A suicide note impaled with a red pen into the soil of a potted plant was long believed to be Kurt Cobain’s final message to the world.
The Nirvana frontman died on April 5, 1994, at age 27 from a shotgun wound at his Seattle home. The King County Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide.
Written in red pen on a restaurant placemat, the note was one of the key pieces of evidence cited by Seattle Police in their conclusion that Cobain took his own life.
Now, a private forensic team has claimed that the final lines of the note, where Cobain appears to bid farewell to his wife and daughter, may have been written by someone else.
Those lines read: ‘Please keep going Courtney,’ ‘for Frances,’ ‘for her life which will be so much happier,’ ‘without me,’ followed by ‘I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.’
Independent researcher Michelle Wilkins, who worked with the team, told Daily Mail: ‘If you look closely, the handwriting in the last four lines is different, larger and more scrawled. We don’t believe Kurt wrote those lines.’
By contrast, the top of the note, addressed to Cobain’s imaginary childhood friend ‘Boddah,’ reads like a farewell to the music world rather than a personal message to his family: ‘I’ve tried everything… I’ve tried to get what I wanted out of life, and it just hasn’t worked.’
Handwriting analyst Mozelle Martin claimed that the last lines were written by someone else, citing changes in letter formation and rhythm, though her findings have not been peer-reviewed.
Martin said she conducted her analysis to see the Kurt Cobain case officially reopened by Seattle Police as a homicide investigation, not a suicide.
Hellbound and Down 