Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  “The Greta Van Susteren response is a very different explanation and makes even less sense because when Chris didn’t arrive for the PPV, why didn’t Chavo tell anyone?” Meltzer said. He added that at the time what Guerrero was saying on Fox News didn’t seem that important, but now it does: “Again, if Chavo did get the text messages, why didn’t he say anything to anyone until Monday?”

  The fishiness of Guerrero’s text message story gives fresh meaning to his behavior on Monday night at the Raw tribute. Chavo’s on-camera messages that night were mixed. A five-minute testimonial shows Guerrero in tears. Between sobs, he manages these words[6]:

  Chris Benoit was my friend, if not my best friend. He was part of my family, the Guerrero family. To tell you how close he was to my family and me, the night, the morning that I found Eddie, that Eddie died, the first one I called was Chris Benoit. And after telling him it almost broke my heart as much as finding Eddie, because to see a guy as hard as steel and chiseled and just a rock and never show emotion. And when I told him he wailed, he wailed and cried and was sobbing, was uncontrollable. Because Eddie was his best friend.

  The gift I was given when Eddie passed away was that I was able to be with him his last day and be the last one he saw. But I was given another gift because last week I spent the night at Chris Benoit’s house. And — Chris never lets — he’s a very private person. He doesn’t let people in. And he let me in. He let me into his home, with his family and his dogs, fed me, put me up, made me feel at home. Then we went on a couple of house shows together, went to TV, went to dinner that next night, and we both missed our flights. I woke up to him banging on my door, “Come on, let’s go, let’s go, let’s make your flight.” He made it, just barely. I missed mine, but I was able to get home. He called to check up on me. I called to check up on him.

  And it’s just . . . so hard to go through this again with someone I just respected so much as a person, as a friend, as a wrestler. . . . It was such a privilege and an honor to be in the ring with him. I thank God for the actual matches we were able to have together, because they were some of the best of my career. I was able to learn so much from being in the ring with him. I remember, after we were done working together, I pulled him aside and thanked him, hugged him, told him I loved him, thank you so much for everything he’s given me in the ring, in life. And we always left with a hug and a kiss and “I love you.” That’s something he didn’t give out very willingly, he didn’t give that to people, but we gave that to each other. And the last time I talked to him, the day before he passed, he ended the phone call with “I love you, Chavo.”

  I just want to say, Chris, you were my friend, I love you and you’re part of my family. I don’t say that about people, I say that about you. Thank you, God bless you, man. I feel for you. I feel for your family. I just — I’m so sorry. I thank you for the time we spent at WrestleMania, my kids and your kids, and they all played together. . . . The privilege and the trust you had in me, by letting me have your kids, I took them with my kids, and we went to the movies together. I guess that shows me how you thought about me, Chris. I thank you very much for that, for thinking of me that way, because I feel the same about you and I would trust you, with me, with my life, with my kids’ lives, because I know you, Chris, I know your heart, and I know what a great heart you have — had, whatever. Thank you, Chris, and thank you for being my friend. Love you, man.

  On the live Raw TV tribute show, however, Guerrero has a different demeanor, more like William Regal’s; Chavo is detached, even shut down. In retrospect, colleagues thought Guerrero looked extraordinarily reserved for someone whose close friend had just died. They figured that he may have suspected something, or just been confused.

  * * *

  On March 28, 2008, I called both Guerrero and Armstrong’s cell phones. At the number for Guerrero, a male voice answered and, when I asked if he was Chavo Guerrero, replied, “Who are you?” I said, “Irv Muchnick” — whereupon the man said no, that he wasn’t Chavo Guerrero and I had a wrong number. I later called back and got an outgoing message with the same voice. This was the same voice as the live one moments earlier, and it also sounded like the Chavo Guerrero on TV. I left a message, which was not returned.

  At the number for Armstrong, a man answered and, before I could even identify myself, said he couldn’t hear me. I called back and he repeated the exercise. I suspect he was feigning a bad connection, as everything sounded fine on my end on both calls. Later I called yet again, got voicemail, identified myself, and left a message, which was not returned.

  Some months later a close friend of Armstrong’s told me that he was at the Houston airport on Sunday morning when he texted Benoit “What time do u land?” If true, that would make some difference in the perception of Armstrong’s actions. Specifically, it would go some distance toward suggesting that his Sunday text was not faked to support a phony timeline already under construction (as he could just as easily have transmitted a fake message from the comfort of his hotel room). That said, I do not know why Armstrong could not have told me himself that he went to the airport Sunday. And for the reasons stated, I am not convinced that he did.

  Two timelines . . . a flight reservation on either Saturday night (early version) or Sunday morning (final version) . . . Benoit text messages that were either construed slowly (national TV interview) or clogged in the electronic pipeline (later private explanation). . . . Such details, on their face, are matters for resolution by law enforcement. District attorneys and sheriffs do not ordinarily close the files on heinous crimes without offering a coherent account of how and why three corpses lay undetected inside a house in their jurisdiction for more than thirty hours after the perpetrator, who was in the middle of missing important commitments for a high-profile job, sent five text messages to two colleague- friends. Indeed, failure or delay in reporting a crime is, itself, sometimes prosecuted as a crime, known as “misprision of a felony.”

  Yet closing the file without making any attempt to resolve these contradictions is precisely what Scott Ballard, the district attorney of the Griffin Judicial Circuit, and Randall Johnson, the sheriff of Fayette County, chose to do in the Benoit case. As will be shown in the next chapter, the authorities also airbrushed phone logs, concealed other text message evidence, retrieved no voicemail messages at all, and released a final report calculated to mislead in several other respects. They played shell games with public records, which cast them, and WWE, in a poor light.

  Chris Benoit committed the crime all by himself. On general principle, we might settle for the murky final report on the murder-suicide with the resignation of Sheriff Tate in To Kill a Mockingbird, who says of the mysterious murder of bad guy Bob Ewell, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

  But the willful passivity of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office busted the buttons of that principle. To a public whose interest would be served by disclosure, not concealment, the local authorities did their best to stonewall facts about the modus operandi of the wrestling industry: its blurring of fact and fiction; its totalitarian control over talent, with no concern for safety, let alone honor; its resourcefulness at eluding scrutiny and projecting the right combination of imagery and bluster to ensure that business as usual would not be interrupted.

  Unless those conditions are squarely faced and corrected, people will continue to die backstage, in numbers that dwarf the mortality rate of rock-and-roll stars, in the debris of ruthless big-money cartoons whose victims are merely replaceable parts without a constituency. Until then, future Chris Benoits are inevitable.

  [1]. On my blog, I originally called the earlier version “the Daily News timeline” because it was picked up most prominently on the New York Daily News website. Subsequent research on fan discussion boards, however, established that the timeline originated at http://www.wwe.com/inside/news/detailed benoittimeline before the company deleted it. After expunging the timeline, wwe also disowned it. In respo
nse to an email about this on September 25, 2008, Jennifer McIntosh, WWE’s head of publicity, immediately wrote back: “Irv, Thanks for getting in touch with me. Can I get back to you on this tomorrow? I’m traveling today and need to double check my files to make sure I’m sending you the correct info. If you need it today, I’ll ask my co-worker Gary Davis [WWE vice president of corporate communications] to help. Thanks, Jenny.” McIntosh, however, did not get back to me the next day or ever, and she did not return follow-up email and voice messages.

  [2]. Would Benoit have been missed at a particular Houston hotel on Sunday morning or afternoon? The chaotic nature of WWE procedures for traveling talent suggests not. WWE wrestlers bear all out-of-pocket expenses and make their own arrangements for the regular tour events, known as “house shows”; some choose to stay in expensive hotels, while others cut corners in cheap motels. For TV tapings and pay-per-views, the WWE office does make more generous and plush arrangements, booking large blocks of rooms, often spread across more than one local hotel, in order to accommodate everyone from the front office, the TV personnel, the support crew, and the wrestlers (including a safe margin of backups to cover no-shows). Taking no chances, the company overbooks rooms in multiple locations, and neither the hotels nor WWE pay much attention to precisely who checks into which rooms where and when. The former are being paid handsomely to accommodate anyone and everyone associated with WWE. And the only thing the latter cares about is that the wrestlers “make their towns” and appear on time at the arenas.

  [3]. The complete text of road agent Finlay’s house show report to the WWE office, which I obtained via a company insider, is included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.

  [4]. In a raw transcript, it can be difficult to determine exactly what the person is trying to say. Van Susteren here seems to be asking Guerrero what he thought Benoit was thinking. My investigation is more interested in what Guerrero himself was thinking at this point.

  [5]. Harper tied his afterthought remark to a false accusation that he had explained his “very interesting” remark in an earlier message, but that I had suppressed that explanation in my blog coverage. In fact, I had never received, and he almost certainly never sent, such an earlier message. For a full discussion of this controversy, see “Notes on Sources” at the end of this book.

  [6]. David Bixenspan, then with cagesidewrestling.com and now with sbnation.com, pointed out that I was incorrect in the original edition in saying that Guerrero’s tribute on Raw was different than the one posted at WWE.com. (Above, at page 105 in the print edition, I also referred to the Guerrero tribute interview as having been “on the WWE website.”)

  CHAPTER 8

  The District Attorney, the Sheriff, and What’s Missing

  FAYETTE COUNTY HAD A CRIME PROBLEM, all right: stolen golf carts. In Fayette, recently built residential communities (such as Highgrove, near the Whitewater Creek Country Club, minutes from where the Benoits took residence in 2006), as well as entire charter municipalities (such as Peachtree City, where the Benoits had spent the previous nine years), were meticulously zoned and pre-planned down to the last architectural, landscape, and lifestyle detail. The goals were comfort and stability. The unifying feature of most subdivisions — though the quaint suburban term “subdivision” itself seemed somehow beneath them — was a network of golf-cart paths, which proved equally congenial to pedestrians, baby strollers, and bicycles. The problem, from time to time, was that golf carts disappeared in clusters of either hard-core thefts or juvenile pranks. With each outbreak, the town pooh-bahs and the local newspaper, the Citizen, would brood over what to do about it.

  Yes, there were also some gang issues in the schools, and Fayette County got its share of the heavy methamphetamine traffic throughout the region. But the bottom line was that Fayette encountered very little violent crime: around three and a half incidents annually per 1,000 people, in a total population of just over 100,000 — a rate half that of the state of Georgia as a whole. The Benoit murder-suicide was one of only two homicide incidents in the county in 2007.

  This sylvan setting would have an impact on how the Benoit case was investigated. In exurbs far removed from mean streets, the worst fatalities in wrestling history, under the microscope of worldwide 24/7 media, taxed the capacity of public resources to administer them thoroughly and professionally.

  Scott Ballard, who boasted multigenerational county roots, led the local law enforcement hierarchy. In 2004 Ballard was elected district attorney of the four-county Griffin Judicial Circuit. Beefy-faced, ruddy-complexioned, with a Senator Foghorn Leghorn white cowlick and a drawl as soothing as bourbon-and-branch-water, “Scooter,” as he was known, continued to teach at his church Sunday school even as he hunted down the area’s underwhelming criminal element Monday through Friday. Ballard mastered both the piety and the folksy political chops necessary to thrive in this enclave of dead-red Republicanism. When he ran for re-election in 2008, his opponent attempted to make an issue out of the fact that Ballard had agreed to testify as a character witness for a convicted child molester in a probation revocation hearing. Ballard won in a landslide anyway.

  When the Benoit spotlight shone on Fayette County, Ballard was front and center, and he appeared intoxicated by it all. WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt, who said he never spoke to the district attorney, accused Ballard of making “numerous public statements which were inappropriate and ultimately belied by the actual forensic evidence and failed to see to it that certain tests were done which might have supplied a motive and/or more complete picture of the circumstances within the Benoit family. Indeed, the disdain for Mr. Ballard is evident to anybody who speaks to the actual investigators.”[1]

  From the start, consciously or otherwise, Ballard stoked the frenzy, substituting attention-grabbing sound bites for measured words. A favorite trope was to label something “bizarre,” a term made to order for splashy play. “The details, when they come out, are going to prove a little bizarre,” he teased the media on the first day.

  Ballard also said, “In a community like this it’s bizarre to have a murder-suicide, especially involving the death of a seven-year-old. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to wrap our minds around this.”

  And: “Bizarre. That’s the only way I can describe this.”

  And: “There was a Bible placed beside each of the bodies, and I thought that was somewhat bizarre.”

  And: “What’s most bizarre to me is the timing and the circumstances. Not just that a man could kill his own seven-year-old son but that he could have stayed in the same house with the bodies.”

  Even as Ballard’s serial proclamations of bizarreness fed the media beast, they contributed to slaking the thirst for concrete answers. Who cares about fissures in the back story — about multiple timelines and day-plus gaps after text messages — when an obvious double murder-suicide can be written off as sui generis weird? As Forrest Gump might have put it, in Fayette County law enforcement, bizarre was as bizarre did.

  * * *

  Ballard’s most reckless statement threw fat into the fire of what became either a fabricated forty-eight-hour distraction or a legitimate, though not exactly central, puzzle piece. That was the report that Daniel Benoit had a genetic disorder, Fragile X syndrome, which in turn gave rise to the theory — heavily promoted by WWE before being abruptly abandoned — that parental stress over Daniel’s care drove Chris Benoit over the edge.

  The Fragile X story established a pattern of the Benoit investigation and coverage: first, it surfaced in an exaggerated and irresponsible form; then, it was prematurely buried. Reviewing how the report found daylight makes it hard not to infer that it contained a germ of truth. Despite evidence that WWE — eager for anything that would turn the focus away from steroids — ran too hard and too fast with the Fragile X theory, the story itself appears to have been spontaneous, not planted
.

  Ballard got the ball rolling when he told the media that Daniel’s arm showed needle marks from injections of growth hormone by his parents. The DA said he was told that Chris and Nancy were concerned about their son’s size. “The boy was small, even dwarfed,” Ballard said[2].

  Nearly 3,000 miles to the northwest, a woman named Pamela Winthrope heard the news of the deaths in Georgia on a car radio tuned to Vancouver’s News1130. The Benoit name rang a bell. Winthrope was an activist with the British Columbia chapter of the Fragile X Research Foundation of Canada, an organization raising funds and awareness for a syndrome that has been identified as the most common cause of inherited mental impairment and the most common known cause of autism. (Fragile X has a host of physical-development symptoms, as well, and differs widely among victims generally and between boys and girls especially.) Winthrope’s son Jamie had Fragile X, and she was widowed. Before her husband died, she recalled his telling her that he had learned through the Fragile X community that the Benoits were also part of it, whereupon he contacted Chris Benoit about becoming a Canadian celebrity spokesman for the cause. Chris declined.

  “I called the station to ask for more information,” Pam Winthrope told me. “The person I spoke to [reporter Katharine Kitts] did not identify herself, nor did she tell me she was interviewing or recording. When I explained why I had called, she asked many questions about Fragile X. I, of course, am always happy to oblige.”

  Late the next day, Tuesday, June 26, Winthrope’s daughter called to tell her that she was being quoted on the air by name, and it was all over TV and the Internet. In the on-air interview, which Winthrope said she did not authorize, she recalled her husband talking to Benoit “because I was trying to set up a support group in B.C. and in Canada, we only have a couple of them. My husband was struggling when we got diagnosed with our son, and Chris was struggling with his. They talked for a few minutes and then he said he didn’t want to be a public face for Fragile X, he just wanted to keep it really, really quiet.”