Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  I know I keep repeating it but I feel terrible about the mainstream coverage this has received, since it was only a huge coincidence and a terrible event that should of never happened. I am not sure how to react, as hearing about my message becoming a huge part of the Benoit slayings made me feel terrible as everyone believes that it is connected to the tragedy, but it was just an awful coincidence. That is all I have to say, I will never post anything here again unless it is pure fact, no spam nothing like that. Thank you, and let this end this chapter of the Benoit story, and hopefully one day we will find out why this tragedy ever actually happened.

  In subsequent exchanges on the talk page, 69.120.111.23 was asked if he would grant an interview. He replied:

  Hey, I’m sorry but I would prefer not to do an interview, I really just want to put all this behind us. I made a mistake and I’m sorry, I know I’ve said that a million times but today has just been a bad day with this getting all this mainstream coverage even though it was just a huge coincidence. If an interview is deemed necessary, than I will only do it under the condition that I remain anonymous out of respect for my privacy. But really I would rather not do one, all that needs to be known is that this situation was blown out of proportion, though I can understand why.

  I’m just still in shock that what I posted turned out to be true, and I feel awful that my post turned into a huge story, when it was only speculation on my part. Sorry I’m writing a lot, I just want to move on from this mistake and I hope you understand this. Thank you.

  I also want to clarify again that the comment wasn’t meant to be a prank, but just speculation on my part from some rumors that I had heard on the internet about the family emergency that caused Chris to miss the pay per view Vengeance. It was stupid of me to post, and I regret it, but I did and that won’t change, but as long as everyone knows that it was simply a coincidence and nothing more then we can move on from this. Also, I’d like to apologize for my other wiki “updates” on other pages as they were immature and dumb, but I know I’m not the only one who has done this, but nonetheless I will never post anything like that again as I have learned from this. Thank you again.

  By this time, online journalist Corey Spring was already putting the finishing touches on an investigation of the Wikipedia affair, which he would post at 3:04 a.m. on his page on another website called Newsvine. Spring found that 69.120.111.23 had also been responsible for several other Wikipedia alterations dating back to May 16 of that year. At the Wiki page for the city of Naugatuck, Connecticut, for example, he replaced the name of the town’s mayor and other officials with those of three friends; reporter Spring’s research on the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook revealed that they were all part of a circle of students at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

  Furthermore, 69.120.111.23 had been warned in the past for vandalizing content and for posting pranks displaying a range of immature behavior. On the page of Stacy Kiebler, an actress and former wrestling personality, he wrote: “People want to @!$%# her in her lovely @!$%# and whip her ass til the dawn of day. Many people fantasize about ramming their cocks up her @!$%#.” On the page of Ron Artest, 69.120.111.23 called the basketball player “a piece of @!$%# nigger!!!!!!!” (Though Spring did not clarify this, his report appeared to be cleaning up the epithets with the same series of characters for each one.) 69.120.111.23 replaced the Wiki page of information about the African Wild Ass with one word: “piss.”

  There was one out-of-character Wikipedia edit by 69.120.111.23, on the page of Chavo Guerrero. On the evening of June 15, 2007, someone else had inserted: “Before starting his wrestling career, Chavo was addicted to crack and was a rapist. One day when Chavo was doing crack he thought he saw a little white kid but it was actually his son, and sexually abused him until his penis fell off. On this day forth he will no longer rape his kid, but he still rapes people (even though he has no penis) so watch out for him, even adults.” Three hours later, 69.120.111.23 went onto the page and deleted this vulgar, defamatory material. It was the Benoit hacker’s only known instance of benign editing.

  * * *

  On Friday morning, June 29, Stamford police called the Greenberg house in the Stamford East Side’s Cove neighborhood and spoke to Matthew’s father, Steven Greenberg, who worked for the City of Stamford Finance Department. From information provided by Comcast/Optimum Online, the Fayette County Sheriff’s investigators had traced the Wikipedia edit to Matthew Greenberg and asked Stamford to assist. Steven took Matthew to police headquarters. At 1:35 p.m., Detective Tim Dolan questioned Matthew in an interrogation room at the Bureau of Criminal Investigations.

  The friendly interview lasted less than twenty-five minutes. Detective Dolan did not ask a single question about Chavo Guerrero.

  Matthew Greenberg called himself a “pretty big” wrestling fan who, starting around 10 p.m. Sunday, “was reading rumors and speculation online” about Benoit missing Vengeance, perhaps because “his family was sick and someone maybe died, like his wife perhaps.” But it was “more of my speculation.” He didn’t know about the three deaths until he returned Monday night from his summer job at Bed Bath & Beyond and saw the announcement on the front page of WWE.com.

  Where online had he read the rumors on Sunday night? Dolan asked.

  “Like, on forums. I forgot the exact, like, sites.”

  The detective wasn’t too concerned about Green-berg’s faulty memory of his involvement in world-news events less than five days earlier. The forensic specialists who would analyze Greenberg’s laptop computer, Dolan said confidently, will “find out where these rumors started. . . . As long as you were in [a particular website] and looked at it, they can check it.”

  Greenberg said, “I totally — I kind of forgot I posted the Wikipedia thing. I didn’t even think about that. Then, like, last night I was hearing about it and I posted, like, an apology in a Wikinews article. I just wasn’t really sure how to react. I was probably going to call, like, the police soon, because I felt so bad. It was such a huge coincidence.”

  Steven Greenberg, the father, interjected to ask if there were any other posts saying Nancy had died.

  “His was the only post!” Dolan said. He was wrong. There was also the second edit from Australia, which somewhat more responsibly cited as its source “several wrestling websites.” The authorities never pursued that one. For what it’s worth, the syntax of the very first edit, which was accurate and was retained by the Wiki editors, ended with a dependent clause beginning with “as,” sounding more like British or Australian English than the most common usage in either the U.S. or Canada.

  The detective started to leave the room to get a consent form for the computer search, and the father asked if Matthew was in trouble. Dolan said probably not. The elder Greenberg then said, without prompting, “I was thinking because he’s from Stamford. . . . We live around the corner from them [WWE office], almost.”

  Incredibly, Dolan had not even brought up this subject. Now he said: “Well, I’m sure there was some of that. That’s what I thought originally, but then I talked to the, uh. . . .”

  Steven Greenberg interrupted him, and Dolan never finished the thought. Instead of explaining who had persuaded him that Matthew had nothing to do with WWE, the detective turned back to scold him. “To be honest, this isn’t the first time you’ve adjusted a site. . . . Didn’t you change the name of a mayor of a town to a couple of your friends?” Watch it, he warned, “You can turn yourself from a prank to a murder suspect” with that kind of stuff.

  Dolan proceeded to pin down Matthew’s alibis during the Georgia murders — he’d hung out with a couple of friends in New Rochelle, New York, on Friday night and was home all of Saturday and Sunday.

  Dolan never got around to Stacy Kiebler and Ron Artest.

  * * *

  If the Stamford detective’s softball interrogation was predicated on the expectation that the compu
ter forensic exam would reveal the websites young Greenberg had visited, that expectation proved to be misplaced. Stamford police farmed out the exam to Detective Chester Perkowski of the nearby Darien police. Perkowski didn’t waste a lot of breath in his report. “An examination of the computer’s hard drive revealed no information about the homicide that was posted prior to June 25, 2007,” he wrote.

  When I spoke to Detective Perkowski more than a year later, it was apparent that he didn’t know Chavo Guerrero from Chita Rivera. If Fayette County had asked Stamford — and Stamford in turn had asked Darien — to find the evidence on Greenberg’s computer of where he had picked up on Nancy Benoit death rumors, Perkowski had not internalized the message. He told me he felt that his mandate was simply to find out if there was any evidence on the computer linking Greenberg to the crime. And there was none. Period.

  Perkowski acknowledged that the computer showed some Internet history but said it was insignificant and not worth citing in his report. He added that it was possible that Greenberg, like many computer users, had used software to wash off traces of sites he had browsed.

  Forensics expert Kevin Ripa of Computer Evidence Recovery said that explanation was bunk. “Most history-scrubbing software is a joke,” Ripa said, adding that he had consulted on cases “where files were not only cleansed, but also allegedly deleted altogether, and I was still able to recover data. If the Connecticut report couldn’t recover data, it at the very least could have recovered evidence confirming that scrubbing software had indeed been used.”

  * * *

  Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had told the media, “The guy who’s admitted to doing it said it was just a coincidence. He said he was hearing rumors. I wonder where those rumors came from. I guess the police will figure that out eventually.” But the police never figured it out and never seriously tried. The media likewise turned the page on the “coincidence.” Nearly eight months later, the Fayette County sheriff’s report was released.

  In a supplemental attached to the main report, Detective Josh Shelton wrote, “Det. Tim Dolan informed me after the interview that Matthew was simply speculating as to the reason Benoit missed the event and described Greenberg as ‘harmless.’”

  The main body of Detective Harper’s report devoted far less space to the Wikipedia edit than to information WWE had provided, early on, about activity at a WWE.com chat room starting at 9:41 p.m. Sunday. There a user who called himself “GOB_The_Illusionist” typed, “Benoit’s wife died.” Another, “MaggieCrumb,” responded, “Woman is gone!” GOB_The_Illusionist came back with, “Benoit killed his wife,” and “_JUPITER” agreed: “benoit killed his wife.”

  The chat room chatter continued:

  _JUPITER: “benoits wife is eead”

  _JUPITER: “dead”

  GOB_The_Illusionist: “ChrisBenoit is a murderer.”

  uk_batista_uk: “where u read benoits wife is dead?”

  _JUPITER: “dave meltzer reported benoit is suspected for killing his wife”

  buster: “benoit has family problems”

  uk_batista_uk: “whos dave meltzer”

  GOB_The_Illusionist: “Benoit killed his wife like that nigger. In Ohio”

  Fighting_Rules: R.I.P. benoits wife?

  Lilkenny: benoits wife died??

  Spanked_Monkey: benoit is dead?

  LitaKD: Is Benoits wife really dead??

  CmPunkfan2007: BENOITS WIFE DIED?

  Philgr: R.I.P. BENOITS WIFE

  GOB_The_Illusionist was found to be Sheldon Chandler, a fan in Orlando, Florida. “Some people was really trying guess why he wasn’t there,” the guy explained in an email to Shelton, “but some were just making things up for why he wasn’t there just joking around. Usually when people are joking around I join in and I always try to make up the most outrageous thing I could think of and just all of a sudden what came to my mind to type was that Benoit killed his wife like the guy in Ohio did. . . .”

  _JUPITER, according to the sheriff report, was traced to a Mariano Escobedo. Detective Shelton tried to call Escobedo on August 23, 2007, and received no answer at the residence. “I left a message,” he wrote in his report. That was the extent of the dragnet on Escobedo.

  (The number in the report was actually a cell phone in Phoenix. There was also a land-line number listed for Mariano Escobedo, at the Victorville, California, address in the report; when I called it, the person who answered, speaking in Spanish, said Mariano was a relative but did not live there. At the cell phone number in the report, I got only an incomprehensible outgoing message.)

  Wrestling Observer’s Meltzer, of course, had not reported that Nancy was dead, or that Chris was a murderer or anything remotely similar. Asked about Wikipedia on cable news, Meltzer instantly declared it a “nonstory.” He cited the frequent gossip shorthand on discussion boards and chat rooms, “Meltzer said . . .,” whenever a star wrestler missed an appearance and someone was trying to sound authoritative with a wild rumor. But in the middle of this little play to his vanity, Meltzer may not have realized that while some premature online references to Nancy’s death indeed inaccurately called Meltzer the source, the Wikipedia posts were not among them. Meltzer, like the sheriff, never stopped to look into whether all Benoit rumors that day were created equal. Some could have been “non-stories” and others could have been real stories.

  In the sheriff’s report, a copy of the Matthew Greenberg interview was said to have been “sent to the Sheriff’s Office and . . . included in the case file.” (Contemporaneously, the Stamford Advocate had reported that the interview was on videotape, but the police there did not release Greenberg’s name.) In addition, Detective Shelton wrote, the report from the search of Greenberg’s computer was “attached to this supplemental.”

  But I found that the Greenberg interview was not included. And the computer report was not attached.

  At first, sheriff’s attorney Rick Lindsey explained to me that the report was wrong, that the video was never received but now was being acquired “from the law enforcement agency [Stamford police] which conducted the interview.” Some time later, Lindsey changed that explanation. He said Harper told him that the task of reviewing the videotape had been delegated to another detective (presumably Shelton), who, instead of viewing it, simply discussed it with Stamford’s Dolan. “To my knowledge, FCSO never had possession of the videotape. . . . [W]e don’t live in a perfect world and mistakes are made. Let me see if we can get this corrected,” Lindsey emailed me.

  Four days after that, on July 1, 2008, came a third version. “We have had and still do have the video they sent us,” Harper wrote via Lindsey, but it “cuts out after just a couple of minutes, so there is no recorded interview. I used Det. Shelton’s summary for my report. Det. Shelton spoke directly to Det. Dolan and Matt Greenberg and had first-hand knowledge from both perspectives.”

  There is nothing quite as breathtaking as “first-hand knowledge” of secondary sources.

  At my request, Fayette County sent me a copy of the partial interview in its possession, which cut off after three minutes. But the sheriff’s office refused to confirm that it was requesting a complete and faithful copy from Stamford to make the open records whole.

  And the Stamford cops played along. “From what I understand,” Stamford Captain Richard Conklin told me, “the dupe that we made and sent down south of our video cut off for some reason after some time. But our original is ok. I think they’ve requested a copy.” That was in Conklin’s second conversation with me. In our first conversation days earlier, before he knew the missing video was about to send out a stench, Conklin had tried to imply that Greenberg was a juvenile of twelve or thirteen, rather than a nineteen-year-old young adult.

  I requested a copy of the full interview directly from Stamford. In response, the police claimed an exemption under Connecticut law. I filed a complaint with the Connecticut Freedom of Inf
ormation Commission, and the Stamford police capitulated and provided the video in November 2008, just before our scheduled hearing. The complete interrogation is now viewable through links on the Wrestling Babylon News blog and on YouTube.[1]

  ***

  The chance that Matthew Greenberg didn’t just guess, but rather had stumbled onto a sliver of inconvenient truth, cannot be rejected out of hand. Did he have an acquaintance with Chavo Guerrero, whose Wikipedia page he had cleaned up? No one asked Greenberg. Did he have a friend or relative who worked for WWE or one of its contractors? No one asked. What was the specific language of the posts that inspired his Wiki edit about Nancy Benoit dying, and on what discussion boards did he read it? The cops in WWE’s home city appear to have hardly lifted a finger to find out the answers to any of these questions.

  And what about the second Wikipedia edit from Australia? That didn’t get a first look from Fayette County, let alone a second.[2]

  Drilling into the discussion threads of that period on some of the most popular wrestling fan boards, I noticed that not all the archives were intact. Madison Carter, the moderator of the board at a site called WrestleCrap, told me he had “a hidden board that contains all the Benoit stuff from that night that we didn’t outright delete, only accessible by my mods [moderators] and I.”

  Lots of hard and soft information flew around on wrestling sites that Sunday, and not all of it was reliable even when it emanated from usually reliable sources. Meltzer himself, in reporting that Chris Benoit’s status for Vengeance was up in the air due to a family emergency, was given incorrect information by a WWE source that Benoit had flown home from Texas. Because the report came from Meltzer, this error took on a life of its own; to this day, even many fans who closely followed the drama do not realize that Benoit was never in Texas that week but home in Georgia the whole time. This widely held misunderstanding would complicate efforts to make the proper connections, and reject the improper ones, between and among his Saturday cover story (that Nancy and Daniel had food poisoning and were throwing up blood), his Sunday text messages, and the Monday news of the three deaths.