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basement, which doubled as a home gym.
    At 2 : 48 — traumatized, isolated, and worried about the officers’ safety — Holly punched 911 on her cell phone.
    â€œThey asked me to hop the fence because they have attack dogs and I went in and someone had — the little boy and the mom are dead,” Holly explained breathlessly to the dispatcher. “And so I ran out to scream to them but then they went in the house but they haven’t come out yet. Are they OK ?” She added, “I didn’t see Mr. Benoit. I don’t know where he is. I didn’t want to go down in the basement for some reason. He might be dead.”
    The 911 dispatcher called the sheriff’s dispatcher, who made contact with the cops inside the house. They assured Holly they were OK .
    They were in the basement, where Chris was, indeed, also dead. They found him sitting upright on a bench facing a Magnum Fitness weight machine. He was shirtless, wearing red gym shorts and socks and sneakers. His left leg was extended, his right leg bent at the knee, foot tucked under his left thigh. The black nylon weight machine cable was around his neck; a strip of a white towel was underneath to keep the cable from cutting the skin.
    Chris was being held in sitting position by the cable, which passed through pulleys attached to 150 pounds of weight. The weight stack on the machine had been supplemented by two forty-pound dumbbells on top. The weight was lifted and kept from going slack by Benoit’s own 220 pounds of body weight, plus two additional ten-pound dumbbells, which appeared to have dropped from his grip to the floor. Clearly, he had put much thought and masochistic discipline into hanging himself in near-perfect equipoise, not only to ensure a successful hanging but also to maximize the pain he must have intended to inflict on himself in the process. When the dumbbells had dropped, his body rotated right, just over the spot on the floor where two cell phones, his and Nancy’s, rested next to a water bottle filled with green tea. Also on the floor was an empty bottle of Dynamite Vineyards 2004 merlot [1] .
    Inspection of all the doors and windows revealed no sign of forced entry.
    * * *
    WWE security man Fagan’s first contact with 911 had come nearly two hours after his company, Andrews Inter-national, made the apparent final WWE -generated call to the Benoit home, at 11 a.m. A little more than an hour later, Fagan called someone in the sheriff’s office who advised him that the way to proceed was to ask 911 for a “welfare check.” The summons to law enforcement marked the beginning of the end of a drama that stretched across more than sixty hours.
    Two days earlier, Saturday the 23 rd, Chris Benoit had missed his appearance at a wrestling show in Beaumont, Texas, following a day and an evening of conflicting messages in conversations with concerned fellow wrestlers and the WWE front office. These conversations were surely after the murder of Nancy (which most likely took place on Friday night). At least some, and probably all, of them also succeeded the murder of Daniel (which most likely took place early Saturday). Chris’s basic cover story that day was that he was pinned down at home in Georgia, where he said Nancy and Daniel had food poisoning and were vomiting blood. Chris promised his colleagues and bosses that he would get his wife and son cared for and join the WWE Texas tour with dispatch.
    But Benoit did not turn up in Houston either late that night or the next day, Sunday the 24 th. On Sunday night WWE staged one of its biggest shows of the year,
Vengeance — Night of Champions
, broadcast globally on cable and satellite systems to pay-per-view subscribers. The original script for
Vengeance
called for Chris to win his match and, with it, the championship of ECW , one of the company’s three “brands” of wrestling troupes. With Chris’s no-show, the match lineup had