Chris & Nancy (7 page)

* * *

A young wrestler named Michael Parker, who had just been released after a tryout with
WWE
, had left Chris a message on his cell, apparently about office politics. At
1
:
57
p.m., Chris left a return voice message, which Parker would preserve and share with investigators. Many of Chris's words sounded slurred. He acknowledged, “I'm talking shit, I don't know what the details [of your situation] are off the top of my head.” Chris said, “It sounds like you got shafted over and that really fuckin' sucks. . . . Nothing is better than experience and you've got that. . . . Hope you're doing well, I've missed you the last couple of weeks, wanted to point that out. When you can, give me a call.”

* * *

At
3
:
49
p.m. Saturday, Chris was on his desktop computer. He did a search for “Elija” on Google. One of the links there was information about the prophet Elijah on Wikipedia.com, and Chris went to that page at
4
:
02
.

The New Testament's Book of Kings, Chapter
17
, tells the story of Elijah being sent to a widow. The son of the widow dies and Elijah takes the child from his mother and stretches out on him three times in his own bed. Elijah pleads to God to restore the boy's soul to his body. “Yahweh listened to the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived. Eijah took the child, and brought him down out of the chamber into the house, and delivered him to his mother, and Elijah said, Behold, your son lives. The woman said to Elijah, Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.”

Later the Benoit family pastor, George Dillard, would theorize that at that moment Chris might have been praying to God to return life to his family.

Another theory dovetails with Dillard's to surmise further that Daniel was not yet dead at that point, but Chris proceeded to kill him upon realizing that Nancy would not be revived and that the boy would be orphaned.

* * *

Chris continued talking to and texting with others through Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, not knowing that Benoit was dead, Chris Jericho texted, “Just heard that Wellington died of a heart attack this weekend.” Shayne Bower (“Biff Wellington”), Benoit's old Stampede Wrestling stable mate, had been found dead in his bed at age forty-four.

Bower's best friend, Devon Fielding, told
SLAM! Wrestling
, “His dad said that the initial report was that they think he had a heart attack. . . . I know it wasn't drugs, because I know Shayne. He'd had a real battle with drugs, and he'd been clean for the last two years.”

CHAPTER 6

JUST AS THE EYES ARE THE WINDOWS
to the soul, the decision by World Wrestling Entertainment to stage a three-hour tribute to Chris Benoit on the
USA
cable network's June
25
,
2007
, edition of
Raw
vividly illustrated the depravity at the heart of a peculiar genre. But tepid moralism exaggerates or misunderstands the lesson. Or to put it more precisely, the exaggeration becomes an excuse for the misunderstanding. While respectable opinion can legitimately lament the cliché of wrestling's festival of poor taste, the lament soon becomes its own cliché, and does nothing to prevent more performers from dying — by the bushel. An intelligent perspective on the Benoit tribute goes on to take a hard look at everything a huge corporation achieved when it brought its considerable resources to bear on containing the fallout of the Benoit crime.

Dan Abrams, on
MSNBC
, was among those who, at the time, denounced “spending three hours celebrating a guy . . . the authorities now say is a murderer.” Worse, the tribute plotline echoed, mocked, and, in its inimitably weird way, validated the sentimental exploitation of previous non-homicidal wrestling deaths for
TV
ratings. The most pungent ironies began — but, like all wrestling “angles,” never really ended — with the fact that this particular tribute happened to bump an already planned and fictitious parody show in which
WWE
chairman Vince McMahon's own violent death was to have been memorialized.

Still, the prosaic questions raised by the
Raw
tribute are much more troubling than the postmodernist mind games of a
TV
show cranked out on the fly. As critics speculated, but never followed through on, McMahon and his key people did indeed know that Benoit was the killer well before
8
p.m. eastern time on June
25
. So, how much earlier did they know? Why did they want to know? And what did they plan to do about it? Those questions are the basis of the next chapters of this book. The answers are not clear-cut.

The next day, June
26
,
WWE
would issue a press release headlined, “
WWE
Shares Internal Timeline and Details Relating to Chris Benoit Tragedy.” A facsimile of the release is on the following two pages.

After closely examining
WWE
's asserted timeline of the Benoit death weekend, we can say that, unsurprisingly, it was sliced, diced, and ground through a processor of lawyers and
PR
specialists. But we can also say that the timeline is wildly implausible.

As this project unfolded,
WWE
lawyer Jerry McDevitt sent me a series of legal threats over some of the content of my blog. Tellingly, though, neither McDevitt nor anyone else from
WWE
has ever challenged the veracity of the conclusion that the Benoit
Raw
tribute was broadcast with substantial knowledge by the decision-makers that the Benoit family deaths were not a random triple murder, but a double murder-suicide committed by Chris. That finding is unassailably true.

* * *

At
3
p.m. eastern time on June
25
, Detectives Ethon Harper and Joshua Shelton joined Deputy Mundy and Lieutenant Alden, along with next-door neighbor Holly, at the crime scene. Lieutenant Tommy Pope (later promoted to captain) arrived minutes later. Pope supervised the ongoing tasks of assembling evidence and preserving its chain of custody. Harper did his own quick inspection, confirming the obvious signs that Chris had murdered Nancy and Daniel before hanging himself. Harper then drove eight miles back into central Fayetteville, to the Fayette County Justice Center, where he obtained a search warrant from Circuit Judge Christopher Edwards. Harper called Pope to advise him that a signed warrant was in hand before making the eighteen-minute return trip to Green Meadow Lane.

The head of the Crime Scene Unit team, Lieutenant Tray Powell, oversaw the photographs and, with Bee Huddleston of the coroner's office, arranged for the removal of the three bodies to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab. The task of notifying family members fell to Detective Bo Turner.

A minor controversy would ensue over the failure to collect blood tissue samples from the bodies at the scene. Powell observed a discolored smudge on Chris's left index finger near the knuckle on the thumb side, and hypothesized that it was a friction burn from tying the knots of the cable that bound Nancy. Powell also saw dried blood on the bridge of Chris's nose and in the nail bed of his right index finger. The lieutenant decided to transport the bodies to the crime lab “as is” and to have tissue samples collected during the autopsy. At the lab the next day, however, Powell could no longer locate the areas of suspected blood, and he was therefore unable to collect samples. Powell would write in his report, “The blood that was noted on his nose . . . had been removed by the moisture of the body or rubbed off in the bag. The blood splatter noted on his left index finger showed no signs of injury either. I noted no marking of injury where the blood smear was on his nose. The blood was . . . most likely produced by another source. The source likely being the wife, Nancy Benoit.”

Searching for motives, Detective Harper collected paperwork, most of which was in folders in Nancy's office above the garage: financial records, household utility and credit card statements, insurance and tax documents, medical reports, business and legal correspondence, fan mail.

Inside a small refrigerator in the office's wet bar, Detective Mitchell Howard found several small bottles labeled “Recombinant Human Growth Hormone” from a Chinese company called GeneScience Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. The bag with the growth hormone bottles also contained three insulin syringes.

A Hewlett Packard desktop computer was removed from the office for a forensic examination. Later the Benoit side of the family would dispute the thoroughness of that exam, which involved making an image of the hard drive with a tool called
FTK
and creating an index of the data files
^[1]
.

The cell phones near Chris's body and the home phone answering machine were impounded. Before removing the answering machine, Detectives Shelton and Howard played back and made a secondary digital audio recording of the messages on it. The recording, ultimately released with the public records, was crude due to background noise during the general commotion at the crime scene.

In the upstairs master bedroom, Lieutenant Powell and Detective Bryan Hergesell spotted two boxes with prescription labels from Jones Pharmacy in Fayetteville. The prescribing physician was Phil Astin of Carrollton. The boxes contained March and May
2007
prescriptions of testosterone
200
mg/ml. That night and the next day, investigators would locate supplies of many other prescription medications for both Chris and Nancy. These included Carisoprodol (Soma), a muscle relaxer; Lorcet (Hydrocodone), a narcotic pain reliever; Alprazolam (Xanax), which is used to treat anxiety and panic disorders; Naproxen, an anti-inflammatory drug; Ambien, a sedative or sleeping drug; and Sertraline (Zoloft) and Cymbalta, both antidepressants. Still later, over a period of weeks, Nancy Benoit's family members staying at the house would discover additional steroids, syringes, and other prescription and over-the-counter drugs in a suitcase and in a walk-in closet.

* * *

At around
3
:
30
p.m. mountain time (
5
:
30
eastern) on June
25
, Margaret Benoit, Chris's mother, answered the phone at the home she and her husband shared near Sherwood Park, a suburb of Edmonton, Alberta. The caller was Carl DeMarco, who had risen through the ranks as the person who drove former champion Bret Hart to his appearances in Canada. DeMarco was then the president of
WWE
Canada.

“I considered Chris one of my best friends . . .” DeMarco began.

Confused, Margaret Benoit said, “Why are you telling me this?”

Only then did DeMarco realize that the Benoits hadn't yet gotten the news. He made an excuse and told Margaret he would call her right back.

In Georgia, Detective Turner hadn't called either the Benoit family in Alberta or the Toffolonis, Nancy's side, in Florida
^[2]
. Perhaps the Georgia authorities were hoping to assemble more information before talking to the families. But some time before
4
:
30
p.m. mountain time (
6
:
30
eastern), Turner did call Margaret Benoit. As promised, DeMarco then also called Margaret back.

DeMarco — whose concern the family would describe as genuine and appreciated — took note of how distraught Margaret became. DeMarco called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment in Strathcona County and requested that Emergency Medical Services attend to Mrs. Benoit.

At
4
:
47
mountain time,
RCMP
Constable Rob Morris drove to Sherwood Park to assist the medical team. While en route, Morris would write in his report, “The following information was confirmed: The son who had passed away was World Wrestling Entertainment star Chris Benoit, along with his wife, Nancy, and their
7
year old son, Daniel. Information was received of this by Detective
TURNER
of Atlanta/Fayetteville Police [
sic
] and the president of World Wrestling Entertainment Canada, Carl
DEMARCO
. Det.
TURNER
had already notified Margaret of the incident.”

Five minutes later Morris called Turner to confirm details:

Detective Turner had already spoken with Chris's mother, Margaret BENOIT, and informed her of Chris's passing. The incident was being investigated as an alleged murder-suicide. . . .
^[3]

Morris also called DeMarco, who said he had enlisted Scott Zerr, an Edmonton journalist who was close to Chris Benoit, to drive to the house and lend his additional support to Margaret and Michael Benoit. Margaret had called Mike at work and asked him to come home immediately, without telling him why. When Mike pulled into the driveway around
4
:
45
, Zerr greeted him outside “and told me that Chris had taken the lives of Nancy and Daniel and then taken his own life,” Mike would later write in an email to me. “This information had been given to him that afternoon by
WWE
.”
^[4]

Forty minutes earlier in California, wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer had received the same news in a call from Canada. Meltzer said the call came from one of Chris Benoit's best friends, whom a
WWE
executive had told matter-of-factly of the murder-suicide at around
5
:
30
eastern time. Meltzer would later confirm to me that the
WWE
executive was DeMarco.

According to
WWE
's published timeline, “In keeping with company policy, and with limited knowledge regarding facts of the case,
WWE
chose to air a memorial dedicated to the career of Chris Benoit,” making this decision between
4
p.m. and
5
p.m. eastern.

* * *

World Wrestling Entertainment had substantial experience in public relations crisis management, specifically in inconvenient high-profile deaths. In
1997
, Brian Pillman was found dead in a motel room in Blooming-ton, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis, just as he was supposed to have a leading role in a pay-per-view that was about to be broadcast from the Kiel Center in St. Louis. McMahon shot a straightforward opening cut-in, explaining to the audience why Pillman wasn't there, and carried on with the show. The next night
Raw
was devoted to a Pillman tribute; McMahon even had Pillman's tearful widow on a satellite hookup discussing his lost battle with various addictions.