The divorce rumours persisted, even after Cobain himself tried to quash them in a January interview with Rolling Stone - "I don't think Courtney and I are that fucked up. " There was talk that he'd consulted lawyer Rosemary Carroll about changing his will. And there was the growing belief that the week he'd died, Cobain had finally made up his mind to get out of the music industry just days before his body was found - at the same time, ironically, as Courtney Love was officially reporting him missing to the Seattle Police - it was announced that Nirvana had pulled out of the Lollapalooza tour, which they were to have headlined.

Cobain's death might have decapitated a multi-million dollar phenomenon, but at least it created a posthumous industry to take its place. His simple retirement - and Lollapalooza alone was worth $9.5 million - would have killed the whole thing.

The Seattle Police investigation has not, according to conspiracists, presented a watertight case for suicide. The smudged prints which they did find on the shotgun were at least consistent with Cobain's own. His last note did not specifically mention suicide, but it barely looked forward to a happy future, either. And not only was there no indication that anybody else had been in the room with Cobain, there was no way a mysterious other could have escaped the scene - the door to the room was locked from the inside (a police finding which private investigator Tom Grant disputes), as was the window. Friend of Courtney's or not, coroner Hartshorne had no choice but to summarise the whole thing as an "open and shut case of suicide", and on May 11, the police confirmed "there's been no foul play - just an early death that no one could explain".

No-one, that is, outside of an ever broadening circle of conspiracy buffs for whom such an admission of uncertainty is catnip. An independent investigative journalist, Richard Lee, was the first media figure to begin piecing together what he perceived to the inconsistencies, hitting the airwaves on April 13, 1994 - just days after the tragedy - with the Seattle public access television programme Who Killed Kurt Cobain? Since then, he has racked up over 200 hours of televisual monologues, detailing the whos, whats and whys of the case, and another 200 hours of on-line material (www.speakeasy.org/kurtwasm). No longer Was Kurt Cobain Murdered?, his show was swiftly retitled Kurt Cobain WAS Murdered.

The mob, the media, his wife, his baby's nanny... Lee's list of suspects was endless. Neither Geffen Records, Nirvana's label, nor Gold Mountain, their management, was above suspicion. Neither were the Seattle Police, the medical examiner, lawyer Rosemary Carroll, MCA-Universal, Seagram's, Time-Warner... and when Love's private investor, Tom Grant, announced that he, too, believed foul play was involved, Lee added him to his list of suspects as well, explaining, "to be frank, there was immediately something I didn't like much about Grant, basically that he seemed to have the policeman's habit [Grant is a former LA County Sheriff] of changing details in the description of events he was relating to you within the course of a conversation, and acting as if you weren't too intelligent, or concerned about his discrepancies..."

It should also be noted that alone of the principal crusading conracists - a roll call which includes the late El Duce, Montreal journalists Ian Halperin and Max Wallace, LA author Toby Amirault, and Love's own father, Deadhead author Hank Harrison - Lee has not made capital from the case, and may in fact have caused himself damage. His attempts to win a seat on the Seattle City Council in February, running on the totally unrelated platform of public expenditure, can scarcely have been boosted by his hour-long appearances on Channel 29, all close-up camera angles and ratty moustache, and ever more labyrinthine theories over who really pulled the trigger that day.

Grant, however, collected eight months of wages from Love before she finally took him off the case, since when he has popped up on radio talk shows and NBC Television's Unsolved Mysteries to air his views and suspicions. Wallace and Halperin, whose 1985 investigation into low-level corruption within the Concordia University athletics department won them a Rolling Stone award for best investigative reporting at a university newspaper, have written a book on Cobain's 'murder' (Who Killed Kurt Cobain?, published in March by Birch Lane Press, a division of Carol Publishing). Internet maven Amirault, too, has written a book (the still unpublished The Murder Of Kurt Cobain, also the title of his website,www.tiac.net/users/tobya/); and so has Harrison, whose Beyond Nirvana: The Legacy Of Kurt Cobain is also scheduled for a 1998 publication, and who joined Halperin and Wallace on a November 1996 Canadian tour, presenting a three hour multi-media lecture on the subject.

Indeed, Harrison wasted no time whatsoever mourning the son-in-law he never met, tirelessly touting his own take on the tragedy, much of it geared towards his own flesh and blood. "When I heard that Kurt died, I just knew there was foul play involved," Harrison told the dope-fiend bible High Times in 1996. "I called Courtney and challenged her to take a polygraph exam at my expense - because I knew that sick and nauseous junkies don't take shotguns and kill themselves." Neither do Zen masters, he told a baffled Canadian audience later in the year, "[not] unless they're lighting themselves on fire in Vietnam to protest the war". Kurt Cobain, of course, was a Zen master, "and the fact that he didn't know it was so Zen".

Whatever Cobain was (or wasn't), Love refused her father's offer of a polygraph exam, just as she refused to have anything more to do with the man she claimed date-raped her mother on the night Love was conceived. The pair have apparently barely spoken since 1987, and in 1995 Love told the San Francisco Chronicle, "I don't want this man near me ever." Harrison denies that his crusade against his daughter is fuelled by familial bitterness, although he does admit to Broomfield's camera, "It's a great war and I hope the public watches it." Rather, he has embarked upon this investigation as a simple quest for justice, fuelled by a natural loathing of seeing murder go unpunished. "I don't think he killed himself," Harrison tells Broomfield. "I think somebody killed him. I'm not saying Courtney did it. I don't really know... "

To High Times, Harrison portrayed a daughter who not even a mother (let alone an estranged father) could love. "Courtney has a dark side, a suppressed and repressed dark side to her personality that is extraordinarily violent. She tried to kill me twice. She's been extraordinarily violent with her friends, and was kicked out of every band she's been in for violent outbursts. It's almost like she has multiple personalities. And one of those personalities is really evil - really, really dark and sinister - more so than you can imagine. I mean, real sick. She watched the Frances Farmer story 32 times, [and] it worried me. I realised at that point that Courtney was deeply troubled. "

"I've got her number!" he roars to Broomfield. "I got her nailed. I'm still the father, period. I don't care if you've got $177 million, I'll kick your ass. If you want to cop to me, maybe we can work something out. But until then, I'll keep kicking your ass."

Throughout the autumn of 1996, Harrison was ass-kicking his way across Canada with Halperin and Wallace, turning in a performance which all three were convinced would nail the killer for good. They were armed with an impressive body of evidence - a slide show highlighting inconsistencies within the police investigation, and the "crime scene" itself, interviews with participants, suspects and investigators; and a Biblical altruism which went way beyond simply solving a rock'n'roll whodunnit. They were crusading for the children, Halperin and Wallace swore. According to their findings, upwards of 60 teenagers have committed suicide in the four years since Cobain died, each one unable to carry on living in a world in which their idol himself could not survive.

"A proper investigation would put an end to the hundreds [sic] of copycat suicides that have followed Cobain's death. Halperin told Toronto. "If we can prevent one more copy-cat suicide, wouldn't it be worth it to reopen the investigation?" he pleads. "One life saved?"

Interestingly, Tom Grant raised this same issue two years earlier, when he appeared on CBS Radio's Gil Gross show, but Love's legal advisors were no more impressed by it now than they were back then. On November 11, lawyer Jack Palladino interrupted the Toronto Opera House presentation. Rosemary Carroll turned up the following night in London, Ontario. And Nick Auf Der Maur, father of Hole bassist Melissa, was one of two men ejected from the Montreal event on November 14 for heckling the speakers while they tried to explain why the show was not, after all, about to go on - the New York law firm of Gendler, Codikow & Carroll had just announced they would be suing on Love's behalf if it did.

But before one dismisses their bellicosity as a sign of fear that the 'truth' about Cobain's demise is getting too close to the surface, it is worth remembering that the Seattle Police Department has yet to be convinced there is anything more to the case either. They continue to insist that no new evidence whatsoever has come to light, as Pat Kingsley, the Los Angeles PR agent whom Love shares with Tom Cruise and Dodi Fayed among others, tirelessly reiterates. 'Anyone who wants to know what happened to Kurt Cobain should talk to the coroner in Seattle and the DA in Seattle. Courtney was not involved."

Indeed, amid all the claims, threats and innuendo, it seems incredible that nobody has yet considered by far the most likely reason for Love's hostility towards her accusers: the possibility that she simply resents being publicly condemned for murdering her husband, and that she is responding to those suggestions in the same way as would any other human being, regardless of their nature or status: with denials, anger, threats. In other words, the next time you lose somebody you love, imagine how you'd feel if your father and his friends then told the world that you'd killed them.

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