Love & Death (27 page)

In 1995, Nine Inch Nails musician Trent Reznor, with whom Courtney had a brief affair the year before, told
Details
magazine that she was a master at manipulating the press: “She was obsessed with the media and how she’s perceived. What I didn’t realize was that 95% of it was her directly calling editors. She’s got a full media network going on.”

This could in part explain why most media have refused to take an objective look at the facts, choosing instead to accept a one-sided version of events that simply does not stand up under scrutiny.

L
eland Cobain had just dropped his bombshell. As hardened as we were by the clamor of evidence and opinion about this case, we were, quite simply, stunned. For years, the Cobain family had refused to talk publicly about Kurt’s death, and there was never an intimation that any of his relatives had questioned the suicide verdict. Sheltering themselves from a prying press, they had remained silent for nearly a decade. Courtney’s father, Hank Harrison, had long ago declared that Kurt was murdered, but his credibility was thought to be suspect and, more important, he had never actually met his son-in-law. Now here was the man said to have been closer to Kurt than his own parents, telling us he believed his grandson was the victim of foul play. We asked Leland how long he had harbored this suspicion.

“I knew it almost right from the start,” he declared. “Something just didn’t sit right with me about the description of that shotgun.”

The news had come on the morning of Friday, April 8, with a call from Kurt’s mother, Wendy. “She said she didn’t want us turning on the TV and finding out about it,” Leland recalled. “It nearly killed Iris, my wife. She couldn’t even go to the memorial. I did, but she wouldn’t go. Her and Kurt were very close.”

A few days later, Leland saw a news report describing the scene where Kurt’s body was found. When he heard the description of the body, he said, he knew immediately that his grandson had not killed himself: “They said that shotgun was laying on his chest. They’ll never make me believe that you can take a shotgun and put it on your chest that way and then put it in your mouth and then pull the trigger, because once you do that, you can’t hold that gun to pull the trigger. Once your arms are stretched out as far as they’ll go to get the trigger, and [the gun] goes off, especially with it in his mouth, that thing will jump clear off his body. I’ve got a shotgun in there that if you don’t hold it tight to your shoulder, it will knock you right on your butt.”

He points to his gun collection, which includes a 12-gauge shotgun he uses for duck hunting. “The shotgun was still laying on his chest. I couldn’t understand that; it didn’t make sense. Anyone else I talked to who knows about guns said they couldn’t understand that either. You know, there’s a lot of
poof
that comes out of that shotgun, and especially when it’s in his mouth, it’s going to blow the shotgun back out of his mouth and off his chest.”

A seasoned hunter, Leland considers himself something of an authority on the subject. His argument centers on the “kick” of Kurt’s gun, yet Leland admits that he has never actually shot a 20-gauge Remington, the type of gun that killed Kurt. To test his theory, we decided to go to a range and test-fire a similar shotgun ourselves. The results were inconclusive. The 20-gauge is in fact considerably less powerful than the 12-gauge owned by Leland. Although it packs a definite kick when fired, it doesn’t seem capable of knocking someone over the way a lower-gauge shotgun can. This is why the 20-gauge is popular with female hunters as well as with beginners. If Kurt had indeed committed suicide, would this gun have simply popped out of his mouth and come to rest vertically on his chest after he fired it, as the official scenario suggests?

It’s possible, but not likely, says Denise Marshall, the Colorado deputy coroner: “I won’t say it can’t happen like that. I’ve seen many suicides with shotguns, and they usually brace it between their legs really well, and you won’t really see it laying on the chest, but you’ll see it wedged between their legs, and it will fall to one side or the other. I haven’t seen the photos in this case, but from what I read in the police reports, it does sound like a staged scene.”

In 1998, while we were promoting our first book, we appeared on a nationally syndicated radio show hosted by ’70s rocker Ted Nugent. As a board member of the National Rifle Association since 1995, Nugent has become better known in recent years as a gun advocate than as a musician. He, too, was suspicious about the description of Kurt’s gun.

“I’m one of the leading gun experts in this country, and I’ve read the police reports describing the gun evidence,” Nugent told his audience. “I’m telling you right now that Kurt Cobain did not commit suicide. He was murdered.” He did not elaborate on what led him to this conclusion.

If Kurt didn’t commit suicide, what does Leland think happened?

“I think somebody murdered him. You know, he had just turned down a $9 million offer for the Lollapalooza deal. I honestly think Courtney had something to do with it. I might get myself in a lot of trouble for saying that. She must have had [something to do with it], because they had a prenuptial agreement where what she had was hers and what he had was his, and if they divorced, that’s what they got. They didn’t get anything of the other’s. But if one of them died before, they got the other’s stuff. So that’s how Courtney got everything. I haven’t heard how they figured it out for Frances, whether they put something in escrow for Frances, or what. They should have.”

We ask Leland if he thinks Courtney herself committed the crime.

“No, no, I don’t think she actually did it, but I think she
had
it done.”

What makes him think Courtney is capable of such an act?

“Well, she’s a manipulator, that’s for sure. She wants things her way. She got Kurt hooked on drugs; he may have already done them before he met her, but she made sure he got hooked. She’s capable of anything…. Why did she cremate his body so god-damned quick? By the time we went to that memorial service, he was already cremated. Kurt never asked to be cremated. I think they were getting rid of the evidence, that’s what I think.”

Leland reflects back to the weeks before Kurt’s death and says that his grandson seemed very happy when they last spoke: “He was making all kinds of plans for the future. He said he wanted to come up and go fishing with me. We had never gone fishing before, but I had a boat back then, and we made plans to go fishing. I had been up to the house in Seattle before his last tour, when Iris was in the hospital up there. Kurt brought her that vase full of orchids when he went to visit her in the hospital.” He points to a vase in the cupboard. “Then we went out to dinner, just me and him, and I had just bought myself a brand-new Ford pickup truck, a four-by-four. When we headed back to the house, it was dark and I let him drive. He really liked that truck. Then when I talked to him before he died, he said to me he wanted to come up and go fishing with me, and he was going to buy himself one of those Ford trucks that I had; he really liked it. He wanted to take me with him to buy a truck.”

In the years since, Leland has thoroughly familiarized himself with the facts of the case, examining the police reports and other evidence. He says he’s now more convinced than ever that Kurt was murdered.

“The toxicology tests said he was so loaded with heroin that he couldn’t have even picked that shotgun up,” he says. “There’s a lot of other things that don’t sit right. Kurt didn’t do himself in.”

We ask him whether Kurt’s father shares his suspicion.

“Naw, he doesn’t even talk about it. He gets pissed if I do,” Leland replies. “Donny gets mad at me whenever I talk to him about Kurt.”

Courtney’s father, Hank Harrison, has also followed the case closely over the years, and he, too, is more convinced than ever that Kurt was murdered and that his daughter was involved. But unlike Leland Cobain, he now claims to have evidence to back up his theory.

In 1996, before the release of our first book, we appeared with Harrison on a Canada-wide multimedia lecture tour. The bill was split into two segments: we talked about the case during the first half of the presentation, and then Harrison discussed life with Courtney as well as his own colorful career. On stage, he never actually accused his daughter of complicity in Kurt’s murder. “I have never said that Courtney killed him. I don’t know whether she killed him or not,” he said more than once. Yet behind the scenes, he repeatedly leveled this accusation. “I certainly wouldn’t put it past her to have Kurt killed,” he told us. “Face it, she’s a psychopath.” When we asked him how a father could say these kinds of things about his own daughter, he defended his position, explaining, “I love my daughter very much, believe it or not. That’s why this is so difficult for me.”

That same year, he went public with his accusations for the first time, telling
High Times
magazine, “I know for a fact that [Kurt] was trying to divorce [Courtney] and she didn’t want the divorce, so she had him killed or knew it was going to happen…. I don’t want to put my daughter in jail. I’ve been caught up in a bizarre web of events which has affected my life. It would be very much like if your child came home with plans for a nuclear weapon in their briefcase and you wanted to know where the hell he got them. Well, my daughter came home with a dead husband and I damn well want to know what happened.”

Two years later, not entirely convinced of his sincerity, we appeared with Harrison on Maury Povich’s television talk show, where we had a heated exchange with Harrison on the air:

At times, Harrison can come off as a bit of a buffoon, as when he turned to the camera in Nick Broomfield’s documentary and said, “I’ve got her number…. I’ve got her nailed. It’s still tough love and I’m still the father. Pop off to me and maybe we can work something out, but keep on bad-rapping me, I’ll keep kicking your ass. Courtney, don’t take me on, I’ll kick your ass. I don’t care how big a show it is, I don’t care if she’s got $177 million.”

At other times, however, he comes across as a caring father and grandfather who regrets the seemingly permanent estrangement from his daughter and is deeply concerned about the welfare of Frances Bean. He fears the girl, who turns twelve in 2004, is growing up in an environment of drugs and general excess. More than once, we saw him burst into tears as he described how Courtney has never let him see his granddaughter. He also frequently claims to love his daughter.

Harrison, who is writing a biography of Kurt Cobain, claims to have had a “mystical connection” with the son-in-law he never met. When Kurt died, he says, it was as if “my heart had been ripped out of my chest.” At the time of his death, Harrison hadn’t seen or spoken to Courtney since November 1993, five months before Kurt died, when she invited him to a concert at Slim’s, a San Francisco music club where Hole was opening for the Lemon-heads. An early computer buff who helped develop the first version of the Acrobat PDF format when he worked for Adobe Systems, Harrison describes how he taught his daughter how to use the Internet on his Apple Powerbook while he and Courtney had coffee at Cafe Trieste before the show that evening.

Backstage, Courtney introduced him to Evan Dando of the Lemon-heads, who asked him for an autographed copy of his book about the Grateful Dead. Harrison claims that he saw Dando kissing her backstage and saw him again naked in his daughter’s hotel room bed the next day. (Two months after Kurt’s death, an undated photo circulated in several tabloids of a wasted-looking Courtney in bed with Dando. They were kissing. Courtney later claimed it was a staged “publicity shot.”)

The night of the San Francisco show, Courtney promised her father that she and Kurt would try to come up to the ranch soon with the baby. “I was always telling her that I wanted to take [Kurt] bungee jumping, which is a proven treatment for heroin addiction,” he recalls, explaining that he started America’s first LSD telephone intervention program in 1965, talking people through bad acid trips. “I’m convinced that I could have got Kurt off drugs. She thought I was crazy.” Courtney later confirmed to the
San Francisco Chronicle
that she had indeed invited her father backstage that night but that “he was only interested in talking to people who were more famous than me.”

For months after Kurt’s death, Harrison logged on to the Internet to conduct more than two hundred online “interventions” with teenagers who were expressing suicidal feelings about Kurt’s death. A year later, sometime after he first heard Tom Grant’s murder theory and became suspicious that Courtney was involved in her husband’s death, word was leaked of his upcoming biography. Courtney’s lawyers quickly sent him a letter threatening a lawsuit if he went ahead with plans to write the book. He ignored the threats and fired off a letter of his own: