Inside the Dark, Final Days of Kurt Cobain's Life

Frances Bean Cobain Posts Tribute to Dad Kurt Cobain on 30th Anniversary of His Death

For six days in April of 1994, Kurt Cobain was missing.

One of the biggest rock stars in the world, the Nirvana frontman was nowhere to be found. Police were on the hunt, his wife Courtney Love hired a private detective and friends of the troubled musician were on high alert.

On April 8, 1994, an electrician named Gary Smith arrived at Cobain's Seattle home to install a security system. And when he entered the greenhouse above the garage, he discovered a body, a 20-gauge shotgun laying across its chest, and a note. 

The King County Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide. But for years, the circumstances surrounding Cobain's death have spurred many conspiracy theories, with many fans—and a new report by a private sector team of forensic scientists—suggesting he was actually murdered.

With a high concentration of heroin and traces of Valium in his bloodstream, the medical examiner determined that—despite the desperate hunt to find him—Cobain's body had been lying there for about two days.

By 13, he'd begun smoking weed, and six years later, he had his first taste of heroin. As the '80s turned to the '90s, it was a full-blown addiction.

Around the same time, he met Love, a woman with her own admitted set of troubles. (For the record, she seemingly responded to the new report surrounding his death by posting a Feb. 9 Instagram photo of herself reading Flamingo Estate's The Guide to Becoming Alive.) 

A "Sid and Nancy" of sorts for the grunge era, albeit with a different type of tragic conclusion than that toxic rock couple, Cobain and Love tied the knot in 1992. Their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born six months later.

"I always knew their relationship was toxic," Frances Bean told Rolling Stone in 2015, referring to the couple's early bond over drugs. "And I don't promote having a fix-it baby, which is what I was—to fix their problems...In the sense that their own families were so chaotic, that they wanted to create their own family as soon as possible: 'If we create our own family, it will be nothing like our families were.'"

Instead, added the now-33-year-old, who welcomed son Ronin Walker Cobain Hawk with husband Riley Hawk in 2024, "It ended up being a million more times chaotic."

As Love later told Rolling Stone, this was Cobain's first suicide attempt. "He was at the end of the bed with a thousand dollars in his pocket and a note saying, 'You don't love me anymore. I'd rather die than go through a divorce.' It was all in his head," she shared that December. Though she acknowledged he likely forgot how many he'd taken, "There was a definite suicidal urge, to be gobbling and gobbling and gobbling."

After three days in the hospital, Cobain was released and allowed to return home to Seattle.

On March 25, 10 people—including Love, Novoselic, and longtime friend Dylan Carlson—gathered at Cobain's home with an intervention counselor. Love told him she would leave him if he didn't seek treatment, while Novoselic threatened to dismantle the band.

While his wife had hoped that Cobain would check into a Los Angeles rehab with her, by the end of the day, Love was alone on that plane. 

A day later, she checked into the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills and began an outpatient program to "detox from tranquilizers," according to her rep. She would later express regret about leaving Cobain alone, saying in a taped message played at his memorial two weeks later, "That '80s tough-love bulls--t—it doesn't work."

As Carlson told Rolling Stone, Cobain showed up at his condo on March 30, seeking his friend's help to secure a gun because there were trespassers on his property. 

"He seemed normal, we'd been talking," Carlson told the publication. "Plus, I'd loaned him guns before." As he saw it, the reason Cobain wanted his help was so that the police wouldn't confiscate this weapon like they had with his others just days earlier. So, they headed to a gun shop and bought a six-pound Remington 20-gauge and a box of ammo for about $300, which Carlson paid for in cash provided by Cobain.

"He was going out to L.A.," Carlson said. "It seemed kind of weird that he was buying the shotgun before he was leaving. So I offered to hold on to it until he got back." Cobain refused the offer.

At around 7:25 p.m., he told staff, whom claimed to have had no knowledge about his history of depression or prior suicide attempts, he was going out to smoke a cigarette. Instead, he scaled the six-foot brick wall and left. "We watch our patients really well," a spokesperson for the facility said that the time. "But some do get out."

Cobain flew home to Seattle, seated next to Guns N' Roses musician Duff McKagan, who later said that he knew from "all of my instincts that something was wrong."

After learning he'd left treatment, Love canceled all his credit cards and hired private investigator Tom Grant to track him down, but he was already bound for Washington. 

On April 2 and 3, there were various sightings of Cobain throughout Seattle, but no one could track him down. On April 4, his mother, Wendy O'Connor, filed a missing-persons report, telling police she feared her son might be suicidal. 

News of Cobain's death was first reported by Seattle's KXRX-FM radio station, after a co-worker of Smith's called in claiming to have the "scoop of the century," adding, "you're going to owe me a lot of concert tickets for this one."

"Broadcasting this information was kind of an eerie decision to make," Marty Reimer, the on-air personality who took the call, told Rolling Stone. "We're not a news station."

In 2013, a spokesperson for the Seattle Police Department said that they get at least one request per week, mostly through Twitter, to reopen the investigation. As a result, the public affairs unit always keeps a basic incident report on file because of the number of requests. 

And, yet, in some ways Cobain's loved ones were always readying themselves for his death. 

"There are some people that you meet in life that you just know that they are not going to live to be a 100 years old," Grohl said in an interview with BBC 1 Radio in 2009. "In some ways, you kind of prepare yourself emotionally for that to be a reality."