Federal authorities have charged a man with the killing of his wife while they were on an African safari in Zambia five years ago.
Lawrence Rudolph, 67, was charged with foreign murder and mail fraud on Dec. 22 and was taken into custody while on a trip to Mexico on Dec. 23, WPXI’s news partner TribLive reported.
Prosecutors said Rudolph and his wife Bianca, who frequently traveled to Africa to hunt, had gone to the continent in 2016 when Bianca Rudolph, a respected international hunter, according to court documents, wanted to kill a leopard.
Lawrence Rudolph accompanied his wife on the trip but did not go hunting with her, investigators said.
The hunt was unsuccessful and as they were packing to leave camp in the Kafue National Park, Bianca Rudolph was shot in the chest with a Browning 12-gauge shotgun they had taken with them for the trip, WPXI and the newspaper reported.
Lawrence Rudolph told Zambian investigators that he was in the bathroom and heard the shot. He then found his wife bleeding on the floor.
He said he thought the gun had still been loaded from their hunt and it went off as she packed it in its case.
Lawrence Rudolph reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Zambia the same day to report the shooting and told them he wanted to cremate her remains and return to the U.S.
The consular chief, a 20-year veteran of the Marines, took photos of Bianca Rudolph’s wounds a few days later, prior to her cremation, and estimated that the gun was fired from between 6.5 and 8 feet away. He also did not see any gas burns or other signs that the gun was in contact with Bianca Rudolph’s body at the time of the shooting.
A friend of Bianca Rudolph asked the FBI office in South Africa to investigate the woman’s death, saying that Lawrence Rudolph had affairs, including one at the time of his wife’s death.
FBI agents discovered that Lawrence Rudolph had collected the life insurance, totaling $4.8 million, from his wife’s death.
Defense attorney David Markus told TribLive that his client is innocent and that he loved his wife of 34 years. He told the newspaper that the Zambian investigators, along with the insurance companies, determined that Bianca Rudolph’s death was an accident.
But investigators, according to court documents, allege that Lawrence Rudolph planned the trip to kill his wife and claim that she died in an accident.
Lawrence Rudolph is expected to go on trial next month, WPXI reported.
If convicted, Lawrence Rudolph faces life in prison or the death penalty for the foreign murder charge, as well as a $250,000 fine and up to 20 years in prison along with a $250,000 fine for the mail fraud charge, according to court documents.
Rudolph court record by National Content Desk on Scribd