leave for rehab in California, he had his best friend, Dylan Carlson, legally purchase a new 20-gauge Remington C-11 shotgun and a box of shells at Stan’s Gun Shop for $303.17.
Kurt lasted two days in rehab before walking away. On the flight home, he encountered Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses who noted that Kurt seemed to be in really bad shape. He then dropped out of sight, invisible to even a private detective who was hired to find him. Meanwhile, there were reports of being seen at various locations around Seattle.
Then came the morning of April 8, 1994.
The Kurt-was-murdered theories erupted immediately. He needed to die because he was about to break up Nirvana. A divorce from Courtney was imminent, so he had to be killed. Hadn’t Courtney asked around for a hitman who would do the deed? Who was supposedly using his credit card after he died? The handwriting on the suicide note was inconsistent and therefore fake. The toxicology report showed that he had lethal amounts of drugs in his system, making him incapable of shooting up, putting away his syringe kit, loading the gun, and pulling the trigger. Didn’t it look like someone had combed his hair when the cops found him? Where were his fingerprints on the gun? And so forth.
Super-suspicious, right? Not really. A lot of these theories have been embellished in the telling and re-telling.
- Kurt was worth more to everyone alive than dead. Calling an end to Nirvana might have been annoying to his bandmates and record label, but groups break up all the time. Nirvana had been in a precarious position for years. A breakup was inevitable.
- If Courtney wanted him dead, why did she do everything she could to keep him alive? She called the cops when he threatened to shoot himself. She called an ambulance when he overdosed in Rome. She was the prime organizer of the intervention. If she was looking to make off with Kurt’s fortune (as some insist), she had a funny way of showing it.
- The credit card? Couldn’t Kurt have given his MasterCard to some sketchy friend? It’s interesting that whoever used it tried to get some cash advances, all of which were refused for security reasons.
- The suicide note was written when Kurt was extremely high, which accounts for the change in handwriting. And why in different colours of ink? Kurt was also a visual artist. Perhaps he wanted his final work to look pretty.
- The toxicology report has been misinterpreted by non-medical people. Yes, if you read the numbers one way, something known as a “free morphine count,” it looks like Kurt had 12 times the lethal amount of drugs in his system at the moment he died. But the numbers represent “total morphine count,” which describes how much morphine had cumulatively built up in his system through months and months of heroin use. Guess which one is cheaper and quicker to administer by a coroner, as is typical in drug overdose adjacent deaths like this? Yep: the free morphine count. Kurt was high but not so high that he couldn’t shoot up, put away his drug paraphernalia, load the gun, and then shoot himself.
And don’t you think that if Kurt had been murdered, everyone close to him, his mother and father, his sister, friends, bandmates, management — everyone — would want the King County Police Department to get to the bottom of the case? Wouldn’t a cop love to be the one who cracked the case no one else could? Funny how they’ve all accepted the obvious.
Other people have tried to find a crime here. In April 2014, a detective on the Seattle police force specializing in cold cases named Mike Ciesynkski reviewed the file and even released new information and photos, including of the position of Kurt’s body. Consulting with a firearms expert determined that there was nothing weird about were the spent shell landed or the position of the gun relative to the body.
The conclusion delivered by this 20-year vet? “The investigation on the death of Kurt Cobain, which was conducted 20 years ago, reached the correct conclusion that the manner of death was suicide.”
In 2021, the FBI made their file on Kurt available. It was all of 10 pages long and revealed… exactly nothing new. And following these new allegations, the Medical Examiner’s Office for King County released a statement.
“King County Medical Examiner’s Office worked with the local law enforcement agency, conducted a full autopsy, and followed all of its procedures in coming to the determination of the manner of death as a suicide,” the statement read. “Our office is always open to revisiting its conclusions if new evidence comes to light, but we’ve seen nothing to date that would warrant re-opening of this case and our previous determination of death.”
As for the Seattle PD, they say “Our detective concluded that he died by suicide, and this continues to be the position held by this department.”
And let me add this: In addition to researching everything about Kurt’s death since that day, I’ve had plenty of personal dealings with Courtney over the years. I’ve been over to her house for a Sunday morning visit. There were pictures of Kurt everywhere. She loved him and he loved her. And as for unfounded ridiculous rumours that she was somehow involved in being trafficked by the CIA, all I can say is get a life. That’s so out on the fringe that it exists in the Oort Cloud.
Kurt Cobain died tragically at his own hand. No amount of insane conspiracy talk is going to changed that.
For my full examination of Kurt’s death where I debunk every single conspiracy theory, check out this episode of my podcast, Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. Save your complaints, too. You won’t change my mind.
