What if Kurt Cobain was alive? Youth and death: the short but colorful life of Kurt Cobain Kurt Cobain's body after death.

25 years ago, on April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain, the main rock star of the 90s, committed suicide in the city of Seattle.

Alexander Kutinov

Kurt with his best friend, 1994

On Friday, April 8, 1994 at 8:45 am, a police officer on duty, rabid from the unusual heat for Seattle, recorded a phone call from a certain Gary Smith. He said in a not entirely sober voice that in the house number 171, owned by a married couple Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, lies the bloody corpse of a man. Arriving 11 minutes later, the squad found the applicant (a full-time electrician who checked the alarm) and the actual corpse at the site.

It was not easy to identify the deceased, as he: a) lay in a stuffy, closed room for at least three days and b) imagine what remains of the head of a man who shot himself in the mouth with a large-caliber Remington rifle 11th model.

No traces of disorder were found, but on the table were several sheets of paper covered in red ink, presumably a suicide message. Cobain was identified by sneakers and fingerprints, at first cautiously stating that Nirvana's scheduled Lollapalooza performance was in doubt. However, a few days later the sad news spread around the world: Kurt is no more. Grunge Is Dead.

May there always be a mother

From the Cobain diaries

Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967 in Hockheim, Washington. His father's name was exactly the same, he was a German by birth and worked as an auto mechanic.

Mother, Wendy O'Connor, was of Irish blood and, unlike her husband, had a higher education, which did not prevent her from working either as a kindergarten teacher or as a waitress in a bar. Kurt was six months old when the family (numerous uncles and aunts also lived with them constantly) moved to Aberdeen, a place a hundred kilometers from Seattle, famous for its giant trailer park and a fantastic number of trucker brothels of various sizes.

Relations in the family were difficult: Cobain Sr. was known as an eccentric and mumbling, he liked to pawn behind a high German collar, and he spent undrunk money on a collection of weapons of all stripes - from hunting shotguns to battle axes. Not surprisingly, the passion for killer toys was passed on to his son. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Mom, on the contrary, was a domineering, hot-tempered woman and often beat her husband and his relatives in anger, but not her son. The boy grew up sickly and shy and had obvious artistic inclinations: already at the age of two he painted wallpapers and sang along at rehearsals to Uncle Chuck and Aunt Mary, who amused the drivers and their girlfriends in local taverns. The same relatives gave him the first records - the Beatles' "Let It Be" and the collection "The Best of Country".

According to his mother, Kurt at the age of seven could play the guitar "Mr. Bojangles" and drum out "No Jude" on my uncle's kit. And he constantly reread Tolstoy and Salinger, wrote poems, dedicating them, as you might guess, to his mother. Although the whole large family literally carried the blond angel with huge blue eyes in her arms, he gravitated exclusively to his mother and always took her side in quarrels. Wendy, in turn, encouraged him to play music by buying him records and cassettes, and for his fourteenth birthday he gave him an amplifier with speakers and a guitar.

One day, Wendy, during her husband's next drinking bout, collected his entire weapon collection and drowned it in the river. The next day, Kurt and his friends went "fishing", caught almost all of dad's arsenal and, having washed and cleaned it, drove it to the local flea market. The proceeds were used to purchase equipment. Constantly complaining about the insufficiently loud and powerful sound, Cobain could now come off to the fullest.

Meanwhile, his mother divorced his father and left with the kids, and Uncle Chuck committed suicide. Both of these circumstances hit Kurt’s fragile soul hard, he fell into a terrible depression (later this would become his main occupation) and, despite his strong attachment to Wendy, actually left home, moving to a new friend and rock and roll comrade-in-arms Chris Novoselic. Kurt was 18 years old.

Congratulations on Novoselic

Chris was the son of emigrants from Croatia, was two meters tall and had a girlfriend, Shelley. He played the bass guitar, could blow out a case of Miller in an evening, and completely shared Kurt's punk habits. And he gradually became a constant headache for the Aberdeen police.

Subject to frequent mood swings and torn apart by a million youthful torments, an artist by nature and a rescue sailor by a temporary profession, he destroyed the apartments of friends and casual acquaintances, fought with truckers in eateries and even once wrote “God Is Gay” on the wall in the police station with his own blood. ! ("God is gay!").

Then, already in the days of Nirvana, he did this more than once and even wore a T-shirt with such an inscription. Kurt and Chris also played in numerous semi-professional teams, which were united by only one thing - grunge.

Grunge is a very arbitrary concept. In English, it seems to be just "dirt", but not the same dirt as in punk, without vomiting and syphilitic ulcers. It is a hymn to hatred and disappointment, an apotheosis of political and spiritual vacuum, an encyclopedia of personal experiences and an endless ode to neuroses. Furious and aloof at the same time, a hybrid of McCartney and Ozzy, grunge, in fact, did not bring anything new to music, but is legitimately considered an independent musical style.

After the posturing and tinsel of the early 80s, the rockers finally looked inside themselves, and what they saw turned out to be one big bullshit. Simple guys in wrinkled plaid shirts and cheap sneakers tore guitar strings and their own souls and played as if tomorrow they would be put on a wooden pea coat. However, they also died en masse.

The founding fathers of grunge are Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone and Green River (all former punks and hard rockers), and the capital is Seattle. Why exactly him? Most likely, because in the eternal antagonism of the show capitals - New York and Los Angeles - this city (American Sverdlovsk) stood aside and gave rise to its own separate superstars like Jimi Hendrix.

Kurt decided to call his band Nirvana (drummer Aaron Buckhart became the third member) while undergoing rehabilitation in one of the special hospitals: he had been friends with hard drugs for a long time. “I wanted the title to be sonorous and beautiful, but controversial in terms of interpretation,” Cobain recalled. The year was 1988 outside.

reach nirvana

Lyrics to Nirvana's biggest hit "Smells like teen spirit". Cobain's autograph

A strange psychedelic-destructive project was suddenly taken up by a certain John Endino, a former Navy captain and member of the interesting pre-grunge band Skin Yard. He worked as a sound producer and, for a nominal fee and beer, recorded a dozen Nirvana songs. By that time, Bookhart had been replaced by Chad Channing, and Kurt, sitting in the apartment of a lonely Novoselic (Shelly had run away, unable to withstand her friend's rock and roll lifestyle), wrote a song a day. In 1989, the debut album "Bleach" was released, for which Cobain wrote several now classic grunge hits - "About a Girl", "Mr. Mustache", "Blew". The record was a local success, and in England much more than in America, which was experiencing a grunge boom. The group received a $70,000 fee, which almost killed them in the bud: Kurt was so carried away by the expansion of consciousness that he was twice in a coma, and the police established constant supervision over him.

In the recording of the trinity's second, most successful and most loved by the people album "Nevermind" (1991), Dave Grohl already played drums, like Kurt, half-German-half-Irish, but much more experienced professionally: at the age of 21, he had already managed to travel half the world in part of the Washington hardcore team Scream. From this disc, or rather, from the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the video for it, a real nirvanomania began.

The release of this particular record marked a complete change of landmarks in pop music: "Nevermind" kicked Michael Jackson's gigantic opus "Dangerous" from the first line of the Billboard hit parade. At that moment, the era of alternative rock began, the decline of which we are still experiencing. Nirvana's live shows were turning into radical new style manifestos; fury, drive and aggression of the musicians flowed like water. A rare amplifier lived to the end of the performance, and playing a solo standing on his head was a common thing for Cobain. In one of the interviews he said:

« Nirvana in my understanding means freedom from pain, suffering, the outside world. This is an immersion in a fairy tale by playing the guitar »

In the same year, the first meeting of the shaggy storyteller who became hyperpopular and a well-fed girl named Courtney Love took place.

Kurt and Courtney

She was born in 1966 in Eugene, Oregon. Her mother was a real hippie and changed partners more often than socks and underwear. At the age of three, Courtney visited Woodstock, and her girlish face flaunts on the album "Aohotohoa" by acid rock classics Grateful Dead. Arriving at a very young age in England, she made a living from sports dancing, striptease, women's boxing and hanging out with the aging New Wavers. Her partners and "teachers" were Ian McCulloch (Echo & The Bunnymen) and Julian Cope (Teardrops Explodes), whom she now recalls with ill-concealed disgust. Returning to America, the girl was noted in the music (she was the vocalist of the early composition of Faith No More) and the film field (“Straight to Hell”, “Sid and Nancy”) and eventually formed the Hole feminist quartet, with which she achieved success. Cobain and Love met in Los Angeles at a Butthole Surfers concert. A stately young lady with a beautiful figure and obvious artistic abilities, Courtney literally struck Kurt. He almost with his fists repelled her then boyfriend - the leader of the Smashing Pumkins Bill Corgan and married the wayward girl with amazing speed. It happened on the cheerful island of Waikiki in Hawaii, where all the formalities can be completed in fifteen minutes.

In 1992, the daughter of Frances Bean was born to a crazy couple - a completely healthy child, despite the reluctance of the rocker mother to give up some habits even during pregnancy. Kurt gave his wife an oath to quit with a syringe and held on almost until his death.

Grunge Finale

Relations within the group became increasingly strained. Courtney, like Yoko Ono for the Beatles, was a bone of contention, Kurt began to have serious problems with his lungs and stomach, which he suppressed with the strongest dubious drugs, and his teammates who took up arms against him increasingly looked to the side. Yes, and Cobain himself, after the release of the last album of the group “In Utero”, either announced the suspension of Nirvana and the creation of a project with Mark Arm from Mudhoney, or hinted at a desire to leave the game. Back in 1992, Cobain wrote in his diary:

« I feel that people want me dead, otherwise rock geniuses haven't died for a long time »

On March 3, 1994, in Rome, he makes his first suicide attempt by eating 50 Rohypnol tablets and washing them down generously with champagne. He even wrote a suicide note, which has not survived. Then he was pumped out, but already on March 6, in Seattle, Cobain went into a heroin frenzy for a month. In moments of abstinence, the musician writes chaotic and tearful letters to his mother and buys weapons with maniacal zeal. He already has a Tauras pistol and a Beretta assault rifle, ostensibly to protect his daughter, but he buys a Remington 11 large-caliber rifle, the same one.

In his last days, according to producer Steve Albini, he was practically insane: on edge, with burning eyes, terribly thinner and completely unable to work or communicate with people who tried to reason with him. Two days before Cobain's death, Courtney was arrested for possession of drugs and forgery of documents (she was found to have a fake prescription). Already sitting in the cell, Courtney tried to direct the activities of the detectives in a different direction - to find her husband, whom she had not seen for almost a week.

The news of Kurt's death found her in the hospital, and, having escaped from there, she immediately discovered a number of inconsistencies in the official version of the suicide. Here are traces of the presence of an outsider in the room (someone else's sleeping bag, cigarettes in the ashtray), and the fact that it was locked from the outside, and the testimony of random witnesses who saw two figures in the window opening. Yes, and Novoselic added fuel to the fire, saying that Cobain was killed by "some forces of evil."

The suicide note was full of confusion and contradictory statements, and besides, it was clearly written in two different handwritings, with only the last words "Peace, love, best wishes" uniquely his. But this, you see, does not mean a desire to die. Many also believe that Kurt, holding the muzzle in his mouth, could not pull the trigger on his own: it is extremely difficult physically.

The investigation of Kurt's murder was not officially conducted, the detectives hired by Courtney were refused by the police department "for lack of evidence." Naturally, most fans believe that Kurt is alive to this day and enjoys a heavenly peace somewhere in Tahiti in the company of Elvis Presley and Bob Marley.

after life

Nirvana's influence on 90s rock music is comparable to Black Sabbath's influence on heavy metal. At the same time, the revolutionary nature of their heritage is not even in how effectively they managed to mix the guitar dirt and heaviness of Ozzy and Co., punk ethics and teenage self-criticism. Before them, The Melvins and Mudhoney did it no less successfully. The thing is that they managed to pour the resulting mixture into easy-to-use molds of a classic three-minute pop song, that is, plant their musical ideas on riffs and hooks that caress the ear of the rocker. And, of course, the frontman's image: Cobain achieved incredible success in combining the most exciting features of Pete Townsend, Neil Young and Sid Vicious. The hilarious idiocy of "hairy metal", the hip-hop recyclables of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, the euphoria of acid rock of the late 80s are left deep in the past - for the first time in twenty years, sincerity and originality of self-expression again came to the fore. Without Nirvana, there would be no true '90s grunge heyday, just as there would be no Bush, Radiohead, Oasis, Linkin Park, The White Stripes and thousands more.

The name of Kurt Cobain, the leader of the rock band Nirvana, is no less known than the names of the members of the Beatles. A significant role in this was played by his mysterious death, the solution of which cannot be found until now. In childhood and adolescence, the future cult musician Kurt Cobain considered himself abandoned. His parents definitely didn’t need him, and they didn’t hide it. Since childhood, Kurt found salvation from parental dislike in music.

Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967 in Aberdeen (Washington) in the family of auto mechanic Donald Leland Cobain. Wendy's mother Elizabeth did not work - she took care of the house and children (Kurt had a younger sister, Kimberly). Kurt started singing songs of the Beatles at the age of two. And no wonder, he grew up in a musical family. His mother sang well, Uncle Chuck Fradenburg performed with one of the bands, Aunt Mary Earl played the guitar well, and great-uncle Delbert was a professional tenor.

Kurt Donald Cobain wrote his first song at the age of four, and for his seventh birthday, his aunt gave him a drum kit. A happy childhood ended when Kurt was 10 years old - his parents divorced. He took it hard, became gloomy and withdrawn. Already a well-known musician, Cobain spoke of that period: “I was ashamed of my parents. I could not communicate normally with classmates, because I really wanted to have a full-fledged family: mother and father. Because of this, I was angry with my parents for several years.

Kurt Cobain in childhood - photo

After this divorce, Kurt could not get along with either his father or mother, who already had new families, and lived with his grandparents. Music saved him from loneliness and dislike. At the age of 14, he became interested in playing the guitar - a gift from Uncle Chuck. Warren Medak, a musician from Chuck Fradenburg's band, became his first teacher. Kurt became interested in punk style and fired up to create his own punk band. But acquaintance with the Melvis band, who played grunge (alternative rock with elements of heavy metal and punk rock), helped him find his direction.

In 1984, 17-year-old Kurt Cobain, after graduating from school, returned to his mother, ‘but she set a condition: either you find a job, or leave! Now Kurt lived with friends - who will shelter for the night. It even happened to spend the night under the bridge of the Uishka River. Tired of working, Kurt got a job, and soon he was arrested for penetrating into foreign territory and drinking alcohol and went to prison for eight days.

In 1985, he nevertheless created his own group Fecal Matter (translated into Russian - "Feces"), but a year later it broke up without releasing a single disc.

Kurt began to distribute the band's demo among the musicians in the hope of finding like-minded people. And those were found. The new team consisting of Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselitsa and Chad Channing, changing more than one name, eventually became Nirvana.

Nirvana group performance

The first single was released in 1988, and a year later the debut album Bleach. Journalists called Nirvana "the flagship of generation X", and Kurt Donald Cobain - "the voice of the generation." Nirvana was mostly out of politics, but Cobain was an active advocate for the rights of women and sexual minorities in his songs. In connection with the latter, he began to receive more and more threats against him.

Drugs and Kurt Cobain

On February 24, 1992, Kurt Cobain married singer and guitarist Courtney Love. In fact, it was she who married him to herself, showing perseverance. On August 18, their daughter was born, and shortly after the birth of the child, the department of children's affairs filed a case against the spouses for deprivation of parental rights. The reason was a newspaper interview with Courtney Love, in which she admitted that she used drugs while pregnant.

Courtney justified this by saying that she did not know about the pregnancy. Narcotics (heroin) as an anesthetic were also used by Kurt Cobain, who has suffered from chronic bronchitis and sharp pains in the stomach since childhood.

In general, Kurt's medical history looks like a direct path to a madhouse. Doctors diagnosed him with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder as a child, and he took psychostimulants. He was later diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis. According to cousin Kurt Beverly, a doctor by profession, alcoholism was common in their family, and two of his paternal uncles committed suicide.

Kurt Cobain had been taking drugs since the age of 13, and by 1991 he had developed a severe addiction to heroin. In the summer of 1993, Cobain barely survived an overdose, and in the spring of the following year, his bronchitis and laryngitis worsened, and he flew to Rome for treatment. On March 4, 1994, Courtney, who flew to him, found Kurt unconscious - again an overdose! He filled the potent drug with champagne!

On March 18, Courtney called the police - Kurt locked himself in a room with a gun and threatened to shoot himself. The police confiscated a collection of guns and a bottle of pills. On March 25, Corney called close friends, and they persuaded Cobain to go to the clinic. On April 3, he flew to Los Angeles, to a rehabilitation clinic, and disappeared. Courtney hired private detective Tom Grant to look for her husband.

Death of Kurt Cobain

The news of the death of Kurt Cobain shocked tens of millions of his fans around the world, relatives and friends. Cobain's body was found on the morning of April 8, 1994 by electrician Gary Smith, who came to install a security system.

Gary Smith is the electrician who found Kurt Cobain dead

Smith called, but no one answered, and he climbed the stairs to the greenhouse in search of the owners, whose car was parked near the open garage. In the greenhouse, an electrician found the corpse of Kurt Cobain with a bullet wound on his left temple. A gun lay across the body.

The electrician found a suicide note in which Cobain complained that he "hadn't had the pleasure of listening to and writing music for a long time." The note was addressed to Bodda, his fictional childhood friend.

After cremation, the ashes of Kurt Cobain were scattered over his hometown, over the Wishka River.

A part of the ashes was taken by a widow, a practicing Buddhist, and taken to a Buddhist monastery for blessing and adding to clay for making ritual figurines. Left a part.

Cause of death of Kurt Cobain

The investigation was quick and obviously superficial. According to the main version, Kurt Cobain injected himself with an overdose of heroin and shot himself. Ordinary suicide. The doctors concluded that the corpse had lain at home for three days. The version of the murder was worked out without enthusiasm, one of the suspects was Cobain's wife Courtney Love. Relations between the spouses were worse than ever. It turned out that Cobain had filed for divorce, and Courtney was losing $30 million. But the police had nothing against Courtney, also a musical superstar.

Burial of Kurt Cobain

The fact that Cobain's death was violent, disguised as a suicide, was first publicly spoken by American journalist Richard Lee. A week after Cobain's death, he released a series of broadcasts in which he covered police reports, refuting the versions and arguments of the investigation. Soon he was joined by private detective Tom Grant, the same one who was looking for Kurt in April 1994. Grant became increasingly suspicious of the widow, who during the investigation was clearly confused in her testimony.

Having studied in detail the conclusions of the medical examiners, Detective Grant came to the conclusion that Kurt Cobain could not have given himself a second shot of heroin (he had two injection marks on his hands), since the first dose was such that a person would die instantly. And after the second injection, carefully put the syringe and related tools into the case and shoot yourself in the head. A dead man can't do that.

According to Grant, the suicide note did not contain a direct indication of suicide, but could simply speak of an intention to leave music. Kurt's lack of clear fingerprints on the gun also raised many questions. Detective Grant concluded that Courtney Love ordered her husband's murder.

Who killed Kurt Cobain

In 1999, Ian Halperin and Max Wallace published Who Killed Kurt Cobain? Her main conclusion was that the case of the death of Kurt Cobain was closed too quickly, there were too many questions left. In 2004, their second book about Cobain's death was published with the same conclusions and conclusions.

In March 2014, the Seattle Police released a retrial of Kurt Cobain by suspended and unsolved investigator Mike Chesinski to the public, confirming the initial finding of suicide. Detective Tom Grant, who at the time was preparing a documentary on the death of Kurt Cobain, publicly called the Seattle police incompetent.

I must say that Cobain's relatives are skeptical about the version of the murder. In a newspaper interview, Wendy Cobain, the singer's mother, judging by her son's physical condition and his diagnoses, said: "For the last two years, I lived in the belief that he would soon die."

But who knows, maybe someday new circumstances will appear in this case, and time will put an end to this tragic story related to the death of singer Kurt Cobain.

Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. Until the second half of 1991, the group playing grunge was known, perhaps, by the youth who were especially turned on rock. But by the end of the year, Nirvana's popularity had crossed the borders of the United States and spread throughout the world.
The musicians of "Nirvana" were drug addicts and this circumstance was not hidden by them either during the existence of the group, or later. Formally, of course, it was believed that they overcome this disease, undergo appropriate treatment, fight it with might and main, and even win, but in reality, drugs, incl. and heroin, all the time present in their lives.
In 1990, at a concert in Portland, Kurt Cobain met the leader of the female rock band "Hole" Courtney Love. Kurt was already 23 years old, Courtney - 26. The latter was married at that moment. Subsequently, it became known that Courtney Love saw the performance of Nirvana back in 1989 and even then became interested in Kurt. After Nirvana's meteoric rise to fame in the summer and fall of 1991, Courtney intensified her contacts with Kurt, resulting in an "unplanned" pregnancy and, as a result, a love marriage in Hawaii in late February 1992. August of the same year, the couple had a girl, Francis Bean.

Source: murders.ru

By the beginning of 1994, the marriage began to heat up. Energetic and tough, prone to dominance Courtney Love put pressure on her husband, demanding preparations for a world tour scheduled for the summer and autumn of 1994. Kurt's fee for participation in it was to be $ 9.5 million and Courtney already had plans for where to invest this money. In 1993, with her husband's money, she bought two land plots with houses in the state of Washington and did not refuse to buy real estate in the future ... Cobain himself was thinking about leaving Nirvana and starting a solo career. He was not interested in wasting time on a world tour even for the sake of several million dollars, Kurt Cobain already had enough money for everything and he perfectly understood that they did not add happiness. It is clear that the discrepancy between the interests of husband and wife automatically led to the growth of tension in the family. It even got to the point that at the end of March, Courtney Love turned to Nirvana's lawyer Rosemary Carroll with a request to find her the "most evil" divorce lawyer.
.......
On the morning of April 8, 1994, Gary Smith, an alarm installer who arrived at Kurt Cobain's home to install an alarm in the garage, found the owner's corpse in the greenhouse above.
According to the official version of events, Kurt Cobain, who was in a state of drug intoxication, committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth with a shotgun. The place of suicide was the so-called. greenhouse, a room with a glass roof above the garage, in which there were boxes with soil for planting flower seedlings. Kurt locked himself from the inside, he left a suicide note written with his own hand in one of the boxes with earth, piercing it with a fountain pen.

Photo taken by a paparazzi perched on a tree. You can see the position of the body on the back, small things folded at arm's length from the corpse.
The first reasonable suspicion of the murder of Kurt Cobain was reported to Detective Tom Grant by lawyer Rosemary Carroll. According to her, on April 5, 1994, Courtney Love came to her and left her backpack. A few hours later, Courtney was detained by police as being "high" in a public place and spent the night of April 6 at the police station. Rosemary began to suspect that Courtney had deliberately left her backpack with her so that it would not fall into the hands of the police in case of detention. Opening it, the lawyer found sheets of writing paper on which Courtney Love ... trained in reproducing letters and letter combinations inherent in Kurt Cobain's handwriting. This seemed suspicious to the lawyer, but nothing more, since at that moment nothing was known about Kurt's death. However, when she saw Kurt's supposedly dying letter a few days later, the lawyer drew attention to the obvious difference in the handwriting in which it was written - about 3/4 of the letter really came out from under the hand of Cobain, who had a habit of writing in small handwriting with a reverse slope and block letters, but here the last part was a postscript made by someone else's hand ... but imitating the musician's handwriting.
Suspicions of Rosemary Carroll find a lot of objective evidence. We list the main ones:
- The police claimed that the front door on the west side was locked from the inside with a padlock, and the balcony door on the east side was blocked with a stool. At first glance, this is true, the front door lock was indeed closed, however, it was impossible to block the balcony door with a stool in principle. This is clearly seen in police photographs.
- The official version says that Kurt Cobain drank a can of beer, smoked a cigarette and injected himself with heroin before his death. According to the coroner's report, morphine was found in his blood at a concentration of 1.52 mg/l, which means that he injected himself with 75-80 mg of heroin at a time. A lethal dose for intravenous administration is considered to be a value of 10-12 mg, even for experienced drug addicts who have an increased tolerance (tolerance) to morphine, 75 mg is certainly a lethal dose. With its introduction, a rapid collapse develops, the person loses consciousness so quickly that he does not even have time to remove the syringe from the vein! According to forensic statistics obtained by Tom Grant, such overdoses occur in less than 2% of heroin overdose deaths. And in all these cases, the dead are found with a needle in a vein! How was Kurt Cobain able to inject himself with such a monstrous dose of the drug, and then remove the syringe, put a cap on the needle and put the syringe in a box?

According to the police report, the shotgun that the suicide fired from was between Kurt's legs in a forend-up position. Kurt held his barrel with his left hand, on which there was a trace of a burn, pulling the trigger was done with his right hand - it all looks logical for a right-hander.
However, when the shotgun was positioned with the forearm up, the ejection of the spent cartridge case should have occurred to the right side for the shooter, i.e. towards the right knee. More precisely, far from him, about 3 meters. It was there, near the wall on the right side of the corpse, that the shell should have been located. Why did the sleeve end up at the left knee? Because the shot was fired in the normal position of the shotgun, i.e. forearm down, and in this position the sleeve was extracted to the left of the corpse, hit the wall and rolled back from it to the body.
- On the shotgun, which was the instrument of "suicide", only 4 smeared fingerprints were found, the identity of which could not be established. Considering that Kurt inspected the shotgun in the store, practiced loading and unloading it there, and then walked around the house with it, the cleanliness of the weapon's surfaces seems very strange. It is really problematic to get clear fingerprints and palm prints from a weapon and it is far from always possible due to the presence of curved or corrugated surfaces, which exclude the tight fit of the hand to the parts of the weapon, however, in this case, it is not the low quality of the prints that is suspicious, but their small number. It's hard to get rid of the feeling that the shotgun was thoroughly wiped after the shot. Unfortunately, the author does not know anything about whether Kurt Cobain's fingerprints were found on the box of cartridges and the cartridges themselves, those that the suicide loaded into his shotgun. He must have touched them!
- Courtney Love, as Detective Tom Grant found out, has already attempted to kill Kurt Cobain, or, to put it mildly, actions that could lead to his death. For example, on May 2, 1993, Courtney Love called 911 to report a heroin overdose. Then Kurt was saved, however, a blood test showed a high content in it (in addition to morphine) of valium, buprenophrine and codeine. Cobain himself denied taking these drugs. Backed against the wall, Courtney admitted that she injected her husband with these strong sedative drugs "to save him." In fact, they enhanced the effects of morphine. Any normal person would have been killed by such a "salvation", however, Kurt's high tolerance for morphine allowed him to live until the arrival of the doctors. Another suspicious case took place on March 18, 1994, i.e. less than 3 weeks before the notorious "suicide". Then Courtney called the police to the house, saying that her husband threatened her and her daughter with weapons and announced his intention to commit suicide. Arriving police found Kurt Cobain in the bathroom, he was unarmed and was very surprised by their appearance. The incident actually could have ended very badly for Kurt, because. police officers, believing they were dealing with an armed psychopath, could use their weapons without hesitation.
- An important argument of the opponents of Cobain's suicide: there is no need for a drug addict to combine an "overdose" with other types of suicides. When choosing between a firearm and a "golden shot" (ie, a lethal dose), a drug addict always chooses an overdose - this is an axiom. Kurt Cobain had no money problems and could have secured an overdose if he really wanted to leave this best of all possible worlds.
- A suicide does not need to equip a shotgun with 3 rounds. After all, he only needs one!
- A forensic medical examination of the corpse of Kurt Cobain was carried out by a young medical examiner Nicholas Harshtorn. It was he who made the final diagnosis of "suicide", which automatically stopped all investigative actions of the police. Less than a year later, Harshthorn retired from the service of the coroner and began to live the lifestyle of a bored playboy - he was fond of extreme sports, flew on hang gliders, jumped from cliffs and skyscrapers, traveled the world. A young doctor who had no money to study at the university a few years ago and took out a loan for this business, suddenly ceased to need anything. It took several years before it turned out that Harshthorn was a good friend of Courtney Love, and for many years. As a student, Nicholas arranged discos, to which he invited the latter with her rock band. After several years of a fun life, the playboy died tragically - his parachute did not open during a long jump from a 700-meter cliff. It's too bad, Nicholas Harshthorn certainly had a lot to say about his girlfriend Courtney.
- Tragically died Antonio Terry, the detective who conducted the inquiry on the death of Kurt Cobain. Just 2 months after the death of the musician, the detective was shot dead in the line of duty. It was the first killing of a police officer in Seattle since 1985. What an unfortunate coincidence...
- Among the fans of "Nirvana" and Kurt Cobain, there have been rumors for a long time that Courtney Love was trying to find a hired killer to kill her husband and for this purpose turned to various people from the musical party. In 1998, film director Nick Broomfield, who was filming a documentary about Cobain, decided to deal with this legend. Imagine his surprise when he found such a person. It turned out to be the former rock musician El Duce, who not only did not refuse to talk with the director, but also agreed to repeat his story on record. Courtney Love, according to El Duce, offered him $50,000 to kill Kurt. "We had to agree!" - the witness finished his story with a laugh. After 11 days, he tragically died under the wheels of a train.
- Kristen Pfaff, bassist of the group "Hole", headed by Courtney Love, in June 1994 quarreled with the latter to the nines. A few hours later, Kristen was found dead, the cause of death - a drug overdose. At first glance, nothing surprising, if not for one "but" - Kristen packed her things and bought a ticket but Minneapolis, where she was going to go the next morning. She had no reason to commit suicide, on the contrary, the girl expected to see her mother and called her a few hours before her death.
According to Tom Grant, Kurt Cobain did not have any suicidal thoughts and did not intend to commit suicide. Apparently, there was a lot of pressure on him because he didn't want to go on a big tour of the world, there was a lot of money at stake, and he was preventing someone from making it. Kurt had reason to be concerned about the safety of his daughter and the Lake Washington home. It was for the purpose of protection that he acquired a shotgun.
There was no suicide. Kurt was drugged with ultra-pure heroin, and the person who gave him the dose did not himself know what the true amount of morphine was in it. That is why Kurt was actually killed before the shot. However, the killer, not knowing this, implemented the previously worked out plan, i.e. fired a shot in the mouth while holding the hair of the unconscious body in a sitting position. After the shot, he let his body fall and laid the shotgun upside down, making a mistake that he had overlooked either due to haste or nervous tension.
After that, the killer left a "farewell letter" in a box with earth, falsified in advance by Courtney Love, who added an ending that was not originally there. To make a fake, she used one of Kurt's options for addressing fans, of which the musician wrote several pieces. Leaving the scene of the crime, the killer took with him Kurt's bank cards (3 pcs.), With which he unsuccessfully tried to withdraw money in different parts of Washington State until the morning of April 8th. Perhaps these cards were promised to him as an additional "bonus" for the kill. By the way, his awareness of pin codes clearly indicates the connection of this person with someone from the inner circle of Kurt Cobain, or the musician himself (strictly speaking, only one card required the introduction of a pin code, for the other two it was enough to authorize by phone - such technology existed prior to the mass introduction of chip cards, however, in the context of this topic, these details are not significant).

He was born in the family of a housewife and a simple auto mechanic. Despite the lack of interest in any kind of creativity from his parents, little Kurt became interested in music from the age of two thanks to his uncle, Chuck Fradenburg. Chuck performed with The Beachcombers, and Kurt enjoyed spending time with him at numerous rehearsals. “Already at the age of three, he was singing the songs of the Beatles with might and main,” said the younger sister of the musician.

The divorce of the parents greatly influenced the 9-year-old Kurt, which he later admitted more than once in interviews. “I was ashamed of my parents. I couldn’t communicate with classmates, because I really wanted to have a“ decent ”and complete family. Like everyone else,” Cobain said.

After the divorce, the teenager really had a hard time. At first, he tried to live with his mother, but under pressure from his newly-minted 22-year-old stepfather, he was forced to move in with his father. However, there was no place for the boy in the new father's family either. In the next 7-8 years, Cobain lived either with his grandparents or with relatives on his mother's side.

Of course, the closest person to Kurt has always been Uncle Chuck. It was he who gave his nephew a guitar for his 14th birthday. Kurt, who was carried away by drums, immediately abandoned the drums and plunged headlong into learning new chords.

In this difficult period of his life, the future legend of the world scene will light up with the idea to create his own direction in music - a kind of mixture of punk music and hard rock. Kurt does not yet suspect that in just a few years he will fulfill his dream, and the mixture of musical genres will get its own name - grunge.

At 17, Kurt will return to his mother's house, but the family idyll does not last long. Immediately after graduation, Wendy Cobain sets her son a tough condition: either he gets a job or leaves home. Cobain, who once dreamed of studying at an art college, chooses the latter. However, his dream never comes true. Instead, the young man wanders around friends and continues to make music.

A few years later, a young journalist will ask Cobain what books influenced the development of his work. "I have read Patrick Suskind's Perfume more than 10 times already. This book is always with me. It does not let me go," the musician admitted.

Just a few months after the release of the book that influenced him so much, Cobain founded his first band, Fecal Matter. There were only three of them, and the band existed for less than a year, but during this time Kurt managed to finally realize: music is his whole life.

The first single Nirvana was released in 1988 and literally blew up the whole world. Fans of real rock instantly became interested in the work of the new group. Kurt's old friend Krist Novoselic and drummer Chad Channing helped the musician form a really strong team. After a couple of years, it became clear: Nirvana is a real classic of alternative rock.

This is not to say that their style of play remained unchanged. "In the beginning," Kurt said, "our songs were very angry, but now we're getting poppier and poppier. Probably because I'm getting happier and happier."

There really was a reason for happiness. They first met Courtney Love at the very beginning of his career - in 1990. "Of course, I'd love to be a bachelor for a couple more years, but Corny drove me out of my mind," the musician laughed. A couple of years later, they got married, and six months later, Courtney gave birth to Kurt's daughter.

It would seem that there were no prerequisites for suicide. Yes, from time to time Cobain clashed with the current authorities, but he perfectly expressed all his dissatisfaction in his new albums. Journalists have really spoiled the reputation of the Love and Cobain family more than once. So, once they said that Courtney allegedly took drugs during pregnancy.

Checks by law enforcement, humiliating tests and numerous unpleasant articles in the media - all this the Cobain family drank in full. But the reason for the tragic ending, of course, was not this.

Cobain suffered from severe stomach pains and chronic bronchitis from early childhood. He actually grew up without parents, and therefore he was used to relieving all the symptoms with fairly strong painkillers. Over time, all this grew into a real addiction. Analgesics and tranquilizers brought the musician to insane states.

Courtney sounded the alarm back in March, a month before the terrible tragedy. She called the police and in a trembling voice said that her husband had closed himself with a gun in a separate room. "He threatens to kill himself!" the young woman shouted in hysterics. Arriving at the scene, the police found a living Cobain, who confidently stated: he did not think about suicide, but just "quarreled with his wife." After a pause, Love confirmed her husband's version.

A couple of weeks later, she called all of Kurt's close friends and asked them to talk to her husband. At that time, the heroin addiction of the musician manifested itself in all areas of life. He constantly fought with his wife, with the band members and with his own producers.

At the end of March, family friends and record company employees teamed up and persuaded Cobain to take a course in one of the leading rehabilitation clinics in Los Angeles. However, after being treated for only a couple of days, the artist escaped from the medical facility.

Many modern experts today complain that the clinic simply did not pay attention to the presence of a manic-depressive psychosis in a patient. Kurt was diligently treated for drug addiction, while he desperately needed the help of a psychiatrist.

The search for Cobain went on for several days, but to no avail. His body was found 3 days after the suicide. According to the results of the forensic medical examination, the musician independently injected himself with a lethal dose of heroin and shot himself.

The version that Cobain's death is nothing more than a contract killing exists to this day. The rocker's widow, Courtney Love, has been repeatedly named as one of the unofficial suspects. Say, their relationship with Kurt has long deteriorated and she carefully arranged everything. However, no evidence of this crazy version has yet been found.

body detection

Later, Tom Grant, a Los Angeles-based private detective hired by Courtney Love (who was in Los Angeles at the time) on April 3, 1994, after Cobain escaped from rehab on April 1, 1994, became a notable proponent of the murder theory. . Tom Grant was hired by Courtney to track down Kurt, whose whereabouts have been unknown since April 1, 1994 (i.e., since escaping from rehab), and also to determine the identity of the person who tried to use Kurt's blocked credit card in the days before his death ( Courtney later confessed to Grant that she lied about Kurt's credit card; in an attempt to restrict her husband's movements, she canceled his credit card claiming it was stolen). Grant, according to him, was alarmed by Courtney's illogical behavior and confused testimony during the investigation. In the process, Grant established, in his opinion, a number of interesting facts. According to the private detective, someone wanted to paint a picture of a suicide and portrayed it almost convincingly. The main arguments of the Grant were the following statements:

Grant concludes that Courtney Love ordered the murder. Love's relationship with Cobain was in a critical state during the last months of his life; the detective considered that the singer was afraid of a possible divorce and chose to get rid of her husband. Shortly before his death, Cobain began the process of filing divorce papers, after which Love's share in the inheritance from her deceased husband would be reduced from $ 30 million (as a widow) to one million (as an ex-wife).

Grant was also supported by documentary director Nick Broomfield, author of an investigative film called Kurt & Courtney(). A video interview he made with rock musician Eldon "El Duce" Hawk, included in the film, is often cited by murder theorists as further evidence that Cobain was murdered rather than committed suicide: in this recording, Eldon announces that Courtney Love offered him to kill her husband and promised $ 50,000 for it, said that he knew who the musician was killed, but did not disclose the name of the criminal - only once he called the name of a certain “Alan”, after which he laughed and said: “I will do this for the FBI to catch this guy!” Just a few days after this, Hawke died under the wheels of a train on the railroad (which, according to conspiracy theorists, also seems highly suspicious). At the same time, many were critical of El Duce's testimony; for example, journalist Everett True, who knew Cobain closely during his lifetime, writes in his book Nirvana: The True Story (in the Russian edition - Nirvana: The True Story) that Hawke openly mocks the interviewer in this video. Brumfield himself, in an interview made shortly after the release of Kurt & Courtney, announced that he did not believe in the murder: "I think he committed suicide ... Courtney only pushed him to it."

Jan Halperin ( Ian Halperin) and Max Wallace ( Max Wallace) released a book in 1999 called Who Killed Kurt Cobain?, in which they investigated the murder theory and also interviewed Tom Grant. In the end, they concluded that, although there was not enough hard evidence for the conspiracy theory, Cobain's death was still surrounded by many questions and the murder case should not have been closed so quickly. In 2004, the authors wrote a second book, Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain, which draws similar conclusions.

The reaction of family and friends

Some of Kurt's relatives and friends also doubted that he committed suicide, or at least expressed their bewilderment in connection with this act. Mark Lanegan, a longtime friend of Cobain, admitted in an interview with Rolling Stone: “I never imagined that he would commit suicide. I thought he was just going through a tough period." In the same article, Dylan Carlson, one of the last people to see Cobain alive, said he wanted to ask Kurt or someone close to him if the Rome incident was a suicide attempt. Kim Gordon, bassist for Sonic Youth who knew the musician during his lifetime, remarked in a 2005 interview, "I don't even know if he killed himself. Some of his relatives do not think so ... ”and when asked if she thinks that Cobain was killed by unknown people, she answered in the affirmative. Speaking of "relatives", Kim may have referred to Leland Cobain, who openly announced that, in his opinion, his grandson did not commit suicide, but was the victim of murderers. In the same interview, Gordon's husband, Sonic Youth founder Thurston Moore, also had a few words about Cobain's suicide: “He died a hard death; it was not just an overdose, he killed himself with violence and cruelty. It was so...aggressive, but in life he was not aggressive, he was smart, he had an unusual mind. So his act can only be explained in this way: here, they say, your mother, what gesture. But this gesture... there is something wrong with it, there is something unnatural in it. It somehow doesn’t really fit into the framework of what we know about all this.”

In turn, some of Kurt's relatives and friends, including his mother, Wendy Cobain, and his former bandmates, are skeptical about the version of the murder and agree with the official conclusion or refuse to comment on this topic at all. In an interview with Today newspaper, Wendy said: “Kurt's suicide was not an accident. He carefully considered his step and carried it out methodically. For the last two years I have lived in the belief that he will die soon. In the same place, she noted that, in her opinion, “the incident in Rome was ... [his] first attempt to die”: “I immediately realized that this was his joyful“ recovery ”is nothing more than a buffoon’s dramatization. He already had one foot in the grave." Curt's cousin Beverly, a psychiatrist by profession, emphasized the fact that in the Cobain family there had been cases of suicide and mental illness before (in particular, both of his paternal uncles had committed suicide). After the death of her famous cousin, she became seriously interested in the topic of suicide and its causes and devoted herself to the work of preventing suicide among young people, publishing, among other things, a book called When Nothing Matters Anymore: A Survival Guide for Depressed Teens("When Nothing Matters Anymore: A Survival Guide for Depressed Teens"). . Dave Grohl has stated that he always felt that Kurt was destined to die young. The journalist and musician Everett True, who knew both Cobain and Courtney Love, was critical of the rumors about the "murder"; in his book, he cites the words of another acquaintance of Kurt, Rene Navarrete: “One guy later tracked me down through my brother and put forward a conspiracy theory that Kurt was killed. That's funny. Kurt himself told me a couple of times that if he was going to commit suicide, then only in this way, in this way. We joked about it. They joked about how much drugs you need to take in order to be able to bring a gun to your own head - and so it happened. We had such a sense of humor - we childishly made fun of people and things. Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg is also scathing about this theory: in his book Dispatches From The Culture Wars: How The Left Lost Teen Spirit he mentions "stupid Internet rumors that Cobain did not commit suicide, but was killed" and admits that the thought of the musician's death still hurts him.

Greg Sage, leader of the influential punk rock band Wipers and one of Kurt's idols who knew him during his lifetime, commented on Cobain's death in one of his interviews:

I can't theorize and make any assumptions here, I only know what he told me personally: he was not particularly happy about all this. I think success seemed like a brick wall to him. There was no other way for him but to end it all; it was all too fake for him, and he was not a fake person at all. He was actually going to come here on the day about two weeks after he died, he wanted to record a bunch of Lead Belly covers. But it was kind of kept a secret, because people definitely wouldn't let him do it. Think he was in a multi-billion dollar industry at the time and if the industry knew he wanted to leave, they would never let him, they wouldn't let him in their lives, because if he just left with scenes, he would be completely forgotten; but if he had died, he would have been immortalized.

original text(English)

Well, I can't really speculate other than what he said to me, which was, he wasn't at all happy about it, success to him seemed like, I think, a brick wall. There was nowhere else to go but down, it was too artificial for him, and he wasn't an artificial person at all. He was actually, two weeks after he died, he was supposed to come here and he wanted to record a bunch of Leadbelly covers. It was kind of in secret, because, I mean, people would definitely not allow him to do that. You also have to wonder, he was a billion-dollar industry at the time, and if the industry had any idea at all of him wishing or wanting to get out, they couldn't have allowed that, you know, in life, because if he was just to get out of the scene, he'd be totally forgotten, but if he was to die, he'd be immortalized.