Joe Burns original

It all started at the Lake Washington house, where things had been running on pure exhaustion for days. Me, Kurt, and Cali had been up for so many goddamn days straight, just hanging out, doing tattoo work, and shooting dope to pass the time. Most of that was happening in Cali’s bedroom, which was this really weird space with brown wooden shelves covering the walls for records and tapes, and these massive windows that made you feel totally exposed.

At some point, Kurt left the room, and when he finally came back down, he was completely spent. His tolerance had obviously gone way down, and the drugs hit him incredibly hard—he was completely fucked up. He’d already reached and maybe even breached whatever he needed to get high, and he absolutely did not need to be doing any more dope. There was just no need for it.

We were all hanging out in the kitchen later that evening, and at first, everything seemed totally alright. We were just standing around talking about music and normal stuff. But then, the whole vibe shifted instantly. You could totally tell that things were getting way more serious and strange, and that's exactly when Dylan Carlson showed up out of nowhere.

Dylan didn’t come alone, either; he had these random, weird dudes with him. I couldn't tell exactly how many at first—it looked like just one guy standing right next to him, but there were actually a couple of other dudes hanging back in the shadows. I didn't think I'd ever seen them before. But the more I looked at the one guy hanging back, the more I realized I actually *had* seen his face around the house before, like someone had brought him around one day to hang out with the people living there. I started getting really paranoid, wondering who these people were and why the hell Dylan was bringing them to the house.

Right there in the kitchen, things completely turned to shit. Dylan and his guys immediately started pressuring Kurt, trying to get him out of the kitchen and force him back upstairs toward the space they call the greenhouse. Dylan was doing this fast-talking routine, trying to herd him up there by dangling the promise of more drugs over him. Then they started putting their hands on him, leaning on him physically to get him to move. It wasn't an outright fistfight or like they were dragging his body kicking and screaming, but they were using their bodies to block him, crowding him, and nudging him forward to force his momentum up the stairs.

I instinctively tried to move with them to stay close to Kurt and Dylan, but one of the guys cut me off. He literally got right between us to facilitate the whole thing, while the other guy who had been hanging back finally stepped up to help Dylan finish pushing Kurt out the door. It was a completely crazy, messed-up situation, and looking back, I still feel this awful weight because I knew Kurt didn't want to go up there, and I feel like I should have done something to stop it.

While they were herding Kurt up the stairs, Cali suddenly got all over me, trying to divide us up and distract me. He started quick-talking, telling me that we needed to take off and get the hell out of there right away. His excuse was that a bunch of private eyes had been sneaking around the property, videotaping us and taking photos of us doing tattoos and shooting dope, and that they had all these incriminating pictures of us. It felt like a total premeditated game to me, a setup to scare me into running away so they could isolate Kurt. Even though Cali was hounding me to leave, I just didn't feel like I should abandon the property while all of this was going down.

Eventually, the movement shifted outside near the top of the driveway. That’s when my girlfriend Bonnie and her friend Jennifer showed up after being in Cali's room. It was late night or early AM hours by then, and it was pitch blackout outside. Bonnie was really anxious to leave and was trying to figure out how we could get out of there. As we were walking toward our little station wagon car, Bonnie suddenly stopped and pointed out something through a window. It was the window of the room right above the garage, right next to the greenhouse area. She told me to look right away, and when I focused in on it, it was the weirdest, most unsettling goddamn thing. She pointed out someone in a red dress up there. It just completely filled my head with bad thoughts, and it was strange as hell. Bonnie immediately wanted me to get the car keys so we could just get the fuck out of there. Right after she said "look," Cali checked off and walked away from us, heading back toward the stairs or into the main house.

I didn't actually see the final moments up on the balcony or inside the greenhouse because I had gone to post myself somewhere else on the property to get away from Dylan and those guys. But while I was on the premises, the gunshot went off. I definitely heard it, and it didn't sound like a distant hunting rifle or a heavy double-buck blast. It sounded entirely different, almost muffled, which makes sense if it was birdshot. I didn't see the motherfuckers physically come back down the stairs afterward, but Dylan definitely didn't hang around the property. He left immediately after the murder happened.

Right after that, this heavy, unspoken feeling of death just hung in the air. It was like everybody remaining on the property already understood exactly what had happened without anyone having to say it out loud. But the craziest part is that before the body was ever officially discovered or mentioned on the news, a note entered the picture. I never actually held the paper or read it myself, but Cali or someone else in that circle brought it out and read it out loud to me. Knowing what was on it, I'm certain someone just added those last lines to the text afterward to fake the whole thing.

During that bizarre window of time between the killing and the public discovery of the body, Eric Erlandson from the band Hole showed up briefly on the property. I always avoided Eric because he just rubbed me the wrong way, so whenever he was around, I’d deliberately hang out in a different room. But I distinctly saw him outside between Cali’s bedroom and the recording jam space. He just briefly talked to whoever he was there to see and then took off.

After the note was read to me, a total panic set in to get the hell out of town. Cali became frantic, telling me that the cops and the FBI were going to be hunting for me to force an interview out of us. He was totally sure of himself, putting it in my head that I needed to avoid law enforcement and flee to a completely different city or at least a couple of states away. It was super obvious he was being put up to saying that, just trying to force me away. So, eventually, me, Bonnie, Cali, and Jen piled into the car and finally left the house. We drove all the way to Jen's house and just completely crashed out there.

The next morning, which was Friday, we were all sitting around Jennifer's house when the TV broadcast came on. That was the moment it all got publicly confirmed. The news announced that they had finally found Kurt's body up in the greenhouse.

When you really look at the logic of who was there and who profit from it, it's clear to me. The people who showed up that night came on behalf of Courtney Love to take care of business. It was Dylan Carlson and those cold-blooded, sociopathic dudes he brought into the kitchen with him who forced Kurt up those stairs and ended his life.