HERE IS AN ARTICLE FROM THE SEATTLE P-I ON JUNE 17, 1994
BASSIST FOR BAND HOLE FOUND DEAD
By Dan Raley and Gene Stout P-I Reporters
Friday, June 17, 1994
Section: News, Page: A1
The bass guitarist for Courtney Love's rock band, Hole, was found dead of a possible drug overdose yesterday, the second tragedy for Love in the past two months.
Kristen Pfaff, 27, was discovered in a bathtub at her Capitol Hill apartment by a friend at about 9:30 a.m. Police found a bag holding suspected drug paraphernalia, including syringes, nearby on the floor.
Pfaff's death comes nearly 10 weeks after the death of Love's husband, Kurt Cobain, the lead singer for the internationally acclaimed band Nirvana. On April 5, the 27-year-old Cobain killed himself using a shotgun at his home overlooking Lake Washington just a few miles from Pfaff's residence.
``It's harsh because it's like getting hit in the same spot," said Paul MacKusick, a musician for the Seattle band Salon Betty. He learned of Pfaff's death as he walked past her apartment last night carrying a guitar.
Love, who is believed to be in Seattle, could not be reached for comment yesterday.
But a statement released through Hole's publicity firm, P.M.K., said:
``We are deeply anguished by the loss of an extremely talented musician, a beautiful soul and a great friend. She was an intense player, scholar and passionate as a musician and about life in every way.
``We are obviously very shaken by the tragedies affecting the band . . . but have decided to continue on."
A spokesman for the King County Medical Examiner's Office said an autopsy would be performed today to determine the cause of death.
Police recovered a green spiral notebook and two black ballpoint pens they said were in Pfaff's bathroom at the time of her death. A medical examiner's spokesman, however, said there was no suicide note.
Two friends told police they were with Pfaff Wednesday at the Swansonia Apartments, 1017 E. Harrison St., when she left them to bathe at 9:30 p.m. The friends, a 28-year-old man and a 31-year-old man, said they heard Pfaff snoring through a locked door about a half-hour later. They said it was not unusual for her to take long baths or sleep in the bathtub. The 31-year-old man left the first-floor apartment. The 28-year-old stayed and fell asleep. He told police he kicked in the bathroom door yesterday and found Pfaff unresponsive. Pfaff was in a kneeling position, with her head, shoulders and arms hanging over the edge of the bathtub, according to a police report. She was in five inches of water.
Friends and family members said Pfaff planned to move to Minneapolis until Hole resumed touring. They said Pfaff was never especially comfortable with the trappings of rock stardom and worried that it could interfere with her development as a musician.
``She was really in it for the music," her father, Norm Pfaff of Denver, told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. ``She wasn't interested in the money or the fame or any of that. She resented the loss of freedom that goes with climbing up the ladder."
Pfaff grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., but later moved to Minneapolis. A classically trained pianist who studied English and Women's Studies at Boston College, Pfaff began playing rock at 22.
She had been a member of the Minneapolis punk trio Janitor Joe until she joined Hole last year.
Hole formed in Los Angeles in 1989 and later relocated to Seattle. Love and guitarist Eric Erlandson were later joined by drummer Patty Schemel in 1992 and then in1993 Pfaff.
Love has been the most outspoken member of the group, while Erlandson, Schemel and Pfaff have remained mostly in the background.
In the May issue of Spin, which went to press before Cobain's death was known, Pfaff's Capitol Hill apartment was described as ``a place stuffed with records, all neatly if unartfully organized along the walls, and there are posters everywhere of her former band, Janitor Joe."
Last night, Ed Rosenblatt, president of Geffen Records, Hole's label, issued a statement on Pfaff's death:
``She made a unique and vital contribution to the creative force of that band. She will be sorely missed. This is all the more tragic because she had gone through a drug rehabilitation program this past winter."
At Seattle-area clubs, Pfaff was remembered as a relatively new edition to the band and as a passionate bass guitar player. Within the past year, the band had played at the Off Ramp nightclub. Pfaff is the fifth prominent Seattle musician to die in the past four years, a disturbing trend for a city that simultaneously has spawned a globally recognized rock scene. A year ago, Mia Zapata, lead vocalist for the Gits (beautiful, raw, Punk band, very unknown but God, what a talent they had), was found strangled on Capitol Hill. Stefanie Sargent, guitarist for the Seattle band 7 Year Bitch, died of a heroin overdose in June 1992. And Andrew Wood, lead singer for the now-defunct Seattle band Mother Love Bone, fatally overdosed on heroin in March 1990.
Besides her father, Pfaff is survived by her mother, Janet Pfaff, and a brother, Jason, both of Buffalo.
P-I Reporter Robert L. Jamieson Jr. and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Kristen Pfaff was one of the most beautiful, talented female bass players in the world and her death came as a shock to the music world in Seattle, 1994. It was the second death, only 10 weeks after Cobain death mysteriously.
Courtney Love was the wife and later widow of Kurt Cobain and was connected to him. Love played in a band: Hole, and although I dislike Courtney, Hole made pretty good, raw, Punk music, but I am honest in saying that I don't listen to her music, but I did in the past. Anyway, Hole, had a bass player named: Kristen Pfaff and she as very beautiful as talented!! This makes Love connected to Pfaff as well.
Remembering Kristen Pfaff: A Tragic Loss in the World of Music
Kristen Pfaff was a talented musician whose life was cut tragically short, leaving a significant impact on the alternative music scene of the 90's. Born in Buffalo, New York, Pfaff showed an early obsession for music, mastering the bass guitar in such a way as only she could and displaying a natural talent for songwriting.
Kristen Pfaff came from a family of musicians so it came as no surprise, while attending the University of Minnesota, Kristen played in a number of local groups. In 1991, she joined Janitor Joe as bassist and co-songwriter/vocalist. While on tour with Janitor Joe in 1993, she was recruited by Hole (Led by Courtney Love)
Her time with Janitor Joe helped showcase her skills as a talented bassist and songwriter, earning her recognition within the underground music community.
However, it was her playing with their new band 'Hole' that brought Pfaff into the spotlight. Joining the band in 1993, she replaced Jill Emery as the bassist. Hole, fronted by the enigmatic and beautiful, talented, destructive, Punk: Courtney Love, was already gaining attention for their raw and confrontational blend of Punk and Grunge influences. Pfaff's addition to the band added depth and musicality to the band's sound with her bass influence, contributing to their critically acclaimed album "Live Through This," released in 1994. The album charted in nine countries before going multi-platinum in the US in December 1994.
"Live Through This", propelled Hole to new heights of fame, earning widespread acclaim for its raw emotion and powerful lyrics. Pfaff's basslines provided a solid foundation for the album's raw yet Punk sound, helping to solidify its place as a appreciated work of the 1990's alternative rock.
Tragically, Kristen Pfaff's promising career was cut short on June 16, 1994, when she was found dead of a heroin overdose in her apartment in Seattle, Washington. Her death sent shockwaves through the music world, leaving fans and colleagues mourning the loss of a talented and so beautiful young artist with boundless potential! Kristen was just 27 years old and makes a member of the 27 club. Adding Amy Winehouse as it's latest member.
Pfaff's untimely passing marked a dark chapter in the history of Hole and the wider alternative music scene. Though her time with Hole was brief, Kristen Pfaff's contributions to the band's legacy and her impact on the music world continue to be remembered and celebrated by fans around the world.
Hole playing "Violet" live at 1993 Phoenix Festifal
Hole Interview MTV 1993
Another interview with Punk Rock Band 'Hole' and baby Frances
The Mysterious Death of Kristen Pfaff
Here contains all the mysterious events surrounding the death of Kristen Pfaff.
On June 16, 1994, around 9:30 a.m., Paul Erickson, a friend intending to depart with Kristen Pfaff to Minneapolis that day, discovered her lifeless body in a bathtub in her Seattle apartment. She was only 27 years old. Among her belongings on the floor lay a bag filled with syringes and drug paraphernalia. Pfaff's tragic death was attributed to "acute opiate intoxication," occurring just two months after the passing of Cobain, who shared a close bond with Pfaff and was the spouse of Courtney Love, the frontwoman of Punkband Hole.
Norman Pfaff, her father, fondly remembered her as "bright, personable, wonderful...very, very talented, smart, and she always seemed to be in control of her circumstances. Last night she wasn't." In the book "Love & Death," published in April 2004, Janet Pfaff, Kristen's mother, expressed her ongoing skepticism towards the official narrative surrounding her daughter's untimely death. Interviewed by authors Wallace and Halperin in August 2003, Janet voiced her doubts.
Here are some pages and an interview with Janet Pfaff, the mother of Kristen:
Five months after the death of her daughter in June 1994, Janet Pfaff said: “I am not convinced my daughter’s overdose was accidental".
Kristen Marie Pfaff was born in the Buffalo suburb of Williams-ville, New York, on May 26, 1967. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother remarried shortly afterward. When Kristen was nine, her half brother, Jason, was born. Kristen was educated in Buffalo’s Catholic school system, where she became proficient in classical cello and piano at an early age. Her mother recalls that, while other girls her age were playing with dolls, Kristen was recording Girl Scout songs that she adapted to her own lyrics. She graduated from Sacred Heart Academy in 1985 and then briefly attended Boston College before receiving a scholarship to study in Holland. Two years later, she enrolled at the University of Minnesota.
After earning enough credits, Kristen decided to leave college to pursue her lifelong dream of a music career. “I graduated myself,” she told a Minnesota newspaper. “I just decided to start a band and forget about school.” Kristen soon immersed herself in Minnesota’s underground music scene, where she decided that she preferred playing hard rock to the staid classical music she had performed since the age of five. She taught herself to play bass guitar, which she mastered quickly. Her first project, Drool, featured members of the notorious Minneapolis garage bands, the Cows and God’s Bullies; shortly afterward, Kristen teamed up with two local musicians, Joachim Breuer and Matt Entsminger, to form a new trio called Janitor Joe, with Kristen on bass and keyboards. “Kristen was an incredibly driven person,” recalled Breuer. “Whatever she set her mind to, she could accomplish.”
Within a year, Janitor Joe was the talk of the Minnesota music scene. In 1993, the respected indie label Amphetamine Reptile Records released the band’s debut album, 'Big Metal Birds', to great acclaim. Kristen’s musicianship was beginning to attract attention beyond the Minnesota indie scene, but her fame had not changed her gentle personality. “She was the most peaceful, friendly person you could meet,” recalls former Janitor Joe music producer Pat Dwyer. “Kristen had a beautiful presence. And she was one damn talented musician and artist.” One night in 1993, after Janitor Joe finished a gig at a small L.A. club, Eric Erlandson and Courtney Love came backstage and introduced themselves to Kristen. Hole had just signed with Geffen Records, and they were about to head into the studio to record a new album. Their bassist, Leslie Hardy, had recently left the band, and they needed a replacement. Saying they were “blown away” by Kristen’s assertive style, they told her she would be a perfect addition to the group. “She agonized over that decision for a long time,” says her father, Norm Pfaff. “Janitor Joe was just getting rolling, but she recognized the opportunity of being in a successful band on a big label.”
After some convincing, and a generous financial offer, she agreed to join Hole on a temporary basis. “I wish to God she would have never made that move,” says her mother, Janet. “I was totally against it. I never trusted Courtney and Eric. They were deeply into drugs. I thought that Kristen was better off in Minnesota. I tried to convince her not to go, but she didn’t want to let such a big opportunity slip by.” Kristen rented an apartment in Seattle, where the band rehearsed before heading to a studio in Atlanta to record their new album, 'Live Through This'. Before long, Kristen had hooked up with the band’s guitarist, Eric Erlandson, Courtney’s ex-boyfriend, who told friends he was taken with Kristen’s stunning long jet-black hair and striking figure.
Within weeks she became hooked on heroin. Janet tried to persuade her daughter to quit the band and enter a detox center, but there was little she could do with Kristen so far away. Jason, however, saw the depth of his sister’s addiction first-hand: “I think she might have already tried heroin before she met Courtney, but in Seattle, Courtney got her addicted. She would always make sure that Kristen was supplied with as much heroin as she needed. I was there at the time. Kristen had asked me to move to Seattle to be with her for support, so I witnessed a lot of the crazy things that went on. One time, Kristen showed me a purse Courtney gave her. It had needles inside that Courtney had put in it. Courtney and the rest of the band pushed Kristen into drugs beyond control. Of course, Kristen had a mind of her own, so she has to take some of the responsibility.”
According to Kristen’s close friend Kathy Hewitt, Kristen and Courtney got along well at first, but the relationship went rapidly downhill after the band flew to Atlanta to record, Live Through This. Kristen was a formally trained musician with strong opinions about the song arrangements. Courtney could barely play an instrument. Hysterically defensive about her musical abilities, she did not take well to Kristen’s suggestions and threatened to fire her more than once. Hewitt believes Courtney set out to break Kristen emotionally, an experience that left her friend traumatized: “Courtney yelled at Kristen all the time. She wanted to make sure Kristen knew who was boss. I think Kristen thought she was out of control. She said Courtney was the most egomaniacal, insecure and power-hungry person she had ever met. Kristen was interested in making good music.
Courtney was more interested in making headlines for all the crazy stuff she did every day.” To make matters worse, Kristen had established a deep bond with Kurt. They spent hours talking together. As Jason recalls, “Kurt was extremely fond of Kristen. It made Courtney very jealous. Courtney kept a close eye on them. I don’t think that they were involved—in fact, I’m pretty sure they weren’t—but Courtney was jealous because Kristen was so beautiful and smart. And she had a lot in common with Kurt. They used to talk a lot about books, art and music. I don’t think it made Courtney very happy.” Courtney once complained to Jason that Kurt and Kristen were “connecting too much.” Two weeks later, when Kurt gave Kristen a copy of the novelPerfume, Jason says, “Courtney hit the ceiling.” Around Christmas 1993, Kristen broke up with Eric.
The album completed, Kristen moved back to Minneapolis in February to await the start of Hole’s summer tour. It was there that she received the news of Kurt’s death. “She was devastated,” Janet recalls. “It was a big loss for her. She lost someone she really respected. They had a lot in common. It was a big wake-up call for her. Kristen stopped doing drugs the day Kurt died.” Reeling, Kristen entered a Minneapolis detox center and began the job of straightening out her life.
In May, she told the local alternative paper the Minnesota Nightly how happy she was to be home: “I’m really having a great time doing the things I’m doing now here, getting back to friends, playing music together, which I really missed. I couldn’t get going in Seattle because the local scene was so stagnant. There’s a lot more going on in Minneapolis.” Kurt Cobain, she told the interviewer, “broke my heart.”
Meanwhile, she had made the decision to rejoin her old band, Janitor Joe. Revitalized, the Minneapolis band flew to Europe in May for a brief tour. Kristen was adamant she would never go back to Hole. “I met Courtney for the first time at the Phoenix Festival in England in 1993,” says Janet Pfaff. “She was never able to look me in the eye, and I could never figure out why. I thought she was very rude. I never trusted her, and I could see how she treated Kristen. When Kristen told me she was quitting Hole, she told me that she would never rejoin them, no matter how successful the album was. She wasn’t really quitting Hole, she was quitting Courtney. She just couldn’t stand to be around Courtney anymore, especially after Kurt’s death. I think she was scared of her. She wanted to make a new start.” As Kristen told a bandmate: “These people (Hole) are all crazy. Let them find another idiot to play the bass.”
Courtney was livid when she heard the news. 'Live Through This' had just been released to great acclaim, and many critics were crediting Kristen’s bass playing for the band’s unique new sound. She was being hailed as one of the top female rock bassists in the country. “The day Kristen joined Hole is when we took off,” Erlandson toldSpin magazine. “All of a sudden, we became a real band.” To quit just as Hole’s long-anticipated tour was set to begin was to plunge Courtney’s carefully ordered plans into disarray.
Before settling in Minneapolis for good, Kristen made arrangements to visit Seattle one last time—just long enough to clear the things out of her apartment. Janet begged Kristen not to go: “I felt something bad might happen. I just did not want her to go back. I had this strange inner feeling that told me not to let her go. There was just so much I could tell her. It was her decision.” After a week postphoned of the planned travel, Kristen asked her friend Paul Erickson, leader of the Minneapolis band Hammerhead, to come with her and help her move.
They arrived in Seattle on June 14. The next day, Paul and Kristen packed her furniture and other belongings in a U-Haul for the return trip to Minneapolis. They planned to set out the next morning. After Paul finished helping Kristen pack up the U-Haul, he volunteered to spend the night in the truck to guard her belongings from thieves. Sometime that evening, Kristen called her Janitor Joe bandmate Joachim Breuer, who later said that Kristen sounded “as chipper and happy as she’d ever been. She couldn’t wait to get back to Minneapolis.” Around 8:00P.M., Paul left Kristen alone in the apartment so she could take a bath.
As he was sitting in the truck a few minutes later, he saw Eric Erlandson enter the apartment and then leave again roughly half an hour later. Paul returned to the apartment around 9:30 and knocked on the locked bathroom door. He heard Kristen snoring inside. He knew she often fell asleep in the bath, so he returned to the truck to sleep for the night. When Paul awakened the next morning, he returned to the apartment to see if Kristen was ready to hit the road. He discovered the bathroom door still locked. When he knocked and got no response, he kicked down the door. Kristen was kneeling in an inch or two of water in the tub, unconscious. The phone had already been disconnected for the move (phone was cut?) so he rushed to a phone booth around the corner to call 911. She was dead by the time police and paramedics arrived. In a cosmetics bag on the bathroom floor, police found what they described as “syringes and narcotic paraphernalia.”
On June 17, a spokesman for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office declared Kristen’s death accidental; he did not name the person who conducted the autopsy. When we obtained a copy of Kristen’s death certificate, it revealed that the task had been performed by none other than Nikolas Hartshorne, who listed the cause of death as “Acute Opiate Intoxication” caused by an accidental “[injectable] use of drug.” “It seemed clear that the frequently self-destructive grunge music demimonde had claimed another victim,” concluded People magazine, a little out of its depth.
The media were quick to blame the city’s notorious drug culture, but also its take-no-prisoners music scene. Rock stars died, they concluded, case closed. But the fact that the two deaths involved someone close to Courtney wasn’t lost on those who were just beginning to have their doubts about the official verdict in Kurt’s death.
It is a muggy August night in 2003, and we are sitting at the bohemian Higher Ground Café in Buffalo. Janet Pfaff has agreed to discuss her daughter’s death publicly for the first time since Kristen was taken from her nine years ago. She has brought along some Kristen memorabilia: journals, photos and a platinum record presented to her posthumously by Geffen Records, commemorating one million units sold of Hole’s albumLive Through This. Accompanying Janet is Kristen’s twenty-eight-year-old brother, Jason. “I’ll never forget how I found out Kristen died,” Janet says, her voice choking. “I had just come back from the grocery store, and my brother’s car was in the driveway, very unusual for the middle of the afternoon. My brother, Don, came out of the house and told me the news. I kind of fell to the ground. He told me it was an accidental overdose. I just couldn’t believe it. She had gone into rehab and got involved in religion. She stopped using drugs the day Kurt died. I talked to her every day. She said she was happier than ever being off drugs. That’s why I was so shocked that police said she died of a drug overdose. I just didn’t think it was possible because she hadn’t used drugs for so long.” (plus she was determined to stop?? But relapse does happen...)
Janet recalls how Geffen Records relayed a message that the members of Hole would like to attend the funeral. She rejected the request outright. “I don’t know what’s going on in that Seattle scene,” she told People in her only public statement about her daughter’s death at the time. “But something’s wrong, terribly wrong.”
Geffen president Ed Rosenblatt issued a public statement of sympathy: “This is all the more tragic because she had gone through a drug rehabilitation program this past winter. She was in the process of moving back to Minneapolis to be with old friends until the Hole tour resumed.”
Courtney issued her own statement, announcing that Kristen’s death would not force the cancellation of Hole’s upcoming tour: “I’m deeply anguished over Kristen’s death. We are obviously shaken by the tragedies affecting the band in the last months, but have decided to continue on.”
That week, against the family’s explicit instructions, a member of the band did show up at the funeral—Eric Erlandson—who, to the shock of the family and assembled mourners, draped himself over Kristen’s coffin just before it was lowered into the ground. He was immediately escorted out by security staff. An hour later, he showed up at the Pfaff house, looking strung out. They refused to let him in. “He looked like he had done a lot of drugs,” Janet recalls. “I didn’t want a circus, and that’s exactly what he created when he threw himself on her coffin.”
Norm Pfaff had flown to Seattle immediately upon hearing of his daughter’s death; when he arrived, he met with Courtney and the other members of Hole. He later described this meeting to the Seattle Weekly: “There was no sign of the type of remorse you would look for in a person who’d lost someone they cared about. It could have been that Kristen died or somebody missed a bus.” Meanwhile, Courtney had posted a message on an AOL Internet newsgroup about the recent tragedies in her life: “I’m begging you, pray for [Kurt] and Kristen…they hear it I know…. My friend has been robbed of her stellar life. My baby has no dad…. Please pray for Kristen’s mom.” But prayers weren’t going to do it for the Pfaff family. They were already beginning to harbor suspicions about Kristen’s death.
When Janet learned more about Kristen’s time in Seattle, and particularly of Courtney’s virulent jealousy over Kristen’s relationship with Kurt (friendship, but Kurt admired Kristen) she called Seattle police to report her misgivings, only to be rebuffed. Seattle police didn't care for the family and didn't give a fuck about Kristen's case. When a few days after Kristen’s death the Seattle Times asked whether police were looking into the circumstances of Pfaff’s overdose, Captain Dan Bryant of the Narcotics Division told the paper, “Unless we had someone who knew her and was willing to testify and work with us, we really have nowhere to go. We won’t treat this case differently than any other case just because it’s someone with notoriety. 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.” Soon afterward, the Seattle police returned a number of Kristen’s belongings confiscated from her apartment the day her body was found. Among these items was Kristen’s private journal, some of its pages inexplicably torn out. “I don’t know who removed those pages,” Janet says, “but I have my suspicions.” She has brought the journal along but won’t show us its contents. “They’re very personal,” she explains. “I’m still a grieving mother. It’s been so difficult for me and my family to cope with our loss. Maybe when I feel the time is right, I’ll release parts of her journal for the sake of her fans. Her death was very hard on them, too. I received messages of condolence from all over the world.” She does, however, consent to show us the very last words Kristen had entered before her death: “I’ll write it on my sleeve—I know how to live.” “That does not sound like someone who wanted to die,” Janet says. “We had made plans to go back to Europe together so Kristen could show me all the great places she saw when she was on her last tour with Janitor Joe a couple of weeks before she died. That’s one of the reasons I’m suspicious. She had been off drugs for so long. Why would she all of a sudden start doing drugs again the night she was leaving Seattle?”
Janet:“Originally, I had some doubts of my own about whether Kristen really died of an accidental overdose. I also wondered if she might have been murdered. But emotionally, I just wasn’t equipped to deal with that possibility, so I kind of let it go. At the time, the Seattle police convinced me that there wasn’t any reason to investigate because they told me there weren’t any signs of foul play.” But the missing journal pages rekindled her doubts, and when she learned that Nikolas Hartshorne had conducted the autopsy ( same coroner who did the autopsy op Cobain and was personally very close with Kurt and Courtney, loved music himself) it was no longer possible to ignore them. “It concerns me and my family greatly that Dr. Hartshorne did the autopsy,” says Janet. “I’ve heard all about his close friendship with Courtney. It’s a conflict of interest. It scares me. I don’t want to accuse anybody of anything, but I have my concerns.” Meanwhile, Tom Grant was having doubts of his own: “It seems that everyone who tries to get away from Courtney does not live to tell about it. Kurt wanted a divorce, and he dies. Kristen wanted to get away from Courtney, and she dies. Their deaths both involved lethal amounts of heroin.”
Finally, after some convincing, he takes out a tape from a conversation he had with Courtney about Kristen’s death on October 1, 1994. On the tape, Courtney is discussing Kristen’s drug use: “When Kristen did drugs for several months, she had always done cocaine with her heroin. I didn’t even know about the problem until she ntered rehab. I knew that she had done drugs a few times before she came to town. I knew that she partied. I think it’s called totally self-destructive. I know what it is. It’s fucking trying to kill yourself, or numb yourself. Partying?? Please. She only did heroin.” Courtney proceeds to talk about what she knows about the events on the night of Kristen’s death. She reveals that Eric had visited the apartment that night on his way to a date with Drew Barrymore and found Paul Erickson there.
Kristen was already sleeping in the bathtub, she says, when Eric arrived. “Eric’s like, ‘I heard her snoring, I heard her breathing. I thought if they were breathing, they were OK.’ ” At this point in the conversation, Grant says, “Eric’s the one who heard her snoring?” “Yeah, it never gets attributed in the press, but I know exactly what happened that night,” she replies. Grant asks where Kristen’s friend Paul Erickson was when Eric was listening at the door. “He was in the apartment. It was a one-room apartment…. Eric said, ‘I’m going to go on a date. If she’s not out in twenty minutes, call my machine. I’ll check it.’ And then Paul goes to sleep. He wakes up at 9:30, and she’s dead. Paul went to sleep at 9:00 P.M?? I’m sorry, but people in rock bands don’t go to sleep that early.”? Then, bizarrely, Courtney begins to talk about Nikolas Hartshorne, who had conducted Kristen’s autopsy: “I’m going to say one thing. Nikolas, my rock-and-roll medical examiner, he did say one weird thing. He goes, ‘God, she’s pretty.’ This is a dead person he’s talking about! ‘God, she’s pretty.’ ” Two months later, Courtney was asked about Kristen’s death during an interview with David Fricke of Rolling Stone. In this interview, published December 15, 1994, she claims that she was actually at Kristen’s apartment the morning the body was found: “I had to go over there and get Eric away from the body,” she tells Fricke. “Kristen was his lover for a really long time."
When later interviewed, Reflecting on his role as the last person to see Pfaff before her fatal heroin overdose, Eric Erlandson confessed:
"I admit, I made some stupid mistakes with some people, and people are dead because of my stupid mistakes. That's what I want to say. And I want to use that so that other people don't make the same mistakes that I made, and other people start understanding. I get emotional about this. We've all lost people."
(her mother Janet's book about her daughter's life and it contained excerpts from Kristen's diary; Unfinished Rhapsody: The Other Side of Fame)
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