Britney Spears was rumored to be dating her drug counselor. Lindsay Lohan, who had checked herself into a drug rehabilitation center after a wild Memorial Day weekend, was confirmed to be extending her stay there. And Paris Hilton was being released from a Los Angeles County jail after doing three days there on a drunk-driving rap. In crime news, bail was set at $5 million for a former police officer in Ohio named Bobby Cutts Jr., who had murdered his pregnant girlfriend in front of their two-year-old son before rushing off to interview for the job as coach of his old high school football team. For interludes over the next two weeks, the Chris Benoit double murder-suicide would overshadow all these stories. It combined the celebrity-mongering of the Spears-Lohan-Hilton party-girl indiscretions with the heinous crime aspects of the Cutts case. Live satellite feeds on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC beamed news conferences and interviews with law enforcement figures, along with scenes of gawkers who had made pilgrimages to the front gate, providing eerie visuals for the haunted house in the distant background.
