Retired professional wrestler and two-time failed GOP congressional candidate Dan Rodimer is challenging evidence that led to his arrest on a charge of killing a man in a Las Vegas strip hotel room last year.
Rodimer, 45, allegedly beat up 47-year-old Idaho resident Christopher Tapp at the Resorts World hotel room on Oct. 29, 2023 at a Halloween party.
Tapp suffered brain bleeding and blunt force trauma to the head and was declared dead at the hospital days later.
Rodimer, who lost congressional bids in Nevada in 2020 and in Texas a year later after faking a southern twang, was charged with murder after turning himself in to Vegas police on March 6. The former WWE wrestler remains free on a $200,000 bail.
His attorneys David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfield on Wednesday filed documents claiming that prosecutors relied on a privileged conversation between Rodimer and his wife to conclude that he allegedly fatally punched Tapp.
The judge did not immediately decide the evidence question, the Associated Press reported.
Rodimer, a father of six, allegedly attacked Tapp after he offered the wrestler’s stepdaughter cocaine at the party, according to an arrest warrant.
“If you ever talk to my daughter again, I’ll [expletive] kill you,” a witness said they heard him tell Tapp, followed immediately by loud banging noises.
Initially investigators believed that Tapp’s death was an accidental overdose due to cocaine found in his system, according to his autopsy. But authorities later learned he had been in a fight in the hotel room that night.
A second witness claimed she saw Rodimer knock Tapp to the ground causing his head to hit a small table. Rodimer then rained several punches on his head and body. However another witness said Tapp slipped, fell and hit his head on the coffee table.
However, it was text messages between Rodimer and his own wife, Sarah Rodimer, that provided the most damning evidence.
“I watched you nearly murder somebody and I had to take your [expletive] hands off from his neck as he laid [sic] there and you ran away and I spent the next two hours trying to take care of him. Nobody should have to watch their husband murder somebody,” Sarah texted her husband following the altercation, according to police.
“I watched you murder somebody like let that sink in your psychopath,” she then added in another text, the documents show.
Tapp served more than 20 years in prison in a 1996 killing before receiving an $11.7 million settlement from Idaho Falls in 2022 in a wrongful conviction lawsuit, bringing him national attention.
Rodimer, who is originally from New Jersey, and Tapp reportedly knew one another through the classic car and racing circuit, a family attorney told 8 News Now.
With Post wires
