Wrestling is a culture of bullshitting. That probably comes from it being based on a shared delusion. No one thinks wrestling is real, but everyone agrees to pretend. Which is pretty strange. When you go and see Stupid Superhero Movie #58, you don’t pretend that Captain Pecs and Lady T&A are real people really fighting real space aliens that look like cosplay dorks. But when you go to watch wrestling, you pretend for a little while that it’s a real sport. Kinda.
Due to that fact, 80% of what wrestlers say can be disregarded off the bat. Everyone of a certain age says they helped break in Hulk Hogan. Everyone in a certain area says that they trained Steve Austin. Everyone is a bad ass bar fighter who’s fucked a hundred models and made a million dollars. No one believes it but everyone says it. That’s just how it is.
With that in mind, when a wrestler tells you that they hunted werewolves with Dennis “Scrap Iron” Ray, should you believe him?
I was going to let the werewolf hunter thing go. Seems like I drive a long way for no answers all the time. Why should this be different? The police weren’t going to tell me anything about it. What was I going to do? Try and solve a 20-year-old murder on my own?
And then I decided, sure, why not? It’s not like I have a lot on my plate.
I started with what little information there was about Scrap Iron online. Between Kim and Wolfman Mack, I got some numbers for old timers that might have been around then. I started calling around to see if I could find anyone who knew Scrap Iron or even had just worked with him.
After 117 calls, I was on the road to meet two broken down old wrestlers at Denny’s in Rochester – Benji Vieux, a French/native American who wrestled as El Mirador from Mexico; and Tommy Rivera, an Irish-Puerto Rican fellow who wrestled as “the Russian Bulldog” Andrei Romanovich. See what I mean about the nature of wrestling?
According to them, Scrap Iron was still wrestling part time in the 80s when they were breaking into the business. They became pals and late one night in a moment of booze and cocaine filled candor, Scrap Iron told them about all the people he’d killed. He was crying and carrying on because he was worried that they weren’t really werewolves and he was just an insane man who was killing innocent people.
Benji and Tommy tried to console him as best as piss ass drunk, violently high, emotionally repressed tough guys can. End result being they ended up at a shallow grave out in the woods. So they knew Scrap Iron was a murderer at least. Tommy was out at that point, but Benji was willing to give this werewolf idea some more of his time. He says that he and Scrap Iron started hanging around with a group of bikers that sold meth out of a double wide out in the county.
Benji says Scrap Iron never told him why, but that he suspected that the leader of this group and his girlfriend were werewolves. Benji claims that one night some angry customers showed up upset about some “bad shit”, one thing led to another, guns came out and once the shooting started, the leader “wolfed out” and started ripping people limb from limb. Benji said that in the fight, Scrap Iron shot the werewolf six times with a 44 magnum and that didn’t finish it off.
I looked at Tommy at this point and he just shrugged. Like it was no big deal if this was true or not. Like the existence of werewolves didn’t matter.
Benji says that after this incident he went on several hunts with Scrap Iron until Dennis decided he was too old to do it anymore. Benji said that he wanted to continue the hunts but he didn’t have the “sense” for them like Scrap Iron did. He claims that he lost his foot to a werewolf. When he went to the bathroom, Tommy said that diabetes took Benji’s foot.
After I talked to them, I looked back through Dennis’s journals and saw that he did write about the bike gang. And the other hunts Benji mentioned matched up as well. But there was nothing in there about Benji. His “hunting” logs are very detailed. Obsessively detailed. So how much of Benji’s story can I believe?
Tommy’s contribution was to blandly ask me if I wanted to know who killed Scrap Iron. He says that Scrap Iron had beef with some Mexican drug runners (also werewolves according to Benji) and they killed him and buried him under his own trailer. According to Tommy, the man who did the deed was none other than Eterno Corazon Inmortal.
When I asked him how he knew this, Tommy just snorted and said “Everyone knew”.
When I asked why no one did anything if everyone knew about it, he laughed and asked why no one did anything when Bruiser Brody was murdered. “Everyone knew who did it and nobody did anything. People get killed all the time girl, what can anyone do about it?”
