by Everett True
“Here’s where I’m in the picture where I’m not supposed to be,” says Cali. “I was supposed to go down to LA right after him. They’re both in LA, I’m in Seattle, and I decide to stay in Seattle [at the Lake Washington house]. I’m a drug addict, I’m in Seattle – what do I want to come down there for? I’m glad they’re out of the house. Jessica [Hopper] is staying at the house with me [ Cali’s ‘straight edge’ girlfriend had flown out to join him for spring break a couple of days earlier], I’m leaving to go get drugs or go get food or do whatever I do every day. So he runs away from Exodus, and no one knows where he is. Every day when I come into my room, which is downstairs, my phone rings. I answer it; it hangs up. In retrospect, I think that was him in the house, calling to see if it was me. [Courtney had placed a restriction on Cali and Jessica that they weren’t allowed in most of the other rooms when they were alone in the house.] I had a collection of metal toys on my shelves and one day I came home and they were all facing in the wrong direction. I was like, ‘Did I do that?’ I think that was just him messing with me.”
On the morning of April 2, Kurt took a Graytop cab ride over to 145th and Aurora. He was on the lookout for more dope and ammunition, having already disposed of his first lot – he purchased some 20-gauge shotgun shells from Seattle Guns that day. Once again, Courtney cancelled all of Kurt’s credit cards. The next day, increasingly desperate, she hired a private investigator straight out of the Yellow Pages. But Kurt had gone to ground. There were reports that he’d spent a night with an unidentified friend at the other Cobain residence – the house in Carnation – where police later found a blue sleeping bag and an ashtray filled with two brands of cigarettes. But, despite a handful of scattered sightings of Kurt hanging around in the park near the house and on Capitol Hill, nobody knew where he was.
Wendy O’Connor filed a missing person’s report with the Seattle Police Department on April 4, stating that Kurt had “bought a shotgun and may be suicidal”. The report also listed Caitlin Moore’s address as a possible hang-out location.
Sunday passed, and then the Monday . . .
“He did see me when he got home, for a minute,” says Cali. “He kicked open my bedroom door and saw me in there. He was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing here? You were supposed to go to LA yesterday.’ I was like, ‘I didn’t want to. What are you doing here? Everyone is looking for you, Courtney thinks you’re dead in a ditch.’ He goes, ‘OK, well I’ll call her.’ I didn’t really have any reason to think that he was on the lam and hiding. But that was the last time I saw him.”
At some point on either Tuesday, April 5 or Wednesday, April 6, Kurt Cobain killed himself. He walked up to the greenhouse above the garage, locked the doors, propped a stool up against the French doors, wrote a one-page suicide note in red ink addressed to his imaginary childhood friend Boddah, and shot himself in the head with the shotgun, one bullet, dying instantly. A cigar box lay by his side, full of drugs and drug paraphernalia. A wallet lay wide open on the floor. Kurt had taken 1.52 milligrams of heroin – more than enough to kill most heroin users outright. His body lay there for two or three days, while his friends continued to search high and low for him.
Courtney sent Eric over to the Lake Washington house to help look for Kurt. He seemed furious with Cali, and instructed Cali and Jessica to look everywhere, especially to find a secret compartment in the closet in the master bedroom. But they didn’t search the grounds.
“Courtney had gotten a private detective – the brilliant Tom Grant – to keep an eye on the house,” recalls Cali. “I was staying at Jennifer Adamson’s house and I had searched high and low for him and I had searched for this gun she had told me about, and I couldn’t find it. I was feeling pretty paranoid when she told me there was a detective watching me because I was on drugs all the time. [Courtney was still in LA at this point.] The end result was I said, ‘I’m going to come to LA and see you, I’m on my way.’ ”
On April 6, Lollapalooza organiser Ted Gardner issued a press release, officially confirming that Nirvana would no longer be headlining the festival – “Due to the ill health of Kurt Cobain.” With a richly bitter irony, the headlining slot was passed along to Smashing Pumpkins.
On April 7, management at the Peninsula Hotel placed a 911 call to police. When the cops arrived, Courtney was taken to Century City Hospital for a suspected heroin overdose – she was booked and charged with heroin possession and receiving stolen property. She posted $10,000 bail and was later cleared of all charges.
The same day, Cali and Jennifer Adamson carried out another search of the house at 2.15 a.m. – Jessica had flown back to Minneapolis two days before. They discovered the bed unmade in the master bedroom, cold to the touch – with MTV playing, muted. The pair returned again at dusk, with a few other friends. Cali was seriously spooked. He didn’t want to enter the house.
After checking every room, Cali left Kurt a note on the main staircase – “Kurt, I can’t believe you managed to be in this house without me noticing. You’re a fuckin’ asshole for not calling Courtney and at least not letting her know that you’re OK. She’s in a lot of pain, Kurt, and this morning she had another accident and now she’s in hospital again. She’s your wife and she loves you and you have a child together. Get it together to at least tell her you’re OK or she is going to die. It’s not fair, man. Do something now.”
“Do you remember the wax old lady that we had?” Cali asks. “It was a life-sized replica of Lizzy Borden.1 I would put it in windows facing out to scare people, or put it in front of guests’ bathroom doors for when they opened the door. I was always afraid of that thing. That day, Bonnie [ Dillard, Jennifer Adamson’s friend] and me and some other people went over there to get some food or money or something. On our way out the driveway, Bonnie turned around and said she saw someone looking out the attic window. I turned back and it was gone. In my memory, that was Kurt watching us leave. I imagined it was the wax lady she saw, but it was probably him. I talked to his mom afterwards. She was like, ‘He could be so quiet if he wanted to be. He could just sit there.’ It was a huge house. So I’m loaded, and I don’t think he’s in there. If I hear a creak of the floorboards here and there, I’m sure he was there a lot of the time. Was he going over to Caitlin’s house? Maybe. He had a car. There’s so much crazy speculation.”
Police records show a cab leaving the Cobain residence with a young man answering to Cali’s description at 4 p.m. that day.
Early that evening, Cali took a flight down to LA.
“When I got to LA, I was so paranoid,” Cali continues. “I went to this girl’s house. She was like a high school girlfriend. I was like, ‘Someone’s watching us.’ Rene was there. I remember the night so clearly. I was so crazy and I felt so afraid. I found out a couple of years later, that her dad had hired a private detective to watch her on a whole separate issue. She was a drug addict, a dominatrix, and she was a rich Jewish girl from a really wealthy family. So I was being watched in both cities.”
The following morning – around 8.40 a.m. on Friday, April 8 – electrician Gary Smith discovered the body of Kurt Cobain while he was carrying out some routine work on the house’s alarm system. He called 911, but not before first calling his boss at Veca Electronics, who promptly called Seattle talk radio KXRX with “the scoop of the century”.
The official police report stated: “Smith arrived at 171 Lake Washington Blvd East to carry out some electrical work. Smith walked on to the west facing deck of the garage and observed the victim through the windowpanes of the French door. The victim was laying on the floor, with a shotgun across his body and a visible head wound.”
KXRX broke the news at 9.40 a.m.
“In the morning, Rene and I got a phone call from Rene’s mom telling us what had happened,” says Cali. “They’d found the body that morning. I just turned around and went back to the airport and went back up there. I didn’t sleep at the house ever again. It was so surreal. Your friend is dead, and it was on
the front page of all the newspapers. It took years to digest. It was too much. The day of the funeral was my 21st birthday. It was too much to handle. I just remember the phone ringing all those times.”
Part One: Jessica Hopper
“I don’t think I realised how bad it was until I got to Seattle during spring break,” states Jessica Hopper. “ Cali was a complete fucking mess and Courtney was in a hotel in LA, and Kurt was in rehab in southern California. And Cali was using as much as $400 to $500 a day could buy him. He was like, ‘Don’t answer the phone, Courtney calls every one or two hours.’ He was only talking to her intermittently because she was calling constantly. There was a real drama, but it was a manipulated situation. It was during the course of Kurt going missing. I think I’d been there for two days – the house was empty, no one else except for Cali and me. It was the first time I’d been to the new house. They had some really nice furniture but it looked like the other house, like they’d never quite moved in. It was a lot bigger, and there were records and knick-knacks and stereos in every room, but Cali’s room had a terrible vibe, from being in it, smoking cigarettes and getting high and making mixtapes every day.
“At one point I accidentally picked up the phone because I was expecting a call, and it happened to be Courtney: had I heard from Kurt, what was Cali doing? She said, ‘Get Kurt to call me.’ Cali was furious with me for taking the call. There was a real bad atmosphere over everything. There was a real vibe of fundamental chaos. It felt like somebody was going to die, the whole time. I didn’t want to leave because it felt like Cali was going to die. I’d been around people using, but I’d never seen anyone strung out like that.
“The night before I left, Cali went out for two hours to get drugs and hang out with his girlfriend [ Jennifer Adamson] or whatever it was, and I heard somebody in the house and I thought I saw somebody walk through the hall. I assumed it was Kurt. I went, ‘Hello? Who the hell is here?’ I stood in the doorway, and later I heard something creaking upstairs: after that was when Cali took a note up. I told him that I thought Kurt was here. That was towards the end of my stay.
“Oh, and at some point, Eric showed up at the house because he was going out to the Cavern, this other house they had in the woods. He was looking for Kurt, and he was also looking for Kurt’s gun. And there was a locked room next to Kurt and Courtney’s bedroom, and he was trying to find the key to that room because there was a padlock on it, a big lock. He was looking around the house, really urgently, asking us if we’d seen Kurt. That day Cali had to find something in the basement, and he made me come into the basement with him; he was so freaked out because we’d heard someone in the house and he thought Kurt might be down there. The house was so creepy at that point. I don’t remember the chronology. The house was really cold. There was nothing to eat in the house. There was an air like I wasn’t even supposed to have been there. I should have just stayed in Cali’s room. Everyone was totally on drugs. Kurt’s missing, or they think he has the gun and he’s missing. I vaguely remember Cali thinking that maybe Kurt would show up at their dealer’s. He wanted to find Kurt.
“Right around that time was when Courtney cancelled all of Kurt’s credit cards, and that included Cali’s credit cards, so he couldn’t get drugs and he started to freak out. He was supposed to buy me a plane ticket home and all of a sudden he couldn’t and I was panicking. I had to call my dad, and say, ‘I can’t tell you the situation, but it’s really bad and I have to get out of here and I need a $600 plane ticket the next day.’
“The last morning I was there [Tuesday, April 5 – although it might have been the Monday], right about 6.30, 7.00 a.m., I woke up and Kurt was standing next to the bed. He was like, ‘Hi,’ totally normal. I talked to him for a few minutes and he made a joke about my head. It was shaved at the time, so he made a joke, something to do with that Unrest song, ‘Skinhead Girl’. Cali woke up, and we told Kurt, ‘You’ve got to call Courtney, she’s freaking out, you have to call her.’ We gave him the number in some little address book, and he sat towards the end of the bed and tried to call, but they wouldn’t put him through to her room. [Kurt had forgotten the assumed name his wife was staying under.] He was trying to do that for a while, and I fell back asleep. I woke up, maybe an hour later, and he was sitting at the foot of the bed, looking at a copy of Puncture magazine. I said something like, ‘Did you get through to Courtney?’ and he said no.
“The TV was on. It was a Meat Puppets video on MTV. I don’t think he said anything about it. He was just watching. I don’t remember him being dressed like he’d been out – although it was probably warm enough that you could be out with just a sweater – but I got the impression he’d just gotten there, like he’d just walked in. He was casual. He didn’t seem more high or sedated than normal. He seemed normal and he was being jovial with me. I hadn’t seen him since New Year’s. So then I fell back asleep and he was gone.
“I woke up, and a few hours later Cali had called a limo service to take me to the airport. That might have been around 11 a.m. I got up. I’d been eating Diet Coke and bananas for days. I’d been sick while I was there, and I remember leaving, but I was so freaked out at leaving Cali to die there, I threw up in the driveway before getting into the limo. It was from the anxiety. I could tell something really bad was going to happen. There was a TV tray next to the bed with this pre-prepared syringe of Narcane2 wrapped in masking tape. Death was in the house waiting.
“ Cali was a mess. He’d nodded off while he was carrying a flaming log to the fireplace. He dropped it on the carpet. A couple of my friends were there, the girls from my band, it happened when they were leaving . . . Cali was trying to pretend everything was normal, wearing pyjamas at three in the afternoon, dropping flaming logs on the carpet and they asked me to leave with them, and I was like, I can’t.
“I left and went home to Minneapolis. That was midweek. I was sick for two days when I got back because I was such a mess. I’d spent the previous week watching Cali shoot up in front of me. I think I came back to school on Thursday and then as I was leaving school on the Friday somebody said that they’d heard on the news, someone with blond hair had been found dead in the house. I assumed it was Cali, he’d been talking all week about bleaching his hair, and I passed out right there in the parking lot. I went inside school and I called Cali’s parents and they told me it was Kurt, not Cali. And that was it. I remember talking to Courtney for a minute or two.
“Jackie Farry called me for my rundown on events because we realised I was the last person to see Kurt. They all wanted to know what I’d saw and heard. Cali was no use at all. He thought Kurt showing up was just a dream. He debated so hard whether I’d seen him. The only other thing I remember about talking to Jackie was that she said Kurt’s ghost was in the house and everyone could feel it.”
Part Two: Rene Navarette
“The day of my birthday [March 30], I got a call from Kurt from a payphone that didn’t say anything, just ‘Hey . . .’ Kurt was missing, I believe. I got home and listened to my messages, and there was Kurt’s message, and all these insane messages from Courtney. She’d be screaming, ‘I know he’s there’ – and it was the same for the next few days. A lot of people thought he was with me. He wasn’t. I remember calling Cali, and he was there with Jessica in the house. He told me that he’d had a dream that Kurt showed up holding a big white bag [like a gym bag]. I told him it sounded creepy to me, that he should get the fuck out of there. He came home [to LA] that night. We were looking for Kurt. Courtney had us calling places, threatening people, wanting me to strong-arm people she thought might have been hiding Kurt – I wanted to do it, to clear my own name. People thought it could have been me.
“ Cali found out Kurt was back in Seattle, left a note for him, and took off to LA. My mom and I picked Cali up from the airport. We went to my friend Candice’s. At the airport, someone was following my mother’s car. We had to do some quick manoeuvring to lose them. We thought it was a PI. We went over to Ca
ndice’s house, and my mom called to let us know that someone had died, and that Cali should call his parents because everyone thought it was him. It was surreal.
“At that point, I hadn’t talked to Courtney as a friend that whole last couple of weeks, she was so crazy. Someone called us at Candice’s, someone from Gold Mountain arranged for us to take a flight from LA up to the house in Seattle. The plane we were on was full of people going there for the same reason, via Gold Mountain. We got off the plane and people were taking pictures. When we got to the house it was weird. There was someone from MTV reporting from in front of the house, someone else draping black plastic over the trees to stop people coming in. There were so many people in the house. We were just looking for Frances.
“ Cali and I went into a room and there were people there. We’d hear the occasional scream let out, Courtney was screaming. It was all really weird. We all didn’t know how to act. We wanted to make sure Frances was OK. We were like, ‘We’ve got to get the hell out’ – I remember blacking out, going to the funeral, hanging out with [Hole bassist] Kristen Pfaff. Little did we know, but Cali and I were really sick. We’d gotten hepatitis. We went back to the Roosevelt hotel downtown, after the funeral, still on drugs – and the manager came up and told us the credit cards we were on had been cancelled. Gold Mountain flew us back to LA. Everyone was like, ‘You’ve got to get off drugs.’ My mom drove us out to El Paso, Texas to try and help us get clean. It was when we were there we noticed we were bright yellow from the hepatitis. We drove back and got hospitalised. It was a blur after that for a while.