FBI Releases Long-Withheld File on Kurt Cobain - Rolling Stone

For decades, the government kept a file on conspiracy theories about Cobain’s death.

The FBI's file on Kurt Cobain includes letters urging the Bureau to investigate his death as a murder.

In the past month, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana have snuck back into the headlines.

April 5th marked the 27th anniversary of Cobain’s death, an NFT of Cobain’s last photo shoot was put on the market, and Nirvana as a group were hit with a copyright-infringement lawsuit for alleged unauthorized use of a 1949 illustration on their merch.

And quietly last month — for reasons the Bureau has not commented on — the FBI plucked out its file on Cobain and made it available for the first time, shortly after it had done the same with paperwork on late mob boss Vito Genovese.

The centerpieces are two letters, sent from names that have been redacted, urging the Bureau to investigate Cobain’s 1994 death as a murder, rather than suicide.

The FBI’s responses to the letters, sent from different officials at the Bureau but nearly identical in wording, are also contained in the file.

Even stranger, the released pages also include portions of a January 1997 fax sent to the Los Angeles and D.C.

(the Bureau’s files include more than 300 pages on his murder, although the case was closed in 2005), the Monkees (for anti-American “subliminal messages” incorporated into their Sixties concerts by way of video footage), Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees (“a potentially threatening” telegram supposedly signed by that brother Gibb, sent to the law firm representing his then-wife in their divorce proceedings), and John Denver (for supposed death threats made against him in 1979)