Love & Death (11 page)

Marshall was not the only expert with doubts about the official story. In 1997, the NBC-TV show
Unsolved Mysteries
presented Cobain’s autopsy results to Dr. Cyril Wecht, one of America’s most prominent forensic pathologists. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has described him as the “Sherlock Holmes of forensic science.” Dr. Wecht was immediately dismissive of the tolerance argument cited by Nikolas Hartshorne. “For most people,
including addicts,
1.52 milligrams per liter of morphine is a significant level,” Wecht cautiously explained, “and for most of them, a great percentage, it will be a level that will induce a state of unconsciousness quite quickly. We’re talking about seconds, not minutes…. It does raise a question, a big question, as to whether or not he shot that shotgun.”

On camera, however, Dr. Wecht refused to rule out completely the possibility of suicide, declaring it “within the realm of possibility.” Thus, a leading authority appeared to believe that, however remote the possibility, Cobain could indeed have shot himself, as the official version indicates. In the years since this interview took place, however, we learned that there was more to Dr. Wecht’s interview than NBC broadcast that night. According to the segment’s producer, Cindy Bowles, Wecht had never been fully informed of the circumstances of Cobain’s death before his interview, knowing only that he had been found shot through the mouth and with a postmortem blood morphine level of 1.52 milligrams per liter. What Wecht actually said off camera
after
declaring suicide within the realm a possibility was this: “If it
was
suicide, he probably would had to have been holding the gun in his hand while he was injecting himself with the heroin, and then shot himself immediately after the injection.”

Of course, we know from the police reports that this is not what happened. Before picking up the gun, Cobain took the time to roll down his sleeves, remove his drug paraphernalia and place it back into a nearby cigar box. Again, the official scenario appears to be scientifically impossible.

The new revelation regarding Dr. Wecht’s verdict, however, is not the only crucial piece of information that has emerged in recent years. In 1995, after Nikolas Hartshorne and his supervisor, Dr. Donald Reay, informed us that tolerance was the mitigating factor that allowed Cobain to shoot himself—even after injecting such a massive dose of heroin—we challenged each of them to point to a single case in which somebody had taken a dose equal to Cobain’s and remained conscious for more than a few seconds. Neither of them was able to cite such a case.

Two years later, in his BBC documentary
Kurt & Courtney,
filmmaker Nick Broomfield believed he had met this challenge. In the film, Broomfield featured an interview with a British physician, Dr. Colin Brewer, who insisted that somebody could indeed shoot himself after taking the amount of heroin found in Kurt’s bloodstream. To prove his point, the doctor took out a photograph he had taken of one of his patients. In this photo, featured in Broomfield’s film, a man could be seen balancing on one leg fifteen minutes after supposedly taking “twice the amount as Kurt.” When the documentary was released in 1998, this photo alone proved a near fatal blow to the murder theory. In fact, this evidence was the single element cited by Broomfield when he changed his mind about how Cobain died. Before interviewing the doctor, the filmmaker reveals, he was leaning toward the belief that Kurt had been murdered. After the interview, Broomfield became convinced that Cobain had committed suicide.

If, in fact, a case existed where an addict remained conscious for fifteen minutes after taking such a large dose, it would indeed prove that Kurt might still have been able to shoot himself after injecting the level of heroin found in his system.

However, it has since emerged that Broomfield made a crucial error in his film—a mistake that has inflicted lasting damage to the credibility of the murder theory. The patient depicted in the photo had not actually injected heroin after all. Rather, he had swallowed
methadone
—a synthetic opiate commonly used for heroin withdrawal. The doctor later conceded that he was not even licensed to administer heroin, so he could not have duplicated the results even if he wanted to. The difference between methadone and heroin, explains Denise Marshall, is immense.

“Methadone is meant to be swallowed, not injected,” she explains. “Anytime you have to swallow a drug, it has to go through your gastrointestinal tract, and that can take thirty-five to forty minutes. But when you inject a drug, the effect is instantaneous: it goes right into the bloodstream. You feel the effect within seconds.”

She says the example cited in Broomfield’s documentary is completely inappropriate and misleading.

“The man in the photo swallowed methadone. It’s comparing apples and oranges,” she says. “Yes, methadone is an opiate. I can take that much orally and go jump around, too. I don’t know how I’d be in forty-five minutes, though. But methadone is also different on how it works on the body. We have opiate receptors in our brain, and that’s what the drug binds to. And once the drug binds to those receptors, the receptors release another drug called dopa-mine, and that’s what makes you feel the high. Methadone doesn’t work in quite the same way as heroin.

“Clearly the filmmaker, and probably even the doctor, didn’t understand the science of opiates,” she says. “I can explain it like this: if you’ve ever had surgery or any kind of IV sedation, the moment they tell you to start counting backwards, they’re putting the drug into your vein, and you’re asleep before the plunger ever finishes. That’s what heroin can do. And with the amount Cobain took, I’m fairly certain that’s what happened to him. He was probably unconscious while the needle was still in his arm.”

How, then, could Nikolas Hartshorne have got it so wrong? Renowned forensic pathologist Samuel Burgess writes in his 1992 book,
Understanding the Autopsy,
“There are many jurisdictions in this country where you would not have to be half-smart to get away with murder, quite literally…the fact remains that, in all too many places, the investigation of possible murder is undertaken only after pressure is brought by relatives or other interested parties, and when such investigation is instituted, it is done so incompetently that murder after murder goes unsolved and unpunished.” Burgess points to faulty autopsies as one of the main culprits.

Denise Marshall agrees. “Unfortunately, that’s true. A lot of autopsies are conducted very poorly, especially when the pathologist has already come to a conclusion about the cause of death before-hand. This particular case amazes me, but I see these mistakes happen every day. You know, watching all these crime shows on TV, if you went as a visitor to a crime scene, you would just think everything goes according to the book, but it’s like any other job, it just doesn’t. You have people that are lazy and incompetent, just like any other job. You can spend a lifetime just researching all the deaths that were ruled incorrectly by coroners and medical examiners, especially coroners that have preconceived ideas about junkies. Opiate addicts really have a bad deal. I can’t imagine how many deaths are out there that were ruled accidental overdoses or suicides with junkies that were probably homicides.”

One of the best examples of autopsy misdiagnosis, in fact, involves another notorious rock-and-roll suicide. In November 1997, Michael Hutchence, lead singer of the band INXS, was found dead in a Sydney, Australia, hotel room with a belt around his neck. He had apparently hanged himself from a doorjamb before the buckle of the belt broke, sending him sprawling to the floor. Finding no signs of foul play, the Sydney coroner immediately ruled the death a suicide. But within hours, Hutchence’s wife, Paula Yates, declared that she was certain her husband had not committed suicide and hinted cryptically that she knew the real cause of death. Soon after, she confessed to friends that Hutchence had almost certainly hanged himself accidentally while engaging in a sex game known as autoerotic asphyxiation (AEA).

The bizarre sex act, practiced by millions, involves an intentional act of self-strangulation performed to heighten orgasm by constricting the flow of blood to the brain during masturbation. Practitioners, nearly all male, tighten belts around their necks or suspend themselves by a noose, often using a rafter or tree branch. The resulting breath deprivation, known as cerebral anoxia, results in a woozy, heightened orgasm. Yates revealed that Hutchence was a devotee of this and other dangerous sex acts such as bondage and S & M, and that he must have died when the self-asphyxiation went wrong. Said Yates at the time, “He did everything. He’s a dangerous boy, dangerous, wild. He could have done anything at any time. The only thing he wouldn’t have done is just left us [her and their daughter, Tiger Lily].”

When the details of Hutchence’s death scene leaked out, they seemed to confirm her story. Police revealed that when his body was found, he was completely naked, sprawled out on the floor. Nevertheless, the coroner maintained it was a suicide and refused to call an inquest to investigate whether AEA was involved. His reluctance was probably due to the fact that the fetish is virtually unknown in Australia, although in the UK, where Hutchence lived, some two hundred people die during the act every year. Two years after the case was closed, McMaster University professor Stephen Hucker, considered the world’s leading authority on AEA, agreed to investigate the circumstances of the rock star’s death. At the completion of his probe, Professor Hucker declared, “I have concluded that this is most likely a death due to an act of autoerotic practice that went wrong.” In the Sydney coroner records, however, Hutchence’s death remains a suicide to this day.

In 1995, a Canadian chemist named Roger Lewis became suspicious of the circumstances of Cobain’s death, largely because of the remarkably high blood morphine levels involved. On his own initiative, he conducted a yearlong survey of the existing forensic and criminological literature. During the course of his review, he studied 3,226 heroin-related overdoses, more than 3,586 self-inflicted deaths, including 760 violent suicides, and a considerable number of known staged deaths. His resulting essay, “Dead Men Don’t Pull Triggers,” is a scientifically rigorous “reinterpretation of the officially released evidence” that argues strongly for a reopening and independent investigation of the Cobain death.

Two years after Lewis first published his essay, Bradley Speers, a twenty-one-year-old Australian pharmacology student, took issue with the findings and published his own scientifically complex rebuttal of Lewis’s theory. One of his central arguments was that Kurt might not have taken the entire massive dose of heroin all at once, but that the blood morphine levels had become elevated as a result of repeated injections throughout the day. Kurt, after all, was a junkie who would have shot up every few hours during the normal course of a day. Therefore, Speers believes that there has perhaps been too much emphasis placed on Cobain’s blood morphine level of 1.52 milligrams per liter.

“It may be possible,” he writes, “that there was a reasonable level of morphine present in his blood before a final injection, and thus its effects are less pronounced.”

But, according to Denise Marshall, this argument just doesn’t stand up under scientific scrutiny. “First of all, when you are a junkie and you have a tolerance, it means your liver has become very smart,” she explains. “The way you get that tolerance is from doing it a lot, and your liver says, ‘I know that a big blast of heroin is coming soon because it does every four hours, so I’ve got to process what I have or I’m going to die when the next blast comes.’ That’s the same way you develop a tolerance to alcohol. That’s why, when you see people who can drink you under the table, it means their liver processes the alcohol faster than yours does. And the only way that can happen is from using it on a regular basis. So no, it wouldn’t build up in his body. If anything, he would process it quicker than somebody else. I would say that the 1.52 milligrams per liter would have had to represent a dose he took recently, not multiple doses throughout the day.”

Apart from the evidence demonstrating the sheer scientific impossibility of the official verdict, Roger Lewis cites a number of relevant probability studies that he believes further demonstrate the unlikelihood of the suicide scenario. According to one study published in the journal
Medicine, Science and Law,
1,862 postmortem examinations of suicides were conducted in northwest London over a twenty-year period. Twenty percent of these suicides resulted from “physical injury,” including gunshot wounds. Yet not a single case involved opiates. In another study of 1,117 suicides in the British county of Avon, fifty-one victims used a shotgun. Again, not a single case involved opiates. Lewis points to these and other studies to demonstrate what he calls the “myth of the suicidal heroin addict.”

In a separate study of 189 cases of fatal self-poisoning with opiates in London between 1975 and 1984, only a single case resulted in a blood morphine level exceeding 1.52 milligrams per liter—or less than 0.53 percent of the cases studied—demonstrating that even when somebody does attempt suicide with a massive dose of opiates, the chances are extremely remote of reaching the levels found in Kurt’s blood.