ARCHIVE 4/28/08: Muchnick Email/Fax to Fayette County Sheriff Randall Johnson

Muchnick Email/Fax to Fayette County Sheriff Randall Johnson

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Below is the text of the email sent earlier today to Fayette County Sheriff Randall Johnson. It was copied to Detective Ethon Harper, attorney Richard Lindsey, and the sheriff’s public information officer, Lieutenant Belinda McCastle.

BY EMAIL AND FAX

Sheriff Johnson:

I am reporting on my blog about what increasingly appears to be missing evidence in the Benoit case. I have focused on the absence of voicemail audio from Chris Benoit’s cell phone and on your investigative report’s cutoff of the log of phone calls at 1:50 p.m. on June 24, 2007, despite the fact that Verizon Wireless produced, per your subpoena, transactional data through June 26, 2007.

In an April 5 email, I wrote to Detective Harper, “Your report includes a printout of the text messages. Is it also technically possible to retrieve audio of the incoming voicemail messages? If so, was a demand for voicemail audio included in any of the 14 categories of the subpoena to Verizon? And did Verizon provide it? If audio of voicemail is not in the sheriff’s records in this case, I would like to find out why. If such records do exist, I would like to study them.”

On April 8, Detective Harper responded, “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 text or voice mails.”

He did not answer the question of whether a demand for voicemail audio was included in the Verizon subpoena. In my reading, Detective Harper’s 52-page Case Summary – including the section headed VERIZON PHONE INFORMATION at pages 24-28 – does not say anything about a request for and failure to acquire voicemail audio. Indeed, the report does not even mention cell phone voicemail. (The report does state, “Verizon Wireless advised they experienced a problem with their equipment which made them unable to produce any text message details,” and goes on to explain how your Detective Shelton proceeded to download an open-source software called BitPim, which allowed him to access the text messages on both Chris and Nancy Benoit’s cell phones.)

I have emailed a media contact for Verizon and am pursuing further answers at that end. In the meantime I request your response to the following questions:

1. Did the subpoena to Verizon demand voicemail audio? If so, who in the company responded and what was the response, and in what form was that communication?

2. In the account by your office, you worked around a technical problem with the text messaging by finding a way, independent of Verizon, to hack into the cell phones. Was a similar solution contemplated for voice messages? If so, was such a solution attempted and what was the result? If not, why not?

3. What was the disposition of the Chris and Nancy Benoit cell phones themselves? Are they still in the custody of the Sheriff’s Office?

4. In an email last Friday, attorney Rick Lindsey advised me that my question about the 1:50 p.m. 6/24/07 cutoff of your Chris Benoit cell phone log – which, in turn, had been refined from the crude data provided by Verizon – is not an open-records question. It is, however, most certainly a critical question with respect to the integrity of your Benoit investigation. Therefore, I would appreciate your addressing it.

Thank you, Irv Muchnick