It's sad and laughable and it would be funny if it weren't so destructive. True, stabbing through clothing is unusual. But so is driving off a cliff or falling from a tree. Yet those improbable things do occasionally happen. Unusual does not equal impossible. I don't want to review all the facts here. That would take too much time. And I cover them exhaustively in the book. After taking into account the totality of the case and thinking through every possibility as deeply as anyone could, do I believe Elliott committed suicide; do I believe a reasonable person would conclude the same thing?
Absolutely yes. Am I certain he did, unquestionably certain? Of course not. No one can be that. Do I believe, after interviewing her for over 30 hours, on the phone and in person, and trying to get a sense of her as an individual, that Jennifer Chiba was capable of killing Elliott Smith?
I believe Chiba's therapist, who said the only person Jennifer would ever be capable of killing is herself. His girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Chiba, has been the victim of a pretty vilifying smear campaign in the wake of his death.
It is one of the saddest aspects of the whole situation that the person who looked after him and cared most about Elliott in his final years seems destined to have this cloud hanging over her for ever more. What were your impressions of her during your time researching the book? I liked her. She's very smart, open, insightful, interesting, artistic.
She's married to a super nice guy from the UK, she's moved on with her life. She works as a therapist. Every story she told me that could be checked against other accounts totally checked out.
And I found her to be exceptionally frank, spontaneous in her answers, willing to disclose facts that came at her own expense sometimes.
These people who devote their lives to detesting and accusing Jennifer Chiba, a person they've never met, are deranged. I hate to even talk about them because I know it only increases their ridiculous hatred of me too. But at a certain point these sorts of attacks need to be called out and named for what they are.
In fact, I appreciate your putting the question the way you did. True fans focus on the music, not the death, and definitely not on Chiba. It's fine when people decide they'd like to retain some uncertainty about what happened. That's maybe reasonable. But going beyond that and calling Jennifer Chiba a murderer is despicable. If I can, I'd like to say one other thing. Jennifer Chiba was not my main source for this book. Don't take that wrong, please.
She was incredibly helpful and I'm grateful to her and always will be, but I talked to others--JJ Gonson, for instance, whose fabulous photos are all throughout the book--or Pete Krebs, or Tony Lash, who knew Elliott for a lot longer, and who provided quite a bit more material.
He just talked about it as if it were going to happen. It was a story many of his old Portland friends would have found familiar. It would soon become apparent that public adoration was no solution. When he was nominated for an Oscar afterwards, Smith was cajoled into performing at the ceremony with threats that the organisers would get Richard Marx to sing the song if he refused. The nadir came in North Carolina that year, where a severely intoxicated Smith was impaled on a tree during an impulsive attempt on his own life.
I got freaked out and started running, it was totally dark, and I ran off the edge of a cliff. Who cares, whatever. He was really excited and pumped. We would try tape machine games, recording real strings, playing with form.
Only rarely did the lyrics suggest distraction. Schnapf suggested recording Figure 8 in batches, to lighten the burden on Smith. Which meant that, after working in a variety of LA studios, Smith could make a pilgrimage to Abbey Road Studios in London to record strings and immerse himself in the records of his childhood. Yet behind the scenes, things were turning pretty ugly. Hard drugs crept in and escalated fast. A lot of Figure 8 was very positive. Chiba had declined all interview requests in the wake of Smith's death, but on January 9, four days after The Smoking Gun published the coroner's report, she made a statement to MTV News.
She claimed that she had been "physically sick" when she discovered the report was online: "I felt Elliott's privacy and dignity in being able to die were violated. She denied that she had refused to speak to detectives and said that although she had not been charged or questioned over the allegations, she felt she was now a suspect in the eyes of the public. I want people to know that I'm not keeping quiet because I have anything to hide. If I was a suspect, I would have heard from the investigators, for one thing.
Another is that his sister and his parents and everyone else close to him knows the truth, so I'm not worried about it. Five days later, however, Conrad Rippy, an attorney representing Smith's mother and father and his half-sister Ashley issued a statement on their behalf, contradicting Chiba's claim that they "know the truth".
In the wake of the coroner's report and the statements by Chiba and the Smith family lawyer, there has been an uncomfortable silence. For this article, interview requests to both his former British label and his US publicist went unanswered. LAPD detective James King would not comment on the coroner's report, nor on Chiba's allegation that she had not refused to speak to detectives and would say only that the investigation was "ongoing". None of this, however, has done anything to damp down speculation.
According to Sean Organ, the Happy Ending website had to be "totally and utterly taken down" because so many people were using it to send death threats to Chiba. The band have split up. Over on Sweet Adeline, the Elliott Smith messageboard where the "sad kids" Mary Lou Lord described congregate, stories continue to circulate.
More than one correspondent is convinced they know the truth about the death, because Smith has appeared to them in a dream and revealed all. Another suggests that diehard fans should hire US television medium John Edward in an attempt to contact Smith beyond the grave. In a way, you cannot really blame them for believing that Smith is trying to reach them in death: intimate, wracked with sorrow and personal details, his music certainly tried to reach people when he was alive. The website's news pages report that Smith's family will release his final album later this year.
One of its tracks is called See You In Heaven. The mysterious death of Mr Misery. No one was too surprised when Elliott Smith - a boozy, druggy Oscar-nominated folk singer who had talked openly about killing himself - was found dead. But then the coroner's report raised a chilling new possibility: murder. By Alexis Petridis. Topics Music Pop and rock Elliott Smith features. Reuse this content. Schultz at times leans toward armchair analysis, but in a way that can be revelatory.
After a stint couch-surfing in New York, Smith landed in Los Angeles in the late s, where he lost control. He got hooked on smoking heroin and crack and partaking in a cocktail of pain pills and Adderall while studying pharmacological texts. The final chapters are hard to bear as Smith slurs his way through concerts, quitting songs midway through and obsessing over a studio soundboard while maintaining a death wish.
Schultz with unblinking eye describes a man unstable and paranoid — convinced, for example, that DreamWorks Records had bugged his house and was following him in white vans — lost to psychosis and desperately trying to hold on. How could a person stab himself not once but twice with a newly sharpened kitchen knife?
Were two small wounds on his hand and arm defensive?
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