A former Greensburg dentist accused of gunning down his wife while on a 2016 big-game hunting trip in Africa is asking to be let out of jail pending trial, saying he didn’t kill her and that he’s not a risk to flee because he could have run years ago during the FBI’s investigation but always came home.
Lawrence Rudolph is being held in a Denver lockup on federal foreign murder and mail fraud charges following his arrest by the FBI in December during a trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where Mr. Rudolph owns a vacation home.
“Dr. Rudolph is not a risk of flight,” said his lawyer, David Oscar Markus, in court filings in Colorado, where the case was brought because one of the insurance companies listed as a victim of mail fraud is located there. “Dr. Rudolph, a 67-year-old father of two with no criminal history, had every opportunity to flee when he learned of the investigation five years ago, but took no steps to abscond. The notion that he could flee to a foreign country during a pandemic, without a passport, while being GPS-monitored is fanciful.”
Mr. Markus also said Mr. Rudolph didn’t kill his wife, Bianca.
The FBI said Mr. Rudolph shot her with a shotgun during a trip to Zambia to hunt big game in an effort to collect $4.8 million in life insurance and get her out of the way so he could carry on his long-standing affair with his girlfriend, the former office manager at Three Rivers Dental, his Greensburg practice. The two now live in Phoenix.
The government wants Mr. Rudolph detained as a risk to disappear and as a potential danger.
But Mr. Markus said his client is neither. He said the government’s case is weak and that Mr. Rudolph could have disappeared long ago but did not.
Mr. Rudolph “vehemently maintains his innocence and is committed to defending himself,” he said. “He wants nothing more than to appear in court to fight the outrageous allegations against him.”
The flight risk is not valid, Mr. Markus said, because Mr. Rudolph knew he was under investigation for years and the FBI did not act urgently to take him into custody.
“Agents believed they had probable cause to arrest Dr. Rudolph no later than December 16, 2021,” he said. “They deliberately chose not to arrest him. At some point, they learned he would be traveling to Mexico for a vacation on December 21, 2021. The agents had been investigating Dr. Rudolph for years and were not at all concerned. They were so confident that he was neither dangerous nor a flight risk that they let him fly to Mexico to test a novel legal theory that arresting him outside the country would circumvent all limits on venue. Dr. Rudolph did not resist arrest.”
Mr. Markus said Mr. Rudolph’s passport has been seized, so he can’t go anywhere. Further, he said, the FBI found no evidence of foreign bank accounts.
“Rather than considering the importance of that testimony,” he said, “the magistrate judge made an inferential leap from the premise of a dentist who earned a good living and used it to see the world with his wife of 30 years to the unjustified conclusion that this dentist can inexplicably cross borders sans passport and with much of his assets frozen, like a character in a Hollywood movie.”
In addition, he rebutted a government argument that Mr. Rudolph was volatile and had threatened people in the past at the dental practice.
Mr. Markus said those allegations are based on hearsay by disgruntled employees.
“Dr. Rudolph built a successful pediatric dental practice to pass on to his daughter,” he said. “If he had created a tense work environment ruled by threats of violence and was throwing syringes at assistants, there would inevitably have been some sort of official complaint — i.e., real, hard evidence of the sort that the clear-and-convincing standard demands. There is none.”
Finally, Mr. Markus said the government does not have solid evidence against his client that he killed his wife.
At the detention hearing, he said, the FBI confirmed that there were no eyewitnesses to the murder, nor is there fingerprint, blood spatter or gunshot residue evidence. He said Zambian police ruled the shooting an accident.
The FBI says Mr. Rudolph killed his wife on Oct. 11, 2016, and then filed life insurance claims through seven life insurance companies for a $4.8 million payout. Four of the companies hired a private investigation firm to examine the death before paying the benefits.
According to a witness, Mr. Rudolph’s girlfriend had given him an ultimatum to sell his dental practice and leave Bianca.
Torsten Ove: tove@post-gazette.com.
First Published: January 18, 2022, 8:23 p.m.