Chris & Nancy (24 page)

Pages 1–2: all photos courtesy of Bob Leonard.

Page 3: Photos courtesy of Mike Lano.

Page
3
: Nancy Benoit with Too Cold Scorpio and Sandman in
ECW
(ECW Press archives).

Page
4
: George Napolitano.

Pages
5
–
6
: all photos courtesy Mike Lano.

Page
7
: Eddie Geurerro, courtesy Jake Aurelian.

Page
7
: Johnny Grunge and Rocco Rock, courtesy Mike Lano.

Pages
8
–
9
: Simon Dean, courtesy Mike Lano; Randy Orton and Umaga, courtesy Matt Balk; all other photos courtesy Mike Mastrandrea.

Page
10
: Vince McMahon (ECW Press archives).

Page
10
Michelle McCool, courtesy Matt Balk.

Page
13
: Chavo Guerrero and Kane, courtesy Mike Mastrandrea.

Page
13
: Scott Armstrong, courtesy Matt Balk.

Page
13
: Dave Taylor Singing with Paul Burchill, courtesy Shawn Boyette.

Page
14
: All photos courtesy AP.

Page
15
: Linda McMahon, (ECW Press archives).

Page
16
: Chris Benoit,
2004
, courtesy Jake Aurelian.

At the back of this book is information on how to order on disk some of the background records I used. The goal here was for as much transparency as possible. From the get-go, I had faith that, even if the Benoit crime itself flashed no conspiratorial smoking gun, a close reading of the public record would reveal more than we might think.

Below are the stories behind the stories of a few important aspects of my reporting.

FAYETTE COUNTY AUTHORITIES

On February
12
,
2008
, the Fayette County Sheriff's Office released a report closing the Benoit investigation. The materials consisted of a fifty-two-page case summary by Detective Ethon Harper, the lead investigator, along with more than
300
pages of supplemental reports and records.

Through the public information officer, Lieutenant Belinda McCastle, then-Sheriff Randall Johnson said that only Harper was authorized to talk to me; everyone else in the department was instructed to grant no interviews. I reached out to others as needed, but it was clear that the sheriff's employees took his directive seriously.

My dialogue with Harper started off amiably before quickly dribbling into nothingness. As the questions got sharper, Harper did not want to interpret the gaps in his report, which I was showing were not just discretionary, but passive to the point of negligence. Missing text messages, arbitrarily truncated phone call logs, absence of voicemail evidence, references to documents and records that were not released and then, in defense, were explained as never having existed at all — all these detours from openness and common sense speak for themselves.

“I hope you are keeping in mind that I am not a professional writer,” Harper said at one point. Ultimately, his lack of felicity with the written word was presumed to excuse that where he represented that Scott Armstrong had said something “in a statement,” the detective merely meant to refer to something he claimed to remember Armstrong stating. There was no backup document, after all; the plain language suggesting otherwise was a swerve.

In an April
8
,
2008
, email, Harper accused me of not publishing on my blog his explanation of a text message Armstrong sent to Chris Benoit on June
24
,
2007
. “I thought you said you did not want to ‘hype,'” Harper wrote. When I replied that I had received no such explanation and asked him to show me the original message, he wrote back, “I clear out my sent box pretty frequently to keep from getting the ‘over size limits' message from our server. I don't have any messages past a week ago.” Unfortunately for his logic, such a message would have been less than a week earlier. Anyway, Harper wrote, “I was really just poking a little bit of fun at you. No reason to point out a misunderstanding and make it a bigger issue than it is.”

If this was a joke, I wasn't laughing. Thereafter, Harper stopped returning phone calls, emails, and faxes.

Three months later came the search for the Stamford police interview of the Wikipedia hacker, which the Fayette County sheriff's report said was “included in the case file.” After several rounds of dodgeball, Harper said, through sheriff's attorney Richard Lindsey, “We have had and still do have the video they sent us. The video cuts out after just a couple of minutes, so there is no recorded interview.”
^[1]
I demanded and received what was, in fact, a partial recorded interview. I asked Lindsey why the sheriff's office issued a report on this aspect of its investigation on such a basis. Lindsey wrote back, “I have no idea.”

After a time-consuming fight that led all the way to the docket of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission, I got the full video from Stamford, and it reinforced the apparent determination of authorities in two states not to breathe a word of whatever was known about why the body of a famous wrestler — who was uncharacteristically missing appearances — and the bodies of his wife and their son could lie around decomposing for days.

Then there were the grudging and piecemeal releases of copies of
WWE
's calls to
911
. All records “of the initial call to
911
for a welfare check may be obtained from the Fayette County
911
Communications Center,” noted the summary of the open records. By omission, this at least implied the existence of only one
911
call. After I applied to the
911
center for “the” call and listened to it, it was evident that there were others; in fact, three iterations of requests to the center were required before the complete collection of
eight
audio records got pinned down.

At the beginning of the process, Lindsey had written to me, “I suggest that you read the investigator's summary first (which I am sending to you) to determine if you really need the
911
documents. The summary is very good.”

Later Lindsey was angered by my persistent questions about the mysterious Scott Armstrong “statement.” Unable to understand why Harper wouldn't produce what nine out of ten drunks in a bar could identify in that context as a dedicated document, I assured Lindsey that I would not make a fuss if such a document surfaced and turned out not to have been disclosed previously due to an honest mistake. Lindsey then threatened in an email, “If you ever imply that I withheld anything, all communication will cease immediately.” He complained that he was “at the mercy” of his client in such a situation. “I do not withhold documents — I never have and never will. If I read that again (as a threat, comment or thought), you'll have to get a court order before I will ever communicate further with you.” After I replied that I'd proferred no such threat, comment, or thought, Lindsey apologized.

MICHAEL BENOIT

Michael Benoit, Chris's father, contacted me early in
2008
, after we were separately interviewed for a documentary on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program
the fifth estate
. Mike was most interested in promoting research suggesting that Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy — a doctor's neologism for the brain damage he had found caused by Chris's serial concussions in the ring — had been the central cause of his rampage. I promised Mike that I would cover and address this research respectfully, whereupon he wrote me, “I will help you with any details you require for your book. I will not ask that you write in a manner that is pro Chris Benoit.”

For several months Mike and I conversed extensively, though at arm's length, in dozens of emails and several long phone conversations, about aspects of my reporting on the timeline in particular, and we contemplated meeting face to face for further conversations on a range of topics. Mike was eager to introduce me to one of the
CTE
research pioneers, Dr. Bennet Omalu, a professor at the University of California-Davis Medical School, the coroner of San Joaquin County, California, and the author of
Play Hard, Die Young: Football, Dementia, Depression and Death
. A meeting among the three of us almost happened in May
2008
, when the producers of
NBC
's
Dateline
planned to fly Mike to San Jose to participate in interviews for an investigative piece. But Mike's flight was canceled at the last minute as
NBC
abruptly scrapped the Benoit story.

A month earlier Mike had been a key confirming source as I nailed down the story of
WWE
's phony
Raw
tribute show, hours after company executives knew full well that they were spinning a murder-suicide. After the publication of that report on my blog, Wrestling Babylon News (http://muchnick.net/babylon), he alerted me to a clumsy attempt to discredit me by Scott Zerr, an Edmonton journalist who had hoped to work with Chris on his autobiography. (Zerr might have been smearing me in concert with Carl DeMarco, the head of
WWE
's Canadian operations, who likely had been embarrassed by my revelation that the leak of the company's early knowledge that Chris was the killer came from DeMarco.) For details, see the April
6
,
2008
, posts on Wrestling Babylon News.

Mike and I never met in person, and he eventually cut off contact altogether. Though I found his information on Chris's brain trauma useful, I intuited a difference — one that I think Mike, grasping at straws to explain the criminal acts of his beloved son, couldn't accept — between it being a contributing factor and the single, comprehensive explanation for this tragedy. I later independently spoke to Dr. Omalu; and while I agreed that the concussion research was an important emerging field, certain to save the lives of future athletes, and that this deserved to be noted as part of Chris's legacy, I also felt that it was exaggerated by Dr. Omalu as well as by Mike. As a father, I empathized with Mike. But as a journalist, I had a job to do.

Along the way, before I got on his bad side, Mike put me in touch with the office of his lawyer, Cary Ichter. My reporting on gaps in the sheriff's account of the telephone records had spurred Mike to direct Ichter to hire technicians who combed Chris and Nancy's cell phones and computer for further insights into the weekend timeline and other issues. (I well understood that as we compared notes, Patricia Roy, one of Ichter's assistants, would get far more information from me than I from her; the statutory deadline for filing a civil lawsuit against
WWE
was several months after the completion of this book.)

As a member of the Georgia Athletic Commission, Ichter also was pushing for new legislation to regulate the pro wrestling industry there. I, too, strongly advocate regulation. Still, in this particular scenario I found myself thinking
WWE
officials had a point when they complained that a commission member who was also a lawyer contemplating a major lawsuit against the company in private practice had a blatant conflict of interest. The merits of Ichter's proposals, as opposed to their process, make for a more complex discussion; but in any case, they quickly foundered when
WWE
threatened to pull out of Georgia if toothful regulations were enacted.

In our few conversations, Ichter expressed interest in using my book to help promote a lawsuit by his client Carlos Ashenoff (“Konnan”) against Total Non-Stop Action Wrestling. The suit alleged that the promotion negligently endangered Ashenoff by forcing him to work through debilitating injuries, which led to life-threatening transplant surgery after the wrestler's kidneys stopped functioning, most likely a consequence of toxic doses of painkillers. The case also included claims of racial discrimination, based on the stereotype Latino character that Ashenoff, a native Cuban, said he was forced to portray in order to maintain
TNA
employment. That count echoed a discrimination suit Ichter had filed years earlier against World Championship Wrestling on behalf of a group of African-American wrestlers, who won a substantial settlement. (In a well-known piece of wrestling lore, that settlement was driven by an extraneous factor: a report of racist comments by Bill Watts, who at the time was running
WCW
, reached baseball legend Hank Aaron, an executive with
WCW
's parent Turner Broadcasting System, and higher-ups quickly passed down orders to resolve quickly any disputes adversely impacting the company's image in race relations.)

I must say that, on intellectual principle, I am unimpressed by this type of racial-discrimination litigation in wrestling — which, after all, is a lowbrow entertainment form, by definition exploiting lowest-common-denominator gimmicks. I find risible the proposition that the legal system should set right the reality that racism (or homophobia or sexism or xenophobia) will always be a default ingredient of the recipe of fictional story lines. If Turner Broadcasting didn't want to be part of such a business, it could get out — and eventually it did.

In our conversations, Mike Benoit was the first to raise the point that his lawyer sometimes behaved “unprofessionally,” as Mike put it. In one set of meetings Ichter “kept calling this person an ‘asshole' and that person an ‘asshole.' In my experience, when you're calling everyone else an asshole, maybe the first thing you should be doing is looking in the mirror,” Mike said.

Late in
2007
, Ichter leaked the story that the Benoits had offered to settle with
WWE
for $
2
million.
WWE
rejected the offer and Mike Benoit denied ever having authorized it. Thereafter, he told me, he instructed Ichter to focus on estate matters only.

All of which is to emphasize that the thrust of this book is not willy-nilly wrestling-bashing. The real takeout here is the outrageously out-of-bounds health and safety risks in this industry, which — in the absence of a sensible regulatory regime — the talent must bear all by themselves.

HOLLY SCHREPFER

Naturally, I sought the cooperation of Holly Schrepfer. In March
2008
Mike Benoit told me that he had arranged for Schrepfer (often referred to in media reports as Holly McFague) to talk to me about the timeline of events following her discovery of the bodies. When I called her, though, I found that either Mike had misunderstood or she had developed second thoughts.

Specifically, Holly said she had addressed all of my questions about the subject in her official statement to the sheriff. Taken aback, I said I would thoroughly review her statement, which I'd already read, and call her back only if I still thought we had things to talk about.

When I did call back, Holly responded that from what I was telling her, the sheriff's release of records must have included only one of the four or five separate statements she said she'd given investigators. At that point I went back to Detective Harper, who flatly denied that there were additional, undisclosed Schrepfer statements. “You have what I have,” Harper said.