Chris & Nancy (15 page)

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.

The reporting of the food-poisoning story is a key to determining whether posts on boards Sunday night were anything but fabrication. Meltzer did not report the story prior to its publication in
WWE
.com's first timeline, but his memory of when he first heard it varied (in one version of his responses to my questions, Meltzer said Monday; in another, Sunday). Whether it came from Guerrero and Armstrong or from management, many wrestlers were trading that story in the dressing room in Houston as they wondered if Benoit would show up. Meltzer never clarified for his readers any details behind the dissemination of what, in retrospect, was a cover story.

Another wrestling journalist, Bob Ryder of
1
wrestling.com, was the first to report the food-poisoning angle, and he did so before it became part of the first
WWE
timeline. At
6
:
36
p.m. Monday, Ryder posted a story headlined “More Details on Death of Chris Benoit & Family,” which included this scoop: “Benoit had been scheduled to appear on a
WWE
house show on Saturday. Sources tell us Benoit called to first say he would be taking a later flight, and then to say he would not be attending the house show due to a family illness. According to one source, Benoit said both his wife and son were throwing up blood and he needed to stay to take care of them.”

There appear to be no earlier online references to the Benoits' purported bout with food poisoning. Most significantly, there are none as early as Sunday. Or, at least, none that survive.

What does it all mean? It means that not only crackpots should wonder what people at all levels of
WWE
knew, and when they knew it.

When a cover story collides with the discovery of the crime it is covering up, the scales fall from the beholder's eyes. The Fayette County authorities didn't care. But
WWE
must have cared a lot, since a thorough investigation of Greenberg's Wikipedia edit held the threat of blowing the company's timeline out of the water. For
WWE
, it was better not to get into all that. The sheriff obliged.

While the Wiki mischief itself may indeed have had no basis, the immediate willingness of insiders to give Matthew Greenberg a pass didn't allay suspicions. It strengthened them.

CHAPTER 10

AT THE SAME TIME THE
Fayette County Sheriff's deputies were discovering the corpses of Daniel, Nancy, and Chris Benoit,
WWE
wrestler Dave Taylor and his wife, Lisa, were also, inexplicably, spotted on Green Meadow Lane. This is well established, along with Taylor's lies about it. As is the case with so much of the Benoit timeline mystery, however, it is not known who put Taylor up to this mission and what it entailed, or what, if anything, he was covering up when he lied. This chapter endeavors to make some sense out of Taylor's role.

A wrestler from Yorkshire, England, David Taylor adopted the gimmick used by a number of British performers who make it to these shores: relying on technical ability and a faux patrician air. Anyone listening carefully to his particular accent would identify it as far closer to Cockney than to Knightsbridge, but then again, we're not talking about
Masterpiece Theatre
. (On the independent wrestling circuit, he has been billed as “Squire” David Taylor.)

He and Lisa were part of Chris and Nancy's original group of
WCW
Peachtree City friends. In addition, Dave and Chris went all the way back to the early
1990
s as tag-team partners in the German Catch Wrestling Association. With fellow Brit William Regal and the Irish Dave “Fit” Finlay, Taylor founded an Atlanta-area wrestling school called the Blue Bloods Academy. Like the others, Taylor eventually landed in
WWE
, first in
2000
–
01
and again in
2006
. But unlike Benoit, Taylor never achieved main-event status or got himself “over” with a line of evolving feuds and gimmicks. In his second
WWE
stint, Taylor's main duties became training the young talent in Deep South Wrestling, one of the company's “developmental” territories, based in McDonough, twenty miles east of Fayetteville. In
2007
Dave and Lisa lived in Tyrone, another town in Fayette County.

The Taylors' presence near the crime scene, well before anyone in the general public could have known it might be a crime scene, is not seriously disputable. Indeed, because even the Taylors might not have realized it was a crime scene, one fork of entirely innocent speculation follows. Several sources reported seeing Lisa and an unidentified woman carrying prepared dishes of deli food, such as would be offered to console a bereaved family. This would imply that the Taylors believed one or more, but not all, of the Benoits had died, and non-violently at that — or, alternatively, it would suggest that they wished to convey as much. Even that little cannot be asserted with certitude. All we really know is that, for some reason, Dave Taylor felt the need to prevaricate rather than to explain.
^[1]

A memo by one of Mike Benoit's lawyers, Patricia Roy, has the following account:

Holly [Schrepfer] told me early on that WWE had Dave and Lisa Taylor appear at Green Meadow house and try to get information from Holly. Holly ran into Dave and Lisa immediately after discovering the bodies, and it appeared to her that Dave and Lisa Taylor knew about what happened, though Holly thought that would be impossible because Holly was the first one to discover what happened. After speaking to Holly outside Green Meadow, Dave and Lisa Taylor would not call Holly directly and would have a mutual friend who taught horseback riding call her. Holly thought it was weird that the couple called her via the mutual friend and they thought it was weird that a week later they called and kept emphasizing to her that they did not know what had happened prior to being told by Holly and just didn't want it to appear to her that that was the case.

In the summer of
2008
, I twice discussed this account with Taylor in phone conversations. Each time he denied that he was even in Georgia during that period; he claimed he was in Texas with the
WWE
tour crew. When the front office called him, he said, “They wanted to know where Benoit lives. They didn't even know I was in Texas, not Georgia. I told them that, and I told them I'd never been to Benoit's house and didn't know where he lived.”

Clarifying, I asked Taylor if he was saying that he was at the house show in Beaumont on Saturday, at the pay-per-view in Houston on Sunday, or at the
Raw
shoot in Corpus Christi on Monday. He said he was at all three — in Texas continuously throughout the Benoit crisis. He insisted that the first he knew of the Benoits' deaths was when Vince McMahon gathered the talent to inform them at the mid-afternoon Monday meeting in Corpus Christi.

However, sources confirmed that Taylor was not booked to wrestle in Beaumont on June
23
. If he were an agent —
WWE
now officially calls them “producers,” the backstage people who go over the finishes with the boys and keep things running smoothly — then he would have been in Houston and Corpus Christi;
WWE
subsidizes the presence of an expanded crew at pay-per-views and television shoots. But Taylor was not an agent; he was talent, in descent on the wrestler food chain and mostly idle except when called upon to train inexperienced wrestlers near his Georgia home.

After consulting with an insider who referred to company records, I confronted Taylor on the phone a second time, but he stuck to his guns. He maintained that he could have been in Beaumont no matter what the records showed. He said a number of non-booked wrestlers regularly travel to and hang out at
WWE
house shows on their own to serve as backups and to collect “draws,” or cash advances on their contract guarantees. An authoritative source told me that this contention by Taylor was nonsense. While
WWE
overbooks pay-per-views and
TV
to some extent, it is not in the habit of throwing away money every night on wrestlers who don't perform.

Through every conceivable avenue, I sought contact with the Benoits' other old Peachtree City friends. The point people for this group were Penny Durham, the widow of Johnny Grunge, and Jill Ewing, the ex-wife of a Turner Broadcasting cameraman. Eventually Ewing talked to me.

Most accounts of the estrangement between the Benoits and their neighbors present it in terms of a slow and passive withdrawal by Chris. But for Ewing, it was a bitter and specific falling-out, precipitated by the tendencies of both Chris and Nancy to try to control with whom their friends chose to associate.

“Chris was not one of my favorite people,” Jill said bluntly. From there, her assessment of him zigged and zagged. She said he was great with children, and when they were first friends, in the
1990
s, “I would have left my kids with him in a minute.”

On the other hand, she said Chris's final text messages to Chavo Guerrero and Scott Armstrong were not strange at all, if you knew anything about him. “Chris's drug of choice was ecstasy,” a synthetic stimulant/hallucinogen, Ewing said. “He did and said weird things like that all the time.”

As for Dave and Lisa Taylor on Green Meadow Lane on June
25, 2007
, Ewing later sent me an email in which she confirmed that Penny Durham told her the Taylors were “looking for the house at the time the police were there. They didn't know where it was.”

An Atlanta television reporter also confirmed some basics: “I was told that when investigators arrived, there were
WWE
wrestlers' wives already there. And yet that is not mentioned in the [sheriff's] report.”

Before Mike Benoit cut off contact with me (because of my refusal to embrace his theory that Chris's concussions supplanted, rather than supplemented, steroids as the main factor in his irrational behavior), he passed along bits and pieces of information from Holly Schrepfer. On April
26, 2008
, Mike quoted her in an email: “I may have a lead for Mr. Muchnick on a few people he needs to speak with. I had a conversation with someone who was at the scene that said that things didn't look right but was uncomfortable elaborating. I have not pushed him for info yet but I will at the right time.”

Detective Harper's final report said nothing at all about the Taylors. In an April
8, 2008
, email to me, Harper said his own conversations with Schrepfer “did not involve anything about her speaking to the
WWE
that I can remember.” He was responding to my question of “people from
WWE
talking to her almost immediately after she emerged from the crime scene, and other ongoing contacts by
WWE
people and intermediaries.” Our dialogue ceased before I could get Harper to clarify whether he would have considered a Schrepfer-Taylor conversation to constitute “speaking to the
WWE
.”

What the Taylors were up to is anybody's guess, but once again the lies, so free-floating and gratuitous, legitimize a round of responsible guesswork. Perhaps
WWE
asked Dave and Lisa to see if they could check on the Benoits on Saturday, Sunday, and/or early Monday, simply to complete the picture. As noted earlier, it is not intuitive that the pricey Andrews International security firm merely made one or two phone calls on behalf of
WWE
. By the same standard, it makes sense that a local on the payroll might have been utilized to supplement the effort to track down the Benoits.

Or perhaps, following the call to
911
, the Taylors were just lurking so as to learn facts the instant they emerged. In truth, the worst pr nightmare for
WWE
might have been a scenario in which Chris was found to have killed Nancy and Daniel but
not
himself.

Whether or not the Taylors counted among them,
WWE
certainly had vast organizational resources and methods at its disposal. In July
2007
, according to Mike Benoit, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent named Clifford E. Cormany Jr. would present his business card at the Fayette County Sheriff's Office and say he represented the family. “That was not true,” Benoit told me. “We later found out he was working for
WWE
.” A
26
-year
FBI
veteran, Cormany had turned in his G-man badge to found in Decatur, Georgia, Investigative & Polygraph Group, Inc., “a professional association of former
FBI
agents” specializing in private investigations, polygraph examinations, and security consulting. (Cormany did not respond to emails, and the sheriff and
WWE
spokesman Davis refused to comment on him.)

What is most clear about a small fry like Dave Taylor is that he was yet another emblem of a completely closed system — a corporate culture that keeps pro wrestlers under the thumb of management while they, and they alone, bear responsibility for a range of decisions, inside and outside the ring, legal and not, monumental and petty. Benoit did the crime. Since so many drugs were found throughout the house, it doesn't appear that Taylor, or anyone else, had been charged with the task of hiding or disposing of them. Still, Taylor can be presumed to have done as he was told, whatever he was told.
WWE
's reward for his loyalty was to release him early in
2008
.

Despite all that, Taylor may still have had his eye on the prize of a high-paying
WWE
gig in the future after yet another run through the indies. When in doubt, a wrestler clamps the truth in a painful submission hold, no matter how comically the fib is exposed. And even death is something to be “worked,” and even homicide timelines are open season for “kayfabe.”

Embedded in such whimpers, disguised as bangs, lay the ultimate secrets and lessons of the Benoit tragedy.