Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  McMahon told the crew that, in lieu of wrestling, Benoit’s colleagues would give interview testimonials and remembrances on Raw. McMahon said anyone who wanted to go home had permission to do so. Few, if any, took up the offer — there was comfort in remaining enveloped in the numbers of this spontaneous wake. Ted DiBiase, a retired wrestler who had become an evangelical Christian minister, had been flown to Texas to be part of the McMahon death story line; now DiBiase found himself enlisted as a real-life grief counselor.

  At 8 p.m. eastern time on June 25, Vince McMahon stood in center ring in the empty arena. Eyes blurred by tears, voice choking and reduced to the hoarse growl characteristic for him at the end of a long day of stress, McMahon broke character as he delivered the Raw opening:

  Tonight’s story line was to have been the alleged demise of my character, Mr. McMahon. However, in reality, WWE superstar Chris Benoit, his wife Nancy and their son Daniel are dead. Their bodies were discovered this afternoon in their new suburban Atlanta home. The authorities are undergoing an investigation. We here in the WWE can only offer our condolences to the extended family of Chris Benoit. And the only other thing we can do at this moment is, tonight, pay tribute to Chris Benoit. We will offer you some of the most memorable moments in Chris’s professional life and you will hear, tonight, comments from his peers — those here, his fellow performers — those here, who loved Chris and admired him so much. So tonight will be a three-hour tribute to one of the greatest WWE superstars of all time. Tonight we pay tribute to Chris Benoit.

  With that, taped highlights of Benoit’s career were played to the accompaniment of the song “One Thing” by the Canadian grunge band Finger Eleven. Raw announcers Jim Ross and Jerry “The King” Lawler reflected on Benoit’s legacy. Retired wrestling legend “Stone Cold” Steve Austin spoke via videotape. John Bradshaw Layfield talked about Benoit’s devotion to his family. Tazz, C.M. Punk, Dean Malenko, Triple H and his wife Stephanie, and others said their pieces. The tribute culminated with footage of Benoit’s 2004 WrestleMania championship victory, followed by the emotional in-ring celebration with Nancy, Daniel, and Eddie Guerrero.

  One of the live testimonials was by William Regal, one of Benoit’s original Fayette County wrestling neighbors. Regal’s segment came off as unintentionally chilling. Just before Regal went out for the shoot, Layfield remarked to him, “You don’t think Chris killed that boy, do you?” Spooked, Regal proceeded to deliver an eerily detached eulogy; while calling Chris the best wrestler he had ever faced, Regal also said he would rather reserve comment on anything else until the facts came in.

  “If you watch the Raw tribute carefully, it doesn’t appear that the wrestlers, as a group, had an inkling that it was murder-suicide,” Meltzer said. “But the McMahon family had to know.” Meltzer’s assessment was too generous. Though the power of denial cannot be discounted, my investigation has unearthed plenty of evidence that a substantial group of people had “an inkling.”

  During the hour from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. (eastern time) — two thirds of the way through the tribute’s live feed — Doug Evans of Fox 5 News in Atlanta became the first journalist to report to a wide audience that the Fayette County crime scene investigation was focusing on murder-suicide. Minutes later the WWE website’s own home page was headlined, “Double Murder-Suicide,” with the text: “It has been ruled that the deaths . . . were the result of a double murder-suicide from within the home. WWE.com will have more as soon as it becomes available.”

  “Here is what has always bothered me,” Evans said in a later email to me. “I got a tip about the murder not long after the investigators arrived, and it came from inside the gates. Pretty fresh you would think, right? I started heading immediately to Fayette County. On my way, a radio reporter from Canada called me (he was given my cell number by our staff in Atlanta) and he wanted to know about the murders and suicide. He said it was already on the WWE web page. How did that happen so fast? My source couldn’t reveal the names at the time but gave me the location. However, there it was already in full detail for the whole world to read. How did that happen?”

  The last hour of the Benoit tribute forged ahead on USA cable, after which the repeat feed to the West Coast was broadcast intact. The WWE website home page, alongside the news bulletin, continued to stream a tribute video package along with exclusive studio-produced testimonials.

  Inside the ring and in TV skits, WWE’s verbal agility is always striking, and it was on full display here. The company had concealed the overwhelming suspicion of murder-suicide, of which at least higher-ups had been aware since, at the latest, around the hour of four to five o’clock eastern time. Turning on a dime, WWE.com now exaggerated the report of the preponderant investigative theory, calling it a “ruling.” At the same time, the phrase “within the home” continued to keep the identity of the killer vague. Recalling the murder of comic actor Phil Hartman by his wife, many of Chris’s fans continued to hold out the perverse hope that Nancy, and not Chris, would prove to be the perpetrator.

  Of course, that was not to be. The next night, at the start of another cable show, on the Sci Fi network, McMahon said Chris Benoit would never be mentioned again on WWE television. By then all references to Benoit had been expunged from the website, and all Benoit-related videos and merchandise were being pulled from physical and virtual store shelves “as facts emerged surrounding the case,” according to the company’s timeline. The passive construction “as facts emerged” was key. When they emerged to Vince McMahon did not compute; only when they emerged to the public at a pace and in a manner McMahon tightly controlled.

  It was the end of the following week, Friday, July 6, by the time McMahon got around to calling Mike Benoit in Alberta. “I suppose that I could have called earlier,” McMahon said. “But we were both trying to deal with this.”

  Screening calls, Benoit heard the message live as it came through on his answering machine. He chose not to pick up. Nor would he ever return McMahon’s call.

  [1]. The sheriff did not release the full Internet and email history, images, and video files, asserting that they were exempt under Georgia open records law: “None of this information is relevant to the incident and had any bearing on the investigation.” Whether the entirety of the computer’s Internet and email history was irrelevant seems highly questionable, but at least the assertion of a legal exemption was made directly. As will be seen later, the sheriff in other areas fudged the very existence of a supporting record.

  [2]. The publicly released home answering machine messages would include a series of late Monday afternoon/early Monday evening calls from Nancy’s parents, Paul and Maureen Toffoloni, escalating in confusion and worry. Though neither DeMarco nor Turner would grant an interview to confirm this, it seems overwhelmingly likely that DeMarco called Turner or got a message to him after DeMarco spoke the first time with Margaret Benoit. Also on the answering machine was a message left at some undetermined point by Daniel Benoit for his father, whom the little boy affectionately called “pooh-bear.” Finally, the answering machine still retained — probably for sentimental reasons — the very last known recordings of the voice of Eddie Guerrero, in two messages left the day before Guerrero died in Minneapolis in 2005. The answering machine audio is included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.

  [3]. Facsimiles of the RCMP “Occurrence summary” and “General Occurrence Report” are included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.

  [4]. After some of the information in this chapter was published on my blog, Zerr denied to Josh Stewart, a wrestling columnist for the Long Island Press, that he was the one who had told Mike Benoit that Chris was the perpetrator. Mike linked Zerr’s puzzling denial to Mike’s earlier refusal to sign a legal release authorizing a book Zerr was planning to write. Mike reemphasized the accuracy of my account and said he believed Zerr to be part of
“a coordinated attempt to discredit” my work. Zerr — whom I have never met or spoken to — also falsely told others that an essay I had published months after the Benoit deaths failed to mention Chris’s concussion syndrome, and he spoke of me in disparaging terms to Mike Benoit. A wrestling insider told me, “The fact that Zerr would run you down in combination with the denial shows it’s likely coming directly from DeMarco, and that they have no defense. DeMarco is the type — clumsy in covering his tracks.”

  [5]. Generally speaking, does WWE, a publicly traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, run afoul of federal securities law prohibitions against issuing materially false statements when it hypes wrestling story lines on its corporate website, outside the boundaries of its entertainment television shows, website, and magazines? In a related example, WWE in the spring of 2008 staged a news conference to announce that boxer Floyd Mayweather was being paid $20 million to appear at WrestleMania — a figure surely many multiples higher than Mayweather’s actual payoff. If there were factual misstatements in WWE’s published internal timeline for Benoit, the same issue might arise. And in June 2009, WWE shares plunged seven percent after a TV storyline, supported by a USA cable news release, had Donald Trump purchasing WWE’s Raw brand.

  CHAPTER 7

  Chavo Guerrero, Scott Armstrong, the Text Messages, and the Two Timelines

  HUNDREDS OF PRO WRESTLERS DIED young in the twenty or so years before the Chris Benoit tragedy. Some, like Brian Pillman and Eddie Guerrero, had heart disease brought on or exacerbated by abuse of steroids and other drugs. Some overdosed more overtly on recreational drugs like cocaine. Some committed suicide. Some suffered liver or kidney malfunction, which — like the forms of cancer sometimes associated with them — stemmed from alcohol and/or high doses of their pharmaceuticals of choice. Others met their ends in car crashes, in which fatigue or impairment played a part, and at least one was killed in a barroom brawl. Most rarely, but occasionally, others died in accidents inside the ring, like Owen Hart.

  Prior to June 2007, however, no wrestler had ever murdered loved ones in a rampage so sensational that it made the cover of People magazine, fueled tabloid coverage, and for weeks commanded panel-discussion analysis and commentary on cable news networks. Principally for that reason, it is hard to pass judgment on Chavo Guerrero and Scott Armstrong if they initially weren’t sure what to make of Chris Benoit’s final text messages on Sunday, June 24. The Benoit murder-suicide was an event of unprecedented perplexity and ugliness. Guerrero and Armstrong couldn’t fight the last war because there hadn’t been a last war.

  The two wrestler friends must have found further disorienting the sense that Benoit seemed poorly cast for the role of someone “going postal.” By wrestling standards he was a straight arrow. He was also private and reserved outside the ring, and even if under stress in his marriage — an element worsened by the travel and image demands of his profession — he gave every indication of loving his wife and their child. Chris especially doted on Daniel.

  So the first possibilities to occur to Guerrero and Armstrong naturally wouldn’t have been successive garroting, neck-snapping, and hanging. To the extent they realized Chris was in serious trouble, their instinct would have been to protect him and protect their business. Expecting them to comprehend immediately the depth of that trouble may be unfair.

  Still, informed speculation as to how and why Guerrero and Armstrong acted as they did cannot let them entirely off the hook. Even if they didn’t grasp the picture on Saturday evening, Sunday morning, or Sunday afternoon, the full alarm was surely sounded by the time Benoit no-showed the Houston pay-per-view on Sunday night. At that point, it made no sense for friends and colleagues (or for WWE’s well-staffed talent relations and security departments, reporting to company executives) to continue to scratch their heads in isolation instead of huddling and taking action. Specifically, it is not credible that Guerrero and Armstrong told no one (not just no “WWE officials,” in the words of the company’s timeline, however those are defined) about the text messages all day and night Sunday — if, indeed, that is what they maintain. To the public, they would have nothing to say (with one key exception, which we will get to). And law enforcement authorities either didn’t ask them to say anything or censored the answers in the report on their investigation.

  As for the company’s assertion that “WWE officials” were unaware of the messages until 12:30 p.m. Monday — more than thirty hours after Benoit transmitted them, and an hour and a half after the company’s security consultant made the last call to the Benoit home attempting to reach him — the chance is extremely slim that the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. This was sixteen hours after the curtain went up on the Vengeance pay-per-view, with a lineup of matches and story lines altered due to Benoit’s absence. Confusion falls into place as a global explanation only if WWE deployed a chain of communications designed to give “plausible deniability” to Vince McMahon and his top aides.

  And for the boss to have been so detached from the details of his wrestling intelligence and corporate decision-making would have been dramatically unlike him: McMahon was as involved an owner as you will find in any industry anywhere. Vince and his daughter Stephanie and son Shane and, even occasionally, wife-CEO Linda were themselves cast members of the WWE TV soap opera subplots. In his sixties, Vince still stepped between the ropes for a gimmick match a couple of times a year. In a 2001 Playboy magazine interview, McMahon discussed his hands-on management style. If someone was needed to help the stagehands pull cable for a camera operator at a TV shoot, he said, “I’ll pull cable.”

  Guerrero and Armstrong’s shared private explanation of the thirty-hour gap between the sending of Benoit’s red-flag text messages and their acting on them is almost laughable — not only on its face but also because it contradicts that single public utterance on the subject by Guerrero.

  Probing the meaning of WWE’s timelines, with their interchangeable elements, is the subject of this chapter. The full and accurate story remains hazy, and the most responsible outcome is not to jump to a specific, Monday-morning-quarterback conclusion. The missing pieces, however, do concentrate the mind on wrestling’s corporate culture of control and calculated ambiguity. Guerrero and Armstrong could have been playing fast and loose with the truth out of mere habit, because that’s what wrestling and wrestlers do. Or they could have acted out of discomfort with the sudden attention focused on them in a scenario whose outcome they sincerely, if guiltily, determined they’d had no power to change. They could have believed that time-honored methods of working the marks would make that attention go away. And if that was their goal, they were largely vindicated by the general public’s lack of stamina for getting to the bottom of the story.

  Or they could have done what they did because they were so advised — or ordered. In the best of times, the wrestling business was never a secure place for talent; today a single company, WWE, and a single promoter, McMahon, call pretty much all the shots for just a few dozen top spots.

  * * *

  The text message angle of the investigation starts with the official and permanently published WWE timeline, reproduced below. This timeline was issued as a news release, dated June 26, and at the time of this book’s publication, was still viewable at the corporate website at http://corporate.wwe.com/news/2007/2007_06_26_2.jsp.

  But in addition, there was an earlier timeline, the text of which is reproduced on the following two pages.

  This was first published on the WWE entertainment website on Tuesday night, June 26, but later pulled. Read one way, the two timelines complement each other. Read another way, the earlier and better-substantiated timeline contradicts the later and more circumspect one in subtle and disturbing ways. The latter seems intended to stand as WWE’s final and authoritative words on the subject. It may have been spurred by Wall Street observers who criticized WWE’s initial response
for saying too much too soon — causing the company to revise, clarify, and come across as unhelpfully defensive and combative[1].

  The earlier and fuller version of the timeline illuminates the thirty-hour gap between text messages sent and bodies recovered. Even more significantly, it jibes with the consensus account — in the phone call logs and interviews of the Fayette County sheriff’s report, as well as from other sources — of Benoit’s Saturday conversations with Guerrero, Armstrong, and others.

  * * *

  The most devastating of those interactions was Benoit’s dialogue with Chavo Guerrero on Saturday afternoon, as Chris agonized over still being in Georgia even though he was scheduled to wrestle that night at the WWE show in Beaumont, Texas.

  According to the first version of the timeline, at 3:30 p.m., “A co-worker received a voice message from Benoit. The message from Benoit stated he missed his flight and overslept and would be late to the WWE Live Event. The co-worker called Benoit back, Benoit confirmed everything he said in his voice message and sounded tired and groggy. Benoit then stated, ‘I love you.’” (The timeline times are probably all intended to be eastern time, but a possible one-hour discrepancy between eastern and central time would not affect the thrust of this part of the narrative.)