My probe of the mystery of Chris Benoit’s missing cell phone voicemail – which I think leads to overall credibility questions about the closing report on the Benoit double murder/suicide by the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office – took me to an expert in the field, Kevin Ripa of Computer Evidence Recovery, a firm specializing in information technology investigations and data recovery.
(Interesting side note: the company, http://www.computerpi.com, is based in Calgary. Not only that – Ripa says he has done work for the Hart family.)
Without getting into all the specifics, Ripa agreed with me that there is reason to question the conclusion of the sheriff that the Benoit voicemail is irretrievably lost.
Ripa said: “Assuming that Verizon told the police investigators that there was a system error, the question I would raise is, ‘What about the backup system?’ In my experience, lawyers and even law enforcement often don’t get the data they need because they don’t ask for it the right way. If Benoit’s voicemail was truly missing for good, that is a serious problem that would have affected thousands of other customers, as well. Verizon surely could have been pressed further on this point, instead of accepting its initial answer and simply dropping the goal of acquiring that piece of the record.”
This is not a story that will be going away soon.
Irv Muchnick