Through the Static

By Hannah Saunders

Questions surrounding the death of Seattle’s beloved rock star and lead singer of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, have resurfaced following an exclusive interview between retired Seattle Police Captain Neil Low and The Daily Mail. Since 1994, the SPD has claimed that Cobain’s death was a suicide, but Low claims otherwise, citing a “botched” investigation.

“I just am not buying that Kurt did that to himself,” Low said.

Before his retirement in 2018, Low was requested to audit Cobain’s case, and he told The Daily Mail that there were inconsistencies between the King County Medical Examiner’s autopsy and SPD reports, including missing notes, omitted witness reports, and conflicting details about the events that led up to his death.

“One thing about report writing is the human error factor: misheard, misunderstood, transposed thoughts, and forgotten details,” Low said. “They were led astray. I might have fallen for it, too, but now I think it’s a homicide, and I do think the case should be reopened.”

Cobain died on April 5, 1994, and his body was found by an electrician installing a security camera three days later. During this time, Low was working as the commander of the SPD’s South Precinct and not involved in the original investigation.

“I’ve read the case, and I can tell you what the evidence says because that’s what I did for a living, and it does not say suicide,” Low added.

Low said he believes that responding officers had already made up their minds that Cobain’s death was a suicide, with this narrative surfacing at crime scene arrival.

Recapping Cobain’s death

The electrician found Cobain dead in his Lake Washington Boulevard home with a Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun across his body with a visible gunshot wound to his head. A suicide note was found nearby his body. In March of 1994, he was struggling with substance use and was admitted to a recovery center in Los Angeles, but went out for a cigarette break on April 1 and never returned.

The next day, Cobain took a taxi to a Seattle gun shop to purchase shells and allegedly told the driver he’d been burglarized. Since no one had heard from him, his wife at the time, Courtney Love, hired private investigator Tom Grant to locate Cobain. Grant previously stated that he believed Cobain was murdered, and claimed that he would not be able to pull the trigger of the shotgun with the large amounts of heroin in his system. He also said he believes the suicide note was fake.

The King County Medical Examiner’s Office’s report cited puncture wounds on the interior of his right and left elbows, but the gun was not swabbed for fingerprints until May 6, 1994. Low stated that crime scene photos showed Cobain with clean hands, an inconsistency with self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

Hank Harrison, Love’s father, publicly stated that she had a motive for his murder and noted evidence of foul play, suggesting the case should be reopened. In the “Kurt & Courtney” documentary, Harrison claimed Love cheated on Cobain with Smashing Pumpkins singer, Billy Corgan, around Cobain’s 27th birthday in February of 1994; several weeks prior, Cobain attempted suicide. Leland Cobain, Cobain’s grandfather, also announced that he believed his grandson had been murdered.

Journalists Ian Halperin and Max Wallace conducted an investigative piece, and after speaking with numerous sources, concluded that Cobain wanted to divorce Love around the time of his death. The reporters said Love was looking for a “vicious” divorce attorney to squash the pair’s prenuptial agreement, which would have kept their fortunes separate. At the time of his death, Cobain was worth about $50 million, according to Music Times. Love’s net worth during this time was not made public, but she inherited Kurt’s writing and publishing rights, with the estimated value being $130 million and $115 million.

“It’s ridiculous. He killed himself. I saw him the week beforehand, he was depressed. He tried to kill himself six weeks earlier, he’d talked and written about suicide a lot, he was on drugs, he got a gun. Why do people speculate about it? The tragedy of the loss is so great, people look for other explanations. I don’t think there’s any truth at all to it,” Danny Goldberg, Nirvana’s manager and Cobain’s friend, said in an interview with The Independent.

But Low is firm about his beliefs that Cobain’s death was no suicide.

“All the pellets were accounted for, but the impact would have been so forceful that it would have produced a significant spray, not just a little, a large spray,” he said.

SPD responds

After The Daily Mail published its article and posted it to Twitter on February 18, the SPD responded by replying that “The Kurt Cobain case remains closed. The SPD has no plans to revisit it. For all items released in this case, please check our Botter post from 2014.”

The SPD’s blotter post from over a decade ago included an update from June 11, 2016, where it released five images of SPD’s cold case detective Mike Ciesynski holding the firearm and reviewing it.

Due to pressure from the public to release disclosed information on the case, the SPD provided another update from July 24, 2015, and released 34 images from the scene, which included images of the room Cobain was found in, his suicide note, an investigator posing in his home, a box full of syringes with a spoon of heroin, and more.

Finally, in its original post created on March 20, 2014, it stated that Ciesynski obtained as much information about conspiracies on Cobain’s death by consuming articles, TV shows, and documentaries. While reviewing the SPD’s case, Ciesynski found four underdeveloped camera rolls that included crime scene footage, stating they were undeveloped because SPD, “felt it was a suicide and already had polaroids and photos from the medical examiner,” he said.

“Sometimes people believe what they read— some of the disinformation from some of the books, that this was a conspiracy. That’s completely inaccurate,” Ciesynski said. “It’s a suicide. This is a closed case.”

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