The Seattle Times 18th June 1994: Seattle police say they will not step up enforcement efforts against heroin, despite another death apparently linked to the drug in the city’s rock music scene. Kristen Pfaff, the 27- year old bass player for the band Hole, was found dead Thursday morning in a bathtub in a Capitol Hill apartment. A syringe and apparent drug paraphernalia were found in a cosmetic bag next to the tub. An autopsy yesterday failed to establish a cause of death, and lab and toxicology tests were ordered. Pfaff’s death followed that of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, who committed suicide in early April. A heroin shooting kit was found next to his body in the Lake Washington home where he lived with his wife, Courtney Love. Love is Hole’s lead singer..... “I don’t think heroin is any more accessible in Seattle than any other city”, said Capt. Dan Bryant of the Seattle Polices Department’s narcotics section. “Heroin is not a Seattle problem; it’s a national problem.” Bryant said Pfaff’s case is not being investigated by the narcotics division because it doesn’t review drug overdoses, which is how Seattle police have categorized the case. Most investigations focus on known drug dealers, he said, although police will not try to determine who sold Pfaff the heroin, if in fact she bought it in Seattle. Pfaff had been travelling in Europe for five weeks and returned to Seattle last weekend. “Unless we had someone who knew her and was willing to testify and work with us, we really have nowhere to go.” He said, noting the difficulty in developing drug cases. “We won’t treat this case differently than any other case just because it’s someone with notoriety,” Bryant added. “We did attempt to locate the source of drugs in the Cobain case but were unable to come up with any meaningful evidence. That may well be true in this case too.” Cobain is believed to have purchased heroin from dealers in Capitol Hill apartment buildings not far from the apartment where Pfaff died.

Well that really gives me a lot of faith in the Seattle Police Department.

1) At what point did they rule that it was a self inflicted drug overdose, and rule out foul play? Does this mean that anyone who is found dead and who has drugs in their system is automatically ruled as a drug overdose and thereby does not warrant an investigation? That means that anyone could be murdered, and as long as drugs were involved the police could use the argument that as a drug overdose they would not investigate. The Narcotics department weren’t investigating Kristen's death, and nowhere in this paper does it say that the Homicide Department were investigating it either. That’s excellent work.

2) What does Bryant mean when he said that unless he had someone willing to testify and work with him, he had nowhere to go? Kristen’s friends were shocked at her death, they said she was off drugs (Like Kurt’s friends said he wasn’t suicidal and were shocked when he died.) Why didn’t Bryant (and the detectives working on Kurt’s case), find this suspicious? Like I said before, if someone who is clean and not suicidal dies, and their friends are asking ‘Why did Kurt die?, why did Kristen die?’ surely the police have a duty to answer these questions in a satisfactory way. Any person who shows no suicidal urges who turns up dead, has the right to have their deaths investigated properly.

3) The Seattle police tried to ascertain the source of heroin Kurt supposedly purchased, but could find no meaningful evidence. Could this be because they were looking to where Courtney directed them, Caitlin, for example? We know Caitlin didn’t see or provide Kurt with drugs, and it looks like the police interviewed her as we saw in the un-named sources section. If the police followed Courtney’s leads, and found nothing, why didn’t they become suspicious as to the reasons? The heroin had to have come from somewhere, they were being given what turned out to be false leads from Courtney. Why didn’t they suspect Courtney was lying? These are elementary questions. Every police officer who attends any death should automatically go into cynical/question mode, at every level. If someone is providing false information (Courtney) the police should have asked themselves why? So, now in Seattle anyone can get away with murdering a person who doesn’t want to be murdered as long as they murder their victims by narcotics overdose. And it doesn’t matter how many friends of the murdered person tell the police that the circumstances are suspicious, the police will happily ignore their pleas. Great.