Winthrope complained to News1130 management that she had been ambushed. The station placated her with a second, extended interview focusing on Fragile X awareness[3]. Meanwhile, in the U.S., National Fragile X Foundation executive director Robert Miller issued an educational news release and found himself fielding questions from People magazine, TV’s Inside Edition, and others; the foundation website had 30,000 visitors in three days, much more than the typical traffic of a busy month.
According to Winthrope, she never spoke with anyone from World Wrestling Entertainment. There is no reason to think she made up the story about Benoit and her late husband out of whole cloth. She was not a WWE stooge.
But once Winthrope’s story got into the public domain, company spinmeisters did not pause to check out meticulously the state of Daniel’s physical and mental health and its relevance to the double murder-suicide. At most, CEO Linda McMahon or her surrogates seem to have questioned some of Chris’s friends, such as fellow wrestler Chris Jericho, who was in the midst of negotiating his return to WWE after a period of inactivity. Jericho had seen the boy in social situations and, perhaps influenced by the power of retrospective impression, agreed that something must have been “off.”
Jericho and others close to Chris Benoit also found authentic the idea that Pam Winthrope’s husband would have been rebuffed in an effort to get Chris to go public about his own family’s bout with a genetic disorder; that would be consistent with everything everyone knew about a man who looked as uncomfortable in his own skin outside the ring as he looked comfortable in it in the ring. In some Fragile X families, the shame and frustration of parents are said to be so profound that not even close relatives are told. If ever anyone fit such a profile, Benoit did.
And that, really, was all the confirmation WWE needed before putting its vast propaganda apparatus in motion. Thus, on the Wednesday, June 27, edition of Good Morning America, ABC’s Robin Roberts introduced Linda McMahon by noting that “there are new clues surfacing that could take the case in a whole new direction — clues about a Benoit family secret: their seven-year-old son’s rare genetic disorder, known as Fragile X . . . a point of tension between Benoit and his wife, apparently.”
McMahon agreed. “The focus,” she said, “is turning more to the tension that must have been happening between the husband and wife over the management, the schooling, and the rearing of this child who had the mental retardation.”
In print media interviews, lawyer McDevitt reinforced the new message du jour. McDevitt said the couple’s friends told WWE that Chris and Nancy had a hard time with Daniel’s school placement. “I know that they had difficulty figuring out the solution and it was a cause of tension between the two of them.” McDevitt said the Benoits “were constantly struggling with the difficulties of raising a child who, from all indications, may well have had Fragile X syndrome.” He added, “It’s very difficult to raise a child this way. There’s a lot of guilt. Chris was traveling on the road, she was trying to deal with the problems on her own. . . . When they moved into this new area and the child had to be placed in a new district, I gathered the tension became somewhat exacerbated.” McDevitt said that Daniel’s special needs were part of a conversation Nancy had with Dr. Astin the previous Thursday, and that “we have reason to believe Chris talked about being depressed . . . with the situation.”
By Tuesday, July 2, however, the tune was changing. After the attorney for the Toffoloni family, Richard Decker, insisted to ESPN that there was no record of Daniel having Fragile X, and that Daniel’s grandparents had spent a lot of time with him and never noticed anything untoward, the DA backed off. Ballard issued this statement: “A source having access to Daniel’s medical reports reviewed those reports. They don’t mention any preexisting mental or physical impairment. Reports from Daniel’s educators likewise contradict the claim Daniel was physically undersized. The educators report that Daniel graduated.”
WWE took the cue. Spokesman Gary Davis said that while McDevitt had been “confident” in the accuracy of his earlier statements, “I think we have to go with what the district attorney has said as being the best up-to-date information available right now.” A lot of people, Davis said, “got caught up in the idea that Daniel had Fragile X syndrome. We were just as caught up as everyone else.”
McDevitt himself was more grudging; he either was playing bad cop to Davis’s good cop, or as a long-time trusted adviser to the McMahons, he had earned the independence to speak his own mind. McDevitt told People he had “reason to believe, and we believe the evidence will show, the situation with Daniel was a source of tension in the relationship between Chris and Nancy.” And he continued to suggest that Chris’s visit to Dr. Astin’s Carrollton office on Friday was driven by a phone conversation the previous day in which Nancy discussed “the needs of the child and how they would be met,” and that Chris talked in person with the physician about “the child and the family situation he was in.”
Ballard, for his part, never bothered to resolve the contradiction between his original remarks and his reverse-field conclusion that Fragile X was a non-issue. The best guess is that the Toffolonis’ unhappiness over the besmirching of Daniel’s memory combined with Ballard’s own belated perception that his indiscretion had served no positive purpose, since marital stress over a child’s medical issues could never be posited as more than a minor part of this crime’s equation.
Though Ballard did not grant an interview for this book, he did respond, in an email, to my questions to him about two anonymous posts at the time on the online discussion board of the Citizen newspaper. One of the posts said Ballard himself had a child with a challenge. Ballard confirmed, “My son, Paul, has autism.” Another Citizen post asserted that, before Ballard was elected DA, he had represented some Atlanta-area wrestlers in his private law practice, though Benoit was not one of them. Ballard told me he handled some legal matters for Paul Orndorff and for Benoit’s close friend Mike “Johnny Grunge” Durham. Neither was with WWE at the time. (Orndorff had been a WWF main event star in the ’80s. Durham was with the company for two months in 1999.)
As for Daniel, the painful and counterintuitive truth was that he had been enrolled in a “bridge kindergarten” preschool class at First Baptist Church of Peachtree City. Such programs are designed for children who turn five years old right around the enrollment deadline for regular school kindergarten (typically late summer or early fall). That way, parents who aren’t sure whether their borderline-age kids are school-ready can hedge their bets for a year; after the pre-K program, the kids are sent on to either kindergarten or first grade. But Daniel wasn’t five, five and a half, or even six; he was seven.
On the Citizen’s discussion board, a poster identified only as “Christi” maintained, “Daniel did not have trouble dealing with other kids. He had lots of friends in his class. My daughter called him her boyfriend and said he used to protect her. He looked and acted like all the other kids in his class.”
(Clearly a member of the pro-Nancy, anti-Chris faction, “Christi” also wrote: “The man did fake fighting in a ring with other men in tights. It’s FAKE! They are all big muscular bad actors. Why does this qualify him as a hero??? It’s WRESTLING!!! Chris had the personality of a wet mop. At least that’s the impression my husband and I got from him at our kids’ graduations. We also got a very bad vibe from him.”)
Other sources close to the Toffolonis ascribed Daniel’s enrollment at the First Baptist preschool to Chris’s increasingly zealous desire to control Nancy and Daniel, and to a growing paranoia, which only lockdown security could satisfy. Chris talked a lot about the 2003 murder in the Atlanta area of the daughter of retired wrestler Khosrow Vasiri, “The Iron Sheik” — never mind that she was a grown woman who was killed by her boyfriend. The Benoits’ move from Peachtree City to their gated home was motivated by safety concerns, as was the acquisition of the German shepherd guard dogs. During this period, Chris al
so began having a local hanger-on who drove him around, Jimmy Baswell, take different routes from the airport to home with the view of shaking off anyone who might be following them.
There’s a difference, though, between being a control freak and a security fanatic, and making a school enrollment decision that would retard the academic career of a developmentally normal child. Juxtaposed against the known facts, the denials that Daniel had a medical condition came across as more defiant than convincing. Advocates of this viewpoint did not respond to my invitations to entertain follow-up questions.
The most telling sign that something was amiss with Daniel came from the authoritative, if muted, testimony of next-door neighbor Holly Schrepfer. Seeking to escape the June-July 2007 frenzy, Schrepfer traveled to the Boston area, where she’d previously lived. There Schrepfer, who had been a well-connected events producer, hired a Boston public relations firm, Regan Communications Group, to help her handle the barrage of media inquiries. George Regan issued a statement on Schrepfer’s behalf acknowledging that Nancy Benoit, over the course of their year-long friendship, had spoken of Daniel’s “medical problems.” Regan said, “I know there were some problems, problems and issues that she said the son had.”
The sheriff’s report covers the subject by noting that “rumors” about Daniel and Fragile X circulated during the investigation. “The rumors reported the Benoit family had a difficult time raising Daniel with this autism-like condition. Investigators with the Georgia State Composite Board of Medical Examiners obtained Daniel Benoit’s medical records and were unable to locate any notation or evidence that Daniel Benoit suffered from Fragile X syndrome or any form of autism.”
This conclusion would carry more weight if it included the medical records rather than a second-hand characterization of them, and if it had grappled with DA Ballard’s statements about needle marks on Daniel’s arm. If this was a false rumor with a fuse, Ballard was the one who lit it.
* * *
Not all the warps in the Fayette County investigation can be blamed on its loose-tongued DA. Some emanated from the sheriff’s office. Others were by-products of combined and inglorious incompetence. These lapses may or may not have risen to the level of corruption.
Perhaps the most important such area was the authorities’ baffling approach to the voice messages left on Chris and Nancy’s cell phones. Home phone answering machine messages were captured, but those had little value; Chris, like most mobile people, communicated almost exclusively through his cell. From the primary-source audio of the voicemail left on that cell, we could backfill what others knew about the Benoits’ crisis, or at least acquire hints of the levels of their concerns.
But the investigators did not retrieve any voicemail whatsoever. Moreover, they didn’t even try.
A June 26, 2007, subpoena to Verizon Wireless Communications — submitted by DA Ballard and Detective Harper, and signed off on by a Fayette County judge — demanded documentation in fourteen categories. These included cell site activation, numbers dialed, incoming numbers, call duration, and incoming and outgoing text messages. Not one of the categories was incoming voicemail.
While discussing the voicemail issue for this book, Harper could not have been more vague or misleading. On April 5, 2008, I emailed Harper, in part, “Your report includes a printout of the text messages. Is it also technically possible to retrieve audio of the incoming voicemail messages? If so, was a demand for voicemail audio included in any of the 14 categories of the subpoena to Verizon? And did Verizon provide it? If audio of voicemail is not in the sheriff’s records in this case, I would like to find out why.”
Three days later, the detective responded, “Luckily, we were able to at least get the texts from the phones. We retrieved the data from the phones such as SMS (text messaging). We asked for them from Verizon, but due to an issue they had with their systems, they could only produce what they gave us and nothing more. They were unable to provide text or voicemails.” Harper did not answer the question of whether a demand for voicemail audio was included in the Verizon subpoena, and I concluded that it was not. Harper also did not respond to the question of whether retrieving voicemail was technically feasible: the answer is obviously yes.
Below we will get to what the sheriff’s office said about the text messages; for now, let’s stick with voicemail. Harper was trying to combine the two under the heading of technical problems, when the bedrock reason for not obtaining the former was that it wasn’t in the subpoena. He would not comment on what — or who — could possibly have persuaded him not to pursue this key evidence.
Assuming that the sheriff’s office actually pressed Verizon informally for the voicemail — defective subpoena and all — but was told that the system was down, would Harper’s explanation wash? Not according to the forensic experts I consulted, one of whom was Kevin Ripa of a company called Computer Evidence Recovery. “If there was a system error, then what about the backup system?” Ripa said. “Major telecommunications companies don’t record mission-critical information casually. If Benoit’s voicemail was truly missing for good, that is a serious problem that would have affected thousands of other customers, as well. Verizon surely could have been pressed further on this point.”[4]
* * *
The sheriff’s investigation did produce text messages, to and from both Chris and Nancy’s cell phones; that evidence was especially useful in its depiction of their deteriorating marriage and her alarm over his drug use. Yet the text record, too, is incomplete.
On June 28, 2007, the New York Daily News reported that Chris had texted “biblical verses and portions of his will.” No such messages would appear in the sheriff report’s logs. Bryan Alvarez, publisher of the Figure Four Weekly newsletter, echoed this report in an interview with National Public Radio the next day. “I’ve been told there are other messages that have not been made public yet that perhaps quoted biblical passages, had estate information. So I think more is going to come out as it pertains to the text messages,” Alvarez said. When I followed up with Alvarez more than a year later, he said the report was probably just “confusion or some other miscommunication” in the first days.
On June 29, ex-wrestler Joe “Road Warrior Animal” Laurinaitis — brother of WWE Talent Relations chief John Laurinaitis — seemed to be telling Dan Abrams of MSNBC that John was among the recipients of the text messages from Benoit at the very end. No such messages are in the sheriff report’s logs. However, in full context it is not clear whether Joe was merging unrelated pieces of already known information:
[Y]ou better have a good reason [not to show up for a major booking] or your butt’s getting canned. You’re going to get fired. You know, my brother is vice president of operations for the WWE, my brother John. And I had — once I heard of this horrific situation, I called him and said, ‘Man, what’s going on?’ He said [and here is where the boundary between direct and indirect quotation gets jumbled], ‘Man, all that I know is that some of the guys and my brother himself had got text messages saying, you know, this is my new address. The dogs are out on the deck. The side garage door’s open’ — just plain one-liners that didn’t make any sense, that were so unlike Chris Benoit.[5]
These tidbits do not prove the existence of suppressed texts. But at least one wrestler whose text messages appear on the log released by the sheriff told friends of other messages of his that mysteriously are not included.
The final piece fueling these strong suspicions has a tinge of Keystone Kops. In response to the subpoena, Verizon Wireless produced printouts of calls sent to and received by Chris and Nancy’s cell phones. At the beginning of the printout is a legend with explanations of all the abbreviations and codes therein, and examples of how they were applied. One such example is the following text:
CTM data (ASCII)
[I don’t understand any of this chris. What could ever have made u do this? U r a hero and my biggest influence in the bizn
ess as well as my friend. But no]
Sent (ASCII)
[I don’t understand any of this chris. What could ever have made u do this? U r a hero and my biggest influence in the bizness as well as my friend. But no]
Originating Time [06/26/2007 02:51:15[00] [00001]
This text appears nowhere on the Verizon printout itself, much less on the sheriff report’s logs. Could the author of the company’s explanatory legend have gone to the trouble of making up such an elaborate hypothetical example, with this authentic-sounding voice and detail? (The sender of the message, real or imagined, would be someone who idolized Benoit and was in anguish upon learning that he was a murderer.) Highly, highly, highly doubtful.
True, a message mourning the family and posthumously judging Chris might have been excluded from the public record as “not relevant.” In the February 12, 2008, records release, the sheriff hedged its incompleteness by calling the collection of text messages therein the “relevant” ones. But the authorities’ definition of relevance seemed awfully crabbed and debatable — in a way that served WWE more than anyone legitimately scrutinizing it.
And anyway, the real point is that Verizon, in the official story, was supposed to have told Fayette County law enforcement that it could not produce any texts. According to the sheriff’s report, Verizon’s text data stopped at date, time, and phone number, with no content. Detective Shelton had to download from the Internet an open-source software called BitPim, with which he was able to access the text messages. So what’s with the fully quoted example in the explanatory legend?
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