Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Demri visited Bad Animals Studio a few times during the Alice in Chains sessions, Sam Hofstedt recalled. “She did not look good. She was like so, so, so skinny. And I think at one point during the record, she was actually in the hospital, and she survived, but at one point they said all her organs pretty much shut down for a little while. She was knocking at death’s door.”

Despite the multiple hospitalizations and brushes with death, Demri continued using drugs. She had seemingly accepted that her addiction was going to kill her. One weekend, Demri was visiting her mother. After the visit, Austin was driving Demri back to Seattle when another car cut her off on the freeway.

“God, Mom! I hate you driving on this freeway every day. If anything were to happen to you, I don’t know what I’d do,” Demri said after the shock wore off. And then she said, “I don’t know why I said that. I’m going to die before you do.”

Austin turned to her and said, “Oh, okay. You love me so much, you’re going to have me bury you? Do you have any idea what that would do to me?”

Demri was silent and then responded, “Well, I never really thought about it that way, but I know that I’ll be dead before you. I’ll be dead before I’m thirty.” She was right.

According to Austin, while Demri and Layne’s relationship might have been over, they still cared for each other. “Demri was sick and dying for those last two and a half years. Layne would come and stay with her in the hospital at night.” Austin worked at Harborview Medical Center, where Demri was a patient, and would let Layne in the building with her pass. He would spend the night and leave the hospital in the anonymity of the early hours of the morning. Susan also visited Demri while she was hospitalized.

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Russell—a pseudonym—is a foreign-born musician who came to Seattle in 1996.2 He overstayed his visa and remained in Seattle, living and working as an undocumented immigrant, doing a variety of jobs to pay his part of the rent on a downtown apartment. He was dealing heroin to make extra money on the side and occasionally used some himself.

One night in May or June 1996, a group of people came over to his apartment to hang out, Demri being one of them. Demri and Russell hit it off and began hanging out as friends. She eventually asked if she could stay at his place for a while. Russell agreed, and she crashed at his apartment off and on for about six to eight weeks that summer. Demri didn’t have much in terms of possessions, only a few small suitcases carrying her clothes and some books. Sometimes she would visit her mother or a friend for a few days and come back.

“A lot of my friends that I sort of knew in Seattle I wasn’t hanging around with for various reasons,” Russell said of the time he met Demri. “It was good to have a friend. So we went out to bars and [to see] rock bands—it was good to have a friend to hang out with.”

According to Russell, Demri told Layne “I’m staying with this guy. He’s a musician and he’s really nice, blah, blah, blah.” Although Russell was a heroin dealer, Layne was not one of his buyers. Layne was not happy about the arrangement. He called Russell’s apartment and left messages on the answering machine with comments like, “You’re not a musician—you’re a drug dealer.”

“I didn’t have a very good impression of Layne,” Russell said. “Every time I’d sort of say, ‘He’s an asshole,’ she would always stick up for him.” Demri told him they had met in high school—a story Russell did not know to be false until he was interviewed for this book fifteen years later. Russell did not recall if Demri ever told him why they broke up. He remembers her saying when Layne got rich and famous, he started hanging around prostitutes, but he doesn’t know if this is true or not.

Demri told Russell she was going to Layne’s home once a week to clean the place up. She told him Layne had gotten very paranoid about people coming over at all hours of the day and night and that he had set up a security camera outside his door and wouldn’t let anyone in unless he wanted to see them. Both Michelle Ahern-Crane and Jon Wiederhorn remember that Layne complained about random people coming over and was very conscious about his security.3

Whether Demri was going there to clean or for a tryst or to get high or some combination of the three, Russell doesn’t know. He does say that every time she came back from Layne’s, she brought cocaine that he had given her. Russell started using cocaine after Demri shared some.