ARCHIVE 5/2/08: Yo, Channel 2/Atlanta — Was the Benoit Story Your Bright Idea?

Yo, Channel 2/Atlanta — Was the Benoit Story Your Bright Idea?

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Yesterday I emailed Tom Regan, the WSB-TV, Channel 2/Atlanta reporter and weekend anchor who did a story Wednesday with some of the 23 messages left on Chris Benoit’s answering machine — which in turn were re-recorded by sheriff’s investigators at the crime scene on June 25, 2007.

The sheriff had recently added a CD of this audio to the open records file released in February. I listened to the CD last week and noted little of significance, except for an historical artifact: two messages left by Benoit’s friend and fellow wrestling great, Eddie Guerrero, in November 2005, the day before he died. I informed blog readers that I didn’t think uploading the audio to my website would serve any useful purpose.

Regan and his colleagues at Channel 2 obviously had a different take. I suggest their replay of a terminably cute message from 7-year-old Daniel Benoit — left some indeterminate amount of time before his father murdered him — was exploitation of lowest-common-denominator “if it bleeds it leads” principles. Channel 2 didn’t even mention the Eddie Guerrero messages, probably because they didn’t know who Eddie Guerrero was.

My email to Regan yesterday had questions about this process. Regan immediately emailed back wondering if I were available for “an exclusive interview.” I said yes. Regan then fell silent.

I’m as much of a media hound as the next guy. But if the Channel 2 folks think a sop to my vanity is a substitute for answers to questions that interest readers of this blog, they are mistaken. I reiterate the text of my Thursday email:

Dear Mr. Regan:

I saw your report last night on the Benoit answering machine messages. I am writing a book about the case. For full background on my work, see the links below.

At my blog, http://muchnick.net/babylon, I have been focusing for some time on the phone evidence. The home answering machine messages, which were “inadvertently” left out of the original open records release, have titillating nuggets, to be sure, and you played some of them. But the real story is the missing voicemail from Chris Benoit’s cell phone, and the arbitrary cutoff of the log of them in the addenda to the Fayette County sheriff’s February report closing the case.

My questions to you:

1. Are you aware of all this background?

2. Did you get the home answering message CD in a routine mailing from the Sheriff’s Office explaining and correcting the lapse to everyone who had earlier applied for the complete file of open records? Or was the CD leaked just to you as a way to plant this new story with a handful of calls that shed no real light on the timeline of that June 2007 weekend?

3. Are you pursuing the cell phone story?

I’ll follow up by phone.

Thanks,

Irv Muchnick