Love & Death (13 page)

In 1993, a
Philadelphia Inquirer
reporter named David Zucchino began to probe the deaths of a number of U.S. soldiers ruled suicides by military pathologists. After reviewing thousands of pages of investigative, forensic and autopsy reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Zucchino found not only that the basic facts directly contradicted suicides, but that investigators had lost or carelessly destroyed important evidence, mishandled death weapons, failed to perform routine forensic tests and pursue leads, and filed inaccurate and misleading reports.

In case after case, he found that the victims’ families had challenged the suicide verdicts, only to be accused by military authorities of refusing to face up to the fact that their loved ones had killed themselves.

Among the most glaring examples Zucchino discovered pointing to staged suicides:

• In 1989, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) tried to convince Bill and Donna Digman that their son, Marine Captain Jeffrey Digman, had shot himself in the head, even though he would have had to contort himself upside down to produce the bullet’s trajectory. The bullet, moreover, had entered Digman’s head from the right side even though he was left-handed. The family hired a forensics expert, who found injuries on Digman’s body consistent with a struggle and concluded that someone had probably shot Digman and arranged his body to look like suicide.
  
• In 1991, the NCIS informed John Sabow that his brother, Col. James Sabow, had shot himself to death in his backyard. John Sabow, a neurosurgeon, was immediately suspicious of the circumstances and hired civilian forensics experts to examine the death records. They concluded that the colonel had been murdered and his body arranged to simulate a suicide.
  
• The same year, the army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CIC) told Sidney and Carlos Wright that their son, Army Specialist Terry Wright, shot himself in the head with a rifle. Yet a perfunctory examination showed that Wright was wearing gloves too thick to fit through the rifle’s trigger housing when he died. Army investigators had discarded evidence, and no fingerprints were even taken from Wright’s gun. When queried by Zucchino, the agent who supervised the investigation admitted that he had serious doubts about the suicide ruling.
  
• In June 1992, the NCIS told Mary Gallagher that her son, seaman apprentice Todd Gallagher, had fallen to his death from a Philadelphia rooftop. However, two civilian doctors and two military medical technicians said they thought Gallagher’s severe head injuries were caused by a beating, not a fall. Gallagher’s shipmates told the NCIS that he had had a drunken argument with sailors from a rival ship hours before he died. Yet the navy still insisted he had committed suicide.
  
• A month later, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) informed Royal and Linda Shults that their son, airman Allen Shults, had hanged himself with a sheet strung from a hydraulic door opener, even though Shults was taller than the level of the opener. Zucchino discovered that investigators had failed to pursue evidence that other people were in Shults’s room on the night of his death. Moreover, autopsy photos of Shults’s neck showed marks that a medical examiner concluded were not caused by the sheet.
  

In each of these cases, as well as nine others, Zucchino concluded that all the evidence pointed to murders staged to look like suicides or accidents. After his stories were published in December 1993, twenty-six more families emerged to dispute the suicide rulings made by military authorities in the deaths of their sons.

Frederick R. McDaniel, a former army criminal investigator who reviewed three of the cases for family members, found no organized conspiracy afoot to cover up the murders—only poor investigative practices. “I see utter incompetence combined with laziness and lack of experience,” he told the
Inquirer.
“Nobody goes to any trouble to do a proper investigation.”

Ronald F. Decker, a private investigator who spent twelve years as an air force criminal investigator, later reviewed nine of the cases on behalf of the newspaper. He concluded that each of the suicide rulings represented a quick rush to judgment based on first impressions: “These people make up their minds on suicide long before they should. Then they work like heck to prove a suicide and totally disregard any other leads pointing to accident or homicide.”

The mother of one murdered soldier summed up the official attitude that she believed had resulted in the bungled suicide verdicts: “Blame the dead—they can’t complain.”

O
ur summons to a secret location on the coast of central California during the winter of 2003 had all the makings of a spy novel. After eight long years, and repeated requests, Tom Grant, the L.A. private investigator at the heart of the murder theory, had finally consented to play his tapes for us. Almost from the moment he was hired by Courtney Love to find Kurt Cobain in April 1994, Grant taped everything—his conversations with Courtney, with the police and medical examiner, with the lawyers, with the witnesses and with Kurt’s closest friends. He had always claimed these tapes were a crucial part of his case proving that Kurt had been murdered but had refused to play them for us, saying he would turn them over to an outside law enforcement agency only when the case was reopened. To ease our doubts about them, he had played us snippets while we were writing our first book and later posted select passages on the Internet. But, to our mounting frustration, he had consistently refused to let us or anybody else hear what he called the “most damning evidence” of the Cobain case. Now we had convinced Grant that if he genuinely wanted the case to be reopened, it was time for him to be a little more forthcoming.

When we first heard Grant’s murder theory in the spring of 1995, we were highly skeptical. In the febrile world of rock and roll, conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen. Every time a rock star dies prematurely, it seems, somebody comes out to claim he or she was murdered. From Brian Jones to Jimi Hendrix to Elvis Presley, theories continue to circulate—some quite convincing—that their deaths were the result of foul play. So when Grant first went public with his charges, we figured this was just one more example of a half-baked celebrity conspiracy theory. In fact, in the very first article we wrote about the case—in
Canadian Disk
magazine—we cynically speculated that Grant was in it for the money and would attempt to cash in on his charges by writing a book or by selling his story.

When we visited his Beverly Hills office for the first time in 1995, it didn’t take us long to realize that Tom Grant was not your typical L.A. gumshoe. Surrounded by photos of his seven grandchildren, the stocky, clean-cut P.I. looked more like a bank manager or a university professor than somebody who made his living chasing down sleaze. Nor did he look like the kind of person whose music collection contained any albums by Nirvana or Hole.

Grant had begun his career in law enforcement more than a quarter century earlier, in 1969, when, at the age of twenty-two, he joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as a deputy. Within a year, his sharp investigative skills earned him a promotion to the elite Specialized Crime Activity Team (SCAT), which worked undercover busting felony crime operations. In 1972, shortly after Grant was transferred to the Malibu County Sheriff’s Department, he cracked a major arson ring and was promoted to the rank of detective, one of the youngest ever in the county. Three years later, feeling burned out by the dangerous job, he took a leave of absence to open a retail music shop near the Malibu film colony, where he sold equipment to the Beach Boys and other big-name musicians.

If there are any skeletons in his closet from his days on the force, we couldn’t find them, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Each of his former colleagues whom we interviewed had nothing but praise for Grant’s skills, saying he was a highly respected police officer.

After his music shop went under, Grant worked as a security consultant for a number of celebrity clients, including Sammy Davis Jr. and Sondra Locke, before becoming the lead investigator for a former FBI agent turned P.I. in 1990. Three years later, he started his own firm.

When we first met Tom Grant, we were immediately struck by his integrity—not the first quality one would necessarily expect in a private detective. Time and again, prospective clients phoned his office, only to have Grant tell them that they could do the job themselves, and then proceed to instruct them how. “I’ve been told I’m not much of a businessman,” he confesses. “That’s probably why my music store went belly-up.” One caller, suspecting her husband was having an affair, asked Grant to install a hidden surveillance device in his office. Grant’s refusal was immediate: “That’s illegal. I don’t work like that,” he told her before he hung up.

Eight years later, about to reveal his tapes to us, Grant is no longer a full-time private investigator, but he has retained his license and still takes on the occasional case. In fact, in the years since our first meeting, he has been a major player in an investigation considerably more notorious than the Cobain case itself. Grant was hired by former Arkansas state clerical employee Paula Jones to find witnesses to back up her sexual harassment suit against then-President Clinton. Later, Grant was instrumental in locating the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, who first surfaced as a result of the Jones lawsuit. Thus, Grant played a major role in the impeachment of a sitting president.

We have to ask: Does this mean that he is a member of the so-called vast right-wing conspiracy out to bring down Clinton?

“Not really,” he responds. “Some of those people I worked with might be pissed at me for saying so, but I actually think Clinton was a pretty good president. As a person, he’s a complete jerk, and I know that better than most. But as president, he wasn’t half bad.”

Grant opens the safe and takes out a huge box of cassette tapes he recorded between April 1994 and January 1995. They represent more than thirty hours of conversations relating to the Cobain case. To our disappointment, however, the tapes containing what Grant considers the most crucial evidence in support of his murder theory are still off-limits. They will be turned over to the FBI, Grant tells us, if the case is reopened.

Still, the prospect of listening to the vast bulk of what transpired immediately before and after the discovery of Kurt’s body is irresistible; we are eagerly anticipating hearing whatever new clues they may reveal. On the strength of our first book, we are generally considered the foremost journalistic authorities on the death of Kurt Cobain. But as we sit listening to Grant’s tapes over the next three days and well into the nights, we quickly realize just how much we didn’t know about the events of April 1994—indeed, how much we had got wrong, or just plain missed.

While the tapes don’t answer all the questions, they are extremely damning and provide the first objective perspective of the events surrounding Cobain’s death. Together with police reports we have obtained under Washington State’s Freedom of Information laws, they go a long way toward answering the still-lingering mystery of how Kurt Cobain really died.

On April 3, 1994—Easter Sunday—Tom Grant is in his Beverly Hills office with his associate, Ben Klugman, finishing up the paperwork on an old case, when the phone rings. The caller is a woman seeking a detective to find out who is using her husband’s credit card. She does not identify herself but asks Grant if he can meet her in her suite at the nearby Peninsula Hotel. “We’re kind of famous,” she adds.

An hour later, Grant and Klugman arrive at the Peninsula—a five-star Beverly Hills hotel favored by celebrities—and immediately recognize the woman who greets them at the door. “If you leak this to the press, I’ll sue the fuck out of you,” Courtney Love warns them as they enter the room.

Her husband, Courtney tells Grant and Klugman, is Kurt Cobain; he escaped from an L.A. drug rehab center two days ago and hasn’t been seen since. She lied during the initial phone call, she confesses. In an attempt to limit Kurt’s movements, she has had his credit card canceled by falsely claiming it was stolen. To help locate her husband, she wants Grant to call the credit card company and get a list of all the transactions made on the card before it was canceled. At this point, Grant informs her that she doesn’t need a detective for that but can do the job herself. “I’d have to charge you fifty bucks just to make a phone call,” he says.

“What? That’s not enough money for you?” Courtney snaps back. She tells them Kurt has only one credit card and, without it, he has no access to money, since she has also had his bank cards canceled. When Grant asks whether Kurt can obtain funds from other sources such as friends, she tells him that Kurt is totally “helpless” and has no friends. “This guy can’t even catch a fucking cab by himself.”

Then Courtney tells the pair that she believes her husband is suicidal. He has bought a shotgun, and she fears he may be planning to use it: “Everybody thinks he’s going to die.”

Grant and Klugman return to the office to get a form for Courtney to sign authorizing the release of Kurt’s credit card records. By the time Grant returns to the Peninsula later that afternoon, Courtney is frantic; she has apparently taken his advice and phoned the credit card company herself.

Kurt, she discovered, had booked a plane ticket about half an hour after he left the rehab on April 1. He paid $478. This, it turned out, was the ticket he used to fly from Los Angeles to Seattle. But it appears this wasn’t his only purchase. At 5:30
P.M.
the same day, while he was still at Exodus, Kurt had used his MasterCard to purchase two other plane tickets on United Airlines. The credit card company could not ascertain the flight date or the destination for these two tickets, only the amount he had paid. Courtney tells Grant that Kurt may be going east to stay with his friend Michael Stipe, the leader of his favorite rock group, R.E.M. Stipe had invited Kurt to record with the band in March, before the Rome overdose, and had even sent a plane ticket, which Kurt never used.

“I don’t know where the hell he is,” Courtney says. “I was figuring he goes up to Seattle and picks up his guitar. And then he flies to Atlanta…. [R.E.M.] are recording in Knoxville. He has two tickets. I’m curious if he bought a plane ticket for somebody else.”

She tries to persuade Grant to hack into the airline’s computer system. She wants to know whether Kurt has taken a flight out of Seattle and, if so, with whom he’s traveling. Telling him it’s “done all the time,” she says she would be willing to pay a hacker $5,000 to tap into the computers of Delta and United airlines. “If he’s taken those plane tickets, I want to know where he’s gone.”

Grant demurs: “Yeah, and then the next thing you read about me is that a major P.I. in Beverly Hills has been arrested for computer hacking.”

But Courtney is persistent, urging him to hire “some sleazeball” to do the job. She tells Grant she “grew up on Nancy Drew,” so she knows how these things are done.

Grant tells her that, even if she wrote a check for $300,000, he still wouldn’t break the law because it’s not worth the risk of going to prison. “Whatever I do,” he insists, “I’m going to do it legally.”

From the tone of Courtney’s voice, it’s obvious that she is in a panic about the second plane ticket. Grant soon finds out why.

“I think Kurt wants a divorce,” she says. “If he wants a divorce, that’s fine. If we got into a divorce and it came down to a custody battle, I’d win in a second.” She shares something else. Kurt had left her a note in Rome in which “he says he’s leaving me.” At this point, Grant is still unfamiliar with much of the couple’s history, and he knows nothing about Kurt’s recent overdose in Rome. So this revelation means little to him.

Courtney proceeds to tell Grant about the prenuptial agreement that she and Kurt had signed before their wedding in February 1992: “Despite our prenuptial, my name is on all of our homes and all of our assets…. I don’t want a divorce out of this. The only way a divorce will happen is if I bust him for infidelity.” Then she confesses that she fears exactly this scenario; she is convinced that Kurt is having an affair with a Seattle heroin dealer named Caitlin Moore, who she says has a history of “fucking rock stars.”

Courtney tells Grant she’s convinced that if Kurt is in Seattle, he’s with Caitlin. She asks him to bug the drug dealer’s house. Again, Grant refuses. Courtney then reveals that she had already sent a friend over to Caitlin’s house with $100 to buy heroin as an excuse to see if Kurt was there. He wasn’t. She tells Grant that Kurt has a pattern of using girls, then says, “If he’s fucking her, look out…” Her tone softens as she tells Grant that she and Kurt “have a good marriage,” but says she thinks he is upset at her because “I’m so antidrug” and that, whenever Kurt does drugs, they fight. “When he brings drugs home, I do them, too,” she says. She tells him that even Kurt’s mother is “terrified of him” now, claiming that Wendy “abused him a lot” when he was a child, but now Kurt appears to have forgotten about it and forgiven her.

Grant asks whether Kurt has any favorite hangouts in Seattle where he might be holed up. She tells him that he liked to check in to a seedy Aurora Avenue motel called the Marco Polo, where he would occasionally go to shoot up. Then she steers the conversation back to Caitlin, demanding Grant find a Seattle P.I. to stake out her apartment. In an undertone to herself, she says, “If you’re fucking someone else, Kurt, I’m going to nail you.”

She then confesses that, the day before, she planted a phony story in the press that she had suffered a drug overdose in a ploy to attract Kurt’s attention and get him to contact her. A reporter from the Associated Press has now called asking about the incident. Courtney asks Grant what he thinks she could tell them: