Friday night's episode of Unsolved Mysteries will focus national attention on the the singer's death, which is the subject of at least a dozen Web sites. According to these cyber-sleuths, the troubled Nirvana front man did not commit suicide in April 1994. Instead, he was targeted by--take your pick--bad cops, drug dealers, ex-friends, record industry execs, wife Courtney Love or any combination thereof. Some of the "evidence":
Cobain allegedly injected himself with three times the lethal dose of heroin--making it nearly impossible for him to be able to shoot himself. Cobain's head wounds are not consistent with other suicide victims' self-inflicted wounds, meaning someone else pulled the trigger. His suicide note wasn't a suicide note. Some Cobain was telling fans he was "retiring" from rock 'n' roll and that the suicidal bits were forged later. There are no fingerprints on the shotgun, which wasn't thoroughly examined until a month later. Seattle DJ Richard Lee claims to be first to uncover a plot. On his site and in subsequent interviews, Lee attibutes Cobain's death to a bizarre, nearly incomprehensible conspiracy between rogue cops a la Mark Fuhrman and drug traffickers. He says somehow this plot also claimed the life of Love's Hole bandmate, Kirsten Pfaff, who died of a heroin overdose, and a Seattle detective investigating Cobain.
But far and away, the most avid Cobain-theorist is Los Angeles private investigator, Tom Grant. His research, featured tonight on Unsolved Mysteries, is based on two years compiling clues that, he says, show Cobain was offed by a hitman--a hitman hired by his own wife, Courtney Love.
Grant says he was originally hired by Love to investigate Cobain's disappearance from a drug rehab center days before his death. He claims that Cobain was close to divorcing Love and/or dropping her from his will. Faced with losing millions, Love masterminded a scheme "that resulted in the murder of Kurt Cobain."
Of course some Nirvana followers disavow the conspiracy crowd. One fan in the band's newsgroup doubts Grant's intentions, saying "Grant will finally get what he's always wanted, his 15 minutes of fame!"
Another fan, David Perle, launched a counter-investigation to defend Love's honor and debunk the murder theory.
The Cobain cover-up has become so pervasive that it's even inspired parody pages suggesting how TV dick Jim Rockford would tackle the mystery.
Despite the conspiracy theorists so-called evidence, Seattle police maintain Cobain was a suicide and their investigation into his death ended in 1994.