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