Art Guty, Nicole Zambrano (left in a photo from mutual friend Carlos Ramirez via WTAE), Guty (right) with a cigarette in his mouth following his Las Vegas arrest (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department)
A 55-year-old Pennsylvania husband who was once seen as the target of a murder-for-hire plot pursued by his ex-wife was arrested Tuesday in Las Vegas, Nevada, after his missing current wife was found dead at home on New Year’s Day.
Investigators at this time view Arthur “Art” Eugene Guty, Jr., as the prime suspect in the death of 26-year-old Nicole Zambrano, a Venezuelan woman he married under a year ago after one of her friends, Carlos Ramirez, introduced the two.
Zambrano, who last spoke with her family members on Christmas Eve and had not been spotted by neighbors since then, was reported missing by co-workers — not her husband — who worried when the housekeeper uncharacteristically did not show up for work for days, according to WTAE.
That missing person report led to a welfare check last Friday, but the search that led investigators to Zambrano’s body did not take place until Monday.
Uniontown Police Lt. Thomas Kolencik reportedly said investigators focused in on Art Guty after he allegedly failed to provide answers that made sense about where Nicole Zambrano was located, even falsely telling a neighbor on the phone that the couple was headed to the Grand Canyon.
That neighbor, Bob Luick, said Art Guty “maybe” disappeared three days before Christmas. Luick said he didn’t know where Guty was or what he was doing, but one phone call prior to the grisly discovery of Zambrano’s death stuck in the neighbor’s mind.
Art Guty’s neighbor speaks on murder case (WTAE/screengrab)
‘I said, ‘Art, where are you?’ But we didn’t know about Nicole yet, and he said, ‘I’m in Kansas, and we are going up to the Grand Canyon,’” the neighbor reportedly described the phone call to WTAE. “He said we’re going up to the Grand Canyon.”
The very same neighbor also made the claim that Guty one month ago angrily suspected Zambrano was “messing around on him.”
“Did I ever think he could do that? No. But I’ll you what, he made a statement maybe a month ago that he thought she was messing around on him, and 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,’” Luick reportedly said.
There have been two major developments in the case since.
On Monday, Nicole Zambrano was reportedly found shot in a “vital part of the body” at her Uniontown home, leading to a homicide warrant against Art Guty, who was seemingly on the run. Early Tuesday, Art Guty was reportedly arrested at a resort in Las Vegas. One Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department image showed Guty on his knees and with a cigarette in his mouth while his hands were behind his back. He will presumably be held as a fugitive in Nevada until he can be hauled back to Pennsylvania to face criminal homicide and aggravated assault charges.
The already alarming murder case is compounded by Art Guty’s recent past, when his then-wife Roxanne Guty in 2019 was suspected of three times trying to hire a man to kill him, allegedly asking the would-be assassin on one occasion, “What kind of gun would do the job?”
Roxanne Guty was accused of forging an agreement with the man where the two would split $50,000 in life insurance money once Art Guty was taken out. The man backed away apparently realizing that these conversations were no joke, leading to the woman’s arrest.
Roxanne Guty (Fayette County Prison)
But a Law&Crime search of Pennsylvania prison records did not show Roxanne Guty as an inmate or a parolee because the case which began as a conspiracy to commit homicide investigation was resolved by a no contest plea to misdemeanor recklessly endangering another person in February 2021. That plea resulted in a 20-month probation sentence and an order not to contact Art Guty “except as necessary through counsel to conclude the divorce proceeding.”
Just a couple of years later, Art Guty got married to the friend of a friend he’s now suspected of killing.
Nicole Zambrano’s cousin has since started a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for funeral expenses.
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