Chris & Nancy (11 page)

Still later, Harper maintained that when he had said “That is very interesting,” he was referring only “to the way you were interpreting the text. During our conversation, I felt you were trying to say the text was planned or planted by Scott under some type of direction from the
WWE
.” Harper did not clarify whether he agreed with the way he thought I was referring to the text
^[5]
.

And as with Guerrero, this tidbit from Armstrong, even if honest, doesn't get us any closer to understanding why neither one of them told
WWE
about Benoit's texts when he remained missing in action at call time for the Sunday night pay-per-view.

Months after the media frenzy receded, Guerrero and Armstrong would simply ignore what Guerrero had told Greta Van Susteren about his initial reaction to the texts, and issue another version of why they didn't take action on Sunday. Benoit's wrestler friends were now telling colleagues that they had experienced cell phone reception problems in Texas; the messages were not received until Monday. They gave the same account to a television journalist working on the Benoit story. Dave Meltzer also heard this one.

“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.

CHAPTER 8

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 News
1130
. 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.”

Winthrope complained to News
1130
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 '
80
s. Durham was with the company for two months in
1999
.)