After 32 years, Jimmy Superfly Snuka has finally been arrested for brutally beating his 23-year-old girlfriend to death in a Pennsylvania hotel room back in the spring of 1983.
The former bodybuilder and pro-wrestling star has long been suspected of murdering Nancy Argentino in a fit of roidal rage, but her case went cold only a few months into the investigation and wasn’t opened again until last year.
Yesterday, Lehigh County’s district attorney told reporters for The Morning Call that Superfly Snuka was taken into police custody at his New Jersey residence and bail set at $100,000.
The 72-year-old’s been charged with both third-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in the fatal battering of Argentino.
Wrestling showman Superfly was the last to see his girlfriend alive, according to eyewitness accounts and numerous statements he himself made to colleagues and detectives at the time of her unnatural demise.
A never-before-released autopsy shows that from the start of the inquiry into the young woman’s death county officials had labeled it a homicide.
She suffered dozens of lacerations and bruises all over her body in the vicious assault that claimed her life, leading the coroner to conclude she had been attacked with a blunt object and was the victim of “mate abuse.”
Jimmy the Superfly Snuka has already lost a wrongful death lawsuit to the family of his slain lover. Now, thanks to the Morning Call’s persistence in publicizing Ms. Argentino’s cold case killing, the accused ex-wrestler will at last have to answer in criminal court, too.
