by Max Wallace
Terry was initially reported shot by two men after stopping to help a stranded motorist on an interstate ramp. Eric Smiley and Quentin Ervin were charged with Terry’s murder. Both insisted in their statements that they didn’t know Terry was a police officer and had shot him in self-defense when he took out a gun.
But when the case went to court eighteen months later, some curious details were made public for the first time. Witnesses testified that Detective Terry had not stopped to help a stranded motorist as was first reported, but had been deliberately flagged down by Smiley and Ervin as he turned onto the exit. As he stepped from the car, they shot him. Terry managed to shoot one of the suspects, get back in the car, drive to Seattle’s South Precinct and make a statement about the incident before bleeding to death. In it, he described hearing one of the shooters say, “He’s a cop,” despite the fact that he was in civilian clothes and an unmarked car. Clearly, the two were lying in wait to ambush Terry as he turned off his regular exit to go home.
But that wasn’t the only anomaly revealed at trial. Defense attorneys claimed that Terry’s personnel records had been altered after his death to bolster the prosecutors’ contention that the detective was on duty when he was shot. Terry’s original checkout time of 1:15A.M. was changed to 1:45A.M. so that it would look as if he were still on duty when he was murdered at 1:30A.M. The Washington State Patrol crime laboratory analyzed Terry’s checkout sheet and concluded that it had been altered in six places. In Washington State, killing an on-duty police officer is an aggravating factor that automatically calls for life imprisonment upon conviction. Sergeant Donald Cameron—at that time still perceived as a beacon of integrity—happened to be the lead homicide detective in the Terry case. The SPD never determined who was responsible, and no officer was ever disciplined for the offense.
Grant says that, because of the unlikely combination of circumstances, he doubts that Antonio Terry’s death is connected to the Cobain case but doesn’t rule out the possibility entirely. “There certainly are a lot of strange coincidences,” he says.
Although no evidence linking Courtney to Terry’s murder has ever been presented, an intriguing fact was unearthed byNewsweek correspondent Melissa Rossi: at the time of his death, Terry happened to be investigating the source of the heroin found in Kurt’s bloodstream when he died.
While working on her Courtney Love biography,Queen of Noise, two years later, Rossi told Courtney what she had learned about Terry’s involvement in the Cobain investigation. And, although there was no suggestion of a connection between this investigation and Terry’s subsequent murder, Courtney, with no explanation, told Rossi that she “felt responsible” for Detective Terry’s death. She has never elaborated. However, we have learned that Courtney quietly paid a significant amount of money to Terry’s widow in 1994.
11
During the course of our investigation into Kurt Cobain’s world, we had encountered a fair amount of darkness, from the kids in his birthplace who dreamed only of getting wasted, to the serial overdoses in his last hometown. We had learned ugly things about Courtney, rock and roll, and love gone bad. But nothing was to prepare us for our meeting with a smirking rocker who all but boasted of having killed Cobain.
The bizarre series of events that led to this encounter began in 1996 while we were still researching our first book. There was a report out of Los Angeles that a musician named Eldon Hoke claimed Courtney Love had offered him $50,000 to kill her husband. We immediately flew to Los Angeles to meet with Hoke and check out his story.
He did not make a good first impression. Disheveled, drunk and somewhat pathetic, he looked more like a street person than a hired killer, and our first instinct told us we had made the trip for nothing. Still, we listened to his story because Hoke’s background was intriguing.
In 1977, while attending Seattle’s Roosevelt High School, Eldon Hoke had formed a band called the Mentors with two school friends, Eric Carlson and Steve Broy. In the beginning, the band played a primitive version of heavy metal influenced by the punk ideals emerging out of the American music underground at the time. Before long, they had raunched up their act considerably. Hoke, the band’s singer/drummer, took on the stage name “El Duce,” and the Mentors became notorious for their offensive, sexually explicit lyrics and obscene onstage antics, which included go-go dancers and sex toys. Members of the band sported black executioner hoods onstage. Among the Mentors’ repertoire were such ditties as “Donkey Dick,” “When You’re Horny You’re Horny” and “All Women Are Insane.” Their timing couldn’t have been better. Their young audience, appalled by the prevailing politically correct sensibility, hailed the Mentors, and a new genre of music—porn metal—was born.
The band had a huge cult following in the Pacific Northwest and soon signed their first record deal with Mystic Records. In Aberdeen, a teenage Krist Novoselic even played bass under the stage name “Phil Atio” in a Mentors cover band started by members of the Melvins. In the early eighties, Hoke and the Mentors relocated to Los Angeles, where they soon became a fixture on the ’80s L.A. underground music scene, notorious for their wild on-and off-stage debauchery. Their fame reached its zenith in 1985 when, at a Senate hearing on obscenity in rock and roll, Tipper Gore named the Mentors as its very worst exponents and recited the lyrics to the band’s song “Golden Showers”: “Bend up and smell my anal vapors,” Mrs. Gore memorably read out loud to the staid assembly of U.S. Senators. “Your face will be my toilet paper.”
It was in Los Angeles during the late ’80s that Eldon Hoke and Courtney Love crossed paths for the first time. Around 1987, Mentors guitarist Eric Carlson (a.k.a. Sickie Wifebeater) began to date Carolyn Rue, the drummer for an L.A. band called the Omelettes. Two years later, Courtney recruited Rue to play drums for her new band Hole.
Mentors bassist Steve Broy (a.k.a. Dr. Heathen Scum) recalls the scene: “Carolyn had already broken up with Sickie, and I hadn’t seen her for a while. I think they had an acrimonious breakup. Then I ran into her at some club, and I remember her telling me that she had just joined this band called Hole and she was quite excited about it. We were talking, and she said she needed a roommate, so we moved in together. That’s when El would have known Courtney, during that period when Carolyn lived with me. He already knew Carolyn very well from when she was dating Sickie. We used to tour a lot in the old days with Courtney’s old boyfriend Rozz Rezabek’s band, but I don’t know if El ever met her back then.”
By this time, Hoke was better known in the L.A. music scene for his alcoholic binges and drunken antics than for his music. As El Duce’s drinking started affecting the band’s live performances, Mentors bookings began to drop off significantly. By 1993, Hoke had taken to hanging out at the Rock Shop, a West Hollywood music store, where he did odd jobs and waited around for Mentors fans to drift in and offer to buy him a drink. It was there one evening around New Year’s Eve 1993 that Hoke claims Courtney Love asked him to kill Kurt Cobain.
It was at the Rock Shop that we first met Hoke in February 1996. Reeking of alcohol, the burly musician told us of Courtney’s queenlike arrival at the dingy establishment: “She got out of a limo, came walking up to where I was standing and said, ‘El, my old man’s been a real asshole lately. I need you to blow his fucking head off.’ ”
Hoke asked her if she was serious.
“I’m as serious as a heart attack,” Courtney allegedly replied. “I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars to do it. I’ll fly you up to Seattle and tell you what to do.”
They talked for about fifteen minutes, Hoke said, while Courtney outlined her plan to have him stage the killing to look like a suicide.
“She said she’d even give me a blow job if I did it. I said, ‘Forget the blow job, just give me the money.’ She asked me where she could reach me, and I told her I take my messages at the Rock Shop. We went inside and got her a business card, and I said, ‘You can reach me here.’ ”
As we talked, a short, dark-haired man was stan
ding behind the counter serving customers. Hoke pointed to him and said, “That’s Sep. He was there that day.” The man was Karush Sepedjian, manager of the Rock Shop. He said he remembered Courtney’s visit as if it were yesterday: “I remember Courtney pulls up in this limo,” he recalls. “She starts talking to El in front of the store, and my counter is right near the door so I could hear part of the conversation. She said to him, ‘Look, can you handle doing this, can you get this done? What do you want for it?’ They were talking about Kurt Cobain. Then they come into the store, and El whispers to me that she just offered him fifty thousand dollars to get rid of her old man. He was pretty excited. ‘Courtney tells me she’ll be calling me soon,’ and she left.”
Sepedjian—who claims he was friends with Courtney when she lived in Los Angeles years earlier—said that when the two didn’t hear from Courtney again, they decided her request had been a joke. Then, one day in late March 1994, Sepedjian received a call: “Courtney phoned looking for El. At the time, he was out on tour with his band. I told her I didn’t know where to reach him. She was all frantic. She says, ‘I need to talk to him. He’s got a job to do.’ I told her I had no idea, and she starts screaming at me. I told her I’ve got a business to run, and I hung up.”
As he spoke, we eyed the yellowing concert posters, the hash pipes and the general sleaziness of our surroundings. Somewhere, surely, there had to be a better source than these two guys, we thought. Later, after Hoke had left, we made the trek to the Rock Shop once again to question the marginally less weird Sepedjian alone. Why, we asked him, did he think Courtney would have approached somebody like Hoke to kill her husband? Why not a professional hit man?
“Everybody thinks he’s crazy,” he replied. “He’s also got a reputation that he’ll do anything for a buck.”
Witness or no witness, it was difficult for us to take anything Hoke said seriously. We had even resolved not to use his bizarre claim in our book. Then we received a call from Santina Leuci, the producer ofHard Copy, which was then America’s best-known tabloid TV show. She wanted us to appear with Tom Grant and Eldon Hoke in a segment about the Cobain murder theory. Grant refused outright, saying he did not participate in tabloid television. For our part, we feared that appearing with Hoke might jeopardize the credibility of our case. But when Leuci told us the show’s attorneys had agreed to clear Hoke’s appearance only if he passed a credible polygraph exam, we decided to accept her invitation—provided Hoke passed the lie detector test.
Hard Copyspared no expense. At their attorneys’ insistence, they hired America’s leading polygraph examiner, Dr. Edward Gelb, who is known as a pioneer in the field and at the time was the instructor for the FBI’s advanced polygraph course. Shortly before O. J. Simpson was arrested for allegedly killing his wife, Simpson’s attorney F. Lee Bailey had Gelb administer a polygraph on his client. Simpson reportedly failed the test quite badly, although Bailey would later claim he stopped the test midway through “because of Simpson’s emotional state.”
After administering Hoke’s polygraph on March 6, 1996, Gelb concluded that his story was “completely truthful.” To the question, “Did Courtney Love ask you to kill Kurt Cobain?” Hoke’s positive response showed a 99.91 percent certainty that he was telling the truth. According to Dr. Gelb, that score falls into the category “beyond possibility of deception.” When the question was repeated, Hoke’s response scored exactly the same.
We asked Gelb about the common belief that psychopaths and sociopaths can beat a polygraph. “That’s a myth,” he replied, explaining that a recent British Columbia study had shown the polygraph was actuallymore accurate when testing such people. Gelb said that many of the misconceptions about the polygraph stemmed from its earliest days, when the technology was much less sophisticated. Today, when conducted by a qualified examiner, the test is so accurate that its results are now being accepted in many court jurisdictions throughout the United States.
The results of Hoke’s polygraph exam were too compelling to ignore. On March 6, 1996, one of Hoke’s friends took it upon himself to call the Seattle Police Department and report the test’s findings. For once, it seems, the SPD paid attention. We received a call a few days later from a source in the Seattle Police Department telling us that the Cobain case had been reopened for the first time in two years. Hoke’s claim had caused a “flurry of activity,” our source said, adding that if the story could be proven, it might be enough to have Courtney charged with conspiracy to commit murder—the usual charge for attempting to hire a hit man. Curiously enough, Sergeant Cameron denied the Cobain case had been reopened when a reporter asked him about it the same week.
Years later, an updated set of police reports we obtained under Washington State’s Freedom of Information laws revealed that the Cobain file had indeed been reopened when word of Hoke’s polygraph test came out—but only under barely concealed duress. A heavily blacked-out March 7 memo from Sergeant Cameron to his superior, Lieutenant Al Gerdes, mentions Tom Grant, who “currently has some type of dog and pony show touring the country with the bottom line being Courtney killed, or had killed, her loving husband Kurt Cobain.” Cameron, citing Hoke’s polygraph results, goes on to note that a detective named Ila is going to “follow up on this information and I believe we will also have to look into it.” He concludes by advising Lieutenant Gerdes to “please make yourself familiar with all aspects of this investigation.”
But after that there is nothing. Nowhere in the file is there any indication that the SPD followed up on Hoke’s claim. In fact, when Hoke’s friend first phoned the SPD about the polygraph test, he was brushed off with an instruction to relay the information to the Los Angeles Police Department. The SPD seems then to have sat on their hands waiting for the LAPD to investigate. Hoke said he contacted police in Seattle and Los Angeles offering to provide a statement but never heard back from either force.
We had approached the Eldon Hoke issue with the idea that he and Sepedjian had concocted the story for some sort of monetary gain, or for Hoke to reattain the kind of fame he had once enjoyed as the target of Tipper Gore’s antiobscenity crusade. Yet Hoke had never asked for money to tell his story, even whenHard Copy —a program with a reputation for paying sources—called for an interview. Tom Grant was skeptical himself: “At first, I thought maybe Courtney put them up to it to set me up. I would start talking about these guys as proof and then they would come out and say they made the whole story up. I would then be discredited and have no more credibility.” But after Hoke passed his polygraph, neither we nor Grant knew what to make of it.
“I called up the examiner, Dr. Gelb, and asked him if he thought there was a possibility that Hoke had somehow fooled the polygraph,” Grant recalls. “After all, these things aren’t a hundred percent foolproof. He told me, ‘Notthis guy.’ ”
Even if Hoke’s story is true, it would not prove that Courtney killed her husband, but it would certainly prove intent. Still, Hoke himself did not commit the crime. His story left a gaping void.
By this point, our investigation had taken us to a dark place where rock-and-roll intersects crime. We had interviewed a bizarre cast of characters that included junkies, hit men in waiting, musicians who dressed as executioners and an assortment of other lowlifes. We had met sources in drug dens, back alleys, county jails and some of America’s sleaziest bars. We were pursuing an alleged murderer. Our friends and family constantly asked if we were afraid. If we got too close to fingering the person who murdered Kurt, couldn’t we be a potential target? they asked.
We pooh-poohed the suggestion. No one would target us, we countered, because it would attract too much suspicion. Never once, as we pursued our story, did we believe we were in any danger. And then the story of Eldon Hoke took an unexpected twist.
A few months after our first encounter with Hoke, we received a phone call from the British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who said he was thinking of doing a documentary for the BBC about the Cobain murder theory and wished
to hire us as consultants. At the time, Broomfield—dubbed “Britain’s Michael Moore” for his in-your-face interviewing technique—was one of the world’s leading documentary filmmakers, known for controversial films on topics as diverse as neo-Nazi politicians, Margaret Thatcher and female serial killers.
In March 1997, Broomfield flew us to Seattle for a week of filming, during which we shared some of our own findings and named some of the characters we had interviewed for our forthcoming book. Among them was Eldon Hoke, whom Broomfield was determined to interview when he headed to California.
A month later, we learned that Eldon Hoke’s mangled body had been found on a train track in the dingy working-class city of Riverside, California. Nick Broomfield had interviewed him only a week before his death and had just heard the news himself. “What’s going on? Should I be afraid?” Broomfield asked us. “Do you think Courtney had anything to do with it?” At that point, we weren’t sure what to answer, knowing nothing of the circumstances of Hoke’s death.
But two months later, we received a call from yet another veteran L.A. punk musician. Brent Alden (a.k.a. Brent Aldo), former leader of the band False Alarm, told us that two nights before Hoke was killed (in fact, it was the night before), the Mentors had played a gig at Al’s Bar in downtown Los Angeles. Alden, who was writing a book about the L.A. punk scene, had interviewed Hoke before the show and found him unaccountably agitated: “Duce was acting very freaked out. He had heard that he might be in danger, and he asked me if I knew where he could get a fake driver’s license. I asked him why and he said, ‘People get buried in cornfields, people get lost in swamps.’ I asked him what he was talking about. He said he had recently been told who killed Kurt Cobain, and he was super-paranoid. I knew all about the thing where he said he was offered $50,000, but he said this was different.”