Wrestler Benoit, family found dead

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/06/2007 (6762 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE ‘Canadian Crippler,’ pro wrestler Chris Benoit, was found dead in his Atlanta-area home Monday along with his wife Nancy and seven-year-old son Daniel.

Officials were investigating the deaths as a murder-suicide, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Police would only say the family had not been shot to death.

The family’s bodies were discovered around 4 p.m. at their house in Fayetteville, Ga.

Detective Bo Turner told television station WAGA that the case was being treated as a murder-suicide, but said that couldn’t be confirmed until evidence was examined by a crime lab.

The station said that investigators believe the 40-year-old Benoit killed his wife, Nancy, and seven-year-old son, Daniel, over the weekend, then himself on Monday. A neighbour called police, and the bodies were found in three rooms.

“We here in the WWE can only offer our condolences to the extended family of Chris Benoit,” said Vince McMahon, the chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, as he introduced a hastily assembled three-hour tribute to Benoit in place of the company’s usual Monday Night Raw program.

“The only other thing we can do at this moment is tonight pay tribute to Chris Benoit.”

McMahon called Benoit “one of the greatest WWE superstars of all time.”

The Montreal-born Benoit, 40, was raised in Edmonton before moving to Calgary to be trained by the famous Hart family. He is considered one of the greatest in-ring performers of all time.

Benoit met his wife Nancy in the late 1990s while working for Ted Turner’s now-defunct World Championship Wrestling.

At the time, Nancy, whose ring name was Woman, was working as a wrestling manager.

Her husband, wrestler Kevin Sullivan, was a booker — someone who determines the outcome of matches and shapes the storylines. He organized a plot twist in which Nancy started an affair with Benoit.

That storyline backfired for Sullivan when his wife began having a real affair with Benoit, eventually leaving her husband for him. It was a true life scandal in the violent fiction that is pro wrestling.

Benoit has two other children from a previous relationship.

“This is insane,” said David Meltzer, editor and publisher of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, an industry publication. “I’m all shaken up.”

Meltzer said he heard rumours, but didn’t know anything for sure.

“The company hadn’t heard from him since Saturday night or Sunday morning, and they told the police to check the house and when they got to the house they were all dead,” said Meltzer, repeating what he’d heard from various sources.

“All the doors were locked from the inside when they got there, so everything is speculative.”

The deaths shocked friends of Benoit.

“He was very happy with his wife and he loved his son Daniel,” said Ross Hart, a friend of Benoit and member of the Hart wrestling family.

“This would be very uncharacteristic of Chris to do anything self-destructive. I find it very hard to believe that he would end his life or his family’s.”

Benoit was scheduled to appear on a WWE pay-per-view Sunday evening from Houston in a championship match against wrestler CM Punk.

He was a no-show, apparently telling WWE he needed to return home for personal reasons.

On Monday night’s tribute, fellow wrestlers spoke glowingly of their friend.

“He was just a hard-nose son of a bitch,” said WWE champion John Cena.

“He was never the type of guy to say I love you to, and Inever go the chance to. So, if he’s watching … Chris I love you.”

Benoit is the second big-name Canadian WWE star to die in the past decade.

Owen Hart, brother of WWE legend Bret, plunged to his death in 1997 during a pay-per-view event from Kansas City after a piece of rigging that was to lower him from the ceiling snapped.

— With files from Calgary Herald and Atlanta Journal-Constitution