Tom Grant (private investigator)
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Tom Grant is a private investigator known for his involvement in high-profile cases involving celebrity clients. Grant owns and operates his own detective agency, The Grant Company.
Grant joined the Los Angeles Police Department in 1969 and within a few years had been promoted to Detective. However, Grant left the Department in 1975 to work as a security consultant. Eventually, Grant obtained his private investigator's license and opened his own agency in Beverly Hills, California.
[edit] The Cobain Case
Grant rose to national prominence in late 1994 when he claimed that rock musician Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the popular band Nirvana, had not committed suicide, as was the official police conclusion, but in fact been murdered. On 1 April 1994, Cobain had escaped from a drug rehab center in Marina Del Rey, California. Shortly afterwards, Cobain's wife Courtney Love hired Grant to locate him. Grant flew to Seattle, Washington to search the Cobain home with Cobain's friend Dylan Carlson. Grant and Carlson searched the house starting at 2 am on April Seventh. They then returned the evening of the same day, only to find a note left by Cobains nanny. The next day Cobain's dead body was discovered by an electrician. Cobain was found dead the next morning, 8 April 1994 in the house's greenhouse, one of the only areas Grant and Carlson did not search.
While police quickly came to the conclusion that Cobain had committed suicide, Grant instead launched his own investigation, and eventually came to believe that Cobain had instead been murdered, and that Cobain's wife, Courtney Love, and their male nanny Michael Dewitt were somehow involved.
Grant has since launched somewhat of a crusade to prove his case. He runs an Internet website, CobainCase.com, which presents an overview of the evidence supporting Grant's murder theory. The website also sells "case manuals" containing detailed evidence, including audio recordings of Courtney Love, her lawyer Rosemary Carroll, and the aforementioned house search with Dylan Carlson.
Grant's theory claims that the amount of heroin found in Cobain's bloodstream was three times a lethal dose for even a toleranced addict like Cobain. Grant also questions the labelling of the note Cobain left as a "suicide note"; Grant instead believes that it was merely a letter "clearly written to Cobain's fans telling them he was quitting the music business.", with the exception of the last lines, which he believes to have been added by a second hand. Grant also believes Cobain planned to leave his wife Courtney, which, in his opinion, provides for a possible motive.
Grant's crusade has resulted in considerable media coverage; Grant has appeared on the television program Unsolved Mysteries as well as Nick Broomfield's documentary film Kurt and Courtney. Grant also appeared on The Tom Leykis Show, a Los Angeles-based syndicated radio talk show that had generated a large listening audience in Seattle; within days of the appearance, however, Leykis' syndicator, Westwood One, inserted retractions of Grant's claims into a subsequent Leykis broadcast. Grant's efforts have also inspired at least two books on the theory. However, suicide remains the official cause of Cobain's death.
In 1997, Paula Jones hired Grant after suing President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment.
