A former Greensburg dentist and big-game hunter killed his wife with a shotgun on an African safari in 2016 to collect $4.8 million on life insurance policies and carry on his affair with a longtime girlfriend, according to federal prosecutors in Colorado.
Lawrence Rudolph, 67, owner of Three Rivers Dental, is charged with foreign murder and mail fraud.
The complaint was filed Dec. 16 and unsealed last week in U.S. District Court in Denver. Mr. Rudolph, who lives in Arizona but had been traveling back to Greensburg for business at the time of the alleged crime, was ordered detained this week pending trial.
His Miami lawyer, David Oscar Markus, on Wednesday called the case an “outrageous prosecution” against a man who loved his wife of 34 years and didn’t kill her.
“The investigators on the scene concluded it was an accident,” he said in an emailed statement. “Several insurance companies also investigated and agreed. Now, more than five years later, the government is seeking to manufacture a case against this well-respected and law-abiding dentist. Dr. Rudolph looks forward to his trial where he will demonstrate his innocence.”
An affidavit by FBI Agent Donald Peterson of the Denver office, however, says Mr. Rudolph “murdered his wife, Bianca Rudolph, with premeditation, while the two were on a hunting trip in Zambia on Oct. 11, 2016, in such a manner that he could falsely claim the death was the result of an accident.”
The affidavit also says that a woman who had worked in Mr. Rudolph’s dental office in Greensburg had been having an affair with him for many years and had demanded that he sell the practice and leave his wife. That woman has been living with Mr. Rudolph since 2017, the affidavit says.
Lawrence Rudolph first met Bianca Finizio when Lawrence was in dental school and Bianca was enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh. They married in 1982, and Mr. Rudolph started a dental practice around that time, where Bianca worked. In 2006, the FBI said, Mr. Rudolph separated from his partners and opened Three Rivers Dental, where one of his children now works.
The Rudolphs were both big-game hunters who traveled often to Zambia to kill animals. They took their last trip from Sept. 27 to Oct. 11, 2016, where Bianca’s goal was to shoot a leopard, the FBI said. She wasn’t able to do that but did kill other animals. Lawrence was with her but didn’t hunt.
On Oct. 11, they were packing up at 5:30 a.m. in Kafue National Park when Ms. Rudolph was shot in the chest with a 12-gauge shotgun.
This is what happened, according to the affidavit:
The Zambian police interviewed Mr. Rudolph, who said he was in the bathroom of their cabin and Bianca in the bedroom when he heard a gunshot.
He said he came out and found her lying on the floor bleeding from the chest. He said he tried to revive her but couldn’t. He said he suspected the shotgun had been left loaded from the previous day’s hunt and that it went off when she was packing it into its case.
A hunting guide with the couple said he was completing paperwork in the camp dining hall and heard a gunshot from the cabin where the Rudolphs were staying. He and a hunting scout rushed to the cabin and found Bianca on the floor bleeding as Lawrence shouted for help. The scout saw the shotgun inside a partially zipped case and an expended shell on the ground.
Zambian police took the gun and conducted tests to see if it would fire properly. It did. The authorities returned the gun to Mr. Rudolph.
The Zambian authorities determined that the gun was loaded from the previous day and that Ms. Rudolph didn’t follow safety precautions in packing the weapon, causing it to fire accidentally.
The consular chief at the U.S. embassy in Lusaka told the FBI that Mr. Rudolph called the embassy after his wife’s death and said she had died that morning of an accidental gunshot.
But the chief was suspicious. He said Mr. Rudolph “quickly turned the conversation to the issue of cremating Bianca’s body and leaving the country,” according to the affidavit.
The chief said he explained to Mr. Rudolph that the embassy would need documentation before letting him leave Zambia with his wife’s remains. The two talked again the next day to discuss funeral homes and mortuaries. Bianca’s body was being maintained at Ideal Funeral Home in Lusaka. The chief told Mr. Rudolph that Ambassador St. Ann’s Funeral Home was one of the few funeral homes in the region that could perform cremation. On Oct. 13, the chief was informed that St. Ann’s was waiting for the pathologist’s report before accepting the body for cremation. Shortly after that, the chief said he received a call from Ideal Funeral Home saying the body was set to be cremated the next day.
The chief, a former U.S. Marine who is familiar with guns and gunshot wounds, told the FBI that he “had a bad feeling about the situation, which he thought was moving too quickly,” according to the affidavit, so he decided to travel to the funeral home with two other embassy employees to take photos of the body and preserve evidence.
The chief took photos of the body and measured the chest wound. He said the wound was 6 centimeters in diameter. He also didn’t see burns or tissue expansion as would be expected from a contact wound, and he saw what he believed was a second wound caused by the wadding from the shotgun cartridge.
Based on those observations, he believed Bianca was shot at a distance of 6½ to 8 feet.
When the chief got back to his office, he said Mr. Rudolph called him and was “livid” that he’d visited the funeral home and taken the photos.
The chief and Mr. Rudolph met at Ambassador St. Ann’s Funeral Home on Oct. 14 to collect Bianca’s passport and other documents necessary for the cremation. Mr. Rudolph declined offers of help in contacting family members and told the chief he wanted to tell the family himself. He said he had been married before and that his children were from that prior marriage and not Bianca’s children.
He also asked questions about who would be able to access information about Bianca’s death, such as police reports, under Zambian law. When asked what kind of gun the shotgun was, he said he didn’t know but described it as an antique.
He said he was in the shower at 5 a.m. while Bianca was packing to leave, heard the shot and came running out of the shower.
The consular chief also told the FBI that Mr. Rudolph had told him that Bianca may have committed suicide.
Agents then reviewed Bianca’s nine life insurance policies.
The beneficiary was a trust established by the Rudolphs with Lawrence as the beneficiary. Starting in 2017, Mr. Rudolph began filing claims on those policies totaling $4.8 million, according to the affidavit.
A private investigation firm hired by one of the insurance companies interviewed Mr. Rudolph and the hunting guide about Bianca’s death. The guide said Mr. Rudolph carried the shotgun for Bianca during the hunt and unloaded it and cleaned it the night before her death. The guide also said it would have been difficult for someone of Bianca’s small stature, about 5-foot-5, to reach the trigger of a shotgun and shoot herself in the chest. He did say, however, that she could have accidentally pulled the trigger while packing the gun if she had hit the butt of the gun on the ground to try to push it into the case.
The FBI affidavit also includes details from a friend of Bianca’s who called the FBI’s legal attache in Pretoria, South Africa, on Oct. 27 to ask the bureau to investigate Bianca’s death because she suspected Mr. Rudolph killed her.
The witness said Mr. Rudolph had cheated on his wife in the past and was involved in an affair at the time of Bianca’s death. The friend also said Mr. Rudolph had been verbally abusive and the two fought over money. In addition, she said, Mr. Rudolph’s children didn’t find out about the death until a week after the shooting.
She said the cremation would have been against Bianca’s wishes because she was strict Catholic and had expressed opposition to cremation in the past.
“Larry is never going to divorce her because he doesn’t want to lose his money, and she’s never going to divorce him because of her Catholicism,” the friend said, according to the affidavit.
Other witnesses also told the FBI that Mr. Rudolph was having an affair.
Agents interviewed a former employee at the dental office in Greensburg, who said that Mr. Rudolph’s girlfriend was the manager of the practice and told the witness that she’d been having an affair with him for 15 to 20 years.
According to the witness, the girlfriend had given Mr. Rudolph an ultimatum of one year to sell his dental offices and leave Bianca. Records showed the two moved in together in January 2017, the FBI said, and offered $3.5 million in cash for their home in Phoenix.
First Published: January 12, 2022, 4:49 p.m.