Chris & Nancy by Irvin Muchnick Page A

minute later, and another at 10 p.m., though no voice messages were left. Three days later, after she led the sheriff’s deputies to the grisly scene on three different floors, Holly would recall the ringing of the phone on Friday night and wish she had answered. Maybe she could have done something.
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    At 8 : 30 Saturday morning, Chris left Holly a voice message: Was Daniel supposed to be at horse camp today? If so, he couldn’t make it because he was sick.
    When Holly picked up the message in the afternoon, she remarked to her husband that it was strange — Nancy, of course, knew the camp was on weekday mornings only. And with Chris’s “somewhat antisocial” ways (as she would describe them to sheriff’s investigators), it was uncharacteristic for him to initiate a conversation.
    At 3 : 01 p.m., Holly called Chris back. They talked for nine minutes. Chris asked if anyone in her family had been sick. He said he was asking because Daniel had been up all night with food poisoning. Chris felt bad that he could do nothing for him. Nancy also had food poisoning, but just a touch, not as bad. Chris said he, personally, was fine, and Nancy and Daniel wanted to lay low for a few days and recover. Chris sounded very calm. Later Holly would realize that Chris had been discouraging her from calling or visiting Nancy, with whom she talked a lot.
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    A young wrestler named Michael Parker, who had just been released after a tryout with WWE , had left Chris a message on his cell, apparently about office politics. At 1 : 57 p.m., Chris left a return voice message, which Parker would preserve and share with investigators. Many of Chris’s words sounded slurred. He acknowledged, “I’m talking shit, I don’t know what the details [of your situation] are off the top of my head.” Chris said, “It sounds like you got shafted over and that really fuckin’ sucks. . . . Nothing is better than experience and you’ve got that. . . . Hope you’re doing well, I’ve missed you the last couple of weeks, wanted to point that out. When you can, give me a call.”
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    At 3 : 49 p.m. Saturday, Chris was on his desktop computer. He did a search for “Elija” on Google. One of the links there was information about the prophet Elijah on Wikipedia.com, and Chris went to that page at 4 : 02 .
    The New Testament’s Book of Kings, Chapter 17 , tells the story of Elijah being sent to a widow. The son of the widow dies and Elijah takes the child from his mother and stretches out on him three times in his own bed. Elijah pleads to God to restore the boy’s soul to his body. “Yahweh listened to the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived. Eijah took the child, and brought him down out of the chamber into the house, and delivered him to his mother, and Elijah said, Behold, your son lives. The woman said to Elijah, Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.”
    Later the Benoit family pastor, George Dillard, would theorize that at that moment Chris might have been praying to God to return life to his family.
    Another theory dovetails with Dillard’s to surmise further that Daniel was not yet dead at that point, but Chris proceeded to kill him upon realizing that Nancy would not be revived and that the boy would be orphaned.
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    Chris continued talking to and texting with others through Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, not knowing that Benoit was dead, Chris Jericho texted, “Just heard that Wellington died of a heart attack this weekend.” Shayne Bower (“Biff Wellington”), Benoit’s old Stampede Wrestling stable mate, had been found dead in his bed at age forty-four.
    Bower’s best friend, Devon Fielding, told
SLAM! Wrestling
, “His dad said that the initial report was that they think he had a heart attack. . . . I know it wasn’t drugs,