July 2, 2007 Observer Newsletter: Chris Benoit double murder-suicide

On Sunday afternoon, if you were to poll wrestlers from around North America and ask who the single most respected wrestler in the business was, or who the best wrestler in the business was, the name Chris Benoit would be in the top three, and as likely as anyone to be at the very top, of both lists.

The legacy of a man that took two decades to build of traveling around the world and working as hard as any wrestler alive during that period, took one weekend to become forever remembered as the closest thing the modern sports world has seen to Charles Manson, as he killed his wife Nancy, his seven-year-old son Daniel, and then himself over about a 30-hour period, leaving an entire wrestling world filled with psychologically conflicted fans, wrestlers and other employees. What caused this quiet, intense, model employee who had been consumed by wrestling since seeing Dynamite Kid on Klondike Wrestling (the Edmonton version of Stampede Wrestling) at the age of 12, in 1979, to commit crimes so heinous and so far beyond imaginable?

There are probably only two people who really know, and both of them are now dead. Everything else is just theories. But in many ways, there were also two different Chris Benoits.

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