By John McMullen
Philadelphia, PA (The Phanatic Magazine) - Author Irvin Muchnick is raising new questions regarding the circumstances surrounding World Wrestling Entertainment's Chris Benoit tribute show, which aired on the USA cable network on Monday night, June 25, 2007.
The company has defended the show by maintaining that it did not know Benoit had strangled his wife Nancy with a cord, before killing his seven-year-old Daniel with his "crippler crossface" wrestling maneuver sometime over the previous weekend. Benoit later committed suicide by hanging himself from his basement gym weight-machine.
Muchnick obtained the 911 call, placed just before the corpses of Benoit, his wife and son were discovered, through a public records request.
The recording of the call to the Fayette County (Georgia) 911 Communications Center shows that at 1:16 p.m. (et) on Monday, WWE’s Dennis Fagan requested a "welfare check" on the Benoit home. Benoit had missed WWE events in Beaumont, Texas, on Saturday night, and in Houston on Sunday. After missing his scheduled Saturday flight from Atlanta to Houston, he also failed to arrive on his re-booked Sunday morning flight.
The WWE issued timeline also notes that in the early morning hours on Sunday, Benoit left a series of text messages for two other wrestlers (Salvador "Chavo" Guerrero and Brad "Armstrong" James) giving them his street address in Fayetteville.
However, on the 911 audio, Fagan, a retired New York City Police Department detective who directs WWE security, gives a chronology that is off by 24 hours. He says, "At three o'clock this morning there was a message left for one of the other wrestlers. And basically it says, ‘The dogs are in the backyard. The back door is open. Goodbye.’ And that’s it."
"I have played the recording repeatedly to determine if Fagan spoke ambiguously or in confusion," Muchnick stated. "The fair conclusion is that he did not. For example, if the theory is that he meant Sunday morning rather than Monday morning, because he had just been referring to Benoit’s failure to show up for the Sunday pay-per-view, that theory is dispelled by Fagan’s repetition of the error a few seconds later. In a completely neutral context. Fagan emphatically says a second time, ‘That message was left at three o'clock this morning.'"
The audio, lasting a little less than three minutes, can be heard here.
"I reached Fagan by phone yesterday [Thursday]," Muchnick added. "He immediately told me that he would have nothing to say about the matter and that I would have to talk about it with Rich Hering, WWE’s vice president for governmental relations.
"I hesitate to say Fagan lied to 911, because the possibility exists that he did not willfully tell an untruth. But in that case, other disturbing questions arise. If WWE executives did not get their own chief of security faithfully briefed on the facts prior to his being assigned to call 911, then what does that tell us about how urgent an effort they were making to get to the bottom of what had happened to the Benoit family over the weekend?"
Critics, and Muchnick has been a vehement critic of WWE chairman Vince McMahon, have speculated that the famous promoter knew Benoit had committed a double homicide well before he went on the air for the tribute show,
In an email to Muchnick, Gary Davis, WWE’s vice president of corporate communications, did not dispute the author's reporting of the facts but questioned where he went with them.
"I'm unsure of the point you're trying to make," Davis wrote.
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