Chris & Nancy (9 page)

CHAPTER 7

HUNDREDS OF PRO WRESTLERS DIED
young in the twenty or so years before the Chris Benoit tragedy. Some, like Brian Pillman and Eddie Guerrero, had heart disease brought on or exacerbated by abuse of steroids and other drugs. Some overdosed more overtly on recreational drugs like cocaine. Some committed suicide. Some suffered liver or kidney malfunction, which — like the forms of cancer sometimes associated with them — stemmed from alcohol and/or high doses of their pharmaceuticals of choice. Others met their ends in car crashes, in which fatigue or impairment played a part, and at least one was killed in a barroom brawl. Most rarely, but occasionally, others died in accidents inside the ring, like Owen Hart.

Prior to June
2007
, however, no wrestler had ever murdered loved ones in a rampage so sensational that it made the cover of
People
magazine, fueled tabloid coverage, and for weeks commanded panel-discussion analysis and commentary on cable news networks. Principally for that reason, it is hard to pass judgment on Chavo Guerrero and Scott Armstrong if they initially weren't sure what to make of Chris Benoit's final text messages on Sunday, June
24
. The Benoit murder-suicide was an event of unprecedented perplexity and ugliness. Guerrero and Armstrong couldn't fight the last war because there hadn't
been
a last war.

The two wrestler friends must have found further disorienting the sense that Benoit seemed poorly cast for the role of someone “going postal.” By wrestling standards he was a straight arrow. He was also private and reserved outside the ring, and even if under stress in his marriage — an element worsened by the travel and image demands of his profession — he gave every indication of loving his wife and their child. Chris especially doted on Daniel.

So the first possibilities to occur to Guerrero and Armstrong naturally wouldn't have been successive garroting, neck-snapping, and hanging. To the extent they realized Chris was in serious trouble, their instinct would have been to protect him and protect their business. Expecting them to comprehend immediately the depth of that trouble may be unfair.

Still, informed speculation as to how and why Guerrero and Armstrong acted as they did cannot let them entirely off the hook. Even if they didn't grasp the picture on Saturday evening, Sunday morning, or Sunday afternoon, the full alarm was surely sounded by the time Benoit no-showed the Houston pay-per-view on Sunday night. At that point, it made no sense for friends and colleagues (or for
WWE
's well-staffed talent relations and security departments, reporting to company executives) to continue to scratch their heads in isolation instead of huddling and taking action. Specifically, it is not credible that Guerrero and Armstrong told no one (not just no “
WWE
officials,” in the words of the company's timeline, however those are defined) about the text messages all day and night Sunday — if, indeed, that is what they maintain. To the public, they would have nothing to say (with one key exception, which we will get to). And law enforcement authorities either didn't ask them to say anything or censored the answers in the report on their investigation.

As for the company's assertion that “
WWE
officials” were unaware of the messages until
12
:
30
p.m. Monday — more than thirty hours after Benoit transmitted them, and an hour and a half after the company's security consultant made the last call to the Benoit home attempting to reach him — the chance is extremely slim that the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. This was sixteen hours after the curtain went up on the
Vengeance
pay-per-view, with a lineup of matches and story lines altered due to Benoit's absence. Confusion falls into place as a global explanation only if
WWE
deployed a chain of communications designed to give “plausible deniability” to Vince McMahon and his top aides.

And for the boss to have been so detached from the details of his wrestling intelligence and corporate decision-making would have been dramatically unlike him: McMahon was as involved an owner as you will find in any industry anywhere. Vince and his daughter Stephanie and son Shane and, even occasionally, wife-
CEO
Linda were themselves cast members of the
WWE
TV
soap opera subplots. In his sixties, Vince still stepped between the ropes for a gimmick match a couple of times a year. In a
2001
Playboy
magazine interview, McMahon discussed his hands-on management style. If someone was needed to help the stagehands pull cable for a camera operator at a
TV
shoot, he said, “I'll pull cable.”

Guerrero and Armstrong's shared private explanation of the thirty-hour gap between the sending of Benoit's red-flag text messages and their acting on them is almost laughable — not only on its face but also because it contradicts that single public utterance on the subject by Guerrero.

Probing the meaning of
WWE
's timelines, with their interchangeable elements, is the subject of this chapter. The full and accurate story remains hazy, and the most responsible outcome is not to jump to a specific, Monday-morning-quarterback conclusion. The missing pieces, however, do concentrate the mind on wrestling's corporate culture of control and calculated ambiguity. Guerrero and Armstrong could have been playing fast and loose with the truth out of mere habit, because that's what wrestling and wrestlers do. Or they could have acted out of discomfort with the sudden attention focused on them in a scenario whose outcome they sincerely, if guiltily, determined they'd had no power to change. They could have believed that time-honored methods of working the marks would make that attention go away. And if that was their goal, they were largely vindicated by the general public's lack of stamina for getting to the bottom of the story.

Or they could have done what they did because they were so advised — or ordered. In the best of times, the wrestling business was never a secure place for talent; today a single company,
WWE
, and a single promoter, McMahon, call pretty much all the shots for just a few dozen top spots.

* * *

The text message angle of the investigation starts with the official and permanently published
WWE
timeline, reproduced below. This timeline was issued as a news release, dated June
26
, and at the time of this book's publication, was still viewable at the corporate website at
http://corporate.wwe.com/news/2007/2007_06_26_2.jsp
.

But in addition, there was an earlier timeline, the text of which is reproduced on the following two pages.

This was first published on the
WWE
entertainment website on Tuesday night, June
26
, but later pulled. Read one way, the two timelines complement each other. Read another way, the earlier and better-substantiated timeline contradicts the later and more circumspect one in subtle and disturbing ways. The latter seems intended to stand as
WWE
's final and authoritative words on the subject. It may have been spurred by Wall Street observers who criticized
WWE
's initial response for saying too much too soon — causing the company to revise, clarify, and come across as unhelpfully defensive and combative
^[1]
.

The earlier and fuller version of the timeline illuminates the thirty-hour gap between text messages sent and bodies recovered. Even more significantly, it jibes with the consensus account — in the phone call logs and interviews of the Fayette County sheriff's report, as well as from other sources — of Benoit's Saturday conversations with Guerrero, Armstrong, and others.

* * *

The most devastating of those interactions was Benoit's dialogue with Chavo Guerrero on Saturday afternoon, as Chris agonized over still being in Georgia even though he was scheduled to wrestle that night at the
WWE
show in Beaumont, Texas.

According to the first version of the timeline, at
3
:
30
p.m., “A co-worker received a voice message from Benoit. The message from Benoit stated he missed his flight and overslept and would be late to the WWE Live Event. The co-worker called Benoit back, Benoit confirmed everything he said in his voice message and sounded tired and groggy. Benoit then stated, ‘I love you.'” (The timeline times are probably all intended to be eastern time, but a possible one-hour discrepancy between eastern and central time would not affect the thrust of this part of the narrative.)

Reflecting on that conversation, the co-worker was so unsettled by what sounded like an over-the-top expression of affection, and by Benoit's overall “tone and demeanor,” that he called Benoit back twelve minutes later, leaving the message, “Just call me.” Benoit returned the call, though he didn't speak to the co-worker. In his message, Benoit managed to allay any urgent concerns by explaining that he was just having “a real stressful day due to Nancy and Daniel being sick with food poisoning,” the co-worker recalled for the timeline.

That co-worker was Chavo Guerrero. In his Monday tribute interview on the
WWE
website, Guerrero would tell an Internet audience that Chris Benoit ended their last conversation by saying, “I love you” (though Guerrero added nothing in that online testimonial about how the line had struck him as odd).

Mike Benoit, Chris's father, told me Guerrero recounted the identical story to him. “Wrestlers conclude conversations by saying ‘love you' or ‘love ya, man' to each other all the time,” Mike said, “but Chavo said he thought the way Chris said it that time was strange and out of context, so strange that Chavo decided to call back. Chavo left a message for Chris: ‘Just let me know that you're
OK
.'”

The sheriff's report had more of the same:

Guerrero advised Chris Benoit left him a message . . . saying he overslept and missed his flight. . . . Guerrero commented that Benoit sounded a little strange or depressed while they spoke [later]. Guerrero advised that after hanging up he called Benoit right back and asked him if he was ok. . . . Benoit stated he was just upset and tired due to Nancy and Daniel being sick with food poisoning.

At
4
:
30
p.m. Saturday, according to the early version of the timeline, another co-worker, “who consistently travels with Benoit, called Benoit from outside Houston airport and Benoit answered. Benoit told the co-worker that Nancy was throwing up blood and that Daniel was also throwing up. Benoit thought they had food poisoning. Benoit stated he changed his flight and he would be arriving into Houston at
6
:
30
p.m.” Benoit told the colleague to drive on to the Beaumont event alone.

That second co-worker was Scott Armstrong, who told sheriff's investigators that he and Benoit “spoke about rental car and hotel room arrangements” and “Chris told him that Nancy and Daniel were sick and he may be late for the next show, but he would be there.”

* * *

Benoit's travel plan, for either Saturday evening or Sunday morning, is a central mystery. This is where the earlier
WWE
.com timeline and the final corporate timeline stop overlapping and start clashing, suggesting why the company might have decided it was prudent to become less specific, if not downright misleading. Further, the known existing evidence fully supports the earlier version while casting deep shadows over the final one.

At
5
:
35
, according to the first timeline, “Benoit called WWE Talent Relations stating that his son was throwing up and that he and Nancy were in the hospital with their son, and that Benoit would be taking a later flight into Houston, landing late, but would make the
WWE
live event in Beaumont.” Thirty-five minutes later, “A representative of Talent Relations called Benoit” and asked “what time Benoit was getting into Beaumont.” (After flying into Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport, he would need to rent a car and drive more than
100
miles in order to make the Beaumont show.) Benoit said he would depart from Atlanta at
9
:
20
eastern time and land in Houston more than an hour later, at
9
:
24
central time. “The representative from Talent Relations advised Benoit that it would be too late to make the
WWE
live event in Beaumont. Benoit apologized, citing a family emergency. The representative from Talent Relations suggested to Benoit that instead of going to the
WWE
live event in Beaumont, Benoit should take the flight to Houston, rest up and be ready for the Vengeance pay-per-view event [in Houston on Sunday night].”