The mysterious death of Kristen Pfaff: was the Hole bassist murdered?
The story of how a bright, personable student from a private school could cross the divide and go on to be the driving force in one of rock’s most influential bands would usually be compelling enough on its own. Yet, due to the circumstances of her death, the tale of Kristen Pfaff sparks fascination as it affords a different dimension to her character and undeniably brilliant bass work. Notably, she played an influential role in Hole taking it up a gear, but tragically, like many others of her generation, she succumbed to heroin use.
By all accounts, Pfaff was a warm personality who naturally magnetised people around her. After graduating, she lived in Minneapolis and taught herself how to play bass, picking it up quickly. She then formed Janitor Joe in 1991 with Joachim Breuer and Matt Entsminger. It was playing in this outfit that led her to join Hole.
A couple of years later, after Janitor Joe started touring nationally, Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson and frontwoman Courtney Love scouted Pfaff. They were looking for a new bassist following the acrimonious departure of Jill Emery over artistic disputes. Pfaff declined the initial invitation and returned to her creative sanctuary in Minneapolis, but the Hole duo knew they had found the perfect member.
They’d already recruited drummer Patty Schemel and needed the right four-string whizz for the new era. Pfaff would eventually accept their offer after her father, Norman, advised that it was the right career step to join a group further up the pyramid that had amassed a healthy audience with their debut Pretty on the Inside. However, her mother, Janet, was less sure about the move. Unfortunately, her reservations would play out in the gravest of ways.
In 1993, Pfaff moved to the centre of the era’s musical universe, Seattle, Washington, to link up with Hole and release their major label debut, 1994’s Live Through This. According to Erlandson, it was after they hired her that Hole kicked into gear and, in his own words, “became a real band”. Spawning the alt-rock classics ‘Miss World’, ‘Doll Parts’ and ‘Violet’, this is the record many deem the group’s masterpiece, underpinned by the assertive bass work of Pfaff.
During her time in Seattle, Pfaff not only created an era-defining album with Hole but also entered into an intense relationship with Erlandson and became great friends with Love’s husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Although the bassist and Erlandson’s split during the album’s production affected the band, they remained close afterwards. This period was marred by substance abuse in the group, particularly on Schemel and Pfaff’s parts, who would secretly take copious amounts of narcotics.
Although Pfaff is reported to have dabbled in drugs when in Minneapolis, the scene she found in Seattle was utterly different, with heroin rife. Many of her friends and peers there were addicts. Accounts even state that despite her engaging in drug binges with Schemel, Pfaff’s use was moderate in comparison to that of some of those she came into contact with. According to Erlandson, Pfaff’s heroin use arose out of feeling disconnected in the new city and the new ‘friends’ she made. He maintains he told her not to use it, telling SPIN: “The only way you can survive in this town is if you don’t make those connections.”
In February 1994, Pfaff returned to Minneapolis to enter rehab for her heroin addiction after already suffering a near-fatal overdose. In the spring, she quit Hole due to the widening gulf between her and Love, who was supposedly angered by her friendship with Cobain. Instead, Pfaff went on tour with Janitor Joe. After the stint with her old friends, she planned to return to Seattle to collect her stuff and move back to Minneapolis, which she missed dearly. She was also profoundly distraught by the suicide of fellow heroin user Cobain in April of that year.
Pfaff initially planned to return to Seattle on June 14th, 1994. Allegedly, her mother felt uneasy about her returning to such a dark place, so she made plans with her cousin, a security guard, to chaperone her. However, the tour with Janitor Joe was extended by a week, so he couldn’t make it.
Instead, Pfaff asked her friend, Paul Erickson, to go to Seattle with her. They arrived on June 15th, packed her possessions into a trailer, and prepared to hit the road back East the following day. Erickson even slept in the car to fend off any potential robberies because they were a local issue. That night, she is reported as calling her Janitor Joe bandmates and being cheerful, glad to be leaving the city forever. Erickson later recalled seeing Erlandson enter the apartment at 8.30pm and leave roughly 30 minutes later. After the guitarist left, Erickson checked on Pfaff, and after he knocked, he could hear her snoring in the locked bathroom – very typical for her according to her family – so he went to sleep himself.
The following morning, when Erickson checked on Pfaff, he found the bathroom door was still locked. There was no reply from his friend, so he broke down the door and found her unresponsive in a shallow pool of water. He called 911, but by the time the paramedics arrived, she was declared dead, aged just 27. On the floor, a cosmetic bag containing drug paraphernalia and syringes was found by the investigating law enforcement. Her death was later confirmed to have been from “acute opiate intoxication”.
Yet, much conjecture surrounds Pfaff’s death. Most of this can be attributed to her mother, Janet’s position in the 2004 book Love and Death, wherein she maintains that she does not believe the official account. A controversial tome written by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace, it claims that Cobain was murdered, perhaps at the orders of his wife, and is a successor to their divisive 1998 book on the matter.
In light of Pfaff being supposedly clean, Janet’s assertions make some sense. To her, it’s something of a locked room mystery, and at the time, she pushed for the death to be investigated as a homicide, but the police expressed there was no evidence for it. According to some fans, though, strange aspects arose during the investigation. Not only was Pfaff apparently clean in the run-up to her death, but her journal was also found at the apartment with pages ripped out of it.
What’s even more strange is that the coroner who conducted the autopsy, Dr Nikolas Hartshorne, was apparently a close friend of Love’s and also headed up Cobain’s postmortem. Janet would say in Love and Death that this constituted a major “conflict of interest”, and although she didn’t want to accuse anyone of anything, she did have her “concerns”. Norman also maintained that Kristen was not a drug addict at the time of her death and was determined to get clean. Friends and staffers at Hole’s label Geffen have corroborated this.
For those wishing to buy into this conspiracy theory, the most significant inference of skullduggery is that Pfaff’s death didn’t get total coverage because a few days before she died, a policeman, Antonio Terry, was gunned down in the middle of the night. This seemingly unconnected crime occurred when Terry stopped to help what appeared to be two stranded motorists, who were actually criminals who shot and killed him. According to the Love and Death authors – who readers believe at their own discretion – when they examined the missing person report filed days before Cobain’s body was found, Terry’s name was listed on it, as he worked in the narcotics squad.
It’s a strange coincidence, but given the heartfelt statements about her death, it seems that Pfaff’s death was nothing more than a tragic accident. However, those who believe the world is not rudderless might find significance in the ostensibly peculiar circumstances surrounding the bassist’s passing.