A reopening of Kurt Cobain’s case file has forensic scientists asking more questions and wondering: what really happened to the King of Grunge?

 

he year was 1994. Nelson Mandela was the president of South Africa. Friends had just aired on TV. And the King of Grunge Rock, Kurt Cobain, was higher than a Himalayan mountain climber and preparing to shoot himself in the head.

Or was he? The theories about Cobain’s untimely death have been spinning like a top ever since the fateful shotgun blast echoed from his Seattle garage. The police ruled it a suicide. But there were enough peculiarities (and a strong potential motive for murder) that 31 years later, many questions remain — most of which revolve around Cobain’s then-wife, Courtney Love. 

In fact, the circumstances of Cobain’s suicide are so improbable, so inconceivable, that a private group of forensic scientists recently reopened the case file. What they found astounded them and has reinjected life into this fading mystery.   

But let’s back up. Context is important to make these new scientific findings make any sense at all. So let’s revisit that dark April night on Lake Washington Boulevard, when the legendary pioneer of grunge allegedly took enough heroin to kill an elephant, and then put a Remington 20-gauge shotgun in his mouth.

The Background

Cobain was going through some shit in ‘94. He was depressed—but everyone already knew that. He was also severely addicted to heroin. But who wasn’t? It was Seattle. It was the ‘90s. Grunge was exploding, and flannel was everywhere. 

Cobain’s drug problem, though, combined with his mental state and pharmaceutical access, had gotten out of hand. He’d just found out that his wife, Love, was cheating on him (again). He was seriously considering quitting the band. He nearly overdosed once on tour already. Then, on April 1st, he made a daring escape from the subsequent rehab facility he’d been placed in and made his way home to Seattle.

Four days after his great escape, Cobain allegedly shot up with roughly ten times his standard dose of heroin. Then, in his near-comatose state, he grabbed the longest, most unwieldy gun in the house (nevermind the handguns he could have used), and somehow managed to pull the trigger with the barrel up against his head. 

The shotgun perplexed everyone, even the police. So did the fact that Cobain had so much heroin in his system. People who are that high typically can’t operate a firearm. If they die, it’s because of an overdose. Firearm suicide attempts don’t often coincide with heroin overdose attempts. But Cobain was apparently the exception. 

The Note

Cobain’s suicide note didn’t appear until three days after his body was discovered—after Love had moved back into the house. She found it crumpled up in their bedsheets. And boy, is it a strange note. It reads like a depressed journal entry, not about suicide, but about quitting the band. That is, right up until the last five lines, when the handwriting changes (becoming more legible, bigger, and more feminine-looking), and the melancholy tone takes a sudden turn.

It ends with “Please Keep Going, Courtney. For Francis … I love you, I love you.” 

The Motive

That’s all strange and curious. But why would Love want Cobain dead? He was a world-famous rock star. His career was just skyrocketing (while hers was barely off the ground). She could have had a wealthy, privileged celebrity future if she had been able to hang onto him…

Except that Love believed Cobain was going to divorce her. He knew she wasn’t being faithful to him, and they’d had blowout fights about it in the weeks before his death. Cobain was over it. And if he left her, Love would be left with nothing. 

Unless he died before those divorce papers could be served…

Thirty-one years later, Love, now 60 years old, is still riding the coattails of her late husband’s fame (and fortune). However, thanks to the scientists who recently published a peer-reviewed paper reviewing Cobain’s death, that might not be the case for long. 

The Study

Independent scientist Brian Burnett has extensive experience looking specifically at firearm suicides following drug overdoses. He worked with a team of other post-mortem specialists to review all of the documents associated with the investigation and Cobain’s autopsy. After analyzing everything, he and his team came to a disturbing and astoundingly different conclusion than the Seattle Police did in 1994. 

Burnett points to the capped needles in Cobain’s heroin kit (how did he recap them in his altered state?), the unlikely trajectory of the shotgun shell, and the impossibility of a comatose drug addict somehow shooting himself in the head with a full-sized shotgun. They pointed out that he was so high that his organs were going into failure at the time he allegedly shot himself…

The team concludes it is far more likely that Cobain was restrained and forcibly incapacitated with an obscene dose of heroin before he was shot and his body was staged.

The Seattle Police Department said it will not reopen the case as a result of these findings. It maintains that Cobain’s cause of death was suicide by gunshot.