Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

The family moved to Arlington, a town about an hour north of Seattle. When Demri was in grade school, her friend Nanci Hubbard-Mills says she was “boisterous, not afraid to speak her mind.” In an art class, the teacher had assigned them to make pumpkins and fruit out of clay. As a joke, Demri ignored the instructions and made a head with an arrow in it.

In eighth grade, she ran for student body president. She won by a landslide—the teachers stopped counting the ballots after she was leading her closest competitor by more than three hundred votes. After a few months, she was removed from the position by the faculty because she had fallen behind on her schoolwork.

Demri won a state prize for a project about alcohol and drugs. For source material, she approached her mother, who had been a practicing counselor working in the addiction field since 1976. Demri borrowed a display case from Austin’s office, which had fake samples of different types of drugs and a film. In retrospect, Austin said, “If anybody had ever told me that my daughter would become a heroin addict, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Hubbard-Mills remembers that exhibit, saying Demri had put it together for the cultural fair at the middle school. It was so well received that it was eventually shown at the high school. “This is when Demri was happy, would hang out for lunch. This is when she thought people doing drugs would die.” She and other friends from Arlington say Demri had tried marijuana and mushrooms by the time she was in high school.

Karie Pfeiffer-Simmons met Demri when she was in fifth grade and Demri was a year ahead of her at Post Middle School, and the two became friends about a year later. “She was very outgoing, very well liked. Just petite, beautiful. She just lit up the room. She liked to be the class clown, get attention and joke around. She would sneak out through the windows of the classroom and skip class. She was always doing funny things or charming the teachers so that she would get good grades that way.”

Demri’s interests and ambitions at the time were in the arts. “I know that she wanted to be in acting and I know that she wanted to be an actress and be in movies,” Pfeiffer-Simmons said. “She had to be in the limelight.” Lyle Forde, Demri’s high school choir teacher, said, “She really did love music and the performing arts. She definitely had the bent toward the performing arts, and was very social. Some students, they don’t really go up and talk to teachers. They kind of hang with their friends. She was social with other students and their teachers. She was a competent singer, but I think she also was a dancer.”

When she was about fifteen or sixteen, Demri was one of three hundred prospective students to audition for twenty-five openings at a performing arts school in Jacksonville, Florida. Though the odds were against her, she was admitted. She came home for Christmas break after a few months, and, in her mother’s words, “She blew it.” She had fallen in love with a young man back home, left the school, and moved back to Washington.

A few months before meeting Layne, Demri went to a mall to audition in front of an audience for a singing part in a musical called Cinderella Rock. “She starts this song and then she stops and says, ‘Obviously, you can all tell that I can’t sing,’” Austin said. “Then she just played the crowd—it was amazing.” There were three or four agents at the audition, who were impressed enough that they gave her their business cards.

There are two stories of how Layne and Demri met. Although there are a few slight differences in the two versions, they do not necessarily contradict each other.

According to Kathleen Austin, “She met Layne in 1989. She was working at the mall, and there was a girl working in the store with her, and the girl invited her to a party. And the girl was from the Seattle area. Dem told me later that on the way to this party, the girl turned and looked at her and said, ‘I just made the biggest mistake of my life.’ And Demri said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘Bringing you to this party. I know my boyfriend’s going to fall in love with you.’ That was Layne, and the rest is history,” she said. “I think it was love at first sight.”

The only detail that can be corrected in this account is the date. Evidence shows that they met in 1988. Demri’s signature appears several times in the guest sign-in notebook kept at the Music Bank, which closed its doors for good in February or March 1989. There are also photos of her and Layne together in Randy Hauser’s Polaroid collection from this early period in the band’s history.12