Chris & Nancy (2 page)

Mike Benoit recently emailed me and asked, “If you had to do it over again, would you have emphasized chronic traumatic encephalopathy much more?”

My answer: “Yes.”

The idiosyncrasies of my writing career eased the process of catch-up. As I've said before, Archimedes was right: If you have a place to stand, you can move the world. The demimonde of wrestling provided a much more faithful foundation than you'd think.

Dr. Joseph Maroon, the “medical director” of WWE, is also a guru on traumatic brain injuries for the NFL. There is not a doubt in my mind that he has played fastest and loosest with the truth in service of the latter. Along with his cronies at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, he has marketed “concussion awareness” — a misnomer spinning the existential crisis of the sport of football over its intrinsic and systematic infliction of brain trauma — via a for-profit software company that rates somewhere between suspicious and fraudulent.

The fact that Chris Nowinski, who has become the nation's leading lay activist on this issue, combines Harvard and WWE pedigrees, adds a delicious dollop of irony to this scandalous stew. I thought Nowinski did great work in launching the Sports Legacy Institute; got co-opted when, in 2010, he accepted a $1 million NFL grant for the Boston University Center for the Study of CTE, which he also co-directs; and, more recently, has done great work again in forcefully arguing, along with Dr. Robert Cantu, for the elimination of tackle football for pre-high schoolers.

In 2013 and beyond, the question no longer should be whether we're in a mess. It should be who will manage it and how. Did I hear you say Vince McMahon and Roger Goodell, with the support of Joe Maroon? Please. As in the cover-up of the connection between tobacco and cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, you might as well “call for Phillip Morris.”

Before the climactic Mount Rushmore scene of Alfred Hitchcock's
North by Northwest
, the Cary Grant character asks a secret agent which agency he represents. “FBI, CIA . . . they're all the same alphabet soup,” the guy scoffs. And so, my fellow Americans, are the WWE and the NFL.

Irvin Muchnick

December 2012

THE HORROR OF CHRIS BENOIT'S
June
2007
murder-suicide rampage is as good a reminder as any that it is high time to demystify professional wrestling. For too long, this industry has been inoculated from scandal by a banal mystique, the widespread belief that it is an enterprise whose offbeat rhythms simply cannot be mastered, and one whose players' motives lie beyond ordinary human understanding. Baloney and double baloney. Beneath the carny lingo and Mafioso code of silence rests a conventional profit-driven sector of show business, studded not only with glory-seeking performers but also with television executives, writers, technicians, chic-seeking kitsch kings, two-faced politicians. This is nothing less than the Periodic Table of the Elements of mainstream American pop culture. “Sports entertainment” is sports and entertainment, only more so.

The industry's dominant company, World Wrestling Entertainment — controlling more than ninety-five percent of the North American market and a vast majority worldwide — has grown into a multinational with more than a billion dollars in capitalization. It features an accompanying dark side as broad as a half-moon, hidden in plain sight. The brainchild of Vincent Kennedy McMahon, trailer-park incorrigible turned Forbes
400
squatter,
WWE
flowered in Connecticut, the same greenhouse that produced Phineas Taylor Barnum. The state's former governor, Lowell Weicker (once upon a time a hero of the Senate Watergate Committee), is a charter member of the
WWE
board of directors
^[1]
. In the
1990
s, when McMahon was sinking under the first round of steroid and other scandals in what was then called the World Wrestling Federation, Weicker had helped rehabilitate his image with an appointment to a prominent position with the Connecticut branch of the Special Olympics.

In May
2007
, a month before Benoit strangled his wife, Nancy, snapped their seven-year-old son Daniel's neck, and hanged himself, Vince McMahon delivered the commencement address at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.
SHU
is the New England region's second-largest Catholic university. Vince McMahon's wife, Linda, the chief executive officer of
WWE
, is on the
SHU
board of trustees. As the university explained it, “Using self-deprecating humor to explain his choice as recipient of a Doctor of Humane Letters Degree and commencement speaker, McMahon . . . left most graduates and those in the audience with a sense of hope that anything is possible, even in the face of overwhelming obstacles.” The mother of the student government president, in a sound bite no doubt crafted by the campus public relations department, called McMahon “a good choice for the school considering how he started his career and how he has parlayed it into this multi-million-dollar organization.”

In sum, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, you
can
tell the players without a scorecard.

And enough with the Talmudic musings about how to categorize wrestling; they are irrelevant to whether the benefits of unregulated junk spectacle trump the public-health cesspool that “sports entertainment” has turned into. In
1982
a Hollywood star, Vic Morrow, and two Vietnamese-American child actors were killed in a gruesome late-night helicopter mishap during the filming of an action sequence of
The Twilight Zone: The Movie
. Reforms of filmmaking standards and California child-labor laws quickly followed. By contrast, Nancy and Chris Benoit were approximately the ninth and tenth of the approximately twenty-one wrestlers and in-ring personalities who died before their fiftieth birthdays in the year
2007
alone. Some scores or hundreds of others fill parallel lists over the past several decades — choose your time frame and methodology. Dave Meltzer, publisher of the authoritative
Wrestling Observer Newsletter
, said the list of eighty-nine deaths under the age of fifty, from
1985
to
2006
, in my earlier book,
Wrestling Babylon
, was “incomplete, to be sure.” Giving the numbers the best context I have seen, Meltzer drew up a list of sixty-two young deaths in “major league” wrestling organizations from
1996
to
2007
.

The profile and tabloid details of the Benoit case shed a useful light on a generation-long legacy of shame; to dismiss this — and the probability that wrestling's drug-and-lifestyle deviances, induced from the very top, are major factors in the equation — is to make scoundrels' arguments.

Yet here is what has changed as a result of Benoit: almost nothing. Dissecting how that came to be is the second mission of this book. The first mission is to compile a comprehensive and accurate history of what happened in Fayette County, Georgia.

Toward that end, I strove to distinguish this book from others about wrestling by sticking to the public record as much as possible, and by emphasizing that if that turns out to be a problem, it is a problem shared by fans and non-fans alike. For example, everyone has an opinion on the significance, or lack thereof, of the
59
-to-
1
ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in Benoit's postmortem toxicology tests. The few people who want to believe that such a finding tells us very little are far outnumbered by the many people who know that it tells us a lot; it's just that the few add more heat to the discussion than the many add light. While in other areas of life we may need fewer facts, wider-ranging intuition, and a spirit of live-and-let-live, wrestling has reached the point where it needs more facts — facts tethered to accountability — and less paralysis by analysis.

No, the butler didn't do it; Christopher Michael Benoit did. But honest scrutiny of what transpired before and after can demonstrate how
WWE
, as desperate and cagey as any gun or tobacco lobbyist, pulled the strings to ensure that wrestling's death pandemic would remain unaddressed. In real estate, the key is “location, location, location.” In the Benoit story, the most fertile ground is “timeline, timeline, timeline.”
WWE
's published timeline was as phony as its match results, and simultaneously far less entertaining and more illuminating.

To the question, “Was there a Benoit conspiracy?”, we have a clear answer: you bet there was. It was a conspiracy between those who care too much about wrestling and those who care too little. The first group consists of the fans who enjoy the pageantry and the people who profit from them. The second group consists of those who can't be bothered, except possibly to blow hard on cue whenever a comment, no matter how ill-informed, is deemed fashionable.

Like everyone else, I'll take my best stab at what it all means, but even this is only the second draft of history. The most important step is simply to cut through all the taboos that make wrestling an appropriate subject to cluck about, but not to study for its off-the-charts human fallout and for its seedy but pseudo-respectable big-business
DNA
. I submit that anything to which millions of people devote blocks of time every week is serious. Clusters of deaths are serious.

Let's tell and retell the Chris Benoit story in the hope that it will eventually make enough of the right people care in just the right amounts.

CHAPTER 1

THE FIRST PERSON TO ENCOUNTER
the dead bodies of Chris Benoit's wife and their seven-year-old son, at around
2
:
45
p.m. Monday, June
25
,
2007
, was the next-door neighbor. Holly Schrepfer ran out of the house screaming to two Fayette County Sheriff's officers on the driveway outside, “Daniel and Nancy have been murdered! They've killed the family!”

At
1
:
35
, Deputy Donna Mundy and Lieutenant Larry Alden had pulled up to the front of the Benoits' property in unincorporated Fayetteville, Georgia, in response to a call nineteen minutes earlier to the county
911
Communications Center. The cops faced an electronically locked double-iron gate separating a stacked stone wall from the circular driveway, which was set off nearly
200
feet from the main road. (The whole plot measured more than eight acres, typical for this area.) Mundy tried the call box outside the gate: no answer.

The officers noted that the fence on either side of the gate could be easily scaled. But the more significant obstacle to access was the presence of two German shepherd guard dogs roaming the front lawn near the gate and menacing anyone who might dare to traverse it.

Deputy Mundy had
911
dispatcher Chris Nations ask a World Wrestling Entertainment security consultant, Dennis Fagan, if anyone knew the gate pass code and how to pacify the dogs. Fagan had made the original emergency call. After checking with other
WWE
people, he reported back that while he couldn't come up with a pass code, he did learn that the neighbor to the left of the Benoits' house took care of the dogs whenever the family was away. This set of exchanges, including intervals between follow-up calls, lasted the better part of an hour.

The officers found Holly Schrepfer at home. Before joining them on the return to the Benoits' gate, Holly called Nancy. As had been the case for days, there was no answer.

Shortly after
2
:
30
, Holly was climbing over the fence and calming the dogs. Their names were Carny and Highspot, inside jokes from Chris and Nancy's careers in professional wrestling. A carny, or carnival figure, refers to the sport's roots in the nineteenth-century big top, and its reliance ever since on a jargon (“mark” to signify a naive fan, “work” as a synonym for staging something fake, “kayfabe” for the overall con) comprehensible only to insiders. A “highspot” is an aerial maneuver in a wrestling match. During the two decades in which Chris Benoit rose to become one of wrestling's biggest stars, his signature highspot was a spectacular diving head butt from the top rope, sometimes called the Swan Dive.

Holly ushered the German shepherds through the unlocked door on the side of the garage leading into the house. The door led up a short flight of stairs to a mudroom where the dogs were kept in portable kennels. Holly locked up Carny and Highspot.

It was a warm early-summer afternoon in North Georgia, temperature in the low
80
s Fahrenheit. The central air conditioning system in the Benoit house was off, which made the odor hanging in the air, powerful but indistinct, more stagnant and intense.

With foreboding, Holly called out, “Nancy? Daniel?”

Holly ascended two flights to the upper level to look in Daniel's bedroom. The decor was dominated by posters and action figures of his wrestling father; on the dresser lay two toy replica championship belts. Holly found little Daniel, in a long-sleeve blue SpongeBob T-shirt, and pajama pants with a soccer-and-baseball design, lying in bed on his stomach, his left cheek on the pillow over turned-down covers. Next to him were two stuffed Winnie-the-Poohs and a book,
My First Bible
— a children's edition of the New Testament — propped atop his extended right hand. His right leg was bent, with the foot touching the left knee. As Holly got closer, she could see that Daniel wasn't just sleeping. His face was discolored. Dried-up foam was crusted around his mouth and nose.

Holly gasped and scrambled down one flight of stairs. She knew that Nancy kept a home office and liked to watch television in a room above the garage. That room, too, was strewn with wrestling memorabilia: framed photos, plaques, baseball caps promoting
WrestleManias
past.

There Holly found Nancy lying on her right side on the hardwood floor, a red fringed throw rug covering everything except her head and feet. She faced the wall between the sitting area and a wet bar. A pillow, askew, leaned against a messy head of brunette hair. Another Bible, a regular adult edition with a burgundy cover, lay alongside her. Nancy was in a white tank top and blue striped pajama bottoms. Her hands were tied together behind her back, at shoulder-blade level, with coaxial cable. A second cable, along with a small white rope, extended from there and wrapped around her neck. Her feet were bound with the cord from an electric charger, secured by black tape. Nancy's face was blue and black, her stomach bloated; her arms were already in an advanced state of decomposition.

Holly hurried down the steps, through the mudroom, and out the garage side door, yelling to Deputy Mundy and Lieutenant Alden that Daniel and Nancy had been murdered.

The officers told Holly to stay put in the driveway while they went inside and followed her directions to the two bodies. After confirming her discoveries, they searched the entire house, eventually making their way to the basement, which doubled as a home gym.

At
2
:
48
— traumatized, isolated, and worried about the officers' safety — Holly punched
911
on her cell phone.

“They asked me to hop the fence because they have attack dogs and I went in and someone had — the little boy and the mom are dead,” Holly explained breathlessly to the dispatcher. “And so I ran out to scream to them but then they went in the house but they haven't come out yet. Are they
OK
?” She added, “I didn't see Mr. Benoit. I don't know where he is. I didn't want to go down in the basement for some reason. He might be dead.”

The
911
dispatcher called the sheriff's dispatcher, who made contact with the cops inside the house. They assured Holly they were
OK
.

They were in the basement, where Chris was, indeed, also dead. They found him sitting upright on a bench facing a Magnum Fitness weight machine. He was shirtless, wearing red gym shorts and socks and sneakers. His left leg was extended, his right leg bent at the knee, foot tucked under his left thigh. The black nylon weight machine cable was around his neck; a strip of a white towel was underneath to keep the cable from cutting the skin.

Chris was being held in sitting position by the cable, which passed through pulleys attached to
150
pounds of weight. The weight stack on the machine had been supplemented by two forty-pound dumbbells on top. The weight was lifted and kept from going slack by Benoit's own
220
pounds of body weight, plus two additional ten-pound dumbbells, which appeared to have dropped from his grip to the floor. Clearly, he had put much thought and masochistic discipline into hanging himself in near-perfect equipoise, not only to ensure a successful hanging but also to maximize the pain he must have intended to inflict on himself in the process. When the dumbbells had dropped, his body rotated right, just over the spot on the floor where two cell phones, his and Nancy's, rested next to a water bottle filled with green tea. Also on the floor was an empty bottle of Dynamite Vineyards
2004
merlot
^[1]
.

Inspection of all the doors and windows revealed no sign of forced entry.

* * *

WWE
security man Fagan's first contact with
911
had come nearly two hours after his company, Andrews Inter-national, made the apparent final
WWE
-generated call to the Benoit home, at
11
a.m. A little more than an hour later, Fagan called someone in the sheriff's office who advised him that the way to proceed was to ask
911
for a “welfare check.” The summons to law enforcement marked the beginning of the end of a drama that stretched across more than sixty hours.

Two days earlier, Saturday the
23
rd, Chris Benoit had missed his appearance at a wrestling show in Beaumont, Texas, following a day and an evening of conflicting messages in conversations with concerned fellow wrestlers and the
WWE
front office. These conversations were surely after the murder of Nancy (which most likely took place on Friday night). At least some, and probably all, of them also succeeded the murder of Daniel (which most likely took place early Saturday). Chris's basic cover story that day was that he was pinned down at home in Georgia, where he said Nancy and Daniel had food poisoning and were vomiting blood. Chris promised his colleagues and bosses that he would get his wife and son cared for and join the
WWE
Texas tour with dispatch.

But Benoit did not turn up in Houston either late that night or the next day, Sunday the
24
th. On Sunday night
WWE
staged one of its biggest shows of the year,
Vengeance — Night of Champions
, broadcast globally on cable and satellite systems to pay-per-view subscribers. The original script for
Vengeance
called for Chris to win his match and, with it, the championship of
ECW
, one of the company's three “brands” of wrestling troupes. With Chris's no-show, the match lineup had to be scrambled. The live crowd of
15
,
000
-plus at the Toyota Center and the pay-per-view audience were told that Benoit had been detained by a family emergency.

Some wrestlers had bad histories of missing bookings, often because of alcohol or substance abuse. But the fanatically reliable Benoit was not one of them. Seven years earlier he'd even wrestled for months with a broken neck before finally succumbing to cervical fusion surgery, which sidelined him for most of a year. He never missed a show.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, more than sixteen hours before the first bell of
Vengeance
, Chris had sent a series of text messages from his and Nancy's cell phones to the cells of two colleagues, wrestler Chavo Guerrero and referee (and ex-wrestler) Scott Armstrong. The messages contained two repeated and cryptic snippets of information: “My physical address is
130
Green Meadow Lane, Fayetteville, Georgia,
30215
” and “The dogs are in the enclosed pool area. Garage side door is open.” Benoit was saying farewell and giving directions to the scene of the carnage, but that meaning would become crystal-clear only with
20
/
20
hindsight
^[2]
[3]
.

Dennis Fagan revealed little of this background in his Monday afternoon call to the authorities. One possible explanation for this is that
WWE
executives had not thoroughly briefed Fagan. Yet when the
911
dispatcher Cathy Crenshaw asked, “What is your emergency?”, among Fagan's first words were, “I run the security for World Wrestling.”

Fagan said Chris had missed the show last night, which was unlike him, as he was “very religious” about his work commitments.

A retired New York City Police Department detective, Fagan held the title “Executive Director, East Coast Anti-Piracy and Special Events” for Andrews International, which described itself as “a full service provider of security and risk mitigation services, and one of the ten largest private security service providers in the United States.” Later, according to Detective Ethon Harper, who authored the report closing the Fayette County investigation of the Benoit case, the sheriff's office would ask Fagan and Andrews International no detailed questions about how the company came to be involved in the hectic events of a weekend during which a star performer for an Andrews client missed two straight appearances, including a championship match on a pay-per-view show. “I spoke with someone at Andrews International to see what type of business they were,” Harper told me. “I also wanted to confirm that the number on the phone records was one of their phone numbers. It was.”

In an email to me,
WWE
's vice president of corporate communications, Gary Davis, fell well short of confirming that Fagan “ran”
WWE
security operations. “Dennis Fagan is employed by a security firm utilized by
WWE
. He assisted us in trying to contact Chris Benoit on the weekend in question,” Davis said. Davis did not clarify whether the single record of Andrews International's involvement, the
11
a.m. Monday call to the Benoit home, qualified as a “weekend” effort, but the statement at least suggests that Fagan had a somewhat more substantial role, in turn raising suspicion on why he would give inaccurate information in his series of calls to
911
and why the sheriff would not have asked him an additional substantive question or two.

Whatever Fagan's level of authority or involvement, his
911
calls exhibited a lack of intimate knowledge of the events leading up to them. “At three o'clock this morning there was a message left for one of the other wrestlers,” Fagan said to the dispatcher. “And basically it says, ‘The dogs are in the backyard. The back door is open. Goodbye.' And that's it.” In fact, there were multiple messages from Benoit, not “a message”; and they were not “this morning” but the previous morning — well over thirty hours before the first call to
911
.

Fagan's citation of the wrong day for the text messages was not an isolated slip of the tongue. Later in the same, initial
911
call, Fagan reiterated, “That message was at three o'clock this morning.”