Some first thoughts on the audio evidence collected in the previous post, “Still More Benoit 911: WWE Security Chief Sounds Truly Clueless” (http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/05/14/still-more-benoit-911-wwe-security-chief-sounds-truly-clueless):
* I don’t care what Dennis Fagan’s title is — he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Obviously, he has not talked in depth with Scott James (Armstrong) and Chavo Guerrero, recipients of Chris Benoit’s Sunday morning text messages, and may not have talked to either one at all prior to touching base with Guerrero just before Call 4, at 2:13 p.m. Fagan sounds genuinely in the dark about whatever has happened inside the Benoit home, and as late as 4:19 p.m. perhaps even unaware that there are three dead bodies there. One explanation could be real confusion in the WWE bureaucracy. A far likelier explanation, I think, is that he was assigned to be the 911 liaison but was not briefed thoroughly or at all — a move that would give the company flexibility with public relations tactics and timelines. In that Call 4, Fagan says, “They don’t seem to be very worried”: very, very, very odd remark. [Correction: Fagan actually says, “They all seem to be very worried.”]
* Scott James is absolutely key to the unraveling of this mystery, even more important than Guerrero, because James is the one who texted back to Benoit at 9:26 a.m. Sunday, “What time do u land?” I will be reporting more shortly on a possible statement to the sheriff’s investigators by James that has still not emerged, but should. It is absolutely unacceptable if he was not interviewed in detail about both Chris’s texts and his own, and what they meant to him. And like Guerrero, he has to give a better explanation — better that is, than none at all, which is what we have in the current sheriff’s record — of the 30-hour gap between Chris’s texts and the purported knowledge of them by WWE executives.
* I’m guessing that there was a cell of “superior” information about the double homicide/suicide in Canada, and that the source was the Mountie who talked to the Fayette County cops while on the mission of comforting Chris’s distraught mother, Margaret Benoit. Perhaps the Canadian constable told WWE’s head of Canadian operations, Carl DeMarco, who ran with the information somewhat harder and faster than others. The 911 evidence does support the idea that Fayette County law enforcement was not talking early and aggressively about the obvious and inevitable finding of murder-suicide.
* WWE still has a ton of explaining to do about its “between 4:00 and 5:00″ decision to do the Benoit tribute. None of the wrestlers, or maybe only James and Guerrero, knew, but as Dave Meltzer has concluded, the decision-makers knew.
* When did Lieutenant Pope and WWE vice president Hering talk directly? And what did they talk about? That’s the major remaining question for the Monday timeline. And that still leaves a whole lot of stuff to figure out about Saturday and Sunday.
Irv Muchnick