Chris & Nancy (6 page)

* * *

Nancy told her neighbor Holly that the stress of it all had led her to abuse alcohol and prescription medications. Trying to hold things together for Daniel, she began taking long walks to get into better physical condition, and she vowed to cut back on her drinking. But it was hard. Even when Chris was coming home between shows, instead of staying on the road, he was “emotionally detached,” Nancy said.

In this account, Chris was also controlling: he didn't want his wife to have friends or a means of transportation. After one fight, Chris hid her Hummer. Holly had to drive Nancy around the airport parking facilities until they found it. Chris would try to micromanage her from the road — for example, he would call home and tell her exactly what to cook that night.

In March
2007
, while Chris's son David and daughter Megan were visiting from Canada for a week, Chris and Nancy fought loudly on several occasions. At least once, Nancy pushed and hit Chris. (Nancy was furious that, among other things, Chris had made no preparation or plans for time with his older children.) After that fight, David left the house with Chris and they had dinner out. At other times, David took little Daniel upstairs to shield him from what was going on.

Finally, there were the drugs. Chris had abused steroids for decades, to the point where his own endocrine system had stopped producing its own normal supply of testosterone. This became the basis for a therapeutic use exemption under the
WWE
wellness program; with a doctor's prescription, he could continue to inject testosterone and other steroids under the guise of “testosterone replacement therapy.” Nancy may have been frustrated by his impaired sexual function, which limited his performance in the bedroom during his less-and-less frequent time at home.

In general, she was concerned about what she termed Chris's “bee-stinging,” or the heavy amounts of steroids he shot up. In the case of his painkillers and mood drugs, Nancy occasionally appropriated them for herself. In the case of the steroids, at least once — in late January
2007
— she threw out a stash. Chris was so angry about this that he left home for two weeks.

In May, wrestler Bob Howard (“Hardcore Holly”) would tell the sheriff's investigators, Chris checked into a local hotel after a fight. Chris said Nancy was “fucked up” on pills and booze.

* * *

On June
14
, Chris had this text exchange with fellow wrestler Gregory (“Hurricane”) Helms:

(Benoit)
How many men does it take to open a bottle of beer? — none it should already be open when the bitch brings it.

(Benoit)
How are women and toilet bowls similar? — If the hole in the middle isnt worth a shit.

(Helms)
Or how is a woman's pussy like a warm toilet seat? — They both feel nice but u can't help but wonder who was there before you!

CHAPTER 5

ON SATURDAY, JUNE 16,
Chris Benoit wrestled in Dothan, Alabama,
200
miles south of Fayetteville. Nancy joined him at the show. Her suspicions that Chris was having an affair deepened. Backstage, it seemed to her that
WWE
people were walking on eggshells around her, as if everyone else knew something she didn't.

Inside
WWE
, the rumor was that Benoit was, indeed, having an affair with diva Michelle McCool, a blonde bombshell former schoolteacher who, coincidentally, hailed from the same northern Florida region as Nancy. The sheriff's log of text messages would show that on November
30
,
2006
, Chris asked another wrestler, “Could you please text me Michelle McCools number please?”

Also on the log are redactions of the phone number or numbers (represented only as “xxx-xxx-xxxx,” perhaps to protect privacy) to which Benoit texted about his arrivals on Delta Airlines flights in May
2007
. Chris was telling the recipient that he would arrive at
9
:
32
a.m. on May
3
and at
8
:
25
a.m. on May
5
. (In between, on May
4
, Chris appeared to have made a one-day hop home.) Verizon Wireless produced crude printouts of all the call information from the Benoits' phones, but the data starts on June
1
; therefore, it's impossible to determine to whom those two texts were directed. Thursday, May
3
, was a company off-day, so if Chris was conducting any business, it would have been a non-wrestling promotional appearance. Saturday, May
5
, was the date of two
WWE
shows in Poughkeepsie, New York. McCool, like Benoit, was booked in both of them.

(McCool did not respond to requests for comment sent through the contact emails on her website. The wrestler from whom Benoit requested McCool's phone number did not return voice messages.)

Nancy noticed other signs. At home, Chris sometimes went outside to carry on phone conversations. He also had a second cell phone, which Nancy knew about but believed Chris was trying to hide from her. He had never done this before, and since she was a “smartened up” industry insider, she was sure that whatever he was concealing did not pertain to business. Of course, she had been taunting him about the decline of their sex life, and their relationship had taken on a full-throated slash-and-burn dynamic. Perhaps Chris was just taunting her back.

On June
17
, Nancy returned home while Chris split the distance between Dothan and Fayetteville with a show in Columbus, Georgia. Whatever they talked about that day prompted Nancy's last recorded text message fulminations. At
4
:
01
p.m., she transmitted:
“Grow up!”
Twenty-two minutes later:
“Answer the phone I need to know what the plan is.”
And at
4
:
35
:
“If I end up having to throw away any food again for tonight and tomorrow I will not be cooking any meals for anyone for a very long time.”

Chris arrived home from Columbus at sixteen minutes past midnight on Monday, June
18
. Letting himself in through the security gate, he apparently failed to deactivate the alarm. The Fayette County
911
Center was alerted and a sheriff's deputy was dispatched for what would be the first of two times in eight days. At
12
:
43
a.m., user code
17
was typed onto the security system keypad, disabling what in this case was a false alarm.

Later that day Nancy spoke on the phone for nearly two hours with her old friend Pam Clark in Tennessee. Clark was the widow of Brian Hildebrand, a wrestler and referee who had died of cancer. Nancy told Pam that Daniel was attending a summer horse-riding day camp at next-door neighbor Holly's. The women also discussed Nancy's concerns over the search for a school for him now that he had graduated from a preschool kindergarten program. But most of all, they talked about Nancy's ongoing struggles with Chris over money, sex, and control. Nancy specifically mentioned the arguments over the life insurance policy and her suspicions of an affair.

Financial security and sexual fidelity aside, Nancy described Chris's mood swings as becoming unbearable; he was at the point of picking a fight over almost nothing. She talked about needing to get away to visit her parents in Florida or her sister in North Carolina, or even move to Florida with Daniel.

Nancy also said Chris had been physically abusive, and she was afraid of him. She was keeping evidence of her husband's domestic violence in a safe place. She had a bad feeling.

“If anything happens to me,” Nancy told Pam Clark, “make sure people know that Chris did it.”
^[1]

* * *

On Tuesday, June
19
, Chris flew to Charlotte for a
WWE
TV
taping. He returned to Georgia on Wednesday morning. The week proceeded as Chris's down time always did: catching up on sleep, visits to the tanning parlor and the gym. He talked to his friend James Robison, a manager at Partners II Pizza in Peachtree City, about plans for the Fourth of July. Since befriending Benoit years earlier at the gym, Robison had become the facilitator of a family tradition on Independence Day. He would secure a parking space for Chris next to the back entrance of the restaurant at Aberdeen Plaza near Lake Peachtree, then whisk Chris, Nancy, and Daniel upstairs to a reasonably private booth, from where they could look out the window and enjoy the waterfront fireworks without being bothered.

At
8
:
30
Friday morning, Chris dropped off Daniel at Holly's horse camp. Holly would tell Detective Harper that she found it strange that Chris pulled up and drove off so “quickly and recklessly.” At least he drove Daniel to the door this time; the day before he had simply left the boy at the end of the driveway.

Chris drove on to Carrollton, forty miles northwest, for an appointment with his personal doctor, Phil Astin. The appointment wasn't until
12
:
30
p.m. Benoit may have stopped on the way for a bite to eat at one of favorite spots, Moe's Southwest Grill in Peachtree City. Benoit saw Astin every couple of months for routine check-ups and to replenish a raft of prescriptions. This time Chris said he had no special physical complaints — just the usual aches and pains — but added that he was mildly depressed and wanted to start taking Zoloft again. He discussed his marriage, saying Nancy had been acting “moody and bitchy” lately, and wondering if she was experiencing the onset of menopause. Not very likely at age forty-three, but “I agreed to see her professionally” after the Fourth of July “and agreed not to mention our conversation or his conversation to her,” Astin would tell the sheriff in a written statement. Chris chatted with the office staff, as usual, and posed for a picture, and signed a few autographs for other patients in the waiting room.

On the drive home, Benoit talked on his cell with Hardcore Holly, who asked him how things were with Nancy. “She's been acting like Hitler, but we're working it out,” Chris said. He met up with another wrestler friend, Ray Rawls, at the McDonald's off the I-
85
Peachtree City/Tyrone exit. Like many younger wrestlers, Rawls — who worked under the name Rick Michaels — considered Benoit a model of professionalism. But Rawls had additional reasons for admiring him. A few years earlier, after working his way up from regional independent promotions, Rawls had gotten a shot with
WWE
. The company turned out not to be that interested in Rawls as a wrestler, but he was a talented tailor, and a number of the guys, Benoit among them, hired him to make their customized wrestling tights. Chris wore long tights, the kind that cover your legs, and he was a perfectionist about them, as he was with every aspect of his craft. He was like Michael Jordan with basketball shoes, discarding each pair after just a few matches. Over the course of just a couple of years, Benoit commissioned Rawls to make him around
120
pairs of tights, at several hundred dollars a pop.

And Chris was a generous tipper; when Rawls delivered the goods, he invariably got a check for at least $
100
above the quoted price — even more if Chris forgot his checkbook and wound up paying later. That had happened a few months earlier, and the two made a plan to meet at Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport as Chris returned from a tour. Inadvertently, the incident gave Rawls a ringside seat for the disintegration of the Benoit marriage. Nancy, with Daniel in tow, showed up at the terminal to greet Chris, too, but when the plane landed, he wasn't on it. There was no explanatory phone message, and Nancy stormed off. The next day, Chris explained to Rawls that he'd overslept and missed his flight, which struck the latter as odd. Why hadn't Chris just called his wife and spared her the inconvenience of driving to the airport for nothing?

Yet another reason Rawls liked Chris had nothing to do with money. In
2005
,
WWE
fired Rawls after he was arrested for sexual exploitation of a minor. Still, Chris kept up their connection. “I live in a glass house myself, so I don't throw stones,” he said.

Rawls usually met Chris at the same McDonald's off the freeway. Often Daniel was tagging along and Rawls would give him a spare wrestler's mask or some other trinket. This time, because Chris was returning from Dr. Astin's, he was alone. Benoit handed Rawls a check for
$650
, and Rawls gave Chris two sets of tights, one for him and one to pass along to another wrestler, Chris Masters.

Rawls and Benoit talked shop. Ray wanted to know how Chris felt about having been moved recently from
WWE
's
Raw
roster to
ECW
, the company's least-watched brand. “As long as I can wrestle, that's all I care about,” Chris replied.

When Rawls mentioned that he had been working hard and was tired, Benoit perked up. He said he knew the perfect pick-me-up: a mixture of Goody's Headache Powder, Red Bull energy drink, and “Yellow Jackets.” The latter was an ephedra-based diet pill, banned several years earlier by the Food and Drug Administration, but generic knockoffs of indeterminate pharmacology continued to be sold over the counter at places like gas station convenience stores. (One drug expert explained this category of unregulated and easily obtained borderline products as a popular and low-cost pathway to a “hillbilly high.”) No matter how tired he was, Chris said, the concoction “makes me feel like Superman.”

“Chris insisted that I get some Goody's with Red Bull and Yellow Jackets right away,” Rawls recalled. “There was a
BP
service station across the way, and he said
BP
carried Yellow Jackets. He told me to follow him there in my car. But they didn't have any. Then Chris said he was sure he'd find them at the
BP
closer to his house and he'd call me back when he did.”

As Benoit sped off in his Hummer, Rawls thought, This guy is
wired
.

* * *

Back home, Chris talked on the phone to Kyle Burdg, a salesman at a local Hummer dealership, about selling one of their vehicles, and he ordered a call by Aqua Pro, the company that serviced the swimming pool. He talked to Chavo. He talked to Nancy, who was shopping at the local Publix supermarket for that evening's family cookout on the grill on the back deck. When the pool guys, Patrick Sterling and Andrew Webb, arrived, they saw Chris, flipping meat on the grill, and Daniel, both in swimming trunks.

That night, what Nancy had been fearing happened.

Records show that at
9
:
25
p.m., the
411
information number processed a request from the Benoit home phone for the number of the Fayetteville police. The number given out was an obsolete, non-emergency number, but in any case it wasn't called. Could Nancy not have known that, even though they had a Fayetteville postal address, they were located in an unincorporated area of the county and thus under the jurisdiction of the Fayette County Sheriff's Office, not the city of Fayetteville Police Depart-ment? (This awareness would have been underscored if she were awake at the time of the false alarm several nights earlier when Chris forgot to enter the shutoff pass code as he went through the gate. The responding agency that night was the county sheriff, not the city police.)

The possibility that an abortive effort to reach law enforcement might have been undertaken by Daniel, not Nancy, is tantalizing — and, if true, heartbreaking.

At
9
:
32
, records show, there was a call from the Benoit home phone to next-door neighbor Holly's cell, then another a minute later, and another at
10
p.m., though no voice messages were left. Three days later, after she led the sheriff's deputies to the grisly scene on three different floors, Holly would recall the ringing of the phone on Friday night and wish she had answered. Maybe she could have done something.

* * *

At
8
:
30
Saturday morning, Chris left Holly a voice message: Was Daniel supposed to be at horse camp today? If so, he couldn't make it because he was sick.

When Holly picked up the message in the afternoon, she remarked to her husband that it was strange — Nancy, of course, knew the camp was on weekday mornings only. And with Chris's “somewhat antisocial” ways (as she would describe them to sheriff's investigators), it was uncharacteristic for him to initiate a conversation.

At
3
:
01
p.m., Holly called Chris back. They talked for nine minutes. Chris asked if anyone in her family had been sick. He said he was asking because Daniel had been up all night with food poisoning. Chris felt bad that he could do nothing for him. Nancy also had food poisoning, but just a touch, not as bad. Chris said he, personally, was fine, and Nancy and Daniel wanted to lay low for a few days and recover. Chris sounded very calm. Later Holly would realize that Chris had been discouraging her from calling or visiting Nancy, with whom she talked a lot.