An anonymous user operating a computer traced to Stamford, Conn. – home to World Wrestling Entertainment – posted an entry to Chris Benoit’s biography on Wikipedia.org announcing the death of his wife Nancy about 14 hours before police in suburban Atlanta said they found her body along with her husband’s and that of their 7-year-old son, FOXNews.com has learned.
Employees at Wikipedia.com said the posting went live on their site on Monday at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Police, however, said they found the bodies Monday at 2:30 p.m. EDT. Wikipedia.org’s computers are set to record Standard and Universal Time.
The posting reads: “Chris Benoit was replaced by [[Johnny Nitro]] for the ECW Championship match at Vengeance, as Benoit was not there due to personal issues, stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.”
The posting was apparently made in reference to Benoit’s scheduled appearance on Sunday night at an Extreme Championship Wrestling event in Texas, with the last phrase noted in red to indicate an edit made to the original entry.
UPDATE: The IP in question, listed by wikipedia as 69.120.111.23, also made a series of other edits to different entries, including former WWE Diva Stacy Keibler, current WWE star Chavo Guerrero, basketball star Ron Artest and HBO series The Sopranos. Many of the edits were misspelled or explicit in nature, leading one to believe that the postings were made by a hoaxer. If you click the links listed as (diff) you will see the changes made by the user highlighted in red, even if they have been removed from the wikipedia entries as they currently stand. Although the IP address is traced back to the Stamford, CT area, it’s also possible that the user was concealing his true IP address.
This might just be a case of sick irony.