A Book by Irvin Muchnick
The day I learned about the tragic events involving professional wrestler Chris Benoit and his family is etched vividly in my memory. Initially, the word was that somehow Chris and his family had all died, and it hit my like a ton of bricks – Chris had long been one of my absolute favorite wrestlers for a long while. Gathering with my friends, all lifelong wrestling fans, we watched an emotional episode of WWE Monday Night RAW, where tributes poured in, recounting Benoit’s greatness and showcasing pivotal moments from his career. However, even before the full extent of the tragedy emerged, a somber atmosphere enveloped us, as we grappled with questions about what had transpired. Speculation ran rampant: was it murder? a carbon monoxide leak? or even food poisoning? These were all increasingly outlandish and somewhat unlikely. Sadly, the unthinkable truth gradually unraveled – Chris Benoit, a beloved figure in the wrestling world, was responsible for the unimaginable act of taking his own family’s lives before his own.
In the aftermath, wrestling underwent a profound transformation. WWE shifted towards more family-friendly programming in response to heightened scrutiny, and the sport became a target for ridicule in the media. For a period, the tragedy cast a shadow over my passion for wrestling, as I struggled to come to terms with the incomprehensible events that had unfolded. People like Nancy Grace, awful people in the media that use misfortune to get ratings, beat the hell out of the dead horse of hundreds of years of wrestling misdeeds night after night, and professional wrestling could have easily died had things not changed.
“The Benoit murder-suicide in 2007 was one of the most shocking stories of the year, and a seminal event in the history of wrestling. It laid bare the devastating prevalence of steroids and its effects on users. In order to tackle the whole story, dig up the facts, and connect the dots, Irvin Muchnick gives the most sensational scandal in pro wrestling history the full true-crime treatment in Chris and Nancy. Muchnick – the author of Wrestling Babylon and a co-author of Benoit: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport – has parsed public records and interviewed dozens of witnesses, inside and outside wrestling, to put together the first thorough and authoritative events of the gruesome June 2007 weekend in Fayette County, Georgia, during which World Wrestling Entertainment superstar Chris Benoit murdered his wife Nancy and their seven-year-old son Daniel, before proceeding to kill himself.”
It was in this climate that this book was written, partially as a true crime book, and partially as an exposé of corporate mismanagement that led to such a misfortune. However, I would argue that it somewhat fails at doing a good job of either facet of the writing, instead devolving into somewhat of a conspiracy theory book that doesn’t really expose much of anything. Irvin Muchnick does an insane job of gathering and organizing TONS of government and court documents for this look at the most infamous murder-suicide case of the 2000s but seems hell-bent on trying to prove that the WWE knew that it was a murder-suicide long before airing the aforementioned tribute episode to capitalize on the tragedy for monetary gain. I mean let’s face it – I’m sure that’s the case to some degree. I’m sure plenty of people knew about it long before the news officially broke, but did this really need a full-length exposé?
A lot of the evidence is damning, but the end result doesn’t do much more than show that WWE was being shifty and potentially covering things up to avoid media backlash. Considering the nature of professional wrestling, in that it’s somewhat of a closed-off ecosystem, as well as a history of Vince McMahon hiding other things from the press, I feel like most just took that for granted. Maybe that’s just me in 2024 speaking from the perch of fifteen additional years of hindsight based on Vince McMahon’s recent downfall. To me, the author went way out of his way to add plausibility to something that most people just assumed.
Chris and Nancy is not a terrible book, but this just feels like a bonus chapter to the author’s previous book, Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal, than a fully formed expose that needed to be written. In my opinion, the far superior way to learn about this in 2024 is a recent episode of Dark Side of the Ring, which summarizes the facts of the case and presents the conspiracy laid out in this book in a tight one-hour episode that doesn’t devolve into an Alex Jones style analysis of random inconsistencies that prove not much of anything overall.
ECW Press ALWAYS makes great wrestling books, including The Wrestlers’ Wrestlers: The Masters of the Craft of Professional Wrestling, Blood and Fire: The Unbelievable Real-Life Story of Wrestling’s Original Sheik, Wreslecrap, and the classic The Death of WCW, just to name a few. To see all these and more that I’ve read, click HERE.