I went online yesterday afternoon to find out the results of the WWE Vengeance pay-per-view (because I did not go out to Buffalo Wild Wings with the guys) and I became very shocked to see that Chris Benoit, his wife Nancy (’Woman’) and their son Daniel were found dead in Benoit’s house outside of Atlanta, Georgia Monday afternoon.
I read all the articles that I could find and scrambled through all the cable news channels to see what they would cover in the midst of covering the Jesse story and I saw very little coverage except for a brief mention on the Greta show about the police investigation being deemed as a homicide.
I went to watch the special three hour RAW is WAR expecting the WWE to continue the “Mr. McMahon” death angle but instead, we saw an empty arena in Corpus-Christi, Texas and Vince (with more hair looking like Rod Parsley) making the announcement that there would be no tribute to Vince, but a three hour tribute to Chris Benoit where WWE superstars would speak about Chris and some of his best matches would be shown throughout the three hours. It was stirring to hear the Chavo interview of being over there a week earlier and also when Eddy was found dead, Chris was the first one Chavo called.
My buddy ‘Triple-P’ came over to watch this with me as we discussed what we felt was really going on and our best Benoit memories. We agreed on the Four Horsemen era of him in the Tux welcoming back Rick Flair to Nitro, the Bash At The Beach fight with Kevin Sullivan in the men’s room (Nancy was once married to Sullivan and left him for Benoit in real life) working ’stiff’, and the night he did the diving headbutt from the top of a cage on Monday Nitro.
During the last commercial break (around 10:50 PM) for RAW which was halfway between the Wrestlemania 20 match between Benoit and Triple H, we scanned the channels again and saw on Fox News that the investigation was being investigated in the realm of double-murder / suicide. Triple-P temporarily lost his composure and my jaw just dropped to the floor
Not Chris Benoit…….. No Way
Benoit was always portrayed as the silent type that disdained limelight. In fact, after his victory over Triple-H at Wrestlemania 20, the family crawled into the ring and celebrated and later on his best friend Eddy Guerrero came out and congratulated him. The Benoit DVD discussed his childhood and his family life and how he loved family time. In a cutthroat industry, Benoit was well known for being part of one of the most solid group of friends on and offstage in pro wrestling with Dean Malenko, Eddy Guerrero, and later on Chris Jericho and Chavo Guerrero.
We wondered what Vince would now think after giving three hours of valuable tv time to Benoit and it appears to be a double murder / suicide?
This afternoon, I received a link to this article that confirmed our worst fears of the double murder / suicide. What was even more bizarre was that not only did the deaths appear to be staggered out over the weekend, but at the crime scene, anabolic steroids were found and we discovered that Benoit strangled his wife and suffocated his 7-year-old son, but placed a Bible next to their bodies before hanging himself with a weight-machine pulley (and no Bible near him).
I wonder if Chris Benoit took some of the steroids and went into ‘roid’ rage which lead to the strangulation of his wife and the suffocation of his son and after realizing what he had done and that he would probably go to prison and face a death penalty, asked God for forgiveness but could not forgive himself and could not face prison and eventually hanged himself and committed suicide?
It was well known that his best friend, the late Eddy Guerrero, was a steroid user and an alcoholic that eventually cleaned up, found Jesus Christ in the process, did a direct one-eighty in lifestyle but tragically died from heart failure in a hotel room in Minnesota attributed to damage done by the past steroid use even though he was clean at the time of his death?
Based on the fact that there were two Bibles in the house, I wonder if the seeds planted by Eddy Guerrero years before were at work but somehow never fully bloomed?
Today, the WWE has a rebuttal and most of the tributes are pulled. TNA pulled it’s press release. The WWE Canadian tour was cancelled. The Chris Benoit merchandise is no longer available at WWE Shopzone.
We will never know, but God would have forgven Benoit if he had asked…..
