KURT Cobain was murdered, according to an award-winning documentary maker who is offering the rock star’s widow Courtney Love a chance to set the record straight after years of speculation about her husband’s death.
Filmmaker and author Ian Halperin is challenging actress and singer Love, 58, to take a polygraph to answer questions about Cobain’s demise in 1994, which is widely understood to have been a suicide.
Halperin believes his new book Case Closed: The Cobain Murder: The Killing And Cover Up of Kurt Cobain presents a “convincing argument” that Cobain did not kill himself.
The investigative journalist, who has probed Cobain’s suicide since the mid-1990s, says he has uncovered new evidence that the Nirvana frontman was murdered instead – although he stops short of accusing Love or anybody else for the killing.
Halperin believes a successful lie detector test will help clear her name after almost three decades of suspicion from some Nirvana diehards and questions about what really happened.
Cobain, who had been a heroin user, was found dead in a greenhouse room above the detached garage to his home in the Lake Washington neighborhood of Seattle on April 8, 1994.
He was clutching the shotgun which had killed him, the bullet striking his head through his mouth.
Despite the coroner and the Seattle Police Department declaring the death a suicide, theories that Love may have played a role in Cobain’s demise have persisted in the light of apparent discrepancies in the evidence.
'NEW EVIDENCE'
In an exclusive interview with The U.S. Sun, Halperin said: “In this book, I conclude unwaveringly, the police got it wrong a thousand percent, and it was a murder.
“The verdict should be changed from suicide to murder.
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“And all this relies on the forensic pathological evidence, new evidence I've dug up.
“I'm not accusing anybody of murder, but I do challenge Courtney to finally take a polygraph. I will pay for it to clear her name.
“She's been accused of being involved in this for so many years.
“If she passes, I will buy a billboard in Times Square and say on the billboard, ‘Courtney Love is innocent’.
"And I still encourage her as a grieving widow to get on the trail and to find the killers. I am not going to stop until I find the killers.
“I'm saying, look, her role is certainly suspicious based on the plethora of evidence that I outline in the new book.
“But I'm not accusing her of murder."
He added: “A lot of people have doubted her.
“A lot of media, a lot of people close to her, openly accuse her of murder – I am not.”
Halperin issued a direct plea to Love to go on the record with the polygraph, which is a technique option used by law enforcement officials.
POLYGRAPH TEST
Addressing Love via The U.S Sun, Halperin expressed his view that he was “surprised as a grieving spouse that with all these murder accusations all these years that you haven't been on the hunt for the killers or trying to get to the bottom of it”.
He added: “Please accept my challenge to take a polygraph. I will pay for it with the world's leading polygraph examiner."
Halperin feels Love, who is mom to the couple’s only daughter Frances Bean Cobain, is likely to respond to his offer and book with “a big denial.”
Love and Cobain were allegedly struggling to keep their marriage together thanks to drug problems, fighting and jealousy.
The couple”s manny, Michael “Cali” DeWitt, said in the memoir Nirvana: A Biography that Cobain has instructed lawyer Rosemary Carroll to prepare for divorce.
Halperin revealed: “Kurt had a prenup with Courtney. He had talked to a divorce lawyer and he had left her. If they would've got divorced, she wouldn't have got a penny.
“And he was worth much more dead than alive to Courtney Love. There was a motive there.
“He wanted a divorce, and that has been corroborated by multiple sources, including Courtney's own people that I've spoken to.
“So that's not even debatable about the prenup.
“His own grandfather, Leland Cobain, I interviewed him, he was the person closest to Kurt.
“He said Kurt wanted to leave Courtney. He had made other plans.”
STRENUOUS DENIAL
Love has always strenuously denied any suggestions of being involved in Cobain’s death or wanting him dead if they split.
British documentary maker Nick Broomfield was the first to explore questions about her potential involvement in Cobain’s death.
Love tried to have Broomfield’s 1998 film Kurt & Courtney stopped by MTV even though the movie denies her supposed role in a conspiracy to kill her husband.
The documentary features an interview with a rocker known as El Duce – real name Eldon Wayne Home – who claims on camera that Love offered him $50,000 to “whack” Cobain.
Late in the film, Broomfield learns of El Duce's accidental death.
In the 2015 documentary Soaked in Bleach, Cobain's former lawyer Rosemary Carroll stated that she does not believe he wrote the suicide note that was found at his house.
In the documentary, Carroll, a close friend of Cobain's, said: "I don't think he wrote it.
"I feel the same way I felt when I read it.
"He didn't write it."
Love’s late estranged father Hank Harrison openly accused his daughter of having a hand in her husband’s death.
He told NBC’s Dateline in 2004: “She's a psychopath, she has a sociopathic personality like I do.
“I don't know who killed him. I know who benefited from his death: my daughter, for one."
In another interview, he said: “No doubt she was capable.
“I can’t prove she pulled the trigger, but I can prove her involvement to a high degree of certainty.”
But Nirvana’s ex-manager Danny Goldberg has branded claims that Cobain was murdered as “ridiculous”.
Goldberg insists that he witnessed firsthand the star’s downward spiral into suicidal depression.
In recent years, Los Angeles private investigator Tom Grant, who was hired by Love to find the rock star during the days before his death, raised questions about whether the Hole singer had any role in her husband's death.
Halperin, who has collaborated with Grant on books, added: “I do believe it's time for her to clear up her role, because she has been accused by her own private investigator."
He added: “I keep going in the name of justice and it's time to get to the bottom of it.
“I'm just putting it out there that let's not live under false pretense. Let there be no more copycat suicides.”
Halperin penned two NY Times best sellers about Cobain and produced a film for Paramount called The Cobain Case.
He boasts a formidable reputation as an investigative journalist thanks to books on Michael Jackson, Angelina Jolie and Whitney Houston.
Commenting on what he has uncovered for his new book, the Canadian author said: "I reveal the smoking gun in the new book [about the nature of Cobain’s death], and based on the forensic pathological evidence and the new documents that I was able to uncover.
“This is all new evidence.”
SUICIDE NOTE
Among the claims made in the book which he says is based on this evidence, Halperin says Cobain did not write all the lines in his suicide note.
He said: “The five final lines of the suicide notes were not in Kurt Cobain's handwriting.
“That's the only section of the suicide note that deals with suicide.
“And it was in a completely different handwriting.
“I had it examined, years ago, by two of the top handwriting experts in the world.
“They both concluded unwaveringly that it was not in Kurt Cobain's handwriting. “
Halperin added: “Kurt's music is still popular with the new generation. Sure we live in a Rihanna, Bieber, Drake music, pop popcorn generation, but music lovers still like substance. And Kurt's music lives on 30 years later.
“And that's why I've continued on this case to let them know how the voice of the generation, how their idol really died.”
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Case Closed: The Cobain Murder: The Killing And Cover Up of Kurt Cobain is available on Amazon.
The U.S. Sun has reached out to Courtney Love's publicist asking for comment.
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