Love & Death (22 page)

The first expert was Marcel Matley, an American forensic examiner. Matley had attained national recognition in 1995 when he sat on a commission that determined the authenticity of the suicide note written by President Clinton’s former White House deputy counsel, Vince Foster, who had been found dead under suspicious circumstances in a suburban Virginia park in July 1993.

After completing his analysis of Kurt’s note, Matley concluded, “The last four lines of the suicide letter, which include the words ‘I love you, I love you,’ were written by a different person. There are differences in the two.”

The second expert consulted was Reginald Alton, a don at Oxford University, who is considered the world’s foremost authenticator of literary manuscripts. He concurred with Matley: “There are more than a dozen discrepancies in the handwriting, definitely in the first line [where the word
Boddah
appears to have been added], and in the last four lines.” Both experts agreed that the text in the main body of the letter was written by Kurt.

As Grant’s suspicions about Courtney intensified, he asked himself what she would have stood to gain by Kurt’s death. “As a police detective, I was always trained to look for the motive,” he explains. “She had already told me that Kurt wanted a divorce and that they had a prenuptial agreement. But she also told me something else. During one of our earliest conversations, she basically admitted to me that Kurt was worth more to her dead than alive.” He plays a tape of this conversation, recorded on April 3, 1994.

On the tape, Courtney tells Grant that around the time of Kurt’s coma in Rome, her ambition was to become the first female musician to receive a million-dollar music publishing deal. She says that she can always gauge her career by how much money she was being offered by record companies. For example, she tells Grant, before the
Vanity Fair
controversy, she had been receiving $500,000 offers but, after
Vanity Fair,
she was only getting $50,000 offers. So, after Kurt’s coma, Courtney called her entertainment lawyer and said, “I bet the offers fell off after the coma.” On the contrary, her lawyer replied. In fact, the offers had doubled. When Courtney asked why, the lawyer told her it’s because everybody thinks “you’re going to outlive him.” At first, Courtney says, she thought this idea was “morbid and sexist,” but then she realized that she didn’t care. “Go for it,” she told the lawyer. “Try to get two million dollars.”

On November
20,
in Niagara Falls, Ontario, an unnamed seventeen-year-old male hangs himself in his basement bedroom. The day after his funeral, his nineteen-year-old best friend hangs himself from a tree in the park. The suicides are described in the media as Cobain-related. Both boys were devotees of Nirvana; the mother of one blames “death music” for the suicides.

Two weeks later, a twenty-year-old Californian named Lyle Senac, jokingly emulating Kurt’s suicide, accidentally kills himself in front of his friends by propping a 12-gauge shotgun on the floor, then kneeling with his mouth over the barrel. Eventually, there would be sixty-eight documented cases of Cobain copycat suicides worldwide. The real figure is likely in the hundreds, since most suicides don’t leave a note. Because it’s not an intended suicide, Senac’s death doesn’t count in those statistics.

By December 1994, eight months after Kurt’s death, Grant is finally ready to go public with his suspicions and chooses a national forum to do so. Appearing on the
Gil Gross Show,
broadcast over the CBS radio network throughout the United States, he states his belief that Kurt Cobain was murdered. The Seattle police, he says, are not guilty of a cover-up, only a rush to judgment. He refuses to disclose the name of the person he believes committed the crime.

“I felt I had to go public,” Grant recalls. “All the copycat suicides were starting to haunt me, all these kids killing themselves because they thought that’s what Kurt did. At first, I thought the best strategy would be to avoid naming names. I assumed the media would be less nervous.” Nevertheless, within days, he receives a letter from Rosemary Carroll’s firm accusing him of airing his “baseless” allegations for the sake of “personal profit and notoriety,” and warning him to cease and desist with his charges or the firm would refer the “matter to the authorities for possible criminal prosecution.”

“That made me mad,” Grant recalls. “Rosemary knows that she was the one who first said Kurt was murdered and who encouraged me to pursue the investigation. Now here she was threatening me with legal action if I went public. I thought that was very cowardly of her.” His response, dated December 29, 1994, is blistering:

Carroll never responded.

A week later, on January 5, 1995, Grant takes to the radio air-waves again, this time on the nationally syndicated
Tom Leykis Show,
where he outlines his case in detail for more than an hour. It is during this appearance that Grant publicly airs the heart of his theory for the first time, charging Courtney Love and Michael “Cali” Dewitt were involved in a criminal conspiracy that resulted in the murder of Kurt Cobain.

After Grant drops this bombshell, Leykis opens the phone lines to listeners. One of the first callers happens to be Gary Dewitt, Cali’s father, who is understandably outraged:

After the show, Courtney leaves a message on Grant’s answering machine at 4:00
A.M.
: “Hi, Tom. This is Courtney…. I just heard the radio thing…. I haven’t heard you tell an out, ya know, I listened to the thing and didn’t hear you tell, tell like outright lies…. I wish you were doing it for the money, and the realization that you’re doing it because you think it’s right hurts me a lot.”

Two weeks later, Grant receives another call from Courtney, who has just begun a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Her tone is more pained than angry:

Grant asks her for a copy of the autopsy report, explaining that only the postmortem records can prove that Kurt committed suicide. Courtney’s response is unexpected: “I spoke to Nikolas [the deputy medical examiner] the other night…. He said he’d come over to my house when I get back. He’s angry at you. He won’t give you the records…. As long as Nikolas is the coroner, I’m not afraid.”

The Nikolas in question was Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne, the deputy medical examiner who conducted the autopsy in April and ruled Kurt’s death a suicide. In late 1995, when we were researching our first book, a source close to Hartshorne told us that, while he was still in college, he had befriended Courtney Love and her first husband, James Moreland. He met Moreland while he was still in medical school when, as a punk rock promoter, Hartshorne organized Nirvana’s third-ever Seattle show, at the Central Tavern in 1988. This means the bill that night featured not just one but both of Courtney’s future husbands, since the headliner just happened to be Moreland’s band, the Leaving Trains.

We decided to pursue this lead and, posing as Canadian university students who were doing a paper on the Kurt Cobain copycat suicide phenomenon, contacted Hartshorne for an interview. He agreed to meet with us at his office in December 1995.

During our interview, Hartshorne confirmed that he had been friends with both James Moreland and Courtney Love, whom he described as a “great girl.” When we asked him if his friendship with Courtney might have constituted a conflict of interest in the investigation of her husband’s death, Hartshorne replied, “Absolutely not.”

He then confirmed that he had determined Kurt’s death was a “textbook case of suicide” when he first arrived on the scene and admitted that the police never seriously contemplated the possibility of murder at all. He described Tom Grant’s theory as “ludicrous.”

“They [the homicide unit] came to the scene because of the popularity of the individual,” he told us. “I mean, Elvis is still walking around out there, and when you have somebody this prominent, you like to get the best people in there to make sure all your
i
’s are dotted and
t
’s are crossed. Look at all the people who think it’s a conspiracy. If they hadn’t done all this work, you would have many more people mucking about saying it’s murder.” Hartshorne paused for a moment, and we couldn’t help noticing the huge Kurt Cobain poster looming over us from its spot on the wall. We were in the very room where Hartshorne had conducted Kurt’s autopsy a year earlier.

“The suicide was [Kurt’s] decision,” he continues, “and you have to respect him for whatever his decision was. He had that right.”

Now, in the New Zealand phone call, Courtney continues telling Grant about her recent conversation with Hartshorne: “I asked Nikolas if there was doubt in his mind whether this is a suicide, and he said, ‘I’ve seen people fake suicides before, and this isn’t one of them.’ ”