Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (52 page)

The call was made at 12:18 hours. LAFD paramedics arrived on the scene, quickly transporting Elliott to a hospital emergency room. In the chaos Ashley got a message from one of Chiba’s friends. As she reached the house, two police officers were stationed out front, she later told Chiba. They said Elliott had been taken away; they told her Chiba was still inside, but they refused to allow any contact. In fact, at this point, Chiba was being questioned. She says the police forced her to describe the sequence of events over and over, “as if to trip me up.” Then what seemed to be a suicide note was discovered. Chiba had been in the habit of sticking Post-Its around the house, each with a little encouraging message. As detectives questioned her at the kitchen table, her eyes passed over one. On it Elliott had apparently written, “I’m so sorry—love Elliott God forgive me.”
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There was no date.

At 13:36 hours, after having what turned out to be two lacerations to the heart surgically repaired, Elliott was pronounced dead. Chiba wasn’t there. She arrived one hour later, having changed into an Elliott Smith T-shirt. She found Ashley, sitting beside a tiny, angelic, female African American security guard. The two hugged, sobbing. It was impossible to believe. He’d always seemed bizarrely resilient, somehow indestructible. But now it was over. He was gone.

The next day Chiba found Charlie’s letters in the mailbox. Ghoulishly, a package also arrived. It was from the record label Suicide Squeeze, which had brought out “Pretty (Ugly Before)” and “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free.” Chiba took the discs to Sunset where, in front of the
Figure 8
wall, fans had gathered in mourning. She passed copies out to the people there, vinyl from heaven.

Running through Chiba’s mind was “an endless barrage of woulda, shoulda, coulda.” “I was going crazy,” she says. “I lost it.” In the moments before Elliott died she had been thinking, “This will never end. I can’t do anything right.” Yet as he had told others on different occasions, Elliott said to Chiba, “As soon as I am gone, I will unburden you.” He was gone, but as events unfolded, she would be anything but unburdened, for reasons no one anticipated.

* * *

Elliott was cremated, this being what everyone concluded he would have wanted. The ashes were divided three ways—one third to Ashley, one third to Bunny and Charlie, one third to the Smiths. At first the plan was to hold a funeral at the home of Neil Gust and Joanna Bolme, who were roommates at the time in Portland. For some reason that didn’t happen. The service occurred instead at the Smiths’. The ashes weren’t on hand because the coroner would not release them. Chiba was there, having made the trip from L.A. For the first time she met Gary Smith in person. Sean Croghan, Pete Krebs, and Jason Mitchell were also present. Krebs in particular made a point of talking with Chiba. He wanted to know the story. He wasn’t suspicious, no one was, no one had serious doubts at the time as to what had occurred; he just felt a need to get the facts from the one person who possessed them. For several hours everyone milled about, talking in small groups inside and outside, in the backyard. There wasn’t a lot of demonstrative grieving. No one recalls any memorial speeches being made. The mood was one of resignation, of deep, gnawing regret.

In his cover of Cat Stevens’s “Trouble” Elliott had sung of “death’s disguise” hanging on him. He’d asked it to be fair, to be kind, to leave him in his misery. He didn’t want a fight, he sang. “I haven’t got a lot of time.”

From a standpoint
of parsimoniousness, the philosophical principle that simple explanations stand the best chance of being correct, few causes of death could seem less questionable than Elliott’s. He had been depressed and suicidal for much of his life. He had written songs declaring suicide’s lure, if not its inevitability. As Pete Krebs said, his finger never stopped circling an inner self-destruct button; he was on it all the time. He frequently told people he wanted to die; every new day dawned as if by accident, especially in his final few years. There had been several apparent prior attempts, deliberate overdoses. He was a cutter. Toward the end of his life he’d taken to scrawling the words “Kali the Destroyer” across his arm in indelible marker, to hide visible scars. He was paranoid, believing his record label was trying to kill him. And he’d impulsively stopped most if not all meds, his brain chemistry in gnarled flux. Plus, there was a note, along with a set of statements provided by Chiba.

All this qualified itself irreversibly on January 6, 2004, when forensic pathologist and Deputy Medical Examiner Lisa Scheinin released her signed findings.
¹
Each of the two stab wounds entered the chest cavity, Scheinin found. Only one of these, stab wound number two—not necessarily the second in terms of order inflicted—perforated the heart. This wound, therefore, was the likely fatal one. Toxicology tests revealed no illicit substances. But Scheinin writes, “All medications were therapeutic or subtherapeutic,” suggesting psychiatric drugs
were
in fact present in Elliott’s system. He was not entirely drug free at time of death. But he was not abusing his legal drugs, either; nothing was untoward vis-à-vis their levels in the body. In fact, one or some—Scheinin does not provide names because they were already in the toxicology report, and also “noncontributory to death”—were subtherapeutic.

It’s Scheinin’s second paragraph that leaps off the page. With it, and to this day still, Elliott’s posthumous life was altered, along with Jennifer Chiba’s and everyone else’s who loved him or cared about him or counted themselves a fan. Scheinin called the mode of death “undetermined at this time.” Chiba was hurt and alarmed. She’d spent one year of her life caring for someone she adored, someone with whom she was trying to have a child. Now the insinuation was that she, or less likely, someone else, could be a killer. It was monstrously, inconceivably depressing. And not just for Chiba. No one, it seems, had seriously considered a possibility other than suicide. If anything, suicide was predetermined, overdetermined, not “undetermined.” Yet with Scheinin’s ruling a new avenue opened up, especially for fervid fans who felt abandoned by their Virgil. Elliott was murdered, some of them declared. Chiba stabbed him twice in the chest.

Scheinin based her conclusion on five factors; she kindly and very helpfully answered detailed questions about each, along with a number of additional questions on peripheral aspects of the case, for a total of four pages of information.
²
(She also read several drafts of this section of the book, in order to check for accuracy.) The “atypical aspects of the case” Scheinin documents in her report are these: (1) the absence of hesitation wounds, (2) stabbing through clothing, (3) the presence of small incised wounds on the right arm and left hand (“possible defensive wounds”), (4) Chiba’s removal of the knife, and (5) her “subsequent” refusal to speak with detectives. Before getting into these, there is a broader question. Nelson Gary explained, “As far as the possible murder, I know nothing, really”; but he went on to say, “in existentialism, there is no valuable meaning in existence. But Elliott didn’t live that way. He was a fucking perfectionist, always trying to tweak things and make things better.” He added, “Stabbing himself twice—there is just something wrong with that. It doesn’t seem physically possible.” When asked about this, Scheinin replied simply, “Your friend is wrong. It is indeed possible to stab oneself in the chest (and other places) more than once,” especially in cases where nerve connections are spared. “If the first stab wound does not hit a vital organ,” Scheinin said—and wound number one did not—“there is nothing to prevent additional self-inflicted wounds.” David Campbell, official spokesman for the office of coroner, told journalist Liam Gowing the same thing. In fact, he referenced
a specific case, one involving an LAPD detective shot through the heart, who stood up, drew his weapon, returned fire, and killed a suspect. “We’ve had other stories,” he added, “where people have had injuries to the heart and they continued running and collapsed thirty yards away. So it is indeed a fact that a person can sustain heart trauma and not be suddenly incapacitated.”
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So what, then, of the first atypical element, the apparent absence of hesitation wounds at the site of entry? Scheinin says these are “less often seen with stab wounds,” more common with slash wounds of the neck or wrist. But with stab wounds particularly, the person might simply “obliterate the mark,” stabbing himself clear through any small hesitation puncture. A lack of visible hesitation marks, therefore, “doesn’t mean the person didn’t hesitate,” Scheinin explains.

As for stabbing through clothing, Scheinin’s reply is matter-of-fact: “People usually do not stab themselves through clothing, but that does not mean it never happens—it does.” Elliott disliked showing his unclothed body; it made him extremely uncomfortable, according to numerous friends. The last thing he would ever do—and Scheinin is not suggesting he
did
do this—is parade about the house shirtless. The notion, then, that in a moment of suddenly agonized impulse he’d think to remove his shirt is nearly untenable. Not only was doing so out of character; it also fails to jibe with the suddenness of the decision. He spied the knife sitting nearby, and he grabbed it. On this point, Scheinin clarified her meaning: “People do not necessarily take their shirts off if they are going to stab themselves, but they usually do lift them up, move them aside or unbutton them, primarily to see exactly where they are going to put the knife and secondarily to have nothing extra between the skin and the blade.” This can be done relatively quickly, Scheinin adds. So, most typically, clothing will be moved aside in one way or another, and Elliott did not do that; he stabbed himself through his shirt. On the other hand, as Scheinin allows, people do sometimes stab through clothing anyway. The action is not unique.

Of all the questionable elements, the presence of “possible defensive wounds” appears on its face most compelling. Yet these were “very small,” Scheinin revealed. Plus, alongside the tiny incised wounds and “quite easy to tell apart,” Scheinin noted what she called “round scars consistent with
cigarette burns.” Elliott, in other words, had been putting lit cigarettes out on his skin—another commonly encountered self-harm habit, among many. Gowing says Elliott habitually worked a knife on top of scars left from these burns; he claims to have received this information from credible sources unwilling to go on record. That aside, the very small wounds were located on the left hand and right arm. Another, on the bicep, “is in an odd location,” Scheinin remarks, “for a defensive wound.” At any rate, there are, Scheinin says, “other explanations.” Perhaps Elliott mishandled the knife, she says. Perhaps he first “tested the point.” Beyond these reasonable possibilities, there’s a larger, more obvious anomaly. If Elliott was indeed stabbed—not once, but twice—unless he submitted to the act, essentially opening his arms and allowing it to happen, defensive wounds would be anything but “very small.” They would be plentiful. Even in his anguished state, he would have fought instinctively to live, to protect himself. There is no evidence that happened, no indication of a fight. In cases of struggle, Scheinin says, “we often see long incised wounds on the palmar surface of the hands as the person attempts to block or grab the knife.” These are missing. But what if Elliott had been blindsided, with no time to defend himself? Here again, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that a small woman could enter a kitchen, grab a knife, and stab a person not once, but twice, with zero evidence of any struggle. Parsimony dictates a different explanation. As Scheinin explains, summarily: “I don’t think we can know with 100 percent certainty whether the incised wounds were intentional self-injury, testing the point of the blade, or defensive.”

Chiba says she pulled the knife out in a moment of thoughtless impulse. That fact also seems unsurprising. As spokesman David Campbell told Gowing, “If you saw someone who was still alive and they have a knife in their chest, what would you do? The first thing you’d want to do is stop the bleeding, and you can’t do that if the knife is still there.”
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Scheinin adds, “I realize that it’s a very human thing to pull out a knife, but that can also turn out to be the wrong thing to do, since the knife would act as a plug or partial plug limiting blood flow.” (As a small consolation in the circumstances, Chiba says hospital personnel told her that pulling out the knife did not kill Elliott; he would have died anyway from massive internal bleeding.) As for Chiba’s subsequent refusal to speak with investigators,
she claims she was interviewed three times at the scene. She told them everything she knew. There was nothing new to add. She had more than cooperated.

Gowing says Scheinin told him her “gut feeling” was that “it was actually a suicide,” and that she ruled as she did to assist police who might pursue a homicide angle. “He got me wrong,” Scheinin claims, “but just by a bit. I said it certainly could have been [a suicide] for various reasons. That statement remains true,” even though, at the time she compiled her report, “several details of Elliott’s life”—some strongly suggestive of the possibility of suicide—“were not available to me.” She adds that the undetermined mode was, for her, the “only viable option.” “If Mr. Smith had been completely alone when he died, it would have been much easier to call it a suicide, but there was another person present, and unfortunately this muddies the water.” Moreover: “We have to do the best with what we know at the time. It is important not to rush to call something a suicide, since the designation can be very difficult for surviving family to deal with on personal, religious, and sociological levels … I do not call anything a suicide unless I am absolutely certain … If there is anything irregular, I am constrained to be cautious. While I do listen to what police have to say about cases, I do not assign manners of death to help out investigators or to force them to do an investigation—that would be totally inappropriate.”