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I watched the show drinking Crown Royal straight from the bottle, barely paying attention when they aired our Royal Rumble Ladder match, which I consider to be one of my best matches ever. During the match Jim Ross mentioned, “Chris Jericho has been reached at his home in Tampa and is despondent over the news of his good friend’s death.”

I watched the rest of the show in silence, trying to wrap my head around the fact that I would never see my good friend again.

I spoke to Dean Malenko after the show to try and make some sense out of what happened. He brought up that there was going to be another tribute show on Smackdown! and asked if I would like to fly to Texas to participate. I’d already missed Eddy’s tribute show and was seriously contemplating going to this one, when rumors started circulating on the Internet about what had really happened to the Benoits.

I decided I didn’t want to go to Smackdown! until I found out more information, as I was becoming more and more convinced that something very bad had happened.

I spent the next few hours scouring the Internet for information: wrestling websites, news websites, fan forums, anywhere I could find details. Not that they were hard to find, as it seemed like every ten minutes something new was revealed.

Within a few hours of the tribute show the truth came out: Chris Benoit had murdered his wife and son and then killed himself.

When I got the confirmation, I called Vince. It was the first time we’d spoken in almost two years, and I didn’t waste his time with small talk or petty greetings. I was too distraught for that.

“Vince, it’s Jericho. What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know, Chris. It seems that Benoit wasn’t the man we thought he was. He fooled us all.”

Chris had the reputation of being one of the most straightforward, salt-of-the-earth, what-you-see-is-what-you-get type guys in the business. People trusted him, went to him for advice, and respected his opinions. I know I did. How could he commit such blasphemy?

“Vince, if this is true and he killed his family, who can we ever trust again?”

He couldn’t answer me.

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again—Chris loved his children. He talked about them constantly with a gleam in his eye and I know it devastated him when he got divorced from his first wife and moved away from his oldest two kids. He rearranged his schedule on a monthly basis so he could fly to Edmonton and spend as much time as possible with them.

“Don’t ever get divorced,” he told me. “It’s too hard on your kids and it’s not worth it. The only true form of unconditional love is your love for your kids and I’m sorry for what I put them through.”

It was this unconditional love that made it so difficult for me to comprehend how he could’ve done what he did. Everyone in a relationship knows the pure anger that you can feel for your significant other at certain times, and I could understand how a fight could spiral out of control. Everyone knows how it feels to be totally depressed and how one might consider the easy way out of taking their own life.

But who can ever envision killing their own child?

It still gives me chills and horrifies me to even think about it. How could he do it? Was he possessed? Insane? Was it a horrible accident or a premeditated plan? Would we ever really know?

I went back on the Internet to research every possible theory I could contemplate, to try to explain or rationalize what he had done. Chris was a coffee addict, so I looked up the side effects of excessive caffeine intake and found that under extreme circumstances high doses of the drug could cause delusions, psychosis, and even violent behavior. That had to be it, right? It was the caffeine.

Other reports began leaking out that Daniel, his eight-year-old son, had fragile X syndrome. I researched the disease, and its symptoms kind of described Daniel (or I convinced my broken soul that they did). Maybe Chris got in a terrible fight with Nancy, and after the