Part 2-
"Do I still love this guy or do I walk away hating this guy who's so out there that he could actually kill his wife and son," the friend says. "It's hard to distinguish, and you can't meet them both halfway."
When wrestling fans wanted to be marveled by gimmicks, they followed any number of spandex-wearing musclemen. When they wanted a good show, they watched Benoit. He was old-school, he was intense, and his gimmick was that he really didn't have one.
"People looked forward to his matches," says Mike Mooneyham, co-author of "Sex, Lies, and Headlocks," a book about the WWE. "He was believable, realistic and probably one of the greatest workers over the last 10 or 15 years. If it was a bad show, Chris could save it in his match."
Reality has never been a staple of professional wrestling. Its stars are cut from granite; its canned drama could cause the most gullible to collectively roll their eyes. And then there's the schedule. In the old days, Russ Hart says, they'd bond on eight- or nine-hour bus trips together, riding from show to show, taking chairs to the head until the next stop.
The average professional wrestler today spends between 200 and 250 days of the year on the road. Some jokingly call "Marriott" their home address. Others become caught up in their make-believe lives in the ring. Flyin' Brian Pillman wrestled with a loose-cannon gimmick that eventually led to him being fired by the WCW. He crashed his Hummer into a tree, slipped into a coma, and became addicted to painkillers. He died in a Minnesota hotel room, at the age of 35, of an undetected heart ailment.
Benoit's secrets -- and not-so-little-secrets -- have unraveled in the week since his death. The office of his friend, Dr. Phil Astin, was raided last week. Authorities want to know what might have been in Benoit's system at the time of the apparent murder-suicide. Friends of Benoit's say it was obvious long before last weekend that the wrestler was using performance-enhancing drugs.
"I don't think anybody had any illusions about whether he was on steroids," Hart says. " … just by looking at his physique and the muscle mass he had."
And then there were the statements by a WWE attorney this week who said the Benoits had recently been arguing over the care of Daniel, who reportedly had Fragile X Syndrome. Many people close to Benoit, including his in-laws, said they were unaware of any mental ailment.
That was typical Chris -- keeping to himself, hiding.
"You've got to realize that athletes generally handle their problems physically, so we're probably not the best with relationships," says Bill Watts, a former wrestler and promoter. "But here's the problem with athletes: It's not the fear of hope or reward that guides you, it's the fear of loss. You're always trying to look for the edge, to do whatever you can to maintain it so you push all the parameters.
"You can't live this persona and turn it off when you go home and read the newspaper or watch the news. It becomes you."
By all accounts, Chris Benoit was just being Chris Benoit on the afternoon of June 22. He visited Astin's office, took the hour-plus ride to Carrollton, Ga., through at least two construction zones and handfuls of stops, and smiled for a fan in a picture that has been plastered all over the national media. He made plans to fly to a WWE event over the weekend.
And then Benoit bound his wife's wrists and feet and strangled her.
Interviews have given Ballard a better idea of who the Benoits were. But they haven't answered most of the questions.
"A lot of people who knew him are very complimentary of him," Ballard says.
He pauses.
"I wonder how well they knew him."
Dinah Lawrence is a blond-haired mother from Social Circle, Ga., who carries a metal casket on her keychain and a love of wrestling in her heart. She's made the hour-long trip here, to the Benoit house, with her 20-year-old son Chris.
They met Benoit more than a year ago, at the Mall of Georgia, when their hero was on a publicity stop. Most wrestlers shake a few hands and go on their way, Lawrence says. Benoit was different. He spent 30 minutes with her, talking about everything from her studies to become a funeral director to the fact that her son shared his name.
It was one of Benoit's first public appearances since the death of his good friend Eddie Guerrero, who died in another Minnesota hotel room, at 38, of heart failure. Benoit told the complete strangers about his friend, and mugged for a picture. Lawrence brought a copy of the photo to the Benoit house on Thursday, along with a hand-written note that she placed near an action figure of Benoit.
"This is what I want to remember," Lawrence says as she stares at the picture. "The guy who was just … the guy next door."
When police discovered the bodies on Monday, it touched off tears, finger pointing and general confusion among wrestling fans. Monday night's WWE "Raw" broadcast was supposed to focus on the fictitious death of chairman Vince McMahon, whose limousine exploded in a television scene a few weeks ago. Could the grisly stories emanating from the Atlanta area be make-believe, too?
"I probably had 50 or 60 messages Monday," Mooneyham says, "and most of them weren't convinced.
"That line between fact and fiction is so blurred that fans don't even know."
The Benoit house is remote enough that cell phones spin from roaming to no service, but his fans keep coming. They leave potted plants, a smashed-up guitar, a baggie of uncooked macaroni. Near the gate is a note that says, "I love you."
Lawrence's note fills an entire page.
"I'm so sorry you felt this was [the] solution to your problems …" it says.
Every couple of minutes, a man is seen through one of the first-floor windows. It's an investigator trying to piece together last weekend.
"He was like your best friend," Lawrence says. "It's hard to equate what happened in there with what we saw."
The first three nights after Nancy Benoit's body was found, Jim Daus couldn't sleep.
He's been remarried for nearly 20 years now, and has a job in the real world marketing propane and natural-gas products. His work takes him on the road a lot. It almost seems strange -- years after Nancy was going places he couldn't, Jim's job takes him everywhere.
Nine years ago, scrambling to catch a flight in Chicago, he found a seat in the back of the plane, looked up and saw a familiar face. It was Nancy. They talked for three or four hours and reminisced. They had that kind of relationship, no bad blood, just laughs and memories and a little sadness. Jim has been to two wrestling matches since their divorce, and took his son there once. He hated it, and they've never gone back.
Now, wrestling is keeping him awake, bringing him more pain.
"For years, I told everybody [her discovery] was the right place at the right time," he says. "What happened to Nancy … it kind of feels like the wrong place at the wrong time.
"That's why I feel bad. I pushed her into this whole thing."
He wonders why she stayed and what happened in that big house on Green Meadow Lane. Maybe, he says, Nancy tried too hard to make it work. She was stubborn like that.
He knew at some point, she was happy. The last time they communicated was by e-mail seven years ago, when Daniel was born.
He congratulated her and remembered how they didn't want kids. But that was fantasy. This was reality.
"Congratulations on your son, too," she wrote back. "I guess some things change."
Elizabeth Merrill is a senior writer for ESPN.com. She can be reached at
merrill2323@hotmail.com.
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