Pod Insights Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder Ep. 107 | The Mysterious Life & Death of Kurt Cobain About this episode For a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life, when you head tohttps://Smalls.com/CCCM.
The death of Kurt Cobain shocked the world, officially ruled a suicide - but decades later, lingering questions and conspiracy theories refuse to fade. What really happened inside that Seattle home in April 1994?
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Transcript 14,219 words · 7 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 On a Friday morning in April 1994, an electrician arrived at a Seattle home to install a security system, but he would find a body instead. Kurt Cobain was 27 years old, and just like that, the most important voice in rock music went silent. Before Nirvana, if you wanted to hear something raw and real, you had to dig for it. But Kurt kicked the door open, took the noise, the pain, the honesty, and shoved it straight into the mainstream. And Lars Ulrich of Metallica said it best: "With Kurt Cobain, you felt you were connecting to the real person. Between you and him, there was nothing. It was heart to heart. And that connection is what set him apart.
0:45 Speaker 00 And it's why, 30 years later, kids who weren't even born yet still find their way to his music. And it's also why the questions never stopped. Because how a man that real died and what actually happened in that Seattle home is a story that's far from settled. So this is his life, his death, and the mystery that refuses to go away. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder, all things that I love to consume and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually-minded freak. Today, we are talking about Kurt Cobain. And to be honest, I knew very little about his life. I love Nirvana, but I honestly have never gone down the rabbit hole
1:29 Speaker 00 of who Kurt Cobain was, what he did in his life, and why his death was so infamous. So I learned a lot with this case. I think it is extremely interesting, and there's even stuff that is very relevant to today and very scary. So, without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go Mach 5 down the highway, slam on the brakes, and bust through the windshield into this infamous case together.
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4:31 Speaker 00 get 60 that's 6 0% off your first order plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to Smalls.com slash CCCM that's 60% off your first order plus free shipping and treats for life when you head to Smalls.com slash CCCM thank you so much to Smalls for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel and let's get back to it Aberdeen Washington sits in Grays Harbor County roughly 100 miles southwest of Seattle and for decades it was one of the most productive timber towns in the country and they called it the lumber capital of the world and they also called it the hellhole of the Pacific and the port of missing men a nickname
5:14 Speaker 00 earned by a murder rate that made the town infamous long before Kurt Cobain ever picked up the guitar and the Great Depression gutted the place and the town went from 37 working sawmills to nine and what timber was left got stripped over the next few decades and by the late 70s the industry was hollowed out and the Satsopt nuclear plant showed up in 1978 like a lifeline and thousands of jobs talk of permanent work and the whole town was betting on it but four years later the project collapsed and overnight the jobless rate shot through the roof and what was left was a place where options were few and expectations were narrow and Cobain
5:54 Speaker 00 described it himself in 1992 saying quote a very small community with a lot of people who have very small minds basically if you're not prepared to join the logging industry you're going to be beaten up or run out of town unquote sounds like a fun place and New York reporter later put it more bluntly saying Cobain's quote fondness for poetry and painting did not go over big "in Aberdeen." But this is where it all started. And on February 20th, 1967, Kurt Donald Cobain was born at the local hospital in Greys Harbor. And his mom, Wendy, waited tables, and his dad, Donald, fixed cars. And they lived at Hoquiem at first, with Don working at a gas station nearby.
6:38 Speaker 00 And by the time Kurt was six months old, the family had landed at 1210 East First Street in Aberdeen, in the neighborhood of Felony Flats. And Cobain would describe his family's status in four words, saying, quote, "white trash posing as middle class." Nice, sounds like my family, honestly, just kidding, but not really. Anyway, his sister Kimberly arrived on April 24th, 1970, and by most accounts, the early years were good ones. And his Aunt Mary remembered it clearly, saying, quote, "I can't even put into words the joy and life that Kurt brought into our family. He was this little human being who was so bubbly. He had charisma even as a baby. He was funny, and he was bright." Unquote.
7:20 Speaker 00 But that brightness wouldn't last, at least not in the way it should have. And in 1976, when Kurt was nine years old, his parents would divorce, and the split broke something in him. And he became troubled and honestly angry. And the emotional fallout would eventually fuel some of the most raw and honest music ever recorded. But at nine, it was just pain. And he went to his mother's place first, but that wouldn't last. And then it was his dad's house in Montesano, and then his aunt's, and then his uncle's, just basically whoever had room. And his father had remarried, and the new wife would try. She paid attention to Kurt and gave him care, but he couldn't shake the feeling he ranked below her own kids. Been there.
8:06 Speaker 00 I love my stepdad, love my stepdad, loved my ex-stepmom. But you know, when you're a kid, you just kind of feel like that, you know? You just kind of feel like that little feeling, you know? Maybe a little bit. I don't feel like that anymore, but at the time, I understand. But anyway, taking comfort from her felt like turning his back on his mom. And his mother, meanwhile, had gotten involved with a man who actually beat her. And he would be- A longshoreman and he put her in the hospital with a broken arm in fact. And Kurt wrote on his bedroom wall, quote, "I hate mom, I hate dad, dad hates mom, mom hates dad. It simply makes you want to be so sad." That's just heartbreaking when kids get in the middle of all that stuff, oh my gosh.
8:49 Speaker 00 But he was a child caught in the middle of two broken households with nowhere that felt like home. And doctors put a label on it early, diagnosing him with attention deficit disorder. And they gave him Ritalin, but his mother didn't think it helped. So she would pull him off the pills and try him on the Fenn Gold diet, removing artificial colorings and flavors. And she said the change made more of a difference. But the deeper issue had nothing to do with focus. He was quiet, sensitive, more interested in drawing than football. And in a town that ran on logging and toughness, that made him a target. He just didn't quite fit the mold, not with the athletes, not with the burnouts. And one of his closest friends growing up was gay.
9:33 Speaker 00 Kurt never backed down from that friendship, even when guys in town roughed him up over it. And that loyalty cost him bruises, but it built something permanent inside him. A hatred of cruelty and prejudice that never went away. And his journal said it plainly, saying, quote, "I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off the homophobes." That's metal as fuck. And he would tell the advocate, quote, "I'm definitely gay in spirit and I probably could be bisexual." And he showed up to school in dresses and called himself feminine as a kid. And in a place like Aberdeen, that kind of openness wasn't just unusual, it was honestly dangerous.
10:16 Speaker 00 And on top of that, his body was fighting him too. Bronchitis just never seemed to go away for him. And worse, a stomach condition no doctor could name that left him in constant grinding pain. And in an interview with journalist John Savage in 1993, he spoke of it saying, quote, "Every time I've had an endoscope, they find a red irritation in my stomach." It's psychosomatic, it's all from anger and screaming, unquote. And he also said he had minor scoliosis since junior high, and that years of slinging a guitar over his shoulder had bent his spine further sideways. But biographer Charles R. Cross wasn't so sure. And Cross found that the whole thing may have started with a routine school screening that incorrectly raised a flag.
11:01 Speaker 00 One that didn't hold up when an actual doctor took a closer look. So the darkness in Kurt's life wasn't random either. His cousin Beverly, who worked as a nurse, eventually spoke publicly about what ran through the family tree. Mental illness, alcoholism, and the word you can't say on YouTube. You know, self, you know what. So Kurt was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder himself. So as the world around him was falling apart, one thing always held steady. And that was music, because the music was there before anybody else. And at two, he was already singing along to Beatles and Monkey albums. And his Aunt Marie had an acoustic guitar lying around, and he wouldn't leave it alone.
11:46 Speaker 00 And by three, he'd written his first song. Which is cra- three? Three? What was I doing when I was three? I don't know, probably eating slugs, eating banana slugs on the side of the road. True story, true story. I was not meant for greatness, anyway. And his grandparents, Leland and Iris, remembered a kid who turned their kitchen into a drum kit, banging on every pot and pan he could reach. So they gave him a harmonica, and then a tin drum, and eventually, a real drum set. And Aunt Marie also handed down an old Hawaiian steel guitar with a small amp. And his artistry took multiple angles. And on top of that, he would draw all the time. Page after page of cartoon characters, sketched in obsessive detail. The art just never stopped.
12:30 Speaker 00 But the music ran in his blood. His Uncle Chuck had been part of the Beach Comers, known as the biggest act in Aberdeen back in the 60s, and later played with a bar band called Fat Chance. Loved that name. And when Kurt turned 14, Chuck handed him a beat-up electric guitar he'd picked ...up from Japan and set him up with lessons from Fat Chance's guitarist Warren Mason. And he eventually helped him trade up to a knockoff Gibson Explorer. And at some point in school Kurt crossed paths with Buzz Osbourne, who was the guy behind The Melvins, one of the Aberdeen's local bands. And Osbourne quickly became a friend and a mentor, and a doorway into the world Kurt didn't know existed. Just punk and hardcore.
13:15 Speaker 00 Music that sounded the way Kurt already felt. So, he went to his first real concert in 1983 with Sammy Hagar and The Quarter Flash at the Coliseum in Seattle. But Kurt always said the show that actually changed him was different. It was The Melvins, playing for free in the front of the Thriftway Grocery Store where Osbourne begged groceries. And he wrote about it in his journals, saying that that was the moment. And after that, the guitar swallowed everything. And he would practice all day, forgetting to do his homework. And it got to the point that his father got fed up and killed the lessons. So Kurt left and headed to his grandparents' house first, then to his mom, switching schools from Montessori High to Aberdeen High,
13:59 Speaker 00 sophomore year. And then, back to his dad's, and then, out again, drifting through the homes of whatever friends would take him in. And one of those stops was Jessie Reed's family's place in North River. And the house was packed with instruments and Kurt was welcome to play anything he wanted. Jessie's father, Dave, had played sax and sung with the Beach Comers, and the boys would spend hours going through the band's old 45s. And with graduation two weeks away, he quit school after realizing he didn't have enough credits to actually walk. And this caused his mom to lay out an ultimatum. Find work, or leave. But he didn't do either. And when he came home a week later, everything he owned was boxed up and waiting by the door.
14:43 Speaker 00 So, he was 17 years old with nowhere to go. So he continued to bounce around. Couches, spare rooms, sometimes he'd even slip back into his mother's basement without her knowing. And he told people he'd spent time sleeping under a bridge that crossed the Wisca River, and that the experience fed directly into "Something in the Way." Something in the way. Oh, I'm listening to Nirvana.
15:08 Speaker 00 After this for at least several hours, okay? And Novoselic always pushed back on that one, saying, quote, "He hung out there, but you couldn't live on those muddy banks with the tides coming up and down. That was his own revisionism," unquote. But what is confirmed is that he spent nights in apartment building hallways where the heat was still running, and in the waiting room of the hospital where he'd been born. So, he was homeless, and he was angry, and he was in pain, but he had a guitar, and he had something to say. So, the first punk album Kurt Cobain ever owned was Sandinista by The Clash, but in his journals, he was clear about where his real loyalty was: The Sex Pistols.
15:50 Speaker 00 The Sex Pistols were, quote-unquote, "one million times more important than The Clash." And after that, the floodgates opened: Black Flag, Bad Brains, Flipper, millions of dead cops, and Buzz Osbourne was the pipeline, handing Kurt stacks of records and stacks of beat-up issues of Cream magazine, dragging him deeper into a world that finally just made sense to him. And the Melvins became his center of gravity. So, Kurt made himself useful hauling gear, sitting behind the wheel of their tour van, and he and Novoselic parked themselves at rehearsal after rehearsal, watching and just absorbing. And Kurt claimed they, quote-unquote, "learned almost everything from them." And then came The Stooges.
16:35 Speaker 00 Raw power hit him like a freight train, and he'd call it "the greatest album ever made." And The Pixies, who would teach him the trick that would define his sound: go quiet, then blow the roof off. So, the music was starting to take shape. Now, all he needed was a band. By early 1985, he started one: Fecal Matter. Fecal Matter. Nice, that's, you know, I'm glad, I'm glad it turns, this is gonna turn into Nirvana, because Fecal Matter doesn't quite hit for me, not gonna lie. But it was one of what he later called "several joke bands born out of the Melvins' circle." And Kurt sang and played guitar, and the Melvins drummer Dale Crowver picked up bass,
17:16 Speaker 00 and Greg Hokinson handled drums, and they worked up originals and ripped through Ramones, Zeppelin, and Hendrix covers. And they laid down a demo together at his aunt Mary Earle's place in Burien Cold. Illiteracy will prevail.
17:32 Speaker 00 Just running everything through a four-track recorder. And she remembered it vividly, saying, quote, "They set up in my music room and they'd just crank it up. It was loud. They would put down the music tracks first, then he'd put the headphones on and all you could hear was Kurt Cobain's voice screaming through the house," unquote. Osborne and former Melvins drummer Mike Dillard joined the band in 1986, but it fell apart fast. Osborne recalled, quote, "Kurt got disgusted with it because I wouldn't buy a bass system and so he said that I wasn't dedicated enough," unquote. And by summer, fecal matter was no more. But the demo long outlived the band, and it was the first recorded proof of what Cobain
18:15 Speaker 00 could do, including raw versions of "Spank Through" and "Downer," both of which Nirvana would eventually rerecord. And with the band no longer playing, the tape became Kurt's calling card, and he handed it to anyone who would listen to it. And the tape got passed around and people in the growing grunge world started paying attention. And by the end of 1986, he had his own place for the first time, renting an apartment with paychecks he earned from working at the Polynesian Resort, a hotel out in Ocean Shores, about 20 miles from Aberdeen. And then came Tracy Marinder, his first real girlfriend. And they would get a place together in Olympia, a small apartment on Pear Street. And Kurt moved there in 1989, and that apartment became The Workshop. And most of the songs
19:00 Speaker 00 that would launch Nirvana were written inside those walls. And his life was tracing an arc, though invisible to him at the time. And Aberdeen gave him the pain. Olympia gave him the space to turn that pain into songs. And Seattle, where indie label Sub Pop Records was building an empire on noise, was where the machine was waiting. And he first crossed paths with eventual bandmate Novo Selik at a Melvins rehearsal. And Novo Selik's mom ran a hair salon, and the guys would sometimes jam in the room above it. And Kurt just wanted to start something together, but Novo Selik initially blew him off, for three years, actually. But when Novo Selik finally sat down and listened- To the fecal matter demo, something clicked.
19:44 Speaker 00 Quote, "I thought it was a really good song," unquote, he said, referring to Spank Through. So, he suggested they start a group. And their first attempt was The Sellouts, a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band with Novoselic singing and playing guitar, and Kurt on drums and Steve Newman on bass. But, it would kinda go nowhere. And round two featured a drummer named Bob McFadden and a set of originals. And that one lasted about... Four weeks. About four weeks. But early in 1987, they brought in a drummer named Aaron Burkhard. And that lineup featuring Cobain, Novoselic, and Burkhard was the first version of what the world would eventually know as Nirvana.
20:25 Speaker 00 And their first show was a house party near Raymond, Pacific County in March of 1987. And beer from a keg and a lot of loud noise. They played under the name Skid Row, but that didn't stick for long. And neither did the next few names. But eventually, they landed on the name we all know and love: Nirvana. And Burkhard eventually left, followed by multiple different drummers. Dale Crowver filled in, then Dave Foster, then Chad Channing, who sort of drifted into the band without anyone officially saying the words, quote-unquote, "They never actually said, 'Okay, you're in,'" Channing recalled. And he played his first gig with them in late May of 88.
21:06 Speaker 00 And by November, they had a single out, which was a cover of Shocking Blue's Love Buzz released through Sub Pop. And a UK music journalist named John Robb gave them their first interview in Sounds Magazine, and the record landed single of the week. So, it was progress. And that December, they went into the studio with producer Jack and Dino to cut their first album. And the whole thing cost $606.17. Oh, what a steal. And Jason Everman footed the bill. And he was a guitarist who joined the band around the same time. And though he never actually played a note on the record, they put his name on the credits anyway. And Kurt wanted him to feel like he belonged, so the label had a mold, and Sub Pop wanted a heavy, grungy, rough kind of sound.
21:51 Speaker 00 Kurt dialed back his pop instincts and the artier edges to deliver what they expected. And biographer Michael Ezraad later noted the irony, saying, quote, "It was the restrictions of the sub-pop sound that helped the band find its musical identity," unquote. And Bleach dropped in June 1989. Now, college radio jumped on it almost immediately, and the band locked in a longer deal with sub-pop, and the album moved a steady 40,000 copies. But Kurt wasn't satisfied, and he thought the label was sitting on its hands, not pushing the record hard enough and not getting it into enough stores. In that fall, Nirvana joined TAD, TAD, at Mudhoney for a European tour billed as a
22:33 Speaker 00 grunge rock uprising, and they arrived in Berlin just days after the wall fell. It's a crazy time to go on tour. Novoselic was struck by the moment, saying, quote, "It was amazing. It's just one of those moments when history is in the air and you can just feel it," unquote. And their first national tour followed, but ultimately ended early, and growing creative tensions with Chad Channing led the band to cut the final dates. And no one even told him he was fired, and he later said he just quit. But then, in September of 1990, came the introduction that changed everything.
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24:09 Speaker 00 Buzz Osbourne called Gabane and Novo Selic about a drummer he knew, a guy named Dave Grohl, whose band Scream had just collapsed back in DC. Grohl flew out to Seattle and within days, he was in the room with them auditioning. And Novo Selic knew right away, saying, "We knew in two minutes that he was the right drummer." However, Grohl saw it differently, saying, "I remember being in the same room with them and thinking, 'What? That's Nirvana? Are you kidding?' Because on their record cover, they looked like Psycho lumberjacks." Which is so true. But regardless of any opinion, the classic lineup was complete. And over the following months, the band began shopping for a major label deal.
24:52 Speaker 00 So Nirvana had outgrown subpop, and the label couldn't keep up with the demand, and no indie distributor could match the band's momentum. Gabane and Novo Selic needed help navigating what came next. So, they went to a woman running Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, Susan Silver, and asked for direction. And she pointed them toward a booking agent, Don Muller, and music attorney Alan Mintz. Now Mintz started pitching the demo to every major label that would take a meeting. And Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth had been talking them up to anyone in the industry who would listen. And it worked. And Geffen's subsidiary label, DGC, came calling in 1990 with A&R, man Gary Gersh, leading the charge.
25:34 Speaker 00 And the deal meant buying Nirvana out of their subpop contract, but DGC was willing to pay. And more than two decades later, at Nirvana's 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Novo Selic publicly thanked Silver for "introducing them to the music industry properly." And though it seemed straightforward, the transition wasn't painless. And Kurt felt the contradiction of it all in real time, saying, "Sure, we felt under pressure to stay underground. We're experiencing the typical independent band going on to a major label punk rock identity crisis." But the opportunity was undeniable. And they cut Nevermind at Sound City in Los Angeles from May through June of 1991 with Butch Vig producing.
26:19 Speaker 00 gave them 65 grand to work with. And Kurt had his own way of explaining the band's sound. Quote, "By definition, pop is extremely catchy, whether you like it or not. Our songs also have a standard pop format: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo. All in all, I think we sound like the NAC and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath." What a fantastic description. Seriously. And come September 24th, 1991, the album hit shelves. And the label figured they'd be lucky to move a quarter million copies, as that was the ceiling sonnet use goo had set. And that seemed like a realistic target. They underestimated it by a factor no one could have predicted, though.
27:05 Speaker 00 And the first single was "Smells Like Teen Spirit." And its music video hit MTV and refused to leave. Dude, what a moment. I wasn't even born yet, but I know, like, born a couple of years later. But I remember watching that for the first time and like, this is the coolest thing ever, dude. This, this, that, that music hits. And the song's title had an origin story nobody saw coming. And Kathleen Hannah, the singer of Bikini Kill, had scribbled Kurt's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on a wall, poking fun at the deodorant his girlfriend wore. And Kurt didn't get the joke, instead, thinking it sounded like revolution. He wrote the song and it just became inescapable.
27:46 Speaker 00 And by late 1991, the band's European tour was buckling under its own weight. And venues were packed past capacity, and camera crews elbowed their way onstage night after night. You couldn't escape the single. It was literally everywhere: the radio, MTV, you name it. And by Christmas, the album was selling 400,000 copies a week in the United States alone. And in January of 1992, Nevermind even climbed past Michael Jackson's Dangerous to take the top spot on the Billboard chart. And then, it did the same thing overseas: country after country. Billboard declared Nirvana is that rare band that has everything: critical acclaim, industry respect, pop radio appeal, and rock-solid college
28:29 Speaker 00 "Alternative bass," unquote, and it would go on to sell more than 30 million copies worldwide. So the impact just rippled outward. And Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt put it in perspective, saying, quote, "When I first moved to Seattle in 1983, most people in the world wouldn't be able to find Seattle on a map. In post 1991, that all changed. Nirvana did for Seattle what the Beatles did for Liverpool," unquote. And he added, quote, "It put Seattle on the map and was a huge inspiration for a lot of young people. The music really brought in a level of emotional depth that had been missing from pop radio and is missing from pop radio now," unquote. And Nevermind paved the way. And bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, all came through
29:14 Speaker 00 the door Nirvana had kicked open. Grunge wasn't a subculture anymore. And by 1992, it was just the culture. And the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards gave them two trophies, one for Best New Artist and one for Best Alternative Video. And they played Lithium on the broadcast. And Novo Selik launched his bass straight up toward the ceiling, misjudged the toss on the way down, and took the neck of the guitar to the face. And he dropped to the stage and played dead. And it was a rare moment of lightness in a year that had already started to feel crushing. And the media started throwing out those labels I mentioned earlier for Kurt Cobain, voice of a generation and Gen X spokesman.
29:57 Speaker 00 But he never asked for it, and he never wanted it. And the more they said it, the more uncomfortable he became. And he responded the only way he knew how, by making music parter to swallow. It was more abrasive and more personal, and he had no patience for the crowd that sang along but missed the point, and people who wore the T-shirts and ignored the message. And he started seeing his own future in Frances Farmer. She was a Seattle woman, famous in the 30s and 40s. And the industry used her up, and they locked her away. And Cobain looked at that story and saw a blueprint for what fame could do if you let it in. And the stomach pain that had plagued him since childhood reached a breaking point during the 1990s. 1991 European Tour.
30:41 Speaker 00 And in a 1993 interview with John Savage, he admitted just how bad it had gotten, saying, quote, "Halfway through the European Tour, I remember saying, 'I'll never go on tour again until I have this fixed, because I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to fucking blow my head off. I was so tired of it.'" And he said heroin was, quote, "The only thing that saves me from shooting myself right now," unquote. And later, reflecting on the songs he'd written for Nevermind, Kurt described what was underneath the distortion and the hooks, saying, quote, "Some of my very personal experiences, like breaking up with girlfriends and having bad relationships, feeling that death void that the person in the song is feeling, very lonely, sick," unquote.
31:24 Speaker 00 The album the world was celebrating as a cultural revolution had been written by someone barely holding on. Now Nevermind had made Nirvana the biggest band on the planet. And for the follow-up, Kurt made a choice designed to make everyone uncomfortable, and he hired Steve Albini. Now Albini was legendary in the indie world, and notorious everywhere else. And he openly criticized the mainstream music industry, and he worked exclusively on analog equipment, and he had no interest in making records that sounded polished or commercial. He once called royalty arrangements "immoral and an insult to the artist." And Kurt understood exactly the message that hiring him would send.
32:04 Speaker 00 To the suits, to the industry, to every bandwagon fan who jumped on after Teen Spirit. And he'd been obsessed with the sound Albini got on the Pixies' "Surfer Rosa." It was just stripped down and brutal with no polish. That was what he wanted for the next Nirvana record. And Albini laid out his terms in a letter to the band, saying, quote, "I'm only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band's own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenant of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you," unquote. So they committed. And Albini didn't want the label anywhere near the studio, so the band paid for it themselves.
32:49 Speaker 00 24 grand for studio time, and Albinie's fee was a flat 100,000. And he walked away from roughly half a million in royalties on principle. So, you know, at least the guy's got principle.
33:01 Speaker 05 On its face, it's absurd. I work on a record for a few days, and then for the rest of your fucking life, you have to keep paying me?
33:08 Speaker 00 For two weeks in February of 1993, at Packard Studios, deep in rural Minnesota, the band locked the doors, and no one from DGC got in, and no one from management did either. Nobody heard a note until the sessions were finished. And then the rumors started, and word spread that DGC might refuse to release the album. And Albinie, of course, pushed back publicly, saying, quote, "I wasn't there when the band was having their discussions with the record label. All I know is, we made a record, everybody was happy with it. And a few weeks later, I hear that it's unreleasable and it's all got to be redone," unquote. So the band fired back with a letter to Newsweek that no one was telling them what to do.
33:51 Speaker 00 And they ran the letter as a full-page ad in Billboard. And Geffen's people gave in and put out their own statement. And the statement was that the label would release whatever Nirvana delivered. No conditions. And in the end, Kurt did make one concession. He called in Scott Litt, who was R.E.M.'s producer, to touch up three songs, "Heart Shape Box," "All Apologies," and "Penny Royalty," because they weren't quite sitting right, and he wanted them perfect. And then, on September 21st, 1993, oh, "In Utero" landed. What a great album, dude. What a great album. And it shot straight to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
34:35 Speaker 00 And over time, it moved three and a half million copies in the U.S. alone. And Rolling Stones' David Frick called it "a lot of things brilliant, corrosive, enraged, and thoughtful, most of them all at once. But more than anything, it's a triumph of the will," unquote. Kurt described the album as "very impersonal." He's just, he's so metal. He's so- Just like, that's the art. Take it or leave it, you know? However, the lyrics seem to tell a different story. The divorce that split his childhood apart, the weight of fame, and what the world had decided about him and about the woman he loved. That love was none other than Courtney Love.
35:18 Speaker 00 She had entered his life sometime around 1989, or around 1990. And Love told Sassy Magazine, quote, "I really pursued him, not too aggressive, but aggressive enough that some girls would have been embarrassed by it. I'm direct. That can scare a lot of boys," unquote. And Kurt's version of the story was simpler, saying, quote, "I didn't mean to play hard to get. I just didn't have the time. I had so many things on my mind," unquote. But by late 1991, they were inseparable. And they bonded through music, through intensity, and through, unfortunately, drug use. And on February 24th, 1992, in Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, a wedding took place with eight guests.
36:00 Speaker 00 And Love showed up in a dress from Francis Farmer's estate. And Kurt wore pajamas. And Grohl was there, and Novocelik wasn't. And he and his wife had grown uncomfortable with the drugs and with what they saw as Love pulling Kurt away from the band. Being a bit toxic, if you will. And Kim Gordon had warned Love that Marion Cabane would destroy her life. And Love responded, quote, "Whatever. I love him and I want to be with him," unquote. And Kurt told Rolling Stone, quote, "I'm happier than I've ever been. I finally found someone that I am totally compatible with," unquote. And he told Sassy, he was so in love, he sometimes forgot he was even in a band. And their daughter arrived on August 18th, 1992,
36:45 Speaker 00 born at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. And they named her Frances, after Vaseline's guitarist, Francis McKee. Not Francis Farmer, though everyone assumed Farmer. And Bean was the ultrasound nickname because the image looked like a kitty bean. And Michael Stipe and Drew Barrymore were named godparents. And Kurt told Los Angeles Time, quote, "There's nothing better than having a baby. I knew that when I had a- "I'd be overwhelmed," and it's true. And he would actually start talking about leaving Nirvana. And he told Sassy his priorities had shifted entirely. "In the last couple of months, I've gotten married and my attitude has changed drastically and I can't believe how much happier I am."
37:27 Speaker 00 And then came the Vanity Fair piece in September of 1992. And journalist Lynn Hirschberg wrote a profile called "Strange Love." The allegation at the center of it was that Love had used heroin while knowing she was pregnant. And Courtney and Kurt both said Hirschberg twisted what was actually said. But it didn't matter what they said. And the state got involved and Child Welfare opened a case and Frances Bean was taken from them at just two weeks old. And the reality behind closed doors didn't match the interviews. His love would later say Frances Bean "was an attempt to save the relationship." And the two of them were both struggling with themselves and with each other.
38:12 Speaker 00 The fights were real and the separations were real and the happiness came and went. And the heroin had taken root years earlier. Kurt claimed it was the only thing that eased the stomach pain that had tortured him since childhood, saying, "It started with three days in a row of doing heroin and I don't have a stomach pain. That was such a relief." And Buzz Osborne didn't buy that explanation though, saying, "He made it up for sympathy and so he could use it as an excuse to stay loaded. Of course, he was vomiting. That's what people on heroin do. They vomit. It's called vomiting with a smile on your face." And Novo Selic found out about it in 1990. And Grohl found out about it a few months later.
38:56 Speaker 00 And it shadowed everything: tours, recording sessions, milestones. And the day before their debut on Saturday Night Live in January of 1992, photographer Michael Levine tried to get a photo shoot done, but Kurt kept nodding off mid-frame. And in the summer of 1993, while backstage at a New York show, he OD'd again. And Love hit him with naloxone and brought him And he walked out and played the concert. But the public persona was fracturing. And he'd already compared himself to Frances Farmer. And now he wrote her into the album Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle. Appeared on In Utero like a personal prophecy.
39:37 Speaker 00 And in 1992, he performed at a gay rights benefit in Oregon fighting Measure Nine. And his work with Rock for Choice made him a target. At least, one activist sent word that they'd shoot him the moment he stepped on stage. Now, at the 1993 VMAs, Kurt, Courtney, and Baby Frances Bean were there together. Behind the scenes, Kurt and Axl Rose got into it. Guns N' Roses and Nirvana were the two biggest rock acts on the planet, and they couldn't stand each other. And for MTV Unplugged, November 1993, the band sat down with acoustic instruments and played a set that felt almost like a confession. And Kurt chose songs by David Bowie, Led Belly, and the Vaseline's and the Meat Puppets,
40:20 Speaker 00 and six covers mixed in with their own more downer material. And the whole thing felt less like a concert and more like a farewell, especially examining in hindsight, because he'd already been thinking about what came next. A quieter acoustic album, more ethereal, something that sounded like R.E.M.'s most recent work. Now, Stipe said the plan was in place and that he and Kurt were going to record a demo together, saying, quote, "He had a plane ticket, he had a car picking him up, and at the last minute, he called and said, 'I can't come,' unquote." Now Nirvana took the stage on January 8, 1994, at the Seattle Center Arena for what turned out to be their last performance in the United States. And no one knew.
41:02 Speaker 00 Courtney described Kurt's state in December 1994 interview with Rolling Stones during the months leading up, saying, quote, "He hated everything, everybody. Hated, hated, hated. He called me from Spain, crying. I was gone 40 days. I was doing my thing with my band for the first time since forever," unquote. And Novoselic saw it all up close. In Charles R. Cross's biography, Heavier Than Heaven, Novoselic recalls- He was really quiet. He was just estranged from all of his relationships. He wasn't connecting with anybody. And one night, Novoselic offered to take him out for dinner, but it didn't go the way
41:42 Speaker 00 he had hoped, saying, "His dealer was right there. He wanted to get fucked up into oblivion." So on March 18, 1994, Courtney got on the phone with Seattle P D. And Kurt had barricaded himself in a room, and he had a gun, and she said he was suicidal. By the time officers got there, Kurt said otherwise, saying he was not suicidal. He just wanted to be alone, away from Courtney. The officers left with four guns, 25 boxes of ammo, and a bottle of pills. And that was the second time in less than a year that police had walked out of his house with his weapons. And Kurt had already started buying guns through other
42:22 Speaker 00 people. He figured cops would just keep confiscating anything registered to him. And then came Rome. After a show at Terminal Eins on March 1 in Munich, doctors told him he had bronchitis and severe laryngitis. And the rest of the European tour was scrapped. So we caught a flight to Rome the next day to see a specialist. And Courtney flew in on March 4. And they checked into the Westin Excelsior. And that night, he gave a bellboy a prescription to fill. And then he called room service and ordered champagne. And the prescription was for Rohitanol, a very strong depressant for the central nervous system. And come the next morning, Courtney woke up to find that Kurt wasn't in bed. He was on the floor next
43:03 Speaker 00 to it, not moving, blood trickling from his nostril. And paramedics would take him to Umberto I Poly Clinic Hospital, where doctors pumped his stomach. And he was then moved to Rome American Hospital. And Kurt didn't wake up for nearly 20 hours. And when doctors examined what was in his stomach, they counted around 50 Rohitanol tablets. Every one of them had to be peeled out of its wrapper by hand. And Grohl would get the call in the middle of everything. Kurt Cobain was dead. Or that's what they told him. And a few minutes later, the phone rang again, and he was, in fact... Not dead, but in a hospital bed and stable. His management team at Gold Mountain called it an accident, something like the flu and exhaustion,
43:48 Speaker 00 just a bad mix. There was a note in the room, but spokesperson Janet Billing made sure to clearly state, quote, "A note was found, but Kurt insisted that it was not a suicide note," unquote. And at the time, that was the story everyone told. They called it an accidental overdose. Two journalists, Ian Halperin and Max Wallace, tracked down Dr. Osvaldo Galetta, the doctor who treated Kurt in Rome, and they put his assessment in their book, Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain, saying, quote, "We can usually tell a suicide attempt. This didn't look like one to me," unquote. Three days later, they discharged him and he flew back to Seattle. Back home, the people around him gave one last attempt to help Kurt.
44:32 Speaker 00 And Courtney organized an intervention. And friends showed up and they all urged him to go to rehab in California. And before he agreed, he made a stop to ask his friend Dylan Carlson, a musician he trusted, to buy him a shotgun. Carlson walked into Stan Baker's gun shop in Seattle and came out with a Remington Model 11.20 gauge. Importantly, it went under Carlson's name, not Kurt's. Courtney headed to Beverly Hills on March 26th, and Kurt came out a few days after. So on April 1st, 1994, Kurt called Courtney from the Exodus Recovery Center, and he told her she'd made a really good record. And then he said, quote, "Just remember, no matter what, I love you," unquote.
45:16 Speaker 00 And those were the last words she'd ever hear from him. And that evening, he told the staff he needed a smoke break, but he never came back. And he went over a six-foot brick wall and he would vanish. And he'd only been at the facility at this point for two days. And on the flight home, they actually put him next to the last person you'd expect, Duff McKagan from Guns N' Roses. Now McKagan didn't think much of it at the time, but they talked. Things seemed fine on the surface, but he told Cross later that, quote, "All of my instincts told me something." "Nothing was wrong." Unquote. Now Kurt landed in Seattle on April 2nd. And hours later, he flagged down a cab and had it take him to the gun shop. And he walked out with a box of shotgun shells and a receipt.
46:02 Speaker 00 And when the driver asked what the shells were for, Kurt told him he's been burglarized. And back in Los Angeles, Courtney was still searching because she had a handful of friends spend hours driving the city, checking every place they could think of. Because at this point Kurt is missing, unaware that he'd already left the state. And on April 4th, Kurt's mom filed a missing persons report with the Seattle Police. And then Courtney brought in a private investigator named Tom Grant. And around the same time, the band pulled out of Lollapalooza. And obviously, there was no version of the festival that worked without Kurt. And a few people saw him around town on April 3rd, but there was nothing after that. And Courtney didn't know where he was, and his family didn't either, and the band didn't either. He was just gone.
46:47 Speaker 00 And there were scattered reports, including a neighbor who thought they spotted him at a park close by the house, bundled in a winter coat, even though it was April. And he allegedly looked rough. And another rumor put him at his summer place out in Carnation, possibly with someone nobody could name. And Mark Lenigan, who was one of Kurt's closest friends, hadn't heard from him either. And he actually went a full week without a call. And Lenigan told Rolling Stone, quote, "Kurt hadn't called me. He hadn't called some other people. He hadn't called his family. He hadn't called anybody. I had a feeling that something really bad had happened." Unquote. And three days went by before anyone found him. And on the morning of April 8th, a security system installer named Gary Smith showed up
47:32 Speaker 00 at the house located at 171 Lake Washington Boulevard East. And he took the exterior stairs up the side of the garage. And through the glass, he saw a figure lying on the greenhouse floor. And he figured the guy was just sleeping it off. But then he noticed blood pooling from one ear. And Smith would call the police. And his wallet was lying nearby, flipped open with his Washington State ID staring at whoever found him. But three days in that room had changed him beyond recognition and they needed fingerprints to confirm it was Kurt and the shotgun was right there with him and it was the same one Dylan Carlson had bought on his behalf and it was flipped upside down across his
48:14 Speaker 00 chest barrel pointing up and his left hand still gripping it and a single wound to his head and the rest of the scene told its own story sunglasses a lighter cigarettes a winter hat and a Tom Moore brand cigar box with syringes a spoon and the rest of a heroin kit packed inside and a note had been left behind written in red ink and a pen was stuck through it placed in a flower pot now the news would break within hours and camera crews were on the property almost immediately after word got out and climbing the hill beside the garage pointing lenses at anything they could reach and fans showed up right behind
48:54 Speaker 00 them and by the afternoon the whole block was packed and Veretta Park sits right beside the house and it became a shrine overnight with flowers piled up and notes and photos things people brought because they didn't know what else to do
49:08 Speaker 06 I'm Kurt Voder with MTV News the body of Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain was found in Seattle on Friday morning he was dead
49:15 Speaker 00 and on April 10th the city held a public visual at the Seattle Center organized by local radio stations and the city government covered half of the expenses and more than 7,000 people showed up packing the area around the International Fountain and they played a tape of Courtney reading from the note out loud over the speakers but she wasn't just reading she was answering him arguing with him her voice kept cracking and at the end she told the crowd to call him a fucker and then to say they love him and a smaller private service took place that same afternoon with about 150 people gathered at Unity Church
49:56 Speaker 00 of Truth and Ove Selig stood up and kept it short saying quote unquote we remember Kurt for what he was caring generous and sweet and Danny Goldberg spoke last saying quote I believe he would have left the ...several years ago if he hadn't met Courtney, unquote. And Courtney would wear all black. And she read from the Book of Job and then from Rimbaud passages out of illuminations that Kurt had loved. And she shared parts of the notes she'd held back from the public visual. And one line hit the hardest. Speaking of his daughter reminding him too much of himself. Sometime over, she turned over every gun Kurt had owned, the shotgun included, to Mothers Against Violence in America.
50:39 Speaker 00 His body would be cremated and some of the ashes went into a teddy bear, some into an urn. And she carried another portion across the country, all the way to the Nembil Buddhist monastery in Ithaca, New York. And monks there blessed them and pressed them into clay, forming small sacred objects known as tsa tsaas. I probably said that wrong, I apologize. And five years passed before the final goodbye. And on May 31, 1999, Kurt's mom brought the family together one last time. And Courtney came, and so did Tracy Miranda, his old girlfriend. And a Buddhist monk chanted while Frances Bean took what was left of her father and let it go, scattering his ashes into a plain creek.
51:22 Speaker 00 And the creek runs through Olympia, which was once called the city where Kurt found, quote unquote, "his true artistic muse." But the world was hurting at the loss of a true great, so much so that the way things were left wasn't accepted by many. It just couldn't be accepted. Someone had to have gotten something wrong on that horrific day. So the Seattle Police Department arrived at 171 Lake Washington Boulevard East on the morning of April 8, 1994. And by the end of the day, they had their answer. The coroner and forensic team put the time of death at roughly April 5, which was three days before Smith found him. And the manner of death was formally certified as suicide.
52:06 Speaker 00 A Dr. Nicholas Hartzorn, an assistant medical examiner, conducted the autopsy. And Hartzorn himself would die in 2002. And the findings were a single shotgun wound to the head, needle marks inside both Elbows and toxicology confirmed what the scene had already suggested. A morphine concentration of 1.52 milligrams per liter with traces of valium. But there was more. Fluid had collected in his lungs and his eyes showed signs of hemorrhaging. And both the brain and liver had sustained damage. And the gun had already been identified, but nobody ran prints on it until May 6th. That's four weeks after the body was already in the ground.
52:48 Speaker 00 And the note was written to Boda, an imaginary friend Kurt had as a kid. Now, most of the notes spoke to a musician who had lost his fire. He said, "Performing had gone hollow, that the crowds, the noise, the energy that once fueled artists like Freddie Mercury just didn't reach him anymore." And he called his wife, quote, "A goddess of a wife who sweats ambition and empathy." And he said his daughter, quote, "Reminds me too much of what I used to be." And near the end, he borrowed a line from Neil Young, saying, quote, "It's better to burn out than fade away." And after signing off with peace, love, empathy Kurt Cobain, he added a final message to
53:30 Speaker 00 Courtney and Francis, saying, quote, "Please keep going Courtney, for Francis, for her life, which will be so much happier without me. I love you, I love you." And Cross described the moment. The room was barely lit, just the flicker of MTV and the first glow of sunrise creeping in. Quote, "When he put the pen down, he had filled all but two inches of the page. It had taken three cigarettes to draft the note." And the King County Medical Examiner's Office stood behind its determination. And the office stated, quote, "In the death examination for Kurt Cobain, the King County Medical Examiner's Office worked with the local law enforcement agency, conducted a
54:11 Speaker 00 full autopsy, and followed all of its procedures in coming to determination of the manner of death as suicide." And the case was closed the same year he died. And Mark Larson spent years running the criminal division at the King County Prosecutor's Office, and his take was pretty blunt, saying, quote, "Investigation was over almost before it started," unquote. And obviously, not everyone accepted that. And it took exactly seven days. A public access TV host in Seattle named Richard Lee launched an ongoing series, and he called it Kurt Cobain Was Murdered, and claimed the police reports didn't line up, and details about the shotgun wound had shifted between versions. And he was the first to do so, but he would not be the last.
54:56 Speaker 00 And an Unsolved Mysteries episode dedicated to the case introduced the questions to a national audience. And the doubt started to spread. And citizens wrote letters to the FBI requesting a federal homicide investigation. In 2021, the Bureau published a batch of those documents, and 10 pages of people asking the government to take a second look. And the institutions didn't budge, but they didn't speak in a unified voice either. And in 1995, when Courtney sued over the release of The Suicide Note, the Washington State Patrol filed a formal response in King County Superior Court. And they said they couldn't confirm what SPD had concluded. And the patrol said they "lack sufficient information to back the ruling."
55:41 Speaker 00 And nearly 20 years later, the department took another look. And in 2014, cold case detective Mike Szczesinski was assigned to review the file. And what he found in an evidence vault surprised even him, because sitting in the vault were four rolls of 35mm film. And nobody had ever bothered to develop. And they were crime scene photographs taken in 1994 and left to sit in the dark for two decades. And Don Cameron, the sergeant on the case, had made that call back in 94. And he shelved the film and relied on Polaroids instead. But Szczesinski had the film developed, and the photos went public in 2016. And a year earlier, SPD had already put out 34 other crime scene images,
56:25 Speaker 00 and five more close-ups of the shotgun follow alongside the newly-developed film. But in the end, Szczesinski reaffirmed the initial ruling, saying, "I've been a detective in homicide for 20 years, and I've been in the cold case unit for 10 years." Most of the cases I work on, I look for something that wasn't done in the past. Sometimes people believe what they read and some of the disinformation from some of the books that this was a conspiracy. Unquote. The full autopsy report didn't see daylight, though, until 2023, which was almost 30 years after it was written. But the requests kept coming. And in November of 2025, the most significant challenge to the official story arrived. And a team of independent researchers dropped a paper in the International Journal of Forensic
57:10 Speaker 00 Sciences, which is an open access, peer-reviewed outlet. And the title was, quote, "A Multidisciplinary Analysis of the Kurt Cobain Death." Unquote. And Brian Burnett, a forensic specialist, led the effort alongside independent researcher Michelle Wilkins. And they brought in heavy credentials from Italy, including a university professor in forensics and toxicology, a medical examiner from a national institute, and the head of chemical forensics for Italy's national police. And their conclusion left no room for ambiguity, saying, quote, "Kurt Cobain, based solely on publicly available discovery and analyzed through a multidisciplinary critical method, was a homicide victim.
57:51 Speaker 00 His body was moved from the site of the homicide and staged to appear as a suicide." Unquote. And Snopes ran it down. And the paper itself was legitimate, but they added a caveat. And Snopes, quote, "Has not independently verified the report's conclusions and no other credible source has disproven SPD's conclusion that Cobain killed himself." Unquote. And that November, the researchers sat down with Seattle Police brass and walked them through it. And the answer came in January of 2026 from Assistant Chief Nicole Powell. And the department thanked them for the effort and said nothing had changed. And the original investigation stood along with the 2014 review.
58:33 Speaker 00 And the SPD still had no intent to revisit the case. But the King County Medical Examiner's Office let the door open just a crack, saying, quote, "Our office is always open to revisiting its conclusions if new evidence comes to light, but we've seen nothing to..." "that would warrant a reopening of the case and our previous determination of death." Unquote. And former Seattle Police Captain Neil Lowe didn't think that was good enough because he'd given five decades to the force, retiring in 2018. And back in 2005, the department had brought him in to take a fresh look at the Cobain file. And Lowe's concluded that the officials had called it a suicide before the investigation was even done.
59:15 Speaker 00 And he recommended a blue ribbon panel of investigators to reexamine everything from the beginning. And then added, quote, "But I don't think that's going to happen." Unquote. Now, the Burnett-Wilkins forensic team called the death scene eerily clean. A shotgun to the head doesn't leave a clean scene. It's one of the most violent ways a person can die. And looking at his left hand, the one wrapped around the barrel, you can barely see any blood on it. And blood covered the gun from end to end, but his hand that held it was clean. And Wilkins put it like this, saying, quote, "If you ever look at photos of shotgun suicides, they are brutal.
59:58 Speaker 00 There is no universe where that hand is not covered in blood." Unquote. And then there was the heroin kit. Everything in it was neat, organized, even careful. The syringes were capped and packed into a Tom Moore cigar box, sitting right at his feet. And receipts for the gun and the shells were still in his pockets. And the shells themselves were arranged in a row beside him. Quote, "We're supposed to believe he capped the needles and put everything back in order after shooting up three times? Because that's what someone does while they're dying." Unquote. And Wilkins said, quote, "To me, it looks like someone staged a movie and wanted you to be absolutely certain this was a suicide."
1:00:43 Speaker 00 Unquote. And the gun sat for almost a month before anyone thought to check it for prints. And May 6 is when they finally dusted it. No usable fingerprints were recovered from the gun, the pen, or the shell casing. And other physical details raised questions as well. The Port on the Remington faces right and physics would say the spent shell goes right, but the casing ended up on the floor to Cabane's left. The wrong side, if you've ever shot a shotgun. And his left hand had locked onto the barrel in a cadaveric spasm, just an instant death grip, which means the gun didn't spin or shift after it fired. If you've ever shot a shotgun, that shit has a kick.
1:01:26 Speaker 00 And he was sitting upright when they found him with legs crossed. But a 20 gauge shotgun kicks hard enough to knock a grown man backward and yet his body hadn't moved. And one detail caught their attention more than most. Cabane shot up, left handed. And that's why most of his old track marks showed up on the right arm. You inject the arm you're not using. But there was a mark on the other arm too, a fresh one on his left forearm. The arm he would have needed someone else to inject. And that would suggest someone else held a needle. And there was also an alleged witness, someone who claimed they'd watched other people hold
1:02:09 Speaker 00 Cabane down and push heroin into him. And the forensic team found this person in the record and police supposedly never talked to them. And then there was the note. The main body was addressed to Boda, but it starts off reading like a goodbye to the music, not to life. He talked about losing the spark, feeling like a fraud, guilt he couldn't shake. More than a few people who read it came away with the same reaction. That's not a suicide note. That's someone quitting the band. The sign off did seem final, quote unquote, peace, love, empathy, Kurt Cabane. But the page didn't stop there. And below the signature, more words appeared, the ones addressed to Courtney and Francis.
1:02:54 Speaker 00 And the handwriting though, looked different here. Bigger, rougher, less controlled. And that bottom section is technically the only place in the entire note where death actually comes up. And as Wilkins notes, quote, the ...text is a little bit different. It's bigger, it looks more scrawly, unquote. Not everyone agreed, though, and forensic linguist Carol Shosky put the entire note through Snare, which is a computational tool built specifically to analyze suicide notes. And the top and bottom sections both came back the same way: suicide. And her analysis found no evidence that a second person had written the ending. And his mother, Wendy,
1:03:36 Speaker 00 looked at the whole note, and she believed Kurt wrote every word of it. But others pointed to a simpler explanation: A person in crisis doesn't write the same way they do when they're calm. Handwriting shifts under the kind of pressure. And then, there was the heroin. At 1.52 milligrams per liter, the morphine in his blood was roughly triple what it takes to kill even a seasoned user. And on top of that, his valium came back at 7 milligrams per liter, which is enough on its own to slow a person's breathing to almost nothing. Quote, "He's dying of an overdose, and so he can barely breathe. His blood isn't pumping very much. I mean, he's in a coma, and he's holding this up to be able to reach the trigger
1:04:17 Speaker 00 to get it in his mouth. It's crazy," unquote, Wilkins would say. And his brain and liver both showed necrosis, and that's what happens when a body shuts down slowly in overdose at a gunshot. Quote, "The necrosis of the brain and liver happens in an overdose. It doesn't happen in a shotgun death," unquote. And in their view, the shotgun wasn't the cause of death, it was the last step, the final blow to a man who was already dying. And there was one more thing. When someone shoots themselves in the head, blood typically floods the airways. But Kurt's were clear. The heroin question is more complicated than
1:04:57 Speaker 00 it appears, and that 1.52 number depends on how you read it, because total morphine includes everything: metabolites stacked up from days of use. And free morphine strips all that out and measure only the live drugs still active in the blood. And if the test measured total morphine, a 2002 study says you can survive that number. And found functioning drivers with even more in their system. But if it measured free morphine, Cobain had almost 12 times the highest level anyone has ever lived through. And nobody knows which test the lab ran, which is really odd. But both methods have been available since the 70s. The answer matters, but the file doesn't say.
1:05:42 Speaker 00 And people on the other side of the argument don't ignore the heroin numbers, but just read them differently. And they say tolerance rewrites the equation. And death investigator Joseph Scott Morgan said the heroin questions, quote unquote, "may be worth examining." But he pushed back on the idea that the numbers alone tell you what happened. His Kurt had been using for years, and that history can't be ignored. And Dr. Richard Hariff said, quote, "Tolerance is extremely important when evaluating opiate levels. With tolerant individuals, very high levels can be achieved far more than a non-tolerant individual," end quote. And forensic consultant Douglas Lyle framed the broader problem, saying, quote, "Determining
1:06:23 Speaker 00 what drugs are present and in what amounts is critical and usually fairly easy, but determining how that level of that drug affected the victim's abilities isn't always so clear. In the end, the me and toxicologist must make a best guess as to the drug's true effect in the particular victim being examined," end quote. And the experts in the forensic and toxicology worlds are still arguing about this to this day. And 32 years later, even they can't agree on whether Kurt could have pulled the trigger or not. But every version of the murder theory starts in the same place. One combo question. Who had the most to lose if Cobain stayed alive and the most to gain if he didn't?
1:07:07 Speaker 00 And for three decades, the answer has pointed in one direction. Tom Grant had spent years working homicide for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department before going private. And when Cobain walked out of Exodus in April of 1994, Courtney called Grant and told him to bring her husband home. He was still working for her when the call came in on April So he started recording every conversation with Courtney, every call with her associates and every contradiction. And what he heard didn't add up as he later described the whole thing as quote, "filled with lies, contradictions in logic and countless inconsistencies," unquote.
1:07:48 Speaker 00 And according to Grant, Courtney filed the missing persons report using a fake name belonging to Kurt's mother. And she told police he'd bought a shotgun and that he was suicidal. And Grant's argument was that by the time cops showed up to the greenhouse, they'd already made up their minds. And Grant also said she killed his access to money. Credit cards, bank cards, all of it shut down. So if Kurt wanted to go anywhere or do anything, he couldn't pay for it. And during his search, Grant was never told about the greenhouse above the garage, which is where Cobain had been the entire time. What's the greenhouse? And he said, "Oh, it's just a dirty little room above the garage." Grant's case came down to four things.
1:08:31 Speaker 00 The drugs in Cobain's blood should have knocked him out cold before he could even reach for a gun. And the note looked tampered with and not a single fingerprint was found at the scene. And the person who stood to gain the most from his death was the one signing Grant's checks. And the money was straightforward. And by early 1994, the marriage was cracking and Kurt told Rolling Stone that month that divorce was on the table. And lawyers were already involved on both sides and wills and prenuptial agreements were being revisited and they'd signed a prenup before the wedding. And if they split, they each kept what was theirs. The math worked fine when they were on equal footing.
1:09:13 Speaker 00 But by 1994, Kurt was worth tens of millions and Courtney wasn't close. And a divorce would have cost her everything, but his death would hand it to her. And Halperin and Wallace, who investigated the case for years, reported that Courtney had been shopping for what she called a vicious divorce lawyer and someone who could break the prenup apart. And Grant would add another layer. And he said Cobain had gone to attorney. Rosemary Carol and asked her to write a new will, one that left Courtney with nothing. And the couple's nanny, Michael DeWitt, who everyone called Callie, reportedly backed that up, saying, quote, "He had talked to a divorce lawyer and he had left her.
1:09:55 Speaker 00 If they would have got divorced, she wouldn't have got a penny," unquote. And the numbers only made it worse. Because at the time of his death, Kurt was worth an estimated $50 million. And the royalties alone were projected to push that number past $450 million over time. And Grant noted that married people kill each other every day over far less. And Kurt had already walked away from a Lollapalooza headlining offer worth nearly $10 million, which Courtney was furious about. And Grant's theory accounted for the optics, too. A public divorce would have destroyed her image, whereas a dead husband made her sympathetic. This is all alleged, by the way.
1:10:36 Speaker 00 This is all, this is all speculation, by the way, for the law. So nobody sues me, okay? And her own father, Hank Harrison, who'd been estranged from Courtney for years, even told the press his daughter had every reason to want Kabane dead. And the day before the body turned up, April 7th, Courtney got arrested in Beverly Hills for drug possession and stolen property. So at the moment Kurt had already been dead in the greenhouse for two days. And then there was El Duce, a punk singer named Eldon Hoak, with stage name El Duce as frontman of a band called The Mentors. And went on camera and said Courtney had offered him 50 grand to murder her husband. What?
1:11:18 Speaker 00 And he sat for a lie detector test on national television and passed. And he also brought up a name, Alan, someone he said had taken the job. And a few days later, Hoak was dead, hit by a train on his way home from a show. And he'd been drinking heavily, and the last person anyone saw him with was a musician who went by Alan Wrench. Not many people took it seriously. Global News said, quote, unquote, "If you know..." Anything about Elduche and the mentors, I'd call Eldon Hoke an unreliable narrator. And polygraphs, as we know, don't hold up in court. And the 2015 docudrama Soaked in Bleach laid the whole theory out.
1:12:03 Speaker 00 Courtney's lawyers fired off cease and desist letters to theaters, calling the film defamatory. But she never followed through, and there was no lawsuit. But Grant has been daring her to for years, saying a court case would crack the whole thing open with depositions and evidence on record. And she has not taken the bait. But the people closest to Kurt have not supported this theory. Not one person in his inner circle has backed the murder theory. Not the band, not his mother, and not his daughter. Novoselic has been direct about it. And in a Reddit AMA, he said he was, quote, "convinced Kurt killed himself," unquote, "and bought that firearm as a suicide device," unquote.
1:12:46 Speaker 00 And the rest of the family made a statement to People, saying, quote, "We all know that Kurt killed himself. Courtney did not kill him, nor did she have him killed," unquote. Carlson rejected the theory outright, implying that if he believed his friend had been murdered, he, quote, "would have dealt with it himself," unquote. The 2025 Burnett Wilkins report gave the theory its most credentialed backing. But it should be noted that the journal it appeared in sits on the Beals list of potentially predatory academic publishers. I am just a mere vessel for information that's out there. I don't have much opinion on this. You guys can speculate in the comments below, but I'm not saying anyone did anything, okay?
1:13:31 Speaker 00 But the questions from the last three decades have found new places to live as well. For years, the debate over Kurt Cobain's death lived in documentary films, private investigator websites, and late-night internet forums. And then, in early 2026, it jumped somewhere unexpected. And a new theory emerged, one that went further than anything Tom Grant ever alleged. And it reframes Kurt Cobain as someone who knew about exploitation inside the entertainment industry and was beginning to fight back against it. And it claims that pushing back is what got him killed. Now, the theory picked up speed on social media through 2025 and into 2026.
1:14:13 Speaker 00 And though its roots trace back to fringe corners of the internet and alternative media outlets, the people pushing this theory don't see Cabane's death as a standalone event. And they instead tie it to the likes of Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Anthony Bourdain, and Avicii. Now, in these corners of the internet, every one of those deaths are explained by the alleged fact that they knew too much about trafficking among the powerful, and they were silenced for it. The claims about Cornell and Bennington have been debunked by snopes. And medical examiners in both cases determined the cause of death was suicide by hanging. And there was also a claim that all four were working on an anti-trafficking documentary called "The Silent Children."
1:14:58 Speaker 00 And Reuters looked into it, and someone from the actual production confirmed that. Cornell, Bennington, Avicii, and Bourdain had nothing to do with the film, apparently. And an important distinction needs to be made, because here's what's true about Kurt's activism. He stood against sexism, racism, and homophobia, and he backed it up with benefit concerts and public statements. He showed up, but look through every interview he gave, every journal entry, every public statement, you won't find a single reference to child exploitation, trafficking rings, or anything resembling the organized abuse these theories describe. Kurt fought for the causes he believed in, and that is documented.
1:15:42 Speaker 00 But the idea that he was blowing the whistle on trafficking is not backed up. But then, in February 2026, the theory got a little bit more fuel. And on February 14th, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the full release of the Jeffrey Epstein files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. And attached to it was a list, and more than 300 names pulled from across the released documents. And Kurt Cabane was on that list. However, the context was completely harmless. Epstein had a book in his possession called A Manual of Peace: Thirty-Eight Steps Towards Enlightened Living, and Kurt's name was in it. And the book held him up as a bad influence on young people. And that's it.
1:16:26 Speaker 00 But one other detail did turn up, and Epstein's Twitter account appeared to follow Courtney, and even the DOJ's own letter said as much. And the names came from a wide variety of contexts. And some people had real, direct contact with Epstein, and others just showed up in unrelated documents that happened to pass through his orbit. And on W. Burr's On Point, experts called out names like Cobain and Elvis Presley as "nonsensically mentioned," mixing them in with people actually tied to trafficking, they argued, was "almost intended to confuse, intended to dilute, the actual impact and the actual nefariousness of what so many people in Jeffrey Epstein's circle did."
1:17:10 Speaker 00 And Courtney's name appeared in a different part of the files, and her contact info was in a separate document, Epstein's personal address book, the one people call his "little black book." And her name had a circle around it. And within that book, a circle is thought to mark someone as more than a casual contact. But the book was massive. Hundreds of names, politicians, business figures, celebrities, plenty of them had no proven tie to anything Epstein did. If you want to know more about that, I have several videos on Epstein, one including that birthday book, so you can go look at those. But, I mean, we all know what the government, I mean, the government's throwing around all sorts of names, like mixing everything up to confuse people, and so it doesn't make any sense. It's just disgusting.
1:17:55 Speaker 00 I just, I just, you know. But the wildest version of the story ran on a site called The People's Voice, previously known as News Punch, and it has a long track record of pushing unverified conspiracy content. And their claim is that Courtney played a direct role in trafficking, and Kurt was killed because he was about to blow it open. And they leaned on a deposition from Judge Paul G. Castle, who said that in a hypothet- FBI investigation, Courtney, quote, "would be one of the people I'd want to talk to," unquote. But that's quite a far cry from calling someone a criminal. And in February 2026, a post went viral claiming to show Epstein sitting in a crowd during Nirvana's
1:18:34 Speaker 00 legendary MTV Unplugged taping in November 1993. However, no credible source has verified it. And one thing about Courtney is verified, though. At the 2005 Pamela Anderson Comedy Central Roast, Courtney was asked if she had advice for young women trying to make it in Hollywood. And she said, quote, "I'll get libeled if I say it. If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party in the Four Seasons, don't go," unquote. And she said later that her remark got her permanently banned by the talent agency, CAA, and that footage came back around 2017, right as the hashtag Me Too movement was exploding. So yes, Courtney knew what was happening in Hollywood, and she wasn't afraid to say
1:19:17 Speaker 00 it out loud. And years before, anyone else would. But knowing about Weinstein doesn't connect her to Epstein in any way that we know. And three things happened at nearly the same time in early 2026. The DOJ released the full Epstein files with Cobain's name included, and the Burnett Wilkins forensic report challenged the official cause of death. And the ground had already shifted with Weinstein, the Diddy case, and years of Epstein revelations. So by 2026, people are primed to question just every institution that ever looked the other way, which seems like every institution, basically. And the result has just been a collision. On social media, the two threads got welded into one story, even though they
1:19:59 Speaker 00 almost had nothing to do with each other. #JusticeForKurt and #CobainForensics started trending. And people were treating the forensic report and the Epstein files like chapters of the same story. But the forensic team never said a word about Epstein and never mentioned trafficking and never touched the entertainment industry. And real forensic questions do exist about Kurt's death. I still have lots of questions because stuff does not add up and it's very concerning, but they didn't come from Reddit threads. Credentialed professionals raised them, saying there are unanswered questions is one thing, and saying Kurt Cobain was murdered by a trafficking ring connected to Jeffrey Epstein is something else entirely. There does not seem to be convincingly credible evidence
1:20:44 Speaker 00 for it at this point. But there are absolutely things about Kurt Cobain's death that still don't add up. That much is for sure. But the Epstein link that's been trending based on everything that's surfaced so far isn't one of them. The official answer has never changed. The King County Medical Examiner's Office ruled Kurt Cobain's death as suicide on April 8, 1994, the same day his body was found. And the case remains closed, though the Medical Examiner's Office did leave a slight glimmer of hope that it could be looked into further in the future. But the Seattle Police Department has made its position clear that it still has no intention of reopening the case. But a change.org petition demanding
1:21:29 Speaker 00 the case be reopened has pulled in significant public support. People still regularly contact SPD, asking them to take another look, and most of those requests come through social media. The forensic study published in late 2025 gave the doubters their strongest ammunition yet, with credentialed professionals concluding it was homicide. And SPD listened to the presentation and still said, no.
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1:22:24 Speaker 00 As of March 2026, nothing has changed. The case is closed, and the questions are still sitting there. No fingerprints on the shotgun, four rolls of crime scene film left in a vault for 20 years, a heroin level that experts still argue over, a note that doesn't quite add up to many people, and a man found in a greenhouse above a garage three days after anyone last saw him alive. That's what we're left with. So let me know what you think down below. But that is the case of Cora Cabane. And for me, I am, you know, I'm just going to listen to some Nirvana. The whole, the whole case is, is very devastating, but what an artist. But as always, my heart goes out to the family.
1:23:09 Speaker 00 And if you have any other cases you want me to deep dive into, let me know down below. I always read the comments. And until next time, stay safe out there, stay beautiful, and I'll see you in the next one. Okay? Bye.
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