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.
Kurt Cobain’s childhood home
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.”