Love & Death (10 page)

At 8:56 on the morning of April 8, Officer Von Levandowski of the Seattle Police Department was cruising alone in his patrol car when he received a dispatch on his police radio to investigate a dead body at the Lake Washington Boulevard estate belonging to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. When Levandowski arrived, the electrician, Gary Smith, led him to the deck above the garage. Through the French doors, the officer saw a man with long blond hair lying on his back with a shotgun across his body. The butt of the gun was between the victim’s feet, and the muzzle was at mid-chest level. Levandowski, who had recently been called to the house to investigate a domestic dispute involving Kurt and Courtney, immediately recognized the victim as Kurt Cobain. A few minutes later, a fire truck arrived at the house, dispatched by the Seattle Fire Department at the officer’s request. Outside, it was raining steadily. Firefighters climbed onto the deck and broke a pane of glass on the French doors to force entry. Inside, one of them felt for a pulse and confirmed that Cobain was “dead on arrival.” The firefighter asked for an I.D. from a wallet that was lying on the floor about two feet away from the body. Levandowski removed a Washington State driver’s license identifying the victim as Kurt Donald Cobain, date of birth 02/20/67, and laid it out beside the body. (Many media accounts falsely reported that Kurt had removed the driver’s license before shooting himself, so that whoever arrived at the scene could identify the victim even if the gunshot made his face unrecognizable.) Two more officers had arrived by now, and both proceeded to photograph the scene, one with a Polaroid, the other with a 35 mm camera. Officer Levandowski placed a call to the Homicide Division.

As he waited, Levandowski surveyed the 19-by-23-foot room, which clearly had once been used as a greenhouse but now contained no real signs of plant life, except for an overturned potted plant in the corner, and dirt-lined planting trays set up along the walls. The victim was wearing jeans, black running shoes, and an unbuttoned long-sleeved shirt over a black T-shirt with Japanese lettering. To the right of the body was a Tom Moore cigar box containing syringes, cotton, a spoon “and other items of narcotic paraphernalia.” On the floor were a hat, two towels, $120 in cash, a wallet, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and a pair of sunglasses. To the left of the body lay a brown corduroy jacket and a beige shotgun case, on top of which was one spent shotgun shell. A box of twenty-two unused shells was found inside a brown paper bag at the base of Kurt’s left foot. (It had originally contained twenty-five shells.) Inches from Kurt’s head, next to a large drying puddle of blood, was an opened can of Barq’s root beer, three-quarters full. A paper place mat covered with red handwriting, stabbed through with a pen, lay on a stainless steel planting tray at the north wall. On reading it, Levandowski wrote in his report that it “was apparently written by Cobain to his wife and daughter, explaining why he had killed himself.” (See page 283.)

Inside the pocket of the corduroy jacket was a receipt for the purchase of a Remington 20-gauge shotgun, serial #1088925. The receipt, for $308.37, was made out to Dylan Carlson and dated March 30, 1994, the day Kurt left Seattle for Los Angeles.

Before long, three SPD detectives had arrived to secure the scene, along with three members of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, including Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne, who had already been assigned to conduct the examination of the body. With difficulty, Hartshorne removed the shotgun from Kurt’s left hand, which had gripped the barrel so tightly that its impression could be seen on his palm. The damage to the interior of the mouth, Hartshorne noted, revealed that Kurt had been shot there. There was one live shell in the shotgun chamber, and another in the magazine, indicating that the gun had been loaded with three shells, including the spent cartridge that had apparently fired the fatal shot. The victim was cold, in the early stages of putrefaction, suggesting that the body had been dead for some time. There were puncture marks on the insides of each elbow.

Hartshorne took photos of the body and then emptied the pockets: $63 in cash and a piece of notepaper with “Seattle Guns, 145 & Lake City” written on it. In the left front pocket, he found an address book, miscellaneous papers and another note, which read, “Remington 20 gauge, 2
³
/
₄
shells or shorter, set up for light shot.” In the same pocket was a used Delta plane ticket, dated April 1, seat 2F, in the name of Cobain/Kurt—the ticket he used to fly from L.A. to Seattle after he left Exodus a week earlier.

After Hartshorne had finished examining the scene, he arranged for the body to be removed to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, where he would conduct the autopsy to determine the cause of death. This was standard procedure, though his parting statement to the assembled officers—including Sergeant Cameron, who had arrived an hour earlier—was not: “This is an open-and-shut case of suicide. The victim died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

The media, alerted by a radio report that a body had been found at the Cobain estate, had begun to gather outside shortly after 10:00
A.M.
Within minutes of Hartshorne’s pronouncement, the world would learn that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide at the age of twenty-seven. His fans were shocked by the news, but, after what they learned from Courtney Love the next day, nobody was surprised.

When the
Seattle Times
published a story by award-winning investigative journalist Duff Wilson a month later detailing some curious inconsistencies about the case, it failed to cause much of a stir. The repeated assertions by Nikolas Hartshorne and Donald Cameron that the death was a “textbook case of suicide” had done their job. Most people had by then accepted the death as just another rock-and-roll tragedy—a self-destructive junkie who had crashed and burned. Besides, he had attempted suicide once before. Hours after his body was found, Courtney was telling anyone who would listen that the Rome overdose in March had in fact been a suicide attempt, not an accident as previously claimed. In Rome, she revealed, he had also left a note. The only difference this time was that he had succeeded.

But Wilson’s findings were nagging him. His sources in the SPD had tipped him off to a number of facts about Cobain’s death that just didn’t add up. Among the most glaring was the fact that a subsequent police investigation found there were no legible fingerprints on the shotgun, the shotgun cartridge or the pen that was found stabbed through the note. But it was the note itself that raised the most questions. Despite the fact that police on the scene had immediately described it as a “suicide note,” those who had seen it said that it didn’t mention suicide at all. More disturbingly, the only part of the note that might have alluded to such a fate appeared to have been added at the end, in a completely different style of handwriting.

To add to the mystery, somebody had attempted to use Kurt’s credit card between the time the medical examiner said Kurt died and the discovery of his body. The police never determined who was using the credit card, missing from Kurt’s wallet when he was found.

But an even more troubling detail had been disclosed in another Seattle newspaper three weeks earlier. Nikolas Hartshorne had completed his autopsy the day Kurt’s body was found and immediately announced that the pathological examination had confirmed his initial verdict—that Kurt Cobain had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Because Washington State law classifies autopsy results as private medical records, Hartshorne’s office refused to reveal the details of his findings. But on April 14, veteran reporters Mike Merritt and Scott Maier of the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
who had cultivated enough sources over the years to obtain the unobtainable, filed a story claiming that a source in the medical examiner’s office had leaked them the results of Cobain’s autopsy. A small technical detail stood out. Toxicological tests indicated that Cobain’s body contained traces of diazepam (Valium) and had a blood morphine level of 1.52 milligrams per liter. Although Nikolas Hartshorne was a medical doctor, he, like most doctors, had very little background in the complex field of pharmacology and opiates, and so this measure failed to resonate. For anyone in the field, however, the statistic spoke volumes.

L
ike hundreds of thousands of teenagers around the world, Rochelle Marshall was devastated when she heard the news about Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Like many of them, she and her friends started asking questions after the murder theories began to circulate. Unlike most of them, however, her mother was in a position to provide answers.

“My daughter was very disturbed at first. She was a big fan of Cobain,” recalls Denise Marshall. “Then after a while, she started saying she wasn’t sure he had really killed himself, and I told her, ‘Well, a lot of people feel that way about a suicide because they just can’t believe it, or they don’t want to believe it.’ But she said this was different. She wanted me to look into it.”

Marshall was well suited for the task. As a deputy coroner in Colorado, she has investigated hundreds of deaths, including countless suicides and murders. During her years as a forensic medicolegal investigator, she says, she has learned one important lesson: “Things aren’t always as they appear at first.” After reading our first book and a myriad of other information about Cobain’s death, including the police reports, Marshall has come to her own conclusion about what happened. “I’d bet a year’s salary that he was murdered,” she declares. “There’s just not enough evidence to rule it a suicide.”

Marshall explains that a number of factors have led her to this conclusion. “There are too many red flags. There’s just so many questions about how the case was handled,” she says. “When I read the police reports, I was amazed at how many things they did wrong. For example, the first officer on the scene handled the body when he reached into the victim’s wallet to take out his driver’s license. That’s a big no-no. You’re supposed to wait for the deputy coroner or medical examiner to arrive so that you don’t contaminate the scene. You never touch the body.”

She is particularly disturbed about what she believes was a rush to judgment by both the police and the deputy medical examiner, who each concluded the death was a suicide while they were still at the scene.

“That in itself is ridiculous,” says Marshall. “I don’t know of any case that’s an open-and-shut case of suicide, and that’s what they all did in this case: they immediately ruled it a suicide. You just don’t do that. You wait for all the test results to come back and you investigate the circumstances before you rule. That’s just how it’s done.”

Even in this situation, with a suicide note at the scene and the shotgun still in the victim’s hand?

“That’s one of the things I’m concerned about,” she responds. “In the majority of suicides, there is no note. I’m always a bit suspicious when there is one, at least suspicious enough to take a closer look. And I’m particularly suspicious after reading the so-called suicide note in Cobain’s case. That’s hardly a typical suicide note from my experience. I have a lot of questions about the handwriting on the note. You know, nowhere in the note does he say he wants to die. He just doesn’t like what he’s doing, and he wants to change his life. I don’t see it as a suicide note, and I think it was really unprofessional for them to judge on it so early.”

None of these factors, however, convinces Marshall that Cobain was murdered. It’s the heroin levels that she claims are the clincher. “When I saw the blood morphine results of the toxicology tests—1.52 milligrams per liter—I immediately said to myself, ‘How could he have pulled the trigger?’ That just didn’t make sense. With that much heroin in his system, it would have been virtually impossible.” (When heroin enters the bloodstream, she explains, it is instantly transformed into morphine—thus, the discussion of blood morphine levels rather than heroin levels.)

Marshall relates how, suspicion piqued, she began to dig through county records in an attempt to find any autopsy whose subject had blood morphine levels near Cobain’s. “There were none even approaching those kinds of levels,” she said. “As a matter of fact, when I started searching further through the state, I just couldn’t find any cases with those levels. The amount of blood morphine in Cobain’s blood was truly amazing. With levels that high, he just wouldn’t have been conscious long enough to pull the trigger.”

How
could
Kurt have shot himself after injecting that much heroin? While researching our first book, we put the question to the deputy medical examiner, Nikolas Hartshorne. Tolerance levels were the mitigating factor, he explained. A severe addict like Cobain has a much higher tolerance than the average user; the opiates would therefore have taken longer to render him unconscious. “He was a serious junkie,” said Hartshorne. “His system could process higher amounts of heroin than [that of] the average person.” Hartshorne’s supervisor, Dr. Donald Reay, who was King County’s chief medical examiner at the time, concurred. “It is really an issue of tolerance: how much is this person used to,” said Reay. “If a person has gradually over months or years increased the dose, a person could function with that amount of drugs.”

Denise Marshall is unconvinced. “Certainly, tolerance does play a factor, there’s no doubt about it. I won’t argue with that,” she says. “But I don’t care what your tolerance level is. His morphine level was so high that I really question anybody having a tolerance that high. I’ve seen some really amazing amounts, and I’ve seen them live through it, but I’ve never seen anybody with his levels. It’s just staggering. If tolerance was that important, you wouldn’t have so many heroin addicts overdosing all the time, and with levels significantly lower than what Cobain had in his blood.”

The tolerance argument in Cobain’s case has always relied on the premise that he was a longtime heroin user whose body had gradually over the months and years built up a tolerance to higher and higher levels of the drug. And, despite his own frequent public denials, there is no question that Cobain was at times a heavy heroin user. However, it is still an open question just how much heroin he was actually using during the final months of his life. According to the musicians who played with him during his final European tour in February and March 1994, Kurt was almost certainly heroin-free during that tour. In April 1994, Tony Barber, bassist of the Buzzcocks, who opened for Nirvana during several dates on their European tour, told
Melody Maker
magazine, “I know he was not taking drugs on that tour. He was walking around drinking Evian water and looking clean every time I saw him.” In the same article, Buzzcocks guitarist Pete Shelley echoed Barber’s assessment: “He seemed really clean when we were on tour. In some ways it was a bit awkward because he wasn’t really joining in the very mild debauchery that went on.”

Were these musicians simply unaware of Kurt’s heroin use? Perhaps, but there is another more reliable source that appears to back them up. When Kurt was rushed to the hospital after his overdose in Rome on March 4, doctors said they found no traces of narcotics in his blood, only the prescription tranquilizer Rohypnol. Thus, exactly one month before his death, Kurt’s blood was free of heroin, and probably had been for some time. According to Courtney’s own account, Kurt started using heroin again eight days after he returned to Seattle. For the sake of argument, we can assume he continued using it during the last two weeks before he entered rehab, building up a renewed level of tolerance. However, even the Seattle medical examiner who cited tolerance as the mitigating factor said a user would have had to increase his dose “gradually over months or years” to function with the amount of drugs found in Cobain’s system. But Denise Marshall cautions against reading too much into the length of his drug use. “Tolerance can build quite quickly,” she explains. “Nevertheless, I still don’t think anybody could be that tolerant.”

According to Geoffrey Burston’s medical textbook
Self-poisoning,
“The effect of heroin is of such short duration and is so intense that it inhibits any type of physical activity, either criminal or non criminal.” In 1996, we asked eleven different heroin addicts whether they believed it was possible for somebody who had injected as much as Cobain had to have then shot and killed himself immediately after injecting, as the police and medical examiners claim. Each insisted it would be impossible, no matter what their tolerance level. Said an eight-year addict, “Anybody who says you can do that has never shot smack.”

Coroners and medical examiners without the requisite training in opiate toxicology will often cite tolerance in cases like Cobain’s, says Marshall. “My specialty is in pharmacology, specifically opiates, so I understand these issues better than a doctor who doesn’t have that kind of specialized pharmacological training. They would know the basics but wouldn’t have a grasp of the studies that provide the necessary data about a specific issue in our field. I run into these kinds of cases all the time where it’s difficult for me to make my case because the coroner may not properly understand the science behind opiates or another type of drug. If you consult the medical and scientific literature, it just won’t back up their explanation of ‘tolerance’ as a factor when it comes to this kind of dose. With most drugs, there is a therapeutic level, there is a toxic level and there is a lethal level. But there is no exact ceiling lethal level with opiates because the tolerance level keeps moving up. Everybody has a ceiling, of course, otherwise you wouldn’t have people dying of overdoses. With opiates, as your toxic level goes up, so does your lethal level. That’s why opiate users can use a lot before they die. But if you get anywhere near Cobain’s levels or much lower even, you’re going to be immediately incapacitated.”

Blood is often described as “an honest witness.” Lethal opiate levels generally vary according to factors such as tolerance and body weight, and, although there is no officially recognized ceiling, the maximum lethal heroin dose should be slightly higher than the highest known dose someone has taken and survived. Historically, toxicologists have relied upon previously published case reports of fatal intoxication to determine the concentrations of a given drug required to produce a measured blood level. In his 1986 book
Heroin Addiction,
Jerome J. Platt—former director of the Institute for Addictive Disorders at Allegheny University—concluded that the maximum known lethal dose for a 150-pound male would result in a blood morphine level of approximately 0.5 milligrams per liter. A few months before his death, Cobain weighed in at 115 pounds. According to Denise Marshall, this would have made his lethal dose even lower. “Generally, the less you weigh, the lower the lethal dose,” she explains. Other studies cited in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
also suggest the maximum known lethal dose for heroin would result in an approximate blood morphine level of 0.5 milligrams per liter. In other words, Cobain’s level of 1.52 milligrams per liter was more than three times the accepted maximum lethal dose.

It would be inaccurate, however, to simply state that Cobain took a triple lethal dose of heroin. In fact, according to the medical literature, the dose he took was approximately seventy-five times the lethal dose for the average person. What’s crucial is that it was triple the lethal dose for even the most
severe
addict.

Yet this statistic does not tell the entire story. While the heroin Kurt took was undeniably enough to kill him three times over, there are many studies that demonstrate he may not have died immediately after injecting such a dose. The literature indicates he could have stayed alive for as long as several hours, even after injecting this massive amount of heroin into his system. The real question that must be asked is whether he could have remained
conscious
long enough after shooting up to have picked up the shotgun and killed himself. According to the leaked autopsy results, in fact, the cause of death was most probably the gunshot wound rather than the heroin injection, suggesting that Kurt was still alive for some time after shooting up.

In 1973,
The New England Journal of Medicine
published a comprehensive study, “Morphine Concentrations and Survival Periods in Acute Heroin Fatalities,” by pharmacologists J. C. Garriott and W. Q. Sturner, who examined hundreds of heroin-related overdoses. In all the fatalities they studied to that point, the two scientists had never encountered a single case with a blood morphine level over 0.93 milligrams per liter—more than 50 percent
lower
than Cobain’s level.

However, although neither Denise Marshall nor Garriott and Sturner had ever found a blood morphine level as high as Kurt’s, a number of such cases do exist. A comprehensive review of blood morphine levels in 1,526 deaths involving intravenous heroin-related overdoses found twenty-six cases, or 1.7 percent, where levels were equal to or higher than Cobain’s level of 1.52 milligrams per liter.

The statistics are telling. According to a study cited in the
International Journal of Legal Medicine,
approximately 85 percent of cases with levels this high will result in a so-called “golden shot,” culminating in immediate death. But in the balance of the cases, the study concludes, “the death is not so rapid and a survival period in a comatose state has to be taken into consideration.” Another 1996 study of survival times following opiate overdose, reported in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences,
confirms that the user experiences a state of acute shock “within seconds” after injecting the fatal dose.

In all of the twenty-six known heroin overdose cases where blood morphine levels were equal to or higher than Cobain’s level, however, the tourniquets were still in place when the body was discovered, and the syringe was still affixed in the victim’s arm or lying on the floor next to the body—suggesting either instant death or unconsciousness.

Yet, as Denise Marshall notes, the police reports describe no such scenario when Kurt’s body was found: “Was it suicide? I don’t see how physically that could have been done. I do not see how he could have injected himself with the amount of heroin to cause those levels, put the syringe and other drug paraphernalia away, folded his sleeve down, grabbed the gun, positioned it backwards in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I do not see it.”