Love & Death

by Max Wallace

  Geberth’s words may or may not explain the unusual series of events that took place on March 18, 1994—roughly two weeks before Kurt died. On that day, police received a 911 call from Courtney stating that her husband had locked himself in a room with a gun and was threatening to kill himself.

  When police arrived at the Lake Washington estate, they did indeed find Kurt locked in a room. However, according to the police report, when he opened the door, Kurt immediately told the officers that he had actually locked himself in “to keep away from Courtney.” He insisted that he wasn’t suicidal and he didn’t want to hurt himself. And, contrary to what his wife had reported in her 911 call, he had no gun.

  When the officers questioned Courtney about her phone call, she was forced to admit that she “did not see him with a gun, and he did not say he was going to kill himself.” When he had locked himself in the room and refused to open the door, she said, “knowing that he had access to guns, she contacted 911 for his safety and well-being.” Just to be safe, the officers confiscated four guns from the house, a box of ammunition and a bottle of Kurt’s stomach medication pills.

  Two weeks later, of course, Courtney would file another false police report, the missing person’s report in which she claimed to be Kurt’s mother, Wendy O’Connor. Here, too, she mentioned guns and suicide, reporting that Kurt “bought a shotgun and may be suicidal.”

  Could these two false police reports have been an attempt to lay a “suicide trail”? If so, it was remarkably effective. In the SPD incident report, filed the day Kurt’s body was found, the first officer on the scene described the death as a “suicide” and told homicide detectives that he was aware Cobain’s “family had filed a missing person’s report with SPD. The family’s fear was that the victim was suicidal, and he had recently bought a shotgun.”

  Grant has absolutely no doubt about Courtney’s intentions. “Of course she was trying to plant an official trail showing Kurt was suicidal before his death,” Grant says. “Just look at her actions. She filed not one, but two false police reports less than two weeks before his death. Each mentioned suicide, each mentioned a gun. Why else would she do that? Why did she lie to the police? She did the same with me when she hired me. She kept telling me that he was suicidal, he had bought a shotgun and that ‘everyone expects him to die.’ The problem is that when I spoke to those who knew him best, they all told me the same thing: that he wasn’t suicidal, and that he loved guns, so the fact that he bought a shotgun wasn’t at all evidence that he planned to kill himself.”

  We found exactly the same thing when we spent a month in Seattle in December 1995. For more than a year, the media had been painting Kurt as a depressed, self-loathing, suicidal junkie who had finally succumbed to the demons that had been haunting him for years.

  For weeks, we interviewed Seattle musicians, drug dealers and others who had inhabited the outer fringes of Kurt’s world. Although some described him as “moody,” “morose” or “antisocial,” no one believed he was suicidal. Most agreed he was a changed man after Frances Bean was born. But how well did any of these people really know Kurt? Most were nodding acquaintances at best; some probably exaggerated their friendship. Nobody seemed particularly qualified to talk about Kurt’s state of mind at the time of his death. As a result, we were determined to land an interview with the person who is said to have known Kurt best, his closest friend, Dylan Carlson. At the time, Ian Halperin was a professional musician. A former member of his band, Casio, a Bulgarian who had moved to Seattle a year earlier, told us he was friends with Dylan and could probably arrange a meeting.

  They were getting together to jam over the weekend, and Casio promised that if we dropped by, he would introduce us. At the time, the twenty-six-year-old Dylan was the leader of Earth, a struggling Seattle “ambient metal” band, which had been signed to the Sub Pop label a few years earlier.

  At the appointed time, we arrived at an address in Seattle’s university district where the jam session was scheduled to take place. If Stephen King had ever written a novel about the grunge scene, he would have set it in this house—a three-story Gothic Victorian, which, from the outside, looked as if it had seen its share of ghosts. Inside, it didn’t take us long to figure out that the house was a “shooting gallery”—a location where junkies come to buy heroin and shoot up. All over the house, strung-out addicts were plopped on couches and threadbare mattresses. We found Ian’s musician friend Casio in the basement, banging away on a set of old Tama drums, while Dylan Carlson jammed along on a beat-up Fender guitar. A few minutes later, they took a break, and Casio introduced us as his friends from Montreal. To explain the video camera, we told Dylan that we were shooting a documentary on the decline of the Seattle scene. (At the time, we were indeed planning to produce a documentary.) We didn’t mention Kurt Cobain or that we knew Dylan was his best friend. It was Dylan who eventually raised the subject. Once he did, he was all too willing to discuss his old friend and the circumstances behind Kurt’s death. He talked to us at length that day and at a subsequent meeting.

  They had met in Olympia a few years earlier, Dylan explained, and soon became the best of friends, even though they were very different in many ways. We asked him to give us an example.

  “Well, for one thing, I’m a Republican. I was a big fan of [the elder] George Bush; I liked what he stood for. Kurt couldn’t stand him. He really liked Clinton.” Indeed, Kurt was widely credited with helping Clinton win the presidency in 1992 by convincing a generation of young Americans to vote for the sax-playing Democrat. Later, Chelsea Clinton was said to be a huge Nirvana fan.

  After touching on Kurt’s drug habit (“He didn’t do as many drugs as people think”), Courtney Love (“I only met her the day before their wedding in Hawaii when I was the best man…. I always got along pretty well with Courtney…. She pays my rent sometimes…. She bailed me out of jail when I got arrested for drugs”), and his love for guns (“I can’t stand that whole gun control crowd”), Dylan finally came around to the subject of Kurt’s final days.

  “You know, I’m the one who bought him the gun,” he told us casually. When we ask why, he explains, “He had a robbery or something, and he said he needed it for protection. He wanted me to buy it because the cops had recently confiscated all his guns, and he was afraid they would take it away again if it was in his name. I think he was also kind of afraid of stalkers. His hero was John Lennon, you know, and Mia [Seattle punk rocker Mia Zapata] was murdered the year before, so I guess he had his reasons.”

  Wasn’t Kurt known to be suicidal? Hadn’t he already attempted to kill himself in Rome the month before?

  “At the time, Kurt definitely wasn’t suicidal or I would never have bought the gun,” he insists. “He was my best friend, so I would have known if Rome was a suicide. No way. A year earlier, I would have believed it because of the pain, but he wasn’t talking like that anymore. He was making all kinds of plans for when he got back from rehab.”

  The comments echoed what Dylan had told a reporter from theSeattle Post-Intelligencer a week after Kurt’s death: “Kurt was facing lots of pretty heavy things, but he was actually pretty upbeat. He was prepared to deal with things facing him…. Kurt just wanted to make music, and he didn’t want to do the grind.”

  Dylan also told us that he and Kurt “used to go shooting together all the time, just targets and stuff. Kurt didn’t like to hunt. We’d go into the woods and shoot at tin cans.”

  Kurt had toldRolling Stone ’s David Fricke roughly the same thing a few months before his death: “I like guns. I just enjoy shooting them…when we go out into the woods, at a shooting range. It’s not an official shooting range…there’s a really big cliff so there’s no chance of shooting over the cliff and hurting someone.”

  Kurt told Fricke that he didn’t think it was dangerous to have guns in the house: “It’s protection. I don’t have bodyguards. There are people way less famous than I am, or Courtney, who have been stalked and murdered. Look, I
’m not a very physical person. I wouldn’t be able to stop an intruder who had a gun or a knife…. It’s for protection reasons. And sometimes, it’s fun to go out and shoot…. It’s the only sport I have ever liked.”

  Yet despite Kurt’s professed penchant for guns and his obsession with protecting his family, Courtney continuously cited his purchase of the shotgun as evidence that he was planning to kill himself during the week he was missing.

  When Fricke interviewed Courtney forRolling Stone in December 1994, he reminded her of his interview with Kurt a year earlier: “When I pointedly asked him about guns in our interview, he started talking about target practice.”

  Courtney responded: “He totally fucking lied to you. He never went shooting in his life. One time he said, ‘I’m going shooting.’ Yeah. Shooting what? He never even made it to the range.”

  Why Kurt had Dylan buy a gun for him on March 30, the day he left for rehab, is one of the enduring mysteries in the case. The shotgun Dylan purchased was a Remington Model 11 20-gauge, “set up for light load.” Kurt had told Dylan that he was afraid of intruders and that there had recently been a number of trespassers on the grounds of his Lake Washington home. His choice of gun would seem to confirm this. Setting up a shotgun for light load is what gun dealers often recommend to their clients for home protection because a bullet shot in one room won’t penetrate walls and endanger those on the other side. Moreover, it is clear that both Kurt and Courtney were indeed concerned about protecting their home from intruders during this period because they had just contracted Veca Electric to install a complete home security system. (It was an electrician from this company who discovered Kurt’s body on April 8.)

  But the best indication that Kurt had purchased the shotgun for protection rather than to kill himself is the fact that, when police found the gun, it had been loaded with three cartridges, including the one that killed him. Why would Kurt load three cartridges in the gun if he intended to shoot himself in the mouth? Surely one would do.

  Yet by the time the police reports were made available, these and other arcane details of the case were deemed insignificant. After all, Kurt was said to have barricaded himself inside his room. What’s more, as Courtney said, Kurt had already tried to kill himself in Rome a month earlier. He had even left a note, she said. Nobody had any reason to doubt her word.

  To establish what really happened in Rome, it is crucial to distinguish between contemporary accounts and Courtney Love’s more widely reported version of the events, published after Kurt’s death.

  We know for certain that the day after Nirvana’s March 1 Munich concert, Kurt saw a doctor, who diagnosed him with bronchitis and recommended he take two months off from touring. The next day, March 3, Kurt flew to Rome, where he was meeting Courtney and Frances Bean, who were flying in from London. Kurt checked in to Suite 541 of Rome’s five-star Excelsior Hotel to await their arrival. Around late afternoon, Courtney arrived at the hotel with Frances Bean and Cali Dewitt. Little is known about what happened during the interval, but sometime between 6:00 and 6:30A.M. the next day the Excelsior front desk received a call from Courtney requesting an ambulance. When paramedics arrived, they found Kurt unconscious and rushed him to Rome’s Umberto I Polyclinic hospital, where his stomach was pumped.

  Twenty hours later, Kurt awoke at Rome’s American Hospital, where he had been transferred at Courtney’s request. The next day, his doctor, Osvaldo Galletta, held a press conference to announce that Kurt was recovering from a “pharmacological coma, due not to narcotics, but the combined effect of alcohol and tranquilizers that had been medically prescribed by a doctor.” It wasn’t until ANSA, Italy’s national press agency, named the tranquilizers that people began to ask questions.

  Kurt was reported to have mixed champagne with a prescription tranquilizer called Rohypnol. In Rome, this drug is most commonly known as a sedative or sleeping pill, so the disclosure didn’t attract much attention. But in the United States, Rohypnol was already better known by its sinister nickname: “The Date Rape Drug.” On university campuses in particular, the tranquilizer had become notorious for its use as an illicit means of sexual conquest. Dropped in someone’s drink, the odorless pill dissolves quickly and can rapidly induce a blackout or decrease in resistance. On awakening, the victim is often unable to remember what happened. Police departments all over the United States were reporting women waking up naked in frat houses or unfamiliar surroundings, the victims of sexual assault while under the influence of the drug. In 1996 alone, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency reported more than a thousand such cases nationwide. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Rohypnol, particularly when mixed with alcohol or other drugs, may lead to respiratory depression, aspiration and even death.

  Could somebody have dropped an incapacitating dose of Rohypnol into Kurt’s drink without his knowledge? That’s exactly what Tom Grant speculates: “I think that Courtney mixed Rohypnol into Kurt’s drink to induce an overdose. I firmly believe this was her first attempt to kill him.”

  Boosting Grant’s theory, it was later reported that the Rohypnol was in fact Courtney’s prescription, not Kurt’s. After his death, the British music magazineSelect reported that one of its journalists interviewed Courtney in her London hotel room on March 3, hours before she flew to Rome to join Kurt. One passage in the article seems eerily significant:

  There is a box of Rohypnol on the big mahogany table in the middle of Courtney Love’s London hotel room, among the scattered papers and cigarette boxes. “Look, I know this is a controlled substance,” she smiles as she empties one of those fizzy stomach upset powders into a tumbler of water and washes back a Rohypnol. “I got it from my doctor. It’s like Valium.”

  After Kurt’s death, when Courtney claimed for the first time that Rome had been a failed suicide attempt, the tranquilizers figured prominently in stories she told about the incident. According to her version, she had “retrieved two empty blister packs of Rohypnol next to Kurt—he had taken sixty of the aspirin-size pills, individually removing each from a plastic-and-foil container.” She later toldRolling Stone, “I can see how it happened. He took fifty fucking pills.”

  Of course, if Kurt had really taken fifty or sixty Rohypnol pills, it would prove that Rome was indeed a suicide attempt. However, there is not a single witness who actually saw the empty Rohypnol packets—not the paramedics, nor any hotel official. The media and biographers have simply accepted Courtney’s version of the incident as the truth.

  When we interviewed Dr. Osvaldo Galletta, the doctor who treated Kurt after his overdose, he vehemently denied that Kurt had taken the massive quantity of Rohypnol described by Courtney. Neither did he believe that Kurt’s overdose was deliberate. “We can usually tell a suicide attempt,” he told us. “This didn’t look like one to me. He mixed tranquilizers and alcohol and when you do that, you’re playing with fire.” After Kurt’s death, Dr. Galletta told reporters, “The last image I have of him, which in the light of the tragedy now seems pathetic, is of a young man playing with the little girl [Frances]. He did not seem like a young man who wanted to end it all.”

  Galletta’s doubts and the absence of witnesses would all be irrelevant if Kurt really left a suicide note in Rome. And it appears to have been Courtney’s revelation about the note that convinced the press and public that Rome had been a suicide attempt. But, as we heard Courtney tell Grant, the letter Kurt left her doesn’t appear to have been a suicide note at all, but a husband’s declaration of independence from a wife he detests. In it, as Courtney confessed to Grant, Kurt wrote that he was leaving her: “It’s not very nice. It’s mean to me…. It wasn’t really nice. It talked about getting a divorce.” The one part of the note that might be reasonably construed as referring to suicide—where Kurt declares he is “choosing death”—is lifted entirely out of context.

  Even members of the Seattle Police Department who saw the Rome letter didn’t believe it was a suicide note. According to one SPD source who is c
ritical of his department’s investigation, “Love gave us another note which she said Kurt had written in Rome. She said it was a suicide note, but it wasn’t. It was a rambling letter which was very unflattering to her. There are some veiled references which you’d have to stretch to conclude referred to suicide.”

  At the time of Kurt’s Rome overdose, Geffen Records itself issued a statement declaring that Kurt’s mixing of alcohol and tranquilizers “was definitely not a suicide attempt—it was strictly accidental.” But perhaps the most significant public statement about the Rome incident may be that of Janet Billig, the spokesperson for Nirvana’s management company, Gold Mountain. Billig toldRolling Stone—after Kurt’s death—that she had talked to Kurt about the note in Rome and “Kurt insisted it was not a suicide note. He just took all of his and Courtney’s money and was going to run away and disappear.” This would appear to confirm what Courtney told Tom Grant on April 3, that in the note, Kurt “says he’s leaving me.” In light of this revelation, it is especially interesting to read what Courtney toldSelect magazine while Kurt was still in the Rome hospital recovering from his coma: “If he thinks he can get away from me that easily, he can forget it. I’ll follow him through hell.”

  In Charles Cross’sHeavier Than Heaven, Rosemary Carroll reveals a crucial piece of the chronological puzzle for the first time. She had already made it clear to Tom Grant that Kurt wanted a divorce from Courtney but had never told him precisely when Kurt first made his intentions known. Cross supplies the missing data: on March 1 in Munich shortly before going on stage for his last concert, and two days before he met up with Courtney in Rome.

  Backstage, he phoned Courtney and their conversation ended in a fight, as had all their talks over the past week. Kurt then called Rosemary Carroll and told her he wanted a divorce.