Chris & Nancy (12 page)

As for Daniel, the painful and counterintuitive truth was that he had been enrolled in a “bridge kindergarten” preschool class at First Baptist Church of Peachtree City. Such programs are designed for children who turn five years old right around the enrollment deadline for regular school kindergarten (typically late summer or early fall). That way, parents who aren't sure whether their borderline-age kids are school-ready can hedge their bets for a year; after the pre-K program, the kids are sent on to either kindergarten or first grade. But Daniel wasn't five, five and a half, or even six; he was seven.

On
the
Citizen
's discussion board, a poster identified only as “Christi” maintained, “Daniel did not have trouble dealing with other kids. He had lots of friends in his class. My daughter called him her boyfriend and said he used to protect her. He looked and acted like all the other kids in his class.”

(Clearly a member of the pro-Nancy, anti-Chris faction, “Christi” also wrote: “The man did fake fighting in a ring with other men in tights. It's
FAKE
! They are all big muscular bad actors. Why does this qualify him as a hero??? It's
WRESTLING
!!! Chris had the personality of a wet mop. At least that's the impression my husband and I got from him at our kids' graduations. We also got a very bad vibe from him.”)

Other sources close to the Toffolonis ascribed Daniel's enrollment at the First Baptist preschool to Chris's increasingly zealous desire to control Nancy and Daniel, and to a growing paranoia, which only lockdown security could satisfy. Chris talked a lot about the
2003
murder in the Atlanta area of the daughter of retired wrestler Khosrow Vasiri, “The Iron Sheik” — never mind that she was a grown woman who was killed by her boyfriend. The Benoits' move from Peachtree City to their gated home was motivated by safety concerns, as was the acquisition of the German shepherd guard dogs. During this period, Chris also began having a local hanger-on who drove him around, Jimmy Baswell, take different routes from the airport to home with the view of shaking off anyone who might be following them.

There's a difference, though, between being a control freak and a security fanatic, and making a school enrollment decision that would retard the academic career of a developmentally normal child. Juxtaposed against the known facts, the denials that Daniel had a medical condition came across as more defiant than convincing. Advocates of this viewpoint did not respond to my invitations to entertain follow-up questions.

The most telling sign that something was amiss with Daniel came from the authoritative, if muted, testimony of next-door neighbor Holly Schrepfer. Seeking to escape the June-July
2007
frenzy, Schrepfer traveled to the Boston area, where she'd previously lived. There Schrepfer, who had been a well-connected events producer, hired a Boston public relations firm, Regan Communications Group, to help her handle the barrage of media inquiries. George Regan issued a statement on Schrepfer's behalf acknowledging that Nancy Benoit, over the course of their year-long friendship, had spoken of Daniel's “medical problems.” Regan said, “I know there were some problems, problems and issues that she said the son had.”

The sheriff's report covers the subject by noting that “rumors” about Daniel and Fragile X circulated during the investigation. “The rumors reported the Benoit family had a difficult time raising Daniel with this autism-like condition. Investigators with the Georgia State Composite Board of Medical Examiners obtained Daniel Benoit's medical records and were unable to locate any notation or evidence that Daniel Benoit suffered from Fragile X syndrome or any form of autism.”

This conclusion would carry more weight if it included the medical records rather than a second-hand characterization of them, and if it had grappled with
DA
Ballard's statements about needle marks on Daniel's arm. If this was a false rumor with a fuse, Ballard was the one who lit it.

* * *

Not all the warps in the Fayette County investigation can be blamed on its loose-tongued
DA
. Some emanated from the sheriff's office. Others were by-products of combined and inglorious incompetence. These lapses may or may not have risen to the level of corruption.

Perhaps the most important such area was the authorities' baffling approach to the voice messages left on Chris and Nancy's cell phones. Home phone answering machine messages were captured, but those had little value; Chris, like most mobile people, communicated almost exclusively through his cell. From the primary-source audio of the voicemail left on that cell, we could backfill what others knew about the Benoits' crisis, or at least acquire hints of the levels of their concerns.

But the investigators did not retrieve any voicemail whatsoever. Moreover, they didn't even try.

A June
26
,
2007
, subpoena to Verizon Wireless Communications — submitted by
DA
Ballard and Detective Harper, and signed off on by a Fayette County judge — demanded documentation in fourteen categories. These included cell site activation, numbers dialed, incoming numbers, call duration, and incoming and outgoing text messages. Not one of the categories was incoming voicemail.

While discussing the voicemail issue for this book, Harper could not have been more vague or misleading. On April
5
,
2008
, I emailed Harper, in part, “Your report includes a printout of the text messages. Is it also technically possible to retrieve audio of the incoming voicemail messages? If so, was a demand for voicemail audio included in any of the
14
categories of the subpoena to Verizon? And did Verizon provide it? If audio of voicemail is not in the sheriff's records in this case, I would like to find out why.”

Three days later, the detective responded, “Luckily, we were able to at least get the texts from the phones. We retrieved the data from the phones such as
SMS
(text messaging). We asked for them from Verizon, but due to an issue they had with their systems, they could only produce what they gave us and nothing more. They were unable to provide text or voicemails.” Harper did not answer the question of whether a demand for voicemail audio was included in the Verizon subpoena, and I concluded that it was not. Harper also did not respond to the question of whether retrieving voicemail was technically feasible: the answer is obviously yes.

Below we will get to what the sheriff's office said about the text messages; for now, let's stick with voicemail. Harper was trying to combine the two under the heading of technical problems, when the bedrock reason for not obtaining the former was that it wasn't in the subpoena. He would not comment on what — or who — could possibly have persuaded him not to pursue this key evidence.

Assuming that the sheriff's office actually pressed Verizon informally for the voicemail — defective subpoena and all — but was told that the system was down, would Harper's explanation wash? Not according to the forensic experts I consulted, one of whom was Kevin Ripa of a company called Computer Evidence Recovery. “If there was a system error, then what about the backup system?” Ripa said. “Major telecommunications companies don't record mission-critical information casually. If Benoit's voicemail was truly missing for good, that is a serious problem that would have affected thousands of other customers, as well. Verizon surely could have been pressed further on this point.”
^[4]

* * *

The sheriff's investigation did produce text messages, to and from both Chris and Nancy's cell phones; that evidence was especially useful in its depiction of their deteriorating marriage and her alarm over his drug use. Yet the text record, too, is incomplete.

On June
28
,
2007
, the
New York Daily News
reported that Chris had texted “biblical verses and portions of his will.” No such messages would appear in the sheriff report's logs. Bryan Alvarez, publisher of the
Figure Four Weekly
newsletter, echoed this report in an interview with National Public Radio the next day. “I've been told there are other messages that have not been made public yet that perhaps quoted biblical passages, had estate information. So I think more is going to come out as it pertains to the text messages,” Alvarez said. When I followed up with Alvarez more than a year later, he said the report was probably just “confusion or some other miscommunication” in the first days.

On June
29
, ex-wrestler Joe “Road Warrior Animal” Laurinaitis — brother of
WWE
Talent Relations chief John Laurinaitis — seemed to be telling Dan Abrams of
MSNBC
that John was among the recipients of the text messages from Benoit at the very end. No such messages are in the sheriff report's logs. However, in full context it is not clear whether Joe was merging unrelated pieces of already known information:

[Y]ou better have a good reason [not to show up for a major booking] or your butt's getting canned. You're going to get fired. You know, my brother is vice president of operations for the
WWE
, my brother John. And I had — once I heard of this horrific situation, I called him and said, ‘Man, what's going on?' He said [and here is where the boundary between direct and indirect quotation gets jumbled], ‘Man, all that I know is that some of the guys and my brother himself had got text messages saying, you know, this is my new address. The dogs are out on the deck. The side garage door's open' — just plain one-liners that didn't make any sense, that were so unlike Chris Benoit.
^[5]

These tidbits do not prove the existence of suppressed texts. But at least one wrestler whose text messages appear on the log released by the sheriff told friends of other messages of his that mysteriously are not included.

The final piece fueling these strong suspicions has a tinge of Keystone Kops. In response to the subpoena, Verizon Wireless produced printouts of calls sent to and received by Chris and Nancy's cell phones. At the beginning of the printout is a legend with explanations of all the abbreviations and codes therein, and examples of how they were applied. One such example is the following text:

CTM data (ASCII)

[I don't understand any of this chris. What could ever have made u do this? U r a hero and my biggest influence in the bizness as well as my friend. But no]

Sent (ASCII)

[I don't understand any of this chris. What could ever have made u do this? U r a hero and my biggest influence in the bizness as well as my friend. But no]

Originating Time [06/26/2007 02:51:15[00] [00001]

This text appears nowhere on the Verizon printout itself, much less on the sheriff report's logs. Could the author of the company's explanatory legend have gone to the trouble of making up such an elaborate hypothetical example, with this authentic-sounding voice and detail? (The sender of the message, real or imagined, would be someone who idolized Benoit and was in anguish upon learning that he was a murderer.) Highly, highly, highly doubtful.

True, a message mourning the family and posthumously judging Chris might have been excluded from the public record as “not relevant.” In the February
12
,
2008
, records release, the sheriff hedged its incompleteness by calling the collection of text messages therein the “relevant” ones. But the authorities' definition of relevance seemed awfully crabbed and debatable — in a way that served
WWE
more than anyone legitimately scrutinizing it.

And anyway, the real point is that Verizon, in the official story, was supposed to have told Fayette County law enforcement that it could not produce
any
texts. According to the sheriff's report, Verizon's text data stopped at date, time, and phone number, with no content. Detective Shelton had to download from the Internet an open-source software called BitPim, with which he was able to access the text messages. So what's with the fully quoted example in the explanatory legend?

Later, when he got possession of the phones, Mike Benoit hired an expert to search for additional text evidence, but he never shared with me what, if anything, that exercise uncovered.
^[6]

* * *

The suspicion that the sheriff reported the telephonic evidence in bad faith is slam-dunked by the discrepancies between the raw phone call logs produced by Verizon and the final sanitized logs created by the sheriff. The public Benoit investigation report released the latter with the subtle suggestion that they were comprehensive. Though no disclaimer language was included to inform readers that calls documented by Verizon had been deleted, this secondary, interpretive log produced by the sheriff abruptly stops listing calls to Chris Benoit's cell phone after
1
:
34
p.m. Sunday — more than twenty-four hours before the bodies were discovered. Again, the only defense for this would be the dubious contention that subsequent calls were “not relevant.” Why was
1
:
34
relevant but not
1
:
35
, or
5
:
52
, or
8
:
00
(which was bell time for the
Vengeance
pay-per-view)?

Detective Harper, Sheriff Johnson, and
DA
Ballard all ignored repeated inquiries about the incomplete cell phone call logs. In emails from Richard Lindsey, the attorney representing the sheriff's office, he expressed the legalistic view that the Georgia open records statute did not require public agencies to explain or justify why they did not produce something different than what they released, despite what a critic could argue were fundamental inconsistencies.