ARCHIVE 5/5/08: Benoit Voicemail Scandal — Complete Rundown

Benoit Voicemail Scandal – Complete Rundown

Monday, May 5th, 2008

It’s just about time to move on to fresher aspects of the Chris Benoit investigation. But first let’s fully review the scandal of the missing cell phone voicemail. No one out there – not Fayette County officials, not the Atlanta area media, not wrestling newsletters and news websites – should have the excuse that they don’t know what this is about.

On April 5 I emailed Detective Ethon Harper of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office with various Benoit questions. Through his public information officer, Sheriff Randall Johnson had told me that Harper would be my contact for such questions. Among them was a query about voicemail from Chris Benoit’s cell. “Your report includes a printout of the text messages,” I said in my email. “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.”

Three days later the detective 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.”

(Bullfeathers. See what a voicemail forensics specialist had to say about this in “Benoit Lost Voicemail Is Fishy: Evidence Expert,” http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/05/04/benoit-lost-voicemail-is-fishy-evidence-expert.)

On April 20 I had a related question for Harper: “My copy of the log of calls at Chris Benoit’s cell phone ends at No. 130, Sunday 6/24 at 13:54:34. It has just occurred to me: There are numerous text messages, as well as calls to the home phone answering machine, after this time. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that concerned friends and family would also continue to be leaving voice messages on Chris’s cell? Am I missing a continuation of the log?”

Detective Harper has not responded at all to this question. Nor has Sheriff Johnson. Nor has District Attorney Scott Ballard. All three were solicited for answers in redundant faxes, emails, and voice messages. Richard P. Lindsey, the attorney handling open records requests for the Sheriff’s Office, told me they are not obliged to answer the question because it is not an open records request. Well, I don’t think they should answer the question because I think it is an open records request. I think they should answer the question because it is a damn good question.

It became an even better question when I closely examined the information already in the hands of the investigators about additional calls to the cell phone. Verizon Wireless had been asked to supply transactional data for all calls through Tuesday, June 26, and had complied. But in creating their own log interpreting those calls, sheriff’s investigators had consciously and arbitrarily chosen to ignore the last 60+ calls on the raw list. Many of them were from phone numbers that did not turn up elsewhere in the investigation. Further, many were in the 23-hour period between the end of the explanatory log and the first of World Wrestling Entertainment’s three calls the next day to 911.

To say that this gap raised flags is an understatement. Announcing the gap to the world in large capital letters seemed even more appropriate when I noticed that the cell phone voicemail retrieval problem (the subject, above, of a separate but related question-and-answer) was not even mentioned in Detective Harper’s 52-page case summary.

*****

To cap things off, the Sheriff’s Office also spontaneously told me on April 8, without any prompting on my part, that it had mistakenly failed to include in the open records file a recording of the 23 messages found on the Benoit home phone answering machine. “That is completely my fault,” Harper said.

Two weeks later I received that CD and reported its contents on this blog. (See “Benoit’s Home Answering Machine Still Had Eddie Guerrero’s Last Messages,” http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/04/23/benoits-home-answering-machine-still-had-eddie-guerreros-last-messages.)

The same CD was obtained by Atlanta’s WSB-TV, Channel 2. Reporter Tom Regan did a story based on them, highlighting a message left at some point – for all we know, days, weeks, or even months prior to his murder – by 7-year-old Daniel Benoit.

As is typical of far too much TV news, the WSB story had no useful context or purpose; it simply passed along audiovisual evidence dropped into its lap, for the same reason Mallory climbed Everest – because it was there. (Regan made no reference to a controversy over missing cell phone voicemail, almost certainly because he was unaware of it.)

So …

Are Fayette County officials covering up evidence embarrassing to WWE? Perhaps not only embarrassing, but also highlighting inaccuracies in the company’s published timeline of its activities over that tragic weekend?

Did WSB-TV just happen upon the answering machine CD audio because the station had previously requested the complete file? Or did someone involved in the sheriff’s investigation leak it to Channel 2 and Regan? The motivation for the sheriff would have been to appear to be acting openly and proactively to correct a gap in the public files, when the real agenda was to throw everyone off the scent of a much more substantive and suspicious problem.

I’ve asked Sheriff Johnson directly (see “Muchnick Email/Fax to Fayette County Sheriff Randall Johnson,” http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/04/28/muchnick-emailfax-to-fayette-county-sheriff-randall-johnson). No response.

I’ve asked District Attorney Ballard (see “Benoit Cell Phone Questions Forwarded to District Attorney,” http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/04/30/benoit-cell-phone-questions-forwarded-to-district-attorney). No response.

I’ve asked WSB’s Regan (see “Yo, Channel 2/Atlanta – Was the Benoit Story Your Bright Idea?”, http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/05/02/yo-channel-2atlanta-was-the-benoit-story-your-bright-idea). No response.

I’ve asked WSB news director Marian Pittman (see http://muchnick.net/WSB.pdf). There are also multiple voicemail messages to both Regan and Pittman. No response.

Irv Muchnick