Who Really Killed Kurt Cobain?

On the 8th April 1994, grunge band Nirvana’s front man Kurt Cobain was found dead in his own home in Seattle. Discovered with a fatal bullet wound to the head, clutching a shotgun, with a note near his body, his death was quickly deemed to be a suicide by the Seattle Police Department. Just three albums into his critically acclaimed career, the music world mourned Kirk Cobain’s seemingly unexpected, violent death. Many questioned why a man at the peak of his career, who had recently celebrated the birth of a daughter, would be driven to suicide?

Just two weeks before Cobain’s death, his wife Courtney Love organised an intervention for Cobain. She was concerned with her husband’s drug addictions, and Cobain agreed to enter a rehab facility in California. Despite his struggles with addiction, the staff at the facility did not report Cobain as having a suicidal mindset. Similarly, friends who visited him during his short stay reported that Cobain was upbeat and showed no indication that he wanted to end his life.

But after spending just two days in rehab, Cobain escaped the facility and flew back to his home city, Seattle. Love hired private investigator Tom Grant to track down Cobain’s whereabouts. But by the time he was found it was too late: he had already been dead for three days. Initially hired to track down a missing person, Tom Grant was now intent on tracking down Cobain’s murderer.

Grant contested key pieces of evidence, believing them to prove Cobain’s suicide was staged. He says Cobain’s suicide note was forged, and the level of heroin in his blood stream would have made him unable to pull the trigger himself. Both these claims have been disputed by forensic specialists

Grant isn’t the only person to believe that Cobain was murdered. A week after Cobain’s death was announced, TV host Richard Lee aired a series, accusingly titled, ‘Kurt Cobain Was Murdered’. Lee cited discrepancies in the police reports, including contradicting information regarding the fatal shotgun blast, as evidence of a murder conspiracy. Furthermore, Cobain’s grandfather, Leland Cobain publicly stated that he believed Cobain was murdered. Meanwhile Cobain’s father in law, Hank Harrison, accused his own daughter Courtney Love, of being responsible for his death.

Whilst employed by Courtney Love, Grant recorded every conversation he had, in order to gather evidence for his own investigation into the death. Grant claims that Cobain’s attorney encouraged him to investigate the case, stating that Cobain wanted to exclude Courtney Love from his will, as he was planning to divorce her. Grant believes that the threat of losing access to Cobain’s significant and valuable estate motivated Love to have her husband murdered. However despite Grant’s confidence in attaining a motivation for murder, Cobain’s attorney has never corroborated these claims.

Filmmaker Nick Broomfield investigated Tom Grant’s murder theory in his 1998 documentary ‘Kurt & Courtney’. During his investigation, Broomfield interviewed Eldon Hoke, the bandleader of heavy metal band, The Mentors. Eldon claims that Courney Love offered him $50,000 to kill Cobain and says the murder was carried out by someone called ‘Allen’, who has since been suggested to be, from the band Road Whore. However, this line of investigation came to abrupt halt, when just a few days later Eldon Hoke was himself killed in a freak train accident. Despite the hint of a witness to the Cobain murder charge, Nick Broomfield cited suicide as the most reasonable explanation for Cobain’s death.

The seemingly mysterious circumstances surrounding Kurt Cobain’s suicide may be due to the conspiracy to keep Cobain’s mental health private from the press at a time in which he was most vulnerable. Just a month before Cobain’s death, whilst in Rome, Cobain fell into a coma after overdosing on a mixture of alcohol and pills. Whilst Cobain’s management publicly reported that Cobain had taken the pills in an attempt to combat flu, Courtney Love has since claimed that the Rome incident was in fact Cobain’s first suicide attempt and he only survived because of her timely call for help. Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo supports these claims stating, “Rome was only the latest instalment of [those around Cobain] keeping a semblance of normalcy for the outside world”.

More that 20 years after his death, the Seattle Police Department still receives weekly requests to re-open the Cobain investigation. At the time of Cobain’s death he was suffering from drug addiction and clinical depression, all of which had plagued Cobain even before he achieved fame. Cobain’s cousin Beverly publicly stated that her family had a history of mental illness, noting that two of her uncles had also committed suicide with guns. Struggling with the pressures of fame and public scrutiny, heightened by his high profile relationship with Courtney Love, evidence suggests that Cobain was disillusioned with his success and intent on a path of self-destruction. Nirvana drummer David Grohl stated he knew Cobain would die at an early age, saying, “sometimes you just can’t save someone from themselves”.