by Max Wallace
Two years after Lewis first published his essay, Bradley Speers, a twenty-one-year-old Australian pharmacology student, took issue with the findings and published his own scientifically complex rebuttal of Lewis’s theory. One of his central arguments was that Kurt might not have taken the entire massive dose of heroin all at once, but that the blood morphine levels had become elevated as a result of repeated injections throughout the day. Kurt, after all, was a junkie who would have shot up every few hours during the normal course of a day. Therefore, Speers believes that there has perhaps been too much emphasis placed on Cobain’s blood morphine level of 1.52 milligrams per liter.
“It may be possible,” he writes, “that there was a reasonable level of morphine present in his blood before a final injection, and thus its effects are less pronounced.”
But, according to Denise Marshall, this argument just doesn’t stand up under scientific scrutiny. “First of all, when you are a junkie and you have a tolerance, it means your liver has become very smart,” she explains. “The way you get that tolerance is from doing it a lot, and your liver says, ‘I know that a big blast of heroin is coming soon because it does every four hours, so I’ve got to process what I have or I’m going to die when the next blast comes.’ That’s the same way you develop a tolerance to alcohol. That’s why, when you see people who can drink you under the table, it means their liver processes the alcohol faster than yours does. And the only way that can happen is from using it on a regular basis. So no, it wouldn’t build up in his body. If anything, he would process it quicker than somebody else. I would say that the 1.52 milligrams per liter would have had to represent a dose he took recently, not multiple doses throughout the day.”
Apart from the evidence demonstrating the sheer scientific impossibility of the official verdict, Roger Lewis cites a number of relevant probability studies that he believes further demonstrate the unlikelihood of the suicide scenario. According to one study published in the journalMedicine, Science and Law, 1,862 postmortem examinations of suicides were conducted in northwest London over a twenty-year period. Twenty percent of these suicides resulted from “physical injury,” including gunshot wounds. Yet not a single case involved opiates. In another study of 1,117 suicides in the British county of Avon, fifty-one victims used a shotgun. Again, not a single case involved opiates. Lewis points to these and other studies to demonstrate what he calls the “myth of the suicidal heroin addict.”
In a separate study of 189 cases of fatal self-poisoning with opiates in London between 1975 and 1984, only a single case resulted in a blood morphine level exceeding 1.52 milligrams per liter—or less than 0.53 percent of the cases studied—demonstrating that even when somebody does attempt suicide with a massive dose of opiates, the chances are extremely remote of reaching the levels found in Kurt’s blood.
In his study, Lewis also researched the likelihood of suicide among missing persons, since Kurt had been missing for seven days before his body was found. According to a study cited by Charles O’Hara in his criminology textbookThe Fundamentals of Criminal Investigation, only approximately one in two thousand missing persons cases is found to be a suicide. “To the layman,” O’Hara writes, “the suicide theory is one of the first to suggest itself in a disappearance case. Statistically, however, it can be shown that the odds are greatly against the suicide solution…. A voluntary disappearance is motivated by a desire to escape from some personal, domestic or business conflict…. In the disappearance of approximately 100,000 people annually in this country, it is to be expected that personal violence should play a significant part in some of these cases. Murder, the unspoken fear of the relatives and the police, must always lie in the back of the investigator’s mind as a possible explanation.”
O’Hara also offers investigators some crucial advice that may be particularly relevant in the Cobain case: “Certain combinations of wounds suggest a physical impossibility. To draw a conclusion of suicide, the wounds should be physically not improbable.”
The clincher for Nikolas Hartshorne was the gun in Kurt’s hands. When he arrived at the scene shortly after 10:00A.M. on April 8, the victim was still gripping the shotgun tightly. Before Hartshorne conducted the autopsy—before he even read the note—it was this detail that led him to the conclusion of suicide, he later revealed.
“With gun suicides, you always see the victim still gripping the barrel of the gun,” Hartshorne told us in 1995. “That’s because at the point of death, the hand freezes in place. We literally had to pry that shotgun from Cobain’s hands. You could still see the markings of the gun in his palms from where he had been gripping it for days. That’s a sure sign the wound was self-inflicted. That kind of evidence doesn’t lie.”
Denise Marshall confirms Hartshorne’s explanation—but with one important reservation.
“When you see the hand gripping the gun like that,” she explains, “it’s called a ‘cadaveric spasm.’ You usually see it more when somebody uses a pistol or an automatic weapon, but it can also happen with a shotgun. Let’s say you shoot yourself in the head with a .357 Magnum. When you grip that gun, and you pull the trigger and the bullet rips through your brain, it causes a cadaveric spasm, which is basically instantaneous rigor mortis. And often we find the gun still in the grip of the hand, and even when we remove the gun, the hand is still in the position like it’s holding the gun. That’s from the trauma, the chemicals being released. I worked on this guy recently who shot himself in a truck with a shotgun. He wedged his shotgun between his legs and the truck, and it took his head off completely, but his hands were still wrapped around it.”
Wouldn’t the cadaveric spasm described by Hartshorne, therefore, confirm that Kurt shot himself?
“You’re overlooking the obvious,” Marshall responds. “There’s one other scenario that could easily explain it. From my experience, everything about this case points to a staged scene, somebody trying to make a murder look like a suicide. I think that’s exactly what happened. Cadaveric spasm can still occur in a homicide.”
Indeed, the forensic literature appears to contradict Hartshorne’s assertion that Cobain’s cadaveric spasm conclusively proved he had killed himself. According to the University of Dundee’s Forensic Pathology Wounds Manual, “Occasionally suicide is accomplished with a single stroke and the weapon may be left protruding from the wound. The hand of the decedent may be gripping the weapon in cadaveric spasm; this is proof that the victim was holding the weapon at the time of death and therefore creates a presumption,but not a proof, of suicide.”
Marshall believes somebody gave Kurt an incapacitating dose of heroin that immediately rendered him unconscious. “I think somebody had to have given him an overly pure dose, what’s usually referred to as a ‘hot shot.’ When heroin addicts do heroin, they pretty well know exactly how much they should do. Whenever you see an accidental overdose, it’s usually because they got it from someone else, and they didn’t know how pure it was. With heroin, you normally dilute the purity with some kind of adulterant. Usually you trust that whoever gave you the heroin has already done this. You would never expect to get a pure dose.”
Marshall is particularly suspicious of the Barq’s root beer can found beside Kurt’s body. “The autopsy revealed the presence of Valium in Kurt’s system along with the heroin,” she says. “Somebody could have easily put a large dose of valium in the can. It would have helped incapacitate him a lot quicker than without it. Valium exacerbates the effects of the heroin. It doesn’t look like the police even tested the contents of the can, but they should have.”
Regardless of whether or not the Valium was used to hurry the process, Marshall theorizes that if somebody who knew Cobain gave him an overly pure dose of heroin, they simply had to wait for him to lose consciousness. “Then they could have placed the shotgun in his hands, positioned it in his mouth and pulled the trigger, making the death look like a suicide. At the point of death, his hand would have gripped the shotgun barrel, and you have your
cadaveric spasm.
“Unfortunately, it’s not really very difficult to get away with murder,” Marshall adds, “particularly when the death involves a junkie.”
Vernon Geberth knows a thing or two about getting away with murder. Recently retired as the commanding officer of the Bronx Homicide Task Force, Geberth has personally investigated, supervised, assessed and consulted on more than eight thousand death investigations. Among them, he says, “I can show you a list as long as my arm of murders that were staged to look like suicides.”
According to Geberth, whose criminology textbookPractical Homicide Investigation is considered the bible of homicide detectives, all death investigations should be handled as potential murder cases until the facts prove otherwise. “The issue is not ‘Could this conceivably have been a suicide?’ It is ‘Could this conceivably have been a murder?’ This is the only logical procedure for distinguishing staged murders from suicides. If the police were to assume without further inquiry that an apparent suicide was not murder, then other evidence and leads at the scene would never be followed up and murders would go undetected.”
Like Denise Marshall, Geberth believes the laziness of investigators has made it increasingly easy to make a murder look like suicide. “The presentation of the homicide victim and the manipulation of the crime scene by a clever offender could make the death appear to be a suicide,” he explains. “I have personally investigated many such cases, and the truth of the matter is that initially the cases did look like suicides.”
Geberth cites a particular case he worked on, one that resembles the Cobain case in many respects. In this investigation, he was acting as a consultant for an insurance company that filed a wrongful death suit against a man they believed had actually murdered one of his relatives, whom the authorities claimed had committed suicide.
When police arrived at the scene, the victim was lying on his back in his mobile home with a rifle wedged between his legs, blood and brain matter scattered around the body. After a perfunctory investigation, the police ruled the death a suicide and closed the case.
When Geberth conducted his own investigation, however, he discovered a number of troubling inconsistencies. The deceased was known to keep at least $1,000 cash at home, but police found an empty wallet on the floor of his car and $2.50 in his pockets. What’s more, the victim’s bank account showed he had made a $200 withdrawal from an ATM shortly before his death, but this amount was also missing from his trailer and unaccounted for. Geberth interviewed a neighbor who had stopped by the trailer because of his suspicion “that something wasn’t right.” Geberth observed that the car doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition—unusual for the deceased. Moreover, the door to the trailer was unlocked, the stereo blasting and the thermostat inexplicably set as high as it could go, despite the fact that the deceased reportedly never kept it above 65 degrees. Family members told Geberth the victim’s radar detector, always clipped to his car’s sun visor, was missing, as were a pouch of tools from the rear seat and a gold calculator with the initials of the deceased. Finally, the deceased was known to have made a number of short-and long-term plans just before his death.
Convinced the evidence pointed to foul play, Geberth submitted his findings to the police and suggested they reopen the investigation. They refused to even consider it. The verdict remained suicide.
“Frankly, some cops just don’t want to admit they made a mistake, no matter how compelling the evidence,” Geberth says. “They’re afraid it will reflect badly on their reputation. But the fact is that when you come across an apparent suicide, you have to probe deeper, find out if anybody had a motive, if anybody benefited financially from the death. Then you have to look at the forensics to see whether the medical facts fit the pattern of suicide. Often the perpetrator is counting on the authorities not to do their job. I hate to admit it, but it’s relatively easy to stage a murder to look like suicide and have the crime go undetected. It doesn’t take a genius.”
In his 1975 book,Fundamentals of Criminal Investigation, Charles O’Hara cites a study of forty apparent suicides in which the victims’ skulls had been destroyed by a bullet. “Naturally in such cases,” he writes, “the muzzle of the barrel must be placed directly under the chin or in the mouth. It is not therefore impossible that a murder may be committed in this way, and all the more likely as it lends itself easily to the suspicion of suicide; it is a fair supposition that a person asleep, stupefied, or bound may be thus killed.”
Another study comparing homicides and suicides cited by David Lester in his 1986 book,The Murderer and His Murder, found the typical homicide victim—a man between twenty-five and thirty-four, killed at home with a gun—fits a profile similar to Cobain’s. Lester also reports on a study that found wives killing husbands constituted 41 percent of female murderers and that 85 percent of spousal murders took place in the home. But it is the presence of drugs in Cobain’s system that most closely fits the findings of the study, which concludes, “Narcotics were more likely to be present in the homicides” than in the suicides.
Indeed, says Vernon Geberth, “There is one group above all where you tend to find the most staged crime scenes, and that is in the deaths of junkies. Before I was a homicide investigator, I worked in narcotics. Whenever the authorities arrive at the scene where a junkie has apparently overdosed or committed suicide, they have a tendency to write it off as just another junkie death without properly investigating the circumstances. That’s why it’s easier to murder a junkie and stage the death to look like suicide than it would be in the case of your average upstanding citizen.”
Although statistics about this phenomenon are difficult to come by because so many staged crimes go undetected, one 1971 study is particularly revealing, looking at drug-related deaths in an area where the use of narcotics is known to be especially prevalent—the U.S. military. Two investigators, Colonel Richard Froede and Commodore Charles Stahl, examined 1.3 million surgical and autopsy cases in the files of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology conducted between 1918 and 1970. They detected 174 examples of what they call “fatal narcotism”—cases where military personnel were known to have died from using opiates. Of these, they found a surprisingly high 3.7 percent were actually known homicides—instances where the dead soldiers received an intentional “hot shot” of heroin.
Two decades later, the U.S. military would also become the backdrop for the most important study ever conducted into the phenomenon of staged suicides—a study that provides a cautionary tale for investigators tempted to label a death as an open-and-shut case before investigating all the facts.
In 1993, aPhiladelphia Inquirer reporter named David Zucchino began to probe the deaths of a number of U.S. soldiers ruled suicides by military pathologists. After reviewing thousands of pages of investigative, forensic and autopsy reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Zucchino found not only that the basic facts directly contradicted suicides, but that investigators had lost or carelessly destroyed important evidence, mishandled death weapons, failed to perform routine forensic tests and pursue leads, and filed inaccurate and misleading reports.
In case after case, he found that the victims’ families had challenged the suicide verdicts, only to be accused by military authorities of refusing to face up to the fact that their loved ones had killed themselves.
Among the most glaring examples Zucchino discovered pointing to staged suicides:
In 1989, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) tried to convince Bill and Donna Digman that their son, Marine Captain Jeffrey Digman, had shot himself in the head, even though he would have had to contort himself upside down to produce the bullet’s trajectory. The bullet, moreover, had entered Digman’s head from the right side even though he was left-handed. The family hired a forensics expert, who found injuries on Digman’s body consistent with a struggle and concluded that someone had probably shot Digman and arranged his body to look like suicide.
In 1991, th
e NCIS informed John Sabow that his brother, Col. James Sabow, had shot himself to death in his backyard. John Sabow, a neurosurgeon, was immediately suspicious of the circumstances and hired civilian forensics experts to examine the death records. They concluded that the colonel had been murdered and his body arranged to simulate a suicide.
The same year, the army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CIC) told Sidney and Carlos Wright that their son, Army Specialist Terry Wright, shot himself in the head with a rifle. Yet a perfunctory examination showed that Wright was wearing gloves too thick to fit through the rifle’s trigger housing when he died. Army investigators had discarded evidence, and no fingerprints were even taken from Wright’s gun. When queried by Zucchino, the agent who supervised the investigation admitted that he had serious doubts about the suicide ruling.
In June 1992, the NCIS told Mary Gallagher that her son, seaman apprentice Todd Gallagher, had fallen to his death from a Philadelphia rooftop. However, two civilian doctors and two military medical technicians said they thought Gallagher’s severe head injuries were caused by a beating, not a fall. Gallagher’s shipmates told the NCIS that he had had a drunken argument with sailors from a rival ship hours before he died. Yet the navy still insisted he had committed suicide.