CHAPTER 14
CERTAIN DROLL APHORISMS about pro wrestling, if delivered by men in tweed rather than spandex, would be recognized staples of academic deconstruction theory. For example, the wrestler-promoter Cowboy Bill Watts once confronted the topic of the sport’s fake nature with this puzzler: “Work or shoot — either way, it’s still a competition.” Watts meant that just because “sports entertainment” is physical theater rather than a legitimate contest doesn’t change the fact that one participant is trying to get the upper hand over the other under some admittedly elusive standard. Or anyway, that’s probably what Watts meant. Michel Foucault took the final three-count in 1984. The absence of a pulse got Roland Barthes disqualified from life in 1980. Neither could be consulted.
You can’t talk to a man with a shotgun in his hand. Nor can you argue with anyone who thinks a cluster of avoidable deaths, in a show business in a non-war zone, can be rationalized. Vince McMahon knows this; the rest of us only suspect it. Chris Benoit might have snapped — but the ring ropes guarding his way of life from reality did not. They just got a little more frayed. They will snap next time, or the time after that. Or they won’t. In the Western Canada and American South of Benoit, in the New Jersey of Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler, and at all points in between, young men (and women) are still taking, and will always take, to extremes their ambition to bask in the roar of the crowd. As a society, we have decided that the collective price they pay is OK. Similarly, we have decided not to make that big a deal of the inevitability of a “student-athlete” croaking every now and then at a “voluntary” off-season college football practice.
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Chris killed Nancy on Friday night, Daniel either very late Friday or some time Saturday, and himself on Sunday morning. What happened?
Most likely, Chris and Nancy had their final fight, spontaneously, and it got out of hand. A false dichotomy of the subsequent debate over steroids was that acts of deliberation across a several-day period could not have been the result of “roid rage.” Such a framing of the events misses two things. One is that the first murder, Nancy’s, could very well have been produced by a quick burst of rage, with the other acts being ones of greater calculation — more like desperation — once Chris realized what he had done.
The other thing missed by harping on the ’roid rage straw man is more fundamental: steroids also can cause depression. Whether or not they were the main cause of the crime, steroids and the steroid culture were an important factor.
WWE counted on the enormous capacity of its fans to deny and the enormous capacity of everyone else to shrug. At strategic points, it rolled out the sound bites it needed, such as when beloved TV announcer and former company executive Jim Ross attended the funeral of Nancy and Daniel at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Daytona Beach, Florida, on July 14, 2007. “This is not a steroid issue,” Ross told the media. “That horse has got to be put in the barn and unsaddled.”
Those who read the Georgia medical examiner’s toxicology report, which was released three days later, might have been tempted to get back in the saddle. But not good old “JR.”
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The presence of a small amount of Nancy’s blood indicated that Chris banged her head on the floor in the course of a struggle, which, if he were serious, could not have lasted long. “Some type of violence” was evident, the sheriff’s report said, including “several impact injuries to her head, and possibly to her body, but it is unclear what type of instrument or object caused the injuries.” Why Chris then felt the need to tie up Nancy, either before or after killing her, takes us to the outer reaches of speculation. One theory is that he considered the possibility of fleeing with Daniel, or in any case somehow making the scene look like a third-party home-invasion crime.
During the dispute between the Benoit and Toffoloni families over the disposition of the estate, a question arose about the order of the deaths. Neither Chris nor Nancy left a will, and the answer had implications under a Georgia slayer statute, whereby the estate claims of a murderer are forfeited. The law would have kicked in if the Toffolonis could establish, as they suggested they would, that Chris killed Daniel first, and Nancy’s side could argue for a larger share of the assets.
A handwritten document in the files of the Toffolonis’ lawyer, Richard Decker, headed “Leigh’s theory,” outlined one possible scenario. (I asked Decker who Leigh was. “Don’t know for sure, probably one of our paralegals,” Decker emailed back.) Leigh’s notes:
Friday night — all 3 seen at pool
Nobody seen Saturday
Later Fri. maybe Saturday morning Nancy and Chris fight over drugs or some other issue and Chris, all jacked up on his stuff from Astin, hits Nancy on the head and knocks her out, maybe an accident. She had many central nervous system depressants in her system to enforce the unconsciousness. This would explain why Chris tied her up, to keep her contained while he figures out what to do. Daniel finds out what happens and freaks out. Chris sedates Daniel to calm him down but accidentally gives him too much and he dies.
Xanax peak plasma concentration about 1 hr after administration. At this point he loses his mind completely and goes to the office and kills Nancy.
Doesn’t make any sense that he would kill Daniel first, chances are he killed Daniel accidentally, to sedate him, gave him too much and died so at that point he knew he was in too deep. While in contact with WWE they may have still been alive, after they told him not to show up Sat he got scared his career over and decided to end it hence leaving the drugs out to be found
Nancy still had alcohol in her blood, why did no other bodies produce alcohol during decomposition
It must be reemphasized that this theory appears to have been drawn up to advance a particular monetary interest. (The theory became moot when the Benoits and the Toffolonis settled the estate dispute by splitting the assets right down the middle, abandoning any claim the latter might have been contemplating of their entitlement to a larger share.) The theory means little more than that. The narrative of any crime, especially one with no surviving witnesses, has open-ended elements. Here the open-endedness was worsened by the poor record created by the authorities.
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Since the summer of 2007, Atlanta’s dubious distinction as a capital of wrestling’s drug culture hasn’t missed a beat. On March 23, 2008, thirty-four-year-old ex-wrestler Chase Tatum was found dead in his Atlanta home from an overdose of painkillers. Two weeks earlier, Tatum had been recovering from surgery for a degenerative spinal disc. He was a heavy-duty steroid guy at WCW in the ’90s.
The next month the daughter of a preacher in another Atlanta suburb, Locust Grove, came across a stash of at least eight vials of steroids, testosterone, and growth hormone, and more than twenty syringes, in their house attic. The drugs were left by former residents of the house, who included WWE wrestler Michael Hettinga (“Mike Knox”). Hettinga’s WWE contract and a company memorandum about its dress code were also found.
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In 2008 director Christopher Bell released the critically acclaimed documentary Bigger Faster Stronger, which glorified his own steroid use and that of his brothers Mark and Mike.
On December 14, 2008, “Mad Dog” Mike Bell, who wrestled for both WWE and the original ECW, was found dead at Ramona House, a substance abuse rehabilitation facility in Costa Mesa, California. He was thirty-seven.
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On January 16, 2009, independent wrestler Paul Fuchs (“Paul E. Normus”), who had a cameo role in the even more critically acclaimed dramatic film The Wrestler, was found dead at his parents’ home in Sloatsburg, New York. Fuchs was thirty-three.
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Another character in The Wrestler was a drug dealer, portrayed by Scott Siegel. It was method acting at its finest, for Siegel was a real-life drug dealer. So exposing himself on the big screen could not have helped him elude the DEA agents who were closing in on him.
As the website TMZ.com reported on February 19, 2009:
Scott Siegel was already under DEA surveillance in Westchester County, NY last night when officers spotted him picking up a package. Feds in four cars moved in, and the raging beefcake allegedly rammed three of their cars — then took off on foot.
Officers caught up with Scott and arrested him for steroid distribution and assaulting a federal officer.
UPDATE: Siegel’s bail has just been denied — due to strong evidence against him, along with his 1999 conviction for selling steroids.
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A handful of ex-WWE wrestlers took up Vince McMahon’s offer to underwrite alcohol and substance rehab. One of them, Jake “The Snake” Roberts, expressed his undying gratitude before he and his prop, a live cobra, headed back out to independent bookings.
Another old druggie, Lanny Kean, “Cousin Junior” in the ’80s, checked out early, from his rehab clinic and then from life. On January 12, 2009, Kean suffered a fatal heart attack in Jamestown, Kentucky. He was forty-eight.
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Early in 2007, months before the Benoit rampage, WWE star Andrew Martin failed a wellness program test and was suspended. He was released soon thereafter. Martin was known as “Test.” The handle was an inside joke about drug-testing.
Martin — also at one time the boyfriend of WWE diva Barbara Blank (“Kelly Kelly”) — became a part-time independent wrestler. In April 2007 the Maryland athletic commission refused to let Martin work his spot in a show because he was under the influence. He also missed numerous other bookings. After his April 2008 arrest for driving drunk and with a suspended license, he accepted WWE’s offer to underwrite rehab. In August he checked himself into the Hanley Rehabilitation Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, for treatment of a painkiller addiction.
On March 13, 2009, a neighbor of Martin’s at a waterfront condo complex in Tampa saw through the balcony window that he had appeared to have been sitting in the same awkward position for more than twenty-four hours. The neighbor called police, who climbed a ladder to the balcony and entered the apartment through an open window. Martin was dead. Steroids and painkillers were found on the property. He was thirty-three.
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World Wrestling Entertainment put a lot of hours into the obliteration of all references to Chris Benoit in its DVDs. A few leaks remained, mostly in side references by announcers in non-Benoit matches.
On the June 28, 2007, Today show on NBC, Vince McMahon told Meredith Viera, “There was no way of telling this man was a monster.”
Yet according to company sources, WWE privately held out hope that, over time, the “monster” of the tale would prove to be Nancy, Chris’s image could be rehabilitated, and the marketing of his branded merchandise could resume. Some office flunkies were tasked with helping to bring about this happy day.
In the secondary market on eBay, all things Benoit moved briskly. Out of every three fans, one was creeped out by this, one wallowed in it, and a third experienced the latter while pretending to experience the former.
Shortly before his death, Chris Benoit gave Ray Rawls, the small-time wrestler who made his ring wear, a special token of their friendship: the dark tights with blue piping and design that Benoit wore when he won the championship at WrestleMania 2004. It was something he wanted to do for Rawls, Chris said. He added, “It’s for your use in the future.” Following the murder-suicide, and because of the loss of his star customer and other factors, Rawls was broke. Though he felt guilty doing so, Rawls decided that Chris had been giving him permission to auction the tights on eBay to keep the wolf from the door.
The tights fetched $3,000.
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On May 12, 2009, Astin was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. The harsh sentence was dictated by information from the prosecutors that his promiscuous prescription practices had resulted in the deaths of at least two patients — two, that is, other than Chris and Nancy Benoit. (Though not named, both were believed to be ex-wrestlers: Johnny Grunge and “Sensational Sherri” Martel.)
On June 10, 2009, just before the statutory deadline for a civil wrongful-death lawsuit, Maureen and Paul Toffoloni — the parents of Nancy Benoit and grandparents of Daniel — sued Astin, who was already headed to prison, along with unknown “Distributors X, Y, and Z.” The Toffolonis sought damages stemming from Astin’s actions as Chris’s physician for seven years, The complaint charged that the doctor’s misconduct put his patient “under the influence of CNS [central nervous system] depressants, opioids and anabolic and androgenic steroids,” in turn impairing him mentally and triggering his homicidal-suicidal rampage. The family apparently was depending on subsequent revelations, during discovery and trial, to establish the identities of the co-defendants — “manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers and/or retail sellers of certain anabolic and androgenic steroids, narcotic drugs and/or controlled substances.”
WWE was not named.
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Securities and Exchange Commission filings by World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., disclosed $526.5 million in net revenues in 2008, broken down as follows:
|
Live and Televised Entertainment |
$331.5 million |
|
Consumer Products |
$135.7 million |
|
Digital Media |
$34.8 million |
|
WWE Studios |
$24.5 million |
About three-quarters of the revenues came from North America operations. Other portions were generated in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), 18%; APAC (Asia Pacific), 7%; and Emerging Markets (Latin America, China), 1%.
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On January 12, 2009, Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell nominated Linda McMahon for a position on the state Board of Education.
Rell said, “Linda clearly understands the skills and education needed to succeed in business and the type of highly educated and skilled workforce that must be available to ensure that success. I am confident that her leadership abilities, input and advocacy as a mother and grandmother will be key assets to the Board and its mission of ensuring quality education for all Connecticut children.”
During the confirmation process, McMahon acknowledged that her claim that she had a degree in education was false. She said the error on her resume was caused by honest confusion.
Linda McMahon was confirmed by the State Senate, 34–1, and by the House of Representatives, 96–45.