When Chris Benoit murdered his family last year the wrestling industry was stunned, as were Benoit fans. Speculation as to what drove Benoit into a murderous weekend rage went from one extreme to the other and included conspiracy theories that more resembled wrestling storylines than anything remotely grounded in the reality that Benoit was the lone assailant in the murder of his wife and child. In his book, Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit & The Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry, author Matthew Randazzo takes a hard investigative look into an entertainment industry built off of the violent destruction of the human anatomy, while he tries to find the answer as to what it was that turned the man into a monster. 
By Matthew Randazzo V
Unlike most early demises in the pro wrestling industry, which can be traced with stunning regularity to the abuse of bodybuilding drugs and narcotics that’s been practically obligatory for survival in the business over the past twenty years, the death of pro wrestling legend Chris Benoit was something of a mystery. The crime itself was seemingly straightforward: over the weekend of June 22-24, 2007 in the Benoit family home in Fayetteville, Georgia, former World Wrestling Entertainment world champion Chris Benoit strangled his bound wife Nancy with a television cord, suffocated his seven-year-old son Daniel with his pro wrestling finishing hold, and lynched himself slowly from his weight machine. The crime scene left no doubt that Benoit himself was the sole perpetrator of the murders. The mystery lay elsewhere: how could Chris Benoit be the murderer of his own family, or, perhaps more accurately, which Chris Benoit?
Chris Benoit was the best man in pro wrestling,” one coworker in World Wrestling Entertainment told me in an interview for my book, Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit & The Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry. Among his cynical coworkers in the wrestling business, who have all known what it feels like to watch a colleague die young, Chris Benoit’s death was the rare wrestling tragedy that provoked sincere shock. If you listen to most stories about Benoit, h
e was a generally polite, civilized, kindhearted, hardworking, and disciplined man whose passion for his craft as a wrestler was trumped only by his almost obsessive affection for his son, Daniel. Though Benoit, like almost all wrestlers, used steroids so that his bodybuilding fetishist bosses would support his career, Benoit was nonetheless considered one of the paragons of wrestling sobriety and clean-living, a workout freak who supposedly “hated” the debauchery that defined “The Road” for pro wrestlers like it did for touring rock bands or biker gangs. To most who knew him in pro wrestling, it was impossible to reconcile how the “one gentleman in the lockeroom” somehow became the homicidal maniac who would wring the life from his small child with his signature “Crippler Crossface” hold.
Just as bizarre as the actual crimes were the other details that came to light from that long, incomprehensible weekend. The irreligious Benoit, a lapsed Catholic who would coldly shut down any amateur evangelist he encountered, had left bibles next to the bodies of his victims and, after the murder of his son, had searched in vain on the Internet for the secret of the “prophet Elijah” who had resurrected a small child in the Old Testament. In the aftermath of the crimes, a devotional journal in Chris’ name was found in the trash containing macabre rants from what seemed to be a schizophrenic religious crank, not the agnostic workaholic Benoit, who hardly seemed like the type to obsess over abstract spiritual thoughts.
More chilling than Benoit’s newfound twisted faith was the evidence that, after murdering his family, Benoit momentarily decided to continue his wrestling career as long as he could. Benoit, who was so disoriented and fixated on his lifelong passion, pro wrestling, to murder his child with his fictional character’s wrestling move, rescheduled his flights so that he could continue to make his appearances with World Wrestling Entertainment while his family rotted in his home. Obviously, Benoit changed his mind on the early morning of Sunday 6/24. He tied his lat pulldown weight machine’s steel cord around a towel wrapped over his throat, adjusted the machine to the comparatively light weight of 240 pounds, and released the pressure. With his legendarily strong neck muscles and the moderate pressure applied, Chris Benoit’s death was likely slow suffocation, yet there was no sign of resistance.
My challenge in Ring of Hell, then, was to identify why Chris Benoit, respectable and sane family man, had undergone an out-of-character homicidal meltdown that lasted over a whole weekend, or, more likely, to uncover how the public story about Chris Benoit differed from the reality. After all, in the notoriously crooked and secretive wrestling business, deception is a way of life.
Through diligent research and interviews with dozens of Benoit’s former friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, I was able in Ring of Hell to sketch a profile of Chris Benoit that was diametrically opposed to the public image provided by World Wrestling Entertainment and Benoit’s friends. Psychologically, Benoit was always a bit strange: he displayed patterns of severe sadomasochism and obsessive-compulsive behavior dating to his pubescence. As he progressed in pro wrestling, at every step of the way his bosses encouraged and rewarded him for cultivating his basest qualities, for becoming more self-destructive and crueler to his coworkers. In one infamous incident, Benoit participated in the group hazing of a rookie by shaving his head with a rusty razor, rubbing wasabi into his wounds, and forcing him to perform pushups while they urinated on his back; the same rookie was forcefully sodomized for admitting that he disliked the food served at his wrestling dojo. This was known as “teaching respect for the business” and “instilling discipline.”
Though Benoit was psychologically abnormal from a young age, there is little doubt among his friends that the sacrifices he made to succeed in pro wrestling directly resulted in a gradual but severe decline in his mental faculties. Fixated on success in pro wrestling, the undersized (5’8-5’9, 180-pounds) Benoit abused steroids and other bodybuilding drugs since he was a young teenager until his death. With forty-to-sixty pounds of artificial muscle on his frame, the still woefully undersized Benoit caught wrestling promoters’ attention by wrestling a reckless, physically destructive daredevil style that resulted in massive spinal damage, countless concussions, and considerable damage to all four lobes of his brain and his brainstem. Doctors examining his brain after his death found decay consistent with an 85-year-old Alzheimers patient, which goes a long way to explaining his extremely abnormal behavior before and during his tragic homicidal meltdown.
Of course, the incredible damage Benoit did to his body made it hard for him to keep up with wrestling’s relentless, 52-weeks-a-year schedule, so, like almost all modern pro wrestlers, Benoit compensated with narcotics use. By the time he was forty, Benoit’s body was partially immobilized and in constant blinding pain, and his overtaxed, severely damaged brain could barely cope with normal stressors. Benoit self-medicated with huge, haphazardly-mixed dosages of amphetamines, painkillers, steroids, and psychiatric drugs, all washed down with alcohol. When combined with his brain damage, already existing sadomasochistic tendencies, and the enormous amounts of aggressive-behavior-inducing testosterone he was taking to maintain his physique, it’s hardly surprising that Benoit suffered a violent psychotic break.
While researching the fall of Chris Benoit, I quickly realized that the book that needed to be written, and the book that I ended up writing in Ring of Hell, was a comprehensive investigative expose of the pro wrestling business. I chose the subtitle of this book, The Life of Chris Benoit & The Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry, because it was my intent to focus on the life – not the death – of Chris Benoit. The story that seemed and still seems important is not the crimes Chris Benoit committed as a brain damaged junkie, but rather why an otherwise normal man lived a lifestyle that was guaranteed to make him that way, and more importantly, why that lifestyle was so professionally successful for him. It is Benoit’s decision to cripple his mind and body and the industry that made it so profitable for him to do so that is the story. In Ring of Hell, I have written the uncensored, no-punches-pulled, naming-names indictment of the wrestling industry, which knowingly encourages and exploits the self-destruction of its performers. It was also my aim to write a book that accurately captures just how bizarre the subculture of pro wrestlers is, a subculture where performers usually surrender the majority of their waking moments traveling to, training for, recuperating from, and performing in slapstick popcorn entertainment in which they voluntarily inflict profound, irreparable damage to their bodies.
Chris Benoit was the best man in pro wrestling,” one coworker in World Wrestling Entertainment told me in an interview for my book, Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit & The Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry. Among his cynical coworkers in the wrestling business, who have all known what it feels like to watch a colleague die young, Chris Benoit’s death was the rare wrestling tragedy that provoked sincere shock. If you listen to most stories about Benoit, h
e was a generally polite, civilized, kindhearted, hardworking, and disciplined man whose passion for his craft as a wrestler was trumped only by his almost obsessive affection for his son, Daniel. Though Benoit, like almost all wrestlers, used steroids so that his bodybuilding fetishist bosses would support his career, Benoit was nonetheless considered one of the paragons of wrestling sobriety and clean-living, a workout freak who supposedly “hated” the debauchery that defined “The Road” for pro wrestlers like it did for touring rock bands or biker gangs. To most who knew him in pro wrestling, it was impossible to reconcile how the “one gentleman in the lockeroom” somehow became the homicidal maniac who would wring the life from his small child with his signature “Crippler Crossface” hold.Just as bizarre as the actual crimes were the other details that came to light from that long, incomprehensible weekend. The irreligious Benoit, a lapsed Catholic who would coldly shut down any amateur evangelist he encountered, had left bibles next to the bodies of his victims and, after the murder of his son, had searched in vain on the Internet for the secret of the “prophet Elijah” who had resurrected a small child in the Old Testament. In the aftermath of the crimes, a devotional journal in Chris’ name was found in the trash containing macabre rants from what seemed to be a schizophrenic religious crank, not the agnostic workaholic Benoit, who hardly seemed like the type to obsess over abstract spiritual thoughts.
More chilling than Benoit’s newfound twisted faith was the evidence that, after murdering his family, Benoit momentarily decided to continue his wrestling career as long as he could. Benoit, who was so disoriented and fixated on his lifelong passion, pro wrestling, to murder his child with his fictional character’s wrestling move, rescheduled his flights so that he could continue to make his appearances with World Wrestling Entertainment while his family rotted in his home. Obviously, Benoit changed his mind on the early morning of Sunday 6/24. He tied his lat pulldown weight machine’s steel cord around a towel wrapped over his throat, adjusted the machine to the comparatively light weight of 240 pounds, and released the pressure. With his legendarily strong neck muscles and the moderate pressure applied, Chris Benoit’s death was likely slow suffocation, yet there was no sign of resistance.
My challenge in Ring of Hell, then, was to identify why Chris Benoit, respectable and sane family man, had undergone an out-of-character homicidal meltdown that lasted over a whole weekend, or, more likely, to uncover how the public story about Chris Benoit differed from the reality. After all, in the notoriously crooked and secretive wrestling business, deception is a way of life.
Through diligent research and interviews with dozens of Benoit’s former friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, I was able in Ring of Hell to sketch a profile of Chris Benoit that was diametrically opposed to the public image provided by World Wrestling Entertainment and Benoit’s friends. Psychologically, Benoit was always a bit strange: he displayed patterns of severe sadomasochism and obsessive-compulsive behavior dating to his pubescence. As he progressed in pro wrestling, at every step of the way his bosses encouraged and rewarded him for cultivating his basest qualities, for becoming more self-destructive and crueler to his coworkers. In one infamous incident, Benoit participated in the group hazing of a rookie by shaving his head with a rusty razor, rubbing wasabi into his wounds, and forcing him to perform pushups while they urinated on his back; the same rookie was forcefully sodomized for admitting that he disliked the food served at his wrestling dojo. This was known as “teaching respect for the business” and “instilling discipline.”
Though Benoit was psychologically abnormal from a young age, there is little doubt among his friends that the sacrifices he made to succeed in pro wrestling directly resulted in a gradual but severe decline in his mental faculties. Fixated on success in pro wrestling, the undersized (5’8-5’9, 180-pounds) Benoit abused steroids and other bodybuilding drugs since he was a young teenager until his death. With forty-to-sixty pounds of artificial muscle on his frame, the still woefully undersized Benoit caught wrestling promoters’ attention by wrestling a reckless, physically destructive daredevil style that resulted in massive spinal damage, countless concussions, and considerable damage to all four lobes of his brain and his brainstem. Doctors examining his brain after his death found decay consistent with an 85-year-old Alzheimers patient, which goes a long way to explaining his extremely abnormal behavior before and during his tragic homicidal meltdown.
Of course, the incredible damage Benoit did to his body made it hard for him to keep up with wrestling’s relentless, 52-weeks-a-year schedule, so, like almost all modern pro wrestlers, Benoit compensated with narcotics use. By the time he was forty, Benoit’s body was partially immobilized and in constant blinding pain, and his overtaxed, severely damaged brain could barely cope with normal stressors. Benoit self-medicated with huge, haphazardly-mixed dosages of amphetamines, painkillers, steroids, and psychiatric drugs, all washed down with alcohol. When combined with his brain damage, already existing sadomasochistic tendencies, and the enormous amounts of aggressive-behavior-inducing testosterone he was taking to maintain his physique, it’s hardly surprising that Benoit suffered a violent psychotic break.
While researching the fall of Chris Benoit, I quickly realized that the book that needed to be written, and the book that I ended up writing in Ring of Hell, was a comprehensive investigative expose of the pro wrestling business. I chose the subtitle of this book, The Life of Chris Benoit & The Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry, because it was my intent to focus on the life – not the death – of Chris Benoit. The story that seemed and still seems important is not the crimes Chris Benoit committed as a brain damaged junkie, but rather why an otherwise normal man lived a lifestyle that was guaranteed to make him that way, and more importantly, why that lifestyle was so professionally successful for him. It is Benoit’s decision to cripple his mind and body and the industry that made it so profitable for him to do so that is the story. In Ring of Hell, I have written the uncensored, no-punches-pulled, naming-names indictment of the wrestling industry, which knowingly encourages and exploits the self-destruction of its performers. It was also my aim to write a book that accurately captures just how bizarre the subculture of pro wrestlers is, a subculture where performers usually surrender the majority of their waking moments traveling to, training for, recuperating from, and performing in slapstick popcorn entertainment in which they voluntarily inflict profound, irreparable damage to their bodies.
[Matthew Randazzo V is the author of Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit & The Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry, an Amazon.com #1 Bestseller in True Crime in the UK, Canada, and Germany and a Top 5 True Crime bestseller in the US. He has three books about the American Mafia that are in the final stages of negotiation with multiple publishers to be released in the next two years. You can find out more about the New Orleans native at MatthewRandazzo.com]
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