Yet more information uncovered from the Verizon Wireless records of Chris Benoit’s cell phone casts the gravest doubts yet on the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office account of missing voicemail and text messages.
The contradictions in the sheriff’s report and in lead investigator Detective Ethon Harper’s statements to me are now so numerous and multi-layered that it is almost impossible not to conclude that the authorities were deliberately covering something up. What they were covering up and why could only be guessed at this point.
As noted previously, the sheriff said that a technical problem prevented the retrieval of text messages from Verizon but that investigators found a way to get them by hacking into both Chris and Nancy’s phones. The report is silent on voice messages, but Harper told me that retrieval of voicemail, too, was stymied by a Verizon system issue. Harper did not respond to the questions of why he hadn’t said anything about voicemail problems in his report, or whether a workaround recovery for voicemail, like that for text messages, was ever considered or attempted.
And the sheriff last month released audio of Benoit home answering machine messages with the explanation that they had been “inadvertently” omitted from the original release of public records – though this evidence had little value.
The latest finding is something that completely blows the official version of missing telephonic evidence out of the water. It is a citation, in Verizon’s responses to the sheriff’s subpoena, of a text message to Chris’s cell phone. Wasn’t the story supposed to be that Verizon said it couldn’t provide texts?
Verizon’s text message cite is a curious insertion in the preamble to a long printout of incoming and outgoing calls. The preamble appears to be a legend of codes for the abbreviations and format of the subsequent printout, and the text message may be an example. Anyway, here’s the full excerpt from the Verizon document:
CTM data (ASCII)
[I don’t understand any of this chris. What could ever have made u do this? U r a hero and my biggest influence in the bizness as well as my friend. But no]
Sent (ASCII)
[I don’t understand any of this chris. What could ever have made u do this? U r a hero and my biggest influence in the bizness as well as my friend. But no]
Originating Time [06/26/2007 02:51:15[00] [00001]
The message itself has no great significance; it was transmitted in the early morning hours of Tuesday, by which point the public knew that the crime was a double murder-suicide. It seems to be from a colleague who idolized Benoit and was in anguish. (There is no accompanying phone number.)
Another thing: This message doesn’t show up in the log of texts later generated and published by the sheriff. That further corroborates yesterday’s report here, “Meltzer Is Confirmed Correct – WWE Wrestler Says Some of His Texts to Benoit Didn’t Show Up.”
Irv Muchnick