In 2016, a national columnist offered her thoughts on the Cobain question, including the following:
“Like daylight savings and ramps at the farmer’s market, the impending anniversary of Cobain’s death always seems to bring out the “Kurt was murdered” brigade. And so, because the Internet is one big rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, because there are people who actively believe Sandy Hook was a hoax and that the earth is flat, this week the Seattle Police Department released five new photographs of the rifle that killed Cobain. And it’s just ignited the believers to cling all the more firmly to their theories.
Two years ago, near the twentieth anniversary of Cobain’s death, the police announced they had “Seattle Police Department Cold Case Detective Mike Ciesynski review the case file in anticipation of media inquiries about Cobain’s death, and the many conspiracy theories surrounding the case.” Ciesynski immersed himself in the known information about the mysterious last days of Cobain, who was found dead of a gunshot in his home by an electrician. He watched documentaries and read articles about the conspiracy theories. And while he admitted, “They’re all very interesting,” he added decisively, “It’s a suicide. This is a closed case.”
May Elizabeth Williams, Salon, March 18, 2016
If you know little about the case, the short article excerpted above would leave an indelible impression: any backward-looking fuss over Cobain’s death owes to the primal urge to see conspiracy, dark works, evil complexity, and a back-story behind every fallen hero. But, there’s really nothing to see here, folks, except some cheap mystification, spawned by the kind of guy who lives in his grandmother’s basement and has nothing better to do.
As serious students of Cobain’s last days know well, that’s many miles off the mark. Even if you conclude at the end of the day that a suicide was most likely you must travel a path of legitimate, complex mystery to get there. Abundant scientific and circumstantial evidence, subtle and intriguing, are at play.
Why, then, would a bright woman, a talented, recognized writer who pens delightful articles and columns, leave us with something so misleading? Don’t be too quick to judge. In one sense, she’s right. The crazies come out, as if howling at the full moon, when something dramatic happens in the mists of the under-culture, where the imagination can run wild. And especially if a rock-star makes it to a twenty-seventh birthday, and no farther.
“It had to have been Courtney, man, I mean do you know how skanky that bitch was when……”
“People just have to listen to his lyrics, dude. He promised he was going out his own way, you know, I mean….”
“But who wouldn’t kill for half a billion dollars? You know I would, in a heartbeat.”
“When a guy jumps the wall to get out of rehab, it’s kind of like he’s ready to jump out of life, it’s obvious, don’t you get it?”
And those would qualify as among the more rational comments that some of these tragedies elicit. Reading post after post of mind-to-mouth chit-chat, on Reddit or wherever you might find it, is guaranteed to shine almost no light at all on the mystery that haunts you. They’re pretty much just noise.
Which brings us to our theme, Signal and Noise. How do you tell the difference?
Signal defines the sound of structured thinking, pieces of evidence which find a meaningful place within a mosaic. Noise is the chatter that comes to people’s minds, or the vague rumors that people hear or their distant memories, that may sound interesting for a moment but really add up to next to nothing.
Separating signal from noise rises as the major challenge for every good mystery analyst.
In the Cobain case, there’s lots of forensic evidence to evaluate, lots of documented circumstances to serve as building blocks of a potential solution to the mystery. Lots of sound to qualify as signal. And of course a ton of noise, as drug-culture and other versions of the counter-culture bleed all over the internet.
But what are we to make of some of that noise, and can it help us hear any signal? A case in point, as one of Kurt Cobain’s old flames unburdens herself about all the years she spent terrified of Courtney Love:
“She told people I killed her cat. She told stories upon stories on the internet (that old AOL Hole folder)…. (DOCUMENTED and downloaded to prove she did), countless grotesque lies that I could NOT stop her from spreading. I was not only was in fear of her, I was in fear of her fans. Countless times I would come out from a club, or the subway, and my car windshield would have been written on with lipstick “you suck”, or “f–k you” signed “Courtney. People would come up to me and say the most rotten things to me. Not even knowing me- All Courtney fans that were brainwashed by her or something… And all the while I KNEW how horrible she was as a person. She violated my integrity, she violated my life, she even left death threats to ME as well as my elderly parents on their answering machine causing a lot of stress and weird fear within our family. It was INSANE. Like having a gangster threaten you. Whitey Bulger or something. It was partially amusing because it was so nuts, but in the back of our minds, we were questioning “is she for real”. Will someone light our home on fire? etc etc…. In any case, made it hard to sleep at night. My parents were old and lovely, and didn’t deserve that. I felt like I had brought that pox with me -again, but not having ever done a single thing to deserve that…. I lived with my parents at the time….awful for them to have had to deal with that.
If she was just some random chick that was going around on her facebook or my space or something saying s–t about another chick- that is one thing. But she was one of the biggest pop stars in the world at the time, and everyone loved her-the “grieving widow”, etc etc….so, the dynamic and the impact is a lot greater regarding the emotional toll , the incredible sadness, fear, and feeling of absolute powerlessness she made me feel. Knowing millions of people were reading her interviews, etc, and all the rotten things she was saying about me. All untrue. I was just a small town nobody busker who loved songs and friends, etc….and suddenly (very publicly), I was a fictional character she made up. She made me feel like a frightened child after she emotionally abused and violated me. She threatened me, she punched me, kicked me, chased me, and nearly had me killed that night on Sunset. And then, it continued until Kathleen and others got the guts to press charges when similar assaults happened to them. I should have pressed charges long ago. But I was too scared and didn’t want to bring any attention to it. I just wanted her to leave me alone.”
(Read More: Kurt Cobain’s Ex-Girlfriend Goes After Courtney Love)
Mary Lou Lord, Loudwire, February 4, 2016
The above is a section excerpted from the ranting posts of Mary Lou Lord published at Loudwire.com on February 4, 2016. The context is a Seattle grunge culture, and Courtney’s place within that, that few of us could directly relate to. The inside-culture diatribe (going far beyond what you see above) is heartfelt, even heartbreaking, but too much a stream of consciousness to be taken seriously in most forums, or any court. Except, note the bold sections, our emphasis.
If Courtney Love was unlawfully aggressive to Lord and others, through threats and assaults, that’s corroboration of the fourth pillar of violent crime. In addition to the classic detective’s search for motive, means, and opportunity, there’s disposition. Can you imagine an individual involved in a specific act, or would it be quite a stretch? Police are always checking prior criminal records, and character witnesses weigh in at trials, for just that reason.
From the endless noise of internet postings some signal can be heard, from time to time.
Max Wallace and Ian Halperin, in their book “Love and Death,” report their first attempt to capture reminiscences of the Cobain-Love relationship on videotape. “You expect me to talk about Courtney with the camera running?” exclaimed the young woman, visibly turning pale. “Do you think I have a death wish?” This after other attempts at interviews found key witnesses in hiding, just plain scared. Courtney’s first husband, after all, remembers jarring low notes such as waking up to their marital bed ablaze, with him in it!
A dossier of similar memories of Courtney’s behavior would fill, literally, hundreds of pages. The point for our analysis here is that if even a third of the scary tales are true, they paint a picture of a personality: mercurial, volatile, violent. By itself that proves nothing at all about Cobain’s demise, but when the hypothesis turns to foul play, it brings a potential suspect into focus. The noise can be distilled down to a coherent signal.
And what of the bleak landscape of Aberdeen, Washington, where Kurt lived a less than perfect childhood, finally escaping at age 20, once and for all? Is it signal or noise to contemplate the depressing gray skies of his background, the reported fact that the suicide rate for the town was twice the national average? That early death ran through his family background? More relevant would be the track record of the miserably famous, the fates of those persons who shot to fame and fortune from nowhere. They don’t all commit suicide by any means, but few of them, it seems, find serenity. An Elvis or Michael Jackson ending to a charmed, ultra-successful trajectory is all too common. And so often, drug abuse assumes a central spot in the final portrait.
In that context, suicide does not seem unreasonable as an explanation for Kurt’s demise. The noise of the background has merged with a possible, clear signal.
And what about Kurt’s earlier “suicide attempt” in Rome, where he collapsed into a coma after having mixed alcohol and excessive quantities of the sedative Rohypnol. First responders considered it an accidental overdose–their professional impression. Only after Cobain’s death, after the body was discovered the following April, did Courtney unceasingly refer to the event in Rome as one of several supposed suicidal incidents. This all rises above the noise and gossip level because a clear interpretation of the medical incident in Rome fits into the mosaic of one theory, or the other. If a suicide attempt, it underscores at least Cobain’s disposition to taking his own life. If an accidental overdose it bears little relation to the death scene, but Courtney’s outspoken advocacy for the suicide theme goes with the allegation that Courtney was working hard to create certain perceptions.
The Death Scene.
Professionals investigating a death scene try to focus on signal, not noise. Not the color of someone’s shirt, or whether a lady painted her toenails, unless that holds unique significance in this case.
The question is: What exactly happened here? Did more occur than meets the eye upon superficial glance?
In the case of Kurt’s death, could he have (and would he have) shot up the ultra-lethal dose of heroin, taken at least a few moments to stow the drug paraphernalia back in its tidy box, picked up the shotgun and positioned it just as he wanted under his mouth, and pulled the trigger?
It was repeatedly asserted by the Seattle PD that the room where Kurt died was locked and thus he had to have been alone. But apparently that wasn’t the case, and the door was the type that can be locked behind as you exit. It’s not clear what happened with the shotgun, devoid of fingerprints as were the shells. The pharmacology of heroin is also signal, though subject to debate. A number of the scientists, perhaps most who’ve looked at this evidence, find it unlikely that Cobain could have held and fired a shotgun even a number of seconds after injecting so powerful a dose, and more than twenty to thirty seconds would have elapsed had he carefully put away the drug paraphernalia, and (for some inexplicable reason) rolled down his sleeves. They find it a stretch that he could have accomplished all this alone. Based on “gut feelings” alone, all this might be noise. Based on science and forensic experience, it becomes significant signal.
For more detailed information on the death scene, several documentaries of varying lengths, and a host of documents available on the internet, offer perspective.
The (Non)Investigation by the Seattle PD.
How relevant is a lousy police investigation to the ultimate truth–in other words, if the Seattle PD’s work on the case left a lot to be desired, so what? An obvious suicide is still a suicide, is it not?
The problem in separating signal from noise here is that you only get one chance to investigate the right way–following up all evidence, witnesses, and leads while they’re fresh. The SPD and especially Detective Cameron, in charge of the case, apparently decided very early on that one more rock-star junkie had killed himself, considered the case an “obvious” suicide, and proceeded accordingly. Such a rush to judgement becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy more often than not: evidence which fits the thesis is noted, potential contrary evidence conveniently ignored, and so the verdict looks more like the original prediction with each passing moment. Asked weeks later about photographic evidence, the department replied: “we don’t generally develop the film on suicides.”
Dangerous circular thinking–“Why don’t you review all relevant evidence?”–“Why bother with a suicide?” –“How are you sure it’s a suicide?”–“What evidence we’ve seen looks that way, and besides, you know, rock stars with heroin habits….”–“But why not delve more deeply?”–“Seriously, and waste all that time on a suicide?”
Such unprofessional thought patterns are not consistent with good detective work, obviously, but police departments rarely wish to redo, and apologize for mistakes, such is professional pride.
The point here is that what seems like noise–fuss over the details of what the Seattle police did or did not do–is signal in the sense that their careless work leaves more questions than it answers. For all intents and purposes, there was no real investigation, worthy of law enforcement professionals, of the death of Kurt Cobain. As Dr. Cyril Wecht asserted an independent law enforcement entity, free of the professional pride issues of the SPD, should have come in years ago to review all the evidence objectively.
None of this implies that a sloppy investigation necessarily reaches a false conclusion. Not necessarily. As one of the reviews critical of the principle murder-theory documentary commented: it’s possible both to have a shoddy investigation, and for Kurt’s death to have been a suicide, as the local police concluded. True enough. We only assert that the SPD inquiry was so shallow that it’s value in determining the truth is extremely limited. We agree with Dr. Wecht that the local inquiry in most ways was a poster for “how not to run an investigaton.”
Circumstances, Props, and Staging
“Circumstantial evidence” as it’s called has always been the poor cousin of “scientific evidence,” but still respected when compelling enough. Many times it’s all a detective has to go on, the only fodder for deductive reasoning there is. Harold Henthorn was convicted of murder in Colorado in 2015 on the strength of having marked the remote spot where his wife fell to her death on a map, ahead of time. He also took out large insurance policies on her (having carefully researched her financial status years earlier). In the minds of the jury, there was no innocent explanation for these acts.
The Cobain death is chock full of suggestive circumstances, dubious props upon the stage, but do they admit of innocent explanation? Are they signal, or just vaguely interesting noise?
There’s a host of odd circumstances that surround the death scene, discussed above and in abundant literature. Example: the shotgun that fired the fatal shot into Cobain’s head was found tightly gripped trigger side up in his hand. The one expelled shell in the room was found on the other side, as it would have been ejected had the gun naturally been right side up. Yet the weapon was reportedly gripped tightly, the death grasp or “cadaveric spasm,” in Kurt’s hand. Those contradictory facts alone called for an expert panel of ballistic specialists and forensic pathologists to make sense of it. Does the Seattle police supposition–that Cobain fired the gun trigger down, the shell traveling to where it was found, and the gun then rotated 180 degrees in his hands–make any sense whatever, is it even possible considering that the reflexive grasp of death would have frozen the gun’s position? On the other hand, how would you explain a murder staged as suicide from this evidence? The killer could easily enough reposition the gun after the fatality (in some ways the whole scene looks as staged as a corpse in a coffin), but how could they stage the vice-like grip in which the gun was found?
The original still is courtesy of the Soaked In Bleach documentary. We have embellished it for emphasis.
It’s easy to dismiss details like this as noise when they become annoying to try to make sense of, but they represent important signal. Either one set of details better matches science and logic, or it doesn’t, the pesky details can’t be simply waved away.
The behavior of Courtney Love in the run-up to the discovery of the body, and shortly thereafter, provides an almost bottomless trove of fascinating circumstances. Perhaps most of them, each by themselves, are just a modest squeak of unusual noise, meaning little to nothing. But do they all add up to something?
Note that Courtney professed a desperation–from April 3 to April 8–to locate her husband, in fact invested serious Private Investigator dollars in the pursuit. Yet she failed to take all the logical measures: go to Seattle herself when she had every ability to do so, allow PI Grant and his associates to surveil the family home where the body was eventually found, or inform her investigators of the most basic facts, such as Kurt’s presence at their Seattle residence if only briefly on April 2nd. Why did a woman supposedly wracked with worry write in her notes she wished to “get arrested” during this stretch, which she did, and why was she practicing penmanship that turned out to be an almost identical fit with the final section of the “suicide note?” There had been some sort of break-in at the Seattle home that year, true, but would Courtney have decided that April 7th was just the perfect day to phone, from Los Angeles, a Seattle electrician to ask for expedited attention to the “greenhouse” above the family garage, a little used area of the property in any event? Wouldn’t the crescendo of her worries over a missing husband, building steadily over several days, wouldn’t that have crowded minor details out of her thoughts? Thoughts of installing alarms on out-buildings, wouldn’t such concerns have been pushed far away to the furthest recesses in her mind? (Kurt was reported dead by the electrical installer the next day, fueling speculation that Courtney ordered the work as a way to get the body discovered and the process moved forward.)
While a critical search for the missing husband was supposedly going full-tilt, PI Tom Grant was repeatedly told not to waste any time watching the couple’s Lake Washington home, except for specific missions that he thought Courtney designed to reveal specific things–a missing rifle, a note to Kurt placed on the stairs by family nanny Michael “Cali” DeWitt. Grant could easily have been put in touch with DeWitt, with whom Courtney communicated often down this stretch, but instead Grant was kept away from him and Cali was flown down to L.A., on April 7th. Both he and Courtney could thus claim a great physical distance, usually a strong alibi, at the time Cobain’s body was discovered on April 8th.
What are we to make of all this, and the dozen or more other circumstances that seem odd and unconnected? Suicide theorists will brush them off as just the eccentric activities of an ultra-eccentric young woman who inhabited the strange rock subculture of the era. They can appear as random, unthinking acts, unless they’re viewed as pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. Then the portrait that takes shape is of Courtney Love managing people, events, and perceptions as vigorously as she can, while playing the role of worried spouse, and after the discovery of the body, of grieving widow. Confirmation bias being what it is, are we just seeing nefarious patterns to Courtney’s behavior because we’ve decided a few facts look bad and that she’s generally bad news?
There’s always at least some subjectivity in the question of what’s signal, what’s noise. We offer this thought: we do find it hard to conjure an innocent explanation for so many odd actions in so short a period of time, and some of them, such as the practice sheet of letters that look amazingly like the writing found at the end of the “suicide note,” appear to us as particularly incriminating. Mystery analysts will have to search for the meaning of all these elements of evidence, and weigh in as to whether there’s strong “signal” here, or just a lot of over-interpreted “noise.”
After the death of Batteau, the research faltered, and documentation or even memory of the project largely disappeared. Batteau, an excellent swimmer, had drowned in shallow waters near his home, at a time when other research had Navy operatives attempting to train dolphins to drown swimmers—the object was to protect ships in harbors from sabotage at the hands of enemy divers. Some even speculate that these different dolphin projects became tragically entangled, part of the reason for so much official silence.