CHAPTER 7

Chavo Guerrero, Scott Armstrong, the Text Messages, and the Two Timelines

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].”

At 6:13 the WWE person “called Benoit to reconfirm the travel plans with no answer from Benoit. The representative from Talent Relations left a voice message to take the flight and rest up.”

WWE’s vice president of talent relations was John Laurinaitis, a retired wrestler under the name “Johnny Ace” and the brother of a more famous retired wrestler, Joe Laurinaitis (“Road Warrior Animal”). The phone logs confirm calls to Benoit’s cell phone from the WWE office in Stamford, Connecticut, on Saturday. (There would be additional calls from the WWE office — including several from John Laurinaitis’s direct line — the next day.)

The final version of the WWE timeline on the corporate website includes two bullet points on Benoit’s Atlanta-to-Houston travel plans. They convey a somewhat different resolution on Saturday night:

The distinction between a later Saturday evening flight and a Sunday morning flight is trivial in the sense that Benoit was not expected to make it to the Beaumont show with either flight. There was also a twilight zone characteristic of the two timelines, whereby both were cited in some measure while being referred to as “the” timeline. For example, on Wednesday, June 27, Forbes.com would report that “the timeline” from WWE “states that on the afternoon of Saturday, June 23, Benoit, who was supposed to appear at a WWE event in Texas, contacted WWE to inform them that his wife and son were ill with food poisoning and he wouldn’t make it. WWE rebooked his flight for Sunday morning.” This combines elements of the first timeline (which mentions food poisoning but not a Sunday flight) with the second timeline (which mentions a Sunday flight and Nancy and Daniel being ill, but not food poisoning).

District Attorney Ballard also would contribute to the confusion between, and the fusing of, the two timelines. In his press conference at the crime scene on Tuesday, Ballard referred to “two” text messages from Chris to other wrestlers and talked about them in the context of Chris explaining that his family was sick. That was indeed the cover story Benoit put out in his Saturday phone conversations; however, it was not the content of his Sunday text messages.

The collective inconsistencies exceed the threshold of triviality. In particular, as we will see, they affect how Scott Armstrong’s actions on Sunday morning are evaluated[2].

The sheriff’s report confirms the Saturday flight account. When Benoit “overslept” on Saturday morning — we now know he was actually prowling about a mansion containing one, or likely two, dead bodies — he missed his reservation on Delta Airlines Flight 1048 from Atlanta at 11:15 a.m. eastern time. (That ticket was issued out of Stamford, having been ordered through the WWE travel office.) He changed to a Delta flight departing at 5:27 p.m., but he missed that one, too, in the course of talking about his family emergency with Guerrero, Armstrong, and WWE Talent Relations; this aligns with Armstrong’s reference, in the first timeline, to a flight arriving in Houston at 6:30 central time. Benoit’s phone records and Delta Airlines’ reservation records agree that he then made calls to Delta Member Services, and according to Delta he booked himself onto Flight 4801 departing at 9:27 p.m.

There is no record of a Sunday morning flight.

WWE “house show” procedures call for the road agent to send the office a written rundown of how things went. In his report to the office on the Saturday night show in Beaumont, agent Dave “Fit” Finlay wrote: “We drove through a lot of storms. . . . It was 90-odd degrees, and all of a sudden the big storms hit. But nonetheless, we all made it, apart from Chris Benoit, who I guess had a little bit of family problems. So we reshuffled the card around a little bit.” Benoit’s scheduled opponent, Edge, grabbed the house microphone — in wrestling parlance, he “cut a promo” — and complained “that Chris Benoit was not here, and that he did not have an opponent, in addition to saying that no one is worthy of stepping into the ring with him.” The entrance music for Ric Flair interrupted Edge. Surprise! Flair strutted down the aisle and became Edge’s challenger in a match ending with a “schmazz” (an out-of-control brawl with outside interference), as Edge “stole” the win.

Fit Finlay concluded: “Just some smoke and mirrors to harden things up, and cover a heel finish on the end of a match that really wasn’t supposed to happen.”[3]

* * *

Early Sunday morning Benoit transmitted his infamous farewell text messages to Guerrero and Armstrong. Both of the WWE timelines and the sheriff’s records are all in agreement about their timing and content:

4:53 a.m. eastern time in Georgia (3:53 a.m. central time in Texas) (Though not so identified in the timelines, this was obviously sent to both Guerrero and Armstrong. Subsequent messages on this list will be noted by eastern time only.)

From Chris’s cell phone: “Chavo, Scott. My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane, Fayetteville, Georgia. 30215”

4:53 a.m. (to both Guerrero and Armstrong)

From Nancy’s cell phone: “The dogs are in the enclosed pool area. Garage side door is open”

4:54 a.m. (to both Guerrero and Armstrong)

From Nancy’s cell phone: “Chavo, Scott. My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane. Fayetteville Georgia. 30215”

4:55 a.m. (to both Guerrero and Armstrong)

From Nancy’s cell phone: “Chavo, Scott. My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane. Fayetteville, Georgia. 30215”

4:58 a.m. (to Armstrong)

From Nancy’s cell phone: “Chavo, Scott. My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane. Fayetteville, Georgia. 30215”

Yet according to WWE, Guerrero and Armstrong didn’t make these messages known to company executives until 12:30 p.m. the next day. To put it charitably, the explanations for this thirty-hour gap are kaleidoscopic.

On July 18, 2007, Guerrero would tell Greta Van Susteren of Fox News that he didn’t understand the messages and initially dismissed them as old or insignificant. Here is the relevant portion of the transcript:

VAN SUSTEREN: So he obviously didn’t call you later that night [Saturday] to say, “I’ve arrived in Houston.”

GUERRERO: He never arrived, right. Right.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right . . .

GUERRERO: He never arrived. I did get text messages from him, though, in the morning, early in the morning, about . . .

VAN SUSTEREN: Now, what time — let me ask you — I was just going to say, was the first — the time of the text message you received from him?

GUERRERO: If I remember correctly, it was 3:53 a.m. Houston time, which is 4:53 Atlanta time.

VAN SUSTEREN: And it said what?

GUERRERO: And that — yes, that text message said — it just had his address. He lived in — he’d just moved to this new house he had built because the last house that he had was kind of on a public — was on a public street, a public area, and he just couldn’t go outside anymore. He was afraid for Daniel to be outside and playing because so many, you know, fans or people from the airport would just come and camp out in front of his house. So he couldn’t really — he couldn’t really have a public life anymore. So he went ahead and bought this land in suburban Atlanta, built the house out there and had a PO box, and no one really even knew his address. So those texts were — his — his — they were telling me what his physical address were. But nothing out of the ordinary, just, my physical address is this, and that’s it. And he texted me again . . .

VAN SUSTEREN: Did he think that was peculiar, I mean, that — I mean, his address, was that odd?[4]

GUERRERO: It was — you know, sometimes when you send a text and the person doesn’t get that text until two days later, I kind of — it was so early in the morning, I was sleeping. I looked at my text, and I’m going — I didn’t know why he was sending that to me, so I thought maybe he sent it to me a day before or two days before or whatever, and I’m just getting it now. And then I got another text a couple minutes later saying, “The dogs are in the enclosed pool area and the garage door’s open.” I’m going — I didn’t know if he was thinking that he wanted us to pick him up. But we were in Houston. I didn’t really know what was going on. And so I thought again maybe it was a — just a text that was sent a couple — you know, a couple days ago. So I went back to sleep and . . .

VAN SUSTEREN: I was going to say, was that the last text message you received from him?

GUERRERO: No, no. I received another one same — that was the same as the first one, My physical address is this (INAUDIBLE) this, whatever it was. That’s — you know, it was the last text I got from him. And it was just — it was just so random. There wasn’t a cry for help. There wasn’t a, you know, “I love you.” There was nothing in there. It was just kind of very, very random. So I didn’t really think anything of it. I went back to sleep. And then in the morning, I kind of — I called him in the morning to see if everything was OK, but he didn’t answer.

VAN SUSTEREN: And then when did you learn that he was dead?

GUERRERO: Not until the following day. That whole day was on Sunday. And we had a pay-per-view event. He was supposed to be at the pay-per-view event. He had a match. And it was very, very, very unlike him to miss the pay-per-view. He was really — didn’t do that. To miss any match, he just — that never happened. Chris was the ultimate professional. And for him to miss a match was very strange. We were calling him all day and WWE was calling him. We were just trying to get a hold of him. We just never did until the next morning, when I mentioned to some of the WWE office that I got these weird text messages from him. So they sent a car out to his place, and I guess there was — the dogs were running around, so they couldn’t really enter his house. And they said that the dogs were there, so they’re trying to — they were trying to get into the house to find out what’s going on, if anything — at that time, they didn’t know what was wrong. So they had talked to me, and I told them that I think their neighbor, one of their neighbors knew them. So I think that’s how they ended up getting in and finding what happened.

Van Susteren didn’t ask Guerrero why he made no connection between the texts and the strange “I love you” coda of his Saturday phone conversation with Benoit. Guerrero said the message was “just so random . . . [not] a cry for help” because there “wasn’t a, you know, ‘I love you.’” But the point of the “I love you” anecdote was not that collection of words per se, but the very quality that Guerrero targeted in the texts: their “randomness.” So his insistence that the equally “random” texts should have elicited a cavalier response from him is hard to swallow.

Van Susteren also failed to ask Guerrero the key follow-up question: Even if he couldn’t make heads or tails out of Benoit’s text messages when he first received them, why would he have hesitated to share them with his bosses at WWE after Chris failed to turn up for the pay-per-view on Sunday night? By that point Benoit, in a complete break from his history of reliability, was missing not one, but two, nights of work amidst confusion about his whereabouts and the health of family members. Moreover, pay-per-views were special high-revenue events, and Benoit had a spot in a title-change match in this one.

Scott Armstrong’s response to the text messages was even more perplexing. At 9:26 a.m. Sunday, a few hours after Benoit transmitted his final texts, Armstrong texted Benoit: “What time do u land?” Presumably Armstrong was referring to when an Atlanta-to-Houston flight would be touching down. It so happens that Armstrong’s text is the only detail anywhere in the record reinforcing the notion, in the final WWE timeline, of a Sunday morning — rather than a Saturday night — flight.

The innocent implication of Armstrong’s text was the chaos at that point surrounding all things Benoit. The more ominous implication is that he sent the message for the express purpose of corroborating the WWE story, retroactively concocted, that Benoit had been expected on a plane on Sunday morning. The second possibility is buttressed by the fact that Armstrong seemed not to know on what flight Benoit had allegedly been booked. Why would Armstrong drive to the airport cold, without getting the basic flight information from Benoit or from the WWE office?

When I first raised with sheriff’s Detective Harper the contradictions suggested by Armstrong’s Sunday morning text to Benoit, Harper said to me in a phone conversation, “That is very interesting.” Later Harper emailed me, “The biggest point we took from the message is that it was unanswered. That helped with the timeline of when Chris died. There may have been a flight scheduled for Sunday, but that never came up in the homicide investigation. If the WWE scheduled the flight for him then they would be the best source for proof of the flight.”

Still later, Harper maintained that when he had said “That is very interesting,” he was referring only “to the way you were interpreting the text. During our conversation, I felt you were trying to say the text was planned or planted by Scott under some type of direction from the WWE.” Harper did not clarify whether he agreed with the way he thought I was referring to the text[5].

And as with Guerrero, this tidbit from Armstrong, even if honest, doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why neither one of them told WWE about Benoit’s texts when he remained missing in action at call time for the Sunday night pay-per-view.

Months after the media frenzy receded, Guerrero and Armstrong would simply ignore what Guerrero had told Greta Van Susteren about his initial reaction to the texts, and issue another version of why they didn’t take action on Sunday. Benoit’s wrestler friends were now telling colleagues that they had experienced cell phone reception problems in Texas; the messages were not received until Monday. They gave the same account to a television journalist working on the Benoit story. Dave Meltzer also heard this one.

“The Greta Van Susteren response is a very different explanation and makes even less sense because when Chris didn’t arrive for the PPV, why didn’t Chavo tell anyone?” Meltzer said. He added that at the time what Guerrero was saying on Fox News didn’t seem that important, but now it does: “Again, if Chavo did get the text messages, why didn’t he say anything to anyone until Monday?”

The fishiness of Guerrero’s text message story gives fresh meaning to his behavior on Monday night at the Raw tribute. Chavo’s on-camera messages that night were mixed. A five-minute testimonial shows Guerrero in tears. Between sobs, he manages these words[6]:

Chris Benoit was my friend, if not my best friend. He was part of my family, the Guerrero family. To tell you how close he was to my family and me, the night, the morning that I found Eddie, that Eddie died, the first one I called was Chris Benoit. And after telling him it almost broke my heart as much as finding Eddie, because to see a guy as hard as steel and chiseled and just a rock and never show emotion. And when I told him he wailed, he wailed and cried and was sobbing, was uncontrollable. Because Eddie was his best friend.

The gift I was given when Eddie passed away was that I was able to be with him his last day and be the last one he saw. But I was given another gift because last week I spent the night at Chris Benoit’s house. And — Chris never lets — he’s a very private person. He doesn’t let people in. And he let me in. He let me into his home, with his family and his dogs, fed me, put me up, made me feel at home. Then we went on a couple of house shows together, went to TV, went to dinner that next night, and we both missed our flights. I woke up to him banging on my door, “Come on, let’s go, let’s go, let’s make your flight.” He made it, just barely. I missed mine, but I was able to get home. He called to check up on me. I called to check up on him.

And it’s just . . . so hard to go through this again with someone I just respected so much as a person, as a friend, as a wrestler. . . . It was such a privilege and an honor to be in the ring with him. I thank God for the actual matches we were able to have together, because they were some of the best of my career. I was able to learn so much from being in the ring with him. I remember, after we were done working together, I pulled him aside and thanked him, hugged him, told him I loved him, thank you so much for everything he’s given me in the ring, in life. And we always left with a hug and a kiss and “I love you.” That’s something he didn’t give out very willingly, he didn’t give that to people, but we gave that to each other. And the last time I talked to him, the day before he passed, he ended the phone call with “I love you, Chavo.”

I just want to say, Chris, you were my friend, I love you and you’re part of my family. I don’t say that about people, I say that about you. Thank you, God bless you, man. I feel for you. I feel for your family. I just — I’m so sorry. I thank you for the time we spent at WrestleMania, my kids and your kids, and they all played together. . . . The privilege and the trust you had in me, by letting me have your kids, I took them with my kids, and we went to the movies together. I guess that shows me how you thought about me, Chris. I thank you very much for that, for thinking of me that way, because I feel the same about you and I would trust you, with me, with my life, with my kids’ lives, because I know you, Chris, I know your heart, and I know what a great heart you have — had, whatever. Thank you, Chris, and thank you for being my friend. Love you, man.

On the live Raw TV tribute show, however, Guerrero has a different demeanor, more like William Regal’s; Chavo is detached, even shut down. In retrospect, colleagues thought Guerrero looked extraordinarily reserved for someone whose close friend had just died. They figured that he may have suspected something, or just been confused.

* * *

On March 28, 2008, I called both Guerrero and Armstrong’s cell phones. At the number for Guerrero, a male voice answered and, when I asked if he was Chavo Guerrero, replied, “Who are you?” I said, “Irv Muchnick” — whereupon the man said no, that he wasn’t Chavo Guerrero and I had a wrong number. I later called back and got an outgoing message with the same voice. This was the same voice as the live one moments earlier, and it also sounded like the Chavo Guerrero on TV. I left a message, which was not returned.

At the number for Armstrong, a man answered and, before I could even identify myself, said he couldn’t hear me. I called back and he repeated the exercise. I suspect he was feigning a bad connection, as everything sounded fine on my end on both calls. Later I called yet again, got voicemail, identified myself, and left a message, which was not returned.

Some months later a close friend of Armstrong’s told me that he was at the Houston airport on Sunday morning when he texted Benoit “What time do u land?” If true, that would make some difference in the perception of Armstrong’s actions. Specifically, it would go some distance toward suggesting that his Sunday text was not faked to support a phony timeline already under construction (as he could just as easily have transmitted a fake message from the comfort of his hotel room). That said, I do not know why Armstrong could not have told me himself that he went to the airport Sunday. And for the reasons stated, I am not convinced that he did.

Two timelines . . . a flight reservation on either Saturday night (early version) or Sunday morning (final version) . . . Benoit text messages that were either construed slowly (national TV interview) or clogged in the electronic pipeline (later private explanation). . . . Such details, on their face, are matters for resolution by law enforcement. District attorneys and sheriffs do not ordinarily close the files on heinous crimes without offering a coherent account of how and why three corpses lay undetected inside a house in their jurisdiction for more than thirty hours after the perpetrator, who was in the middle of missing important commitments for a high-profile job, sent five text messages to two colleague- friends. Indeed, failure or delay in reporting a crime is, itself, sometimes prosecuted as a crime, known as “misprision of a felony.”

Yet closing the file without making any attempt to resolve these contradictions is precisely what Scott Ballard, the district attorney of the Griffin Judicial Circuit, and Randall Johnson, the sheriff of Fayette County, chose to do in the Benoit case. As will be shown in the next chapter, the authorities also airbrushed phone logs, concealed other text message evidence, retrieved no voicemail messages at all, and released a final report calculated to mislead in several other respects. They played shell games with public records, which cast them, and WWE, in a poor light.

Chris Benoit committed the crime all by himself. On general principle, we might settle for the murky final report on the murder-suicide with the resignation of Sheriff Tate in To Kill a Mockingbird, who says of the mysterious murder of bad guy Bob Ewell, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

But the willful passivity of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office busted the buttons of that principle. To a public whose interest would be served by disclosure, not concealment, the local authorities did their best to stonewall facts about the modus operandi of the wrestling industry: its blurring of fact and fiction; its totalitarian control over talent, with no concern for safety, let alone honor; its resourcefulness at eluding scrutiny and projecting the right combination of imagery and bluster to ensure that business as usual would not be interrupted.

Unless those conditions are squarely faced and corrected, people will continue to die backstage, in numbers that dwarf the mortality rate of rock-and-roll stars, in the debris of ruthless big-money cartoons whose victims are merely replaceable parts without a constituency. Until then, future Chris Benoits are inevitable.

[1]. On my blog, I originally called the earlier version “the Daily News timeline” because it was picked up most prominently on the New York Daily News website. Subsequent research on fan discussion boards, however, established that the timeline originated at http://www.wwe.com/inside/news/detailed benoittimeline before the company deleted it. After expunging the timeline, wwe also disowned it. In response to an email about this on September 25, 2008, Jennifer McIntosh, WWE’s head of publicity, immediately wrote back: “Irv, Thanks for getting in touch with me. Can I get back to you on this tomorrow? I’m traveling today and need to double check my files to make sure I’m sending you the correct info. If you need it today, I’ll ask my co-worker Gary Davis [WWE vice president of corporate communications] to help. Thanks, Jenny.” McIntosh, however, did not get back to me the next day or ever, and she did not return follow-up email and voice messages.

[2]. Would Benoit have been missed at a particular Houston hotel on Sunday morning or afternoon? The chaotic nature of WWE procedures for traveling talent suggests not. WWE wrestlers bear all out-of-pocket expenses and make their own arrangements for the regular tour events, known as “house shows”; some choose to stay in expensive hotels, while others cut corners in cheap motels. For TV tapings and pay-per-views, the WWE office does make more generous and plush arrangements, booking large blocks of rooms, often spread across more than one local hotel, in order to accommodate everyone from the front office, the TV personnel, the support crew, and the wrestlers (including a safe margin of backups to cover no-shows). Taking no chances, the company overbooks rooms in multiple locations, and neither the hotels nor WWE pay much attention to precisely who checks into which rooms where and when. The former are being paid handsomely to accommodate anyone and everyone associated with WWE. And the only thing the latter cares about is that the wrestlers “make their towns” and appear on time at the arenas.

[3]. The complete text of road agent Finlay’s house show report to the WWE office, which I obtained via a company insider, is included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.

[4]. In a raw transcript, it can be difficult to determine exactly what the person is trying to say. Van Susteren here seems to be asking Guerrero what he thought Benoit was thinking. My investigation is more interested in what Guerrero himself was thinking at this point.

[5]. Harper tied his afterthought remark to a false accusation that he had explained his “very interesting” remark in an earlier message, but that I had suppressed that explanation in my blog coverage. In fact, I had never received, and he almost certainly never sent, such an earlier message. For a full discussion of this controversy, see “Notes on Sources” at the end of this book.

[6]. David Bixenspan, then with cagesidewrestling.com and now with sbnation.com, pointed out that I was incorrect in the original edition in saying that Guerrero’s tribute on Raw was different than the one posted at WWE.com. (Above, at page 105 in the print edition, I also referred to the Guerrero tribute interview as having been “on the WWE website.”)