Did Courtney Love
have a murder motive?


This Ain't Sid & Nancy

"I'm on fire, you fuckers... be afraid... be very fucking afraid."
--Courtney Love, in an America Online post to individuals she felt were attempting to exploit Kurt's death.

There's a tendency in conspiracy research to dig for holes in the story despite the human reality of a given situation. It's easy to replace flesh and blood with names, dates, and factoids while groping for the truth in a murky pool of suspicion. Sure, Courtney Love has an attitude problem and a fierce temper. Sure, she and Kurt weren't getting along terribly well before his death. But to coldly calculate the death of the person who helped bring life to your child is serious business. Crimes of passion aside, murdering one's spouse in cold blood is a fairly uncommon occurrence.

Which is what makes it so disturbing when it proves to be true. And as unsettling as the allegations against Courtney Love may be, they nonetheless bear cause for examination. That's the price she pays for being a public figure.

If Kurt was murdered, then Courtney certainly had several possible motives -- if she was, in fact, involved. In January 1994, Cobain told Rolling Stone that he might be divorcing Courtney in the near future. After his death, the magazine reported that divorce papers were already being drawn up at the time of his demise.

According to Grant, shortly before Kurt's death, Courtney instructed Rosemary Carroll, one of her attorneys, to get the "meanest, most vicious divorce lawyer" she could find. Kurt also called Carroll around the same time, telling her that he wanted Courtney taken out of his will. At that point, Courtney stood to gain a lot more from a suicide than a divorce. If Kurt blew himself away, Nirvana record sales would predictably skyrocket -- which was proven when "Unplugged in New York" debuted at the top of the charts after his death. Also, before Kurt's death, Courtney's band Hole was yet to become a huge commercial success. Instead of the humiliation of a divorce coinciding with the release of her breakthrough album, Hole ended up taking Nirvana's place headlining Lollapalooza in the summer of '94.

Which is bitterly ironic, considering Courtney's rage when Kurt walked out on the $9.5 million Lollapalooza contract. Grant, a former Los Angeles police officer, says that when her rage failed to change Kurt's mind, she blamed his defective profit instinct on drug use, pouncing on him with a "tough love" intervention which included some of the junkies with whom Cobain had shot heroin.

On March 31, Kurt entered rehab in Marina Del Ray, California; he left the following day. On April 3, Courtney hired Grant to figure out who was using a credit card of Kurt's which she had personally cut into pieces. The charges on this credit card continued after Kurt's latest time of death, but stopped abruptly just hours before his body was discovered. Courtney also ordered Grant to put the house of one of Kurt's drug dealers under surveillance in addition to other locations, but not the Lake Washington house where Cobain's corpse was found. Courtney did not tell Grant at the time that Michael DeWitt, Kurt and Courtney's live-in nanny, had reported having a short conversation with Kurt at the Lake Washington house after he left rehab.

On Monday, April 4, someone claiming to be Wendy O'Conner, Kurt's mother, called the Seattle police department with a missing person's report. According to police records, "Mr. Cobain ran away from CA facility and flew back to Seattle. He also bought a shotgun and may be suicidal. Mr. Cobain may be at [deleted] location for narcotics."

Both Grant and Seattle-based researcher Richard Lee, host of the cable access program "Kurt Cobain Was Murdered," believe that Courtney Love actually called in the missing person's report. Either way, the caller displayed a certain amount of prescience with the call, predicting the key elements of Cobain's death exactly as they would later be described in police reports.

According to Grant, as the search for Cobain ensued, "we began calling hotels looking for Kurt and thought we located him at a hotel room under one of his aliases. Courtney said she didn't want Kurt to know she was looking for him, but later she called me and said she talked to the person in the room and it wasn't Kurt."

During a phone conversation that day, Courtney told Grant that Kurt was suicidal. "Everyone thinks he's going to die," Grant says she announced. "Everyone" was right.

On April 6, Courtney called an electrical contractor to request work on the lights and motion detector installed on the greenhouse where Kurt's body was found. Early the next morning, Love/Cobain attorney Rosemary Carroll reportedly overheard Courtney telling Dylan Carlson to "be sure to check the greenhouse." On April 8, Kurt's corpse was spotted by one of the electricians Courtney had summoned, who immediately alerted the police.

Several months later, on June 15, Courtney lost another close acquaintance when Hole bassist Kristin Pfaff died of a "narcotics overdose" the night before she planned to drive her loaded U-Haul from Seattle to her new home in Minneapolis. Her death was treated as a suicide. Did she learn something about Kurt's death that she wasn't supposed to know? Or was it just a bad year for heroin users?

Courtney had as much of a motive for murder as anyone else who's ever killed out of greed. But the Seattle police determined that Kurt offed himself, and that there was no foul play involved. If Kurt was actually murdered, then the police by definition would be involved in the coverup, as well as the media which reported disinformation handed out by the police and by Courtney Love, reinforcing the official findings of suicide. The Cobain murder theory starts to get a lot shakier when allegations of police and media collaboration are involved. Yet plausible, though less conspiratorial, motives exist which could explain the false findings of the police as reported by gullible news outlets.

(c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc.

Next: Cover-up and disinformation.
Back to Article Index
What do you think? Tell us in the message boards!