WWE legend Owen Hart's widow Martha opens up on husband's tragic death

Paramedics work on Owen Hart after his tragic fall. Photo / AP

Twenty-one years ago the biggest in-ring disaster to ever hit the WWE, or as it was then known, the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), shook the industry to its core.

Owen Hart, performing as The Blue Blazer, fell 23 metres to his death, live on the Over the Edge pay-per-view at Kansas City's Kemper Arena.

To say it was a dark day would be an understatement — Hart was known as a prankster and some would say the best wrestler in the entire Hart wrestling family, which included his brother Bret, a seven-time World Champion.

WWE continued the pay-per-view with Jeff Jarrett, a close friend of Hart and tag team partner, forced to cut a promo as the matches went on.

The show went on, but some would later question why a crime scene was not set up.

Hart's tragic demise is the subject of Vice TV's "Dark Side of the Ring" series with the final episode called "The Final Days of Owen Hart," for which his widow Martha Hart was interviewed.

Hart said she holds WWE directly responsible for her husband's death.

"When Owen died, they scooped him out like a piece of garbage and they paraded wrestlers out to wrestle in a ring that had Owen's blood, where the boards were broken from Owen's fall and where the guys could feel the dip in the ring from where he fell. Just that disrespect and lack of respect for a human life that had just been lost," Martha Hart told CBS Sports.

"The fact that they didn't stop the show is just appalling. Vince McMahon was a poor leader, and he failed because that talent was looking for leadership and he failed them."

Hart claims WWE took short cuts, she told CBS Sports.

"First of all, the stunt itself was so negligent," Hart said. "They hired hackers they knew would do anything they wanted when they knew that proper riggers they had hired in the past had told them, 'We won't do this kind of stunt, it's not safe.' Everything about that stunt was done wrong. The entire set-up was wrong. The equipment was wrong -- the harness, for example, was meant for dragging people behind a car. It was a stunt harness, but it wasn't meant to suspend someone 80 feet above the ground.

"What was happening to Owen when he was sitting in that harness is, his circulation was getting cut off and he couldn't breathe. Then, the snap shackle that they used, that snap shackle is not meant for rigging humans. It's meant for the sole use of rigging sailboats. It's a sailboat clip that, by design, is meant to open on load. By the very design of the stunt, it was meant to fail, because the weight of Owen on that clip actually made it more likely it would open spontaneously.

"Proper riggers have a few things they would never do. First, they would never do a stunt without redundancy. That didn't happen; there was no redundancy. Second, they never, ever, let the talent have any control into the stunt. These guys were telling Owen, 'This cord taped here, don't pull it until you get to the ground.' That would never happen; proper riggers don't rig things this way. The other thing is, WWE is a billion-dollar company. Owen never questioned his safety. He thought for sure they were hiring people that knew what they were doing. He was putting his life in their hands, and they didn't care. They didn't have any regard for Owen's life whatsoever. They went outside of qualified riggers that had good experience."

Martha Hart filed a wrongful-death lawsuit which WWE countersued.

Martha Hart would eventually be awarded $18 million in the settlement and started up the Owen Hart Foundation.

WWE outside legal council Jerry McDevitt responded to CBS Sports to Martha Hart's latest comments.

"The reality is, we've never told our side of the story of what happened - at least not outside of court. We told it in court, but when she talks about the way the lawsuit unfolded over the years, it really isn't accurate what she's saying.

"What she did whenever this happened is, she hired a lawyer in Kansas City who we caught essentially trying to fix the judicial selection process to get a judge that was more to their liking. We caught them and went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court. The Missouri Supreme Court said, 'No, no, no. We're not going to let that happen.' They essentially appointed an independent judge to come in from outside of Kansas City to oversee the proceedings.

"We were basically trying to find out what happened that night. Martha was not even remotely interested in finding out what happened that night; she just wanted to use it as a vehicle to beat up a business that she didn't like that her husband was in, the wrestling business."

Last year an audio documentary by Post Wrestling's John Pollock brought many of the key players from that fateful day together to discuss how Hart's last hours unfolded.

- with news.com.au