WRESTLING BABYLON News

I’ve been critical of Dave Meltzer, bellwether of serious wrestling journalists, for failing to pursue the blatant irregularities in the public record of the Benoit investigation. In general, it’s sad that wrestling newsletters and news websites, which are quick to pounce on even the most trivial mistakes the mainstream media make about this extraordinarily secretive and complicated industry, substitute shallow chatter for hard news at the precise moments when they are uniquely qualified to contribute to the public’s better understanding of the most sensational, and arguably most important, scandal in the history of pro wrestling.

Having said that, I now notice that one of my criticisms of Meltzer, in my May 7 post “Benoit: What the Missing Voicemail Evidence Would Explain,” http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/05/07/benoit-what-the-missing-voicemail-evidence-would-explain, may have gone too far.

When Meltzer pooh-poohed the importance of the disappeared Benoit cell phone voicemail and added that there were also missing text messages, I suggested that this showed his lack of focus: “[A]s far as I know, they got all the text messages.”

But I’ve taken a closer look at a February 12, 2008, letter by attorney Richard P. Lindsey, which catalogues all the documents available to the public under Georgia open records law. According to the list, “relevant” texts are included “with investigator’s summary.”

As we have learned from, among other things, the kid-gloves questioning of Scott James (Armstrong), the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office has had a very crabbed, WWE-serving definition of “relevant.” Dave Meltzer is right about missing text messages. Indeed, Dave may be even more right than he realized.

Irv Muchnick

In the fourth call in the Benoit 911 records (http://muchnick.net/Call4.mp3), WWE security consultant Dennis Fagan speculates to the dispatcher about what might have to be done if the Benoits’ two German shepherd guard dogs at the gate cannot be contained. “Would you taser them — put them to sleep?” Fagan asks.

Earlier this blog had wondered why the dogs were loose and guarding the front gate, after Chris Benoit’s text messages had said they were in the enclosed backyard pool area. (Of course, we need the immediate disclaimer that the German shepherds might not have been in the backyard pool area, no matter what Chris said, when you take into account that he was likely deranged at that point.) I even posted photos of the pool area fence and questioned whether the dogs could have gotten over it; some German shepherd owners said no and a canine expert I consulted emphatically said yes.

But as Fagan points out in this 911 call, my earlier question is irrelevant. If people who knew what they were doing had wanted to enter the property at a time earlier than when the Fayette County sheriff’s deputies responded to the Monday afternoon welfare check, they could have done so, dogs or no dogs.

Irv Muchnick

[originally published at SLAM! Wrestling on May 5 under the headline, “Benoit case is closed — but far from settled,” http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/GuestColumn/2008/05/04/5467876.html]

by Irvin Muchnick

The final report from the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, released in February, officially closed the case of the Chris Benoit double murder/suicide. But anyone who reads the 52-page case summary and the hundreds of pages of ancillary documents made public under the Georgia open records law, in the hope that they will even come close to filling in the pertinent surrounding narrative, is apt to be disappointed.

What the authorities have published is less a report than a filibuster. As the Benoit family tragedy approaches its first anniversary next month, we have lengthy answers to questions long ago resolved. Meanwhile, tantalizing other questions — including, most glaringly, ones raised by a close reading of the investigation itself — are ignored.

World Wrestling Entertainment’s story, and they’re sticking to it, is that Benoit was just another guy, precisely like those in other walks of life, who “went postal.” The WWE panel on the most recent Larry King Live infomercial promoting WrestleMania reinforced this point when the subject came up ever so briefly. In their eagerness to turn the page, they all but yukked it up. Appallingly, these apologists included Chris Jericho, one of Benoit’s best friends.

The sheriff does tell plenty of the background of the troubled relationship between Chris and his wife Nancy. The report also catalogues, but without analysis, the arsenal of anabolics and pharmaceuticals found all over the house. With respect to the latter, Detective Ethon Harper — who was assigned by Sheriff Randall Johnson to author the report — glides around both Benoit’s successful WWE Wellness Policy test two months before his rampage, and the indictment of his doctor Phil Astin.

Treading lightly on the drug angle might be explained by the fact that Astin, who got busted by the Drug Enforcement Administration, is part of a pending federal case, which keeps a lot of the medical and other records under aggressive seal. But anyone who thinks the Benoit story has no connection to the drug culture of pro wrestlers in general, and of Atlanta-area wrestlers in particular, will be proven wrong in due course. (See the recent death in Atlanta of Chase Tatum, an old WCW guy, and the human growth hormone found in the attic of a suburban Atlanta home formerly occupied by, among others, WWE’s Mike Knox.)

Where the sheriff really falls on his face is in the report’s absurd lack of proportion. A dedicated section, with dozens of supporting pages, debunks two Internet hoaxes: the concocted post on a WWE discussion board about Chris supposedly no-showing the Houston pay-per-view because his wife had died, and a parallel phony update of Benoit’s Wikipedia bio. Both hoaxes were almost immediately discredited in the media at the time.

Sheriff Johnson’s exercise in taking the hoaxers back to the woodshed isn’t just tedious; it’s also inconsistent. When I asked why the report doesn’t probe whether Benoit was actually booked onto a Sunday morning Atlanta-to-Houston flight — as WWE’s published timeline claims — the answer was that this had no relevance to the crime itself. (We know for sure that Benoit did make a reservation on a Saturday night flight after missing a Saturday morning flight.) Ditto for why Scott James (referee Scott Armstrong) wasn’t asked why he texted Benoit, “What time do u land?” on Sunday morning, hours after Chris transmitted weird farewell text messages to him. When I asked why WWE security chief Dennis Fagan told 911 that Benoit had left such a message “this morning” (Monday), Detective Harper said he’d have to listen to Fagan’s call again and get back to me.

And when I asked Harper why his report supplement cuts off Chris’s cell phone log at 1:50 p.m. Sunday (the raw data from Verizon Wireless show scores of additional calls), and pressed him on the unexplained disappearance of cell phone voicemail, he stopped returning my calls. (Even as I type this, some fan on a discussion board is probably complaining that a journalist has no right to pose uncomfortable questions to a public servant.)

To date, the biggest embarrassment to WWE is from a Royal Canadian Mounted Police report, corroborated by Chris Benoit’s father Mike and by the Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer: company officials already knew the Raw tribute show that night would be honoring a murderer, and would be disavowed by the next night’s ECW show.

Frankly, this revelation has never held me quite as spellbound as it has others. That Vince McMahon once again worked the public, the fans, and almost all his own wrestlers is not news; at a certain point, this pattern is more about his compulsion to control and mess with minds than it is even about self-interest.

Far more interesting is the overall body of facts residing in the Saturday-Sunday-Monday twilight zone. That evidence remains buried, the result of either poor execution of good intentions on the part of the Fayette County investigators, or something worse.

The precise communications between Connecticut and Fayetteville, and between Texas and Fayetteville, across that grisly weekend? The very real possibility that, through Chavo Guerrero as well as Scott James, Vince and his corporate clean-up crew knew a whole lot more about what was going on, and considerably earlier than Monday afternoon, June 25?

Eventually, some of these answers will dribble out. Apparently, we won’t have local law enforcement to thank for them.

The list of people who applied for and received the complete file of open records from the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office in the Chris Benoit double murder/suicide investigation includes a gentleman by the name of Clifford E. “Cliff” Cormany, Jr.

After 26 years as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cormany founded Investigative & Polygraph Group, Inc., of Decatur, Georgia, “a professional association of former FBI agents” specializing in private investigations, polygraph examinations, and security consulting.

Here’s the rest of the story, according to Chris Benoit’s father Michael: “This individual presented his business card to the sheriff back in July ‘07. At the time he represented himself as working for me. We later found out that he was working for WWE.”

Via email, I solicited comment from both Cormany and WWE vice president Gary Davis, neither of whom responded.

No word on whether Cormany intends to administer a lie-detector test to himself.

Irv Muchnick

* Instant analysis has its limitations; it is, at best, the first draft of the first draft of history. My comment that the details of the conversation between WWE’s Rich Hering and Sheriff’s Lieutenant Pope represented “the major remaining question for the Monday timeline” was way off. There are just so many remaining questions, and I have no earthly idea where the Hering-Pope dialogue will fit in that queue.

* Just as some presidents are their own secretaries of state, some company chairmen are their own security chiefs, and I think Vincent Kennedy McMahon fits into that category. Dennis Fagan clearly was not hired to take charge of the ugly situation, but to do as he was told.

* Speaking of Fagan, an alert blog reader writes: “After listening to the audio of the call, it sounds more like he says ‘They ALL seem very worried’ in a NY accent, and proceeds to talk about how Chavo thought Chris sounded depressed on the phone, etc, which would make ‘They don’t seem very worried’ even more completely out of context. I might be mistaken, but I suggest reviewing the audio; low-quality Mp3s recorded over telephone lines can be very hard to decipher.” I think the reader is right and thank him for the clarification.

Irv Muchnick

In March, having read all the open records in the Benoit matter, I introduced myself in a letter to Fayette County Sheriff Randall Johnson and requested interviews with him and others involved in the investigation.

Lieutenant Belinda McCastle, the public information officer, wrote back: “Sheriff Johnson has authorized you to speak with only one Fayette County Sheriff’s Office personnel, Detective Ethon Harper, lead investigator on this case.”

Harper and I began exchanging emails with my batched questions. We also had one in-depth phone conversation.

On April 3, I emailed Harper, in part: “Your report doesn’t probe the 9:26 a.m. Sunday text from James to Benoit, ‘When do u land?’ [The actual text is “What time do u land?”; I have made this trivial mistake in several places on the blog.] In your phone conversation with me the other day, you said, ‘That is very interesting.’ I don’t want to hype — is it fair to call this something that you’re conceding you missed at the time?”

On April 5, I followed up: “I want to blog further about his 9:26 a.m. text on 6/24/07, ‘When do u land?’ You said it’s ‘interesting’ and I want to know if you had a theory for it in your report or if you are pondering it now for the first time as a result of my report.”

On April 8, Harper responded: “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.”

I reported that on the blog.

The next day I received my first and only email initiated by Harper:

+++

Irv,

I thought in one of your previous emails, you said you did not want to “hype.”

Here is what you sent to me and my response sent in a previous email.

3. Your report doesn’t probe the 9:26 a.m. Sunday text from James to Benoit, “When do u land?” In your phone conversation with me the other day, you said, “That is very interesting.” I don’t want to hype — is it fair to call this something that you’re conceding you missed at the time?

I was referring 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. 

Take Care,

Ethon

+++

This alleged unused quote was news to me and I told Harper so. “I will clarify in a new blog entry,” I said. “However, I first request that you send me the complete previous email, with time and date stamp, in which you gave your perspective on the James message.”

Harper said he didn’t have the asserted previous message. “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.  The only thing I have is a word document I have been pasting all of your questions into.” Anyway, “I was really just poking a little bit of fun at you.”

A detective, whose stock-in-trade is the gathering and documenting of details, cleans out his email sent folder every week? (Not to mention that our entire exchange was less than a week old.)

So Detective Harper was having a little fun. A regular riot, he is.

But why am I, along with the many others interested in getting to the bottom of the Benoit story, not laughing?

My complete email exchange with Harper on this subject can be viewed at http://muchnick.net/Harper.pdf.

Irv Muchnick

At seven months and considerable cost (I’ll try to get numbers), the Chris Benoit double murder/suicide investigation had to be one of the longest and most expensive in the history of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office.

Yet with respect to a linchpin source of information, former wrestler and current referee Scott James (Armstrong), the sum of what the taxpayers of suburban Atlanta got in return is in the following six sentences on pages 27 and 28 of the 52-page case summary:

“Chris Benoit also called his friend and travel partner Scott James, on Saturday, June 23, 2007, several times during the day.

In a statement made by Scott James, he advised he spoke with Chris Benoit several times on Saturday, June 23, 2007.

James advised they spoke about rental car and hotel room arrangements. James stated that Chris told him that Nancy and Daniel were sick and he may be late for the next show, but he would be there.

Scott James stated that Chris Benoit never made any comment that would have made him think something terrible had happened.

Scott James advised later that night (early Sunday morning), he began receiving text messages from Chris and Nancy Benoit’s cellular phones.”

A logical reading of the plain language “In a statement made by Scott James” is that James, like several other key interviewees, provided a detailed and verbatim account of pertinent issues in his purview.

But that turns out not to be the case, as Detective Ethon Harper told me yesterday through the sheriff’s open records attorney. (A month ago Harper seems to have begun finding it unbearable to continue direct dialogue with your humble blogger.)

There is no formal, dedicated document looking anything like what nine out of ten drunks in a bar would identify in this context as a “statement.” There are only cursory notes of a June 28, 2007, telephone interview of James by a Detective Lee. Here is the complete text of the account in Lee’s “supplemental”:

“6/28/07: Interview with Scott James [phone number redacted]

I called Scott to ask him several questions since he sent and received several cell phone calls and text messages to Chris Benoit near the time of his death. Scott said that he spoke to Chris several times on Saturday regarding their upcoming shows for the WWE. Scott said Chris called him and said that Nancy and Daniel were throwing up and very sick and he wasn’t sure that he would make the show, if he did he would be late. Scott said Chris asked him to call one of their bosses named “Fit” and tell him of his situation. Scott said he received several text messages from Chris telling Scott his home address and the dogs were in the back and the side door to the house would be open. Scott said he made several attempts to call and text Chris on Sunday and never received a response from Chris.

I asked Scott several questions about Chris and Nancy’s marriage and Chris’ health. Scott said he knew they argued but knew of nothing physical. He said he didn’t think Chris had any substance abuse or other addictions. Scott went on to say that Chris was a great father and “the man who did this, I don’t know him”. Scott said there were no statements that could have been a prelude as to what happened. Scott James [redacted]”

What — No questions about why WWE higher-ups were not alerted about the bizarre 4 a.m. Sunday text messages from Benoit until Monday afternoon?

No questions, much less explanations, about James’ 9:26 a.m. Sunday text to Benoit, “What time do u land?”

How do you spell “make that a baloney on rye and hold the pickles”?

Irv Muchnick

Some first thoughts on the audio evidence collected in the previous post, “Still More Benoit 911: WWE Security Chief Sounds Truly Clueless” (http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/05/14/still-more-benoit-911-wwe-security-chief-sounds-truly-clueless):

* I don’t care what Dennis Fagan’s title is — he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Obviously, he has not talked in depth with Scott James (Armstrong) and Chavo Guerrero, recipients of Chris Benoit’s Sunday morning text messages, and may not have talked to either one at all prior to touching base with Guerrero just before Call 4, at 2:13 p.m. Fagan sounds genuinely in the dark about whatever has happened inside the Benoit home, and as late as 4:19 p.m. perhaps even unaware that there are three dead bodies there. One explanation could be real confusion in the WWE bureaucracy. A far likelier explanation, I think, is that he was assigned to be the 911 liaison but was not briefed thoroughly or at all — a move that would give the company flexibility with public relations tactics and timelines. In that Call 4, Fagan says, “They don’t seem to be very worried”: very, very, very odd remark. [Correction: Fagan actually says, “They all seem to be very worried.”]
* Scott James is absolutely key to the unraveling of this mystery, even more important than Guerrero, because James is the one who texted back to Benoit at 9:26 a.m. Sunday, “What time do u land?” I will be reporting more shortly on a possible statement to the sheriff’s investigators by James that has still not emerged, but should. It is absolutely unacceptable if he was not interviewed in detail about both Chris’s texts and his own, and what they meant to him. And like Guerrero, he has to give a better explanation — better that is, than none at all, which is what we have in the current sheriff’s record — of the 30-hour gap between Chris’s texts and the purported knowledge of them by WWE executives.

* I’m guessing that there was a cell of “superior” information about the double homicide/suicide in Canada, and that the source was the Mountie who talked to the Fayette County cops while on the mission of comforting Chris’s distraught mother, Margaret Benoit. Perhaps the Canadian constable told WWE’s head of Canadian operations, Carl DeMarco, who ran with the information somewhat harder and faster than others. The 911 evidence does support the idea that Fayette County law enforcement was not talking early and aggressively about the obvious and inevitable finding of murder-suicide.

* WWE still has a ton of explaining to do about its “between 4:00 and 5:00″ decision to do the Benoit tribute. None of the wrestlers, or maybe only James and Guerrero, knew, but as Dave Meltzer has concluded, the decision-makers knew.

* When did Lieutenant Pope and WWE vice president Hering talk directly? And what did they talk about? That’s the major remaining question for the Monday timeline. And that still leaves a whole lot of stuff to figure out about Saturday and Sunday.

Irv Muchnick

by Irvin Muchnick

I have now acquired what I am fairly confident is the complete set of calls from the Fayette County E911 Center on the Benoit emergency of June 25, 2007. There is a total of eight calls — the three previously uploaded here, plus five new ones.
I’ll save for another day the inside baseball of how I came to believe that there was still more important audio evidence than that discussed in “Benoit 911 Call: WWE Security Chief Gave Wrong Day of Wrestler’s Last Message” (March 28, http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/03/28/benoit-911-call-wwe-security-chief-gave-wrong-day-of-wrestlers-last-message), and “More Benoit 911: Calls From WWE Security Chief and VP Hering” (April 22, http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/04/22/more-benoit-911-calls-from-wwe-security-chief-and-vp-hering).

For right now, let’s focus on the content of the evidence itself. In the next post, I will advance some tentative broad conclusions based on my first listens. Below are listed the links to the calls themselves and some brief factual notes.

The first call is at 1:10 p.m.

http://muchnick.net/Call1.mp3

This is the original call from Dennis Fagan of Andrews International, WWE’s security consultant, which we already had. (I am also keeping the old links for this and the other previously acquired calls for the convenience of those who might come across them while browsing old blog items.)

The second call is at 1:39 p.m.

http://muchnick.net/Call2.mp3

The 911 dispatcher leaves a message for Fagan. The dispatcher says the gate is locked and the officers on the scene need the pass code, and also that they are being inhibited by two aggressive canines.

The third call is at 1:41 p.m.

http://muchnick.net/Call3.mp3

Fagan calls back. He sounds surprised to hear that the gate is locked because Chris Benoit’s message had said “the gate’s open.” (Fagan is wrong; Benoit’s message said only that the side garage door was open, not the main gate.) Fagan says he will check around and call back.

The fourth call is at 2:13 p.m.

http://muchnick.net/Call4.mp3

Fagan says “they just called back” and he has more information. “They” clearly include Chavo Guerrero but not Scott James (Armstrong). (Fagan also says at one point, “The gentleman I’m dealing with is a retired judge in New York.” If anyone knows who that is or might be, please email tips@muchnick.net.) Fagan now says he has learned of two text messages from Benoit. (Actually there was a total of five texts to Guerrero and James.) In a strange comment, Fagan says, “They don’t seem to be very worried.” [My mistake: Fagan actually says, “They all seem to be very worried.”] Through Guerrero, Fagan is able to direct them to the neighbor who can secure the German shepherd guard dogs.

The fifth call is at 2:48 p.m.

http://muchnick.net/Call5.mp3

This is the most disturbing call, though it has no real forensic value. Holly Schrepfer, the neighbor, has just emerged from the house screaming upon finding Daniel and Nancy’s dead bodies. The sheriff’s deputies then went inside and were in the basement, where they found Chris’s dead body. Using her cell phone while standing in the driveway, Ms. Schrepfer, in hysterics, calls 911 to make sure the cops inside are OK.

The sixth call is at 3:15 p.m.

http://muchnick.net/Call6.mp3

Fagan checks back in. He is put on hold and then told no one is sure exactly what is going on.

The seventh call is at 4:19 p.m.

http://muchnick.net/Call7.mp3

This is the second of three calls previously reported here. It is Fagan yet again. He is told there is a shift change and he will be called back shortly.

The eighth call is at 4:41 p.m.

http://muchnick.net/Call8.mp3

This is the last of the three calls previously reported here. It is Rich Hering, WWE vice president for governmental relations, leaving a message for Lieutenant Tommy Pope, who Hering says wants certain information.

My comments are in the next post.

I earlier wondered aloud if the April 30 report on WSB-TV, Channel 2 in Atlanta, playing newly acquired audio from the Benoit home answering machine, was a leak to reporter Tom Regan.

This morning Richard P. Lindsey, the attorney administering open records requests for the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, told me that the CD with the previously unreleased audio had been sent to everyone who earlier ordered the complete Benoit file — not just Regan and me. I therefore am happy to clarify for the record that there was no leak here.

Regan himself could have headed off such speculation by not breathlessly introducing his audience to evidence he said he had long been seeking and “finally” obtained — implying that the answering machine messages were something he dug up rather than what the county acknowledged to be an inadvertent omission. But Regan isn’t the first reporter, on TV or elsewhere, unable to resist a little hype.

As I’ve said before, the home answering machine stuff is a sideshow to the overall scandal of the shoddy telephonic and other records of the sheriff’s Benoit case-closing report. This will become even more apparent in the next reports on this blog.

Irv Muchnick