Former wrestling star Marty Jannetty appeared to confess to homicide in a Facebook post on Wednesday. The wrestler, who made his name as half of the “Rockers” duo in the 1980s, wrote, “I was 13, working at Victory Lanes bowling alley buying weed,” and used a homophobic slur to refer to the dealer.
“He put his hands on me,” Jannetty continued. “He dragged me around to the back of the building..you already know what he was gonna try to do.”
“That was the very first time I made a man disappear,” Jannetty added, and said that the man was never found but that “they shoulda looked” in the Chattahoochee River. The river runs through Columbus, Georgia, where, as the New York Post pointed out, Jannetty grew up. Jannetty was born in 1960, and the incident he described would have taken place around 1973.
Later in the post, Jannetty framed the incident as a threat to a woman he was romantically involved with. “I promised myself way back then, nobody would ever hurt me again..that includes you,” he wrote, adding that the woman “hurt” him with her “Jamaican jealousy.”
As SB Nation noted, in 2018 Jannetty posted about wanting to have sex with a woman he raised as a daughter before saying hackers had written it. He’s dealt with substance abuse and sex-addiction issues, and was part of a lawsuit against World Wrestling Entertainment in which he said he suffers from chronic traumatic encephalopathy caused by wrestling. In June 2019, the Post wrote, he said he went on a 60-day drug and sex bender after WrestleMania 35.
In an interview with Boston Wrestling MWF about the apparent confession on Wednesday, Jannetty said that the man, whom he worked with at the bowling alley, sexually assaulted him before Jannetty struck the man with a brick in self defense. Jannetty said he didn’t intend to kill the man and that “I didn’t say I killed him, I said he disappeared.” He suggested later in the interview that he had dragged the man’s body into the river, and that a friend who is a sheriff told him to expect a warrant for his arrest to be put out. Jannetty also echoed his racist comments from his Facebook post in saying that he resented Black women he dated for being “jealous.”
After TMZ initially reported the Facebook post, Jannetty deleted it. The Columbus Police Department told the outlet, “We are going to look into this,” but that they have “several current active homicide investigations underway and they will have to remain the priority.” A spokesperson from the homicide/cold case division said, “The first step will be seeing if we have any missing persons or unidentified remains cases that match the limited information in the post.” Reached by phone on Thursday, a spokesperson for the department confirmed that an investigation is being discussed.
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