But did Cobain commit suicide? Within a week of Cobain’s death at his Lake Washington house, Seattle journalist Richard Lee hosted a show unambiguously entitled “Kurt Cobain Was Murdered”, claiming that there were discrepancies and facts difficult to reconcile with a verdict of suicide.
Kurt Donald Cobain was, admittedly, given to depression and his family had a history of suicide. Cobain himself apparently deliberately overdosed on Rohypnol and champagne earlier in 1994 while in Rome. Bandmate Krist Novoselic considered Cobain “quiet” and “estranged” in the period before his death. Cobain was also under intense financial and professional pressure, having walked out on a $9.5 million contract to headline the Lollapalooza festival.
Against this, psychologists at the rehab centre Cobain visited a week before his demise, thought he seemed far from suicidal. Neither was the “suicide note” found near his body full of the usual darknesses of such missives, and contained the statement: “I have it good, very good and I’m grateful.” The last four lines of the note appear to have been written by another hand, while Cobain’s body contained so much heroin—
There’s more. No legible fingerprints were on the pen used to write the note or on the Remington shotgun used, suggesting that both had been wiped clean. Cobain’s hands, according to Seattle police reports, were free of gunpowder residue. And who fills a Remington 20 gauge shotgun with three cartridges for a suicide shot to the head, when only one is needed? And who uses their Seafirst credit card twice after their death, as timed by the medical examiner. If Cobain was murdered, whodunnit? An LA private dick by the name of Tom Grant was hired by Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, to track Cobain’s credit card. Love’s strange behaviour, however, soon convinced Grant that
The manager of the shop, Karush Sepedjian, overheard the conversation, and agreed with El Duce’s version of it. When asked, “Did Love offer you money to kill Cobain?” with a lie detector strapped to his arm El Duce passed with a 99.7 per cent certainty. El Duce rejected Love’s offer. Further attempts to interview El Duce proved impossible; he was run over by a train in 1997, so adding fuel to the conspiracy fire. Nonetheless PI Grant fingered, to his own satisfaction, the man who did take up Courtney Love’s murderous proposal. Grant named the killer as Michael Dewitt. The claim is still up on Grant’s website www. cobaincase.com: “After several months of intensive investigation, including dozens of taped interviews with Cobain’s closest friends and family members, I reached the conclusion that Courtney Love and Michael Dewitt (the male nanny who lived at the Cobain residence) were involved in a conspiracy that resulted in the murder of Kurt Cobain.”
Grant’s investigation also led him to believe that the Lake Washington shooting was Love–Dewitt’s second homicide attempt, and that Cobain’s drug and alcohol OD in Rome was a masked murder attempt by the same duo. (According to Grant, Cobain was not a user of Rohypnol, the “date rape” drug.) Gumshoe Grant believes that the proof of Love and Dewitt’s guilt is their unwillingness to sue him for defamation: “As I predicted when I first began speaking out [about Cobain’s homicide], no legal action has been taken against myself or anyone in the media who have covered this story.”
Unhappily for Courtney Love, her first husband, James Moreland, weighed into the controversy, telling a British newspaper: “It wasn’t long before I became a battered husband… She would go mad for no reason, and hit me time and time again… Once she threatened to pay someone ?150 to beat me up because I didn’t agree with her about something.”
Pointed questions also began to be asked of the coroner in the case, Dr Hartshorne, because of a conflict of interest. He knew Cobain and Love, and was known to party with the latter.
Despite the welter of evidence and allegations, the Seattle PD has so far refused to re-open the case on Cobain’s death. Perhaps they should.
Nick Broomfield,
Ian Halperin and Max Wallace,
CODEX ALIMENTARIUS
Latin for “Food Code” the Codex Alimentarius is a quango formed by the World Health Authority and the US Food and Agriculture Organization in 1963, with the aim of “protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and nongovernmental organizations”. Put another way, the work of the CA is to ensure that your turkey twizzler is not full of additives, has been prepared properly and is accurately labelled.
Sounds like a good idea? Not according to libertarians and alternative practitioners, who allege that Codex Alimentarius, far from being independent and “voluntary” as described, is in the hands of Big Pharma, food multinationals, agribusiness, government officials and seeks to do down local producers, organic farmers and, especially, manufacturers and sellers of vitamins—and then some. A press release from Alliance for Natural Health states:
The WTO (World Trade Organization) is a global commercial police that ensures countries are required to purchase from transnational corporations in favour of their own locally produced goods, in the name of “lowering trade barriers”.
This WHO/WTO joint effort called CODEX is in the process of wiping out local supplement companies and natural health care practices, to bring in more drug based medicines, in what is euphemistically known as “creating a level playing field”, while primarily giving the public a misleading impression that someone in the World Health Organisation (WHO) is looking after its health and safety.
The frontline for anti-Codex campaigners is the humble vitamin supplement, since the Codex supposedly seeks the banning of dietary supplements for prophylactic or therapeutic use, and the classification of common foods such as peppermint and garlic as drugs, and the requirement of prescriptions for anything but the lowest potencies of vitamins. All new dietary supplements would be banned until Codex-tested. And that is where big business enters the picture: since testing is expensive, few small-scale manufacturers (runs the argument) could
