Authorities believe wrestler Benoit killed wife, son then himself

[Blue-Jay]

-snip-

Authorities believe a professional wrestler, his wife and son ‑ found dead in their central Fayette County home Monday afternoon ‑ died in a murder-suicide.

District Attorney Scott Ballard said Monday night that he felt confident that Chris Benoit killed his wife Nancy, their 7-year-old son and then himself.

Ballard declined to release the cause of death, but said that earlier news reports that the Benoits died of gunshots were false. The crime lab is in the process of confirming the cause of death, but Ballard said there was enough evidence on scene to make him confident that the Benoits were not killed by another person.

-snip-

"Every indication is that this is a murder-suicide," Ballard said, adding that additional investigation still has to take place before a final determination can be made.

___________________________________________________________________________

from: http://www.thecitizen.com/node/18058

Edit: This link takes a while to load. I think it's being inundated.

[slj0101]

1. That's fuckin' horrible.

Of all the pro wrestlers out there, past and present, he's one of the last I'd suspect of doing such a thing. He was definitely one of the most well-loved stars in the business.

Just goes to show what an intense, high-pressure lifestyle that is.

[Blue-Jay]

2. Yeah...

There's no definite confirmation yet, but I'm not doubting this story.

Sad all around. :(

[Kat45]

3. Wow! That's a shock!

Murder-suicides are always a shock, but even more so when it's done by a person who seems to have it all.
It seems like there are stories of dead wrestlers fairly frequently.

RIP Benoit family.

[Wetzelbill]

4. wow, that hurts

What a tragedy.

[lost-in-nj]

5. nothing to say......

stunned and void of feeling right now

can anyone ever tell me what goes through the mind of some one like this.......

anyone......



lost

[Wetzelbill]

12. who knows?

I hope I never find out. I imagine the pain and anguish has to be unbearable. Maybe a bad domestic fight or something set him off, maybe he was always ill? I don't even know if there is an explanation. It's all so tragic, I feel ill just thinking about it.

[electron_blue]

23. I think it's a massive control issue

combined with desperation

[MonkeyFunk]

6. oh my god

how awful!

I wish crazy people would just off themselves.

[johnnie]

7. He called and said his wife and son were throwing up blood

I am guessing he poisoned them then either poisoned himself or hung himself.

[Omphaloskepsis]

8. Kinda fucks up the tribute they played for him tonight.

Ahh, the fond memories of the guy who killed his family.

[johnnie]

9. I was wondering if they knew more

And they had to do the show knowing what had happened.

[Omphaloskepsis]

I don't know..

I just checked and the tribute was on at 8:43 on the west coast. They should have known about this before it aired here. I'm shocked the USA network didn't plug in some crappy movie to fill the time slot. I'm sure the advertisers will be pleased with this.

[NaturalHigh]

18. The WWE office knew before the show.

They were told what the police suspected around 4:30 PM yesterday, and the show aired at 7:00 PM. I don't know when the wrestlers' tributes were filmed, though, so they may not have known while they were filming them.

[enigmatic]

10. I'm really sick to my stomach right now

I'm at a loss for words.

[ghostsofgiants]

11. That just makes it so much more tragic.

[Norwood]

13. This is all just so incredibly tragic

I've never been a big wrestling fan but I had always liked Benoit. Probably the best technical wrestler in the business, besides maybe Angle. If he really did kill his family and then himself though, he deserves nothing but to remembered as scum. I hope its not true but its not looking too good.

[MichiganVote]

14. I'm so sick of these fucked up people who kill mothers and their kids

Do us all a favor and off yourselves first

[Kat45]

15. I wonder if he was bipolar and on a really bad down side?

There has to be some kind of mental illness for anyone to do that.

[Old and In the Way]

16. It's all speculation, but who knows how many shots to the head over his career?

I profess to know nothing about this guy in particular....I haven't watched WWE in many, many years. But it is a brutal sport and a steady pounding on the brain can create organic damage. Might be a combination of this and steroids, or something completely different. A tragedy, whatever the reasons...

[slj0101]

17. That's the theory I'd like to believe.

Concussions are not to be messed with. That was also the theory behind Mike Awesome's suicide earlier this year.

[Greeby]

27. One of his signature moves was a flying headbutt off the top rope

So he took more than most

[JoDog]

19. Family annihilation

Sadly, incidents like this have become so common there is now a name for it--family annihilation. We've had 2 incidents of it in my area so far this summer. One in Delevan, WI, where a man gunned down the mother of his children, their son, her sister and her friend before killing himself. The only one left alive was a 2 year old girl. And now a man from Oswego, IL is accused of killing his wife and their 3 kids before shooting himself in the leg and blaming the whole thing on his dead wife. Reports claim that he told a friend in the weeks leading up to the shooting that he wanted a divorce.

[Divameow77]

20. I told my boyfriend last night

that I thought the WWE tribute show last night was a little premature. If this man suffered from depression or other mental illness, this is truly sad.

[skygazer]

21. What makes a person do this stuff?

So strange - tragic enough that they feel the need to kill themselves (and I'm not one of those people who condemns suicides as "selfish" - I've been suicidal and there's nothing more painful and horrible than feeling like you want to die and that you'd be doing your loved ones a favor by doing it) -

but to take their family with them. Not giving them a choice. So very sad. :cry:

[idgiehkt]

28. did you see this story also?

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/06/23/bodies.found.ap/index.html

JOLIET, Illinois (AP) -- A suburban Chicago man found shot near the bodies of his wife and their three children in the family sport utility vehicle earlier this month was charged Saturday in their shooting deaths.

Christopher Vaughn, 32, was charged with eight counts of first-degree murder, prosecutor James Glasgow said at a news conference in Joliet.

Missouri authorities arrested Vaughn on Saturday morning at a funeral home near St. Louis, Missouri, just before the scheduled start of services for 34-year-old Kimberly Vaughn and her children -- Abigayle, 12, Cassandra, 11, and Blake, 8, Glasgow said.

Their bodies were found June 14 in a 2004 Ford Expedition parked on a service road near Interstate 55 in Channahon, about 40 miles southwest of Chicago. Kimberly Vaughn was shot once and the children were shot twice.



I heard about it when it happened...it seems to be inevitable that when the surviving party has a non-fatal bullet wound they end up being the shooter. That was my gut feeling about this story above, but I told myself I was just being too cynical.

[flvegan]

22. Details of the deaths "are going to prove a little bizarre"

when released to the public, Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Autopsies were scheduled Tuesday by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in DeKalb County.

Investigators believe Benoit, (pronounced ben-WAH) killed his wife and son over the weekend and then himself sometime Monday. The bodies were found Monday afternoon in three different rooms of the house on Green Meadow Lane, in a subdivision off a gravel road about two miles from the Whitewater Country Club.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/4920530.html

Just posted 3 hours ago.

How horribly sad if true.

[SaveElmer]

26. Reading he strangled his wife, smothered his son, then hung himself...

www.cnn.com

[jollyreaper2112]

24. Is there any parallel to this in nature?

Fetuses that are not viable will be spontaneously aborted by the mother, much as she would rather it not happen. This is nature saying "it ain't going to work, better luck next time." We see mother hamsters eat their young if instinct tells them it's not working, it's a way of preserving protein for the next attempt. We know that animals age and die to give way for the next generation. Could there be some sort of instinct for removing one's self and genetic offspring from the gene pool? On the face of it that sounds absurd since a propensity for that sort of thing would be removed with the genes that caused it. Then again, the body's reaction to hypothermia seems quite specialized and not the sort of thing to be passed on in genes. Stop circulating warm blood to the limbs and keep it towards the torso? Great, even if you live you'll lose the limbs. How could someone in that situation even reproduce to keep the genes going?

I'm grasping at straws here, just trying to find an explanation. I've read in some articles that elephants are highly social creatures and absolutely depend on a family structure for social health. Poorly supervised elephant young turn out as fucked up as the worst human punks, complete with violence and murder.

[northzax]

25. i think you are overreaching

more information will likely come out, but male family annihilators are often one of two types: either complete narcissists who cannot accept failure (and who knows what type of failure might come out of the woodwork, maybe he lost all his money investing in some scheme, maybe he was having an affair and was ashamed to have it come out? maybe his wife was, and he was ashamed of that? maybe she was going to leave him, and he was ashamed of that? who knows?) or people with serious mental disturbances. Who knows what the voices in his head told him to do? as someone above mentioned, getting hit in the head over and over again for two decades is going to fuck you up, and if you are already borderline...well, anything might set you off.

or maybe some sort of combination? as a narcissist (come on, professional wrestler, seems somewhat logical for any entertainer) who took too many blows to the old noggin, and was facing some sort of failure that would demolish (in his mind, at least) the image of the macho, good guy protector. so he crashes, mentally, and goes and does this awful thing, so that his wife and children would never know he failed.

or, of course, if the stories about poison are true, then maybe his wife and kids ate something and died, and he was so upset he killed himself to join them.

in any case: wonder what sort of mental health coverage WWE offers in its medical plan?