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Doctors point to “tangible evidence” that ex-wrestler Chris Benoit suffered from a dementia that so impaired his judgement, as to compel him to kill his wife and son before taking his own life.

The hunt for clues linking damage Benoit had done to his brain in the ring, and his last, ghastly acts, began with a phone call from the former wrestler and Harvard graduate, Chris Nowinski. He had a bizarre request for Mike Benoit: he wanted the brain of his dead son.

Nowinski had a theory about the cumulative effects of years of concussions on the brains of athletes like Chris Benoit. Nowinski had himself taken enough hits in the ring and on the football field to appreciate the long-term damage of concussions.

The Benoit murder-suicide struck Nowinski as being uncannily similar to the former football players who committed suicide after displaying increasingly erratic behaviour.

Former Pittsburgh Steeler Terry Long died at the age of 45 in June, 2005 after drinking antifreeze. Ex-Pittsburgh lineman Justin Strzelczyk drove his car into oncoming traffic on September 30, 2004, crashing into a tanker truck, losing his life in the explosion. He was 36 years old.

Former Philadelphia Eagle and father of three, Andre Waters, died of self-inflicted wounds when he took a shotgun to his head in November, 2006. He was 44.

Analysis of their brain tissue revealed the presence of a protein usually seen in the brains of elderly people with dementia, but almost never in normal middle-aged men.

Doctor Julian Bailes at the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, at the University of North Carolina, studied the after-effects of concussions among 3,000 former NFL players in their retirement years.

“What really surprised us was the amount of mental and cognitive problems that they were having, and also depression,” says Dr. Bailes.

“It was much more common than we would have expected, than a general population shows. It was correlated with the number of concussions or head injuries they had during their football playing career.”

Mike Benoit hoped the examination of his son’s brain could provide answers. Chris Benoit’s father, Mike, wanted to know one thing: Could Bailes find anything in his son’s brain or clinical history that would explain why he, like the former football players, would behave so grotesquely out-of-character in the final hours of his life?

In a word, the answer was yes.

Dr. Bennet Omalu, who carried out the examination, diagnosed Benoit’s brain as having Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE. In other words, his brain looked like that of an 80- or 90-year-old suffering from a type of dementia.

“You don’t find that in a normal brain,” said Dr. Omalu. “Chris’s brain showed large amounts of these abnormal proteins affecting specific regions of his brain, affecting regions of his brain that maintained mood.”

The ground-breaking research Doctors Omalu and Bailes had done in the football world could now provide answers to one of the most tragic puzzles to have gripped pro wrestling.

Where observers had blamed Benoit’s murder-suicide on “Roid Rage,” the sudden, violent outbursts stemming from high levels of steroids in the body, something else altogether could now explain it.

“We had a biological explanation,” says Dr. Omalu, “indisputable…tangible evidence that [Benoit] suffered from a dementia that impaired his ability to, to judge himself….And that most likely within a reasonable degree of medical certainly, made him do what he did.”

Just as the NFL has been reluctant to accept the conclusions drawn by similar studies in the past, World Wrestling Entertainment’s Vince McMahon Jr. is already expressing his doubts.
“The findings themselves stated Chris Benoit had the brain of an 85-year old man with dementia,” McMahon recently told CNN.

“And I would suggest to you that from a layman’s standpoint, Chris Benoit could not do what he did for a living. He could not function as a normal human being. He couldn’t even go to the airport if in fact that report were accurate.”

* ORIGINALLY AIRED: February 6, 2008 on CBC-TV