Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  Mike and I never met in person, and he eventually cut off contact altogether. Though I found his information on Chris’s brain trauma useful, I intuited a difference — one that I think Mike, grasping at straws to explain the criminal acts of his beloved son, couldn’t accept — between it being a contributing factor and the single, comprehensive explanation for this tragedy. I later independently spoke to Dr. Omalu; and while I agreed that the concussion research was an important emerging field, certain to save the lives of future athletes, and that this deserved to be noted as part of Chris’s legacy, I also felt that it was exaggerated by Dr. Omalu as well as by Mike. As a father, I empathized with Mike. But as a journalist, I had a job to do.

  Along the way, before I got on his bad side, Mike put me in touch with the office of his lawyer, Cary Ichter. My reporting on gaps in the sheriff’s account of the telephone records had spurred Mike to direct Ichter to hire technicians who combed Chris and Nancy’s cell phones and computer for further insights into the weekend timeline and other issues. (I well understood that as we compared notes, Patricia Roy, one of Ichter’s assistants, would get far more information from me than I from her; the statutory deadline for filing a civil lawsuit against WWE was several months after the completion of this book.)

  As a member of the Georgia Athletic Commission, Ichter also was pushing for new legislation to regulate the pro wrestling industry there. I, too, strongly advocate regulation. Still, in this particular scenario I found myself thinking WWE officials had a point when they complained that a commission member who was also a lawyer contemplating a major lawsuit against the company in private practice had a blatant conflict of interest. The merits of Ichter’s proposals, as opposed to their process, make for a more complex discussion; but in any case, they quickly foundered when WWE threatened to pull out of Georgia if toothful regulations were enacted.

  In our few conversations, Ichter expressed interest in using my book to help promote a lawsuit by his client Carlos Ashenoff (“Konnan”) against Total Non-Stop Action Wrestling. The suit alleged that the promotion negligently endangered Ashenoff by forcing him to work through debilitating injuries, which led to life-threatening transplant surgery after the wrestler’s kidneys stopped functioning, most likely a consequence of toxic doses of painkillers. The case also included claims of racial discrimination, based on the stereotype Latino character that Ashenoff, a native Cuban, said he was forced to portray in order to maintain TNA employment. That count echoed a discrimination suit Ichter had filed years earlier against World Championship Wrestling on behalf of a group of African-American wrestlers, who won a substantial settlement. (In a well-known piece of wrestling lore, that settlement was driven by an extraneous factor: a report of racist comments by Bill Watts, who at the time was running WCW, reached baseball legend Hank Aaron, an executive with WCW’s parent Turner Broadcasting System, and higher-ups quickly passed down orders to resolve quickly any disputes adversely impacting the company’s image in race relations.)

  I must say that, on intellectual principle, I am unimpressed by this type of racial-discrimination litigation in wrestling — which, after all, is a lowbrow entertainment form, by definition exploiting lowest-common-denominator gimmicks. I find risible the proposition that the legal system should set right the reality that racism (or homophobia or sexism or xenophobia) will always be a default ingredient of the recipe of fictional story lines. If Turner Broadcasting didn’t want to be part of such a business, it could get out — and eventually it did.

  In our conversations, Mike Benoit was the first to raise the point that his lawyer sometimes behaved “unprofessionally,” as Mike put it. In one set of meetings Ichter “kept calling this person an ‘asshole’ and that person an ‘asshole.’ In my experience, when you’re calling everyone else an asshole, maybe the first thing you should be doing is looking in the mirror,” Mike said.

  Late in 2007, Ichter leaked the story that the Benoits had offered to settle with WWE for $2 million. WWE rejected the offer and Mike Benoit denied ever having authorized it. Thereafter, he told me, he instructed Ichter to focus on estate matters only.

  All of which is to emphasize that the thrust of this book is not willy-nilly wrestling-bashing. The real takeout here is the outrageously out-of-bounds health and safety risks in this industry, which — in the absence of a sensible regulatory regime — the talent must bear all by themselves.

  HOLLY SCHREPFER

  Naturally, I sought the cooperation of Holly Schrepfer. In March 2008 Mike Benoit told me that he had arranged for Schrepfer (often referred to in media reports as Holly McFague) to talk to me about the timeline of events following her discovery of the bodies. When I called her, though, I found that either Mike had misunderstood or she had developed second thoughts.

  Specifically, Holly said she had addressed all of my questions about the subject in her official statement to the sheriff. Taken aback, I said I would thoroughly review her statement, which I’d already read, and call her back only if I still thought we had things to talk about.

  When I did call back, Holly responded that from what I was telling her, the sheriff’s release of records must have included only one of the four or five separate statements she said she’d given investigators. At that point I went back to Detective Harper, who flatly denied that there were additional, undisclosed Schrepfer statements. “You have what I have,” Harper said.

  Holly then conceded that, in the trauma of her involvement in these horrible events, she might have been confused about whether there were additional formal statements. But in any case she did not want to rehash things with me.

  (In light of the detective’s several subsequent false and misleading statements to me on other subjects — see above — I now suspect that there were, in fact, multiple undisclosed statements by Holly. These and other buried materials may surface in the Toffoloni’s civil suit against Dr. Astin and “Distributors X, Y, and Z.”)

  Four months later, before traveling to Georgia for additional reporting, I checked in again with Holly. We had a pleasant chat, but she reiterated that I wouldn’t get additional input from her. She felt that she had already said everything that needed to be said, to the authorities and to the families and their lawyers. The only thing that might motivate her to weigh in further publicly on timeline discrepancies, she said, would be evidence that if someone had taken more proactive steps with the very earliest and sketchiest information, Daniel Benoit’s life might have been saved. I consider the timeline material in this book important for its own reasons, but I also think Holly is likely correct in her position that no evidence exists that anyone was in an effective position to intervene after Nancy’s murder but before Daniel’s.

  SANDRA TOFFOLONI

  Through intermediaries, I learned that Sandra Toffoloni, Nancy Benoit’s sister, followed my blog and approved of my search for deeper levels of the truth. There was, however, one exception: she didn’t like my refusal to bury the early reports that Daniel Benoit had Fragile X syndrome. For Sandra, this may have been a version of Mike Benoit’s dissatisfaction with my lack of emphasis on Chris’s mental impairment from concussions. I was, and remain, respectful of what both families have gone through, and of their interests in preserving positive memories of their loved ones. But, for me, telling the complete story involved resolving all angles, including Daniel’s, in an accurate fashion.

  In the spring and summer of 2008, I exchanged a few friendly emails with Sandra as she organized the launch of the Nancy and Daniel Benoit Foundation, “dedicated to preventing steroid abuse through education and raising awareness about the unfortunate effects steroids can have on users and those close to them.” In vague terms, we talked about chatting on the phone in greater depth.

  On July 5, 2008, my wife answered a phone call from Sandra at 1 a.m. in California — which was 4 a.m. at her home in North Carolina. My wife chose to take a message rather than wake me. In an email the next day, S
andra explained that as a professional event planner she had a tendency to keep odd hours and lose track of the best time to call people. Sandra again said she would talk with me at the appropriate time. “I firmly believe there is responsibility to be taken, not just by Christopher,” Sandra wrote.

  I followed up with more overtures to schedule a phone discussion, but Sandra did not respond.

  On January 23, 2009, Nancy Benoit’s friend Pam Hildebrand Clark told me that Sandra Toffoloni had authorized her to give me her cell phone number. I left a message for Sandra at that number, and she called me back and we talked about a few points in the book. We made an appointment for a second and longer conversation, but she did not keep it.

  JERRY McDEVITT AND THE BLOG RETRACTION

  In the spring of 2008 I corresponded with Gary Davis, World Wrestling Entertainment’s vice president of corporate communications, with questions about timeline discrepancies. In his second and last email to me, on April 1, Davis said, “I recognize you have an interest in this subject, but why are you asking for this information, how do you intend to use this information if it is provided, and what is it that you think this information, if provided, is going to prove?”

  From June 16 through June 18, 2008, WWE’s chief outside counsel, Jerry S. McDevitt, emailed me a series of legal threats; those messages and my responses to them were published on my blog.

  One of my blog posts erroneously suggested that McDevitt had misled the public by insisting that WWE acted within days in the summer of 2007 to suspend company performers who were revealed to be on the customer list of an Internet steroid connection, Signature Pharmacy, under investigation by the district attorney of Albany, New York. My assertion that WWE had waited more than two weeks before suspending the talent who had violated the company’s wellness policy relied on a report by Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer. Investigating McDevitt’s complaint, I concluded that Meltzer was wrong in that detail, and I ran a retraction on my blog. Later conversations with Christopher Baynes of the Albany DA’s office and Mark Haskins of the New York State Narcotic Enforcement Agency confirmed McDevitt’s chronology of the WWE suspensions[2].

  For Meltzer’s part, I believe he exercised poor journalistic judgment by neither correcting the item himself nor informing his readers of my dispute with McDevitt — which, after all, had arisen out of my straightforward citation of a prominent nine-month-old report in the Observer. Curiously, according to Meltzer, McDevitt never sought a retraction from him. As I like to joke, on its worst day, the Observer has dozens of times more readers than my blog has on its best.

  [1]. My email exchanges with Harper are included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.

  [2]. My email exchanges with McDevitt, and with both Gary Davis and Jennifer McIntosh of WWE, are included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.

  Acknowledgments

  Randy Shaw, the publisher of the award-winning San Francisco online alternative newspaper Beyond Chron, regularly gave me space for guest columns on topics related to this book. So did Greg Oliver, the producer of the online SLAM! Wrestling (and one of my three co-authors of Benoit: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport). I’m grateful to both Randy and Greg.

  Dave Meltzer also ran a couple of guest columns by me on the Wrestling Observer website and, more importantly, supported my work in his own way, through various disagreements and misunderstandings.

  Karl Olson of Levy, Ram & Olson in San Francisco, one of the country’s top First Amendment attorneys, counseled me wisely through World Wrestling Entertainment’s legal threats. I know it’s only a matter of time before Karl is on the right side on the issue of freelance writers’ electronic rights, as well. . . .

  Michael Holmes, my editor at ECW Press, was rock-solid, as ever.

  When the Stamford Police Department stonewalled release of the interrogation of the “Benoit Wikipedia hacker,” I turned to a network of First Amendment stalwarts. My old friend Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists — a New York-based nonprofit promoting press freedom worldwide — introduced me to CPJ staffer Bill Sweeney, a veteran Connecticut reporter who tipped me to the state’s exceptionally strong public information law and infrastructure. Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition helped put me in contact with Stephanie Reitz of the Associated Press, the former “sunshine chair” of the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and her successor Steve Kalb of the Connecticut Radio Network. Stephanie and Steve, in turn, referred me to the knowledgeable staff of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission. Thanks to all of you.

  Two literary betters, Frank Deford and Samuel G. Freedman — my name doesn’t belong in the same sentence as theirs — gave me important encouragement and support early on. Author, public radio commentator, and probably the greatest magazine sports writer of all time, Frank belies the adage that nice guys finish last. Sam is the prolific journalist and author who teaches the legendary course on nonfiction book writing at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, in which I have never enrolled. (For one reason, I can’t. Psst: Don’t tell Sam that I dropped out of college a semester before graduation.)

  My cousin Dan Muchnick and his gracious wife Juli helped with the logistics of public records collection in the Atlanta area. Not only that — Dan still picked up the dinner tab when I later had the great opportunity to reconnect with them on my Georgia research trip. Dan and I both wonder what his father and my uncle, St. Louis promoter and National Wrestling Alliance president Sam Muchnick, would have thought of this book.

  Friends Scott Townsend, of Santa Rosa, and Connor McDonald, of Berkeley, more than once saved my technologically challenged derriere on computer and audiovisual issues.

  Thanks for their general support to Charles Chalmers, Jerry Karabel, Josh Kornbluth, Alice Sunshine, Kim Wood. Thanks for specific support to Dave Gee (book cover design) and Jake Meltzer (my Web 2.0 guru).

  Though our roles were sometimes adversarial, I appreciated the professionalism of several public servants in Fayette County. Most importantly, Katye Vogt, the CAD records manager of the Fayette County 911 Communications Center, drilled into her files three different times in response to my queries until I was finally satisfied that I had in hand the audio of all the Benoit-related calls from June 25, 2007. Rick Lindsey, a Peachtree City attorney who represented the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, walked a fine line in his thankless task of administering the release of public records. I realize that listing Vogt and Lindsey here could cause them collateral grief. But as they’ve already learned, my own medicine chest includes a spoonful of mischief.

  Mel Hutnick, an attorney in Belleville, Illinois, and a former prosecutor, spent hours on the phone with me as I rehashed new findings and reflected on scenarios. Mel is a mutual friend of Larry Matysik, wrestling author, promoter, and Sam Muchnick’s long-time right-hand man and eventual biographer. I mention Mel not only to memorialize his generosity but also because, in one of our conversations, he uttered the line that best captures the ambiguous essence of an examination of the warps of a bizarre lifestyle and industry, and what they tell us about contemporary American society.

  Something very disturbing was going on after that double murder-suicide on Green Meadow Lane. The exact nature of that something? That is for you, the reader, to decide. As Mel Hutnick put it, “Sometimes you just have to leave the participles dangling.”

  Irvin Muchnick

  Berkeley, California

  January 2009

  IRVIN MUCHNICK (ConcussionInc.net) is the author of Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal, and co-author of Benoit: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport (both ECW Press, 2007). A native of St. Louis, he now lives in California, where he fights “on
ly when I have to.” He is the lead respondent in the landmark 2009 Supreme Court case on freelance writers’ rights, Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick.

  Order the DVD

  A companion DVD with further documentation of information in this book can be ordered separately. It is not a movie DVD; it is on a DVD disk only because the total volume of the files exceeds the capacity of a standard CD. Below is the list of files. To order the disk, send $20 (U.S. orders), $25 U.S. (Canadian orders), or $30 U.S. (all other foreign orders) to:

  BENOIT BOOK DVD

  P.O. Box 9629

  Berkeley, California 94709

  If an email address is included with the order, an email acknowledgment will be sent prior to filling the order. (Orders can also be placed by remitting the appropriate payment, via PayPal, to paypal@muchnick.net.) Shipping is by standard postal service.

  LIST OF FILES

  Georgia Bureau of Investigation Medical Examiner’s autopsy report

  Complete set of crime scene photos (these do not include the corpses)

  Audio of 911 calls

  Audio of home answering machine messages

  Royal Canadian Mounted Police report containing the earliest official documentation of murder-suicide

  Full text of World Wrestling Entertainment road agent Fit Finlay’s report to the office on the June 23, 2007, show in Beaumont, Texas