Love & Death (17 page)

After Carroll reveals to Grant that Kurt and Courtney were in the midst of an acrimonious divorce at the time of his death, Grant tells her that Courtney had mentioned divorce at the Peninsula Hotel. He then tells her about some of Courtney’s suspicious behavior he had observed the week before and wonders why she had never told him that Cali had talked to Kurt at the Lake Washington house on April 2.

Both Grant and Carroll also think it’s strange that Courtney did not once go to Seattle to look for Kurt during the week he was missing.

Grant tells her that Courtney told him she had business in L.A. and therefore couldn’t get away.

She had no business in L.A., Carroll replies.

But it is the suicide note that troubles Carroll the most. Courtney had refused to let her see it when they were in Seattle together. Then she adds one more twist: She tells Grant that on the night Dylan called to have the alarm switched off (Wednesday, April 6), she overheard Courtney tell him to “check the greenhouse.”

“When Rosemary told me that, I knew there was something very wrong,” Grant recalls. “Kurt would have already been lying there dead in the greenhouse at that time. I wondered why [Courtney] hadn’t asked Cali to check the greenhouse before that.”

Grant and Carroll quickly come to the conclusion that he should fly back to Seattle to find out what’s going on. She asks him not to tell Courtney what they have been talking about: “Let’s keep it between us.”

Grant returns to his office and books a flight leaving that evening.

On the morning of April 14, Grant arrives at the Lake Washington house where Courtney has been staying since returning to Seattle the day Kurt’s body was found. A security guard posted at the door ushers him inside. Courtney is sitting at the dining room table.

“I guess I really found the right P.I. this time,” she says to him warmly.

Although Grant finds her words of praise puzzling since he had actually failed to find her husband, he doesn’t say so at the time. Instead, he extends his condolences and asks her how she’s holding up.

“Not too good,” she replies.

As Courtney gets up to get a cigarette, a woman approaches wearing a black T-shirt that says “Grunge Is Dead.”

The woman asks Grant what he thinks of the whole situation.

He replies that he doesn’t know what to think. What does she think? he asks.

At this point, the woman introduces herself as Kurt’s mother, Wendy O’Connor, and says that something doesn’t seem right to her. “Why didn’t Dylan look in the greenhouse?” she asks.

Grant tells her he’d like to know the same thing. He asks Wendy if they can get together for a talk sometime in the next couple of days. She agrees and says she’d like to talk to him more about this.

At this point, Courtney goes over to Kurt’s mother and whispers something in her ear.

“After that, Wendy was very evasive towards me,” he recalls, “and we never did have that talk she agreed to.”

Grant was anxious to read the suicide note. Knowing that Courtney hadn’t let her close friend Rosemary Carroll see it, he decided he would have to trick her into letting him take a look at it.

Courtney takes him upstairs, where they can talk out of Wendy’s earshot. They sit down on the bed she and Kurt once shared. Grant says, “I heard you read the note on TV the other day [referring to her taped address at the Saturday vigil]. I was confused about something. It sounded like the note said, ‘I’m lying here on the bed.’ If Kurt was lying on the bed when he wrote that note, why was the bed so neat when I came here the other night? It didn’t look like anyone had been on this bed.”

“No, Tom, I was lying on the bed,” she says. “I was lying on the bed recording the message to Kurt’s fans.”

“Are you sure that’s what you said?” he asks. “I got the impression it was Kurt saying he was lying on the bed.”

“No, here. I’ll show you,” she says, reaching for a piece of folded paper under her pillow. “It’s only a copy. The police have the original. He wrote it on an IHOP [International House of Pancakes] place mat.”

Grant pretends to study the note, then says, “I can’t read this without my glasses. Can I go downstairs and make a copy on your fax machine? I’ll look at it later.”

Note in hand, he goes downstairs and makes a copy, pocketing it so that he can examine it in detail later on.

Later that afternoon, Courtney says she wants to visit the country house in Carnation to see if Kurt had been up there during the time he was missing. Her old friend, Kat Bjelland, leader of Babes in Toyland, is visiting and decides to go along for the ride. Kat had had harsh words for Courtney in the notorious 1992
Vanity Fair
article, telling Lynn Hirschberg, “Courtney’s delusional. Last night I had a dream that I killed her. I was really happy.” But, apparently, all is now forgiven as they make the hour-long drive in Grant’s rental car.

Courtney is irate about a recent news story stating she had overdosed in L.A. on April 2 and vows that she would find out who the hell leaked the story “and sue that motherfucker for libel.” She says she can prove that she was at the hotel at the time, because people saw her there. “It was a total lie,” she says.

It dawns on Grant that Courtney is referring to the story she had leaked a week earlier, allegedly to attract the attention of her missing husband. He reminds her that she had admitted to him that it was actually she who planted the AP story.

“Huh? Oh,” she says, before turning her attention back to the possibility that Kurt had been to Carnation between the time he left rehab and the time his body was found. He better not have been there with some “skank,” she says to herself.

At the Carnation property, there are two cabins, one a weathered log house filled with the used furniture that came with the house, and the other a newly constructed mansion, still bare.

The three enter the old cabin, and Kat and Courtney go upstairs, only to descend a few minutes later, Courtney holding a cloth pouch. She opens the pouch to reveal a syringe inside, claiming it proves Kurt had recently been there.

They head over to the new house, where they find a sleeping bag and some cigarette butts and soda cans scattered around the room. Courtney gathers the items to bring back, explaining she wants to have them fingerprinted to determine if Kurt had been there.

On the way back to Seattle, nationally syndicated radio commentator Paul Harvey is heard on the radio reporting rumors of a suicide pact between Kurt and Courtney. She says nothing.

“This sounded like one of Courtney’s typical planted stories,” Grant recalls. “Soon I started hearing a lot of rumors about this so-called suicide pact. For the first time, I wondered if the AP story she planted about her overdose on April 2, or her alleged overdose on April 7, the day before Kurt’s body was found, had something to do with Courtney trying to convince people that this had all been some romantic suicide pact, and that her part of the pact had simply gone wrong.”

In 1997, Seattle Police Department spokesman Sean O’Donnell told NBC’s
Unsolved Mysteries
of the monthlong investigation his department had conducted into the circumstances of Kurt’s death. His detectives, he said, originally began the investigation with the premise that Kurt had been murdered before officially ruling out the possibility: “That’s the way they conducted this investigation, so that there was a very thorough, comprehensive investigation done from the very beginning, and everything that the detectives encountered indicated to them that this was a suicide. We actually found nothing to indicate that this was anything but a suicide.”

But a long trail of evidence suggests investigators never seriously contemplated the idea that Kurt was murdered at all. Indeed, a Seattle Police Department source familiar with the investigation told us in 1996 that Sergeant Cameron made it clear at the time that the so-called homicide investigation was just a show: “We weren’t supposed to take it seriously.” The source, who said he didn’t necessarily believe Cobain was murdered, described a “shoddy investigation” in which Cameron didn’t even bother to develop the photographs taken at the scene. He said an outside law enforcement agency should reinvestigate the circumstances because “Cameron will never admit he made a mistake. He is very concerned about his reputation.”

The police reports we obtained under Washington State’s Freedom of Information laws appear to reinforce his charge that the homicide unit never took their investigation seriously. According to the initial incident report filed by homicide detectives, they had been summoned to the Lake Washington estate by a patrol officer at 9:50
A.M.
on April 8, a little more than an hour after Cobain’s body was found. The dispatcher informed detectives that uniformed officers “are on the scene of a suicide. There is a note present, and the gun is also in place.” In their official incident report, filed later the same day, the SPD homicide detectives wrote “Suicide” in the box on the form indicating “Type of incident.” This is a clear contradiction of the SPD spokesman’s assertion that the incident was investigated as a homicide from the very beginning. It proves that from the earliest hours of April 8, each unit of the Seattle Police Department had already
officially
labeled the death a suicide.

Certainly, Grant’s own attempts to share information with Cameron did not inspire confidence. Grant had already spent considerable time in the greenhouse, photographing the interior and exterior from every angle. One detail in particular stood out for him. The doors had a simple push-in-and-twist-type lock. On April 8, Cameron had informed him over the phone that Kurt was “locked inside the room,” suggesting that nobody could have been inside with him. This appeared to suggest that suicide was the only possible scenario. Now, face-to-face with Cameron for the first time, Grant asks the veteran homicide detective why he had told him the door was locked from the inside. (Ever since Grant had actually seen and photographed the lock, he realized that the detective’s statement was irrelevant.)

“Anyone could have pulled that door shut after locking it,” Grant says.

Cameron has a ready explanation: “There was a stool wedged up against the door.” This is a detail that had already been reported on both MTV and the talk show
Geraldo,
as well as numerous newspaper articles about the case.
Rolling Stone,
for example, wrote, “Sometime on or before the afternoon of April 5, Cobain barricaded himself in the room above his garage by propping a stool against its French doors.” Anybody reading this would naturally assume that Kurt must have killed himself because nobody else possibly could have been in the greenhouse with him and then exited the room with a stool wedged against the door. Therefore, Kurt must have wedged the stool in front of the door himself before committing suicide.

Grant asks Sergeant Cameron if he can examine the photographs that police took at the scene. The detective refuses, offering yet more proof that he never took his murder investigation seriously. “We haven’t developed the photographs and probably never will. We don’t develop photographs on suicides,” says Cameron.

Grant shares some of the information he and Ben Klugman have gathered, including details on the use of Kurt’s credit card after he died.

Again, Cameron brushes him off: “Nothing you’ve said convinces me this is anything but a suicide.”

At the time, Grant had no reason to doubt Cameron’s word that a stool had been wedged against the door. But when, months later, he obtained the incident report filed by the first detectives who arrived on the scene, the file suggested that Cameron was either lying or had badly bungled his investigation. The report read:

The report clearly demonstrates that the stool wasn’t, in fact, wedged against the exit door at all. Rather, it was standing in front of the French doors on the other side of the room—doors that didn’t even serve as an exit. Although the actual exit door was indeed locked, it could have been locked and pulled shut by anyone leaving the scene. Why Cameron was repeating the demonstrably false story about the wedged stool is a question he refuses to answer to this day.

Whatever the reason, the police report proves beyond any doubt that Kurt never barricaded himself in the room, and it clearly demonstrates that another person could have easily been in the greenhouse at the time of Kurt’s death. Thus, one of the most convincing pieces of so-called evidence pointing to suicide is nothing more than a myth. It is a myth that has never been dispelled by a single biographer, nor by any of the media that originally reported on the barricaded door. It is a myth that many distraught teenagers would cling to in the months and years to come.