April 8, 1994. Seattle was gray, as usual. An electrician named Gary Smith shows up at a house on Lake Washington Boulevard for some routine work. He walks up to the greenhouse above the garage and looks through the glass. He thinks he sees a mannequin lying on the floor.
He didn’t. He found the body of the biggest rock star on the planet.
The kurt cobain death crime scene has been picked apart for over thirty years now. People obsessed with Nirvana have spent decades staring at grainy photos of a cigar box and a shotgun, trying to find something the cops missed. Honestly, it’s one of those cases where the more you look, the weirder the small details get, even if the official story says it’s an open-and-shut suicide.
The physical evidence and the shotgun
When the Seattle Police Department (SPD) walked into that greenhouse, they found Kurt lying on his back. He had a Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun resting on his chest. Now, a lot of people think his head was blown to pieces, but it wasn't. There was a visible wound and some blood from his ear, but he was recognizable.
The shotgun is a huge point of contention. Conspiracy theorists like Tom Grant—a private investigator Courtney Love actually hired to find Kurt before he died—claim the gun was "wiped clean." That's not exactly true. The police reports say there were no "legible" fingerprints. There's a difference. Metal and wood don't always hold prints well, especially if there’s a struggle or a heavy recoil that makes the hand slide.
What was in the cigar box?
Near his feet, there was a Tom Moore cigar box. It wasn’t filled with cigars. It was his works.
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- Black tar heroin.
- Spoons with burn marks.
- Syringes.
- A piece of cotton.
Basically, everything a heavy user needs. The SPD took photos of this box, but those pictures stayed undeveloped in a vault for twenty years. It wasn't until 2014 that Detective Mike Ciesynski developed four rolls of 35mm film from the scene. They had this eerie green tint because the film had degraded so much over two decades.
The toxicology report that breaks brains
This is where the "murder" crowd usually starts shouting. The autopsy found that Kurt had a morphine level of 1.52 milligrams per liter in his blood. For a normal person, that is a massive, "see-you-in-the-afterlife" dose.
The argument goes like this: How could a guy inject three times a lethal dose of heroin, put his needle and spoon away neatly in a box, roll down his sleeves, and then pick up a long shotgun to shoot himself?
Most medical experts would say he'd be unconscious in seconds. But forensic pathologists like Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne (who was actually a friend of Kurt’s from the punk scene and performed the autopsy) argued that tolerance is everything. If you're spending $500 a day on heroin like Kurt reportedly was, your body handles "lethal" doses differently. You're not "fine," but you might be awake enough to pull a trigger.
The note on the planter
There was a note. It was stuck into a flowerpot by a pen. It was addressed to Boddah, Kurt’s childhood imaginary friend.
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If you read the whole thing, it sounds like a retirement letter. He talks about not feeling the "magic" of the music anymore. He feels guilty for faking it on stage. But then, the last four lines change. The handwriting gets bigger, more erratic.
"Frances and Courtney, I'll be at your altar. Please keep going Courtney, for Frances. For her life, which will be so much happier without me. I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU!"
Handwriting experts have fought over this for years. Some say it's the same hand, just someone who's high and emotional. Others, like Marcel Matley, have suggested those last lines were added by someone else. The Washington State Crime Lab, however, officially ruled that Kurt wrote the whole thing.
Misconceptions about the greenhouse
People call it a "room," but it was a greenhouse above a garage. It was sparse. There was a stool, some potting soil, and the French doors. One of those doors was locked from the inside with a stool propped against it. This is a big "pro-suicide" fact. If someone killed him, how did they get out and lock it like that?
Then there's the credit card. Kurt’s credit card was supposedly used after he died but before the body was found. This is a detail Tom Grant pushes hard. But the SPD never found proof of a "second person" at the scene. No extra footprints, no DNA that shouldn't have been there.
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Why the SPD re-opened the files in 2014
They didn't really "re-open" the case to change the verdict. They did it because the 20th anniversary was coming up and they knew the media was going to freak out. Detective Ciesynski looked at everything again. He looked at the shotgun (which was still in evidence, despite rumors it was melted down). He found the receipt for the shotgun shells Kurt bought from Seattle Guns on April 2nd.
He didn't find anything to change the ruling. Suicide.
The case is technically closed, but in the world of true crime, it’s never really over. You have the "suicide" camp who see a depressed, addicted man at the end of his rope. Then you have the "conspiracy" camp who see a crime scene that looks a little too staged and a toxicology report that defies logic.
How to look into this yourself
If you want to move past the TikTok rumors and actually look at the source material, here is what you should do. First, read the actual SPD Follow-Up Report from 2014. It’s public record. It details exactly why they stuck with the suicide ruling. Second, look at the 2014 photo release. You won’t see the body—those are sealed for the family's privacy—but you’ll see the "stuff." You’ll see his wallet (open to his ID), the cigar box, and the shotgun placement.
Don't just watch a documentary. Documentaries have an agenda. Look at the forensics. Look at the timeline of his escape from the Exodus Recovery Center in LA. Once you see the cold, hard paperwork, the kurt cobain death crime scene starts to look less like a movie plot and more like a very sad, very lonely end for a guy who just wanted the pain to stop.