Husband arrested at Las Vegas casino after wife found dead on New Year's Day
A 55-year-old Pennsylvania husband was arrested during his cigarette break outside a Las Vegas casino with $100,000 cash the day after his second wife was found dead in their home on New Year's Day.
In a bizarre twist, Arthur Guty Jr.'s Tuesday arrest came four years after his former wife was accused of targeting him in a murder-for-hire plot for a life insurance payout.
Venezuelan national Franyerlys Nicold "Nicole" Zambrano, 26, married Guty less than a year ago, WPXI reported.
Rather than her husband, worried coworkers reported Zambrano missing on Dec. 29 after the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort housekeeper failed to show up for work, according to WTAE. She last spoke to family members on Christmas Eve and had not been seen by neighbors since.
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The call prompted a welfare check from the Uniontown Police Department at Zambrano's Bierer Avenue home, WPXI reported. When there was no answer, police let themselves in and found the 26-year-old shot dead "in a vital part of the body" around 1:31 p.m.
Police told the outlet she had been dead for at least two days.
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Guty became the prime suspect in her death after he failed to provide satisfactory answers about Zambrano's whereabouts before she was found dead, Uniontown Police Lieutenant Thomas Kolencik told WTAE.
Allegedly, Guty told neighbor Bob Luick that he and Zambrano were visiting the Grand Canyon before her body was discovered.
Other neighbors reportedly told police that the couple was vacationing in Florida.
"The story just didn’t add up," Kolencik said. "They were in touch with him. The story he was telling family members, told a couple of our officers in small conversations, none of it added up."
A warrant was issued for Guty on Monday after authorities found Zambrano dead and were unable to reach him. After evading police for a day, he was placed under arrest with $100,000 cash on him at the Mardi Gras Casino. According to WTAE, police had located him by pinging his cellphone.
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The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department published a photo of Guty handcuffed on his knees with a cigarette dangling from his mouth early Tuesday morning.
"He was on his way, we believe, out of the country with a significant amount of cash and was going to avoid, or try to avoid, any responsibility for what happened here," Fayette County District Attorney Mike Aubele told WTAE.
Before Zambrano was killed, Luick told WTAE, Guty made an eerie off-hand comment that stuck in his memory.
"He made a statement maybe a month ago that he thought [Zambrano] was messing around on him," Luick recalled. "This is exactly the way he said it, he was sitting right there, he said, ‘If I find out she’s messing around, I'll kill her."
The neighbor said he last saw Guty a couple of days before Christmas Eve.
"He disappeared, and I didn't know where he went, or what he was doing," Luick said.
Other neighbors told the outlet that Zambrano was fastidious and well-liked in the community, and echoed Luick's shock at Guty's alleged role in her death.
Now, police in Nevada are working to extradite him back to Pennsylvania to face homicide and aggravated assault charges.
Guty's former wife, 55-year-old Roxanne Guty, faced criminal charges in 2019 after allegedly trying three times to hire a man to kill her then-husband.
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On one occasion, according to CBS News Pittsburgh, Guty's first wife allegedly asked the would-be hitman "what kind of gun would do the job?"
Allegedly, the woman and a man, identified as Norman Pennington in court documents, agreed to split Guty's $50,000 life insurance policy payout after orchestrating his death.
However, Pennington told police that he thought the woman was joking and "never planned on killing Guty," and decided to come forward when he "thought this had gone too far," the Pittsburgh outlet reported.
Roxanne Guty pleaded no contest to conspiring to commit homicide and had charges reduced to misdemeanor reckless endangerment of another person in February 2021, according to Law & Crime.
She served a 20-month probation sentence and was ordered not to contact Guty except as necessary through counsel to conclude the divorce proceeding, the outlet reported. Additionally, she did not appear as an inmate or parolee in state prison records on Tuesday.