Last month the FBI quietly made its file on Kurt Cobain public.
It’s only 10 pages long and, not surprisingly, it’s mostly people asking the Bureau to investigate Cobain’s 1994 suicide as a possible homicide. One letter is from 2003 and another is from 2007, and that one claims, “The police who took up the case were never very serious in investigating it as a murder but from the beginning insisted on it being a suicide… This bothers me the most because his killer is still out there.”
The FBI’s responses to the letters are in the file, with both of them stating, “We appreciate your concern that Mr. Cobain may have been the victim of a homicide. However, most homicide investigations generally fall within the jurisdiction of state or local authorities.” Each says that the Bureau would pass on pursuing any investigation.
The file also includes portions of a January 1997 fax sent to the Los Angeles and D.C. offices of the FBI from Cosgrove/Meurer Productions, the Los Angeles documentary company that does Unsolved Mysteries. The pages include a roundup various conspiracy theories about Cobain’s death involving “Tom Grant, a Los Angeles-based private investigator and former L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy.”
Terry Meurer tells Rolling Stone that he doesn’t recall much about the original request, but that Unsolved Mysteries did do an episode on Cobain in 2008. He says, “We reach out to the FBI for various stories and try to get information on them. We still do that — we were just talking to the FBI yesterday about a request. We’re in constant contact with them. So that was a typical communication.”
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