Nearly nine years ago to the day, the world of pro wrestling was rocked when Chris Benoit was found dead at his home, along with the bodies of his wife, Nancy, and 7-year-old son, Daniel. Benoit had murdered his family and then taken his own life with police discovering the bodies on June 25th. Benoit had been scheduled to appear on the WWE Vengeance pay-per-view the night before where he was scheduled to face CM Punk for the vacated ECW World Championship.
Chris Jericho, who was a close friend of Benoit, recently welcomed the younger sister of Nancy Benoit, Sandra Toffoloni, onto his Talk is Jericho podcast in which she gave her first major interview since the tragic events of that day. Toffoloni revealed that Benoit had a restraining order served against him two years before Nancy’s death and discussed the ongoing struggles of their marriage. She also spoke about Nancy having already planned Chris’ post-retirement career with a wrestling school in Atlanta, which they would call Benoit Academy, and how the pair seemingly had different ideas about that next step, “She was ready for the next move, and I don’t think that he was, in his mind, physically or emotionally — he was just really scared, so a lot of that boiled over into their personal life,” Toffoloni told Jericho.
Benoit was also in a “state of perpetual bereavement” according to Toffoloni – he had suffered with the deaths of many close to him, including Mike “Johnny Grunge” Durham, Victor “Black Cat” Mar, Ray “Big Boss Man” Traylor, Sherri Martel and maybe most significantly, best friend, Eddie Guerrero. “He always had this look in his eye that it wasn’t so much of ‘Who’s next?’ as it was ‘Am I next?’” she recalled, describing “a lot of self-medicating going on in that house … really, really next-level,” saying it was a “huge contributing factor to what happened.”
She also blamed “certain” concussions playing a part in Benoit’s actions that weekend, but thinks other factors contributed:
“It’s upsetting because the big push for ‘concussion, concussion, this is why he did it because the Chris Benoit we know could never have done this—they want to put it on something so they don’t have to blame Chris anymore. But it was a combination of a lot of things. It was just a huge boulder of weight from loss and grief, it was a ton of medication altering his body chemistry and brain chemistry, and possibly, yes, a little bit of brain issue from hitting his head over and over and over. Would it drive someone to murder? I don’t know. I can’t say definitively yes that’s what did it.
“I know there were issues in the house he was having with himself struggling inside with things that are privy to he and I that I wouldn’t put on blast for anyone to know, but that coupled with the facts of what I know from being there immediately after that weekend and seeing everything, it wasn’t the act of someone with brain damage. It’s impossible. I understand the necessity to want to put it on something and say, ‘this is why he did it,’ because the daily pain of living with not knowing why and not knowing what happened is crippling, for lack of a better term.”
Toffoloni also rebuffed the idea that Benoit killed his family in a ‘moment of rage,’ saying:
“What a lot of people didn’t get to see is how much he and my sister loved one another. If there was a moment of rage on Friday night — and to be clear, it was serious rage. He brutalized my sister. It wasn’t just like, ‘Maybe I hit her too hard and she hit her head.’ He murdered her. Brutally. But when I try to talk about my nephew, it’s difficult, because I don’t understand it. You think about a murdered child and it’s the worst thing ever. But when you think about that murdered child as the one thing you love in life more than anything, because I did, and my sister did, and he did, it’s very hard for me to think about what was going on in his head and in his heart to do that. He knew for a fact that had anything ever happened to he or Nancy, I would be there to take care of Daniel, 100 percent. There was no question about that. It would have been a difficult time but he would have had a loving family to take care of him.
“All I can think of is that it was kind of a selfish last act to do that he just — I’m not sure. I can’t put a reasoning behind it. He did love Daniel very much, and all I could really think was if Daniel ever saw or found out what [Chris] had done to his mother, that would have broken that child … [Chris] spent two full days in the house with Nancy and Daniel, not alive. Let’s be honest: That’s weird. That’s straight-up weird. There’s no justification for that.”
It goes without saying this is episode is worth listening to:
