12 Things You Need To Know About the Jimmy Snuka Murder Case

Over 30 years since the death of his girlfriend, WWE Legend ‘Superfly’ Jimmy Snuka is being charged with murder. This may very well be be the worst summer the WWE has had since 2007 (the Benoit double murder/suicide). Hulk Hogan is disgraced. Dusty Rhodes is dead. Roddy Piper is dead. And now this. The icons from the WWE’s golden age have seen better days.

But before the rumor mill swirls, let’s clarify and consolidate the facts. All of this information was compiled and condensed from interviews, first-hand accounts of witnesses and participants, court documents, and research by investigative journalists. Here’s what we know about the Snuka case so far.


  • Who's the victim in the case?

    Her name is Nancy Argentino, and she was a Brooklyn native. She'd worked as an assistant in a dental office since she was a teenager, and was taking college classes at the local community college before dropping out. Her friend was dating a wrestler and Nancy tagged along. She dated Hogan for a minute, but she soon caught the eye of Snuka, and they begun their relationship in ‘82.

    Snuka was a notoriously unreliable worker, and Nancy made sure that he made it to the shows on time. In return, Snuka gave her spending money for shopping sprees. She became Snuka’s "East Coast girlfriend," according to Snuka’s autobiography, and they would hook up every time they met up.


  • So what went wrong? Were there any warning signs?

    Well, not at first. Snuka had even been over to Nancy’s parent’s house, and her family described him as polite and well-behaved— perhaps a bit too quietbut a decent dude. But he consistently dodged making long-term commitments to Nancy, and it soon became obvious to the family that Snuka was a married man.

    There was also evidence of physical abuse, particularly in the lead-up to her death. Nancy’s younger sister alleges that an angry Snuka once told her, “I could kick you and put my hands around your throat and nobody would know.”

    Also, several months before Nancy’s death, police were called to the scene of a domestic disturbance at a Howard Johnson motel in Salina, N.Y. When they arrived there, one officer saw Snuka dragging Nancy by her hair. It took five police officers and two dogs to arrest the professional wrestler. Nancy sustained the following injuries: a bruised right thumb, a neck contusion, a damaged scalp, and an injured lower back. She declined to press charges, and claimed that none of it was intentional.


  • Did any of Snuka's coworkers know about his violent tendencies?

    Yeah, they did, and they should have done more about it. Snuka had a reputation for being rough with women, especially with his wife at the time, Sharon—the mother of four Snuka children, including professional wrestlers Tamina and Deuce. Pro wrestling great Buddy Rogers was a next-door neighbor of the Snukas, and he said the following about Sharon to journalist Irv Muchnik:

    “Jimmy used to beat the shit out of that woman. She would show up at our house, bruised and battered. But she couldn’t leave him—he had her hooked on the same junk he was using.”

    Those are some pretty strong allegations. Snuka, for his part, claimed that he did not get his wife addicted to drugs; rather, they did them together, although it was he who brought the drugs into the house. Snuka never really disputed the domestic abuse, either. Sharon was actually hospitalized from one of the beatings he inflicted on her, and brought up the incidents in the latest grand jury hearing.


  • So when did his violence allegedly turn deadly?

    On May 10, 1983, in Allentown, Pa., Snuka called 911 to report that Nancy was unresponsive in his bed. The wrestlers were in town for a WWE live performance, and Snuka claimed that he found his wife in bad condition when he got back to his hotel room after the show.

    When the EMT workers arrived, they were greeted by a horrible scene. Nancy was laying in bed, naked, with a sheet covering her. Her pupils were dilated. Her breathing was weak and irregular, and it would stop and start again. The heart rate, however, was fast—a notable sign of head trauma.

    The ambulance rushed her over to the Lehigh Valley Hospital, where doctors tried to save her life. She died approximately an hour later, early the next morning, without regaining consciousness.


  • Did the coroner do an autopsy?

    Yes, he did. And that made things look even worse for Snuka. Nancy succumbed to a skull fracture and brain injuries, which one might theoretically get from hitting one’s head on something hard.

    But that’s not all. Nancy also had 39 contusions and abrasions on her arms, forearms, back, buttocks, legs, forelegs. The coroner also determined that the injuries (both the head injuries and the bodily injuries) occurred less than 24 hours prior to her death.

    The coroner ruled the death a homicide, and suggested that the cause of the bodily injuries was “mate abuse,” based upon the forensic evidence.


  • What did Snuka have to say about all of this?

    Snuka’s official story, for three decades now, has been the following:

    He and Nancy were driving, and she needed to go to the bathroom by the side of the road. In the process of doing so, Nancy tripped, fell, and hit her head. She was woozy and concussed, but well enough to drive them both of them back to the hotel. She wasn’t feeling well, and she didn’t feel well the following morning either.

    So Snuka left Nancy in bed while he went to wrestle. And when he returned from the show, he found her unresponsive.


  • Sounds convenient. Do we have reason to doubt that Snuka is telling the truth?

    Unfortunately yes — we have a lot to doubt about Snuka’s account of events.

    Putting aside that slipping and falling does not account for Nancy’s multiple injuries, Snuka also changed his story several times before settling on the particular, "official version." When speaking to doctors, nurses, and police officers that evening, Snuka gave slightly different accounts, every time. Here are just some of the contradictory claims that he made on separate occasions, both at the time of Nancy’s death and after 1983:

    She was injured right outside their motel room. She was injured again inside of the motel room. She was injured by the side of the highway.

    She slipped on concrete. She slipped on moss. She tripped while jumping over a stream. He pushed her. She hit her head on concrete. She hit her head on a guardrail. She hit her head on furniture.

    They were in an argument. They were wrestling. They were fooling around. It was an accident. It was on purpose. She lost consciousness. She didn’t lose consciousness. He slapped her to try and wake her up. And so on and so forth.


  • Are the rumors of WWE Chairman Vince McMahon getting involved true?

    Now this is the part that gets the WWE lawyers upset. They referred to the rumors of Vince McMahon buying or intimidating police to look the other way as an “odious lie.”

    Here’s what definitely happened: McMahon accompanied Snuka to his second, follow-up interview with detectives. At that meeting, by all accounts, Vince did most of the talking. And after that meeting, no one really continued prying into the case.

    "I remember Vince McMahon being what Vince McMahon has always been—very effusive. He was very protective, a showman," said Robert Steinberg, the assistant D.A. at the time. "He was the mouthpiece, trying to direct the conversation."

    It was actually Snuka himself who raised the spectre of bribery in his autobiography: “I don’t know if he gave Nancy’s family money or anything,” he wrote. And Nancy’s sister alleges that a WWE representative called her mother, offering the family $25,000 to keep quiet. The mother, according to the sister, screamed into the phone before hanging up.


  • So what was the result of all this interrogating and investigating?

    Nothing! The case was not pursued and eventually the trail ran cold. Richard Cushing, a private investigator that Nancy’s family hired, chalked it up to fear.

    “There was fear, I think, on two counts: fear of the amount of money the World Wrestling Federation had, and physical fear of the size of these people,” Cushing said.

    Nancy’s family was left without any criminal prosecution options. They pursued civil charges, filing a wrongful death suit against Snuka in 1985.


  • Did the Argentino family win the civil suit? If so, how much did they collect?

    Yes. They were awarded a $500,000 judgment against Jimmy Snuka, and the WWE Legend was found liable in Nancy’s death.

    But Snuka has never paid a dime of it. He insisted that he never hurt Nancy, that he was sorry for her family’s loss, and moreover, that he was broke. The WWE had fired him, and although he would continue to wrestle intermittently for the WWE and for smaller promotions, his glory days were gone, and he always squandered any fortune he managed to acquire. Today, Snuka lives from paycheck to paycheck, and his third wife claims that he’s simply forgotten about what he owed to whom.


  • But that should have been the end, right? How did this all start up again?

    We’re hearing about this case again, after so many years, because Nancy’s sisters have never given up. They reached out to the district attorney to reopen the case, and based upon what has come to light since 1983, there’s good cause to try Snuka for murder. Snuka sat down for recent interviews with both Opie & Anthony and Sam Roberts, where he gave additional, conflicting accounts of the fateful night’s events. And Snuka released his autobiography in 2012, which contained even more murky, conflicted accounts.

    One could also theorize that the case has become an embarrassment to the district attorney’s office. After all, any lay person looking at the evidence today would deduce that it requires a second, third, and fourth look. So they had a grand jury hearing where Snuka was charged for the murder of Nancy Argentino.

    And here we are.


  • What happens now?

    The D.A. is charging him on two counts: one count of murder in the third degree and one count of involuntary manslaughter. Usually, this would mean that the defendant would head directly to jail, and the judge would not set bail.

    But these are somewhat unusual circumstances. The 72-year-old Snuka is in poor health—he’s been battling stomach cancer, and his once muscular body is in ruins from a deadly, long-term combination of drugs, alcohol, and steroid abuse. Because of this the judge has set bail at $100,000. Snuka successfully posted it, and he is freeat least for now. A trial date has not been set.

    Time will tell how everything finally plays out.

    Kevin Wong has written for Complex Media since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter at @kevinjameswong.

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