A man is suing to get photos of Kurt Cobain’s suicide scene, and his widow and daughter filed court motions to try and stop it.
The Seattle City Attorney’s Office is asking a judge to make a summary judgment in the case, and that hearing is scheduled for Friday, July 31. They want to avoid spending thousands on a trial with Richard Lee, the longtime follower of the case who filed the suit.
More popular and trending stories
Lee had a cable access show in the 1990s in which he alleged Cobain was murdered. Seattle homicide Detective Mike Ciesynski, who is named in the suit, previously told KIRO-TV there is no evidence to suggest that.
Cobain injected himself with a lethal dose of heroin before he fatally shot himself, he said.
In 2014, after Ciesynski was asked to look at the case, he developed four rolls of film that had been stored by police since April 1994, when Cobain was found. Some of those images were released last year, and Lee is suing to get the ones that were not.
Though the pictures have a slight green tint because of deterioration, police say they show the scene more clearly than the earlier Polaroid photos taken by investigators. Polaroids showing Cobain’s fatal wound also have not been released.
“Releasing these photographs would physically endanger me and my mother,” Cobain’s only child, Frances Bean Cobain, wrote in a court declaration that described stalkers and fanatical threats made against them.
“I once saw mock photos depicting my father’s body,” she wrote. “That experience irreparably scarred me. I cried for days afterward. Those horrible images still haunt me. I cannot imagine how terrible it would be knowing that the photographs that Mr. Lee seeks were public, and that I or any of my loved ones, included my father’s mother and sisters, might inadvertently see them.”
Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, also wrote of how his death left her physically distraught and the emotional suffering that has come from it.
“I cannot believe that there exists any genuine public interest which might be served by the public release of these images,” she wrote in the court declaration. “Certainly, public disclosure would reopen all my old wounds, and cause me and my family permanent – indeed, endless and needless – pain and suffering, and would be a gross violation of our privacy interests.”
Lee said he has sympathy for Cobain’s daughter.
“These photographs should demonstrate gross misconduct by the Seattle Police Department and the King County Medical Examiner in announcing to the world that Cobain died of a gunshot wound to the head when he did not,” he told KIRO-TV reporter Deborah Horne.
Lee, who ran unsuccessfully for a Seattle City Council seat and other public offices, has been the subject of restraining orders keeping him away from Nirvana member Krist Novoselic and former Seattle mayor Greg Nickels.
Ciesynski, the homicide detective who reexamined the medical examiner’s investigation documents last year, said it is clear to all who investigated the case that Cobain took his own life.
“What are people going to gain from seeing pictures of Kurt Cobain laying on the ground with his hair blown back, with blood coming out of his nose and trauma to his eyes from a penetrating shotgun wound,” Ciesynski told KIRO-TV in 2014. “How’s that going to benefit anybody?
“It wasn’t going to change my decision that this was a suicide, and actually I’m the one that makes the decision finally: Do we go forward or not? Morally I would not be able to justify that. Legally I can’t justify doing that.”
