WRESTLING BABYLON News

Chris Benoit murdered his wife Nancy, then his son Daniel, then killed himself over the course of the weekend of June 22-24, 2007. This blog in no way says or suggests otherwise.

Vince McMahon consciously manipulated the news of June 25, 2007, to produce a Raw tribute to a murderer, before immediately turning around and distancing WWE. Only a moron could read our post earlier this month, “WWE Knew Chris Benoit Was the Perpetrator Before Staging ‘Monday Night Raw’ Tribute,” and deny that. (Then again, there are a lot of morons out there….)

In between those two factual poles is a lot of ambiguous timeline. Even open-and-shut crime cases leave questions about the larger narrative, and this one is no exception. The most curious issue uncovered so far is the lapse of more than 30 hours between the time Benoit’s farewell text messages were sent to Scott James and Chavo Guerrero, and when WWE’s security consultant called 911 (in the process, either accidentally or on purpose giving the wrong day). And James, after receiving Benoit’s messages, texted him, “When do u land?” – presumably referring to a Sunday morning flight that WWE claims, without proof, company executives had booked for him. What’s that all about?

I’m not asserting the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office investigation was a WWE whitewash; nor am I saying it wasn’t. The proof will be in the pudding. Investigators clearly let James and Guerrero off the hook for the 30-hour gap and for “When do u land?” We need to clarify the factors that persuaded the sheriff not to probe that angle. We also need to find out if there is a coherent explanation for the creation of a refined log based on Verizon Wireless’s crude printout of Chris Benoit’s incoming and outgoing cell phone calls – yet cutting off that log at 1:50 p.m. Sunday. Further, there’s the lack of backup for Verizon’s purported failure to produce the cell phone voicemail. Finally, will Sheriff Randall Johnson – who assigned Detective Ethon Harper to talk to me – allow a direct interview with Tommy Pope (at the time a lieutenant, now a captain) about the communications he had on Monday, June 25, with vice president Rich Hering and other WWE officials? (Hering refers to them in his 911 call, which was just released at my request.)

Irv Muchnick

As I’ve reported, the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office log of phone calls to and from Chris Benoit’s cell phone is incomplete and misleading. To give everyone an idea of just how seriously incomplete and misleading, I have begun drilling deeper into the raw public records.

A June 26, 2007, subpoena to Verizon Wireless required the company to produce transactional records pertaining to all calls for Chris’s cell from June 1 through June 26.  Verizon responded by providing the sheriff with, among other documents, a 15-page printout of transactions. Working from that information, investigators drew up their own logs — in a more accessible format and adding information that matched phone numbers with the people who called Benoit or were called by him.

But for reasons known only by the people who wrote it, the sheriff’s report did not complete the exercise for all the call information in their possession. Though they had asked Verizon for transactional data through June 26, the sheriff’s log, as noted previously, stops at 1:50 p.m. on Sunday, June 24. That was nearly 24 hours before World Wrestling Entertainment called 911.

Were there any calls of substance after 1:50 p.m. on June 24? What do you think? The last call explained on the sheriff’s log is in the middle of page 13 of  Verizon’s 15-page printout. In a very quick, rough count, I identified a total of about 63 additional calls from around 44 distinct phone numbers. Some of those numbers are identified elsewhere in the sheriff’s refined logs for Chris’s cell, Nancy’s cell, and the home phone. However, many of the numbers on the unanalyzed final two-plus pages of the Verizon printout — I believe a majority of them — show up nowhere else at all.
On Friday I had a cordial, but pointed, email exchange with Richard P. Lindsey, the Peachtree City lawyer who is coordinating the sheriff’s open records requests. The Georgia open records law, Lindsey told me, “does not require any government office or employee to create a document, report, or compilation of materials. Thus, according to that law, there is nothing responsive to your questions” about the gap in the sheriff’s refined phone logs.

Maybe not, according to that law. But another law — the law of common sense — suggests that the Sheriff’s Office has been either deliberately or accidentally sloppy with the most important evidence shedding light on the accuracy of WWE’s version of the June 23-25 timeline. That problem should be rectified at once.
Irv Muchnick

The addenda to the Fayette County sheriff’s final report on the Chris Benoit case included logs of phone calls. As noted in the previous post, the logs should be supplemented with cell phone voicemail, or the failure to retrieve voicemail should be better explained.

But there’s one further problem with at least my copy of the raw phone-call logs.

The last entry for the log of calls to Chris’s cell phone is 1:50 p.m. on Sunday, June 24. This was the day when family, friends, and people at World Wrestling Entertainment were starting to get frantic, as Chris — who had already no-showed the Beaumont, Texas, show on Saturday — also appeared to be no-showing the Houston pay-per-view on Sunday.

There are, of course, many, many text and voice messages logged subsequent to 1:50 p.m. Sunday for Nancy Benoit’s cell phone and for the home answering machine. And there are texts for Chris’s cell. It stands to reason that there were some, or more likely many, additional voice calls.
Even if the voicemails to Chris’s cell were lost due to a technical glitch, I do not see how they could affect the simple raw call log. We have not one, but two missing pieces of phone evidence, and by far the two most important ones.

I emailed my contact at the sheriff’s office about this on Sunday night and again on Monday.

When I receive a response, I will report it.

The Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, in its February final report on the Chris Benoit case, released text messages to and from Benoit’s cell phone, many of which are revealing. It also released logs, with the times and phone numbers (and in many cases, the parties associated with those phone numbers) of calls to and from Chris’s cell, his wife Nancy’s cell, and their home phone. And as reported yesterday on this blog, the sheriff has belatedly released the audio of messages on the home answering machine, which for the most part are curiosities.

What about the actual audio of voicemail on Chris’s cell? He was a mobile globetrotter who did a super-majority of his communication on the cell. Exactly what was said by various people at various times would provide far more clues than the dry secondary phone-call log.

On April 8, Detective Ethon Harper explained to me: “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 texts or voice mails.”

On Monday of this week I followed up: “If this point is referenced in your report, please direct me to that passage. If not, please tell me who at Verizon told you that the texts or voicemails could not be produced due to an issue they had with their systems.”

When I receive a response, I will report it.

I turn with great reluctance to criticism of the investigation of the Chris Benoit double murder/suicide by the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office.

I respect law enforcement agencies and the difficult job they face day in and day out. We Monday morning quarterbacks have an advantage over the people charged with calling the audibles at the line of scrimmage on Sunday afternoon. Then, too, there’s the fact that the Benoit crime itself was open-and-shut, even though the surrounding narrative is less clear. Finally, the sheriff of a bedroom-community county with very little experience with a heinous crime of this nature was severely underresourced in comparison with the indomitable World Wrestling Entertainment propaganda machine.

Unfortunately, there are just too many vagaries in the sheriff’s report not to call attention to them at this point. I don’t expect the report to answer all the existential mysteries of why a man in Benoit’s position would go berserk. I do, however, think that the crime investigators had the burden of telling a reasonably coherent story of the events of June 22-24, 2007, and their aftermath, and that they’ve fallen short in significant respects. Benoit was a public figure and his family tragedy had public implications. Therefore, simply comforting the already comfortable at WWE — whether deliberately or accidentally — is not good enough.

In upcoming posts I’ll explore all the areas in which I’ve found the authorities’ account, so far, to be inadequate. Some have been mentioned before on the blog in passing; others, not yet at all.

But let’s start by once again reviewing the Chavo Guerrero/Scott James information. WWE contends that company executives didn’t know about Benoit’s final series of text messages to Guerrero and James — starting before 4 a.m. on Sunday, June 24 — until 12:30 p.m. on Monday, June 25. But does anyone really believe that Guerrero and James just sat on this information about their good friend (and a valued performer who was uncharacteristically no-showing important bookings) for more than a day? If not, who did they tell? And who did the people Guerrero and James told proceed to tell? And what was done as a result, both by individuals and by the corporation?

I’ve posed this set of questions to sheriff’s investigators in various ways (as I have to Guerrero and James themselves). The summary report released in February is silent on this. To date, the sheriff has not shared with me any further information or insights, or accepted my invitation to posit a theory.

A corollary issue concerns Scott James’ 9:26 a.m. Sunday text message to Benoit, “When do u land?”

In the wake of Benoit’s texts to him, which began four and a half hours earlier, it makes no sense at all for James to have been expecting Benoit to be on an Atlanta-to-Houston flight. (Let’s set aside for the moment that no evidence has surfaced, other than a vague claim in one version of the timeline, that Benoit ever was even booked on a Sunday morning flight.) Either James was hoping against hope that the worst hadn’t happened or … he was transmitting the 9:26 text for some other reason.

When I raised the James text in my conversation with Detective Ethon Harper on March 31, the detective said, “That is very interesting.” Nine days later Harper elaborated: “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.”

In more recent emails, reinforced by voicemail, I have reiterated my desire to publish an official explanation of the James text, as well as the Guerrero-James 30-plus-hour notification gap.

In addition to getting the new 911 audio today (see previous post), I received the CD from the Fayette County sheriff with the messages on Chris Benoit’s home answering machine. That CD had been inadvertently left out of the original open records release.

As soon as I’ve figured out all 23 messages as best I can, I’ll post a report. The task is formidable because of background noise — the recording appears to have been made right at the crime scene on June 25, 2007, and officers and others are heard talking about the chain of evidence and other matters, often making the answering machine audio even more unintellligible.

Let me say right away that this piece of evidence has very little forensic value. A couple of weeks ago, when I blogged Detective Ethon Harper’s summary of the Sunday messages from John Laurinaitis and his staff at the WWE Talent Relations department, I was bending over backward to be fair. I can confirm that there are indeed such messages, and I think they reflect a sincere concern for Benoit’s well-being and a lack of awareness that he and his wife and their son were already dead. But as the 911 audio and other evidence show, the company’s left hand didn’t seem to know what its right hand was doing all weekend — and perhaps that was by design.

I’m inclined not to upload the answering machine audio for public consumption because the only “highlights” are ghoulish, such as the messages of escalating concern from Nancy Benoit’s sister and parents.

I know people are going to be interested in the two oldest messages on the machine, which were left by Eddie Guerrero the day before he suffered a fatal heart attack in 2005. On those messages, Guerrero’s speech is slurred as he asks Chris to tell him when he plans to arrive in Minneapolis. I’m guessing that Chris and Nancy Benoit never erased these messages for purely sentimental reasons.

One final point about the overall category of Benoit telephone audio: Though the home answering machine proves to be a bit of a dud in terms of leads, Chris Benoit, unsurprisingly, used his cell phone far more than his home phone. So a huge missing piece of the Benoit puzzle remains the voicemail on his cell — which, like the home answering machine messages before today, has not been released. I expect to have a lot more to say about this in the coming days.

Irv Muchnick