At the back of this book is information on how to order on disk some of the background records I used. The goal here was for as much transparency as possible. From the get-go, I had faith that, even if the Benoit crime itself flashed no conspiratorial smoking gun, a close reading of the public record would reveal more than we might think.
Below are the stories behind the stories of a few important aspects of my reporting.
FAYETTE COUNTY AUTHORITIES
On February 12, 2008, the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office released a report closing the Benoit investigation. The materials consisted of a fifty-two-page case summary by Detective Ethon Harper, the lead investigator, along with more than 300 pages of supplemental reports and records.
Through the public information officer, Lieutenant Belinda McCastle, then-Sheriff Randall Johnson said that only Harper was authorized to talk to me; everyone else in the department was instructed to grant no interviews. I reached out to others as needed, but it was clear that the sheriff’s employees took his directive seriously.
My dialogue with Harper started off amiably before quickly dribbling into nothingness. As the questions got sharper, Harper did not want to interpret the gaps in his report, which I was showing were not just discretionary, but passive to the point of negligence. Missing text messages, arbitrarily truncated phone call logs, absence of voicemail evidence, references to documents and records that were not released and then, in defense, were explained as never having existed at all — all these detours from openness and common sense speak for themselves.
“I hope you are keeping in mind that I am not a professional writer,” Harper said at one point. Ultimately, his lack of felicity with the written word was presumed to excuse that where he represented that Scott Armstrong had said something “in a statement,” the detective merely meant to refer to something he claimed to remember Armstrong stating. There was no backup document, after all; the plain language suggesting otherwise was a swerve.
In an April 8, 2008, email, Harper accused me of not publishing on my blog his explanation of a text message Armstrong sent to Chris Benoit on June 24, 2007. “I thought you said you did not want to ‘hype,’” Harper wrote. When I replied that I had received no such explanation and asked him to show me the original message, he wrote back, “I clear out my sent box pretty frequently to keep from getting the ‘over size limits’ message from our server. I don’t have any messages past a week ago.” Unfortunately for his logic, such a message would have been less than a week earlier. Anyway, Harper wrote, “I was really just poking a little bit of fun at you. No reason to point out a misunderstanding and make it a bigger issue than it is.”
If this was a joke, I wasn’t laughing. Thereafter, Harper stopped returning phone calls, emails, and faxes.
Three months later came the search for the Stamford police interview of the Wikipedia hacker, which the Fayette County sheriff’s report said was “included in the case file.” After several rounds of dodgeball, Harper said, through sheriff’s attorney Richard Lindsey, “We have had and still do have the video they sent us. The video cuts out after just a couple of minutes, so there is no recorded interview.”[1] I demanded and received what was, in fact, a partial recorded interview. I asked Lindsey why the sheriff’s office issued a report on this aspect of its investigation on such a basis. Lindsey wrote back, “I have no idea.”
After a time-consuming fight that led all the way to the docket of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission, I got the full video from Stamford, and it reinforced the apparent determination of authorities in two states not to breathe a word of whatever was known about why the body of a famous wrestler — who was uncharacteristically missing appearances — and the bodies of his wife and their son could lie around decomposing for days.
Then there were the grudging and piecemeal releases of copies of WWE’s calls to 911. All records “of the initial call to 911 for a welfare check may be obtained from the Fayette County 911 Communications Center,” noted the summary of the open records. By omission, this at least implied the existence of only one 911 call. After I applied to the 911 center for “the” call and listened to it, it was evident that there were others; in fact, three iterations of requests to the center were required before the complete collection of eight audio records got pinned down.
At the beginning of the process, Lindsey had written to me, “I suggest that you read the investigator’s summary first (which I am sending to you) to determine if you really need the 911 documents. The summary is very good.”
Later Lindsey was angered by my persistent questions about the mysterious Scott Armstrong “statement.” Unable to understand why Harper wouldn’t produce what nine out of ten drunks in a bar could identify in that context as a dedicated document, I assured Lindsey that I would not make a fuss if such a document surfaced and turned out not to have been disclosed previously due to an honest mistake. Lindsey then threatened in an email, “If you ever imply that I withheld anything, all communication will cease immediately.” He complained that he was “at the mercy” of his client in such a situation. “I do not withhold documents — I never have and never will. If I read that again (as a threat, comment or thought), you’ll have to get a court order before I will ever communicate further with you.” After I replied that I’d proferred no such threat, comment, or thought, Lindsey apologized.
MICHAEL BENOIT
Michael Benoit, Chris’s father, contacted me early in 2008, after we were separately interviewed for a documentary on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program the fifth estate. Mike was most interested in promoting research suggesting that Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy — a doctor’s neologism for the brain damage he had found caused by Chris’s serial concussions in the ring — had been the central cause of his rampage. I promised Mike that I would cover and address this research respectfully, whereupon he wrote me, “I will help you with any details you require for your book. I will not ask that you write in a manner that is pro Chris Benoit.”
For several months Mike and I conversed extensively, though at arm’s length, in dozens of emails and several long phone conversations, about aspects of my reporting on the timeline in particular, and we contemplated meeting face to face for further conversations on a range of topics. Mike was eager to introduce me to one of the CTE research pioneers, Dr. Bennet Omalu, a professor at the University of California-Davis Medical School, the coroner of San Joaquin County, California, and the author of Play Hard, Die Young: Football, Dementia, Depression and Death. A meeting among the three of us almost happened in May 2008, when the producers of NBC’s Dateline planned to fly Mike to San Jose to participate in interviews for an investigative piece. But Mike’s flight was canceled at the last minute as NBC abruptly scrapped the Benoit story.
A month earlier Mike had been a key confirming source as I nailed down the story of WWE’s phony Raw tribute show, hours after company executives knew full well that they were spinning a murder-suicide. After the publication of that report on my blog, Wrestling Babylon News (http://muchnick.net/babylon), he alerted me to a clumsy attempt to discredit me by Scott Zerr, an Edmonton journalist who had hoped to work with Chris on his autobiography. (Zerr might have been smearing me in concert with Carl DeMarco, the head of WWE’s Canadian operations, who likely had been embarrassed by my revelation that the leak of the company’s early knowledge that Chris was the killer came from DeMarco.) For details, see the April 6, 2008, posts on Wrestling Babylon News.
Mike and I never met in person, and he eventually cut off contact altogether. Though I found his information on Chris’s brain trauma useful, I intuited a difference — one that I think Mike, grasping at straws to explain the criminal acts of his beloved son, couldn’t accept — between it being a contributing factor and the single, comprehensive explanation for this tragedy. I later independently spoke to Dr. Omalu; and while I agreed that the concussion research was an important emerging field, certain to save the lives of future athletes, and that this deserved to be noted as part of Chris’s legacy, I also felt that it was exaggerated by Dr. Omalu as well as by Mike. As a father, I empathized with Mike. But as a journalist, I had a job to do.
Along the way, before I got on his bad side, Mike put me in touch with the office of his lawyer, Cary Ichter. My reporting on gaps in the sheriff’s account of the telephone records had spurred Mike to direct Ichter to hire technicians who combed Chris and Nancy’s cell phones and computer for further insights into the weekend timeline and other issues. (I well understood that as we compared notes, Patricia Roy, one of Ichter’s assistants, would get far more information from me than I from her; the statutory deadline for filing a civil lawsuit against WWE was several months after the completion of this book.)
As a member of the Georgia Athletic Commission, Ichter also was pushing for new legislation to regulate the pro wrestling industry there. I, too, strongly advocate regulation. Still, in this particular scenario I found myself thinking WWE officials had a point when they complained that a commission member who was also a lawyer contemplating a major lawsuit against the company in private practice had a blatant conflict of interest. The merits of Ichter’s proposals, as opposed to their process, make for a more complex discussion; but in any case, they quickly foundered when WWE threatened to pull out of Georgia if toothful regulations were enacted.
In our few conversations, Ichter expressed interest in using my book to help promote a lawsuit by his client Carlos Ashenoff (“Konnan”) against Total Non-Stop Action Wrestling. The suit alleged that the promotion negligently endangered Ashenoff by forcing him to work through debilitating injuries, which led to life-threatening transplant surgery after the wrestler’s kidneys stopped functioning, most likely a consequence of toxic doses of painkillers. The case also included claims of racial discrimination, based on the stereotype Latino character that Ashenoff, a native Cuban, said he was forced to portray in order to maintain TNA employment. That count echoed a discrimination suit Ichter had filed years earlier against World Championship Wrestling on behalf of a group of African-American wrestlers, who won a substantial settlement. (In a well-known piece of wrestling lore, that settlement was driven by an extraneous factor: a report of racist comments by Bill Watts, who at the time was running WCW, reached baseball legend Hank Aaron, an executive with WCW’s parent Turner Broadcasting System, and higher-ups quickly passed down orders to resolve quickly any disputes adversely impacting the company’s image in race relations.)
I must say that, on intellectual principle, I am unimpressed by this type of racial-discrimination litigation in wrestling — which, after all, is a lowbrow entertainment form, by definition exploiting lowest-common-denominator gimmicks. I find risible the proposition that the legal system should set right the reality that racism (or homophobia or sexism or xenophobia) will always be a default ingredient of the recipe of fictional story lines. If Turner Broadcasting didn’t want to be part of such a business, it could get out — and eventually it did.
In our conversations, Mike Benoit was the first to raise the point that his lawyer sometimes behaved “unprofessionally,” as Mike put it. In one set of meetings Ichter “kept calling this person an ‘asshole’ and that person an ‘asshole.’ In my experience, when you’re calling everyone else an asshole, maybe the first thing you should be doing is looking in the mirror,” Mike said.
Late in 2007, Ichter leaked the story that the Benoits had offered to settle with WWE for $2 million. WWE rejected the offer and Mike Benoit denied ever having authorized it. Thereafter, he told me, he instructed Ichter to focus on estate matters only.
All of which is to emphasize that the thrust of this book is not willy-nilly wrestling-bashing. The real takeout here is the outrageously out-of-bounds health and safety risks in this industry, which — in the absence of a sensible regulatory regime — the talent must bear all by themselves.
HOLLY SCHREPFER
Naturally, I sought the cooperation of Holly Schrepfer. In March 2008 Mike Benoit told me that he had arranged for Schrepfer (often referred to in media reports as Holly McFague) to talk to me about the timeline of events following her discovery of the bodies. When I called her, though, I found that either Mike had misunderstood or she had developed second thoughts.
Specifically, Holly said she had addressed all of my questions about the subject in her official statement to the sheriff. Taken aback, I said I would thoroughly review her statement, which I’d already read, and call her back only if I still thought we had things to talk about.
When I did call back, Holly responded that from what I was telling her, the sheriff’s release of records must have included only one of the four or five separate statements she said she’d given investigators. At that point I went back to Detective Harper, who flatly denied that there were additional, undisclosed Schrepfer statements. “You have what I have,” Harper said.
Holly then conceded that, in the trauma of her involvement in these horrible events, she might have been confused about whether there were additional formal statements. But in any case she did not want to rehash things with me.
(In light of the detective’s several subsequent false and misleading statements to me on other subjects — see above — I now suspect that there were, in fact, multiple undisclosed statements by Holly. These and other buried materials may surface in the Toffoloni’s civil suit against Dr. Astin and “Distributors X, Y, and Z.”)
Four months later, before traveling to Georgia for additional reporting, I checked in again with Holly. We had a pleasant chat, but she reiterated that I wouldn’t get additional input from her. She felt that she had already said everything that needed to be said, to the authorities and to the families and their lawyers. The only thing that might motivate her to weigh in further publicly on timeline discrepancies, she said, would be evidence that if someone had taken more proactive steps with the very earliest and sketchiest information, Daniel Benoit’s life might have been saved. I consider the timeline material in this book important for its own reasons, but I also think Holly is likely correct in her position that no evidence exists that anyone was in an effective position to intervene after Nancy’s murder but before Daniel’s.
SANDRA TOFFOLONI
Through intermediaries, I learned that Sandra Toffoloni, Nancy Benoit’s sister, followed my blog and approved of my search for deeper levels of the truth. There was, however, one exception: she didn’t like my refusal to bury the early reports that Daniel Benoit had Fragile X syndrome. For Sandra, this may have been a version of Mike Benoit’s dissatisfaction with my lack of emphasis on Chris’s mental impairment from concussions. I was, and remain, respectful of what both families have gone through, and of their interests in preserving positive memories of their loved ones. But, for me, telling the complete story involved resolving all angles, including Daniel’s, in an accurate fashion.
In the spring and summer of 2008, I exchanged a few friendly emails with Sandra as she organized the launch of the Nancy and Daniel Benoit Foundation, “dedicated to preventing steroid abuse through education and raising awareness about the unfortunate effects steroids can have on users and those close to them.” In vague terms, we talked about chatting on the phone in greater depth.
On July 5, 2008, my wife answered a phone call from Sandra at 1 a.m. in California — which was 4 a.m. at her home in North Carolina. My wife chose to take a message rather than wake me. In an email the next day, Sandra explained that as a professional event planner she had a tendency to keep odd hours and lose track of the best time to call people. Sandra again said she would talk with me at the appropriate time. “I firmly believe there is responsibility to be taken, not just by Christopher,” Sandra wrote.
I followed up with more overtures to schedule a phone discussion, but Sandra did not respond.
On January 23, 2009, Nancy Benoit’s friend Pam Hildebrand Clark told me that Sandra Toffoloni had authorized her to give me her cell phone number. I left a message for Sandra at that number, and she called me back and we talked about a few points in the book. We made an appointment for a second and longer conversation, but she did not keep it.
JERRY McDEVITT AND THE BLOG RETRACTION
In the spring of 2008 I corresponded with Gary Davis, World Wrestling Entertainment’s vice president of corporate communications, with questions about timeline discrepancies. In his second and last email to me, on April 1, Davis said, “I recognize you have an interest in this subject, but why are you asking for this information, how do you intend to use this information if it is provided, and what is it that you think this information, if provided, is going to prove?”
From June 16 through June 18, 2008, WWE’s chief outside counsel, Jerry S. McDevitt, emailed me a series of legal threats; those messages and my responses to them were published on my blog.
One of my blog posts erroneously suggested that McDevitt had misled the public by insisting that WWE acted within days in the summer of 2007 to suspend company performers who were revealed to be on the customer list of an Internet steroid connection, Signature Pharmacy, under investigation by the district attorney of Albany, New York. My assertion that WWE had waited more than two weeks before suspending the talent who had violated the company’s wellness policy relied on a report by Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer. Investigating McDevitt’s complaint, I concluded that Meltzer was wrong in that detail, and I ran a retraction on my blog. Later conversations with Christopher Baynes of the Albany DA’s office and Mark Haskins of the New York State Narcotic Enforcement Agency confirmed McDevitt’s chronology of the WWE suspensions[2].
For Meltzer’s part, I believe he exercised poor journalistic judgment by neither correcting the item himself nor informing his readers of my dispute with McDevitt — which, after all, had arisen out of my straightforward citation of a prominent nine-month-old report in the Observer. Curiously, according to Meltzer, McDevitt never sought a retraction from him. As I like to joke, on its worst day, the Observer has dozens of times more readers than my blog has on its best.