Mostly everyone who reads this does not watch the professional wrestling, so if this is hard to understand, I apologise in advance.

Chris Benoit was a favourite wrestler of mine. Never my all-time favourite, just a guy who you knew would put on good-to-great matches every week. He made other guys looked better by being in the ring with him, and helped them reach the next level. He worked hard and always gave the impression that he would do anything for a business that he loved.

Three weekends ago, he murdered his wife and 7-year old child, before committing suicide. Some facts that have been reported. Medical reports suggest his wife, Nancy, was bound and strangled on the Friday. His son was strangled late Saturday or early Sunday. He hanged himself on a weights machine on Monday. A Bible was placed next to both his wife and son. He sent a series of odd text messages over the weekend, giving his address to several other wrestlers at shows he had cancelled his appearances over. There has since been a question over his drug use, especially steroids. There has been a further question that his son, Daniel, may have Fragile X Syndrome, a rare condition that causes mental and physical disability.

In comparison to this list, the range of media speculation in the US can not be summarised anywhere nearly so succinctly. The deaths were blamed on roid rage, an unusual suggestion given the deaths occured over a three day period. They were blamed on the parent's struggle with the son's condition. They were blamed on Benoit being frustrated in his career. Stories about divorce and domestic abuse were produced, and connected to other wrestlers' experiences (and those of their familes). They were tied to the deaths of other wrestlers and former wrestlers. The likes of Bill O'Reilly went as far as the blame Nancy for the murders, as she should have "known better" about living with such a dangerous individual and not adequately protecting her child. Most seems, with even a little examination, ludicrous, just further examples of the sort of mainstream reaction everytime professional wrestling receives unwanted spotlight.

There are a million other twists to this tragic tale that have emerged in the past three week, none of which have done anything to make the whole thing seem any less surreal to me. I have found it very hard to get my head around much of it - it doesn't make any sense to me that someone I could enjoy watching work could do this. This being the crazy world of professional wrestling, there is also a small part of me that is mournful for the lost matches, the tainted career and the fact he'll never be doing what he was good at on TV again. And because the more sensible part of me says it is ridiculous to care about this where the events are so tragic, the whole thing becomes even more confusing.

My opinion on crime has always started with the premise that a person's life shouldn't be defined by the very worst thing they did, though this is often the case. I think it is perfectly possible that people that did good in their lifetime can also, for a myriad of reasons, do something very bad indeed. I think this perfectly describes the situation with Chris Benoit. He spent twenty years risking his body to entertain wrestling fans, and in doing this, has probably entertained millions. He was also, by most accounts until this final weekend, a caring father to all his children, and a good friend and mentor to many. The consensus amongst these friend's is that the final few days of his life were without warning, and were completely out of charachter, suggesting that these were not the actions of an innately evil human being, but possible a temporarily deranged one.

I guess what I would like would be, one day, to be able to watch old matches of him and be thankful for his work and his effort, and try to seperate the two people. At the moment, that is clearly impossible, and aside from the horror that developed as I learned more about these crimes, my overriding feeling is that all that went before them is ruined forever.