Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Jim Elmer got a phone call from Austin that morning, informing him Demri had passed. “I went over to Evergreen and gave her a kiss on the forehead good-bye, and she was looking very peaceful,” he recalled. He spoke with Demri’s family before leaving. He touched base with Susan, and the two agreed to go see Layne. He had already heard the bad news. By the time they got to his home, Layne was waiting for Mark Lanegan, who arrived a few minutes after them. “Layne obviously knew what had happened and was distraught and so forth, and while they had a very dynamic relationship, they certainly cared about each other and loved each other. So Susan and I said our good-byes and so Mark stayed with Layne and that was the best thing to do.” This visit was one of the last times Susan saw him.5

She invited Jim to lunch so they could speak privately. She took him to the Ruins, a private club and restaurant in Seattle. She suggested he become a member, which he did. They would meet again at this venue in similar circumstances a few years later.

Demri’s death devastated Layne. Austin thinks it weighed on him heavily: she heard Layne had told somebody, “I should have got us out of here. I had the money. I could have done it. I should have gotten us out of here.” Austin defined the phrase “out of here” as meaning, “Out of Seattle, away from all the people knocking on the door wanting to get him high.” Jim Elmer agreed that Layne had the resources to do it if he had been serious about it, but he never did.

A few months after Demri’s death, Layne asked Austin for the teddy bear Demri had had with her in the hospital and a few other things. They set up a time for Austin to meet at his condo in the U District. Austin arrived and repeatedly rang the doorbell and got no answer. She went back to her car, waited for about half an hour, and tried again. Still no answer. Austin went home. She got a phone call from Layne at ten o’clock that night, asking why she hadn’t shown up. Austin told him she had been there at the scheduled time, to which Layne responded that he had had to go out.

Austin suspected he was out getting drugs. She ran into him by accident on Broadway a few weeks later and still had Demri’s teddy bear and other things in the trunk of her car. They made the exchange at that point. This was the last time Austin saw him. The general consensus from people who knew Layne well is that he never got over Demri’s death. “Layne never recovered from losing her,” Austin said. Jim Elmer agreed.

“I know how much he loved Demri, and I can only imagine that that really just obliterated him,” Nick Pollock said.

“When she died, that was it. He was done,” Randy Biro said.

“After she did pass, I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, no.’ You could almost see the writing on the wall, because that was Layne’s soul mate,” Jeff Gilbert said. “Whenever I saw them together, they had that bond, so I thought that’s not going to be good.”

“I think it’s very likely he used her death as an excuse to throw in the towel, because that’s what we do. The addict is always looking for excuses to use, and that’s a pretty good one,” Michelle Ahern-Crane said.

If this generally held opinion is accepted and presumed correct, then her death triggered an irreversible downward spiral in which Layne would take his drug use to lengths that few could imagine or sustain.

PART IV 1996–2001

Layne doesn’t want to tour. I’d like to tour, but for obvious reasons Layne fell out of being in the public eye. Everybody knows what those reasons are.

SEAN KINNEY

Chapter 23

If I use heroin again, I will die.

JOHN BAKER SAUNDERS

IN 1996, DAN GALLAGHER and his wife moved into the house next to the small two-room house that John Baker Saunders had been living in near the Crown Hill area. They would hear Saunders playing bass at night. “All I remember is it was very melodious. It was bass, so it was very deep and you could feel it as much as you could hear it and it was just beautiful,” Gallagher said. Saunders played late—often starting at around eleven o’clock at night and sometimes ending at three in the morning.