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The Death

Following a tour stop at Terminal Eins in Munich, Germany, on March 1, 1994, Cobain was diagnosed with bronchitis and severe laryngitis. He flew to Rome the next day for medical treatment, and was joined there by his wife on March 3.

The next morning, Love awoke to find that Cobain had overdosed on a combination of champagne and Rohypnol. (Love had a prescription for Rohypnol filled after arriving in Rome.) Cobain was immediately rushed to the hospital, and spent the rest of the day unconscious. After five days in the hospital, Cobain was released and returned to Seattle.  Love later insisted publicly that the incident was Cobain's first suicide attempt.

On March 18, Love phoned police to inform them that Cobain was suicidal and had locked himself in a room with a gun. Police arrived and confiscated several guns and a bottle of pills off of Cobain, who insisted that he was not suicidal and had locked himself in the room to hide from Love. When questioned by police, Love admitted that Cobain had never mentioned that he was suicidal and that she had not seen him with a gun.

On March 25, Love arranged an intervention concerning Cobain's drug use. The ten people involved included musician friends, record company executives, and one of Cobain's closest friends, Dylan Carlson. Former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg described Cobain as being "extremely reluctant" and that he "denied that he was doing anything self-destructive." However, by the end of the day, Cobain had agreed to undergo a detox program.

On March 30, Cobain arrived at the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles. On the afternoon of April 1, one of Frances Bean's nannies brought her to the facility for an hour-long visit with Cobain. That night, Cobain walked outside to have a cigarette, then climbed over a six-foot-high fence to leave the facility. He took a taxi to the airport and flew back to Seattle. The next morning, he stopped by his Seattle home and had a conversation with Michael DeWitt, who lived at Cobain's house. Over the next several days, Cobain was spotted in various locations around Seattle, but most of his friends and family were unaware of his whereabouts.

On April 3, Love contacted a private investigator, Tom Grant, and hired him to find Cobain. The next day, Love filed a missing person report under Cobain's mother's name without her permission. She added in the file that Cobain was suicidal and was in possession of a shotgun.

On April 8th, 1994, Cobain's body was discovered in the spare room above the garage (referred to as "the greenhouse") at his Lake Washington home by Veca Electric employee Gary Smith. Smith arrived at the house that morning to install security lighting and saw the body lying inside. Apart from a minor amount of blood coming out of Cobain's ear, Smith reported seeing no visible signs of trauma, and initially believed that Cobain was asleep. Smith found what he thought might be a suicide note with a pen stuck through it beneath an overturned flowerpot. A shotgun, purchased for Cobain by Dylan Carlson, was found at Cobain's side. An autopsy report later concluded Cobain's death was a result of a "self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head." The report estimates Cobain to have died on April 5th, 1994.

In the alleged suicide note, ostensibly written to Cobain's imaginary childhood friend "Boddah", Cobain quoted a lyric from Neil Young's song "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)": "It's better to burn out than to fade away." Cobain's use of the lyric had a profound impact on Young, who recorded portions of his 1994 album Sleeps with Angels in Cobain's memory. The note also evoked the name of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, who Cobain felt could revel in the adoration of an audience in a way that Cobain himself could not.

Cobain's body was cremated, with one third of his ashes scattered at the Namgyal tibetan buddhist monastery in Ithaca, New York, another third in the Wishkah River, and the rest left in Love's possession.

Suicide or Homicide?

Kurt Cobain is legally recognized to have committed suicide. However, unanswered questions within the Seattle Police Department's report regarding their investigative approach have led to a perception that Cobain may have been murdered.

The first to publicly object to the report of suicide was Seattle public access host Richard Lee. A week after Cobain's death, Lee aired the first episode of an ongoing documentary covering Cobain's death called Kurt Cobain Was Murdered. Making note of several discrepancies in the police reports, including several changes in the nature of the shotgun blast, Lee insisted that Cobain was murdered. Lee acquired a video that was shot on April 8 from the tree outside Cobain's garage and showed the scene around Cobain's body, and noted an absence of blood for what was reported as a point-blank shotgun blast to the head. (Several pathology experts have noted that a shotgun blast inside the mouth often results in less blood, unlike a shotgun blast to the head.) Lee's TV series continues to run, but often focuses on general issues regarding the Seattle Police Department.

In addition, Tom Grant, the private investigator employed by Love after Cobain's disappearance from rehab, adamantly believes that Cobain's death was a homicide. Grant was still under Love's employ when Cobain's body was found. Grant cites a figure published in an April 14, 1994, article by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, purportedly from the official toxicology report, which claimed, "the level of heroin in Cobain's bloodstream was 1.52 milligrams per liter." Grant cites the figure as the key piece of evidence for murder. Grant argues that Cobain could not have injected himself with such a dose and still have been able to pull the trigger, an assertion supported by several notable experts on heroin addiction. (Grant does not believe that Cobain was killed by the heroin dose, however. He suggests that it was used to incapacitate Cobain before the final shotgun blast was administered by the perpetrator.) Critics point to several different studies on heroin use that note the difficulty in pinpointing the level of heroin that an addict can tolerate. In a 2004 story, Dateline NBC questioned five medical examiners about the figure from the toxicology report. Two of them noted the possibility that Cobain could have built up enough of a tolerance through repeated usage to have been able to pull the trigger himself, while the three others held that the information was inconclusive.

Grant also believes that the apparent suicide note was actually a letter announcing his intent to leave Courtney Love, Seattle, and the music business. Grant and a number of handwriting experts point out that the final lines of the note that most sound like a suicide note are written in a style that varies from the rest of the letter. Grant also notes that the official report does not distinguish the questionable lines from the rest of the note, and simply concludes that Cobain wrote the note. However, when Dateline NBC sent a copy of the note to four different handwriting experts, one concluded that the entire note was in Cobain's hand, while the other three said the sample was inconclusive.

In addition, Grant suggests that if the shotgun that Cobain used was positioned to match the findings of the autopsy report, his arm would have been too short for him to reach the trigger. Cobain would have had to fire the weapon with his toe, yet he was found with both shoes still in place. Critics, however, point out that Grant sold "kits" about the alleged conspiracy via his website.

Filmmaker Nick Broomfield decided to investigate the story for himself, and took a film crew to visit a number of people associated with Cobain and Love, including Love's father, Cobain's aunt, and one of the couple's former nannies. Most notably, Broomfield spoke to Mentors bandleader El Duce, who claimed that Love had offered him $50,000 to kill Cobain, and passed a polygraph administered by well-regarded polygraph expert Dr. Edward Gelb. Broomfield inadvertently captured El Duce's last interview, as he died days later. Broomfield titled the finished documentary Kurt & Courtney, and it was released in 1998. In the end, however, Broomfield felt he hadn't uncovered enough evidence to conclude the existence of a conspiracy.


Journalists Ian Halperin and Max Wallace took a similar path and attempted to investigate the conspiracy for themselves. Their initial work, the 1999 book Who Killed Kurt Cobain? drew a similar conclusion to Broomfield's film: while there wasn't enough evidence to prove a conspiracy, there was more than enough to demand that the case be reopened. A notable element of the book included their discussions with Grant, who had taped nearly every conversation that he had undertaken while he was in Love's employ. On their insistence, Grant played some of the tapes for the journalists to prove his claims. Over the next couple of years, Halperin and Wallace collaborated with Grant to write a second book, 2004's Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain, in which they claim to prove conclusively that Cobain was murdered.

After Cobain's death, Love insisted that Cobain's overdose in Rome was a suicide attempt. However, several people have contested the assertion. Dr. Osvaldo Galletta, who treated Cobain, told Newsday, "After woke up, he told me it was an accident. He said he had been confused. He had taken pharmaceuticals and alcohol together. He said it was just a mistake."  He further explained to Halperin and Wallace, "We can usually tell a suicide attempt. This didn't look like one to me." Galletta specifically denied Love's claim that 50 Rohypnol pills were removed from Cobain's stomach.

Advocates of the official verdict of death by self-inflicted gunshot wound cite Cobain's persistent drug addiction, clinical depression, and handwritten suicide note as conclusive proof. It is also notable that Grohl and Novoselic have remained silent in the matter. Members of Cobain's family have also noted a history of depression and suicide in the family.

More recently, while being interviewed for her role on Gus Van Sant's Last Days (a film inspired by Cobain's final days alive), Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon was interviewed by UNCUT magazine regarding the circumstances surrounding Cobain's death. Asked for a possible motive for Cobain's suicide, Gordon answered, "I don't even know that he killed himself. There are people close to him who don't think that he did..." Asked if she thought someone else had killed him, Gordon answered, "I do, yes." This makes Gordon one of few among Cobain's friends to declare, on the record, that they believe that Cobain was murdered.

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The parts highlighted in Blue are the reasons that I believe he was possibly murdered.  It's just far too "fishy".  What do you guys believe?