Chris Benoit’s Wikipedia Page Mentioned Deaths Before Cops Found Bodies
Posted June 29, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
There’s an unexpected twist in the already startling case of the murder-suicide of WWE superstar Chris Benoit. And it’s raising a lot of questions about who knew what the apparently depressed and desperate grappler had in mind.
By now you’ve heard the tragic tale of how Benoit ducked out of a wrestling match, before allegedly killing his wife and son over the weekend, then staying with their bodies for at least a day before hanging himself in his Atlanta home’s weight room. Officials have been probing the circumstances of the shocking death ever since, pondering the possible involvement of steroids found in the house, the serious illness of the couple’s seven-year-old son and the relationship between Benoit and his wife.
The WWE alerted officials that something was wrong after getting strange text messages from the grappler. But the bodies weren’t discovered until police went to the door on Monday. But now investigators have discovered a disturbing new clue about who may have known what was coming. It turns out someone altered an article about Benoit on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia some 14 hours before cops found out about the tragedy.
The article makes reference to the death of Benoit’s wife, which no one but the wrestler could have known about. And Wikipedia officials claim the change appears to have been made from an IP or Internet Protocol address in Stamford, Connecticut – World Wresting Entertainment’s home base. But they admit that doesn’t mean the alteration was made from there.
It appeared on the page at 12:01am Monday, noting the reason Benoit missed his scheduled Saturday match stemmed “from the death of his wife Nancy.” It seems unlikely the suspected killer would have taken the time and trouble to log on to the Internet and make such a strange change. But if Benoit didn’t do it, who did? Officials are probing that question among others.
The WWE insists no one there knew about the gruesome crime until after the bodies were discovered. “I have no idea who posted this,” claims the conglomerate’s attorney Jerry McDevitt. “It’s at least possible Chris may have sent some other text message to someone that we’re unaware of. We don’t know if he did. The phone is in the possession of authorities.”
This latest mystery follows a raid on the offices of the doctor who prescribed testosterone for the wrestler. Investigators were looking for evidence of steroid use in Benoit’s medical records, with many wondering if so-called ‘roid rage’ drove the entertainer to his final desperate acts.
Wikipedia, which can be edited by anyone who logs on to the site, has now frozen any alterations to the article in question as experts investigate the unexplained change to the text. But a possible explanation surfaced Friday when an unnamed Wikipedia user posted a note to the site apologizing for putting up the new information. The writer, who wasn’t identified by gender, claims to have acted on “rumours and speculation” gleaned online about Benoit’s family and called it a “HUGE COINCIDENCE”. But that still doesn’t explain where those original “rumours” came from and how someone might have known about it before police.
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