Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  Reflecting on that conversation, the co-worker was so unsettled by what sounded like an over-the-top expression of affection, and by Benoit’s overall “tone and demeanor,” that he called Benoit back twelve minutes later, leaving the message, “Just call me.” Benoit returned the call, though he didn’t speak to the co-worker. In his message, Benoit managed to allay any urgent concerns by explaining that he was just having “a real stressful day due to Nancy and Daniel being sick with food poisoning,” the co-worker recalled for the timeline.

  That co-worker was Chavo Guerrero. In his Monday tribute interview on the WWE website, Guerrero would tell an Internet audience that Chris Benoit ended their last conversation by saying, “I love you” (though Guerrero added nothing in that online testimonial about how the line had struck him as odd).

  Mike Benoit, Chris’s father, told me Guerrero recounted the identical story to him. “Wrestlers conclude conversations by saying ‘love you’ or ‘love ya, man’ to each other all the time,” Mike said, “but Chavo said he thought the way Chris said it that time was strange and out of context, so strange that Chavo decided to call back. Chavo left a message for Chris: ‘Just let me know that you’re OK.’”

  The sheriff’s report had more of the same:

  Guerrero advised Chris Benoit left him a message . . . saying he overslept and missed his flight. . . . Guerrero commented that Benoit sounded a little strange or depressed while they spoke [later]. Guerrero advised that after hanging up he called Benoit right back and asked him if he was ok. . . . Benoit stated he was just upset and tired due to Nancy and Daniel being sick with food poisoning.

  At 4:30 p.m. Saturday, according to the early version of the timeline, another co-worker, “who consistently travels with Benoit, called Benoit from outside Houston airport and Benoit answered. Benoit told the co-worker that Nancy was throwing up blood and that Daniel was also throwing up. Benoit thought they had food poisoning. Benoit stated he changed his flight and he would be arriving into Houston at 6:30 p.m.” Benoit told the colleague to drive on to the Beaumont event alone.

  That second co-worker was Scott Armstrong, who told sheriff’s investigators that he and Benoit “spoke about rental car and hotel room arrangements” and “Chris told him that Nancy and Daniel were sick and he may be late for the next show, but he would be there.”

  * * *

  Benoit’s travel plan, for either Saturday evening or Sunday morning, is a central mystery. This is where the earlier WWE.com timeline and the final corporate timeline stop overlapping and start clashing, suggesting why the company might have decided it was prudent to become less specific, if not downright misleading. Further, the known existing evidence fully supports the earlier version while casting deep shadows over the final one.

  At 5:35, according to the first timeline, “Benoit called WWE Talent Relations stating that his son was throwing up and that he and Nancy were in the hospital with their son, and that Benoit would be taking a later flight into Houston, landing late, but would make the WWE live event in Beaumont.” Thirty-five minutes later, “A representative of Talent Relations called Benoit” and asked “what time Benoit was getting into Beaumont.” (After flying into Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, he would need to rent a car and drive more than 100 miles in order to make the Beaumont show.) Benoit said he would depart from Atlanta at 9:20 eastern time and land in Houston more than an hour later, at 9:24 central time. “The representative from Talent Relations advised Benoit that it would be too late to make the WWE live event in Beaumont. Benoit apologized, citing a family emergency. The representative from Talent Relations suggested to Benoit that instead of going to the WWE live event in Beaumont, Benoit should take the flight to Houston, rest up and be ready for the Vengeance pay-per-view event [in Houston on Sunday night].”

  At 6:13 the WWE person “called Benoit to reconfirm the travel plans with no answer from Benoit. The representative from Talent Relations left a voice message to take the flight and rest up.”

  WWE’s vice president of talent relations was John Laurinaitis, a retired wrestler under the name “Johnny Ace” and the brother of a more famous retired wrestler, Joe Laurinaitis (“Road Warrior Animal”). The phone logs confirm calls to Benoit’s cell phone from the WWE office in Stamford, Connecticut, on Saturday. (There would be additional calls from the WWE office — including several from John Laurinaitis’s direct line — the next day.)

  The final version of the WWE timeline on the corporate website includes two bullet points on Benoit’s Atlanta-to-Houston travel plans. They convey a somewhat different resolution on Saturday night:

  WWE executives rebooked flight for the following morning, allowing Benoit to miss the Beaumont event and making alternate arrangements for him to attend the pay-per-view event in Houston on Sunday. [Emphasis added.]

  WWE employees attempted to confirm with Benoit his travel plans but were unable to contact him.

  The distinction between a later Saturday evening flight and a Sunday morning flight is trivial in the sense that Benoit was not expected to make it to the Beaumont show with either flight. There was also a twilight zone characteristic of the two timelines, whereby both were cited in some measure while being referred to as “the” timeline. For example, on Wednesday, June 27, Forbes.com would report that “the timeline” from WWE “states that on the afternoon of Saturday, June 23, Benoit, who was supposed to appear at a WWE event in Texas, contacted WWE to inform them that his wife and son were ill with food poisoning and he wouldn’t make it. WWE rebooked his flight for Sunday morning.” This combines elements of the first timeline (which mentions food poisoning but not a Sunday flight) with the second timeline (which mentions a Sunday flight and Nancy and Daniel being ill, but not food poisoning).

  District Attorney Ballard also would contribute to the confusion between, and the fusing of, the two timelines. In his press conference at the crime scene on Tuesday, Ballard referred to “two” text messages from Chris to other wrestlers and talked about them in the context of Chris explaining that his family was sick. That was indeed the cover story Benoit put out in his Saturday phone conversations; however, it was not the content of his Sunday text messages.

  The collective inconsistencies exceed the threshold of triviality. In particular, as we will see, they affect how Scott Armstrong’s actions on Sunday morning are evaluated[2].

  The sheriff’s report confirms the Saturday flight account. When Benoit “overslept” on Saturday morning — we now know he was actually prowling about a mansion containing one, or likely two, dead bodies — he missed his reservation on Delta Airlines Flight 1048 from Atlanta at 11:15 a.m. eastern time. (That ticket was issued out of Stamford, having been ordered through the WWE travel office.) He changed to a Delta flight departing at 5:27 p.m., but he missed that one, too, in the course of talking about his family emergency with Guerrero, Armstrong, and WWE Talent Relations; this aligns with Armstrong’s reference, in the first timeline, to a flight arriving in Houston at 6:30 central time. Benoit’s phone records and Delta Airlines’ reservation records agree that he then made calls to Delta Member Services, and according to Delta he booked himself onto Flight 4801 departing at 9:27 p.m.

  There is no record of a Sunday morning flight.

  WWE “house show” procedures call for the road agent to send the office a written rundown of how things went. In his report to the office on the Saturday night show in Beaumont, agent Dave “Fit” Finlay wrote: “We drove through a lot of storms. . . . It was 90-odd degrees, and all of a sudden the big storms hit. But nonetheless, we all made it, apart from Chris Benoit, who I guess had a little bit of family problems. So we reshuffled the card around a little bit.” Benoit’s scheduled opponent, Edge, grabbed the house microphone — in wrestling parlance, he “cut a promo” — and complained “that Chris Benoit was not here, and that he did not have an opponent, in addition to saying that no one is worthy of stepping into the ring
with him.” The entrance music for Ric Flair interrupted Edge. Surprise! Flair strutted down the aisle and became Edge’s challenger in a match ending with a “schmazz” (an out-of-control brawl with outside interference), as Edge “stole” the win.

  Fit Finlay concluded: “Just some smoke and mirrors to harden things up, and cover a heel finish on the end of a match that really wasn’t supposed to happen.”[3]

  * * *

  Early Sunday morning Benoit transmitted his infamous farewell text messages to Guerrero and Armstrong. Both of the WWE timelines and the sheriff’s records are all in agreement about their timing and content:

  4:53 a.m. eastern time in Georgia (3:53 a.m. central time in Texas) (Though not so identified in the timelines, this was obviously sent to both Guerrero and Armstrong. Subsequent messages on this list will be noted by eastern time only.)

  From Chris’s cell phone: “Chavo, Scott. My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane, Fayetteville, Georgia. 30215”

  4:53 a.m. (to both Guerrero and Armstrong)

  From Nancy’s cell phone: “The dogs are in the enclosed pool area. Garage side door is open”

  4:54 a.m. (to both Guerrero and Armstrong)

  From Nancy’s cell phone: “Chavo, Scott. My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane. Fayetteville Georgia. 30215”

  4:55 a.m. (to both Guerrero and Armstrong)

  From Nancy’s cell phone: “Chavo, Scott. My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane. Fayetteville, Georgia. 30215”

  4:58 a.m. (to Armstrong)

  From Nancy’s cell phone: “Chavo, Scott. My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane. Fayetteville, Georgia. 30215”

  Yet according to WWE, Guerrero and Armstrong didn’t make these messages known to company executives until 12:30 p.m. the next day. To put it charitably, the explanations for this thirty-hour gap are kaleidoscopic.

  On July 18, 2007, Guerrero would tell Greta Van Susteren of Fox News that he didn’t understand the messages and initially dismissed them as old or insignificant. Here is the relevant portion of the transcript:

  VAN SUSTEREN: So he obviously didn’t call you later that night [Saturday] to say, “I’ve arrived in Houston.”

  GUERRERO: He never arrived, right. Right.

  VAN SUSTEREN: All right . . .

  GUERRERO: He never arrived. I did get text messages from him, though, in the morning, early in the morning, about . . .

  VAN SUSTEREN: Now, what time — let me ask you — I was just going to say, was the first — the time of the text message you received from him?

  GUERRERO: If I remember correctly, it was 3:53 a.m. Houston time, which is 4:53 Atlanta time.

  VAN SUSTEREN: And it said what?

  GUERRERO: And that — yes, that text message said — it just had his address. He lived in — he’d just moved to this new house he had built because the last house that he had was kind of on a public — was on a public street, a public area, and he just couldn’t go outside anymore. He was afraid for Daniel to be outside and playing because so many, you know, fans or people from the airport would just come and camp out in front of his house. So he couldn’t really — he couldn’t really have a public life anymore. So he went ahead and bought this land in suburban Atlanta, built the house out there and had a PO box, and no one really even knew his address. So those texts were — his — his — they were telling me what his physical address were. But nothing out of the ordinary, just, my physical address is this, and that’s it. And he texted me again . . .

  VAN SUSTEREN: Did he think that was peculiar, I mean, that — I mean, his address, was that odd?[4]

  GUERRERO: It was — you know, sometimes when you send a text and the person doesn’t get that text until two days later, I kind of — it was so early in the morning, I was sleeping. I looked at my text, and I’m going — I didn’t know why he was sending that to me, so I thought maybe he sent it to me a day before or two days before or whatever, and I’m just getting it now. And then I got another text a couple minutes later saying, “The dogs are in the enclosed pool area and the garage door’s open.” I’m going — I didn’t know if he was thinking that he wanted us to pick him up. But we were in Houston. I didn’t really know what was going on. And so I thought again maybe it was a — just a text that was sent a couple — you know, a couple days ago. So I went back to sleep and . . .

  VAN SUSTEREN: I was going to say, was that the last text message you received from him?

  GUERRERO: No, no. I received another one same — that was the same as the first one, My physical address is this (INAUDIBLE) this, whatever it was. That’s — you know, it was the last text I got from him. And it was just — it was just so random. There wasn’t a cry for help. There wasn’t a, you know, “I love you.” There was nothing in there. It was just kind of very, very random. So I didn’t really think anything of it. I went back to sleep. And then in the morning, I kind of — I called him in the morning to see if everything was OK, but he didn’t answer.

  VAN SUSTEREN: And then when did you learn that he was dead?

  GUERRERO: Not until the following day. That whole day was on Sunday. And we had a pay-per-view event. He was supposed to be at the pay-per-view event. He had a match. And it was very, very, very unlike him to miss the pay-per-view. He was really — didn’t do that. To miss any match, he just — that never happened. Chris was the ultimate professional. And for him to miss a match was very strange. We were calling him all day and WWE was calling him. We were just trying to get a hold of him. We just never did until the next morning, when I mentioned to some of the WWE office that I got these weird text messages from him. So they sent a car out to his place, and I guess there was — the dogs were running around, so they couldn’t really enter his house. And they said that the dogs were there, so they’re trying to — they were trying to get into the house to find out what’s going on, if anything — at that time, they didn’t know what was wrong. So they had talked to me, and I told them that I think their neighbor, one of their neighbors knew them. So I think that’s how they ended up getting in and finding what happened.

  Van Susteren didn’t ask Guerrero why he made no connection between the texts and the strange “I love you” coda of his Saturday phone conversation with Benoit. Guerrero said the message was “just so random . . . [not] a cry for help” because there “wasn’t a, you know, ‘I love you.’” But the point of the “I love you” anecdote was not that collection of words per se, but the very quality that Guerrero targeted in the texts: their “randomness.” So his insistence that the equally “random” texts should have elicited a cavalier response from him is hard to swallow.

  Van Susteren also failed to ask Guerrero the key follow-up question: Even if he couldn’t make heads or tails out of Benoit’s text messages when he first received them, why would he have hesitated to share them with his bosses at WWE after Chris failed to turn up for the pay-per-view on Sunday night? By that point Benoit, in a complete break from his history of reliability, was missing not one, but two, nights of work amidst confusion about his whereabouts and the health of family members. Moreover, pay-per-views were special high-revenue events, and Benoit had a spot in a title-change match in this one.

  Scott Armstrong’s response to the text messages was even more perplexing. At 9:26 a.m. Sunday, a few hours after Benoit transmitted his final texts, Armstrong texted Benoit: “What time do u land?” Presumably Armstrong was referring to when an Atlanta-to-Houston flight would be touching down. It so happens that Armstrong’s text is the only detail anywhere in the record reinforcing the notion, in the final WWE timeline, of a Sunday morning — rather than a Saturday night — flight.

  The innocent implication of Armstrong’s text was the chaos at that point surrounding all things Benoit. The more ominous implication is that he sent the message for the express purpose of corroborating the WWE story, retroactively concocted, that Benoit had been expected
on a plane on Sunday morning. The second possibility is buttressed by the fact that Armstrong seemed not to know on what flight Benoit had allegedly been booked. Why would Armstrong drive to the airport cold, without getting the basic flight information from Benoit or from the WWE office?

  When I first raised with sheriff’s Detective Harper the contradictions suggested by Armstrong’s Sunday morning text to Benoit, Harper said to me in a phone conversation, “That is very interesting.” Later Harper emailed me, “The biggest point we took from the message is that it was unanswered. That helped with the timeline of when Chris died. There may have been a flight scheduled for Sunday, but that never came up in the homicide investigation. If the WWE scheduled the flight for him then they would be the best source for proof of the flight.”

  Still later, Harper maintained that when he had said “That is very interesting,” he was referring only “to the way you were interpreting the text. During our conversation, I felt you were trying to say the text was planned or planted by Scott under some type of direction from the WWE.” Harper did not clarify whether he agreed with the way he thought I was referring to the text[5].

  And as with Guerrero, this tidbit from Armstrong, even if honest, doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why neither one of them told WWE about Benoit’s texts when he remained missing in action at call time for the Sunday night pay-per-view.

  Months after the media frenzy receded, Guerrero and Armstrong would simply ignore what Guerrero had told Greta Van Susteren about his initial reaction to the texts, and issue another version of why they didn’t take action on Sunday. Benoit’s wrestler friends were now telling colleagues that they had experienced cell phone reception problems in Texas; the messages were not received until Monday. They gave the same account to a television journalist working on the Benoit story. Dave Meltzer also heard this one.