Two Years After The Death Of Musician Kurt Cobain, questions are left ananswered. Perhaps no one knows this better than conspiracy theorist Richard Lee. Jon Roig gets the scoop.

I told Richard Lee, the man I consider the be America's foremost Kurt Cobain conspiracy theorist, that I wouldn't dis him when I typed up the interview. "That's OK," he jauntily responded. "If you did, you'd only be fooling yourself."

And that pretty much sums up my two hour conversation with him. Full of energy and an answer for every question, he's been on the "Kurt Cobain was Murdered" beat since day one. I think you'll be surprised and intrigued by what he has to say.

Muchacho: I know nothing about what you're doing. I must admit, I'm intrigued ... but a little skeptical.

Richard Lee: I wouldn't be.

M: Why is that?

RL: You should be skeptical of the cops, not me.

M: What do you mean?

RL: Well, you know... Ask 100 people on the campus of the UA how Kurt Cobain died, and 100 out of 100 that know who you're talking about will say, "Oh, he killed himself." But what's that really based in?

M: Well ... it's based on news reports and ...

RL: Yeah, but ultimately, what is it based in?

M: Pure faith, I guess.

RL: No, I mean ultimately, factually, it's based on what some cops said. And how do you know this cop wasn't Detective Mark Fuhrman.

M: Yeah, but even though we don't know who they are, what reason do we have to doubt them?

RL: They're cops. If you believe everything the cops said, we wouldn't need to have judges or courtrooms or prosecutors or defense attorneys. The police would merely make an accusation and they'd cart someone to prison.

M: But if we believed nothing that they said, we wouldn't have a use for those institutions either.

RL: Yeah, but the point is that's what makes a fake suicide a perfect murder. There's no trial ... and there's no ongoing investigation. I mean, shoot somebody in the back of the head and they're obviously murdered. So the case is open for the n ext hundred years or more.

M: So if we should be skeptical, who's behind it?

RL: Well, the first thing you should be skeptical about is the bottom line result, which is Kurt Cobain committed suicide. You have to ask yourself what the source of that information is - in this case, the Seattle Police Department. I don't know what the cops are like down there in Arizona, but these guys are like wannabe L.A. Cops. They want to be rough, tough, badboys like the LAPD. There just isn't enough action in Seattle to accommodate their steroid-fed fantasies. And yet, you'll find that they like to dig into whatever mischief they can, you know?

The way that the Seattle homicide really works is, for instance, they've never done an investigation of a controlled substances homicide in the history of the department. In the county north of here, if a person dies in your house of an overdose, the police are going to be asking you a whole lot of questions about who supplied the narcotics because that person, in the state of Washington, is guilty of a controlled substances homicide for providing a lethal dose of narcotics.

They never investigate that kind of thing in Seattle - they never have. So if a junkie or an apparent drug user ends up dead, it's really easy to say it's an accidental overdose and an accidental thing. Or, they call it a suicide.

So yesterday, for instance, it was the 2-year anniversary of (the death of) Kristen Fan, who was the bass player in Hole. She was the third person to die in this strange string of homicides that started with Cobain. The second was Detective Teri, who was investigating this very subject - that is, who provided the alleged dose of alleged narcotics that allegedly were involved in Kurt Cobain's death.

M: So you think they were all connected somehow?

RL: Well, they all WERE connected ... whether the cause of their deaths is connected cannot be said with absolute certainty. They're all dead, that's for sure. They were all connected to the Nirvana Phenomenon - that was the bass player in Hole an d Detective Teri, whom I spoke to at one point, knew a lot, apparently, about certain things about Cobain's death. And believe me, if I can figure it out, Detective Teri could've figured it out as well.

M: Who do you figure is behind all this? That's the big question, right?

RL: It is the big question, and it's one that L.A. private investigator Tom Grant has been eager to answer in pointing the finger absolutely at a few individuals. Chief among them, Courtney Love.

M: Well yeah ... she's obviously profited quite a bit from Kurt's death.

RL: She sure has ... but don't leave out Chris and Dave.

M: I guess that's true ... I didn't really think about that.

RL: Well, the general theory that I've advanced is that nothing can be said with absolute certainty. O.J. Simpson committed his murders, if he was guilty and he probably was, according to the basic Columbo school of how to commit a perfect murder, which is, do it an hour before you leave for Chicago and stuff the dirty clothes in a duffel bag. So, he had a plan it pretty much worked and gee, wasn't he pretty much out of town at the point, you know? If this crime was conceived along those lines, wh ich evidently it was, it had to have a mastermind or a chief coordinator right at the center of it - and that would be Courtney Love.

M: What's your interest in this? Do you get paid?

RL: No, it's a public access television program. The program is "Now See this Person to Person," and it was on for a year before the Cobain thing happened. I was using public access, and the fact that I own a $1,000 camcorder and do something that nobody that I know of has done before, which is take your own private camcorder and go out and cover political events.

M: So what do you make of the post-mortem Kurt Cobain phenomenon ... you know, how he's considered the "Voice of our Generation" or whatever.

RL: Well ... the post-mortem phenomena, if you want to know the truth ... I mean, I joke about this among my friends, and on the air I refer to it in a serious way which is basically braintrusted by myself and no one else. I mean, I've been calling this a likely murder or a murder since like five days after it began, and if you want examine the way that this has moved through popular culture, you will notice the distinct influence on the apprehension of the television networks, entertainment execu tives and everyone else to dabble in Nirvana because they all know. They all know. By this point they're asking for trouble because its all going to be documented in the work that I'm doing.

For instance Newsweek came to Seattle and did a cover story, a story on Michael Kinsley about four weeks ago, and there were all this kind of veiled references to mystery. There was one reference to Kurt Cobain in a Linda Berry cartoon that they commissio ned. But, otherwise, they just beat around the issue completely. And it is an amazing thing.

When I did this political show, early on in the Cobain thing, nobody really cared about my show. But now, psychologically ... and I know it'll sound like I'm overstating the case, it's at the center of the psychology of the entire city. Everyone who's exa mined it closely knows that I'm completely right and all of the people who are in the leadership in this city are completely wrong.

M: So what do you think is motivating them to not reopen the case?

RL: You mean, 'Them' meaning the politicians?

M: Yeah... or whoever is in charge ...

RL: Well I'll tell you why that is: they've screwed it up once and they got caught. Now they don't know what to do about it.

M: So, you think it's just a pride thing ... or do they have some other vested interest?

RL: No ... if the Seattle Times comes out and says, "We knew all kind of different things on April 8, '94 about the likelihood of murder, but we never bothered to tell you, and we've stated in our pages eight dozen times in the last two years that Cobain was a suicide" then their credibility would be blown to kingdom come, and they'll cease to exist as any type of entity that anyone will trust.

So they have to perpetuate the lie. It's an absolutely unique situation. In this particular case, it involves the murder of a rock star, a beloved rock star in this area and across the world. They know that when the truth gets out, they're going to be in a hell of a pickle.

M: So you think they all know about this?

RL: They all knew about it immediately. They all knew he was murdered.

M: What other evidence is there?

RL: The primary evidence is that there was no blood at the scene of the crime. That's what I mean when I say that everybody knew that he was murdered on the day it happened.

M: No blood at all? I would think a shotgun wound would be pretty messy.

RL: Precisely. And if you want to talk about this being the perfect murder, that was the stroke of genius, really, on the part of the murderer. What you do is set up a situation where the cops really want to make a suicide out of it, but anyone that gets a peek in that window where the body was situated would know that it's all a lie.

So, essentially, what you do is bring the power structure of the city, meaning its media, in on the crime. And they succeeded in doing that.

M: You don't think they're supportive of what you're doing?

RL: Oh, hell no!

M: I guess what I don't understand, is what information you have that blows this case wide open - besides the blood. It seems to me that there has to be something more than just a motive and a couple of coincidences ... What confirmed it for you?

RL: What confirmed it is the pathologists in the autopsy revealed that they lied about certain things, and once that became clear to me, I understood fully well why there was no blood at the scene of the crime. That is because Kurt Cobain did not die of a shotgun wound.

M: So where is that information that they lied coming from?

RL: The death certificate says that it's a contact perforating contact wound to the head. Perforating means that the shots goes in and the shot comes out. After I found video that had never been seen before and aired it on June 1, 1994, basically six or seven weeks into this thing, they then changed their description of the wound. It wasn't a perforating shotgun wound, but a penetrating shotgun wound. What does that mean?

M: ... just that it went in, and never came out.

RL: Precisely. In other words, completely impossible. If you look at the JFK thing ...

M: I was going to ask if you see any parallels there...

RL: Well, inasmuch as there was never a JFK autopsy photo until the early 90s, and there have only been a few people who worked that angle of it, but the first time you see that picture of Kennedy's head on the autopsy table, you say to yourself, "What the hell is that?"

You assume that you're going to be completely shocked by the sight of a dead president, but you get over that in about a second and a half. The real question that emerges is: Why is it that I've seen film of him getting his head blown off and there's his head completely intact on the table of this autopsy examining room? And the explanation ... I don't pretend to know all the details ... there were FBI agents who inspected the body when it came in into Washington, D.C.; surgery of their head is in their n otes. Roger J. Liften is the chief guy that put together that material on the JFK autopsy.

They're all very squeamish about this autopsy thing. The Globe ran photos of Selena's autopsy. For a second, you're like "Wow... that's the dead pop star," and then after that it becomes a pretty scientific thing. I mean, I wouldn't make any high claims a s to why they ran the photos, but I think it was legal in Texas.

M: So what do you make of the 'suicide attempt' in Rome a few months previous to his death?

RL: Well, in Newsweek magazine his doctor said it wasn't suicide, that it was an accident. Accidental mixing of alcohol and a sedative. There have been all these reports that everyone takes as factual that there were 40 or 50 pills involved - but those apparently come from Courtney Love, or someone connected to Courtney Love, so ...

Probably Kurt had some champagne, had some prescription pill, if at all ... you have to understand that 'coma' is a relative term. In this country there are like seven stages of coma: The lightest of which isn't a whole lot different from sleeping.

So, if you take a couple of valiums and have a couple of beers, you're going to go into a stage one coma or whatever ... or a stage seven coma, however it works. You're going to be really, really sleepy. But that doesn't mean you tried to kill yourself, a nd it doesn't mean that you're dead.

Anyway, take a look at "Black Widow" - that movie with Debra Winger. So what does she do with the champagne? She takes a hypodermic needle and injects something through the cork and when Dennis Hopper drinks the champagne, he dies flat out. Obviously, if you want to drug someone into a state of unconsciousness, it's really easy to do.

M: So why wouldn't he take off after something like that?

RL: Well, since Kurt apparently did not drink alcohol, it's possible that waking up in a hospital didn't panic him too much, because half a bottle of champagne obviously doesn't knock anyone out. But if, in fact, he was using sedatives at all, you could see how the combination of sedatives and alcohol did something to him that he did not expect.

Which, in fact, may be what happened. In any case, he never said it was a suicide. No one ever said it was a suicide attempt prior to his death.

If that was a suicide attempt, why is it that Courtney Love never told his friend that bought him the shotgun, "By the way, don't buy Kurt a shotgun, because he tried to kill himself in Rome three or four weeks ago. And, you know, buying him any firearms would be a real mistake."

Why did that never happen? Why did she never tell any member of his family to take precautions, et cetera ... Why did that never happen? Because it wasn't the truth, I determined. His doctor said so.

M: Where can people find out more about your work?

RL: Stay tuned to the net.

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The full transcripts of Jon Roig's interview are also available

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