Inspection of all the doors and windows revealed no sign of forced entry.
* * *
WWE security man Fagan’s first contact with 911 had come nearly two hours after his company, Andrews Inter-national, made the apparent final WWE-generated call to the Benoit home, at 11 a.m. A little more than an hour later, Fagan called someone in the sheriff’s office who advised him that the way to proceed was to ask 911 for a “welfare check.” The summons to law enforcement marked the beginning of the end of a drama that stretched across more than sixty hours.
Two days earlier, Saturday the 23rd, Chris Benoit had missed his appearance at a wrestling show in Beaumont, Texas, following a day and an evening of conflicting messages in conversations with concerned fellow wrestlers and the WWE front office. These conversations were surely after the murder of Nancy (which most likely took place on Friday night). At least some, and probably all, of them also succeeded the murder of Daniel (which most likely took place early Saturday). Chris’s basic cover story that day was that he was pinned down at home in Georgia, where he said Nancy and Daniel had food poisoning and were vomiting blood. Chris promised his colleagues and bosses that he would get his wife and son cared for and join the WWE Texas tour with dispatch.
But Benoit did not turn up in Houston either late that night or the next day, Sunday the 24th. On Sunday night WWE staged one of its biggest shows of the year, Vengeance — Night of Champions, broadcast globally on cable and satellite systems to pay-per-view subscribers. The original script for Vengeance called for Chris to win his match and, with it, the championship of ECW, one of the company’s three “brands” of wrestling troupes. With Chris’s no-show, the match lineup had to be scrambled. The live crowd of 15,000-plus at the Toyota Center and the pay-per-view audience were told that Benoit had been detained by a family emergency.
Some wrestlers had bad histories of missing bookings, often because of alcohol or substance abuse. But the fanatically reliable Benoit was not one of them. Seven years earlier he’d even wrestled for months with a broken neck before finally succumbing to cervical fusion surgery, which sidelined him for most of a year. He never missed a show.
In the early morning hours of Sunday, more than sixteen hours before the first bell of Vengeance, Chris had sent a series of text messages from his and Nancy’s cell phones to the cells of two colleagues, wrestler Chavo Guerrero and referee (and ex-wrestler) Scott Armstrong. The messages contained two repeated and cryptic snippets of information: “My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane, Fayetteville, Georgia, 30215” and “The dogs are in the enclosed pool area. Garage side door is open.” Benoit was saying farewell and giving directions to the scene of the carnage, but that meaning would become crystal-clear only with 20/20 hindsight[2][3].
Dennis Fagan revealed little of this background in his Monday afternoon call to the authorities. One possible explanation for this is that WWE executives had not thoroughly briefed Fagan. Yet when the 911 dispatcher Cathy Crenshaw asked, “What is your emergency?”, among Fagan’s first words were, “I run the security for World Wrestling.”
Fagan said Chris had missed the show last night, which was unlike him, as he was “very religious” about his work commitments.
A retired New York City Police Department detective, Fagan held the title “Executive Director, East Coast Anti-Piracy and Special Events” for Andrews International, which described itself as “a full service provider of security and risk mitigation services, and one of the ten largest private security service providers in the United States.” Later, according to Detective Ethon Harper, who authored the report closing the Fayette County investigation of the Benoit case, the sheriff’s office would ask Fagan and Andrews International no detailed questions about how the company came to be involved in the hectic events of a weekend during which a star performer for an Andrews client missed two straight appearances, including a championship match on a pay-per-view show. “I spoke with someone at Andrews International to see what type of business they were,” Harper told me. “I also wanted to confirm that the number on the phone records was one of their phone numbers. It was.”
In an email to me, WWE’s vice president of corporate communications, Gary Davis, fell well short of confirming that Fagan “ran” WWE security operations. “Dennis Fagan is employed by a security firm utilized by WWE. He assisted us in trying to contact Chris Benoit on the weekend in question,” Davis said. Davis did not clarify whether the single record of Andrews International’s involvement, the 11 a.m. Monday call to the Benoit home, qualified as a “weekend” effort, but the statement at least suggests that Fagan had a somewhat more substantial role, in turn raising suspicion on why he would give inaccurate information in his series of calls to 911 and why the sheriff would not have asked him an additional substantive question or two.
Whatever Fagan’s level of authority or involvement, his 911 calls exhibited a lack of intimate knowledge of the events leading up to them. “At three o’clock this morning there was a message left for one of the other wrestlers,” Fagan said to the dispatcher. “And basically it says, ‘The dogs are in the backyard. The back door is open. Goodbye.’ And that’s it.” In fact, there were multiple messages from Benoit, not “a message”; and they were not “this morning” but the previous morning — well over thirty hours before the first call to 911.
Fagan’s citation of the wrong day for the text messages was not an isolated slip of the tongue. Later in the same, initial 911 call, Fagan reiterated, “That message was at three o’clock this morning.”
Either WWE misinformed Fagan of the timing of the final text messages or he was confused — or lying.
The sheriff’s report closing the investigation would erroneously state that Fagan told 911 that Benoit “left a text message for a wrestling co-worker around 3 a.m. on Sunday, June 24, 2007.” Asked about this discrepancy months later, Detective Harper told me, “I missed that. I’ll have to listen to it again.” By subtly fusing the report in the 911 call of Monday morning texts with later knowledge that the texts were actually a full day earlier, the sheriff contributed to blurring public understanding of the significant fact that WWE had been dealing with a weekend-long crisis, a missing-person case with a long tail. This was one of many examples of fudged facts in the record, which had the cumulative effect of enabling WWE to sell to the public the most sympathetic interpretation of the company’s response.
At 1:41 p.m., after the 911 dispatcher told Fagan that the Benoits’ front gate was locked and the officers were being deterred by aggressive canines, Fagan expressed surprise, saying, “The message that we got — like I said, he left a message at three o’clock in the morning for another wrestler — ‘The gate’s open. . . .’” Fagan once again was reinforcing the suggestion that Chris’s text message was on Monday rather than Sunday. Fagan also didn’t seem to grasp the difference between the main gate to the property and the garage side door leading into the house itself. That would be more understandable, especially if neither Fagan nor anyone else from Andrews International had ever seen the house. But it is another example of, at a minimum, sloppiness in the details[4].
In his next call to 911 a half-hour later, at 2:13 p.m., Fagan reported that an unspecified “they” had just gotten back to him with more information. Later he said one of his sources was someone named “Chavo.”
“The gentleman I’m dealing with,” Fagan said, “is a retired judge in New York.” That would be Richard Hering, WWE’s vice president of governmental relations and risk management, formerly a justice in upstate Sullivan County. This last piece of trivia could not have been of any interest to the 911 dispatcher. Fagan was trying to impress the listener with his bona fides, or else he was just rambling.
Fagan was now saying he had learned of two separate text messages from Benoit. Actually, Guerrero and Armstrong received a total of at least five texts from Chris in the early morning hours of Sunday.
As for the problem with the dogs in the hour before Holly Schrepfer solved it, Fagan asked, “Can they Taser them — put them to sleep?”[5]
Fagan checked in twice more with 911, both at times after the Benoit family members had been found dead. Each time, at 3:15 and 4:19, the 911 dispatcher told Fagan that there was not yet any information to impart.
But WWE vice president Hering seemed to be on a more substantive track of communications with the county authorities. At 4:41 Hering called 911 to leave a message for Sheriff’s Lieutenant Tommy Pope. Hering said Pope had relayed to Hering a request for certain information in “the Benoit investigation.” (Hering did not say if Pope’s message had been relayed through Fagan. Perhaps so.) Hering said he had returned Pope’s voice messages, but Hering was now calling 911, as well, because he believed Pope was at the house and therefore unable to retrieve the voice messages[6].
By the time Fagan, putatively still in the dark, was making his last call to 911, WWE was already deciding to cancel the live wrestling show in Corpus Christi, Texas, and turn that night’s edition of Raw, the Monday night wrestling show on the USA cable network, into a spontaneously produced three-hour memorial tribute to Chris Benoit. Vince McMahon, the company chairman, was explaining all this in a meeting with the wrestlers. By accident or by design, the person who said “I run the security for World Wrestling” was out of the loop — either a well-planted stooge, as clueless as Inspector Clouseau, or playing dumb[7].
* * *
Around 3 p.m., Lieutenant Pope and Detective Harper reached the crime scene, directing the activities of a stream of nineteen additional personnel from several agencies who fanned out across the house over the course of the afternoon and evening. At 3:30 a deputy coroner, Bee Huddleston, arrived and made that office’s first inspection of the bodies. (In the way of many smaller governments, especially in the American South, Huddleston was also a director of a local funeral home, Carl J. Mowell & Son, whose owner also doubled as the elected county coroner.) Animal control took custody of Carny and Highspot and several kittens cowering in one of the bathrooms.
Detective Bo Turner was put in charge of notifying family. Word of a sensational celebrity crime quickly spread to the public. By 6 p.m. eastern time, WWE had announced on its website:
World Wrestling Entertainment was informed today by authorities in Fayette County, Ga., that WWE Superstar Chris Benoit, his wife, Nancy, and his son were found dead in their home. Authorities are investigating, but no other details are available at this time.
Instead of its announced programming for tonight on USA Network, WWE will air a three-hour tribute to Chris Benoit.
Chris was beloved among his fellow Superstars, and was a favorite among WWE fans for his unbelievable athleticism and wrestling ability. He always took great pride in his performance, and always showed respect for the business he loved, for his peers and towards his fans. This is a terrible tragedy and an unbearable loss.
WWE extends its sincere condolences and prayers to the surviving members of the Benoit family and their loved ones in this time of tragedy.
The newswire services picked up the item, and wrestling fan sites disseminated it. Leaks of details and speculation flooded blogs, message boards, and chat rooms. Sheriff’s officers would blame some of the leaks of early information from the crime scene on District Attorney Scott Ballard, who was already displaying a penchant for loose remarks to whoever pointed a camera at him or held a reporter’s notebook.
Fayette County — a placid collection of mostly tony bedroom communities located in the exurbs south of the Atlanta airport — became a center of the media universe. Dozens of television news crews and print reporters, and scores of fans and curiosity-seekers, some traveling vast distances, descended on the scene. Over the next days, Lieutenant Pope and, especially, District Attorney Ballard were regular talking heads on live reports, as the Benoit family tragedy momentarily eclipsed interminable and redundant cable coverage of the most recent misadventures of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton.
* * *
Every year in the United States there are scores of domestic homicides — multiple murders of children and the co-heads of households. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 329 males and 1,181 females were victims of “intimate” homicides in 2005, the most recent year of comprehensive posted statistics by murder category. In the vast majority of multiple-person family homicides, the perpetrator turns out to be the husband-father. A distraught mother is more likely than a father to kill one or more children, but only rarely does the woman murder her spouse as well.
After the most perfunctory confirmation that no one had broken into the Benoit home, no theory for the three deaths other than double murder-suicide by Chris would ever get past first base — for good reason.
Regardless of the circumstances, multiple murder shocks. Doubly disconcerting is the idea that family, the ultimate haven in a heartless world, could also be the logical platform of the ultimate heinous act. This reaction to crime news is an understandable human one, and it applies to families thought to be happy and not; to those known to have domestic violence histories and not; to stories unleashing the homicidal pathology of men from all walks of life, all levels of substance abuse or abstinence, all outward signs of a ticking time bomb or of a heretofore calm exterior.
When the perpetrator is a celebrity, information gets processed through yet another distorting lens. We, the public masses, have acquired a false sense that we share even a glimmer of genuine intimacy with what turns out to be the manufactured image of a real person. We don’t readily surrender that illusion.
Here the person was Chris Benoit, the Rabid Wolverine, the Canadian Crippler, the erstwhile masked Pegasus Kid; the embodiment both of fans’ thrills and of their denial of the hard truths that enabled those thrills. Fans tend to think in the broad categories of old-time melodramas, populated with heroes and villains — or, as they’re known in wrestling, “babyfaces” and “heels.” But when Benoit snapped, it was something bigger than a wrestling story line; it was for real, and its awful dimensions made it something akin to wrestling’s perfect storm. Occupation-related drug addiction, mental impairment, and lifestyle instability brought into high relief whatever independent personal and marital stressors already existed, and whatever predisposition Benoit might already have carried for resolving in the worst way his inner turmoil.
In the perfect storm, Benoit was the perfect vessel. He linked wrestling’s past with wrestling’s future, its small-time regional roots with its corporate global reach. Trading in the possibility of a developed private life, he pursued a distinguished public career, but one that in the end was fatally tarnished.
[1]. The death certificates would list the causes of death as “strangulation” for Nancy, “suffocation” for Daniel, and “hanging” for Chris. With respect to Daniel, though media reports routinely cited “suffocation,” “asphyxiation,” and similar terms, the autopsy report of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab would say “cervical compression.” That seems to me somewhat different — and more consistent with the damage that would be inflicted by Chris’s applying on Daniel a version of the “Crippler Crossface” wrestling hold, as investigators speculated he did. (This as opposed to, say, choking Daniel or holding a pillow over his face.) The GBI medical examiner, Dr. Kris Sperry, said in an email that “any differences between the GBI reports and the death certificates (which were issued by the Fayette County Coroner) are solely the responsibility of the Coroner, and not the gbi.” A copy of the GBI autopsy report is included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.
[2]. The sheriff’s report referred to Scott Armstrong as “Scott James.”
[3]. Some readers of the original version were confused by my failure to explain that Scott James is simply the real name of Scott Armstrong.
[4]. Some of the photos
of the house plot and individual rooms and evidence, taken by the Crime Scene Unit team and later publicly released, are published in this book. The complete set of those photos is included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.
[5]. The dogs’ job was to protect Daniel Benoit. Almost certainly, they hopped the backyard fence and roamed the property on their own, because they were hungry and frisky or because they went through the house and saw what had happened. According to a family source, next-door neighbor Holly had made a note to complain to the Benoits about Carny and Highspot’s barking on Sunday night.
[6]. The complete audio record of the 911 calls is included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.
[7]. Reached by phone on March 27, 2008, Fagan declined to be interviewed, referring all questions to WWE executive Hering, who did not respond to messages.
CHAPTER 2
Chris & Nancy
STAR-CROSSED WRESTLING LOVERS, Chris Benoit and Nancy Toffoloni were born on the same day, May 21 — he in 1967, she three years earlier.[1] He was the wrestler’s wrestler, the living, breathing descendent of the style of Tom Billington, the legendary “Dynamite Kid.” She was a breakthrough figure in the sexualization of wrestling’s femme fatales, so prototypical in portraying the charms and treacheries of a woman that her last character was known — with an efficiency as stunning as her physical beauty — simply as “Woman.”
Born in Montreal, Chris moved with his family to Edmonton at a young age. It is no exaggeration to note that he never knew any life outside wrestling. Captivated by the televised shows of Stampede Wrestling, Stu Hart’s Western Canada territory, Benoit began turning up at Stampede shows as early as age eleven, volunteering to set up and tear down the folding chairs for ringside seating at Edmonton’s Kinsmen Field House.
Chris & Nancy Page 3