Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents (21 page)

Whilst the likes of Neil Entwistle, Christian Longo and Jean-Claude Romand killed in order to escape from financial pressures and return to a more carefree bachelorhood, UK-based Mohammed Riaz chose to take his own life, and that of his family, rather than let them become westernised. As such, he fits into the controlling category of family killers.

Mohammed Riaz was a traditional Muslim who grew up in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan and had little formal education. He had an arranged marriage to an Anglo-Pakistani woman called Caneze who had been born in the UK but educated in Pakistan, returning to the UK in her mid-teens. She was also Muslim. The couple lived in Accrington, Lancashire in England.

Caneze spoke perfect English, whilst Mohammed knew only a few words. She was better educated than he and did voluntary work for a child improvement centre, working with schools and mosques. She was also an interpreter for the local authority and was regarded as an extrovert and a pillar of the community. In contrast, Mohammed was a quiet and retiring man who worked at a plastic-bag manufacturing factory in Blackburn.

Mohammed wanted his daughters to be raised as traditional
Muslims, whilst his wife took a more relaxed approach. She would buy their children western clothes and, enraged, he would destroy outfit after outfit. He said that his daughters wouldn’t go to college when they grew up and that they’d have arranged marriages.

In 2003, Caneze’s traditionalist father died and she became even more liberal. Tensions in the marriage continued to build as she became a diversity adviser to Accrington Stanley Football club. Mohammed’s stress intensified when their teenage son, Adam, was admitted to hospital with bone cancer and the prognosis was poor.

On 31 October 2006, Caneze and the couple’s four daughters – Sayrah age 16, Sophia age 15, Alicia age 10 and Hannah age three – enjoyed a Halloween party at their end-of-terrace home. It’s likely that Mohammed Riaz regarded this as a final affront to his religion. He waited until the early hours of the morning when the family were asleep then locked the house from the inside and poured two cans of petrol outside the room where his wife and three-year-old daughter slept. After lighting the fuel, he went into another room to die.

His wife and all four daughters burned to death in the resultant inferno, though Mohammed lived for two days in the specialist burns unit at a Manchester hospital before succumbing to his injuries. Adam, whose cancer was by now terminal, was let out of hospital to attend the funeral of his family but died six weeks later. Friends, family and the police later paid tribute to Caneze and her children and local people of various nationalities and religions wept openly at the funeral.

Benoit is one of the few family killers who doesn’t fit into the idealised or controlling pattern. Instead, steroid abuse and
brain damage caused increasing rage and paranoia, and he killed his family before taking his own life.

Born to a French-Canadian couple in Montreal in 1967, he was a small but athletic child. When he was still at primary school, he saw a similarly small-built wrestler, the Dynamite Kid, performing impressive feats on television. From then on, the little boy was determined to become like his wrestling hero, and he even shaved his head in order to copy the man. He begged his father, Michael, to buy him a weights set and his father obliged for his 12th Christmas. Thereafter, Chris spent little time with his parents or siblings, instead obsessively lifting weights in his mirrored room.

That same year, the family moved to Edmonton where Chris alienated school friend after school friend who doubled as his training partners, for none of them could keep up with his obsessive weight-lifting schedule. Completely focused on his ambition, he had no time for partying or for girls.

He spent hours at Edmonton wrestling shows, carrying the wrestler’s bags, sweeping the ring and testing the ropes. Most of the wrestlers thought that the tiny 13-year-old was only 9 or 10 and they were gruffly kind to him, appreciating his humble manner and deferential speech.

Chris Benoit may have been little but his ambitions were large. By 14, he was wearing three or four T-shirts at a time to add bulk to his frame, and by his mid-teens he was using steroids, which, at that time, weren’t recognised as having serious side effects.

At 16, he left school and became a full-time wrestler, a profession which would often take him to the limits of his endurance. Veteran wrestlers and trainers took sadistic pleasure in physically and psychologically breaking rookies such as Benoit, and he was repeatedly beaten and urinated on. His food and drink were sometimes laced with large
quantities of laxatives by other wrestlers who were bored with the amount of time they spent on the road en route to the next gig.

Chris moved to Japan to further his wrestling ambitions, though the Japanese training was even more brutal than that which he’d endured back home in Canada. He also perfected his craft in Mexico and Europe, marrying a woman called Martina who he met in Germany. The marriage produced two children and, though it later broke up, Martina said that he was a mild-mannered and loving man.

Chris was also a good friend to various veteran wrestlers but he was uncharacteristically sadistic towards rookies, doing to them the type of things which had been done to him.

By mid-1997, Chris had become close to wrestling manager Nancy Sullivan. A beautiful woman, she had previously played the submissive role in the ring, where her wrestler-husband would lead her around on a leash. But the marriage had descended into mutual violence, and she sought solace in Chris’s steroid-enhanced arms.

On 25 February 2000, she gave birth to their son whom they called Daniel. Chris put frequent updates about – and photographs of – the infant on his website and said that being a father was awesome. That same year, he won a coveted world wrestling title and, in November, he and Nancy wed. From the onset – perhaps trying to compensate for the fact that he was geographically estranged from his first two children – he was a devoted dad.

The following year, he shattered two discs in his neck during a wrestling match and had major surgery. When doctors told him that he’d be unable to wrestle for a year, he became hysterical and suffered a complete emotional collapse. Despite
their warnings, he began training as soon as he got home, taking massive doses of painkillers in order to cope.

During this year away from the ring, his relationship with Nancy deteriorated markedly. He became addicted to the painkillers and continued to take them after he returned to work, doing routines which included being thrown around the ring and jumped on by his opponents. He also insisted on doing a diving head butt from the ropes during every wrestling match, despite the fact that it often left him concussed and medics warned him he was doing irreparable damage to his brain. Sensible wrestlers faked many of the more dangerous moves, but Chris thought that he was short-changing the fans if he wasn’t genuinely bloodied and bruised by the end of every contest and he would continue to wrestle even when concussed. He continued to take huge doses of steroids and became aggressive towards his wife when they were behind closed doors at their luxurious home in a gated Georgian community.

By 2003, Nancy had filed for divorce, citing his cruelty. That same year, she also took out a restraining order, alleging domestic violence. She told friends that Benoit would fly into terrible rages and throw the furniture about, that she feared for her safety. But she later withdrew both petitions, determined to make their marriage work. A cannabis user for many years, she was by now imbibing large quantities of alcohol and prescription tranquillisers.

In 2004, Chris won another title and was said to be at the top of his game. The mayor of his hometown even declared a Chris Benoit Day to celebrate the local-man-made-good. To outsiders, Chris was still the committed family man, buying his son a series of action figures and enrolling him in a church nursery.

Nancy was also a devoted parent and would bring the little boy to wrestling matches, dressed in a formal suit and bow tie. At the end of the match, his blood-stained father would cuddle him and kiss his cheek. The affection was mutual and Daniel even attempted to copy his father’s exercise regime.

But, the following year, Chris’s wrestling friend Eddie Guerrero, age 38, died of steroid abuse and he began to unravel. A lapsed Catholic, Chris now returned to his childhood beliefs. He wrote letter after letter to his dead friend in his diary, writing that he and born-again Christian Eddie would be ‘together in Heaven.’ Ominously, he added ‘I will be with you soon.’ In the same timeframe, he added anti-depressants to the already potent mix of ’roids and painkillers that he was on. In February 2006, another of his steroid-using wrestling associates died aged 40. That same year, Benoit had shoulder surgery but remained in constant pain.

In spring 2007, the Benoits toured Britain. Externally all was well, but there were rumours that Chris had been giving Daniel, who was small for his age, injections of human growth hormone and that this was understandably causing marital disagreements. And Nancy confided to a friend that the steroids which Chris was taking in large doses were making him increasingly paranoid. He had become convinced that Daniel was going to be kidnapped and insisted that his school keep the classroom locked. He also thought that he was being followed, and told his chauffeur to constantly vary his routes home. And he bought Rottweilers to patrol the grounds of his house, regarding them as attack dogs rather than pets.

Mentally, it was increasingly clear that there was no one at home. Acquaintances noticed that the wrestler would often stare into space, unable to focus on the conversation. And, in
the ring, he sometimes barked out one-word orders instead of acting out the pre-arranged script.

In early June 2007, Nancy bought Chris a silver crucifix on a chain. But she must have doubted that divine intervention would work as she also hid his steroids. Completely addicted, Benoit simply went to his doctor and got more. During the second week of June, he took out a life insurance policy naming his first wife and the two children from that marriage as beneficiaries. When Nancy demanded that he add her name and Daniel’s, he refused. The fight which followed was violent and afterwards Nancy confided to a friend that she was thinking about filing for divorce. She was by now taking so many painkillers that she and Benoit must have been in a permanently drug-addled haze.

On Friday 22 June, Chris and Daniel enjoyed a barbeque in the garden. That evening, a female from the Benoit residence (who police would later assume was Nancy) phoned directory enquiries and asked for the number of the local police department. A few minutes later, Nancy left two
normal-sounding
messages on a neighbour’s answering machine.

Shortly afterwards, Chris tied Nancy up in one of the upstairs rooms: some writers would later wonder if she’d thought that they were about to have bondage sex, as she was only wearing a towel and there were no signs of a struggle. But this is speculation as, by then, the drugs had made Chris Benoit impotent. What’s certain is that, after binding Nancy’s wrists and ankles with duct tape, he knelt on her back, wound a television cable around her neck and strangled her to death. Fetching one of his treasured Bibles, he left it lying by her side.

Benoit spent the night in the house and, the following day, crept into Daniel’s room and used a wrestling hold to suffocate the sleeping seven-year-old. He placed a Bible at his son’s side,
then spent some time on the internet, researching the prophet Elijah who had allegedly resurrected a dead boy.

Later that morning, Chris Benoit phoned the airport and changed that day’s flight to a later one which would still give him time to wrestle in a Texas tournament. He also phoned a friend and explained that he’d no longer be able to meet him before the match. He sounded stressed, so the friend got another friend to call and ask if everything was alright, whereupon Benoit said that his wife and son were ill.

He didn’t take a plane to Texas but instead remained in the house with the corpses for the remainder of Saturday and all day Sunday, during which time he destroyed his diaries and other personal effects. He also tore up photos which Nancy had taken of her earlier domestic abuse injuries – he was apparently attempting to sanitise his life before the murders, yet made no attempt to hide or destroy his steroids and large stack of non-prescription medicines.

When wrestling officials phoned to ask why he hadn’t turned up, Chris Benoit repeated the lie that his family were ill and vomiting blood. He sounded normal during these phone calls but he had always been good at hiding his feelings. Indeed, he had only broken down twice in public, both times when talking of his wrestling friend Eddie’s premature death.

In the early hours of Monday morning, Benoit sent several texts to a friend, saying that the side door of the garage was open and that his Rottweilers were in the pool area. Satisfied that the dogs would soon be found, he went to his home gym and committed suicide by hanging himself from his weights machine.

After his death, journalists found that a doctor had been supplying the desperate wrestler with 10 months’ worth of steroids on a monthly basis, and an autopsy showed that he had 10 times the normal level of testosterone in his system when he died. His brain was so badly damaged through
repeated injury that it resembled the brain of a man more than twice his age.

Sadly, Benoit was an accident waiting to happen. He’d been warned again and again to stop doing specific aerobatics, to start faking injuries rather than doing lunatic stunts which broke bones and caused permanent brain damage. With his million-dollar house, money in the bank and an appreciative fan base, he could easily have moved sideways into another aspect of the wrestling business or the keep fit industry. As Matthew Randazzo, his posthumous biographer, put it: ‘Child killer Chris Benoit is no victim – the voluntary choice to pursue a pro-wrestling career is fundamentally too stupid, irresponsible and silly ever to allow for victimhood.’