The year was 1998. The 70th Academy Awards took place at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and as Madonna approached the podium to present the Oscar for Best Original Song, it seemed a given that Celine Dion’s Titanic megahit, “My Heart Will Go On,” would take the prize. And of course, it did. But another, very un-Celine-like artist made a major impression that evening, performing his own nominated underdog ballad, “Miss Misery.”

His name was Elliott Smith. He was already a critics’ darling, and after this exposure, he was heralded as the next big thing. But just five and a half years after his breakthrough Oscars moment, this genius, one of the greatest singer-songwriters of the past 30 years, was dead. He was only 34.

Fifteen years ago, on Oct. 21, 2003, Smith died from two stab wounds to the chest. While his death was originally considered a suicide (eerily, another one of his songs, “Needle in the Hay,” had recently been the soundtrack for a suicide attempt scene in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums), the official autopsy report was inconclusive, opening up the possibility of homicide. Mystery and speculation surrounding Smith’s death persist to this day, and the Los Angeles Police Department’s investigation remains open. “The trauma that he sustained could have been inflicted by him or by another, and the coroner has not been able to make a determination,” a spokesman for the coroner, David Campbell, said in December 2003.

Smith had always been startlingly frank about his struggles with depression, addiction, and suicidal thoughts — long before such topics were commonly discussed by celebrities — in both his interviews and his lyrics. “I can’t prepare for death any more than I already have, he once heartbreakingly warbled in the posthumously released “King’s Crossing,” for instance. The Independent even proclaimed Smith “up there with the likes of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and William Burroughs” and “one of the greatest modern chroniclers of depression and addiction,” adding: “As a fictional memoir of a crippling addiction, Elliott Smith trumps Edward St Aubyn. As a portrait of personal despair, [fourth album] XO rivals The Bell Jar.” This, of course, made it rather easy to believe that this quintessential “tortured artist” could have died by his own hand. But many fans refused, and still refuse, to accept it.

The details of Smith’s case were investigated in William Todd Schultz’s 2013 biography, Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith, which included conversations with Smith’s live-in girlfriend, musician Jennifer Chiba, who was with Smith when he died. In 2003, Chiba told police that she and Smith had had an argument, that he had stabbed himself after she locked herself in the bathroom, and that after discovering him, she had pulled the knife out of his chest before calling 911. Smith was pronounced dead 20 minutes after being taken to the hospital. A note in the couple’s Los Angeles apartment, written on a Post-It, read: “I’m so sorry — love, Elliott. God forgive me.”

It didn’t take long for conspiracy theories to circulate — implicating Chiba in the same vicious way that some Nirvana fanatics still steadfastly believe that Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain. “I think part of it is misogyny. Hating on the evil harpy who supposedly destroyed the hero,” Schultz told the Independent at the time of his book’s release. Such speculation began, as Torment Saint notes, when the coroner’s report returned an open verdict, mentioning a lack of “hesitation wounds” and stating, “The location and direction of the stab wounds are consistent with self-infliction, [but] several aspects of the circumstances are atypical of suicide and raise the possibility of homicide.” It was also notable that Elliott’s first name was initially reported as being misspelled on the suicide note — as “Elliot,” with one t — although it later turned out that the misspelling appeared only in the coroner’s report of the note, not on the Post-It itself.

No one, including Chiba, was ever charged with Smith’s murder. And Schultz, who also extensively interviewed the coroner for Torment Saint, insisted to the Independent: “I’m convinced that he committed suicide. Everybody I interviewed for the book who would talk about that agreed, with maybe one exception — and that was someone who didn’t know Elliott all that well. We’re talking about a person who had overdosed numerous times in the last couple of years of his life, had cut himself, had always been depressed, was going through the difficult process of getting off the drugs that he was addicted to — and who was still feeling deeply paranoid because of all the crap he had used. He was suspicious of people spying on him, of trying to kill him. He was not in his right mind for the last two years of his life.”