My personal take on what happened in the Benoit household in June 2007 is that Chris murdered his wife and son, then took his own life. Yet, this story would incomplete if we didn’t take the time to look at the conspiracy theories and odd events surrounding the crime.
Whether you believe the official narrative or not, there is no denying that there are strange occurrences and odd coincidences that occurred around the time of the murders. Fourteen years after three body bags were removed from the Benoit home, people are still trying to make sense of them. That doesn’t mean that there is any truth to the rumors, however.
Wikipedia Weirdness
Those of us who write for a living know that Wikipedia should never be used as an official source for an article. This is because anyone can edit the information included in a Wikipedia piece, so there is no guarantee that the information is accurate.
(*Sometimes people use Wikipedia for its sources, but Wikipedia articles are never to be taken at face value.)
Of course, if you don’t write for a living, you might not know how untrustworthy Wikipedia can be. And I will readily admit that I love going down various Wikipedia rabbit holes when I get bored. It’s an entertaining site. Wrestling fans were shocked when they visited Wikipedia just after midnight on June 25, 2007, and read that Nancy Benoit had died. The entry stated:
“Chris Benoit was replaced by Johnny Nitro for the ECW Championship match at Vengeance, as Benoit was not there due to personal issues, stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.”
WWE conspiracy to replace Chris Benoit in ECW Championship match
The announcement was shocking enough, but wrestling fans went ballistic when they realized that the entry was made before the Benoit family was found dead. The frenzy ramped up even further when it came to light that the IP address of the poster originated from Stamford, Connecticut — where World Wrestling Entertainment headquarters is located.
Understandably, this led many to believe that WWE knew about the murder/suicide 14 hours before anyone else did, including the police. Some thought that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a murder/suicide at all, and that maybe the Benoit family was murdered by someone within the company.
These theories were proven untrue, of course. Lt. Tommy Pope, a spokesman for the Fayette County, Ga., Sheriff’s Department, expressed how detrimental the Wikipedia entry was to the department’s investigation, saying:
“It is unbelievable what a hindrance this has put on our investigation.”
The entry forced law enforcement to take time away from the primary investigation and divert at least some of its attention towards finding out who posted the entry and why. Pope added:
“We’ve got to put a lot of effort and time into working to prove or disprove that someone put up a hoax situation or that someone was conceiving the death from out of state.”
By month’s end, the author of the Wikipedia entry had come forward to say the whole thing was just a bizarre coincidence.
The author of the post said:
“I really just want to put all this behind us. I made a mistake and I’m sorry. I know I’ve said that a million times but today has just been a bad day with this getting all this mainstream coverage even though it was just a huge coincidence.”
The author of the entry explained that he, along with thousands of other wrestling fans, were speculating about what “personal reasons” may have caused Chris Benoit to miss scheduled WWE events on Saturday and Sunday and latched onto a rumor online that Nancy Benoit had died, ultimately deciding to post the rumor as “fact” on Wikipedia.
Did Chris Benoit send texts to some inside WWE
Is the story true? Did Chris Benoit possibly send text messages to other people inside WWE? To me, it’s plausible that speculation and rumor got twisted into fact, but even I must admit…it’s weird. Yet, it’s not weird enough for me to believe that the Benoit murders were conceived from outside the state of Georgia. If there is any “conspiracy,” in my mind, it would be that the WWE knew more about what was happening at the Benoit residence than they were prepared to say publicly.
On Friday night, Chavo Guerrero spent quite a bit of time on the phone with Chris Benoit. [5] He claims that about 45 minutes into the conversation, someone knocked on Chris’ door and Chris told Chavo he was going to see who it was, and Chavo heard a “scuffle.”
Chris’ house phone went dead and he could only be reached on his cellphone some three hours later.
It sounds incredibly suspicious…but it’s nonsense. The information was said to have originated from an interview Chavo gave to WWE Magazine, but no such interview ever occurred.
Still, many fans still cling to this tidbit of information, believing it showed that someone broke into the Benoit home and killed the family, and that it explains why there was no forced entry.
Kevin Sullivan Killed the Benoit Family
In the aftermath of the Benoit killings, Nancy’s first husband, Kevin Sullivan, had to deal with suspicions that he was behind the massacre.
During his career, Kevin played the role of a Satanist, and this helped fuel the belief held by many that he had it within him to murder an entire family. In actuality, Kevin Sullivan is not a real Satanist. (The type of Satanism associated with Kevin’s character does not represent the true Church of Satan, anyway. It was an entirely fictional character.)
Of course, it didn’t help that Kevin was Nancy’s ex and that Nancy cheated on him with Chris before marrying him, so he certainly had a motive to kill the Benoits. The police looked into the possibility that Kevin was involved, but there was not a shred of evidence linking him to the deaths. This seems to be a case of fans reading too much into a wrestler’s character in the ring.
A Near Miss
It was late morning on June 22, 2007, and pro wrestler “Hardcore” Bob Holly was in Atlanta rehabbing from an injury. [6]
When Chris Benoit heard that his longtime friend was in town, he called him, pleading with him to come over for a visit, but Holly declined.
Bob Holly said in a 2014 interview that Chris asked him to come by the house, but Holly encouraged him to spend his day off with Nancy and Daniel. This seemed to anger Chris, who told his friend off with a volley of profanities that Holly won’t repeat. Chris told him not to worry about it, that he could come over and eat dinner with the family, but Holly again turned down the invitation.
Bob Holly said:
“Now, mind you, later on that afternoon, that’s when he killed Nancy and so that really hit me hard because it’s one of those things where, okay, if I would have shown up, would the outcome be completely different? Would they still be alive today? I mean…that hit me hard. You couldn’t unplug from that one. And that was really tough to digest because I talked to Chris.
He said, ‘Why in the heck aren’t you coming up here? F this, I don’t care, blah blah blah and you should’ve come up. It doesn’t matter. I wanted — I’d like to see you.’”
After chewing Holly out, Chris seemed to let go of his anger and the conversation returned to normal. Said Holly:
“No. After he said how he felt about me ’cause I wasn’t coming up there to hang out with him or whatever, it was just small talk. ‘How’s TV? How’s this, how’s that? How’s everything going with…’ you know? I said, ‘How are you and Nancy doing?’ ’cause I knew him and Nancy were having trouble because we talked and he said, his exact words were, ‘Aww, she’s acting like Hitler again.’
I didn’t know what to say to that obviously because I didn’t want to get in their business or anything, and so I just kinda laughed it off followed by a little small talk here and there, and then that was it. [Chris] said, ‘Well, next time you’re up here, you need to come see us and come to the house,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, I will, I will. I get it, Chris! Alright, I’ll be there!’”
Only a few short hours later, before the sun had set, Chris killed Nancy. According to Sandra Toffoloni, her sister was brutalized before she was killed, including receiving vicious blows to the head. Covered in contusions, Nancy’s death was not an easy one. Chris Benoit did not “merely” strangle his wife to death. This was an act of pure rage. Nancy’s decaying body was found in a pool of blood.
Toffoloni explained:
“To be clear, it was serious rage. He brutalized my sister. And even though the autopsy report is [available] and [there is] the Freedom of Information Act in the country and people can kind of see some things in the police report on the internet and have, but they didn’t have to see what I saw and I have to put it out there as fact. He brutalized my sister and it wasn’t just like, ‘maybe I hit her too hard and she hit her head.’ He murdered her brutally. And, again, not being the Chris that I would equate with that.
I couldn’t reconcile the man I just talked to a week before with what I was facing when the police released the house to me.
My sister was killed Friday evening between between 11 [p.m.] and one a.m. And then, Saturday morning, Daniel was killed. And then, Chris killed himself Sunday evening, so he spent two full days in the house with Nancy and Daniel, not alive, which is just, again, super out of character. Not just out of character. Let’s be honest. That’s weird. Like, that’s just straight up weird.”
(*Other reports state that it was unclear when Daniel was murdered.)
One thing was clear to Toffoloni: Chris was very much in the middle of a psychotic break that fateful weekend.
“You could see where his logic was skipping in and out of reality. I think that his default mode, as we alluded to before, was to focus on work. Focus on getting the job done. Default to what he knew to do: go to the airport [and] go to work, wrestle, come home.
But then, I think the psychotic break that he had was still very much happening, so he was having these moments of lucidity where ‘I have to do these things,’ but then he didn’t even realize he’s in the throes of a complete psychotic break.
I really don’t know. I can’t say if [suicide] was his plan all weekend.We know that in the search engine on the computer that he had researched the quickest and easiest way to break a neck.”
The wrestler’s sister-in-law also theorizes that perhaps Chris killed Daniel to either prevent him from finding out what he did to Nancy, or because Daniel discovered his mother’s body and Chris wanted to, essentially, put the boy out of his misery.
A Professional Hit
Legendary professional wrestling journalist Bill Apter went on Chris Jericho’s Talk is Jericho podcast in 2015 to put forth a theory of his own as to what happened to the Benoit family. [7] He said he believes that the murders were not carried about by Chris but were, in fact, a professional hit carried out by someone upset with him. His unwillingness to believe the case was a murder-suicide is based on Chris’ love for his son, Daniel.
Apter told Jericho:
“I think somehow Chris got in some sort of trouble. I don’t know what it was, I don’t know what it was after or whatever, but I think something happened. I think when he got home, Nancy and his son were already dead … to me, if a hit, a murder, is done in a professional way, they can make it look like you did it and you committed suicide, as well.”
“I understand that husbands and wives kill each other sometimes. They do! But not the boy. This is what didn’t make sense to me. Because I knew they had a volatile relationship, [Chris] and Nancy, there were a lot of issues and all that, but because of Daniel, the boy, and how enamored he was with Daniel, I still, today, can’t fathom that he would do this.”
This is, of course, just Apter’s opinion. There is no evidence to back his claims. And if Chris Benoit was in a psychotic state, he wasn’t thinking logically.
The Ramblings of Billy Jack Haynes
Over the years, pro wrestler Billy Jack Haynes has said some crazy, outlandish things. We won’t go into all that. Feel free to Google it. If nothing else, it’s an entertaining rabbit hole to go down, especially this one. (There might be some truth to this one, who knows? But he has a habit of saying some bizarre stuff, so you have to take it with a grain of salt.)
In the aftermath of the Benoit murders, Haynes stepped forward and accused WWE Chairman Vince McMahon of fathering Daniel Benoit. This, in turn, infuriated Chris, according to Haynes, who set about having his whole family killed after Nancy supposedly admitted that McMahon was her son’s real father.
Pretty much everyone, from fans to the industry as a whole, blew off these claims. Haynes is known to have beef with McMahon and the WWE. Like Apter’s claims, this theory appears to have been dreamed up out of thin air in Haynes’ mind.
From where I sit, the only theory that makes sense is the one that has been accepted as the truth. Chris Benoit, in a psychotic range, brutalized and killed his wife. Then, he murdered his son, and while the murder was absolutely evil, it was a kinder, gentler death. That is the only thing reflecting Chris’ love for his child. After spending the weekend with the corpses of his family in the house, Chris Benoit took his own life. We will never know all the reasons why.
But one thing seems certain: The Benoit family’s only enemy was Chris Benoit himself.
TCNS is sponsored by Pod Decks. Pod Decks are the hottest new tool for podcasters looking to have more meaningful conversations or gamify their podcast. Simply shuffle up, ask a question, and let the content roll. Order yours today at poddecks.com and use code Larry21 for 10% off your order.
NOTE: This article contains affiliate links, which will earn the site a commission if the product is purchased.
If you enjoy our writing, please consider leaving a small donation. Your support helps keep the lights on and allows us to hire more writers and grow our site.
 |  |  |
