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Scripted story lines don't reveal reasons for Benoit tragedy
By Elizabeth Merrill
ESPN.com
(Archive)
Updated: July 1, 2007, 5:14 PM ET
FAYETTEVILLE, Ga. -- The house, by most appearances, is immaculate and perfect. The fireplace, the wooden deck, the private staircase climbing up to a little boy's room. The circle driveway and the red Hummer.
When fact blurred to fantasy, Nancy Benoit never told people this, that in high school, all she really wanted to be was a housewife. Now her house is where the story ends and the spectacle begins.
It takes a good navigational system to get to the Benoit home, past a gravel road, through a narrow two-lane spin with tall Georgia trees on both sides. Gawkers have inched by for days, peering through the metal gate for answers. A woman rolled in from North Carolina the other night, reeking of alcohol, firing a volley of "why's" as a neighbor went to get his mail. She allegedly pelted him with rocks and wound up in jail.
"It's certainly surreal," says Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard. "I've used the word bizarre. There are so many bizarre things about it."
The why might never be answered -- why Chris Benoit, wrestling superstar, alleged family man, apparently murdered his wife on a Friday, strangled his son on a Saturday then wrapped a cord from his weight machine around his neck and hanged himself on a Sunday.
Because they lived in a world of scripted story lines, flying clotheslines and outlandish ring names, it took nearly a day for some WWE fans to believe that Benoit and his family were actually dead. Some still can't swallow it.
But fiction, those close to the case will say, could not trump the reality on Green Meadow Lane.
Ballard sits in his office across town at 5:30 p.m., after office hours because the Benoit case has evolved into a round-the-clock, breaking-news buffet of Geraldo and Greta proportions. Before Monday, Ballard had no idea who Benoit was. Maybe, he says, nobody really did.
He's describing how rigormortis had set in by the time they found Nancy, whose skin was marbleized as she lay face-down on the floor. He's remembering his walk into Daniel's room -- the 7-year-old boy's body was gone, but posters of his dad still hung on the wall, and two toy wrestling belts sat on a shelf.
There was every indication, Ballard says, that Daniel Benoit adored his father.
"I pray for two things," Ballard says. "That he didn't know about his mother's death and he was asleep when he was strangled.
"I don't think anybody can give me a why for that little boy being strangled that would satisfy me. I will never understand that."
Jim Daus was headed out to dinner Monday night when a call pierced his steeply planted world.
Nancy was dead.
Before she was "Woman," before she graced the covers of wrestling magazines and was drooled over by teenage boys, Nancy Benoit was Nancy Daus, a Florida girl who dropped out of high school to marry her boyfriend Jim.
They were high school sweethearts, kids with no money and little to do, and on Sunday nights, Jim grabbed his girl and whisked her to Orlando to watch wrestling. It was new for Nancy, whose protective parents didn't let her go at first. But he had front-row seats, and the couple was lured by the drama, the machismo, the circus.
"How would I describe it? Male soap opera," Daus says. "You follow the story lines like you'd watch a soap opera on TV. It builds, and you have to wait 'til Monday to find out the next chapter."
He used to call it fate, being in the right place at the right time. One night a wrestler grabbed Jim's chair, heaved it into the crowd and a camera clicked away at Nancy's surprised expression. She was discovered that night, joined wrestler Kevin Sullivan's entourage, and her life as a valet/diva/manager put her in leather and chains and took her everywhere from Texas to Hawaii.
For a while, Daus was a happy part of the ride. They grew up fast and owned their first house as teenagers. Eventually, there was no room for him on the tour.
On New Year's Day -- Daus isn't sure what year -- he picked her up from the airport, heard all the places she was booked for and said they were drifting in different directions. He suggested a divorce. Within days, they were seeing the same lawyer.
"We cried a lot that day," he says. "It was very hard on me. That was the toughest year of my life, the year I got divorced."
He stopped watching wrestling. It was too painful. Nancy's career skyrocketed, and she married Sullivan, a booker/wrestler known for his satanic references in the ring. If the entourage ultimately pulled Nancy away from Jim, it almost seemed fitting that another wrestling saga eventually pried her away from Sullivan.
By the mid-1990s, Sullivan was on the outs with Nancy, and scripted an angle that had her canoodling with Benoit. Wrestling fans knew her as "Woman." Benoit called her Nancy. In a life-imitates-art moment, they fell in love.
Some people thought it was an odd combination -- Chris the quiet workmanlike wrestler, Nancy the headstrong, career-savvy manager. Some also wondered why she gave it all up, left the business to be a stay-at-home wife and mother.
She disappeared from the spotlight, showing up occasionally at her husband's side. In the flurry of video clips of the past week, she's seen hugging Chris while confetti rains down on another wrestling victory. He's shown kissing his little boy as the emotions seep from his sweaty, sculpted body.
How much did anyone know about what went on with the Benoits? She filed a divorce petition in 2003, and withdrew it a few months later. She also filed a temporary protection order from domestic abuse, and later dropped that, too.
Richard Decker, an attorney for Nancy's parents, Paul and Maureen Toffoloni, said the family had no reason to believe there was turmoil on those 8.6 acres in Fayetteville.
"None. Zero," Decker says. "They had a normal son-in-law relationship with Chris. They didn't treat him as a superstar, and he didn't want to be treated as a superstar. He took out the trash and they treated him as anyone would treat a son in law. [The couple] had a close and loving relationship as far as they knew."
The testimonials for Chris Benoit, pre- and post-death, are almost prerecorded from those close to him. Hard worker, they say. Loyal, polite and quiet. Passionate.
Nearly everybody in the wrestling business has a story of how they saw Benoit within the past couple of weeks, and he seemed like the same man who crawled through the ropes and into fantasy more than two decades ago.
One close friend, who declined to be named, says he vacillates from wanting to block the whole thing out to gluing himself to the Internet in search of the latest developments. One morsel of information might crack this thing, and explain the invisible demons.
It's one thing to grieve the death of a good friend. But how do you mourn a monster?
PART 2 TO FOLLOW-
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