Tantalizing new information provided to me Tuesday by Fayette County law enforcement authorities does something that hasn’t happened in a while in my review of their investigation: it tilts the evidence more toward supporting certain aspects of World Wrestling Entertainment’s version of the events of Sunday, June 24, 2007, the day Chris Benoit killed himself.Later, when I have the information in its complete form, I will publish it here. That will take a week or more. At that time I also will be in a position to explain why the information wasn’t available until just now.
In a nutshell:
I was led to some of the specific content of some of the messages left on the Benoit home telephone answering machine. To date, public records released by the sheriff’s office have included only summary logs: phone numbers (and in some cases names and entities associated with those numbers), and times of calls and their duration. The only actual content was in the text messages sent to and from Chris and Nancy’s cell phones.
From the additional – though still partial – answering machine message information, I now know that WWE did, indeed, make persistent and concerned calls to Benoit on Sunday evening and even into Monday morning. A number of the calls originated with WWE’s director of talent relations, John Laurinaitis, and his assistant. (Laurinaitis is the ex-wrestler “Johnny Ace”; his brother Joe was Animal of the Road Warriors.)
Thus, Laurinaitis, a top-tier company executive – and not Fit Finlay or Dean Malenko, as I’d earlier speculated – seems to be the person from the Talent Relations department referred to in WWE’s account of the weekend’s events. If verified by other evidence (which I consider likely), that piece of the puzzle would fit together what I’ve been characterizing as dissonant timelines – the one released by WWE on June 26 (http://corporate.wwe.com/news/2007/2007_06_26_2.jsp), and the one published in the New York Daily News the next day (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/06/27/2007-06-27_chris_benoit_timeline-2.html). At the end of the day, the latter could just be a more detailed version of the former.
In both timelines, the Talent Relations person tells Benoit to forget about showing up for the WWE Beaumont, Texas, show on Saturday night and, instead, concentrate on making it to the “Vengeance” pay-per-view in Houston on Sunday night.
An ambiguity remains, however, as to whether Benoit was expected to board a Saturday night Atlanta-to-Houston flight (Daily News timeline) or a Sunday morning flight (WWE timeline). We know all about the Saturday night flight – phone logs and Delta Airlines’ electronic records establish that Benoit booked himself onto it after missing Delta’s Saturday morning flight out of Atlanta. But we know nothing about a Sunday morning flight except for WWE’s vague reference to it.
“There may have been a flight scheduled for Sunday, but that never came up in the homicide investigation,” Detective Ethon Harper told me. “If the WWE scheduled the flight for him then they would be the best source for proof of the flight.”
So I again will ask WWE for details on the Sunday flight. I also will request that the company make Laurinaitis available for an interview.
(I don’t entirely understand why homicide investigators were so passive about this fundamental timeline element. A decent guess is that the answer lies in the words of Sheriff Tate to Atticus Finch near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird: “Let the dead bury the dead.” At a certain point, law enforcement doesn’t expend resources running down every single thread of the subsequent PR and spin, even when that is an important subject in and of itself.)
There remain, in my mind, some whopper open questions. Two examples:
· What’s the deal with Scott James’ 9:26 a.m. Sunday text message to Benoit, “When do u land?” “The biggest point we took from the message is that it was unanswered,” Detective Harper told me. “That helped with the timeline of when Chris died.” Yes, but what about the fact that James had already received, hours earlier, text messages from Benoit stating and restating his address in Fayetteville and the information that the dogs were in the enclosed area by the pool and the side door to the garage was open? “Interesting,” Harper conceded.
· When did both James and Chavo Guerrero start telling others about those early Sunday morning texts from Benoit? And whom did they tell? Though Laurinaitis apparently wasn’t told, it’s simply unbelievable that James and Guerrero told no one else at all until 12:30 p.m. Monday, when the WWE timeline says company executives were informed. “Kayfabing” the public is one thing; not sharing with their bosses life-and-death information about a superstar who was booked to win the ECW championship on a pay-per-view is another.