Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  Later, when he got possession of the phones, Mike Benoit hired an expert to search for additional text evidence, but he never shared with me what, if anything, that exercise uncovered.[6]

  * * *

  The suspicion that the sheriff reported the telephonic evidence in bad faith is slam-dunked by the discrepancies between the raw phone call logs produced by Verizon and the final sanitized logs created by the sheriff. The public Benoit investigation report released the latter with the subtle suggestion that they were comprehensive. Though no disclaimer language was included to inform readers that calls documented by Verizon had been deleted, this secondary, interpretive log produced by the sheriff abruptly stops listing calls to Chris Benoit’s cell phone after 1:34 p.m. Sunday — more than twenty-four hours before the bodies were discovered. Again, the only defense for this would be the dubious contention that subsequent calls were “not relevant.” Why was 1:34 relevant but not 1:35, or 5:52, or 8:00 (which was bell time for the Vengeance pay-per-view)?

  Detective Harper, Sheriff Johnson, and DA Ballard all ignored repeated inquiries about the incomplete cell phone call logs. In emails from Richard Lindsey, the attorney representing the sheriff’s office, he expressed the legalistic view that the Georgia open records statute did not require public agencies to explain or justify why they did not produce something different than what they released, despite what a critic could argue were fundamental inconsistencies.

  The sheriff’s logs’ known omissions of phone calls on the Benoits’ several phone numbers include five calls made by WWE executive John Laurinaitis on Sunday after Chris killed himself: 4:27, 4:46, and 6:25 p.m. (before the Houston pay-per-view show), 8:25 (during the show), and 11:56 (afterward). There were numerous other calls from WWE cell phones, plus two others from cell phone numbers in Stamford, the company’s headquarters city.

  In addition, there were the following calls:

  4:21 p.m. from a cell phone in Florida — perhaps Dean Malenko, a WWE agent and Benoit’s old “Three Amigos” pal.

  4:32 from a land line in California — most likely wrestler Oscar “Rey Mysterio” Gutiérrez.

  4:40 from Scott Armstrong. Interestingly, this call adds additional weight to the theory that Armstrong, a recipient of Benoit’s early morning texts, truly believed that his friend would be on an Atlanta-to-Houston plane that morning, and that Armstrong might even have been at the airport waiting for Benoit at 9:27 a.m., when Armstrong texted, “What time do u land?” (The alternative theory is that the Armstrong text — perhaps even if accompanied by Armstrong’s drive to the airport — along with this afternoon call by Armstrong, simply had the purpose of contriving a timeline item. But, as noted earlier, the alternative theory is somewhat weakened if Armstrong went to the trouble of driving to the airport.)

  4:43 and 6:26 from a WWE cell phone. If there was a one-digit typo in the printout, it is possible that this was from the same person, “Mark,” who would text Benoit on Monday a willingness to “kayfabe for you” if Benoit was in any kind of trouble. (One of John Laurinaitis’s assistants in talent relations was named Mark Carano, but would not qualify as someone in the WWE inner circle of top executives.)

  7:50 from a phone at the Toyota Center in Houston.

  Several calls from Canada — from an old workout buddy of Benoit’s and from his ex-wife, Martina.

  Perhaps significantly, no apparent calls from Chavo Guerrero. This raises the possibility that Guerrero and Scott Armstrong did not have the same level of information, even though both were recipients of the same early-morning texts; or, if they did have the same information, they acted differently on it, either in separate decision-making or in coordination.

  * * *

  WWE lawyer McDevitt and I agree on at least one thing: the performance of the district attorney was very poor.

  “In point of fact, the authorities did not do many things which should have been done, and which they were urged to do, and did several things which should never be done in any competent investigation,” McDevitt wrote in an email complaining about my blog coverage. “Foremost among such actions was releasing the crime scene, together with critically important evidence, to persons with financial interests within a day of discovering the bodies. Indeed, it is a matter of historical record that I called on authorities during a national television program to locate Chris Benoit’s diary when I learned of it since it might have shed light on the murders. Incredibly, when it finally was located or retrieved, it was evidently given to Michael Benoit rather than maintained in police custody.”

  McDevitt’s account of the diary debacle is substantially accurate. Ballard’s decision to allow Nancy’s side of the family to move into the house almost immediately, and thereby to gain special access to the crime scene, was the crown on the DA’s comedy of errors.

  Whether with the goal of concealing secrets or merely in an incoherent homicidal mania, Chris appeared to have thrown a number of items into an outside trash container.[7] One of the items was the diary Chris began keeping after Eddie Guerrero’s death. Apparently, the cops missed the diary, either inside the house or in the trash can; if the former, then the Toffolonis might have attempted to dispose of the diary, perhaps because it was simply too unpleasant to confront in their grief, or perhaps because it would strengthen the case of Chris’s side of the family that he suffered from dementia and was not responsible for his actions.

  From what we know, the diary includes rambling biblical references, as well as passages directly addressed to Guerrero in the beyond. (If the Daily News report of the former in unreleased text messages was inaccurate, that could explain where that piece of confusion originated.) The only glimmer of the content, other than excerpts read by Mike Benoit in broadcast interviews, came in Chris’s email exchanges with journalist Greg Oliver after Guerrero’s death. “My wife Nancy bought me a diary and I have started to write letters to Eddie. It may sound crazy but that is how I’m coping,” Chris wrote to Oliver.

  On a visit to Chris and Nancy’s house, some time after authorities released it to the Toffolonis, next-door neighbor Holly Schrepfer is believed to have retrieved the diary and then given it to Mike Benoit.

  In our exchanges, McDevitt took exception to a quote in my blog coverage from an unnamed source who stated that WWE had played the Fayette County authorities “like a cello.” That phrase was uttered by Patricia Roy, one of Mike Benoit’s lawyers. To the extent that McDevitt wanted to highlight that the work of the authorities had been incompetent, and to argue that the incompetence had as much of a claim to the explanation of the gaps in the record as corruption, he may have had a point. In the end, we don’t know why the Fayette County district attorney and sheriff screwed up the investigation of the thirty-hour text message gap, and not knowing why includes not knowing if they were in someone’s pocket. We only know that they did screw up.

  In an age of instant and unverified information, the only element missing from this tableau of mind-bending ambiguity would be an excruciatingly intriguing Inter-net rumor, transmitted through the ether and never pinned down, but nonetheless shedding additional light on WWE’s preposterous timeline and the lengths to which the company went to divert attention from it.

  And guess what? Thanks to the “Wikipedia hacker,” the Benoit case had that element, too.

  [1]. Presumably McDevitt referred only to public investigators, and the only one to whom I spoke was Detective Harper. “Disdain” may be strong, but when we talked about the evolution of news reports in the first hours, Harper insisted that any early leaks had to have come from the DA, not the sheriff’s people.

  [2]. The Georgia medical examiner’s report (referenced above, and included in the companion DVD) is, at most, silent on whether Daniel Benoit had needle marks. If Dr. Kris Sperry intended to embed such an observation in ambiguous technical language, he wasn’t saying.

  [3]. Pam Winthrope e
xchanged emails with me in September and October 2007. The News1130 station manager, Jacquie Donaldson, refused to provide me with audio or transcripts, or to discuss the circumstances of Winthrope’s two interviews. Reporter Katharine Kitts did not return messages.

  [4]. Ripa’s company, Computer Evidence Recovery (http://www.computerpi.com), is based in Calgary and, coincidentally, has done work there for the famous Hart wrestling family.

  [5]. Joe Laurinaitis is the father of Ohio State’s pro football–bound All-America linebacker, James Laurinaitis.

  [6]. The sheriff report’s version of the text message logs is included in the companion disk. See “Order the dvd” at the back of this book.

  [7]. Interestingly, drugs were not among the things Benoit might have discarded. This led some to theorize that one of his last conscious acts was to countermand the standard wrestler’s practice of getting rid of a dead wrestler’s drugs. In this way, the theory goes, he hoped to keep one of the root causes of his rampage from being covered up.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Wikipedia Hacker

  SOONER OR LATER ANY PROBE of pro wrestling’s mysteries crawls into a bunny hutch of surrealism, a tunnel of barbershop mirrors with no way out. Call it an alternative universe, or a place where fantasy imposes its will on truth, or just call it a weave of meta-events too tangled to unravel. In the Chris Benoit double murder-suicide, that bunny hutch is the strange tale of the nineteen-year-old Stamford, Connecticut, college student who posted on Wikipedia the news of Nancy Benoit’s death, fourteen hours before the authorities knew of it.

  It would be folly surpassing that of young Matthew T. Greenberg himself, the now-iconic “Wikipedia hacker,” to suggest that this angle does or ever could answer the biggest questions of the Benoit investigation; the official findings of the crime and its perpetrator remain intact regardless. On the other hand, if the Wikipedia story meant nothing at all, then why couldn’t the principals who looked into it have stopped sashaying long enough to lay out the handful of objective, non-self-referential facts that would easily establish its purportedly innocuous nature?

  Assuming the explanation is entirely innocent — a reasonable hypothesis though, when it comes to wrestling, never a completely safe one — then the attendant dissembling could be written off to muscle reflex. Muscle reflex on behalf of the privacy of an essentially harmless prankster who learned his lesson about the dangers of monkeying around on the computer, and who stumbled onto the worst possible prank in the worst possible way. That, plus the “kayfabe” muscle reflex of the carnies who were, for once, victims of a hoax rather than its perpetrators, but who don’t like to disclose their inner workings under any conditions.

  In Greenberg’s case, however, the temptation to dismiss the story is leavened by knowledge that World Wrestling Entertainment might have had a specific motive for keeping the Wiki fiasco under wraps. The more the public was exposed to even an honestly misguided suggestion that someone had gotten a premature tip about one or more Benoit family deaths, then the more people might reflect on the unbelievable thirty-hour gap between when Chris Benoit sent Chavo Guerrero and Scott Armstrong the final text messages and when the timeline insists “WWE officials” were informed of them. Once the Matthew Greenberg cat got out of the bag — whether wildcat or pussycat, it didn’t matter — WWE’s credibility firewall, in the form of two similar-but-different timelines, was in danger of being breached. It’s a lot easier for corporate PR to justify a crisis response that was triggered Monday afternoon rather than early Sunday morning.

  Greenberg therefore represented somewhat more than a brief, perhaps unintended, center of attention during the media frenzy. He was also someone whose consequences the powers-that-be had to work overtime to suppress, for they wanted to make sure he didn’t wind up getting elevated to the status of the Benoit story’s answer to Brandon, the young fan in the 1999 movie Galaxy Quest. In that parody of Star Trek, Brandon has encyclopedic knowledge of his cult, which comes in handy for the climactic solution finally figured out by Tim Allen’s character, a washed-up and cynical former actor on the TV show. The verisimilitude of Galaxy Quest has such a hold on the sweet, hollow souls of its followers that it has inspired the architecture of an entire civilization in another quadrant of the universe.

  * * *

  This much is known: Late in the night of Sunday, June 24, 2007, an anonymous poster logged on to Wikipedia from a computer with the Internet Protocol (IP) address 69.120.111.23, via Cablevision’s Optimum Online service provider.

  The Wiki page with the biography of Chris Benoit had already been edited, at 10 p.m. eastern time, to note, “Chris Benoit was replaced by Johnny Nitro for the ECW Championship match at Vengeance, as Benoit was not there due to personal issues.” A minute past midnight Monday, eastern time, poster 69.120.111.23 added at the end “stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.”

  Strictly speaking, this edit was not a “hack,” nor even necessarily a hoax. Billing itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” Wikipedia, launched in 2001, amalgamates information from a network of more than 15 million global users. More than 130,000 of these are active volunteer editors, around 100,000 of them in the English language. Serving as virtual gatekeepers is a force of more than 1,600 “admins” (administrators), who play catch-up in the vetting of facts published in real time in a bank of articles, long and short, which in 2009 surpassed the three million mark. In the sense that “hacking” is a generic term — used by the technologically challenged to describe a range of crude acts by those who are more comfortable with computers and exploit that skill gap for nefarious ends — the word is appropriate.

  According to Wikinews, a Wikipedia affiliate, the Benoit edit by 69.120.111.23 was reversed “just under one hour later with the [admin’s] comment: ‘Need a reliable source. Saying that his wife died is a pretty big statement, you need to back it up with something.’”

  The Wikinews report continued: “Then just one hour after the first edit reversion, another anonymous edit by 125.63.148.173 using unwiredAustralia.com.au, a wireless Internet service provider, was made about the aforementioned personal issues: ‘which according to several pro wrestling websites is attributed to the passing of Benoit’s wife, Nancy.’” That edit, too, was quickly reverted with the comment: “Saying ‘several pro wrestling websites’ is still not reliable information.”

  One of the many online wrestling forums buzzing with Benoit news and gossip was one called Smart Marks. At 11:18 Monday night, Jonathan Barber, a Smart Marks poster with the handle LucharesuFan619, claimed credit for being the first person to trace the IP address 69.120.111.23 and notice that the Wikipedia edit had come from Stamford, the home of WWE.

  The next day the Wikimedia Foundation’s volunteer coordinator, Cary Bass, notified the Georgia authorities. Bass said someone put the pieces together “and realized that the comment was made by someone who apparently knew about the murders.” On Thursday major news outlets broke the story of how the police were working on the mystery of an explosively curious Benoit edit on Wikipedia.

  That night, at 12:26 a.m. eastern time Friday, 69.120.111.23 confessed in another anonymous post, on the “talk” page of Wikinews:

  Hey everyone. I am here to talk about the wikipedia comment that was left by myself. I just want to say that it was an incredible coincidence. Last weekend, I had heard about Chris Benoit no showing Vengeance because of a family emergency, and I had heard rumors about why that was. I was reading rumors and speculation about this matter online, and one of them included that his wife may have passed away, and I did the wrong thing by posting it on wikipedia to spite there being no evidence. I posted my speculation on the situation at the time and I am deeply sorry about this, and I was just as shocked as everyone when I heard that this actually would happen in real life. It is one of those things that just turned into a huge coincidence. That night I found out tha
t what I posted, ended up actually happening, a 1 in 10,000 chance of happening, or so I thought. I was beyond wrong for posting wrongful information, and I am sorry to everyone for this. I just want everyone to know it was stupid of me, and I will never do anything like this again. I just posted something that was at that time a piece of wrong unsourced information that is typical on wikipedia, as it is done all the time.

  Nonetheless, I feel incredibly bad for all the attention this got because of the fact that what I said turned out to be the truth. Like I said it was just a major coincidence, and I will never vandalize anything on wikipedia or post wrongful information. I’ve learned from this experience. I just can’t believe what I wrote was actually the case, I’ve remained stunned and saddened over it.

  I wish not to reveal my identity so I can keep me and my family out of this since they have nothing to do with anything. I am not connected to WWE or Benoit at all in anyway. I am from Stamford as the IP address shows, and I am just an everyday individual who posted a wrongful remark at the time that received so much attention because it turned out to actually happen. I will say again I didn’t know anything about the Benoit tragedy, it was a terrible coincidence that I never saw coming.

  I hope this puts an end to this speculation that someone knew about the tragedy before it was discovered. It was just a rumor that I had heard about from other people online who were speculating what the family emergency Chris was attending to. I made a big mistake by posting this comment on his page, since all we had were what we thought was going on and nothing about what actually was going on yet, and sadly what happened turned out to be my speculation at the time. I assumed wiki would edit out my information, which they did, so thats why I didn’t go back to edit it out myself.