Chris Benoit
Canadian professional wrestler and murderer (1967–2007)
Christopher Michael Benoit (; May 21, 1967 – June 24, 2007) was a Canadian professional wrestler who worked for various promotions during his 22-year career. Despite his accomplishments, he is more generally known for murdering his wife and youngest son before committing suicide in 2007.
Bearing the nicknames The (Canadian) Crippler alongside The Rabid Wolverine throughout his career, Benoit held 30 championships between the World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment (WWF/WWE), World Championship Wrestling (WCW), Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW – all United States), New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW – Japan), and Stampede Wrestling (Canada). Benoit was a two-time world champion, having reigned as a one-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion and a one-time World Heavyweight Champion in WWE; he was booked to win the ECW World Championship at Vengeance: Night of Champions, which was held the night of his death. Benoit was the twelfth WWE Triple Crown Champion and the seventh WCW Triple Crown Champion, and the second of four men in history to achieve both the WWE and the WCW Triple Crown Championships. He was also the 2004 Royal Rumble winner, joining Shawn Michaels and preceding Edge as one of the three men to win the Royal Rumble match as the number one entrant. Benoit headlined multiple pay-per-views for WWF/WWE, including a victory in the World Heavyweight Championship main event of WrestleMania XX in March 2004.
In a three-day double-murder and suicide, Benoit murdered his wife in their residence on June 22, 2007, and his 7-year-old son the next day, before killing himself on June 24. The incident profoundly shocked and changed the professional wrestling industry and drew intense media criticism regarding brain injuries, substance abuse, and the long-term health of athletes in contact sports. Subsequent research undertaken by the Sports Legacy Institute (now the Concussion Legacy Foundation) suggested that depression and advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition of brain damage, from repeated legitimate strikes to the head that Benoit had sustained throughout his pro-wrestling career were likely contributing factors of the crimes.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Chris Benoit” as canadian professional wrestler and murderer (1967–2007). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q44292. The first chronological checks are 1967, 2007 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chris Benoit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.