CHAPTER 8
FAYETTE COUNTY HAD A CRIME PROBLEM, all right: stolen golf carts. In Fayette, recently built residential communities (such as Highgrove, near the Whitewater Creek Country Club, minutes from where the Benoits took residence in 2006), as well as entire charter municipalities (such as Peachtree City, where the Benoits had spent the previous nine years), were meticulously zoned and pre-planned down to the last architectural, landscape, and lifestyle detail. The goals were comfort and stability. The unifying feature of most subdivisions — though the quaint suburban term “subdivision” itself seemed somehow beneath them — was a network of golf-cart paths, which proved equally congenial to pedestrians, baby strollers, and bicycles. The problem, from time to time, was that golf carts disappeared in clusters of either hard-core thefts or juvenile pranks. With each outbreak, the town pooh-bahs and the local newspaper, the Citizen, would brood over what to do about it.
Yes, there were also some gang issues in the schools, and Fayette County got its share of the heavy methamphetamine traffic throughout the region. But the bottom line was that Fayette encountered very little violent crime: around three and a half incidents annually per 1,000 people, in a total population of just over 100,000 — a rate half that of the state of Georgia as a whole. The Benoit murder-suicide was one of only two homicide incidents in the county in 2007.
This sylvan setting would have an impact on how the Benoit case was investigated. In exurbs far removed from mean streets, the worst fatalities in wrestling history, under the microscope of worldwide 24/7 media, taxed the capacity of public resources to administer them thoroughly and professionally.
Scott Ballard, who boasted multigenerational county roots, led the local law enforcement hierarchy. In 2004 Ballard was elected district attorney of the four-county Griffin Judicial Circuit. Beefy-faced, ruddy-complexioned, with a Senator Foghorn Leghorn white cowlick and a drawl as soothing as bourbon-and-branch-water, “Scooter,” as he was known, continued to teach at his church Sunday school even as he hunted down the area’s underwhelming criminal element Monday through Friday. Ballard mastered both the piety and the folksy political chops necessary to thrive in this enclave of dead-red Republicanism. When he ran for re-election in 2008, his opponent attempted to make an issue out of the fact that Ballard had agreed to testify as a character witness for a convicted child molester in a probation revocation hearing. Ballard won in a landslide anyway.
When the Benoit spotlight shone on Fayette County, Ballard was front and center, and he appeared intoxicated by it all. WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt, who said he never spoke to the district attorney, accused Ballard of making “numerous public statements which were inappropriate and ultimately belied by the actual forensic evidence and failed to see to it that certain tests were done which might have supplied a motive and/or more complete picture of the circumstances within the Benoit family. Indeed, the disdain for Mr. Ballard is evident to anybody who speaks to the actual investigators.”[1]
From the start, consciously or otherwise, Ballard stoked the frenzy, substituting attention-grabbing sound bites for measured words. A favorite trope was to label something “bizarre,” a term made to order for splashy play. “The details, when they come out, are going to prove a little bizarre,” he teased the media on the first day.
Ballard also said, “In a community like this it’s bizarre to have a murder-suicide, especially involving the death of a seven-year-old. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to wrap our minds around this.”
And: “Bizarre. That’s the only way I can describe this.”
And: “There was a Bible placed beside each of the bodies, and I thought that was somewhat bizarre.”
And: “What’s most bizarre to me is the timing and the circumstances. Not just that a man could kill his own seven-year-old son but that he could have stayed in the same house with the bodies.”
Even as Ballard’s serial proclamations of bizarreness fed the media beast, they contributed to slaking the thirst for concrete answers. Who cares about fissures in the back story — about multiple timelines and day-plus gaps after text messages — when an obvious double murder-suicide can be written off as sui generis weird? As Forrest Gump might have put it, in Fayette County law enforcement, bizarre was as bizarre did.
* * *
Ballard’s most reckless statement threw fat into the fire of what became either a fabricated forty-eight-hour distraction or a legitimate, though not exactly central, puzzle piece. That was the report that Daniel Benoit had a genetic disorder, Fragile X syndrome, which in turn gave rise to the theory — heavily promoted by WWE before being abruptly abandoned — that parental stress over Daniel’s care drove Chris Benoit over the edge.
The Fragile X story established a pattern of the Benoit investigation and coverage: first, it surfaced in an exaggerated and irresponsible form; then, it was prematurely buried. Reviewing how the report found daylight makes it hard not to infer that it contained a germ of truth. Despite evidence that WWE — eager for anything that would turn the focus away from steroids — ran too hard and too fast with the Fragile X theory, the story itself appears to have been spontaneous, not planted.
Ballard got the ball rolling when he told the media that Daniel’s arm showed needle marks from injections of growth hormone by his parents. The DA said he was told that Chris and Nancy were concerned about their son’s size. “The boy was small, even dwarfed,” Ballard said[2].
Nearly 3,000 miles to the northwest, a woman named Pamela Winthrope heard the news of the deaths in Georgia on a car radio tuned to Vancouver’s News1130. The Benoit name rang a bell. Winthrope was an activist with the British Columbia chapter of the Fragile X Research Foundation of Canada, an organization raising funds and awareness for a syndrome that has been identified as the most common cause of inherited mental impairment and the most common known cause of autism. (Fragile X has a host of physical-development symptoms, as well, and differs widely among victims generally and between boys and girls especially.) Winthrope’s son Jamie had Fragile X, and she was widowed. Before her husband died, she recalled his telling her that he had learned through the Fragile X community that the Benoits were also part of it, whereupon he contacted Chris Benoit about becoming a Canadian celebrity spokesman for the cause. Chris declined.
“I called the station to ask for more information,” Pam Winthrope told me. “The person I spoke to [reporter Katharine Kitts] did not identify herself, nor did she tell me she was interviewing or recording. When I explained why I had called, she asked many questions about Fragile X. I, of course, am always happy to oblige.”
Late the next day, Tuesday, June 26, Winthrope’s daughter called to tell her that she was being quoted on the air by name, and it was all over TV and the Internet. In the on-air interview, which Winthrope said she did not authorize, she recalled her husband talking to Benoit “because I was trying to set up a support group in B.C. and in Canada, we only have a couple of them. My husband was struggling when we got diagnosed with our son, and Chris was struggling with his. They talked for a few minutes and then he said he didn’t want to be a public face for Fragile X, he just wanted to keep it really, really quiet.”
Winthrope complained to News1130 management that she had been ambushed. The station placated her with a second, extended interview focusing on Fragile X awareness[3]. Meanwhile, in the U.S., National Fragile X Foundation executive director Robert Miller issued an educational news release and found himself fielding questions from People magazine, TV’s Inside Edition, and others; the foundation website had 30,000 visitors in three days, much more than the typical traffic of a busy month.
According to Winthrope, she never spoke with anyone from World Wrestling Entertainment. There is no reason to think she made up the story about Benoit and her late husband out of whole cloth. She was not a WWE stooge.
But once Winthrope’s story got into the public domain, company spinmeisters did not pause to check out meticulously the state of Daniel’s physical and mental health and its relevance to the double murder-suicide. At most, CEO Linda McMahon or her surrogates seem to have questioned some of Chris’s friends, such as fellow wrestler Chris Jericho, who was in the midst of negotiating his return to WWE after a period of inactivity. Jericho had seen the boy in social situations and, perhaps influenced by the power of retrospective impression, agreed that something must have been “off.”
Jericho and others close to Chris Benoit also found authentic the idea that Pam Winthrope’s husband would have been rebuffed in an effort to get Chris to go public about his own family’s bout with a genetic disorder; that would be consistent with everything everyone knew about a man who looked as uncomfortable in his own skin outside the ring as he looked comfortable in it in the ring. In some Fragile X families, the shame and frustration of parents are said to be so profound that not even close relatives are told. If ever anyone fit such a profile, Benoit did.
And that, really, was all the confirmation WWE needed before putting its vast propaganda apparatus in motion. Thus, on the Wednesday, June 27, edition of Good Morning America, ABC’s Robin Roberts introduced Linda McMahon by noting that “there are new clues surfacing that could take the case in a whole new direction — clues about a Benoit family secret: their seven-year-old son’s rare genetic disorder, known as Fragile X . . . a point of tension between Benoit and his wife, apparently.”
McMahon agreed. “The focus,” she said, “is turning more to the tension that must have been happening between the husband and wife over the management, the schooling, and the rearing of this child who had the mental retardation.”
In print media interviews, lawyer McDevitt reinforced the new message du jour. McDevitt said the couple’s friends told WWE that Chris and Nancy had a hard time with Daniel’s school placement. “I know that they had difficulty figuring out the solution and it was a cause of tension between the two of them.” McDevitt said the Benoits “were constantly struggling with the difficulties of raising a child who, from all indications, may well have had Fragile X syndrome.” He added, “It’s very difficult to raise a child this way. There’s a lot of guilt. Chris was traveling on the road, she was trying to deal with the problems on her own. . . . When they moved into this new area and the child had to be placed in a new district, I gathered the tension became somewhat exacerbated.” McDevitt said that Daniel’s special needs were part of a conversation Nancy had with Dr. Astin the previous Thursday, and that “we have reason to believe Chris talked about being depressed . . . with the situation.”
By Tuesday, July 2, however, the tune was changing. After the attorney for the Toffoloni family, Richard Decker, insisted to ESPN that there was no record of Daniel having Fragile X, and that Daniel’s grandparents had spent a lot of time with him and never noticed anything untoward, the DA backed off. Ballard issued this statement: “A source having access to Daniel’s medical reports reviewed those reports. They don’t mention any preexisting mental or physical impairment. Reports from Daniel’s educators likewise contradict the claim Daniel was physically undersized. The educators report that Daniel graduated.”
WWE took the cue. Spokesman Gary Davis said that while McDevitt had been “confident” in the accuracy of his earlier statements, “I think we have to go with what the district attorney has said as being the best up-to-date information available right now.” A lot of people, Davis said, “got caught up in the idea that Daniel had Fragile X syndrome. We were just as caught up as everyone else.”
McDevitt himself was more grudging; he either was playing bad cop to Davis’s good cop, or as a long-time trusted adviser to the McMahons, he had earned the independence to speak his own mind. McDevitt told People he had “reason to believe, and we believe the evidence will show, the situation with Daniel was a source of tension in the relationship between Chris and Nancy.” And he continued to suggest that Chris’s visit to Dr. Astin’s Carrollton office on Friday was driven by a phone conversation the previous day in which Nancy discussed “the needs of the child and how they would be met,” and that Chris talked in person with the physician about “the child and the family situation he was in.”
Ballard, for his part, never bothered to resolve the contradiction between his original remarks and his reverse-field conclusion that Fragile X was a non-issue. The best guess is that the Toffolonis’ unhappiness over the besmirching of Daniel’s memory combined with Ballard’s own belated perception that his indiscretion had served no positive purpose, since marital stress over a child’s medical issues could never be posited as more than a minor part of this crime’s equation.
Though Ballard did not grant an interview for this book, he did respond, in an email, to my questions to him about two anonymous posts at the time on the online discussion board of the Citizen newspaper. One of the posts said Ballard himself had a child with a challenge. Ballard confirmed, “My son, Paul, has autism.” Another Citizen post asserted that, before Ballard was elected DA, he had represented some Atlanta-area wrestlers in his private law practice, though Benoit was not one of them. Ballard told me he handled some legal matters for Paul Orndorff and for Benoit’s close friend Mike “Johnny Grunge” Durham. Neither was with WWE at the time. (Orndorff had been a WWF main event star in the ’80s. Durham was with the company for two months in 1999.)
As for Daniel, the painful and counterintuitive truth was that he had been enrolled in a “bridge kindergarten” preschool class at First Baptist Church of Peachtree City. Such programs are designed for children who turn five years old right around the enrollment deadline for regular school kindergarten (typically late summer or early fall). That way, parents who aren’t sure whether their borderline-age kids are school-ready can hedge their bets for a year; after the pre-K program, the kids are sent on to either kindergarten or first grade. But Daniel wasn’t five, five and a half, or even six; he was seven.
On the Citizen’s discussion board, a poster identified only as “Christi” maintained, “Daniel did not have trouble dealing with other kids. He had lots of friends in his class. My daughter called him her boyfriend and said he used to protect her. He looked and acted like all the other kids in his class.”
(Clearly a member of the pro-Nancy, anti-Chris faction, “Christi” also wrote: “The man did fake fighting in a ring with other men in tights. It’s FAKE! They are all big muscular bad actors. Why does this qualify him as a hero??? It’s WRESTLING!!! Chris had the personality of a wet mop. At least that’s the impression my husband and I got from him at our kids’ graduations. We also got a very bad vibe from him.”)
Other sources close to the Toffolonis ascribed Daniel’s enrollment at the First Baptist preschool to Chris’s increasingly zealous desire to control Nancy and Daniel, and to a growing paranoia, which only lockdown security could satisfy. Chris talked a lot about the 2003 murder in the Atlanta area of the daughter of retired wrestler Khosrow Vasiri, “The Iron Sheik” — never mind that she was a grown woman who was killed by her boyfriend. The Benoits’ move from Peachtree City to their gated home was motivated by safety concerns, as was the acquisition of the German shepherd guard dogs. During this period, Chris also began having a local hanger-on who drove him around, Jimmy Baswell, take different routes from the airport to home with the view of shaking off anyone who might be following them.
There’s a difference, though, between being a control freak and a security fanatic, and making a school enrollment decision that would retard the academic career of a developmentally normal child. Juxtaposed against the known facts, the denials that Daniel had a medical condition came across as more defiant than convincing. Advocates of this viewpoint did not respond to my invitations to entertain follow-up questions.
The most telling sign that something was amiss with Daniel came from the authoritative, if muted, testimony of next-door neighbor Holly Schrepfer. Seeking to escape the June-July 2007 frenzy, Schrepfer traveled to the Boston area, where she’d previously lived. There Schrepfer, who had been a well-connected events producer, hired a Boston public relations firm, Regan Communications Group, to help her handle the barrage of media inquiries. George Regan issued a statement on Schrepfer’s behalf acknowledging that Nancy Benoit, over the course of their year-long friendship, had spoken of Daniel’s “medical problems.” Regan said, “I know there were some problems, problems and issues that she said the son had.”
The sheriff’s report covers the subject by noting that “rumors” about Daniel and Fragile X circulated during the investigation. “The rumors reported the Benoit family had a difficult time raising Daniel with this autism-like condition. Investigators with the Georgia State Composite Board of Medical Examiners obtained Daniel Benoit’s medical records and were unable to locate any notation or evidence that Daniel Benoit suffered from Fragile X syndrome or any form of autism.”
This conclusion would carry more weight if it included the medical records rather than a second-hand characterization of them, and if it had grappled with DA Ballard’s statements about needle marks on Daniel’s arm. If this was a false rumor with a fuse, Ballard was the one who lit it.
* * *
Not all the warps in the Fayette County investigation can be blamed on its loose-tongued DA. Some emanated from the sheriff’s office. Others were by-products of combined and inglorious incompetence. These lapses may or may not have risen to the level of corruption.
Perhaps the most important such area was the authorities’ baffling approach to the voice messages left on Chris and Nancy’s cell phones. Home phone answering machine messages were captured, but those had little value; Chris, like most mobile people, communicated almost exclusively through his cell. From the primary-source audio of the voicemail left on that cell, we could backfill what others knew about the Benoits’ crisis, or at least acquire hints of the levels of their concerns.
But the investigators did not retrieve any voicemail whatsoever. Moreover, they didn’t even try.
A June 26, 2007, subpoena to Verizon Wireless Communications — submitted by DA Ballard and Detective Harper, and signed off on by a Fayette County judge — demanded documentation in fourteen categories. These included cell site activation, numbers dialed, incoming numbers, call duration, and incoming and outgoing text messages. Not one of the categories was incoming voicemail.
While discussing the voicemail issue for this book, Harper could not have been more vague or misleading. On April 5, 2008, I emailed Harper, in part, “Your report includes a printout of the text messages. Is it also technically possible to retrieve audio of the incoming voicemail messages? If so, was a demand for voicemail audio included in any of the 14 categories of the subpoena to Verizon? And did Verizon provide it? If audio of voicemail is not in the sheriff’s records in this case, I would like to find out why.”
Three days later, the detective responded, “Luckily, we were able to at least get the texts from the phones. We retrieved the data from the phones such as SMS (text messaging). We asked for them from Verizon, but due to an issue they had with their systems, they could only produce what they gave us and nothing more. They were unable to provide text or voicemails.” Harper did not answer the question of whether a demand for voicemail audio was included in the Verizon subpoena, and I concluded that it was not. Harper also did not respond to the question of whether retrieving voicemail was technically feasible: the answer is obviously yes.
Below we will get to what the sheriff’s office said about the text messages; for now, let’s stick with voicemail. Harper was trying to combine the two under the heading of technical problems, when the bedrock reason for not obtaining the former was that it wasn’t in the subpoena. He would not comment on what — or who — could possibly have persuaded him not to pursue this key evidence.
Assuming that the sheriff’s office actually pressed Verizon informally for the voicemail — defective subpoena and all — but was told that the system was down, would Harper’s explanation wash? Not according to the forensic experts I consulted, one of whom was Kevin Ripa of a company called Computer Evidence Recovery. “If there was a system error, then what about the backup system?” Ripa said. “Major telecommunications companies don’t record mission-critical information casually. If Benoit’s voicemail was truly missing for good, that is a serious problem that would have affected thousands of other customers, as well. Verizon surely could have been pressed further on this point.”[4]
* * *
The sheriff’s investigation did produce text messages, to and from both Chris and Nancy’s cell phones; that evidence was especially useful in its depiction of their deteriorating marriage and her alarm over his drug use. Yet the text record, too, is incomplete.
On June 28, 2007, the New York Daily News reported that Chris had texted “biblical verses and portions of his will.” No such messages would appear in the sheriff report’s logs. Bryan Alvarez, publisher of the Figure Four Weekly newsletter, echoed this report in an interview with National Public Radio the next day. “I’ve been told there are other messages that have not been made public yet that perhaps quoted biblical passages, had estate information. So I think more is going to come out as it pertains to the text messages,” Alvarez said. When I followed up with Alvarez more than a year later, he said the report was probably just “confusion or some other miscommunication” in the first days.
On June 29, ex-wrestler Joe “Road Warrior Animal” Laurinaitis — brother of WWE Talent Relations chief John Laurinaitis — seemed to be telling Dan Abrams of MSNBC that John was among the recipients of the text messages from Benoit at the very end. No such messages are in the sheriff report’s logs. However, in full context it is not clear whether Joe was merging unrelated pieces of already known information:
[Y]ou better have a good reason [not to show up for a major booking] or your butt’s getting canned. You’re going to get fired. You know, my brother is vice president of operations for the WWE, my brother John. And I had — once I heard of this horrific situation, I called him and said, ‘Man, what’s going on?’ He said [and here is where the boundary between direct and indirect quotation gets jumbled], ‘Man, all that I know is that some of the guys and my brother himself had got text messages saying, you know, this is my new address. The dogs are out on the deck. The side garage door’s open’ — just plain one-liners that didn’t make any sense, that were so unlike Chris Benoit.[5]
These tidbits do not prove the existence of suppressed texts. But at least one wrestler whose text messages appear on the log released by the sheriff told friends of other messages of his that mysteriously are not included.
The final piece fueling these strong suspicions has a tinge of Keystone Kops. In response to the subpoena, Verizon Wireless produced printouts of calls sent to and received by Chris and Nancy’s cell phones. At the beginning of the printout is a legend with explanations of all the abbreviations and codes therein, and examples of how they were applied. One such example is the following text:
CTM data (ASCII)
[I don’t understand any of this chris. What could ever have made u do this? U r a hero and my biggest influence in the bizness as well as my friend. But no]
Sent (ASCII)
[I don’t understand any of this chris. What could ever have made u do this? U r a hero and my biggest influence in the bizness as well as my friend. But no]
Originating Time [06/26/2007 02:51:15[00] [00001]
This text appears nowhere on the Verizon printout itself, much less on the sheriff report’s logs. Could the author of the company’s explanatory legend have gone to the trouble of making up such an elaborate hypothetical example, with this authentic-sounding voice and detail? (The sender of the message, real or imagined, would be someone who idolized Benoit and was in anguish upon learning that he was a murderer.) Highly, highly, highly doubtful.
True, a message mourning the family and posthumously judging Chris might have been excluded from the public record as “not relevant.” In the February 12, 2008, records release, the sheriff hedged its incompleteness by calling the collection of text messages therein the “relevant” ones. But the authorities’ definition of relevance seemed awfully crabbed and debatable — in a way that served WWE more than anyone legitimately scrutinizing it.
And anyway, the real point is that Verizon, in the official story, was supposed to have told Fayette County law enforcement that it could not produce any texts. According to the sheriff’s report, Verizon’s text data stopped at date, time, and phone number, with no content. Detective Shelton had to download from the Internet an open-source software called BitPim, with which he was able to access the text messages. So what’s with the fully quoted example in the explanatory legend?
Later, when he got possession of the phones, Mike Benoit hired an expert to search for additional text evidence, but he never shared with me what, if anything, that exercise uncovered.[6]
* * *
The suspicion that the sheriff reported the telephonic evidence in bad faith is slam-dunked by the discrepancies between the raw phone call logs produced by Verizon and the final sanitized logs created by the sheriff. The public Benoit investigation report released the latter with the subtle suggestion that they were comprehensive. Though no disclaimer language was included to inform readers that calls documented by Verizon had been deleted, this secondary, interpretive log produced by the sheriff abruptly stops listing calls to Chris Benoit’s cell phone after 1:34 p.m. Sunday — more than twenty-four hours before the bodies were discovered. Again, the only defense for this would be the dubious contention that subsequent calls were “not relevant.” Why was 1:34 relevant but not 1:35, or 5:52, or 8:00 (which was bell time for the Vengeance pay-per-view)?
Detective Harper, Sheriff Johnson, and DA Ballard all ignored repeated inquiries about the incomplete cell phone call logs. In emails from Richard Lindsey, the attorney representing the sheriff’s office, he expressed the legalistic view that the Georgia open records statute did not require public agencies to explain or justify why they did not produce something different than what they released, despite what a critic could argue were fundamental inconsistencies.
The sheriff’s logs’ known omissions of phone calls on the Benoits’ several phone numbers include five calls made by WWE executive John Laurinaitis on Sunday after Chris killed himself: 4:27, 4:46, and 6:25 p.m. (before the Houston pay-per-view show), 8:25 (during the show), and 11:56 (afterward). There were numerous other calls from WWE cell phones, plus two others from cell phone numbers in Stamford, the company’s headquarters city.
In addition, there were the following calls:
* * *
WWE lawyer McDevitt and I agree on at least one thing: the performance of the district attorney was very poor.
“In point of fact, the authorities did not do many things which should have been done, and which they were urged to do, and did several things which should never be done in any competent investigation,” McDevitt wrote in an email complaining about my blog coverage. “Foremost among such actions was releasing the crime scene, together with critically important evidence, to persons with financial interests within a day of discovering the bodies. Indeed, it is a matter of historical record that I called on authorities during a national television program to locate Chris Benoit’s diary when I learned of it since it might have shed light on the murders. Incredibly, when it finally was located or retrieved, it was evidently given to Michael Benoit rather than maintained in police custody.”
McDevitt’s account of the diary debacle is substantially accurate. Ballard’s decision to allow Nancy’s side of the family to move into the house almost immediately, and thereby to gain special access to the crime scene, was the crown on the DA’s comedy of errors.
Whether with the goal of concealing secrets or merely in an incoherent homicidal mania, Chris appeared to have thrown a number of items into an outside trash container.[7] One of the items was the diary Chris began keeping after Eddie Guerrero’s death. Apparently, the cops missed the diary, either inside the house or in the trash can; if the former, then the Toffolonis might have attempted to dispose of the diary, perhaps because it was simply too unpleasant to confront in their grief, or perhaps because it would strengthen the case of Chris’s side of the family that he suffered from dementia and was not responsible for his actions.
From what we know, the diary includes rambling biblical references, as well as passages directly addressed to Guerrero in the beyond. (If the Daily News report of the former in unreleased text messages was inaccurate, that could explain where that piece of confusion originated.) The only glimmer of the content, other than excerpts read by Mike Benoit in broadcast interviews, came in Chris’s email exchanges with journalist Greg Oliver after Guerrero’s death. “My wife Nancy bought me a diary and I have started to write letters to Eddie. It may sound crazy but that is how I’m coping,” Chris wrote to Oliver.
On a visit to Chris and Nancy’s house, some time after authorities released it to the Toffolonis, next-door neighbor Holly Schrepfer is believed to have retrieved the diary and then given it to Mike Benoit.
In our exchanges, McDevitt took exception to a quote in my blog coverage from an unnamed source who stated that WWE had played the Fayette County authorities “like a cello.” That phrase was uttered by Patricia Roy, one of Mike Benoit’s lawyers. To the extent that McDevitt wanted to highlight that the work of the authorities had been incompetent, and to argue that the incompetence had as much of a claim to the explanation of the gaps in the record as corruption, he may have had a point. In the end, we don’t know why the Fayette County district attorney and sheriff screwed up the investigation of the thirty-hour text message gap, and not knowing why includes not knowing if they were in someone’s pocket. We only know that they did screw up.
In an age of instant and unverified information, the only element missing from this tableau of mind-bending ambiguity would be an excruciatingly intriguing Inter-net rumor, transmitted through the ether and never pinned down, but nonetheless shedding additional light on WWE’s preposterous timeline and the lengths to which the company went to divert attention from it.
And guess what? Thanks to the “Wikipedia hacker,” the Benoit case had that element, too.
[1]. Presumably McDevitt referred only to public investigators, and the only one to whom I spoke was Detective Harper. “Disdain” may be strong, but when we talked about the evolution of news reports in the first hours, Harper insisted that any early leaks had to have come from the DA, not the sheriff’s people.
[2]. The Georgia medical examiner’s report (referenced above, and included in the companion DVD) is, at most, silent on whether Daniel Benoit had needle marks. If Dr. Kris Sperry intended to embed such an observation in ambiguous technical language, he wasn’t saying.
[3]. Pam Winthrope exchanged emails with me in September and October 2007. The News1130 station manager, Jacquie Donaldson, refused to provide me with audio or transcripts, or to discuss the circumstances of Winthrope’s two interviews. Reporter Katharine Kitts did not return messages.
[4]. Ripa’s company, Computer Evidence Recovery (http://www.computerpi.com), is based in Calgary and, coincidentally, has done work there for the famous Hart wrestling family.
[5]. Joe Laurinaitis is the father of Ohio State’s pro football–bound All-America linebacker, James Laurinaitis.
[6]. The sheriff report’s version of the text message logs is included in the companion disk. See “Order the dvd” at the back of this book.
[7]. Interestingly, drugs were not among the things Benoit might have discarded. This led some to theorize that one of his last conscious acts was to countermand the standard wrestler’s practice of getting rid of a dead wrestler’s drugs. In this way, the theory goes, he hoped to keep one of the root causes of his rampage from being covered up.