Kurt`s homeless home: under the bridge over the Wishkah River.
His ashes were later spread here in the Wishkah.
Photo courtesy of Squid Vicious

Cobain was leaving Nirvana, divorcing Courtney Love, and writing her out of his will. On April 8, 1994, the singer’s body was found above his garage, a shotgun and a suicide note beside it. Handwriting analysts concluded that the part of the note was a forgery. Three times the maximum lethal dose of heroin was present in the blood.

• Could Cobain have pulled the trigger of the shotgun himself?      

• Just before his death, Kurt, while in Rome, gave Courtney a divorce letter then almost fatally OD’d on Rohypnol (the “date rape” drug). Conspiracy theorists, including Courtney Love’s own private detective, assert that the narcotic was Courtney’s and that this was her first attempt to murder her husband. But Courtney asserted that the prescription was Kurt’s and that this was a suicide attempt.

    * Whose Rohypnol prescription, then, did Cobain consume?
    * Did he swallow the sixty pills knowingly?
    * Or was the tasteless drug slipped into his champagne glass?

Excerpt from Chapter 6

Kurt Cobain

“Since the age of seven I’ve become hateful towards all human beings in general....
I have a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be,
full of love and joy… I can’t stand the thought of her becoming
the miserable, self-destructive death rocker that I have become.”

.... Kurt felt creatively straight-jacketed by his fans’ demand for more angst-ridden Nevermind  punk anthems. He was exhausted by his touring schedule. And, though a part of him felt like “an untouchable boy genius,” another felt unworthy of the international attention lavished on him.“ People are treating him like God,” explained his publicist, Nils Bernstein, “and that pisses him off.”

But his frustrated rage fed on a deeper well. Being rich and famous violated the most fundamental Grunge law. The Seattle punks had already branded him with the scarlet letter: “Sell-out scum.” But they still bought his music and flocked to his shows as if to watch him hang himself on his corporate puppet strings.

He might have more easily shed his cross of celebrity had his wife not been so intent on keeping him nailed to it. He could have blamed his “trappings of fame” on her and it may have flown. But this would have put him in the even more untenable position of confirming that he was controlled by Courtney -- another slander that was eating him alive.

“There’s definitely not manipulation going on in this relationship at all,” he told the Advocate. “It really sickens me to think that everyone assumes this.” Years before, Lennon had been even less diplomatic about Yoko’s influence over him, telling Playboy, “You think I’m being controlled like a dog on a leash. Fuck you, brother and sister!”

This is exactly the attitude Courtney told Kurt to adopt: Fuck’em all! She hadn’t worked ten years in strip bars and punk dives to get weak-kneed when it was all starting to pay off. And what about Kurt’s dues for the punk blues? From her point of view, he’d swept a few floors, played with his turtles, jerked off on a few canvasses – then suddenly the motherlode dropped into his lap and he started whining.

The girl with the most cake had no patience for this. It almost made her want to do him a favor and put him out of his misery. It wouldn’t be murder. It would be euthanasia.