WRESTLING BABYLON News

As noted earlier, the Stamford Police Department has denied my request for a copy of the complete videotape of a detective’s June 29, 2007, interview of Benoit Wikipedia hacker Matthew Greenberg. Today I informed Stamford PD of my intention to appeal to the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission. Under state law, I must appeal within 30 days.

Connecticut has a strong Freedom of Information Act, last amended in 2007, and an active public information community and infrastructure. Experts there whom I’ve consulted agree that there is no obvious reason why the Greenberg video should be exempt from public release, and specifically that the claim of an exemption of “voluntary statements” to police is specious. I believe the chance of a successful appeal is excellent.

Irv Muchnick

Thursday, July 17, 2008 11:37 AM

From: Irvin Muchnick

To: Rick Lindsey

Re: FW: Matthew Greenberg Video

Rick,

Thanks for [Detective Ethon Harper’s] update.

Let me try asking this question a different way. In a previous and somewhat analogous situation, you explained to me that while you conscientiously execute the open records law, you are “at the mercy of the client.” That is an apt description of your role, and before I go any further here, I want to reemphasize that I appreciate your open-records services and I am not challenging your professionalism or integrity. However, I do believe this current situation may be different. (May be. I’m not a lawyer.)

The open records administrator indeed is at the mercy of a client using sharp tactics. Perhaps that was the case with the Scott James “statement.” I might have been of the opinion that where the sheriff’s report reads, “In a statement, Scott James …” that had to mean that a dedicated and undisclosed document was lying around. But at the end of the day I can’t prove that “In a statement” wasn’t just an inelegant way of expressing, “Scott James stated that …”

But is that really what’s going on with the records from Stamford that were represented in the FCSO report as being on file in support of the investigation and conclusions therein?

One record — “a copy of the interview” — is now universally acknowledged to be a faithless copy, even though a good one is known to exist. The other record — “report on the consent search of Greenberg’s computer” — evidently never was received at all.

Under the circumstances, I would suggest that FCSO is obliged to go out and get the complete video and get the report on the computer search, not just say sorry, we don’t have them, after all. The alternative, in my view, makes a mockery of open records law, as the public that funded and relied on the findings of the Benoit report finds crucial backup not even lost due to accidental humor error, which is one thing, but caught in a seemingly willful limbo between Stamford and Fayetteville, which is quite another.

I’m curious as to your own views on this. Also, if anything similar has come up in your experience in the role of handling the sheriff’s open records responsibilities.

Thanks,
Irv

***

Friday, July 18, 2008 6:39 AM

From: Rick Lindsey

To: Irvin Muchnick

cc:  Ethon Harper

Re: FW: Matthew Greenberg Video

Irv – I appreciate your comments but disagree that the FCSO has any increased responsibilities under the open records law simply because some over-generalizations or imprecise word choices were made in the language of the report on irrelevant matters.  The portions of this case which you have focused upon are interesting but, in my opinion, have nothing to do with the crimes which were investigated.  Whatever WWE did or did not do has/had nothing to do with the clear fact that Chris Benoit murdered his wife and child then committed suicide.  The actions/inactions of WWE and whether it has any culpability for Chris’ actions are for the civil side of the law.  Taxpayer dollars should not be spent chasing down documents that have no relation to the role of the Sheriff’s Office in handling criminal matters and solving crimes.

In the many emails which you have sent to me over the past several months, I have not read anything which makes me question the integrity and thoroughness of the investigation and the quality of the work done by the detectives.  Their role was to determine who committed the crimes and to ensure that no third party was involved in the murders; their role was not to determine if WWE may have acted or not acted in a manner to control the publicity of the heinous crimes committed by one of its stars.  That angle of the story may be great for reading and reporting but it has nothing to do with the crimes committed and, therefore, is not one on which public dollars can be spent.

If you disagree with me, and you very well might, I invite you to file an action in the local courts.  If a judge agrees with you, I will instruct my client to incur the expense of obtaining these records for you.  Until that time, I will not do so. You can send me as many emails as you wish, splash my name on the internet, question my truthfulness, question the quality of the investigation and argue with me until you can write no more, but I will not change my position on this.  I am not being stubborn (maybe I am), but one of my obligations as the Sheriff’s legal counsel is to ensure that taxpayer money is not spent on matters which are not related to the proper role of the Sheriff’s Office.

By copying Ethon on this email, I am asking him to forward this to his superiors and to Sheriff Johnson, if Ethon’s boss desires, so that you will know the position stated in this email is and has been the position taken by the FCSO on all such matters.  One of my many responsibilities as legal counsel to the Sheriff is to ensure proper and consistent responses to all open records requests.  I am not here to persuade the FCSO to spend money by chasing down records which they do not have and which had no bearing on the criminal investigation.

When and if we receive the report/video from Connecticut, I will send that to you.

If you print this response on your internet blog or anywhere else, please print the entire email and do not edit.

Rick

***

Friday, July 17, 2008 8:11 AM

From: Irvin Muchnick

To: Rick Lindsey

cc: Ethon Harper

Re: FW: Matthew Greenberg Video

Rick,

Thanks for your email. I probably will publish it on my blog, and if so I assure you that it will be published in its entirety. (If I use your statements in my book, which does not have a universe of infinite editorial space, I more likely will be quoting parts of it, but I promise to do so faithfully and in context.)

You have clarified whether FCSO is proactively seeking to make its files whole by acquiring the Greenberg video from Stamford PD. The answer is no. I will not be bothering you with that particular one again.

I realize that we disagree about my review of the criminal investigation. I have drawn no conclusions, except for the one on which we do agree: that Chris Benoit did it. Though taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on irrelevant investigative tangents, it is reasonable to wonder in this case whether FCSO expended taxpayer dollars to close off obviously relevant ones. I suspect that the preponderance of legal experts would agree with me that in the circumstances here, a 30-hour gap between the murderer’s final communications with the outside world and the discovery of the bodies should be investigated thoroughly. There are, after all, laws on the book requiring the reporting of crimes and prohibiting misprision. This is not to assert that anyone committed misprision. It is merely to make the point — which I think is awfully hard to dispute — that FCSO chose not to go there and chose to create a record aggressively reflecting that bias.

Best,
Irv

No one is saying that Matt Greenberg murdered Chris, Nancy, or Daniel Benoit, or had prior knowledge of the crimes.

But that doesn’t mean that the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office’s barebones and conclusory hearsay – “Greenberg is ‘harmless’” – should stand as the final public word on the matter. I say this for at least four reasons.

First, Greenberg resides in Stamford, the headquarters of World Wrestling Entertainment. In his anonymous Wikipedia apology, he said, “I am not connected to WWE or Benoit in anyway [sic].” But the police record so far does not show that he was questioned about this assertion in any depth.

Second and more intriguingly, Greenberg had been “warned several times in the past for vandalizing and posting erroneous information on Wikipedia,” according to the online journalist Corey Spring. On the Wiki entry for actress and former wrestling personality Stacy Kiebler, Greenberg reportedly inserted the edit, “People want to @!$%# her in her lovely @!$%# and whip her ass til the dawn of day. Many people fantasize about ramming their cocks up her @!$%#.”

On the Wiki page for basketball player Ron Artest, according to Spring, Greenberg was responsible for adding, “Artest is a piece of @!$%# nigger!!!!!!!”

Other reports last year had Greenberg and a circle of his friends at UConn vandalizing the Wiki information for Naugatuck, Connecticut; among other things, they made one of the friends the city’s mayor.

But the real kicker is that, amidst this sophomoric behavior, Greenberg’s unauthorized Wikipedia edits were said to include one random act of kindness: He hacked into the bio of Chavo Guerrero and removed ethnic slurs. And Guerrero was one of the two recipients of Benoit’s final text messages – some 19 or 20 hours before Greenberg edited Benoit’s Wiki page to say that he had missed the pay-per-view because his wife died. So the question naturally arises: Is Guerrero a friend or acquaintance of Greenberg’s?

Third, that 20-hour gap raises the possibility that no matter how inadvertent Greenberg’s own role might have been, the frenzy of online gossip surrounding Benoit’s no-show in Houston that night might have contained elements of conscious truth – because an insider told it to someone who told it to someone, who proceeded to feed it through the new-tech information food chain of online discussion boards and chat rooms.

Fourth, major news media, like the cops, were guilty of misleading the public in their hasty dismissal of the Wikipedia chunk of the Benoit story. I’ll have more to say about this aspect of my investigation down the road.

Irv Muchnick

Matthew T. Greenberg apologized anonymously at Wikipedia, but at the time he was not publicly identified as the Benoit hacker. On July 3, 2007, an article in the Stamford Advocate reported on the police interrogation; the story, which noted that the interview had been videotaped, did not name him.

Greenberg was named for the first time in the Fayette County sheriff’s February 2008 report closing the Benoit investigation. The case summary was coordinated and authored by Detective Ethon Harper. The reference to Greenberg, however, is buried in a single paragraph of a “case supplemental” by Detective Joshua Shelton. Here is what Shelton wrote about the matter in its entirety (except for Greenberg’s address, whose deletion is noted by ellipses below):

During the week of June 24, 2007 and June 30, 2007, it was reported in the news that news of Nancy Benoit’s death was reported on the website Wikipedia.com. I contacted Sandy Ordonez at Wikipedia and she advised me that on June 25, 2007 at 12:01AM EDT, an edit was made to the Chris Benoit wikipedia page stating that Benoit missed the WWE Vengeance event due to the death of Nancy Benoit. The IP address that was issued to the person that made the change was a CSC Holdings Inc IP address: 69.120.111.23. It was also found that on June 29, 2007 the same IP address made further edits on the Wikipedia website expressing remorse for posting the news of Nancy Benoit’s death. The user was later identified as Matthew T. Greenberg of … Greenberg’s apology included the fact that his speculation was a “terrible coincidence”. I contacted Det. Tim Dolan of the Stamford, CT police department and requested that he interview Matthew Greenberg about his knowledge of the murders. Det. Tim Dolan informed me after the interview that Matthew was simply speculating as to the reason Benoit missed the event and described Greenberg as “harmless”. A copy of the interview was sent to the Sheriff’s Office and is included in the case file. Det. Dolan also conducted a consent search on Greenberg’s computer and the report from that search is attached to this supplemental.

***

Last month I filed an open records request with the sheriff for “the interview … included in the case file” and the report from the “consent search on Greenberg’s computer … attached to this supplemental.” For now, let’s focus on the interview. Here, in chronological order, are all of Fayette County’s email responses to me:

JUNE 17. Sheriff’s attorney Rick Lindsey: “I need to forward this email to Ethon as I have no idea what you are writing about.”

JUNE 19. Lindsey: “Let me check on the status.”

JUNE 23. Lindsey: “I’m checking.”

JUNE 24. Lindsey: “Still waiting for the video. As soon as I have it, I’ll alert you.”

JUNE 25. Lindsey: “As I understand it, the Sheriff does not have a copy but is getting it from the law enforcement agency which conducted the interview. I have no doubt it is open records.”

JUNE 26. Lindsey: “The Sheriff is still waiting on those. As soon as we have them, I will get to you.”

JUNE 27. Lindsey: “It was not lost on this end. If I understand what happened, this task (of reviewing the videotape) was delegated by Ethon to another detective. Ethon believed that the review was done when, I believe, the other detective simply discussed the results of the interview with the law enforcement agent in Conn and did not actually view the tape. To my knowledge, FCSO never had possession of the videotape. I have tried to run this down for you since you sent me the request. Ethon is trying to get the tape for you. I’ll let you know as soon as I know. As you noted, we don’t live in a perfect world and mistakes are made. Let me see if we can get this corrected.”

JULY 1. Detective Harper (via 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. I used Det. Shelton’s summary for my report. Det. Shelton spoke directly to Det. Dolan and Matt Greenberg and had first hand knowledge from both perspectives.”

JULY 2. Lindsey (in response to my request for the partial video on hand): “It’s subject to open records and I’ll let Ethon respond as to the date he can get it to me.”

JULY 3. Lindsey: “Let me see when the video will be delivered to my office. That is the best I can do. Also, as I understand the situation, the video is basically worthless. I’ll write to Ethon now and see what I can find out.”

JULY 3. Lindsey (in response to my message that I would decide for myself whether the video was worthless): “I’m not basing my response to your open records request on the worth of the tape; I simply was making a statement that will hopefully keep the matter in perspective. While I’ve not seen it, from all that I have heard it is not the proverbial smoking gun.”

***

I also filed an open records request for the complete video from Stamford PD.

On July 7, Stamford Captain Richard Conklin left me this voice message: “From what I understand, the dupe that we made and sent down south of our video cut off for some reason after some time. But our original is OK. I think they’ve requested a copy of that.”

I asked Lindsey and Harper if they could confirm what Conklin told me. Lindsey replied, “No, I cannot confirm that statement.”

I asked Lindsey and Harper, “What would be the explanation for not having bothered to ask Stamford for a good complete copy of the video at the time of the original investigation?” Lindsey replied, “I have no idea.”

On July 9, Stamford Captain Tom Wuennemann called to tell me that the videotape could not be released to me because Connecticut open records law exempts “voluntary statements.” However, he said a copy of Detective Dolan’s report, summarizing and interpreting the interview, would be sent to me.

On July 15, Lindsey wrote me, “To my knowledge, the FCSO does not have a complete interview. Ethon – please confirm.”

***

Some observations:

* The statement in Detective Shelton’s supplemental, “A copy of the interview was sent to the Sheriff’s Office and is included in the case file,” is misleading at best.

* The statement by Detective Harper that “there is no recorded interview” is unambiguously untrue. It is not even true that there is no recorded interview on hand in Fayette County. There is a partial recorded interview on hand in Fayette County and a complete recorded interview on hand in Stamford.

* Harper said Shelton spoke directly to Greenberg. If true, that is nowhere reflected in Shelton’s supplemental.

* I am further researching Stamford Captain Wuennemann’s explanation of Connecticut law. If legal experts there disagree with it, I will further pursue access to the complete interview through that avenue.

* Finally, bear in mind that this is not the first example of how the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office has played fast and loose with disclosures that would shed further light on WWE’s Benoit timeline.

- This blog has revealed that the sheriff’s logs of phone calls and voice and text messages to and from the Benoits were doctored, possibly with a view toward diverting attention from the implications of what the complete raw records show.

- Something similarly fishy is going on with the testimony of final-text recipient Scott James (Armstrong). On page 27 of the case summary, Harper writes, “In a statement made by Scott James …” When pressed for a copy of the statement, Harper contended that he was merely referring to something he was told Scott had said to another detective; Harper maintained that he was not referring to a dedicated document that could more intuitively be called a “statement” in this context.

Irv Muchnick

On June 29, 2007, Matthew T. Greenberg was interviewed on videotape by Detective Tim Dolan in an interrogation room at the Stamford Police Department.

The then-19-year-old Stamford resident, on summer break following his freshman year at the University of Connecticut, had been identified as the computer hacker who had made an unauthorized edit of Chris Benoit’s biography at Wikipedia, sending the media into a frenzy. At 12:01 a.m. on June 25 – nearly a full day after Benoit sent his farewell text messages to Chavo Guerrero and Scott James (Armstrong), and more than 14 hours before the bodies of Benoit, his wife Nancy, and their son Daniel were found – Greenberg inserted a note at Wikipedia that Benoit had missed the June 24 wrestling show in Houston because his wife had died.

A year later I have obtained a copy of just the first three minutes of the Stamford police grilling of Greenberg.

In this post, I will transcribe the pertinent content of the video snippet.

In the next post, I will review how the Fayette County and Stamford authorities are processing my public information requests in this matter.

In the third and final post of this series, I will explain why solving the mystery of World Wrestling Entertainment’s timeline of events following the Benoit double murder/suicide in Georgia requires more information about Greenberg’s role, or non-role, than we currently have.

***

The video opens with Greenberg and his father sitting in the interrogation room. The ticking clock on the wall reads 1:35.

Detective Dolan enters the room and closes the door. Dolan directs the elder Greenberg to sit out of camera range, and points out the camera to Matt Greenberg and positions him facing it.

Matt Greenberg gives his date of birth, Stamford address, home and cell phone numbers, and summer employer.

DOLAN: You know why you’re here, why we asked you to come down.

GREENBERG: Yeah.

DOLAN: OK. Why don’t you tell me …

GREENBERG: … what happened. OK.

DOLAN: First, are you a wrestling fan?

GREENBERG: Yeah.

DOLAN: OK. A big one?

GREENBERG: Well, pretty big.

DOLAN: OK. Go on.

GREENBERG: OK. Well over, like, last weekend, the wrestler Benoit, like he, there was like rumors going on, cause he missed the pay-per-view and like his scheduled dates, which he never does, and I was reading rumors and speculation online.

DOLAN: Where online?

GREENBERG: Um, like on forums, I forgot the exact, like sites. Um, but I was like.

DOLAN: OK, hold on. On forums?

GREENBERG: Yeah.

DOLAN: OK. In any chat rooms?

GREENBERG: No, no chat rooms. I was like, I was just reading about it and some rumors like came up and I just –

DOLAN: And what were the rumors?

GREENBERG: That his, um, that like his family was sick or someone maybe died, like his wife perhaps, because he missed the pay-per-view.

DOLAN: OK. And when was that?

GREENBERG: Uh, Sunday.

DOLAN: Around what time Sunday, roughly?

GREENBERG: It was like at night, maybe between 10 and 12ish, before the post.

***

At that point, the video abruptly goes blank. This snippet is a copy of the tape that the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office received from the Stamford Police Department. According to Stamford, a good original of the complete interrogation is on hand there.

In recent weeks I have sent four unanswered email messages to Greenberg at an apparently current email address. Yesterday I also left a voicemail on his cell phone.

Anyone with tips is invited to contact me at tips@muchnick.net.

Irv Muchnick

More information on the role, or non-role, of Matthew T. Greenberg, the now-iconic “Benoit Wikipedia hacker,” is at hand.

Followers of this blog already know the “dog ate my homework” background of this tangential, but nevertheless important, record. (See here, here, here, and here.) To be sure, getting to the bottom of the Wikipedia affair will not alter the undisputed conclusion that Chris Benoit alone murdered his wife Nancy and their son Daniel before killing himself across the weekend of June 22-24, 2007. However, my review of the official investigation hovers over an unmistakable pattern: the eagerness of authorities to run as fast as they can from the implications of rich and powerful World Wrestling Entertainment’s timeline of the aftermath of the crimes. That is where the story of the Stamford Police Department interrogation of Greenberg — and the transmission of that information to the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia — gets interesting.

As another week winds down, this is where things stand:

* The office of Rick Lindsey, attorney for the Fayette County sheriff, has told me that a copy of the defective copy of the video that it received from Stamford PD (which cut off shortly after it starts) is en route to me in the mail.

* On Wednesday, Captain Richard Conklin of Stamford PD told me that a good duplicate of the complete interview was in the process of being prepared and sent to Fayette County.

* On Thursday, Captain Tom Wuennemann of Stamford PD told me that a copy of the written report of the Greenberg interview was being mailed directly to me.

* Greenberg himself has not responded to emails dated June 16, June 20, and July 8. The emails have not bounced, so I believe the address I am using is good. A recently listed home phone number under Greenberg, at the same address listed in the Fayette County account of the interview of him, is no good. A recently listed business phone number under Greenberg at the same address is also no good.

* I did succeed in reaching by email one of the circle of Greenberg’s college friends who were identified in reports last summer as having been involved in a pattern of vandalism of Wikipedia content. The friend wrote back to me, “I am willing to help set the story straight under one condition: I do not want my name, or the names of any of my friends involved in the unfortunate coincidence on wikipedia all over the news.” I responded that I would promise to exercise discretion with respect to people who could be proven to be innocent bystanders in the Wikipedia affair, but could promise nothing more; as for Greenberg himself, his name is already in the public record through the Fayette County sheriff’s report.

Irv Muchnick

The saga of the missing videotaped interview of Benoit Wikipedia hacker Matthew Greenberg by a Stamford police detective is either a comedy of errors or something of deeper and not yet fathomed intrigue. (See previous posts on this topic now dating back nearly a month.)

At this point all I can tell you is that the attorney for the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, Rick Lindsey, told me last Thursday that he had finally been given the video on hand there and was mailing me a copy. But that video is worthless, according to Detective Ethon Harper, who said it “cuts out after just a couple of minutes, so there is no recorded interview.”

Today I got this voice message from Captain Richard Conklin of the Stamford Police Department: “From what I understand, the dupe that we made and sent down south of our video cut off for some reason after some time. But our original is OK. I think they’ve requested another copy of that.”

Fayette County attorney Lindsey told me he could not confirm what Conklin said. When I asked, “What would be the explanation for not having bothered to ask Stamford for a good complete copy of the video at the time of the original investigation?”, Lindsey replied, “I have no idea.”

Detective Harper was separately asked the same two questions. He has not responded.

Irv Muchnick

I’m waiting for the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office to send me the video it says it received of the Stamford Police Department’s interrogation last summer of Matthew T. Greenberg, the hacker who made an eerily accurate edit of Chris Benoit’s Wikipedia bio some 14 hours before the Benoit family’s three dead bodies were discovered.

For the full background, see “Benoit and Wikipedia (Yes, Again),” June 17, http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/06/17/benoit-and-wikipedia-yes-again/.

The Greenberg video “is subject to open records,” sheriff’s attorney Rick Lindsey reconfirmed to me this week, adding: “I’ll let [Detective] Ethon [Harper] respond as to the date he can get it to [Lindsey for forwarding to public information applicants].”

In three weeks of responses so far to my request for the video, sheriff’s officers have added yet another chapter to an unfortunate legacy of obfuscation in the Benoit double homicide/suicide investigation.

A report by Detective Josh Shelton, published as a “supplemental” to Harper’s February 2008 case summary, tosses off the Wikipedia angle in a cluster of words as terse as they are ill-chosen. Shelton says “a copy of the interview” of Greenberg is “included in the case file.” Last July the Stamford Advocate reported that the interview of the then-unnamed hacker was on videotape. The existence of the video was verified in my own recent conversation with Captain Richard Conklin of the Stamford PD.

“Would be glad to help,” Shelton emailed me on June 12 when I requested to talk to him about the Wikipedia probe.

The next day Shelton, while referring me to sheriff’s attorney Lindsey, said, “I am working on collecting these items.” (I requested both the Greenberg video and a report on a search of his computer by the Stamford PD, which Shelton’s supplemental erroneously says is “attached.”)

On June 24 attorney Lindsey emailed me, “Still waiting for the video.”

On June 25 Lindsey wrote, “As I understand it the Sheriff does not have a copy but is getting it from the law enforcement agency which conducted the interview.”

On June 26 Lindsey