Love & Death (18 page)

After his meeting with Cameron, Grant pays another visit to the Lake Washington house. Courtney is in the dining room discussing Hole’s upcoming tour with her guitarist, Eric Erlandson. Grant asks her if she can arrange for him to meet with both Dylan Carlson and Michael “Cali” Dewitt together.

“Cali went to rehab in El Paso, or Georgia…no, he’s in L.A. with friends,” she replies. Then she shouts to Eric in the other room, “Call Cali and tell him to get back up here on the next plane.”

About an hour later, while Grant is in the kitchen fixing himself a sandwich, Dylan Carlson arrives. The two haven’t seen each other since April 8, when they returned together to the house after hearing Kurt’s body had been found. Grant is anxious to confirm Rosemary Carroll’s claim that Courtney told Dylan to “check the greenhouse.” When Grant emerges from the kitchen, Eric tells him Dylan is upstairs talking to Courtney in her bedroom. The two come downstairs some twenty minutes later. It is obvious to Grant that Dylan has just shot up. Grant leads him into the kitchen to talk out of Courtney’s earshot.

“When we started talking, I immediately noticed that his answers sounded rehearsed, like he’d just been prepared about what to say,” Grant recalls. “He kept nodding off, I guess from the heroin, and I figured I was wasting my time trying to talk to him.”

When Grant finally leaves to return to his hotel, he asks Eric to call him when Cali arrives. By evening, there is still no word, so he telephones the house. Eric tells Grant that shortly after he left that afternoon, Courtney had him call Cali and tell him he didn’t have to return to Seattle after all.

“I don’t know what’s going on here, man!” Eric says.

When Grant pocketed the copy of Kurt’s alleged suicide note from the house, he spotted a letter Courtney had just faxed somebody and quickly pocketed it as well in order to compare the handwriting later on. Then, as soon as he could, he made his exit, desperately anxious to read the note—so anxious, in fact, that he turned his car into a parking lot about a mile from the house and took the two letters out. For the next two hours, he studied the words on the suicide note:

As Grant pores over the words on the note, something doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t sound like any suicide note he’d ever read. In fact, nowhere in the note did Kurt even mention suicide. And the only part that
might
be construed as such—the last four lines—appeared to have been written in a completely different style of handwriting. Grant takes out the other document he had pocketed, a handwritten letter Courtney had faxed earlier that day. Some of the handwriting seems strangely similar, but Grant is no handwriting expert. He starts the car and drives away.

“I got onto the highway and just kept going,” Grant recalls. “There were so many questions going through my mind after I read that note, and I just had to weigh them. I didn’t even know where I was going. The next thing I knew, I had driven all the way to Portland, Oregon. So I just turned right around and came back. The whole time, I really didn’t know what to make of it. I still had no idea what any of this stuff meant.”

By the time Grant returns to Los Angeles, he is more confused than ever. He drives to Rosemary Carroll’s office with a copy of the note. Carroll spends fifteen minutes poring over it and then says it’s “obvious” that Kurt didn’t write it. She reads the note “over and over again” and it doesn’t mention suicide.

Except at the bottom, Grant points out.

Carroll, however, says the bottom section is obviously “in a different handwriting.” She tells Grant that the note doesn’t sound to her like anything Kurt would write. It actually sounds more like Courtney than Kurt, she says, explaining that the note contains a number of phrases that she has heard Courtney use before. Something’s wrong, Carroll says, clearly troubled. She pauses, then shares her conclusion with Grant: She doesn’t believe Kurt killed himself.

Grant did not know what to think. As a former police detective, he had been trained not to jump to any conclusions, but rather to follow the evidence. This evidence comes the next day when he receives a call from Carroll, who sounds somewhat flustered. She says she has something to show him—some “writings” that Courtney left at her house. She never thought to look at them until the night before. Grant asks whether they are Kurt’s writings. “No, hers,” Carroll replies.

Carroll is in a state of shock when Grant arrives at her house an hour later. She shows him a backpack Courtney had left behind after her visit to Carroll’s house the night of April 6. Sick with doubt after reading Kurt’s suicide note, Carroll had taken a look inside the backpack. What she discovered there frightened her. She takes out a sheet of paper. Written in Courtney’s handwriting are two words: “Get Arrested.” It is one of Courtney’s typical “to do” notes to herself.

“She planned that whole thing,” says Carroll, referring to Courtney’s April 7 arrest.

Painstakingly, the two review what occurred after Courtney’s visit to Carroll’s house two weeks earlier, on the night of April 6. Hours after Courtney left Carroll’s house to return to her hotel, she was indeed arrested. Responding to a 911 call reporting a “possible overdose victim,” Beverly Hills police, fire department officials and paramedics arrived at Courtney’s Peninsula Hotel suite the morning of April 7 to find Courtney in a state of physical distress. She was taken by ambulance to Century City Hospital, where she told doctors she was merely suffering an allergic reaction to her Xanax medication. Upon her discharge, she was immediately arrested, brought to Beverly Hills Jail and charged with possession of a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession/receiving stolen property.

“When she eventually went to court,” says Grant, “she had a logical explanation for everything police found in her room. It turned out that the white powdery substance they thought was heroin was actually Hindu good-luck ashes; the prescription pad they thought was stolen she said had actually been mistakenly left behind by her doctor. But at the time, these things provided a perfect excuse for her to get arrested without getting into any real trouble. Rosemary’s explanation that she ‘planned the whole thing’ makes a whole lot of sense. She needed an alibi.” Grant now believes that Courtney planned to get herself arrested on April 7 so that the papers would report the fact that she was in jail in L.A. that day, the day she expected Kurt’s body to be found.

“That’s the day that she suddenly wanted me and Dylan to go back to the house to search for the shotgun in the closet, even though she could have asked Cali to look for it anytime that week,” he explains. “I’m now convinced that she wanted us to find the body that day.” Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson later revealed to Kurt’s biographer Charles Cross that Courtney had already asked him to search the closet for the shotgun on Tuesday afternoon, April 5. So why did she ask Dylan and Grant to do the same thing two days later?

Carroll then tells Grant that she found another piece of paper in Courtney’s backpack, one that disturbs her even more than the “Get Arrested” note. She hands the paper to Grant. On it, somebody has been practicing different handwriting styles. On each line, the person has experimented with different forms of all the letters of the alphabet, much like a schoolchild’s handwriting exercise primer. But this handwriting is clearly in the style of an adult, not a child. On the top right side of the page, in a section marked “combos,” the person has practiced writing two-and three-letter combinations:

ta   re   fe   ur   you   te

As he studies the sheet, Grant gets a chill. “I had no idea what it meant or who had been doing the writing,” he recalls, “but Rosemary found it among Courtney’s things. It sure looked to us like she had been practicing how to forge a letter.”

B
y the time Rosemary Carroll understood the implications of the two notes she found in Courtney’s backpack, she had already stated more than once that she didn’t believe Kurt killed himself. Yet never once on Grant’s tapes, before or after this conversation, does Carroll explicitly say that she believes Courtney murdered him. She is suspicious enough, however, to remove a folder from her files and slide it over to Grant. Inside are more items from the backpack: Courtney’s Peninsula Hotel bill as well as an itemized list of her phone records and messages there.

It is the second message on the list that gives Grant pause. On Friday, April 1, at exactly 8:47
P.M.,
the Peninsula Hotel switchboard took a message for Courtney: “Husband called. Elizabeth number is (213) 850-
.” Courtney has always claimed she never heard from Kurt again after he fled rehab, yet here is concrete evidence that he had contacted his wife less than an hour after he left Exodus and told her where he could be reached. On the copy of the message sheet Grant shows us, he has blacked out the last part of Elizabeth’s phone number, which is located within the Los Angeles area code. He says he knows who “Elizabeth” is, as well as the significance of her involvement, but can’t reveal these details until the case is reopened.

On our own, however, we discovered that the Elizabeth in the message almost certainly refers to the American painter Elizabeth Peyton, who specializes in portraits of pop culture icons. Peyton, who was apparently staying in Los Angeles at the time of Kurt’s disappearance, had become close friends with both Kurt and Courtney and later painted several striking portraits of Kurt after his death. For years afterward, it seemed that Peyton managed to bring up Kurt in virtually every interview she gave, as if her old friend had become a lingering obsession. From a 2000 interview with Peyton in
Index
magazine:

In another interview, she told
Metro
magazine that she paints portraits of “people I love,” including Kurt Cobain. And, although she may be one of the keys to clearing up the mystery of Kurt’s disappearance, Peyton has never discussed the events of that night nor confirmed that she is the Elizabeth referred to in the phone message.

The phone records reveal another interesting fact. On April 1, the day Kurt left Exodus, Courtney called the rehab center’s patient pay phone six times, presumably speaking to Kurt on each occasion.

“That’s one of the things that Rosemary was most concerned about when she gave me the phone records,” recalls Grant. “She said Courtney told her she had only spoken to Kurt once that day. She wondered why Courtney had lied to her about this. My own reaction was to wonder why Courtney never told me that Kurt had left her a message the night he left Exodus with a phone number where he could be reached. You’d think that would be something she might be expected to tell the guy she had just hired to find her missing husband. But she never said a word to me about it.”

According to Charles Cross’s Cobain biography
Heavier Than Heaven
—authorized by Courtney—she was “on the phone every moment trying to find someone who had seen Kurt after Saturday.” Her phone records, however, testify to a more self-serving series of calls: repeated anonymous calls to the request line of L.A. radio station KROQ to play the single from her forthcoming album,
Live Through This.

Grant and his assistant, Ben Klugman, spent the next few days tracking down the various phone calls Courtney had made and trying to match names with numbers. They discovered she had called drug dealer Caitlin Moore twice on Monday, April 4, and had been in almost continuous contact with Cali, the nanny, throughout the week, although the baby was with her in Los Angeles.

When Grant contacts Carroll to report his findings two days later, she is still fixated on Kurt’s suicide note, revealing that she has a lot of “unanswered questions” that she has no idea how to go about answering.

Grant asks her how she feels about the suicide note. Carroll tells him that she feels “exactly the same way” she felt when she first saw the note: “He didn’t write it.”

Grant tells her that in his mind, he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Kurt did write it. But he points out that this still wouldn’t necessarily mean it was a suicide note.

He asks Carroll whether she has read the article about Kurt’s death in that week’s
Us
magazine. She says she hasn’t seen it. Grant tells her the article contains a quotation supposedly taken from the suicide note, in which Kurt is said to have written: ‘I can’t live my life like this any longer.’ That line is not in the suicide note, he tells Carroll, who replies that “of course” it’s not.

The only people who know what’s in the suicide note, Grant says, are Courtney, himself and the police, so he speculates that the magazine had to have obtained the false quotation from Courtney herself. Grant says that Courtney wants the public to falsely believe that Kurt had talked about suicide in his note. Carroll agrees.

Then Grant tells her that he’s “at the same place.” He still feels that there is a possibility that Kurt committed suicide.

For nearly a decade, Grant has been vilified for his role in the investigation of Cobain’s death. He has been called everything from a “lunatic conspiracy theorist” to a “publicity hound” to an “opportunist” who came up with the murder theory to “cash in.” Yet in the decade since Kurt’s death, he has refused countless financial offers from tabloid TV shows, including a significant offer from
Inside Edition,
and he has never attempted to write a book. “If I take any money or try to write a book about the investigation, my credibility will be shot,” he told us. “Courtney will come out and say, ‘You see, he was just after the money.’ I’m never going to get myself in a position where she can say that.” In late 1994, engrossed in the Cobain investigation, he turned down a major case in Hawaii, one that would have netted him between $25,000 and $100,000. After he nearly went broke in the mid-nineties because he had abandoned all his other casework, he started selling a “Cobain Case Manual”—a photocopied summary of the events—for $18 over the Internet to keep up his overhead, but these sales do not bring in any significant income, especially since he has allowed a number of websites to post the manual on the Internet for free. “I’d rather see that the information gets out there,” he explains. Clearly, he isn’t in it for the money. “I would have made a lot more money working in a McDonald’s for minimum wage than I have made on this case,” Grant says. Still, the skeptics persisted in their attacks. If he isn’t doing it for the money, he must simply be a nut. After all, everybody knows Cobain killed himself.

Now, as we listen to this extraordinary taped exchange between Grant and Carroll from April 1994, a number of things become clear. The tape proves that it was not Grant who first called the suicide verdict into question, but Courtney’s own close friend and attorney, a woman so close to Kurt and Courtney that the couple had designated her as their daughter’s legal guardian should anything happen to them. Moreover, even after Carroll repeatedly raised the possibility that Kurt might have been murdered, Grant remained unconvinced, arguing, “I still think there’s a possibility it’s a suicide.”

Grant recalls his feelings: “I’ve never really been big on conspiracy theories…. When I h ear somebody else talk about a conspiracy, I usually scoff…. But by that point, I was certainly beginning to think there was a very real possibility that Kurt had been murdered. If Kurt’s own close friend and lawyer believed it, I thought there had to be something to it.”

On April 20, Grant calls SPD homicide detective Steve Kirkland to find out, among other things, whether the police have made any progress determining who had been using Kurt’s canceled Seafirst MasterCard during the period when he was missing. Credit card records indicated that on Sunday, April 3, a charge of $1,100 was denied around mid-afternoon: this was followed by a series of rejected cash advances ranging from $2,500 to $5,000. There were two unsuccessful attempts to purchase $86.60 worth of goods on the morning of Monday, April 4, and an attempt to buy $1,517.56 worth of unnamed goods at 7:07
P.M.
the following day. More mysteriously, a charge of $43.29 was attempted on Friday, April 8, at 8:37
A.M.
, at a time when Kurt was certainly dead—and only three minutes before the body was discovered. Who was trying to use the card, which was missing from Kurt’s wallet when he was found?

When Grant spoke to Kirkland, asking whether the police had any leads, the detective was dismissive, admitting once again that the SPD never took its homicide investigation seriously. “Your investigation is into things that our investigation doesn’t even apply to,” Kirkland tells Grant. “You’re maybe concerned with what he was doing, where he was, and all that. I’ll tell you, Tom, truthfully, our homicide unit doesn’t even respond to suicides…. We’re involved with this thing because it is Kurt Cobain.”

To this day, Seattle police have never determined who was using Kurt’s card. Because Courtney had it canceled, the bank company could not trace the exact whereabouts of the transactions, only the date and time they were rejected. When Ben Klugman called Seafirst Bank to trace Kurt’s credit card activity, he was told that the transaction records do not reflect the time of the attempted transactions, only the time they were logged in to the computer. The SPD later cited this to explain the apparent use of the card after Kurt was already dead. However, the bank official, Steve Sparks, also told Klugman that the discrepancy in the logged transaction time is “no more than about fifteen minutes.” Therefore, it still does not explain the postmortem credit card use.

In addition, the bank official cleared up another puzzle resulting from the notations on the credit card records. After each declined transaction, the records read “card not present,” which has led many to speculate that perhaps another member of Kurt’s entourage had the card number and was attempting transactions by phone. But the Seafirst official explained to Klugman that when the merchant slides the card through the reader and the transaction is refused, the card number is then entered manually to double-check that the machine has read the correct number. When that happens, the transaction is automatically logged as “card not present.”

There may be logical explanations for each of the transactions, but the police reports indicate that the SPD did not even try to investigate who was using the card. More troubling is the fact that they have never explained what happened to Kurt’s credit card, which has never been found. In 1995, after Grant publicly revealed the credit card discrepancies, a reporter for
The Orange County Register
called Sergeant Cameron to ask him whether he had investigated the missing card. Cameron’s response is telling: “We’re not going to comment until we figure out what Grant’s after.”

Back on April 20, Grant proceeds to describe to Detective Kirkland examples of Courtney’s puzzling behavior during the time Kurt was missing as well as some of the inconsistencies in her story. That week, Grant had met with the alarm company supervisor, Charles Pelly, who had arrived at the Lake Washington estate shortly after his employee phoned to report the discovery of Kurt’s body. Pelly told Grant that, when he saw Kurt’s dead body in the greenhouse, it looked like his hair “had been combed.” Grant now asks Kirkland if he can see the police photos to see what Pelly was referring to. The detective refuses his request. Pelly also told Grant that Courtney had suddenly on April 7 issued instructions for the electricians to begin wiring the greenhouse with a motion detector on Friday, the day Kurt’s body was found.