Further Reading for Jennifer Moore & Chris Benoit
Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide & Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death
Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit and the Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry
Episode: 17
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Jennifer Moore (April 21, 1988 – July 25, 2006) was an 18-year-old American student from Harrington Park, New Jersey, who was abducted around July 25, 2006, from Manhattan, New York, and then raped and murdered.
During the night of her disappearance, Moore and a friend had driven into New York City for a night of clubbing and drinking. Moore was underage at the time. Moore’s friend parked her vehicle on the street outside a nightclub named Guest House, located in the Chelsea district on West 27th Street. Moore’s friend later moved the car, but it was ticketed while the girls were inside the club and finally towed to the West 38th Street impound lot. When Moore and her friend went to get the vehicle at the impound lot, the attendants refused to surrender it. The friend collapsed, allegedly from too much alcohol consumption and an ambulance was called. Moore had walked away unnoticed.
Moore’s friend later awoke to find herself in an ambulance, on her way to St. Vincent’s Hospital. The friend tried futilely to contact Moore on her cellphone. Witnesses had reported seeing Moore walking uptown alongside the West Side Highway.
Moore was reported to have made a frantic phone call to her boyfriend, saying, “There’s a guy following me. He’s offered me drugs. He won’t leave me alone.”
Moore’s body was found in a trash bin in West New York, New Jersey. Moore’s funeral was held at St. Gabriel’s Roman Catholic Church in Saddle River, New Jersey. Five hundred friends and family members attended.
The Chris Benoit double-murder and suicide refers to a three-day period between June 22 and June 24, 2007, when Chris Benoit, a 40-year-old veteran professional wrestler employed by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), killed his wife Nancy Benoit and suffocated their 7-year-old son Daniel before hanging himself. Autopsy results showed that Benoit’s wife was murdered first as she was bound at the feet and wrists and died of asphyxiation on June 22. Nancy was found wrapped in a towel and with blood under her head, although Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard reported no other signs of a struggle.
The couple’s son, Daniel Christopher Benoit, also died of asphyxia, apparently killed as he lay in bed on the morning of June 23. Then, on the evening of June 24, Benoit died by suicide in his weight room, when he used a weight lifting machine to hang himself, breaking his own neck. He placed copies of the Bible alongside the bodies of his wife and son, as well as a third Bible on his weight lifting machine. Since Benoit’s suicide, numerous explanations for his actions have been proposed, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy, steroid abuse, and a failing marriage. The incident led to numerous media accounts, and a federal investigation into steroid abuse in professional wrestling.