Love & Death (21 page)
Authors: Max Wallace
As Grant proceeds with his investigation, the suicide note continues to haunt both him and Rosemary Carroll. Carroll still doesn’t believe Kurt wrote it, and she wonders why Courtney has never let her see the note: “She showed the note to Seth [Lichtenstein, another of Courtney’s attorneys], but she wouldn’t show it to me, which, at the time, I found rather odd,” she says to Grant, who, for his part, continues to be suspicious about the roles of Cali Dewitt and Dylan Carlson.
GRANT
“The main thing that I’m trying to do and the only time I’ll ever put a rest to this—I don’t care if it goes on for the next five or ten years—is if I get a real accurate handle about what happened with Cali and Dylan. Courtney for some reason is trying to keep me from Cali.”
CARROLL
“Well, we know what the reason is.”
GRANT
“I really need to speak to him about some things.”
CARROLL
“Do you know where Cali is?”
GRANT
“Oh, Cali moves all around. I talked to him a few weeks ago and he copped an attitude with me a bit, and I had a feeling Courtney said to him, ‘Oh, you don’t need to talk to Tom.’ Every time I get close to Cali, it seems she ships him off to rehab or something.”
CARROLL
“Oh, that’s why she shipped him off to rehab. I couldn’t figure it out, because it was a big thing, it was costing her a fortune because she sent his girlfriend with him.”
GRANT
“I told Courtney, when she’s in L.A., I want to meet together with her and go over some of this stuff with her, and I’m gonna tell her how bad things look for her. Because if the press get a hold of this before I can finish it up and tie up all these loose ends and figure out what went on, if the press gets a hold of all these bits and pieces, they’ll write conspiracy books and magazine articles all over the place, and she’s going to be the villain in this thing. And she may not be a villain.”
Meanwhile, copies of
Live Through This
—hurriedly released by Geffen on the Tuesday after Kurt’s body was found—were flying off the shelves and getting very positive reviews in the American music press. But Courtney’s new success was temporarily overshadowed on June 16 when Hole’s bass player, Kristen Pfaff, was found dead in her bathtub, apparently of a heroin overdose.
On October 16, 1994, a storage locker attendant in Langley, British Columbia, makes a grisly discovery: the bodies of three teenagers slumped in a 1987 Plymouth, its engine still running. Michael Coté, Stephane Dallaire and Stephane Langlois, each eighteen years old, had driven over three thousand miles from Quebec to B.C. to end their lives in this locker, slowly inhaling the exhaust fumes from their car. In the car’s tape deck, stuck in the
PLAY
position, is a Nirvana tape. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pull the boys out of the automobile, they discover a journal in a triple-ringed binder with the words “The Last Trip” on its cover. In sixty pages of tormented text and drawings, the three teens describe their cross-country odyssey and look forward to their deaths at the end. On the last page, in Dallaire’s handwriting, are the words: “When Kurt Cobain died, I died. The way I would have liked to have died is by a bullet in the head and with the same firearm that Kurt Cobain used. But it’s too late now. Goodbye.”
In her next conversation with Grant, Rosemary Carroll—calling from New York, where she has recently moved—says she is “freaked out” about what has been going on and tells Grant, “I think [Courtney] is pretty scared of you.” Then she shares with him the theory she has developed about Kurt’s death.
CARROLL
“You know, I’ve thought a lot about this. I try not to, but I have…. I’ve thought about stuff I know in general, about Kurt, and about Courtney, and about that whole scene up there. You want to hear my theory?”
GRANT
“Yeah, sure.”
CARROLL
“I hate to think of all this again because I’ll go crazy like I did last time, but I think all of that weirdness with Cali obviously living in the house for several days while there was Kurt’s corpse in the [greenhouse]. I think it had to do with the suicide note.”
GRANT
“Yeah?”
CARROLL
“This is my theory, and it’s a lot of intuition, but that suicide note is a pastiche of things he had written before, I think, and of someone copying or tracing his handwriting. I think it was sort of cobbled together.”
GRANT
“You don’t think Kurt wrote it?”
CARROLL
“No, I think Kurt wrote each of those words at different times and different places. I think someone went through his notebooks, found passages that plausibly could be cobbled together into a suicide note and traced them.”
GRANT
“You think they were traced?”
CARROLL
“Yeah, or forged or something like that.”
At this point, she seems to hear a noise.
CARROLL
“Are you taping this call?”
GRANT
“I tape all my calls. Do you want me to turn it off?”
CARROLL
“Oh shit, Tom, it’s just my theory.” (She hangs up).
Rosemary Carroll never speaks to Grant again.
Grant found Carroll’s “pastiche” theory about the note intriguing, especially in light of the piece of paper she had found in Courtney’s backpack on which somebody had been practicing different handwriting styles. But he subscribes to a slightly different theory about the note.
“If you read the body of that note,” he explains, “it doesn’t read like a suicide note at all. It reads like a note to his fans explaining why he is quitting Nirvana. I think he wrote most of the note, but that somebody possibly forged the last four lines.” When Grant first aired this theory publicly, Courtney adamantly denied that Nirvana had been in the process of breaking up. In a 1998 appearance on the
Howard Stern Show,
however, Dave Grohl admitted that the band had indeed split up at the time of Kurt’s death. Years later, Krist admitted the same thing to Kurt’s biographer Charles Cross: “The band was broken up.” This would certainly make Grant’s theory—about the note being a retirement letter to his fans—plausible, even logical.
Indeed, the body of the note mentions not a word about suicide, but it does say, “Thank you all from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach for your letters and concern during the past years.” To whom else is he addressing this line if not to his fans?
The original officer on the scene, Von Levandowski—the first person to read the note—wrote in his report that the letter was “apparently written by Cobain to his wife and daughter explaining why he had killed himself.” But if Kurt wrote the note to Courtney and Frances Bean, why did he sign it with his full name, “Kurt Cobain”?
For most who see the note, the most suspicious element is the incongruously large first word,
“BoddAH”
—suggesting Kurt had addressed the letter to his imaginary childhood friend—as well as the last four lines:
Please keep going Courtney
for Frances
for her life, which will be so much happier
without me. I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU!
Why are these specific words written in what appears to be a distinctly different handwriting? And if Kurt had really addressed the letter to Boddah, why does he write, “Thank you all…for your letters and concern during the past years”?
On November
18,
in Dublin, Ireland, a sixteen-year-old girl kills herself with a shotgun. In her suicide note, she writes that she has “done it for Kurt.”
A month after Kurt’s death, police had told Grant that Courtney’s Seattle attorney, Allen Draher, had identified the note as being in Kurt’s handwriting. When Grant informed Rosemary Carroll of this development at the time, she responded, “Allen Draher didn’t know Kurt at all.” By this time, the SPD had already turned the note over to the Washington State Patrol crime laboratory, where it was analyzed by a forensic document examiner, Janis Parker. The police then asked Courtney for a sample of Kurt’s handwriting with which to compare the writing on the note. She turned over a three-page note, written on Rome’s Excelsior Hotel stationery, that she claimed Kurt had written to her in Rome before his March overdose—the so-called Rome suicide note.
“That just boggles my mind,” says Grant. “Instead of asking his lawyers for a copy of a document known to be written by Kurt, they went and asked Courtney for a letter. How did they know Kurt wrote the letter she gave them? What if she wrote both letters? The thought never even seems to have occurred to them. But ever since Rosemary Carroll showed me the sheet of paper from Courtney’s backpack where somebody had been practicing different handwriting styles, it certainly occurred to me.”
The state forensic examiner sent back a report on April 22 stating that she was satisfied the note had been written by Kurt Cobain. She did not address the discrepancy in the handwriting of the first and last four lines. Three years later, in February 1997, NBC’s
Unsolved Mysteries
hired two of the world’s most prominent handwriting analysts to conduct their own analyses. This time, the producers supplied the experts with a copy of Kurt’s handwriting
known
to be authentic—song lyrics he had written that were reproduced in his official biography,
Come as You Are.