The Death of Kurt Cobain: The Unresolved Mystery of Rock-n-Roll America - Research Paper Example

One of the most passionate proponents of the murder theory is Tom Grant himself, the private investigator who tried to search for Kurt Cobain when he fled from the drug rehabilitation home. This essay discusses briefly, but substantially, the mystery and three major theories surrounding the death of Kurt Cobain. The discussion focuses first on the theory of suicide, then on accidental drug overdose, and lastly on murder. Kurt Cobain fashioned the grunge-alternative music but he is widely known as Nirvana’s lead singer.

When he died at the top of his game on April 1994, thousands of his fans could hardly accept it (Cross 2001). Tom Grant has been fervently carrying out a search into unraveling the mysteries surrounding the death of the prominent rock star and raising the controversy if whether it could have in fact been homicide. The private investigator discovered a number of discrepancies in the nature and circumstances of Kurt’s demise, such as the findings that an anonymous person had been availing his credit card services immediately after his demise, that fingerprint had evidently been swabbed from the scene of the crime, and that Kurt’s suicide letter could have been falsified (Burlingame 2007).

Due to these findings a number of theories about Kurt’s death arose. . Besides perhaps wrestling bipolar disorder, he was addicted to heroin and alcohol (Halperin & Wallace 1999). His family had a history of suicide and mental problems. Beverly Cobain, a psychiatric nurse and Kurt’s cousin, confirmed (Sandford 2004, 10): Kurt was, without a doubt, bipolar—he had a psychological disorder which caused him to swing from wild ecstasy to manic despair. In trying to self-medicate with heroin, he almost certainly made the problem worse.

That was the background to his shooting himself. The consistent claims by Donald Cameron and Nikolas Hartshorne that Kurt’s demise was an obvious suicide case thrived. Almost everybody had by that time viewed the death as merely a new rock-and-roll misfortune (Sandford 2004). Moreover, Kurt had attempted to kill himself on one occasion in the past. Soon after his body was discovered, his wife was informing everyone that the overdose in Rome had actually been a suicide attempt (Cross 2001). But some believed that the Rome incident as well as Kurt’s death was a case of accidental drug overdose.

On the 4th of March Kurt fell into a coma after a failed suicide attempt wherein he ingested more or less fifty drugs with alcohol. The failed suicide attempt was publicly confirmed as accidental drug overdose (Halperin & Wallace 1999). One of the findings of the April 1994 investigations also confirmed a drug overdose. Kurt evidently had thrice the fatal 225 mgs heroin amount in his blood system. Medical specialists establish that such dose will instantly incapacitate and put Kurt into a coma (Drive 2011).

Furthermore, the drug Valium was traced in Kurt’s blood system. Valium is a drug identified to intensify heroin and thus worsen an overdose. Hence, it is not possible,