Chris & Nancy (3 page)

Either
WWE
misinformed Fagan of the timing of the final text messages or he was confused — or lying.

The sheriff's report closing the investigation would erroneously state that Fagan told
911
that Benoit “left a text message for a wrestling co-worker around
3
a.m. on Sunday, June
24
,
2007
.” Asked about this discrepancy months later, Detective Harper told me, “I missed that. I'll have to listen to it again.” By subtly fusing the report in the
911
call of Monday morning texts with later knowledge that the texts were actually a full day earlier, the sheriff contributed to blurring public understanding of the significant fact that
WWE
had been dealing with a weekend-long crisis, a missing-person case with a long tail. This was one of many examples of fudged facts in the record, which had the cumulative effect of enabling
WWE
to sell to the public the most sympathetic interpretation of the company's response.

At
1
:
41
p.m., after the
911
dispatcher told Fagan that the Benoits' front gate was locked and the officers were being deterred by aggressive canines, Fagan expressed surprise, saying, “The message that we got — like I said, he left a message at three o'clock in the morning for another wrestler — ‘The gate's open. . . .'” Fagan once again was reinforcing the suggestion that Chris's text message was on Monday rather than Sunday. Fagan also didn't seem to grasp the difference between the main gate to the property and the garage side door leading into the house itself. That would be more understandable, especially if neither Fagan nor anyone else from Andrews International had ever seen the house. But it is another example of, at a minimum, sloppiness in the details
^[4]
.

In his next call to
911
a half-hour later, at
2
:
13
p.m., Fagan reported that an unspecified “they” had just gotten back to him with more information. Later he said one of his sources was someone named “Chavo.”

“The gentleman I'm dealing with,” Fagan said, “is a retired judge in New York.” That would be Richard Hering,
WWE
's vice president of governmental relations and risk management, formerly a justice in upstate Sullivan County. This last piece of trivia could not have been of any interest to the
911
dispatcher. Fagan was trying to impress the listener with his bona fides, or else he was just rambling.

Fagan was now saying he had learned of two separate text messages from Benoit. Actually, Guerrero and Armstrong received a total of at least five texts from Chris in the early morning hours of Sunday.

As for the problem with the dogs in the hour before Holly Schrepfer solved it, Fagan asked, “Can they Taser them — put them to sleep?”
^[5]

Fagan checked in twice more with
911
, both at times after the Benoit family members had been found dead. Each time, at
3
:
15
and
4
:
19
, the
911
dispatcher told Fagan that there was not yet any information to impart.

But
WWE
vice president Hering seemed to be on a more substantive track of communications with the county authorities. At
4
:
41
Hering called
911
to leave a message for Sheriff's Lieutenant Tommy Pope. Hering said Pope had relayed to Hering a request for certain information in “the Benoit investigation.” (Hering did not say if Pope's message had been relayed through Fagan. Perhaps so.) Hering said he had returned Pope's voice messages, but Hering was now calling
911
, as well, because he believed Pope was at the house and therefore unable to retrieve the voice messages
^[6]
.

By the time Fagan, putatively still in the dark, was making his last call to
911
,
WWE
was already deciding to cancel the live wrestling show in Corpus Christi, Texas, and turn that night's edition of
Raw
, the Monday night wrestling show on the
USA
cable network, into a spontaneously produced three-hour memorial tribute to Chris Benoit. Vince McMahon, the company chairman, was explaining all this in a meeting with the wrestlers. By accident or by design, the person who said “I run the security for World Wrestling” was out of the loop — either a well-planted stooge, as clueless as Inspector Clouseau, or playing dumb
^[7]
.

* * *

Around
3
p.m., Lieutenant Pope and Detective Harper reached the crime scene, directing the activities of a stream of nineteen additional personnel from several agencies who fanned out across the house over the course of the afternoon and evening. At
3
:
30
a deputy coroner, Bee Huddleston, arrived and made that office's first inspection of the bodies. (In the way of many smaller governments, especially in the American South, Huddleston was also a director of a local funeral home, Carl J. Mowell & Son, whose owner also doubled as the elected county coroner.) Animal control took custody of Carny and Highspot and several kittens cowering in one of the bathrooms.

Detective Bo Turner was put in charge of notifying family. Word of a sensational celebrity crime quickly spread to the public. By
6
p.m. eastern time,
WWE
had announced on its website:

World Wrestling Entertainment was informed today by authorities in Fayette County, Ga., that
WWE
Superstar Chris Benoit, his wife, Nancy, and his son were found dead in their home. Authorities are investigating, but no other details are available at this time.

Instead of its announced programming for tonight on
USA
Network,
WWE
will air a three-hour tribute to Chris Benoit.

Chris was beloved among his fellow Superstars, and was a favorite among WWE fans for his unbelievable athleticism and wrestling ability. He always took great pride in his performance, and always showed respect for the business he loved, for his peers and towards his fans. This is a terrible tragedy and an unbearable loss.

WWE extends its sincere condolences and prayers to the surviving members of the Benoit family and their loved ones in this time of tragedy.

The newswire services picked up the item, and wrestling fan sites disseminated it. Leaks of details and speculation flooded blogs, message boards, and chat rooms. Sheriff's officers would blame some of the leaks of early information from the crime scene on District Attorney Scott Ballard, who was already displaying a penchant for loose remarks to whoever pointed a camera at him or held a reporter's notebook.

Fayette County — a placid collection of mostly tony bedroom communities located in the exurbs south of the Atlanta airport — became a center of the media universe. Dozens of television news crews and print reporters, and scores of fans and curiosity-seekers, some traveling vast distances, descended on the scene. Over the next days, Lieutenant Pope and, especially, District Attorney Ballard were regular talking heads on live reports, as the Benoit family tragedy momentarily eclipsed interminable and redundant cable coverage of the most recent misadventures of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton.

* * *

Every year in the United States there are scores of domestic homicides — multiple murders of children and the co-heads of households. According to the U.S. Department of Justice,
329
males and
1
,
181
females were victims of “intimate” homicides in
2005
, the most recent year of comprehensive posted statistics by murder category. In the vast majority of multiple-person family homicides, the perpetrator turns out to be the husband-father. A distraught mother is more likely than a father to kill one or more children, but only rarely does the woman murder her spouse as well.

After the most perfunctory confirmation that no one had broken into the Benoit home, no theory for the three deaths other than double murder-suicide by Chris would ever get past first base — for good reason.

Regardless of the circumstances, multiple murder shocks. Doubly disconcerting is the idea that family, the ultimate haven in a heartless world, could also be the logical platform of the ultimate heinous act. This reaction to crime news is an understandable human one, and it applies to families thought to be happy and not; to those known to have domestic violence histories and not; to stories unleashing the homicidal pathology of men from all walks of life, all levels of substance abuse or abstinence, all outward signs of a ticking time bomb or of a heretofore calm exterior.

When the perpetrator is a celebrity, information gets processed through yet another distorting lens. We, the public masses, have acquired a false sense that we share even a glimmer of genuine intimacy with what turns out to be the manufactured image of a real person. We don't readily surrender that illusion.

Here the person was Chris Benoit, the Rabid Wolverine, the Canadian Crippler, the erstwhile masked Pegasus Kid; the embodiment both of fans' thrills and of their denial of the hard truths that enabled those thrills. Fans tend to think in the broad categories of old-time melodramas, populated with heroes and villains — or, as they're known in wrestling, “babyfaces” and “heels.” But when Benoit snapped, it was something bigger than a wrestling story line; it was for real, and its awful dimensions made it something akin to wrestling's perfect storm. Occupation-related drug addiction, mental impairment, and lifestyle instability brought into high relief whatever independent personal and marital stressors already existed, and whatever predisposition Benoit might already have carried for resolving in the worst way his inner turmoil.

In the perfect storm, Benoit was the perfect vessel. He linked wrestling's past with wrestling's future, its small-time regional roots with its corporate global reach. Trading in the possibility of a developed private life, he pursued a distinguished public career, but one that in the end was fatally tarnished.

CHAPTER 2

STAR-CROSSED WRESTLING LOVERS,
Chris Benoit and Nancy Toffoloni were born on the same day, May
21
— he in
1967
, she three years earlier.
^[1]
He was the wrestler's wrestler, the living, breathing descendent of the style of Tom Billington, the legendary “Dynamite Kid.” She was a breakthrough figure in the sexualization of wrestling's femme fatales, so prototypical in portraying the charms and treacheries of a woman that her last character was known — with an efficiency as stunning as her physical beauty — simply as “Woman.”

Born in Montreal, Chris moved with his family to Edmonton at a young age. It is no exaggeration to note that he never knew any life outside wrestling. Captivated by the televised shows of Stampede Wrestling, Stu Hart's Western Canada territory, Benoit began turning up at Stampede shows as early as age eleven, volunteering to set up and tear down the folding chairs for ringside seating at Edmonton's Kinsmen Field House.

In
1980
, at thirteen, Chris engineered a backstage meeting with the Dynamite Kid, his favorite wrestler. The British Kid, then in his early twenties, was already the lead bad guy for Stampede and an industry revolutionary. In Japan with Satoru Sayama, “Tiger Mask,” Tom Billington broke new ground in the working of matches. His bouts were built around highspots and lightning-quick changes of advantage. So spectacular were the Kid's athletic precision, timing, and psychology that they obliterated conventional notions of lifting the crowd's emotions slowly up and down; the Kid kept everyone in a bell-to-bell frenzy. With his cousin Davey Boy Smith, he would graduate from Stampede to a lucrative run in the World Wrestling Federation (
WWF
, later
WWE
) as the British Bulldogs tag team.

In order to get there, Billington had to take thousands of bumps in rings before smaller audiences, and he lived on the painkillers and alcohol that got him through the physical and mental ordeal. He also gassed himself to the gills on steroids, because if a small man could find a small opening in the big time, it was still just a small opening, and you still needed to meet a minimum size threshold. In
1986
he had spinal surgery. The next year he had the first of two near-fatal seizures. By
1996
, at thirty-seven, he was through for good, though he had been a shell of the classic Dynamite Kid for many years, messed up by injuries and by a menu of drugs that included both
LSD
and gammahydroxybutyrate or
GBH
, popularly known as the “date-rape drug.” Divorced from wrestling great Bret Hart's sister-in-law, and from a second wife, Billington returned to England to live alone, in a wheelchair, and on the dole.

In
1980
, all thirteen-year-old Chris Benoit knew was that he wanted to be exactly like the Dynamite Kid. Chris begged his family to get him weight-training equipment, and his father complied. Scrawny but determined, he lifted enough and took enough steroids to pump himself over the
200
-pound mark (he would grow to a little over five-eight, quite short for a star wrestler, and weigh around
220
, sometimes more, at the peak of his career).

When he was eighteen, Chris knocked on Stu Hart's door in Calgary and asked for a tryout with Stampede. Stu did what he first did with all wannabes: he took Chris down to the Hart house basement gym, known as the Dungeon, where the upstart was stretched and “hooked” in numerous vein-bursting, impossible-to-break legitimate wrestling holds. It was certifiable torture. Benoit passed the test by not complaining that day and by returning for more the next day, and he was put into the rotation for full training as a pro wrestler. He learned how to distribute his body to cushion those jarring bumps to the extent possible. He learned how to “sell” an opponent's moves, how to carry himself, how to play off his opponent. These were in weekend sessions; at that time, Chris worked for his dad's business in Edmonton during the week and made the nearly
200
-mile commute to Calgary by bus every Friday, returning home Sunday evening.

Later in '
85
, Stampede sent Benoit out on tour in wrestling's exalted backwater, the often frozen tundra of the Western Canadian prairie. Every week the boys drove from Calgary to Saskatoon, Regina, Red Deer, and Edmonton, in a four-wheel-drive van prone to breaking down in the middle of nowhere. And Chris loved it, and the fans loved him. They said he was the spitting image of the Dynamite Kid — the same dives without regard for his own neck, even the same crisply executed snap suplexes.

In
1987
, Benoit moved to Japan to live for a year in the dojo, or training facility, of one of the two top promotions there, New Japan Pro Wrestling. The punishment could hardly exceed what he had already experienced in the Dungeon. But dojos also boasted strict pecking orders and hazing rituals, and for a foreign peon, the psychological humiliations were even worse. Chris did the dirtiest housekeeping chores and ran the most degrading errands for the veterans, all while picking up more tricks of the trade, Japanese style. Eventually New Japan booked him as the masked Pegasus Kid, and he was formidable enough in that role to capture championships and become a two-time winner of the Super J Cup, a prestigious tournament dedicated to the junior heavyweight division.

Benoit also wrestled in Mexico and Europe. Working in the German “catch” league, he met his first wife, Martina, with whom he would have a son and a daughter in Edmonton before divorcing. In Japan, where the master German wrestler Karl Gotch was a major influence, Chris already had perfected, and made into one of his patented moves, the German suplex, in which his opponent was whiplashed up and over Benoit's body and onto his own neck.

They called Benoit “The Rabid Wolverine.” While at the Philadelphia-based Extreme Championship Wrestling in
1994
, Benoit cemented a second nickname: “The Canadian Crippler.” This came after he accidentally broke the neck of another wrestler, Sabu, when they miscommunicated and botched a move. Promoters rarely miss an opportunity to exploit even unintended doses of reality, and
ECW
's Paul Heyman was no exception. Under Heyman's tutelage,
ECW
generally upped the ante on violence and risk. Marketing largely to young kids in the early Hulk Hogan years,
WWF
had taken on a comparatively patterned and safe style. But the promotional war with World Championship Wrestling (
WCW
), Ted Turner's Atlanta promotion, along with
ECW
's way-out-there rendition of the art of the work, pushed
WWF
to enhance its athleticism and cater more to a demanding new base of “hardcore” fans. Though more often playing a babyface than a heel, Benoit embraced the elevation of his persona to that of a ruthless dispenser of spinal injuries. His submission finishing hold was called the Crippler Crossface.

Chris, who had wrestled briefly for
WCW
in
1993
, returned permanently, with a nice guaranteed contract, in
1995
. At twenty-eight, in his athletic prime, he finally had a foothold in the North American wrestling mainstream.

* * *

Like Chris, Nancy Toffoloni had started in wrestling as a fan, hooked up with a regional troupe in the territorial days, and risen to a steady position with one of the two major companies left standing in the cable
TV
era.

Nancy graduated from high school in DeLand, Florida, near Daytona Beach. She got a job selling programs at the Orlando shows of Championship Wrestling, a promotion based in Tampa, and owned and operated by former wrestler Eddie Graham. The Graham office, which controlled all of Florida, was one of the most successful of what at one time were more than thirty thriving full-time regional promotions throughout the United States. Graham had a tight relationship with the largest line of independent pulp wrestling magazines published in New York. A photographer for the magazines discovered Nancy and used her first as a bikini model and then in a series of pictorials, popular at the time, that were billed as “apartment house wrestling.” These were soft-core porn depictions, catering to the fantasies of young men and boys, of attractive women groping each other in street clothes, which were often shed in stages in the midst of matches said to be privately staged for an exclusive clientele. They weren't wrestling bouts at all, of course, just cheesy still photo shoots. Apartment house wrestling stories sold well on newsstands and were credited with extending the heyday of the by-then-struggling old-school wrestling mags.

Playing the apartment house girl named Para, Nancy met wrestler Kevin Sullivan at one of the sessions. Nearly fifteen years older, the stumpy Bostonian was taken by her youthful curves and her sultry dark features, which included prominent cheekbones and eyes that narrowed menacingly on cue. In
1984
, at age twenty, she began touring with Sullivan on the Florida wrestling circuit as his valet. “Fallen Angel” was also mixed up in the
TV
character Sullivan created for himself, the “Prince of Darkness,” some sort of satanic cult guru, in a story line considered innovative for its time. Nancy had married Jim Daus, a boyfriend from DeLand, but she soon divorced him and married Sullivan.

With the exception of a few gimmick matches, Nancy didn't wrestle. Yet as one of the most “over” of the '
80
s generation of valets or managers, she helped pivot the participation of females in pro wrestling away from their burlesque-like and largely unglamorous roots. In the golden age, most were trained in the tired formulas of promoter Billy Wolfe and, later, long-time champion Lillian Ellison (“The Fabulous Moolah”); they wore one-piece suits and mixed a few moves of mat grappling with mild elements of catfights and gender-based sight gags. (In Moolah's favorite heel spot, she hid a “foreign object” in her brassiere and was never busted because the referee “couldn't” inspect there.) Following Nancy Sullivan and her contemporaries were today's fitness-queen vixens, the
WWE
divas, who mostly drive website traffic and push merchandise, as well as tangle on the undercards of live shows.

Championship Wrestling from Florida folded during the promotional war fueled by Vince McMahon's national expansion of the
WWF
. Kevin and Nancy, however, landed on their feet with the cast of
WCW
. Sullivan became influential on the
WCW
booking committee, and Nancy stayed on the air as Woman, a manager with assorted protégés and story lines. With one significant break for a run by the Sullivans together, and then separately, in Extreme Championship Wrestling, that was where things stood when Chris Benoit got his own permanent
WCW
gig.

What happened next was a milestone moment in wrestling's seemingly boundless capacity for life imitating art. Kevin and Nancy's marriage, tumultuous all along, was on its last legs. Meanwhile, Sullivan, wearing the hat of booker, noticed that Benoit, a brilliant but colorless performer, could use an “angle” that gave him more “heat” and drawing power. And maybe Chris and Nancy also had eyes for each other, really and truly and almost instantly. Only their hairdressers knew.

Whatever the bottom line in reality, Chris and Nancy were thrown together in
TV
skits in which they messed around behind Kevin's back, and sometimes right in front of him. This kindled a wrestling feud between Benoit and Sullivan, culminating in a match that Chris won with the stipulation that Kevin then had to “retire.” (In fact, Sullivan was plotting his retreat from the ring to concentrate full-time on
WCW
management.) Nancy soon formally left Kevin and moved in with Chris. The inside joke in the industry was that Sullivan was the booker who had scripted his own divorce.

Further complicating the picture was
WCW
's subsequent puzzling refusal to push Benoit harder as a main-event attraction. That may have been personal retribution on Sullivan's part, or it may simply have been yet another reflection of the company's wall-to-wall mismanagement. By this time, several other smaller wrestlers were in the same boat, including Benoit's pals Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko, who were also undersized but talented; they called themselves the “Three Amigos.” All were wooed by
WWF
and jumped. Benoit's case for release from his high-paying but frustrating
WCW
contract was strengthened when the Turner human resources department learned that Mike Graham, one of Sullivan's assistants, had threatened to slit Chris's throat. (Graham was the son of Nancy's Florida boss, Eddie Graham, who committed suicide in
1985
.) Chris took a pay cut to leave Georgia for Connecticut, but he was happy to abandon, after only a single day, the
WCW
championship that was belatedly bestowed on him. Long-term, this proved an excellent career move.

Weeks after debuting with
WWF
early in
2000
, Chris was given a few days off to join Nancy in Georgia as she gave birth to their son, Daniel Christopher Benoit, on February
25
. Chris and Nancy married nine months later.

* * *

In
2003
, Chris's wrestling home, which had changed its name to
WWE
, embarked on a public education program to tame a phenomenon the media were labeling “backyard wrestling,” in which anecdotes emerged of serious injury and even death. In the
1950
s, several kids were reported to have jumped from upper-story windows trying to emulate actor George Reeves in the
TV
series
Superman
, which led the show's producers to insert into scripts disclaimers about how no mortal should ever attempt the feats Superman performed. Similarly,
WWE
bowed to pressure in its “Don't try this” warnings to young viewers at home. The company cooperated with the Canada Safety Council in a campaign that included an appearance by Benoit on
Canada AM
. The host, Ravi Bachwal, showed a video clip of Benoit executing the Crippler Crossface and asked him to explain it.