Love & Death (31 page)

A few months after our first encounter with Hoke, we received a phone call from the British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who said he was thinking of doing a documentary for the BBC about the Cobain murder theory and wished to hire us as consultants. At the time, Broomfield—dubbed “Britain’s Michael Moore” for his in-your-face interviewing technique—was one of the world’s leading documentary filmmakers, known for controversial films on topics as diverse as neo-Nazi politicians, Margaret Thatcher and female serial killers.

In March 1997, Broomfield flew us to Seattle for a week of filming, during which we shared some of our own findings and named some of the characters we had interviewed for our forthcoming book. Among them was Eldon Hoke, whom Broomfield was determined to interview when he headed to California.

A month later, we learned that Eldon Hoke’s mangled body had been found on a train track in the dingy working-class city of Riverside, California. Nick Broomfield had interviewed him only a week before his death and had just heard the news himself. “What’s going on? Should I be afraid?” Broomfield asked us. “Do you think Courtney had anything to do with it?” At that point, we weren’t sure what to answer, knowing nothing of the circumstances of Hoke’s death.

But two months later, we received a call from yet another veteran L.A. punk musician. Brent Alden (a.k.a. Brent Aldo), former leader of the band False Alarm, told us that two nights before Hoke was killed (in fact, it was the night before), the Mentors had played a gig at Al’s Bar in downtown Los Angeles. Alden, who was writing a book about the L.A. punk scene, had interviewed Hoke before the show and found him unaccountably agitated: “Duce was acting very freaked out. He had heard that he might be in danger, and he asked me if I knew where he could get a fake driver’s license. I asked him why and he said, ‘People get buried in cornfields, people get lost in swamps.’ I asked him what he was talking about. He said he had recently been told who killed Kurt Cobain, and he was super-paranoid. I knew all about the thing where he said he was offered $50,000, but he said this was different.”

Alden then told us that Hoke had actually revealed to him the name of Kurt’s killer and that he planned to reveal it in his forthcoming book. We asked him if he was afraid that by divulging the information, he might share Hoke’s fate.

“The information is locked in a safety-deposit box and will be made public if anything happens to me,” he said.

In our first book, we call Alden “Drew Gallagher” because he asked to remain anonymous. We found his claim that Hoke told him the name of the killer dubious, and we said so. But six months after we spoke to him, an abrupt two-second slip of the tongue in Broomfield’s newly released documentary brought Alden’s claims into focus for us once again.

It occurs in an interview with Hoke taped on April 11, 1997, at the Riverside, California “Mentors Ranch”—a small compound owned by the band’s bassist, Steve Broy. Broomfield had been escorted there by a man named Lomas, better known as the pimp for Divine Brown, the prostitute who set off a notorious Hollywood scandal in 1995 when Hugh Grant was arrested while availing himself of her services. Although Broomfield is notorious for paying his subjects, Hoke had refused money, asking only that the director buy him a drink. When Broomfield arrives at the ranch and asks Hoke about Courtney’s offer, it results in the following filmed exchange:

At this point in the conversation, Hoke—clearly intoxicated—appears to reveal something he shouldn’t have:

Hoke makes no other mention of his friend “Allen,” who, he appears to imply, had actually done the killing. Eight days after the interview, Hoke was dead—run over by a train about a mile from where the Broomfield interview took place.

By the time Broomfield’s film was released, our book was already at the printer and it was too late to follow up on Hoke’s disclosure or investigate the circumstances of his death. We assumed we were finished with this case forever. Four years later, however, we came into possession of a tape that would plunge us right back into the Cobain investigation and force us to reevaluate everything we thought we knew about the case.

We had never put much stock in Brent Alden’s claim to know the name of Kurt Cobain’s killer. By 2002, his book had still not appeared, and we assumed he had made up the story. Then, through an L.A. music source, we happened to obtain a copy of the actual interview that Alden had conducted with Hoke at Al’s Bar in Los Angeles on April 18, 1997. On it, Hoke can be heard telling Alden of Courtney’s $50,000 offer, when he suddenly blurts out something else:

Could this be the same “Allen” that Hoke had let slip during his interview with Broomfield? We had never even heard of Allen Wrench, but a quick Internet search uncovered the website of a California band called Kill Allen Wrench (a.k.a. “Punk Rock’s Most Important Band.”) The site is surprisingly elaborate for a minor rock band. It comes complete with pages of band lore, lyrics, downloadable songs, animated skeletons and an exhaustive gallery of frequently updated free porn. The band, it declares, is about “all four rock essentials: Satanic Worship, Alcoholism, Spousal Abuse, and Self Destructive Drug Use!” In transcribed interviews and texts, there is much talk of groupies and sluts who will do “anything” for these “punk rock legends.” One member bemoans in an interview what “a load of crap punk rock has become” because some punks have had the temerity to complain that porn is bad. The songs include no fewer than two about El Duce (a.k.a. Eldon Hoke)—one describing how the Mentors’ leader has been reduced to panhandling and “fucking chicks that are ugly and mean,” and the other, replete with references to train tracks and trains, describing him as “feeling no pain.” Papering the site are concert photos of Allen Wrench himself in devil’s horns, pentagrams and slatherings of red glop. It appeared we had found our man.

It took us several weeks to arrange an interview, but in December 2002, the band’s publicist, “Jimmy Soprano,” informed us that Wrench was willing to talk. He arranged a telephone interview.

Wrench started off cautiously in that first phone conversation. As part of the Riverside music scene, he said, he had known Eldon Hoke for years and “Duce” was one of his best friends. When we asked him why Hoke would have claimed that he killed Kurt Cobain, Wrench replied, “I have no idea.” He then told us that he was the last person to see Hoke alive: “I drove him to the liquor store that night, but I dropped him off in front of the store and then I went to pick up this chick. I never saw him again. Later, I heard that he got run over by a train a few minutes after I dropped him off.”

Hoke rats out Wrench; Hoke winds up dead. The last person to see Hoke alive is the man he’s just named as Kurt’s killer. Isn’t this scenario somewhat suspicious? we asked.

“Look, if I were to admit to you that I killed Cobain, I’d end up in prison, and I’m not going to risk that,” Wrench replied. “That’s why they’ll never find the guy who really killed Kennedy. Nobody would be stupid enough to come forward and admit to the crime. They’d end up either dead or in prison. It’s still entirely possible the [Cobain] case could be reopened. It used to be that homicide had a statute of limitations in the U.S., but now it doesn’t anymore. If I said, ‘Hey, I whacked Cobain,’ a hundred years from now, when I’m 135 years old, I can still be put in jail for fucking whacking Cobain.”

We said we understood his reluctance. But off the record, would he tell us the real story? “Nobody will ever know how he died,” he responded. “That’s the fun of it.” We persisted: there must be some reason why Hoke named him as Kurt’s killer. He paused and then said abruptly, “OK, off the record, I whacked him, as long as it’s off the record.”

Whoa! It was a telephone interview, so we couldn’t study his face for signs of irony. Was he being flippant or facetious? Probably, but we needed to meet him in person to size him up and gauge his personality and credibility. It didn’t take long for the opportunity to present itself. He offered to show us the “scene of the crime.”

It’s March 2003, and we are having a beer with Allen Wrench at a Riverside steakhouse called the Spunky Steer, a place Wrench has chosen for its proximity to the train tracks where Hoke had met his end. In the three months since we last spoke, we had dug a little into Wrench’s background and discovered that he was a master of Brazilian jujitsu and had won the U.S. national judo championship (blue belt division) in 1997. The irony was not lost on us. Kurt had had a horror of jocks all his life. Was it possible that the last face the sensitive poet had seen on this earth was that of this martial arts fanatic? Whatever the case, we were reluctant to meet this man on our own, so we took along some protection in the form of an actor friend and martial arts master named Dan DiJulio, who was best known for playing Dan Aykroyd in the ABC-TV movie
The Gilda Radner Story.

We had always assumed that the name Allen Wrench was made up because it is also the name of a common household tool. But in our preliminary background check, we discovered that this was in fact his real name, that he had been born Richard Allen Wrench on August 4, 1967, six months after Kurt himself was born. Beyond that, we knew little. In our telephone conversation, he claimed that he had been arrested “a few times” for assault, drunk and disorderly conduct, and various other offenses. But on our own, we found little more menacing in his police record than disturbing the peace and driving without a license.

The man before us at the Spunky Steer was a tall, powerfully built individual, dressed in the rock T-shirt, shorts and sneakers of the neater sort of California punk. Clean-cut, slightly balding at the temples and with an aura of grinding strength, he could have easily passed for a U.S. marine. Soon we discovered that he was also very articulate and highly intelligent. In short, he no more fit our stereotype of a hired killer than Eldon Hoke himself had when we met him seven years earlier. By the time Wrench finished telling his story, however, we weren’t so sure.

Wrench first met Eldon Hoke in 1992, when Mentors bassist Steve Broy (a.k.a. Dr. Heathen Scum) graduated from college and moved to Riverside to start a job as an engineer: “I was a musician myself, and so Heathen Scum and Duce and I would hang out and jam together at the Mentors Ranch, which was the name of the house that Dr. Scum bought in Riverside,” Wrench says. “It wasn’t really a ranch, but there was some land and some animals there, so we called it that. Anyways, we all became pretty good friends. Duce was basically homeless, so when he didn’t have anything going on in L.A., he would come up to Riverside and crash at the ranch.”

Wrench’s eponymously named band didn’t form until two years after Hoke’s death. Before that, he said, he spent most of his time practicing his martial arts: “That’s my weapon of choice. I have a collection of guns, combat arms, stuff like that. But I prefer to use my hands.” Since the band was formed in 1999, they have produced three albums on Wrench’s own label, Devil Vision Records, but his music, he says, doesn’t pay the rent: “We press about 2,500 copies of each album, but we end up giving most of those away.” Odd jobs here and there, along with the odd gig, get him through the month.

What’s with the satanic imagery? we ask.

“That’s just satire in the great tradition of El Duce himself,” he explains. “We’re not satanists or anything like that. We just like to stir things up with our music.”

We decide to cut to the chase. Was Kurt Cobain’s death a murder or suicide?

“Suicide all the way.”

Why?

“Because I’m not going to incriminate myself. You see, the perfect assassinations always look like suicides. A good assassin would be like a military sniper. They know the game, they’re not fucked-up by ego. They’re cold and calculating. Look at Robert Blake: he was a dumbass. Look at Phil Spector. If you’re going to be in that game, I think you have to have a little bit of intelligence. Some people buy into what they think it takes to kill somebody, which I don’t think is that big a deal or difficult to do. They’re just not smart about it; they’re not realistic about what will happen when somebody ends up dead.”