Chris & Nancy by Irvin Muchnick Page B

because I know Shayne. He’d had a real battle with drugs, and he’d been clean for the last two years.”
    [ 1 ]. In Nancy’s safety deposit box at the Wachovia Bank branch in Peachtree City, sheriff’s investigators found photos of Nancy with facial bruises. However, they determined that these documented the period of her earlier marriage to Kevin Sullivan. No photos were known to exist of the times Chris struck her.

CHAPTER 6
Tribute to a Murderer
    JUST AS THE EYES ARE THE WINDOWS to the soul, the decision by World Wrestling Entertainment to stage a three-hour tribute to Chris Benoit on the USA cable network’s June 25 , 2007 , edition of
Raw
vividly illustrated the depravity at the heart of a peculiar genre. But tepid moralism exaggerates or misunderstands the lesson. Or to put it more precisely, the exaggeration becomes an excuse for the misunderstanding. While respectable opinion can legitimately lament the cliché of wrestling’s festival of poor taste, the lament soon becomes its own cliché, and does nothing to prevent more performers from dying — by the bushel. An intelligent perspective on the Benoit tribute goes on to take a hard look at everything a huge corporation achieved when it brought its considerable resources to bear on containing the fallout of the Benoit crime.
    Dan Abrams, on MSNBC , was among those who, at the time, denounced “spending three hours celebrating a guy . . . the authorities now say is a murderer.” Worse, the tribute plotline echoed, mocked, and, in its inimitably weird way, validated the sentimental exploitation of previous non-homicidal wrestling deaths for TV ratings. The most pungent ironies began — but, like all wrestling “angles,” never really ended — with the fact that this particular tribute happened to bump an already planned and fictitious parody show in which WWE chairman Vince McMahon’s own violent death was to have been memorialized.
    Still, the prosaic questions raised by the
Raw
tribute are much more troubling than the postmodernist mind games of a TV show cranked out on the fly. As critics speculated, but never followed through on, McMahon and his key people did indeed know that Benoit was the killer well before 8 p.m. eastern time on June 25 . So, how much earlier did they know? Why did they want to know? And what did they plan to do about it? Those questions are the basis of the next chapters of this book. The answers are not clear-cut.
    The next day, June 26 , WWE would issue a press release headlined, “ WWE Shares Internal Timeline and Details Relating to Chris Benoit Tragedy.” A facsimile of the release is on the following two pages.

    After closely examining WWE ’s asserted timeline of the Benoit death weekend, we can say that, unsurprisingly, it was sliced, diced, and ground through a processor of lawyers and PR specialists. But we can also say that the timeline is wildly implausible.
    As this project unfolded, WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt sent me a series of legal threats over some of the content of my blog. Tellingly, though, neither McDevitt nor anyone else from WWE has ever challenged the veracity of the conclusion that the Benoit
Raw
tribute was broadcast with substantial knowledge by the decision-makers that the Benoit family deaths were not a random triple murder, but a double murder-suicide committed by Chris. That finding is unassailably true.
    * * *
    At 3 p.m. eastern time on June 25 , Detectives Ethon Harper and Joshua Shelton joined Deputy Mundy and Lieutenant Alden, along with next-door neighbor Holly, at the crime scene. Lieutenant Tommy Pope (later promoted to captain) arrived minutes later. Pope supervised the ongoing tasks of assembling evidence and preserving its chain of custody. Harper did his own quick inspection, confirming the obvious signs that Chris had murdered Nancy and Daniel before hanging himself. Harper then drove eight miles back into central