The 27 Club
00:01 Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,
00:23 this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner, of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew.
00:40 And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place.
00:58 History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. On the afternoon of April 8th, 1994, a reporter from the Associated Press reached Wendy O'Connor at her home in Aberdeen, Washington. Her son's body had been found that morning in a room above the garage of his house in Seattle. She had already heard. What she said to the reporter went out on the wire that night and ran in newspapers across the country the next day. She said that now he had gone and joined that stupid club, and that she told him not to join that stupid club. Kurt Cobain was 27 years old.
01:46 His mother didn't have to explain which club she meant. By the spring of 1994, anyone who followed rock music knew the list. Brian Jones at 27. Jimmy Hendricks at 27. Janice Joplin at 27. Jim Morrison at 27. Four deaths inside two years, a quarter century earlier. and now a fifth name that fit the pattern so cleanly that a grieving mother reached for it on the phone
02:13 with a stranger. 17 years later, in July of 2011, Amy Winehouse was found dead in her bedroom in Camden, North London, and the first thing most of the coverage mentioned was her age. She was 27. The club had a new member, and the idea that there was something about that number, something that reached out and took the gifted young before they got old, was by then, so settled in the culture that a team of statisticians in Australia sat down to test it. That's the question this episode is built around, whether there's anything to it, whether the age
02:50 means something, or whether people noticed a handful of deaths, gave the coincidence a name, and then spent 50 years sorting every new death at that age into a box that was already built. To get there, the deaths themselves have to be looked at one at a time, because the files don't look alike. One of them has a coroner's inquest that returned an open verdict because the witness kept changing her story. One has no autopsy at all because the man died in a country where the law didn't require one. One has a death certificate that sat in a Mississippi courthouse for 30 years before anybody went looking for it. And when they found it, the line for cause of death was blank. And one of them had a police department go back and re-examine the evidence
03:34 20 years later, because people still didn't believe the official finding. Some of this material involves suicide and drug overdose, and I'm going to describe those deaths the way the records describe them. Listener discretion is strongly advised. The club didn't have a name in 1969. It didn't have a name in 1970 or 1971 either. Not one anybody used. The deaths happened, the press noted the ages, and a few writers pointed out the coincidence after Morrison died. The phrase itself came later, and the people who died first had no idea they were starting anything. The first of them was Brian Jones. Jones founded the Rolling Stones. That's not a figure of speech. He placed the advertisement. He put the band together. He picked the
04:24 name, and in the early years, he was the one the photographers went to first. By 1969, he wasn't writing the songs, and he wasn't reliably showing up to play on them, and he had two drug convictions that made it unlikely he'd get a visa to tour the United States. On the 8th of June, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts drove down to his house in Sussex and told him he was out of the band. The public announcement said he'd left by choice over musical differences. Everyone involved later said that wasn't the whole truth. The house was Cotchford Farm, near Hartfield in East Sussex. A.A. Milne had owned it. He wrote the Winnie the Pooh books there, and the garden had a statue of Christopher Robin in it. Jones bought it in 1968 and hired a builder named Frank Thoroughgood to
05:13 renovate it. Thoroughgood was living on the property. On the night of July 2nd, three people were at the house with Jones. Thorogood, Jones's girlfriend Anna Wollon, who was Swedish in 22, and a nurse named Janet Lawson, who was there because she was seeing Tom Keylock, the Stones manager. All four of them had been drinking, and the statements the three survivors gave police agreed that Jones had been drinking heavily. Sometime before midnight, Jones and Thurogood went into the swimming pool. The statements say the two women were inside the house at various points, and that Thurogood left the pool to go inside as well. When Lawson came back out, Jones was at the bottom. Wollin and Thurgood got him out. Lawson, as a nurse, tried to revive him.
05:59 He was dead when the ambulance arrived. The coroner's inquest returned a verdict of death by misadventure. The pathologist found that Jones had drowned under the influence of alcohol and drugs and that his liver and heart were both enlarged from long-term abuse. He had asthma and the inhaler he used was found at the side of the pool. He was 27. The verdict was delivered within days and the police closed the file. He was buried on July 10th in Cheltenham.
06:29 the town where he'd grown up. Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman went to the funeral. Jagger and Richards didn't. Jagger had flown to Australia to start filming a movie about the outlaw Ned Kelly, and that was the reason given. Two days after he died, on July 5th, the Rolling Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park that had already been scheduled as the debut of his replacement, Mick Taylor. They turned it into a memorial. Jagger read a passage from Shelley's poem about the death of Keats. And the band's people released thousands of white butterflies from cardboard boxes. A lot of the butterflies had died in the boxes in the heat and fell straight to the stage. The ones that lived went up over the crowd.
07:11 That's on film, and it's the image most people carry of Brian Jones's death, which is a strange thing when you consider that he isn't in it. The file stayed closed for 25 years. Then, in 1994, two books came out within months of each other that said, the same thing. One was by Terry Rawlings and was called Who Killed Christopher Robin? The other was by Jeffrey Giuliano and was called Paint it Black. Both claimed that Frank Thurogood, dying in a hospital in November of 1993, had confessed to Tom Keylock that he'd killed Jones. Rawlings quoted Keylock, quoting Thurgood. The words attributed to Thurgood were that it was him that did
07:54 Brian, that he'd just finally snapped. That's a deathbed confirmed. That's a deathbed, Fesion reported secondhand by a man with his own history in the story, published after the man who supposedly made it, was dead and couldn't answer. Keelock later denied that the conversation ever happened. He told other interviewers it was true. He died in July of 2009, so he can't clear it up either. The following year, a journalist named Scott Jones, no relation, began working through the original police file and tracking down people who'd been around the house that summer.
08:28 Janet Lawson, the nurse, gave him an interview that the mail on Sunday published in November of 2008, shortly before she died. In it, she said things that weren't in her 1969 statement. She said there'd been tension between Jones and Thurroughgood over the building work and the money. She said that when she came in from the pool calling for help, Thurrowgood initially did nothing. She said that when he did come in, he was shaking badly. She also told Scott Jones she didn't think he'd meant to kill Brian, and that she thought it was horseplay that had gotten out of hand. She said she'd left all of that out of her original statement
09:04 because she was tired, confused, and nervous. I spent 16 years taking statements, and a witness who adds material 40 years later isn't automatically wrong. People do leave things out when they're scared, especially when a famous man has just died in front of them and a builder who works for him is standing in the room. But the statement she gave in 1969 is the one that was closest to the event, and nothing in it mentions a fight, a delay, or a man in a lather.
09:33 The later version has to be weighed against that. Scott Jones turned over roughly 600 pages of documents to Sussex Police in 2009. The force said it would review them. In a later statement, the department said the death had been investigated in 1969 and reviewed in 1984 and again in 1994, and that over the years it had received messages and report, from journalists and other individuals about the case. It reviewed the new material and declined to reopen the investigation. The verdict of misadventure stands.
10:09 Cotchford Farm is still there. It went on the market in 2017, and the listing mentioned the Christopher Robin statue in the garden and the pool, which is the same pool. The estate agent's description led with Nelln and didn't mention Jones. Anna Wollon, the girlfriend who pulled him out of the water, wrote her own book in 1999. She has said in interviews that she believes Thurogood killed him,
10:33 and in a 2013 interview with The Mirror, she said she'd wondered whether Frank meant to do it. Thorogood's own daughter has said her father never confessed to anything. That's where the record sits. Three witnesses, one of whom later changed her account, one of whom has written a book accusing the third, and the third dead for 30 years with a confession attributed to him that the man who reported it both confirmed and denied.
11:01 14 months after Jones, on September 18, 1970, Jimmy Hendricks died in London. He'd been in poor shape for weeks. He was exhausted from touring, he'd been sick, and he was in the middle of a contract dispute with his manager, Michael Jeffrey, that was due to come to a head at the end of the year. His last concert had been on the 6th of September
11:23 at a festival on the island of Femond in northern, in Germany, a day late because of weather, in front of a crowd that had spent the delay fighting with the security. Four days earlier, in Arhus, Denmark, he'd walked off after three songs. On the 16th, two nights before he died, he got up on stage at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho and played a few numbers with Eric Burden's band, War. People who were there have described him as sounding fine. That was the last time he played in public. He had a room booked at the Cumberland Hotel near Marble Arch, but he wasn't sleeping there. He was staying with a German woman named Monica Danaman, a figure skater he'd met in Dusseldorf the year before and reconnected with a few days
12:06 earlier. She was renting a garden flat at the Samarkand Hotel at 22 Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill. The account of his last night comes almost entirely from her, and that's the problem the inquest ran into. The outline she gave was this. On the evening of the 17th, they went to a party at the flat of a man named Pete Cameron, where Hendricks drank wine and took an amphetamine. She picked him up around three in the morning, and they went back to Lansdowne Crescent. They talked, she made him something to eat, and they went to bed around six. She took a sleeping pill. When she woke later that morning, he was still asleep, breathing, and she went out for cigarettes. When she came back, she couldn't waken. There was vomit. She called an ambulance at 1118.
12:53 Hendricks was taken to St. Mary Abbott's Hospital and pronounced dead at 1245 in the afternoon. The postmortem was done by Professor Donald Tier, one of the most experienced forensic pathologist in the country. He found that Hendricks had inhaled his own vomit and died of asphyxia while intoxicated with barbiturates. Daniman told the inquest he'd taken nine of her Vesperac's sleeping tablets. The recommended dose was half a tablet. nine was 18 times that. There were 42 tablets left in the packet, which argued against suicide, since a man trying to die would have had plenty more within reach. The inquest was held on September 28th before Gavin Thurston, the Westminster coroner. Thurston recorded an open verdict.
13:41 He said there wasn't enough evidence to find suicide, and there wasn't enough evidence of the circumstances to find accident either. An open verdict means the coroner couldn't say what. happened. That's the finding, and it has never been replaced. Rolling Stone's report on the inquest noted something that didn't come up in the hearing. Hendricks had written a long poem in the flat sometime in his last day or two, several pages, and Danaman had it. A police spokesman told the magazine afterward that if he'd known about the poem earlier, he could have placed it before the corner. Eric Burden of the Animals, who was a friend, went on television within days of the death and described the poem as a suicide note.
14:22 He later backed away from that. Danaman published it in her own book years afterward and said it was nothing of the kind. Daniman's account of the morning didn't hold still. Over the following years, she gave interviews and eventually wrote a book, and the times moved around. In some versions, she found him still breathing, and in others she found him unresponsive. The timing of her call to the ambulance, whether she rode with him, whether he was a Live when the ambulance crew arrived, all of it shifted.
14:51 Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The two ambulance attendants, Reg Jones and John Sawa, were tracked down by a researcher named Tony Brown in the early 90s for a book on Hendricks' final days. Both men said that when they got to Lansdowne Crescent, the front door of the flat was open, and nobody was inside except the man on the bed.
15:17 They said he was already dead, that there was vomit on him and a bed. on the bedding and that nobody rode to the hospital with them. The doctor who received him at St. Mary Abbott's, John Bannister, told the times in 1992 that Hendricks had been dead for some time when he arrived and that his airway was full of red wine, far more than the stomach would normally hold. Danaman said she was in the flat when the crew came, that Hendricks was alive and that she went with him in the ambulance. The two accounts can't both be right, and the wine in the airway, which no witness has ever accounted for,
15:51 is the detail that keeps the murder theory alive. In 1992, Kathy Etchingham, who'd been Hendricks' girlfriend in London in the late 60s and who'd spent years going through the evidence, asked the British authorities to reopen the inquiry. She'd been the one who found Bannister and got him on the record about the wine,
16:09 and she'd compiled a file of Daniman's contradictions across 20 years of interviews. Scotland Yard looked at the material and interviewed witnesses. In 1993, the Attorney General declined to order a new inquest. Echingham then went after Danaman directly in the courts for things Daneman had published about her. Danaman lost the libel case in April of 1996. Two days after the ruling, she was found dead in her car near her home in Seaford on the Sussex Coast. The coroner's finding was suicide.
16:41 Then there's the murder claim. In 2009, a former roadie named James Tappy Wright published, a memoir called Rock Roady. In it, he says that in 1971, drunk in his apartment, Michael Jeffrey told him that he'd gone to the Samarkand with some people, forced pills and wine into Hendricks, and killed him. Wright says Jeffrey was worried Hendricks was about to leave him when the management contract ran out, and that Jeffrey had a life insurance policy on Hendricks worth $2 million. Jeffrey died in March of 1973 when the plane he was on collided with another aircraft over France. He never answered the accusation because it wasn't made until 36 years after his death.
17:24 Wright's claim has one source, which is right. Nobody who has gone through the inquest material has found anything that corroborates it, and the ambulance crew's account of an empty flat and a man dead on the bed doesn't describe a room where anyone had been restrained. The open verdict is still the official answer, and the honest version is that the last few hours of Jimmy Hendricks' life rest on the word of a woman who told the story several different ways and is no longer alive to be asked which one was true. 16 days later, Janice Joplin was dead in Los Angeles.
18:00 She was in the middle of recording the album that came out the following January as Pearl. She was staying at the landmark motor hotel on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, Room 105, which she liked because the hotel didn't care who came and went. On the evening of October 3rd, she'd been at the studio where the band had cut an instrumental track called Buried Alive in the Blues that she was supposed to add a vocal to the next day. She left, went to a bar called Barney's Beinery, had a couple of drinks, and went back to the hotel. When she didn't show up at the studio on the 4th, her road manager, John Byrne Cook, drove to the landmark. He found her on the floor beside the bed late that afternoon. She had been dead for hours.
18:42 The Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi ruled that she died of an accidental overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the alcohol in her system, sometime in the early hours of the morning. There was a story that went around at the time, repeated by people in her circle, that the heroin she bought that week was unusually pure, and that other customers of the same dealer overdosed the same weekend. That claim has been printed many times, and I haven't seen it tied to a police record or a coroner's file. It may be true. It's also the kind of thing people say after a death like this one, because it moves some of the weight off the person who died.
19:21 She had written a will. In it, she'd set aside $2,500 for a party for her friends after she was gone. They held it at the lion's share in San Anselmo, California, on October 26th. The invitation said, drinks were on Pearl. Pearl came out in January of 1971 with the instrumental still on it. vocal under the title Buried Alive in the Blues because there was nobody left to sing it. The producer, Paul Rothschild, who'd made the first Five Doors albums, finished it with what he had. Me and Bobby McGee, a Chris Christopherson song she'd cut earlier in the sessions, went to number one that March. It was the only number one single she ever had, and she'd been dead five months
20:06 when it got there. Two months before she died, she'd gone back to Port Arthur, Texas for her 10th high school reunion. She'd been on the Dick Cavett show a few weeks earlier and said on the air that she was going and that the people at Thomas Jefferson High had laughed her out of class and out of town. And now she was going to go back and see them. Local reporters covered it. The footage that survives shows her at a press table in Port Arthur, answering questions about whether she'd been popular in school and saying that she hadn't been. That's two in 16 days. The newspapers put the ages side by side, and the musicians who knew both of them said the thing people say. In Aberdeen, Washington, Kurt Cobain was three years old.
20:50 The fourth death took longer, and it's the one with the least paperwork. Jim Morrison moved to Paris in March of 1971. The Doors had finished recording L.A. Woman, and he'd left the band with the understanding that he might come back and might not. He'd gained weight, he'd grown a full beer, he'd been convicted in Miami the previous year of indecent exposure and profanity at a concert, and that case was on appeal. He wanted to write. Pamela Corson, who he'd been with on and off since 1965, went with him. They rented an apartment on the fourth floor at 17 Rue Bautreille in the Moray. The last person outside the apartment known to have spent time with him was Alain Rone,
21:34 a friend from his film school days at UCLA, who was living in Paris. Ronee wrote a name account of it for Paris match in 1991, 20 years later. He said he and Morrison spent the afternoon of July 2nd walking around the Moray, that Morrison had a persistent cough and was bringing up blood, and that he'd complained of hiccups he couldn't shake. Ronae said he left him at the apartment that evening. The filmmaker Agnes Varda, who Rone was living with, was one of the handful of people at the burial five days later. On the morning of July 3rd, Corson found him in the bathtub. She called for help. A doctor named Max Vassil came to the apartment and pronounced him dead.
22:15 The certificate Vassil signed gave the cause as heart failure. Under French law, there was no requirement for an autopsy if the attending physician saw no sign of foul play, and Vassil saw none. No autopsy was done. He was buried at Pellichet's Cemetery on July 7th. Five people were at the graveside. The band's manager, Bill Siddons, had flown over from Los Angeles. Angeles after Corson called him. By the time he arrived, the body was in a sealed
22:43 coffin and he didn't see it. The death wasn't announced publicly until July 9th, by which point Morrison had been in the ground for two days. He was 27. A sealed coffin, no autopsy, a six-day gap, and a heart attack in a 27-year-old. The rumors started almost immediately and have never stopped. For years there were people who believed he wasn't dead at all, and the band's own press people did nothing to discourage it because the story sold records. The version that has the most people behind it is a heroin overdose. Corson was a heroin user, and several people who knew the couple in Paris have said Morrison had started using it that spring. In 2007, a man named Sam Burnett published a book in France.
23:32 Burnett had been the manager of a club called the Rock and Roll Circus. He wrote that on the night of July 2nd, Morrison came into the club, went into the bathroom with heroin he'd bought from two dealers, and was found dead on the toilet. According to Burnett, the two dealers carried the body out, took it back to the apartment, and put it in the bathtub so it would look like he died at home. Burnett said he'd kept quiet for 36 years. That's an eyewitness claim, published decades later by a man who had reason to want his club's name out of a death investigation in 1971. It hasn't been confirmed by anyone else who was supposedly there. The two dealers have never been identified publicly. One name does keep coming up. In 2014, Marianne Faithful told Mojo
24:19 magazine that her boyfriend at the time, a French aristocrat and dealer named Jean de Bretoi, had gone to see Morrison that night and come back frightened, and that she believed Debritoi had supplied the heroin that killed him. She said she'd stayed at the hotel and taken a sleeping pill, because she didn't want to be around it. De Britoi left Paris for Morocco within days. He died of an overdose in Tangier later that year. Faithful's account puts the drugs in the apartment, which contradicts Burnett's version of a death in the club bathroom,
24:50 and neither of them can be checked against a body that was never examined. Corson, who was the only other person known to have been in the apartment that morning, told different people different things in the years that followed, and never gave a formal account. She didn't get the chance to. Pamela Corson died in Los Angeles on April 25th, 1974 of a heroin overdose. She was 27. The grave itself has had a rough 50 years. In 1981, a Croatian sculptor named Mladen Mikulin placed a bust of Morrison on it for the 10th anniversary. Visitors chipped at it and painted it, and in 1988, somebody stole it outright. It's never been recovered. The cemetery,
25:33 eventually posted a guard at the plot because the graffiti was spreading to the tunes around it, which belonged to families who had nothing to do with any of this. The marker on Morrison's grave has been replaced more than once. The current one was placed by his father, George Morrison, a retired rear admiral in the United States Navy in 1990. It carries a line in Greek that the family chose, which translates roughly as, true to his own spirit, though the Greek can also be read as, true to his own demon, and both readings have been argued over ever since. Four deaths in two years. All four at the same age. Jones in a swimming pool with a verdict
26:15 of misadventure. Hendrix in a rented flat with an open verdict. Joplin in a motel with a ruling of accidental overdose. Morrison in a bathtub with a certificate that says heart failure and nothing underneath it. Writers noticed. Articles in 1971, pointed out the coincidence of the ages, and the phrase 27 club shows up in print here and there through the 70s and 80s. But it wasn't a fixed idea. There was no agreed list and no sense that the number itself carried anything. If you asked a rock fan in 1985 to name the connection between those four deaths, the first answer would have been drugs. The second would have been the era, and the age would have come third, if it came up at all. Other musicians died at 27 in those
27:02 years, and nobody filed them anywhere. Two weeks before Hendricks, on September 3rd, 1970, Alan Wilson of Canned Heat, the singer and harmonica player known as Blind Owl, was found dead on a hillside behind bandmate Bob Heights House in Topanga Canyon with a bottle of barbiturates. The coroner called it accidental. People who knew him have said he'd talked about suicide. He was 27. In March of 1973, Ron McCurman, who everyone called Pigpen, the original keyboard player and blues singer of the Grateful Dead was found dead by his landlady in Cordomadera, California of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage from years of drinking. He was 27. In 1975, Pete Hamm of Badfinger hanged himself in his garage in Surrey three days before his
27:50 28th birthday. Badfinger had been signed to the Beatles label, had four-hit singles, and had written without you, which Harry Nilsson took to number one. And yet, the band's money had gone into an escrow arrangement controlled by their American manager Stan Polly and the members couldn't get at it. Ham's note named Polly and called him a soulless bastard. Eight years later, his bandmate Tom Evans, who'd co-written without you with him, hanged himself in his own garden, in part over the same money. In 1978, Chris Bell of Big Star drove his car into a utility pole in Memphis at two in the morning.
28:26 27. Both of them. None of those names went into the club at the time. because at the time the club wasn't a thing you could join. It was a coincidence some people had noticed. What turned it into something else was a death in Seattle in 1994, and the single fact that made that death different from all the others was that this time the dead man had known about the list. The last five weeks of Kurt Cobain's life
28:53 are documented more thoroughly than any other death in this episode, because by 1994, a famous musician in crisis was surrounded by people, people writing things down. On March 4th, in a suite at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome, Courtney Love woke to find him unconscious on the floor. He'd taken a large number of rohypnal tablets with champagne. He was in a coma for most of a day. The band's management told the press it was an accidental overdose, and that's what the newspapers printed. Love later said there was a note, and the people who saw it have described it as a suicide side note. Nirvana's European tour was canceled, and he went home to Seattle.
29:33 On March 18th, Seattle police were called to the house at 171 Lake Washington Boulevard East. Love had reported that he'd locked himself in a room with a gun. Officers took four guns and a bottle of pills out of the house. He told them he wasn't suicidal and that he'd locked the door to get away from her. On March 25th, Love, his bandmates, his management, and a counselor held an intervention at the house. He walked out of it. He agreed, after more pressure, to go into treatment, and on March 30th, he flew to Los Angeles and checked into the Exodus Recovery Center in Marina Del Rey. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Earlier that same day, before the flight, he'd gone with his friend Dylan Carlson to Stan Baker
30:24 Sports on Lake City Way in Seattle, and Carlson had bought a Remington 20-gauge shotgun and a box of shells. Carlson said later that Cobain told him he wanted it for protection and had asked Carlson to make the purchase because the police had just taken his guns and he thought they'd take this one too. He was at Exodus for about a day and a half. On the evening of April 1st, he told staff he was going out to smoke, walked to the back of the property, climbed a six-foot fence, and left. He took a taxi to the airport and flew to Seattle on a flight that, by coincidence, also had Duff McCagan of Guns and Roses on it. McCaghan has said they talked and that Cobain seemed in bad shape, but didn't say anything about what he intended. Love, still in Los Angeles, canceled his credit cards and on April 3rd hired a private investigator named Tom Grant to find him. Grant and Carlson went through the house on the night of April 7th and didn't check the greenhouse above the garage.
31:22 Nobody did. On the morning of April 8th, an electrician named Gary Smith arrived to install security lighting. He went up the exterior stairs to the greenhouse to work and looked through the glass. He saw a body on the floor, a shotgun, and, as he told the dispatcher, a lot of blood. He called the police, and then, before they arrived, called the radio station KXRX, which is how the city learned before the medical examiner did. The King County Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide by a self-inflicted shotgun wound and estimated that he died on April 5th.
32:00 The toxicology found heroin in his blood at a level of 1.52 milligrams per liter, along with diazepam. A note was found in the room, written in red ink, addressed to Boda, a name he'd used as a child for an imaginary friend. A pen was pushed through the paper into the soil of a planter to hold it in place. Most of the note is about music. He wrote that he hadn't felt the excitement of listening to or making music for too many years, that he felt guilty beyond words about it,
32:31 and that the worst crime he could think of was to fake it and pretend he was having a hundred percent fun. He wrote that he was too much of an erratic, moody baby and didn't have the passion anymore. Near the end, he borrowed a line from a Neil Young song about burning out being better than fading away. The last lines were addressed to love and to their daughter Francis, who was 20 months old. Those lines are in a different, larger hand than the rest, and they're the part of the note that the people who dispute the finding have focused on ever since. He was 27. Nirvana had played its last concert in Munich on March 1st. The finding of suicide has been challenged almost continuously since 1994, and most of that challenge traces to Tom Grant, the investigator
33:17 her love hired, who concluded within weeks that she'd had him killed and has spent 30 years saying so. The arguments he and others make are that the heroin level was too high for anyone to have been able to work a shotgun afterward, that there were no legible fingerprints on the gun, that the handwriting at the bottom of the note looked different from the top, and that the gun had been bought by someone else. Grant has also pointed to the fact that he and Carlson were in the house two nights before the body was found, and nobody suggested checking the room above the garage. The journalist Charles Cross, who wrote the biography heavier than Heaven in 2001 and went through the police file and the medical examiner's records, came down on the other side of all of it.
34:01 His reading of the note is that the body of it is a letter to his fans explaining why he was leaving the band, and that the closing lines to his wife and daughter were added afterward, which would account for the change in the handwriting. the Seattle Police reached the same conclusion about the note. Grant has never accepted that, and the two readings have been sitting across from each other for 30 years. In 2014, ahead of the 20th anniversary, the Seattle Police Department assigned a cold case detective named Mike Sosensky
34:31 to go back through the file. He found four roles of film from the scene that had never been developed. He had them developed and released a number of the images. He reviewed the evidence and concluded that nothing in it changed the file. finding. On the heroin, the department's position was that tolerance in a long-term user makes a blood level meaningless as a measure of what a person could or couldn't do. On the fingerprints, that a shotgun held with sweaty hands in a room of a certain humidity may not retain any, which is routine. The case was not reopened. I've been in rooms like that one.
35:05 The amount of blood an electrician saw through the glass is consistent with what a 20-gauge does at contact range and tells you nothing about who pulls. the trigger. The note, the prior attempt in Rome, the police call on March 18th, the walk over the fence at Exodus, and the gun purchased the same morning line up in one direction. People who don't accept the finding have to explain all of those things with a single alternative. And so far, nobody has produced one that holds together. That's not a verdict on what Cobain was going through, which I can't know. It's an opinion about the evidence, and the evidence is heavy on one side. Two months later, on June 16, 1994, Kristen Faf, the bass player in Courtney Love's band Hull,
35:51 was found dead in the bathtub of her Seattle apartment with a syringe and heroin paraphernalia in a cosmetic bag beside her. The medical examiner ruled it an accidental overdose. She'd packed up her apartment and was supposed to drive to Minneapolis the next day to get out of Seattle. She was 27. Her death and Cobains are 69 days apart. in the same city, in the same circle of people from the same drug. That's not a pattern. That's one city's heroin supply in the spring of 1994
36:23 and two people who were in the middle of it. After 1994, the club stopped being a coincidence writers mentioned and became a thing with a membership. The phrase, Forever 27, started showing up on t-shirts and posters with the five faces on them. In 2008, a writer named Eric Segelstad published a book called The 27s, which went through 34 musicians who died at that age, and, in its later chapters, started looking at astrology and numerology for an explanation. Websites kept running
36:55 lists. The ages of dead musicians got checked, and anyone who died at 27 got sorted in, including people who died before anyone was counting. That's how Robert Johnson joined. Johnson died on August 16, 1938, near Greenwood, Mississippi. He was a blues singer and guitarist who'd recorded 29 songs in two sessions, the first in a hotel room in San Antonio in November of 1936, and the second in a Dallas office building the following June for a producer named Don Law. Terraplane Blues sold a few thousand copies in the South, which was a respectable number for a race record.
37:35 The rest sold less. There are two confirmed photographs of him. He wasn't famous. When the record producer John Hammond tried to find him that fall to bring him to New York for a concert at Carnegie Hall, he learned Johnson was already dead. When Alan Lomax went to Mississippi in 1941 to record him, he hadn't heard either. No newspaper reported the death. The story that circulated among the musicians who'd known him,
38:01 told most often by the blues player David Honeyboy Edwards, was that Johnson had been poisoned by a jealous husband at a juke joint outside Greenwood where he'd been plunning. that he'd been handed a bottle of whiskey that had been opened, and that he'd gotten sick and died over several days. Edwards told it for 60 years. Sunny Boy Williamson told a version in which he'd knocked the first bottle out of Johnson's hand, and Johnson had taken the second. The versions don't agree on details,
38:28 and none of the people telling them saw him die. In 1968, a record collector and researcher from Mississippi named Gail Dean Wardlow went into the state's vital records looking for pre-year-old. that Johnson had existed. He found the death certificate. It gave the date and the place. Where the cause of death should have been, it said no doctor. There had been no examination. A dead black field hand on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta in 1938 got a certificate so the county could close the book and nothing more. On the back of the certificate was a handwritten note by the county registrar. It said the plantation owner, a man named Luther Wade,
39:10 hadn't called a doctor for the man because the man hadn't worked for him. It also said it was Wade's opinion that he died of syphilis. So the only medical opinion on record about the death of Robert Johnson belongs to a plantation owner who hadn't employed him and hadn't had him examined. Wardlow and his co-author, Bruce Conforth, in their 2019 biography, proposed that if Johnson was poisoned, the substance was likely naphthalene from dissolved mothballs, which was something people in the Delta put in whiskey to make it burn, and which can cause a death over days that looks like what Edwards described.
39:46 That's a hypothesis built on folk practice and the symptoms in the oral accounts. There's nobody to test, and never was. There are three gravestones for Robert Johnson in LaFleur County, Mississippi. One at Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, placed in 1990 by Columbia Records. One at Payne Chapel in Kito, placed by a band, from Atlanta. One at Little Zion Church north of Greenwood, placed in 2002 after a woman named Rosie Eskridge told Wardlow and another researcher that she'd watched her husband dig the grave there in 1938. Nobody knows which, if any, is right. What made him matter came 23 years after
40:28 he died. In 1961, Columbia Records put 16 of the recordings on an album called King of the Delta of blues singers, with a painting on the cover because nobody at the label had a photograph. The album sold slowly in America and found its way to England, where a generation of teenagers who'd never been south of London learned the songs off it. The Rolling Stones recorded two of them. Eric Clapton recorded Crossroads with Cream and has said in interviews that he considers Johnson the most important blues musician who ever lived. By the time the complete recordings came out on compact disc in 1990 and sold half a million copies. Johnson was a bigger name than he'd ever been alive, and the whole where the biography
41:11 should have been had filled up with legend. He was 27 when he died. Nobody in 1938 thought that meant anything, because nobody in 1938 thought his death meant anything. He was added to the list in the 90s, when the list existed and people went looking for members, and he's now the one the whole thing is supposed to have started with. man who sold his soul at the Crossroads and died at 27 for it. The Crossroads story was told about other bluesmen first, including Tommy Johnson, no relation,
41:44 who told it about himself. It got attached to Robert in the 60s by writers who'd heard the records and never met him. The list kept growing because people kept dying in their 20s. Jesse Belvin, who wrote Earth Angel and had a hit with Good Night My Love, died on February 6th, in a head-on crash outside Hope, Arkansas, driving away from a show in Little Rock that had been one of the first integrated concerts in the city. He was 27. There was talk afterward that the car's tires had been tampered with by someone angry about the show, and that talk has never been settled either way. Rudy Lewis, lead singer of the drifters, was found dead in a Harlem hotel room on May 20, 1964, the night before the band was due to record under the boardwalk.
42:33 The cause was reported as a drug overdose, though the record is thin. He was 27. Johnny Moore sang the song the next morning in his place. Dave Alexander, the original bass player in the Stooges, died of pulmonary edema in Ann Arbor in February of 1975. D. Boone of the Minutemen was thrown from the back of a van on an Arizona highway in December of 1985. Mia Zapata, the singer of the Seattle band The Gitts, was raped and murdered walking home in July of 1993. The case went unsolved for 10 years until a DNA match
43:10 led to a man named Jesus Mesquia, who was convicted in 2004. Richie Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers walked out of a London hotel on February 1st, 1995, and his car was found two weeks later at a service area beside the Severn Bridge. He was declared presumed dead in 2008. All of them. 27. The club also pulled in people who weren't musicians. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the painter, died of a heroin overdose in his studio on Great Jones Street in Manhattan in August of 1988 at 27. The actor Anton Yelchen was crushed against a brick pillar at his own home in Studio
43:50 City in June of 2016 when his Jeep rolled down the driveway. He was 27. The gear selector on that model was the subject of a recall. Every one of those deaths has its own file and its own cause. A head-on collision, a murder, a recall, a disease of the liver, a van. What they share is a number, and the number is the only reason they're in the same paragraph. Amy Winehouse was the death that made the idea a headline. By 2011, she'd been the most photographed addict in Britain for about four years.
44:27 Back to Black came out in October of 2006 and became the biggest selling album in the country the following year. In February of 2008, she won five Grammys in one night, performing by satellite from a studio in London because the American Embassy hadn't granted her a visa in time. Her father, Mitch Winehouse, told reporters later that year that doctors had found the early signs of emphysema in her lungs and warned her about crack cocaine. Her marriage to Blakefield or Civil, who was in prison, prison for most of 2008 on an assault charge, ended in divorce in 2009. By her own account and her families, the hard drugs stopped around then. The drinking didn't. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Her last public performance was in Belgrade
45:18 on June 18th, 2011. She was visibly drunk, couldn't remember lyrics, and was booed. The rest of the tour was canceled. She went home to the house at 30 Camden Square. in North London, where she lived with a bodyguard named Andrew Morris. What happened over the next five weeks came out at the inquest, and then at the second inquest, which is a story in itself. Her doctor, Christina Romette, told the court that Winehouse had stopped drinking in early July and stayed off it for about three weeks. Romette said she'd been treating her for alcohol withdrawal and had repeatedly warned her that drinking at the level she drank could kill her. Winehouse had refused.
46:00 psychiatric help, telling her doctor she was afraid it would interfere with her creativity. Then, a few days before her death, she started again. Romet saw her at the house on the evening of July 22nd. She described her as tipsy, but able to hold a conversation. Winehouse told her that she did not want to die. Morris checked on her around 10 that night and again at 2 in the morning. Both times, he said, she was in her bedroom and he could hear her. He looked in again around three the next afternoon and found her on the bed not breathing.
46:34 Two empty vodka bottles were on the floor. Paramedics arrived and pronounced her dead at the scene. The pathologist found no illegal drugs in her system. The blood alcohol level was 416 milligrams per 100 milliliters. The legal limit for driving in Britain is 80. The pathologist told the court that levels above 350 are commonly associated with death. death. The first inquest was held on October 26, 2011, and the deputy coroner, Suzanne Greenaway, recorded a verdict of death by misadventure from alcohol toxicity. A month later, Greenaway resigned.
47:14 An inquiry had found that she'd been appointed to the job in 2009 by her husband, Andrew Reed, who was the coroner for inner north London, and that she didn't meet the requirement of five years as a qualified lawyer in Britain. She'd practiced in Australia. Reed resigned as well. Every inquest Greenaway had conducted was open to challenge, and the Winehouse one was redone. The second inquest was held on January 8, 2013, at St. Pancras Coroner's Court before Dr. Shirley Radcliffe. The same evidence was heard. Radcliffe reached the same verdict, Misadventure, and said that Winehouse had voluntarily consumed alcohol in a deliberate act that took an unexpected turn and caused her death.
47:57 The family said they hadn't asked for the second hearing and didn't blame anyone. The mechanism, as the doctors explained it, was that three weeks of abstinence had brought her tolerance down, and that when she went back to drinking at the volume she'd drunk before, her body couldn't handle what it used to. That's a known pattern in alcohol deaths and in overdoses generally. It's the same thing that kills people coming out of jail and out of rehab. The period of sobriety that was supposed to save her is part of what the coroner found killed. her. Her brother Alex added something in 2013 that wasn't in either inquest. He told the observer that he believed bulimia, which she'd had since her teens, was what actually killed her,
48:40 because years of it had left her body too weak to survive what the alcohol did. That's his opinion, offered as a family member and not as a finding. The coroner's verdict stayed as it was. She was 27, and the coverage led with it. The Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Assangellors, Associated Press, all of them had the club in the first few paragraphs. In December of 2008, two and a half years before she died, a man named Alex Haynes, who'd worked as her personal assistant, told the British tabloids that she'd said to him, she had a feeling she was going to die young, and that she'd mentioned the club by name. That's a former employee talking to a tabloid, and it should be weighed as exactly that. But it was printed while she was alive, which makes it
49:25 the one case in this story besides Cobain, where the number was on the record before the death. That's the part the statisticians went after. In December of 2011, five months after Winehouse died, the British Medical Journal published a study in its Christmas issue, which is the issue where the journal runs serious methods on unusual questions. The lead author was Martin Wolkowitz, a statistician, and the senior author was Adrian Barnett of the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. The paper's title asked whether 27 was really a dangerous age for famous musicians. They needed a way to decide who counted as famous without picking names.
50:09 So, they used the charts. Every solo artist and every member of every band that had a number one album in the United Kingdom between 1956 and 2007 went into the pool. That gave them 1,046,000. musicians and 21,750 years of their lives to follow. 71 of them died in that time. The researchers tracked the risk of death at every age and fitted a curve flexible enough that a spike at 27 would have shown up if one existed.
50:40 Among the 522 musicians who were famous by 27, three died at that age. The curve had no bump there. The risk at 27 was no different from the risk at 25 or at 32. What the curve did show was that famous musicians through their 20s and 30s died at two to three times the rate of the general British population. The danger was real. It just wasn't tied to one birthday. The authors noted something else,
51:08 which is that their own sampling scheme only caught three of the seven members everyone names. Those would be Jones, Cobain, and Winehouse. Robert Johnson died before the chart period. Hendricks, Joplin, and Morrison never had a number one album in Britain, so they weren't famous enough to be in the study that was testing whether their fame had killed them. That's a fair criticism, and the authors made it of themselves. It also tells you something about how the club is built, which is by hand, one name at a time, with the rule written to fit the names already on it. In 2014, an Australian psychologist Diana Kenney
51:45 at the University of Sydney approached it from the other direction. Instead of starting with fame, She started with death. She assembled records on 12,665 popular musicians across every genre who died between 1950 and the middle of 2014, with the age at death for each. 27 didn't stand out. The single most common age of death in her database was 56, at a little over 2% of the total. 27 accounted for about 1.3%. More of her musicians had died at 28 than at 27.
52:20 What Kenny found instead was worse than the club, because it wasn't a coincidence. Across seven decades, popular musicians in her data lived up to 25 years less than the comparable American population. Their accidental death rate was five to ten times higher. Their suicide rate was two to seven times higher. Their homicide rate was up to eight times higher. The numbers shifted by genre. More than half of the deaths among rap and hip-hop musicians in her data, were homicides.
52:52 Rock and metal musicians died by accident and suicide at the highest rates. Jazz and blues musicians lived longer and died of the things older people die of. Kenny also found that the risk had moved over time. Accidental deaths among musicians peaked in the 60s, which is the decade the club's founding members came out of. Suicides and homicides peaked in the 90s, which is Cobain's decade. The curve followed the drugs and the money of whatever era it was met. measuring, and 27 never rose above the noise in any of them.
53:25 So the two studies, built two different ways by two different teams, agreed. There is nothing in the number. There is something in the job. If the number's empty, the question is why it filled up? The answer the researchers offered, and the one that fits the files, is timing. A musician who's going to become famous usually does it in the early 20s. The first record that matters lands at 22 or 23. What follows is three or four years of touring, money, drugs that were a weekend thing, and are now a daily thing. No sleep, no one in the room willing to say no, and a body that has started to break down in ways the person can't feel yet
54:08 because they're still young enough to absorb most of it. By 26 or 27, the habits are years old and the consequences have started to arrive. Jones's liver and heart were enlarged. Pigpen's stomach lining had given out. Cobain's heroin tolerance was high enough to make the toxicology number useless. Winehouse's doctor had been warning her for years. The other explanation that gets offered is astrological. Segalstad's book raised it, and it circulates every time a new name gets added. Astrologers call it the Saturn return, the point around age 27 to 29, when Saturn comes back to the position it held in the sky when a person
54:49 was born, which in their system marks a crisis of adulthood. I'll report that it's a popular explanation and leave it there, because there's no way to test it against a death certificate, and the people who believe it don't claim there is. There's a plainer reason the five faces on the poster look the way they do, and it's that the people who didn't die are still around to be ordinary. The Rolling Stones replaced Jones within a week, and were still touring stadiums 55 years later with Jagger and Richards past 80. Dave Grohl, who was behind the drums in Nirvana, has spent three decades fronting a band of his own. Everybody who made it to 28 kept getting older, which doesn't photograph as well. The club is a list of people who were
55:32 frozen at the exact moment their fame peaked, and a freezing is most of what people are responding to when they say the number means something. None of that is a curse. It's a timeline, and it runs for a few years on either side of 27. The names at 25 and 29 and 32 don't get a club because nobody started counting there. Graham Parsons died at 26. Nick Drake died at 26. Hank Williams died at 29. Sid Vicious died at 21.
56:04 Buddy Holly was 22. Otis Redding was 26. Tim Buckley was 28. Shannon Hoon was 28. Jeff Buckley was 30. The deaths are everywhere in that stretch. The ones at 27 got the name because of a run of four in 1969 and 70 and 71. And once there was a name, every death at that age for the next 50 years had somewhere to go.
56:29 There's one more piece, and it's the one that bothers me most, because the people who've written about the club have raised it, and nobody has been able to measure it. Cobain knew the list. His mother's words on the phone with the Associated Press Reporter make that plain. and people who knew him said he talked about Hendricks and Morrison and Joplin. Winehouse's former assistant said she'd talked about it too. The authors of the British Medical Journal study put it in their paper as a possibility they couldn't test, that the club might have become something a musician could aim at, consciously or not,
57:02 and that risk-taking might peak at 27 because of the story rather than in spite of it. I don't know if that's true. I don't know how anyone would find out. But the idea that a coincidence from 1970 could be reaching forward and putting its thumb on the scale for people who were children when it happened is a different kind of pattern than the one the club is supposed to describe. And it's the only version of a curse in this story that I can't rule out with a death certificate. Which brings this back to the certificate that started it. In 1938, a county registrar in LaFleur County, Mississippi filed a death record for a man named Robert Johnson. The line for the cause was left for a doctor to fill in, and no doctor came, so she wrote that no doctor had come. On the back, she wrote down what the plantation owner thought.
57:52 Then the paper went into a drawer. It sat there through the war, through the years when John Hammond and Alan Lomax went looking for a man who'd been dead the whole time, through the 1961 reissue that put his records in the hands of the English kids who became the Rolling Stones and Cream and Led Zeppelin. It sat there. there through the summer of 1968, while Brian Jones, whose band had been built on records like those, was buying a farmhouse in Sussex with a swimming pool. Wardlow pulled it out that year. A year after that, Jones was dead at the bottom of the pool. A year after that, Hendricks and Joplin. A year after that, Morrison. And at some point in the decades that followed, somebody looked
58:36 at the date on Robert Johnson's certificate and the date on his birth record and did the subtraction. and the man with no cause of death and three gravestones became the founding member of a club he'd never heard of for dying at an age nobody who buried him thought to write down of course the phone is out
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