Park Predators - The Expedition
Episode Date: July 2, 2024In 2016 when a couple ventured into Kafue National Park in Zambia, Africa for a luxury hunting trip and only one of them returned to America alive… red flags started popping up. But it would take ye...ars before the truth of what really happened inside their safari cabin would come to light and a killer finally brought to justice.View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-expedition Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the story I'm going to tell you about today is a chilling one.
It's cold-blooded, callous, and happened in one of the most unique places on Earth, Kfue National Park in Zambia, Africa.
According to Zambiatourism.com, the park is the oldest and largest national park in Zambia.
It stretches for more than 8,000 square miles and
is a place teeming with life. Since it was founded in 1924, much of the parkland has remained untouched
and untraversed. For that reason, it's one of just a few places in the world that still has a huge
array of natural wildlife. The Zambian Wildlife Authority works to ensure the impalas, zebras,
lions, elephants, cheetahs, and hippos that live in this reserve are protected. But sometimes
people's desire for hunting overrides the Wildlife Authority's best efforts.
But even with this issue, park staff members welcome people to come and visit. In fact,
there are several well-maintained roads to safari lodges inside the park. The nearest big city is Zambia's capital,
Lusaka, and it sits roughly five to six hours away to the east. There are also a
handful of cabins and game camps along the park's border in a designated game
management area where big-game hunting is allowed. If you can afford it, there
are even some private airstrips available
to fly planes in, which can help cut down the drive from Lusaka. According to the website
huntinafrica.com, there are a bunch of different hunting outfitters who specialize in taking avid
sportsmen and women to parts of Zambia to hunt big game animals. This practice has been coined
trophy hunting. It's not something I'm personally interested in,
mostly because I'm not a hunter,
but also because it costs a small fortune to do.
BBC News reported in 2015 that just obtaining a license
to legally kill a lion could cost somewhere in the ballpark of $25,000.
Combine that with the price of paying for nightly lodging in the bush,
hiring a guide, transportation, and food, and a hunting trip like this adds up to tens of
thousands of dollars, and in many cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for a lot of folks
from North America, trophy hunting is what they live for, and unfortunately, for the woman at the
center of this story, what she died for.
But not in the way you'd expect.
Her killer wasn't some giant carnivorous predator.
It was a person much closer to home.
This is Park Predators. Around 5.30 in the morning on October 11, 2016, at Chinembe Safari Camp inside Kafue National Park in Zambia,
a game scout named Spencer Kakoma and a hunting guide named Mark Swanepoel
were already up and busy working inside the camp's dining hall.
Spencer was in the middle of counting animal skins,
and Mark had been doing some paperwork.
The hides they were tallying belonged to American tourist 62-year-old Larry Rudolph
and his wife, 57-year-old Bianca Rudolph.
The day before this, October 10th,
had been the couple's last day hunting
as part of a 14-day trip they'd been on.
Despite bagging several trophy animals,
Bianca had been unsuccessful in killing
the one beast she'd set out to capture, a leopard.
And just as Mark and Spencer were almost done
taking inventory of the Rudolph's kills,
the men heard a loud bang
pierce through the morning air outside.
They immediately recognized the sound
as having come from a high-powered firearm.
Spencer personally lived in Kafue National Park full-time,
so he normally wouldn't have been too alarmed
by the
sound of a gunshot ringing out in the distance somewhere. But this gunshot had not come from a
long way off. It had come from inside the first cabin of the camp, where he and Mark knew Bianca
and Larry Rudolph were staying. The jarring sound of nearby gunfire wasn't the only thing the men
heard. Immediately following the sound was a woman's
ear-piercing scream, then nothing. Without hesitating, Spencer and Mark ran outside of
the dining hall and made a beeline to the couple's cabin to find out what was going on.
When they arrived, Spencer quickly entered the front door to the small wooden cabin,
and in a matter of seconds found Bianca lying face up on the ground in a pool
of blood next to the couple's bed. A browning 12-gauge shotgun was lying directly next to her
feet, still kind of partially inside a soft-shell gun case. Near that was a spent shotgun shell.
Spencer leaned down to touch Bianca's body to see if she was still breathing, but he quickly realized she wasn't.
A large, gaping wound covered the left side of her chest, and he knew that she was dead.
According to ABC 2020's episode on this, titled The Last Hunt, Larry Rudolph, Bianca's husband,
was also inside the cabin when Spencer and Mark arrived. From what they could tell,
Larry seemed to be in complete shock.
He was standing near Bianca's body, crying and repeating the words, quote,
what am I going to tell my children? What am I going to tell my children? Let me just kill myself
because my wife, she has committed suicide, end quote. At one point, Larry leaned over and tried
to pick up his wife's body, but couldn't.
Spencer immediately grabbed Larry's hands to try and calm him down,
but Larry pulled away from him and ran out of the cabin towards the nearby crocodile-infested Kifue River.
Based on what Spencer was seeing,
Larry appeared to be frantic and possibly suicidal
as he paced back and forth near the river.
He expressed every indication that he intended to throw himself into the river
and take his own life.
However, that didn't happen.
And once Spencer and Mark got Larry to settle down and focus,
they began asking him more questions
about what the heck had happened.
According to what Spencer told ABC's 2020,
when he asked Larry for a second time
to walk him through the exact sequence of events
that had led up to Bianca's death, Larry said that Bianca had been trying to pack their firearms up
and the Browning shotgun wasn't fitting into the soft gun case very well. So she tried to force
it in and after forcing it one too many times, it had gone off accidentally. Now, I know what
you're probably all thinking. Wait a minute, wasn't Larry's first
story that Bianca had died by suicide? And the answer is yes. Larry had initially told Spencer
he thought his wife had taken her own life. You're not losing your mind. However, I guess by the time
Larry calmed down and began to recount things again during the second conversation with Spencer, his version of the story had changed slightly, but also kind of majorly. He no longer talked
about Bianca being suicidal. Instead, he just kept expressing how this was all such a horrific
accident. Obviously, this discrepancy with Larry's story changing was a red flag to Spencer.
So he did what I hope every person who finds themselves
in this situation would do. He called in the local police. The agency that was leading the
investigation was the Zambia Police Service. However, investigators with Kafue Parks and
Wildlife, a totally separate entity, also showed up to the crime scene. In fact, one of the first
members of law enforcement who got to the cabin was. In fact, one of the first members of law enforcement
who got to the cabin
was a Parks and Wildlife detective named Musua Musese.
When he arrived, he saw the same exact scene
inside the couple's quarters that Spencer had,
which was Bianca dead on the floor,
blood all around her body,
and a shotgun still at her feet,
partially in its case.
Thankfully, Spencer and other staff at the safari camp
hadn't touched anything inside the crime scene.
The only thing Spencer did was briefly touch Bianca
to see if she was breathing.
He hadn't moved her or anything else inside the cabin.
It didn't take Zambian police officers long to arrive
and process the crime scene,
taking pictures and picking up evidence.
In addition to the shotgun near Bianca's
feet, officers also found a Remington.375 rifle inside the cabin. But this second gun wasn't
really that suspicious to investigators because it was a firearm that employees at the safari camp
confirmed belonged to Larry and Bianca. So it's not like it was weird that it was there and no
one thought it was involved. Typically, trophy hunters travel with a variety of firearms, including several long guns like rifles and shotguns.
It's just part of that sport.
Think of guns in this hobby like golfers and golf clubs.
Each one has a different purpose and use.
And the Rudolphs could definitely afford to own these two guns, as well as stay for nearly two weeks at the posh Tinembe Safari Camp.
They were a wealthy couple from a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
who lived pretty lavishly thanks to Larry's successful dental business.
They'd been married for 34 years and first met at the University of Pittsburgh
while Larry was attending dental school.
In the early 1980s, they got married,
and he'd opened his first dental office with a handful of partners.
And like most couples who are trying to run a business together,
Bianca initially helped Larry run the practice when it was small,
but eventually, after having their son and daughter, Julian and Anna,
she took a step back from work.
Larry became the breadwinner, and boy, was he good at it.
By 2009, Larry had parted ways with the business partners from his first dental practice
and started a new group of offices called Three Rivers Dental.
He put a lot of energy and money into marketing,
something that few dentists before him had done.
And that decision proved to be a lucrative one
because that's when Three Rivers Dental and Larry's small-time celebrity status really blew up.
There were multiple office locations
for the dental practice,
and in total, the business raked in
upwards of $200,000 profit a month.
The Rudolphs used a lot of that money to live large.
Larry purchased a nice house in Pittsburgh,
bought himself and his wife nice cars,
and regularly went on expensive
big game hunting trips all over the world. An organization both Larry and Bianca became
heavily involved in was Safari Club International, or SCI, a big game hunting club that advocates for
hunters' rights. According to ABC 2020's episode, The Last Hunt, Larry had actually served as Safari Club International's board president at two separate times.
The couple's involvement with that club solidified their reputation in Zambia as being serious big game hunters who were willing to spend a lot of money to bag a trophy animal.
Milton Cosi reported for BBC News that the year before the Rudolphs went on their trip,
Zambia had lifted a long-standing ban on hunting big cats.
Leading up to the controversial decision, the country's economy had been plummeting,
and the local dollar was not as valuable as it once was.
So to help attract Western visitors with deep pockets,
Zambian authorities and legislators decided to allow big game hunters to come to
places like Kafue National Park, hoping they would spend lots of money to try and bag a lion or a
leopard. Basically, because trophy hunting was such a huge tourism driver, the government was
willing to lift the protective wildlife ban it had put in place in the hopes that people like
the Rudolphs would stimulate the struggling economy. A park worker told ABC's 2020 that 60% of all big game hunting in Zambia was done by
Americans.
Zambia's other tourist attractions like Victoria Falls were still drawing in large numbers
of visitors, but nothing brought in the cash like big game hunters.
Now, even though Detective Musese with Kafue National Parks and Wildlife wasn't officially
leading the law enforcement inquiry into what happened to Bianca, he still spoke with Larry
at the safari camp shortly after the shooting. Larry told him that while Bianca had been packing
their firearms, he'd been in their cabin's bathroom taking a shower. However, this detail
immediately struck Detective Musese as odd because he knew
from conversations he'd had with Spencer and Mark that when they first saw Larry, literally seconds
after the shooting, he'd been fully clothed with his socks and shoes on. One crime scene photo even
shows Larry with his shirt tucked neatly into his pants with a belt on. So to Musese, it seemed very
strange,
maybe even suspicious that Larry,
who'd been bathing and heard his wife shoot herself,
could get dressed so fast in the short time
it took for Spencer and Mark to run over to the cabin.
But it wasn't just this discrepancy
about Larry being in the bathroom
that gave Detective Musese pause.
In general, no one at the scene
felt like Larry seemed to be all that upset
that Bianca had died. I mean, sure, he'd been hysterical in front of Spencer and done that
whole let me toss myself into the river and die thing, but as more and more time passed,
Larry's disposition changed. He seemed less sorrowful and more concerned about what Zambian
police investigators were thinking.
At one point, he'd even asked Spencer if he thought the authorities were going to name him as a suspect. There was also another alarming declaration that Larry made shortly after the
shooting, one that Detective Musese and many others felt was highly suspicious.
According to ABC's 2020 episode, The Last Hunt,
Larry told Spencer he wanted Bianca's body cremated in Africa as soon as possible before flying home to the United States.
Now, I know what you're all thinking, red flag. And trust me, I'm totally with you.
But there was some red tape that Larry had to get through before any kind of cremation could
take place. Per Zambia's policy for storing deceased foreign visitors' remains, Bianca's
body was sent to a local funeral home in the capital city of
Lusaka before being prepared to fly home. A forensic pathologist performed an official autopsy,
but the results were what everyone expected them to be. Her cause of death was a combination of
gunshot trauma to her heart and lungs. On the afternoon of October 11th, so literally just a
few hours after the shooting,
Larry called the U.S. Embassy in Zambia and asked the head consular officer there to issue a death certificate for Bianca.
But when he asked for the certificate, he also repeatedly said he wanted to expedite his wife's cremation.
Like, he apparently said this so many times, it became really noticeable to the staff at the embassy.
And the consular officer in charge of the situation, who was a former Marine, was like, said this so many times, it became really noticeable to the staff at the embassy.
And the consular officer in charge of the situation, who was a former Marine, was like,
no, hold on a sec. I need to see your wife's body to confirm her ID before I just start issuing death certificates and cremating people. And thankfully, that officer went to the local
funeral home a couple of days later on October 13th and did exactly what he
said he was going to do. He and two other staff members from the embassy viewed Bianca's body
and took photographs of her injuries. And wouldn't you know it, when the consular officer compared
his pictures, which showed Bianca's gruesome chest wound, to the crime scene photos taken
days earlier by Zambian police officers, he noticed something weird.
The buckshot pattern on Bianca's chest was scattered in a way that indicated she had not
been shot at close range, but instead had been shot from several feet away. According to the
consular officer's estimate, he thought Bianca had been shot from like six and a half to eight feet away.
Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with buckshot, it's usually what shotguns discharge,
especially if you're hunting big animals. Basically, instead of having one big bullet come out of the end of the barrel, buckshot is a lot of little pellets of metal all packed into
one cartridge. When the gun is fired, the buckshot sprays out of the gun, leaving a scatter pattern on whatever it hits.
When you shoot something with buckshot at close range,
that pattern of pellets is much tighter or closer.
However, when you stand several feet away from a target and shoot buckshot,
the scatter pattern widens and is much more spread out.
So Bianca having a wide pattern of buckshot in her chest wound
screamed that something fishy was up.
And the story that she'd accidentally shot herself at close range
was seeming less and less plausible to the consular officer.
But unfortunately, despite his suspicions
that something wasn't right with Larry's story,
the Zambia police service officially ruled Bianca's death
an accident and pretty much closed the case. One of their summary reports says in part,
quote, the firearm was loaded from the previous hunting activities and the normal safety
precautions at the time of packing the firearm were not taken into consideration, causing the
firearm to accidentally fire, end quote. And with that conclusion,
Larry was allowed to legally cremate his wife's remains. Then, with her ashes in tow, he flew home
to the U.S. According to he and Bianca's travel records, they'd arrived in Zambia on September 27th,
2016. But by mid-October, after all this had happened, he was the only one coming home
alive. And turns out, he wasn't returning to an empty house and grieving life of a widower.
He was coming home to another woman's welcoming arms,
a woman who had just a jet-setting of a lifestyle as he had.
Yeah, you may have guessed it. Larry was not the best when it came to the husband department.
He had been unfaithful to Bianca many times throughout their marriage.
According to some of his former dental partners and employees who spoke with ABC's 2020 team,
Larry's reputation for having girlfriends on the side was a known thing around his dental practice.
But out of all the women he may have cheated on Bianca with,
one relationship took the cake above the rest. His romance with a woman named Lori Milliron.
Lori was one of Larry's employees who was a 59-year-old divorced mother of three
who worked as a dental hygienist at Three Rivers Dental Branch in Pittsburgh.
About a decade before Bianca died, she and Larry began to see each other in secret.
However, secret is kind of a loose term here when it comes to these two, because according to many
of the people who were interviewed about Lori and Larry's relationship, they indicated that nearly
every employee at the Three Rivers dental offices knew what was up between them. Over time, workers
noticed that Lori got what many people saw as undeserved
promotions and special treatment. Many times, she and Larry would ride together to and from work,
which was another clear sign that something extramarital was going on between them.
On top of that, there were several times a year that Lori and Larry would travel together
overseas and domestically in the United States, completely unbeknownst to Bianca.
On one occasion, Lori even accompanied Larry to a board meeting retreat in Alaska for Safari Club
International. This arrangement made several SCI board members uncomfortable because they felt that
it was highly inappropriate for Larry to have his mistress with him at an official club gathering
where they interacted with political leaders and industry professionals. And yeah, I agree with them on that. Now, according to Lori,
she claimed that the entire time her and Larry's affair was going on, Bianca knew about them.
However, everyone outside of Lori's camp says Bianca never knew her husband was being unfaithful,
and neither did their two adult children, Julian and Anna.
For what it's worth, years before Bianca's death in 2009,
Larry's wandering eye and serial cheating
was almost exposed in a big way.
According to ABC 2020's episode, The Last Hunt,
Larry lost his position as the president
of Safari Club International
after an internal investigation revealed he'd been sexting
or trying to elicit sex from other members of the club while at a club event.
Mind you, this is also during the time frame that he was having an ongoing affair with Lori.
What's super interesting, though, is that after getting booted from SCI,
Larry sued the organization for defamation,
claiming the rumors about him sexting a member of the club
and promoting extramarital affair activities were untrue.
And surprisingly, Bianca supported him.
Yeah, she went into full-on defense mode for her husband.
According to ABC 2020's reporting,
Bianca testified in a deposition for the defamation lawsuit,
saying she didn't believe the allegations against Larry were true,
and she expressed that the entire ordeal of him being kicked out of SCI
had changed everything in their lives.
Four years after that, Larry and Bianca moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona
because their daughter was attending dental school there.
The move meant
that Larry commuted to and from Pittsburgh regularly for work, and in his absence,
Lori pretty much ran all the Three Rivers dental offices, and they continued their affair from afar.
The success of the dental business allowed Larry and Bianca to take more vacations together when
he wasn't working, and these trips mostly revolved around their global hunting expeditions.
According to Lori's friends and close coworkers,
during this time, she grew more and more frustrated
by the fact that Larry was still with his wife
and living far away in Arizona.
Fast forward to October 2016, and Bianca was dead.
Where was Lori, you might ask?
Moving in with Larry in Arizona.
Even though things seemed like they were moving on swimmingly and what had happened in Zambia
was long behind Larry, he couldn't have been more wrong.
Slowly and quietly, FBI agents in South Africa and the United States were working to get
to the bottom of what had really happened to Bianca, and people close
to her were helping them. Larry's story that Bianca accidentally shot herself or maybe intended
to shoot herself didn't sit right with those who knew the couple well.
For one, no one who knew Bianca thought for a second
that she would take her own life.
On top of that, Larry and Bianca
had been hunting together for a long time.
And even though when they first met,
Bianca had no hunting experience whatsoever,
over the course of their marriage,
she'd actually become a pretty good shot.
During her previous trips to Kafue National Park,
she'd killed warthogs, hippos, impalas, and zebras
with single shots.
According to court documents and reporting by ABC News,
Bianca had handled a lot of different types of long guns
during her hunting adventures.
She was smart about how to pack and unpack them.
There had even been times where she'd gone on her own hunting trips without Larry
because she was that confident in what she was doing.
So Larry's suggestion that she was haphazardly handling a shotgun in their cabin
because she was rushing to pack just struck everyone as super odd.
According to court documents and reporting for the New York Times and
Fox 13, a few weeks after Bianca's death, a woman called into the FBI's field office in South Africa,
asking agents there to investigate the death of her good friend, Bianca Rudolph. This tipster
revealed a lot of the discrepancies we already know about with the circumstances surrounding
Bianca's death, and she informed the FBI that Larry was having an affair on his wife at the time of Bianca's death.
This friend also said that Larry and Bianca had fought over money and that it was really strange
Bianca had been cremated due to the fact that she was Catholic, and that was kind of against
her belief system. Right around the same time the feds got this information, they also got a call
from one of Lori Milliron's co-workers at Three Rivers Dental Office. This co-worker informed the
FBI that Lori had given Larry an ultimatum prior to Bianca's death. A big sticking point of this
ultimatum was that Lori had told Larry he had one year to leave Bianca and sell off his dental
practice where she was going to end things.
There was also the matter of life insurance.
According to court documents,
Bianca had seven different life insurance policies taken out on her
over the course of her and Larry's marriage.
Some of them were worth a few hundred thousand dollars.
Others were worth more than a million dollars.
Larry made claims on all of them starting in late October 2016,
about one month after Bianca's death.
In all, the life insurance money Larry was awarded totaled close to $5 million.
At that point, the pieces were starting to fall in place,
and federal investigators felt like they could build a reasonable and strong case
against Larry for his wife's murder and life insurance fraud.
But it was going to take some time.
For five years, from 2017 to 2021,
Lori and Larry continued to carry on their relationship,
and with Bianca out of the way,
they were even more public about the fact that they were together.
They took trips out of the country, went on lavish vacations, and eventually sold the
home Larry shared with Bianca and built a new mansion in the posh suburb of Paradise
Valley, Arizona.
Something they did regularly was have expensive dinners at a handful of restaurants and bars
in town, one of which was a steakhouse staffed by a bartender who'd grown super familiar
with the couple.
one of which was a steakhouse staffed by a bartender who'd grown super familiar with the couple.
According to ABC 2020's episode,
The Last Hunt and the Associated Press,
one night in early 2020,
that bartender overheard an argument
between Larry and Lori at their table,
in which Larry exclaimed,
quote,
I killed my effing wife for you, end quote.
Other customers at the restaurant
heard the heated exchange too,
but nobody really did anything about it, and Larry and Lori just kind of left the steakhouse,
and that was that. Almost two years later, on December 22nd, 2021, in Colorado, where some of
the life insurance companies were based, federal prosecutors charged Larry with murder in a foreign
country and mail fraud related to obtaining life insurance money after Bianca's death.
The murder charge meant he was eligible for the death penalty.
According to reporting by Fox 13,
local authorities arrested him in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico,
just two days before Christmas.
He was with Lori.
You might be wondering why it took the feds so long to finally get Larry,
but the short and sweet of it is, it took a painstaking amount of time to gather all the
necessary information to build a rock-solid case against him. For one, tracing the life insurance
money payouts and all the financial stuff that went into Larry's fraud took some time. But second,
agents had to learn as much as they could about Larry and Bianca's marriage.
Weaving the labyrinth of who they were took some digging.
Then there was the matter of having to work
with the Zambian police service,
who had not done a very thorough investigation
of the crime to begin with.
And lastly, the FBI had to consult experts
and an independent medical examiner
who reviewed all the physical evidence in
the case. After Larry's arrest, the FBI's official affidavit detailing all the things agents had done
for five years was released, and it revealed a lot of information about the criminal investigation
that had not been previously known. For example, the affidavit stated that immediately following
the shooting, Zambian police officers had tested the Rudolph shotgun to see if it could accidentally discharge.
And after several rounds of dropping it on concrete, a ballistics expert from Zambia determined that the gun was not prone to misfire.
Still though, the police department back in 2016 had concluded Bianca's death must have been a one-off freak
accident, and they gave Larry the shotgun back before he flew home to the U.S. He reportedly
found it years later in one of his garages and took it apart, then had a trash removal service
take it. Also, according to the affidavit, the consular officer for the U.S. Embassy,
who'd interacted with Larry before Bianca's
cremation had gotten varying accounts from Larry about, well, pretty much everything.
For example, in October 2016, Larry had asked multiple times about who would be able to access
information from the investigation into his wife's death once he was back home in the U.S.
Something else sketchy was that when the officer initially asked Larry about the gun that
had shot Bianca, Larry claimed not to know much about it and just said it was an antique. When
the consular officer asked him several more times what exactly had happened in the cabin, Larry
wavered between claiming his wife's death was an accident, but then at one point went back to his
original story that Bianca had committed suicide.
Which, full disclosure,
no one who has ever investigated this case has thought Bianca took her own life.
In fact, a study conducted by the FBI proved
there was no possible way Bianca could have even reached
the trigger of the shotgun with it pointed at her chest.
It was physically impossible.
In February 2022,
a few months after Larry was federally indicted,
Lori Milliron was also charged, but not with murder.
Prosecutors charged her with several counts of perjury for lying to Larry's grand jury,
obstruction of the grand jury, and accessory to murder after the fact.
She was released on bond and ordered to stay on house arrest with an ankle monitor.
Larry remained in jail awaiting trial. A few months later, in July 2022, both Lori and Larry
were tried together in federal court in Colorado. Throughout the proceedings, both of Larry's adult
children supported him and believed he was innocent of murdering their mother. The New York Post,
CNN, and other publications reported
that Larry even took the stand and testified in his own defense to try and convince the court
that he didn't kill Bianca. He claimed that he and Bianca had an open marriage, and he didn't
kill her for financial gain or to be free to carry on his affair with Lori. On the witness stand,
he said, quote, I did not kill my wife. I could not murder my wife.
I would not murder my wife, end quote. But the problem about taking the stand at your own trial
is that you open the door for the government to cross-examine you. And when prosecutors grilled
Larry under oath, his demeanor changed. He got more agitated, became less confident, and at one point even had
to admit that many years earlier in 2012, when he'd filed that defamation lawsuit against Safari
Club International, he'd lied about the sexting allegations against him. He really had tried to
seduce another member of the club. So yeah, jurors didn't love that, and the admission really turned the tide of the trial.
On August 1st, 2022, the jury found Larry guilty of murder and mail fraud.
Lori was also found guilty of perjury, accessory after the fact to murder, and obstruction of
justice. In June 2023, Lori was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Two months later, in August 2023, Larry was sentenced to life in prison.
The judge also required him to pay millions of dollars in financial penalties.
To this day, Larry's children blame Lori for what happened to their family
and have speculated publicly that she was the mastermind behind Bianca's death to begin with.
publicly that she was the mastermind behind Bianca's death to begin with. But if there's one thing that I heard and read over and over again from the people who claim to know Larry
Rudolph, it's that his overarching goal with any relationship or in any conversation was to control
the narrative. One of his former dental partners mentioned this in his interview with ABC's 2020,
and this characterization of
Larry was definitely an attribute that jurors picked up on when Larry testified at his own trial.
According to an article by Rolling Stone, information jurors were never privy to
was the fact that there was a whole other laundry list of fraudulent activity alleged to have been
going on at Larry's dental practices for years prior to Bianca's death in 2016,
and in the years afterward. Larry and Lori's legal teams made sure a lot of these allegations
stayed out of their criminal trial, but Rolling Stone did a deep dive on the Three Rivers dental
practice and Larry himself. That investigation uncovered a trove of things that relate to
potential healthcare fraud and other white-collar crimes. None of which, I should add, Larry has been formally charged with.
But an example of something that might relate to this kind of behavior was mentioned in ABC's 2020
episode, The Last Hunt, by a former friend of Larry's who was also a Safari Club international
member. This interviewee told the reporting team that in 2006, Larry told
him that while reeling in a fish alongside a river in Zambia, a 10-foot crocodile had jumped out of
the water and nipped his hand, disabling one of his thumbs. However, the interviewee said he doubted
Larry's story, and it never set well with him. But not long after learning about the alleged
crocodile attack,
four separate insurance companies ended up paying Larry disability claims,
which amounted to him earning close to $30,000 a month for several months.
During that time, Larry didn't examine any dental patients
because he said his hand was too damaged.
So is it fair to say Larry probably lied about a lot of things in
his life? I think the answer is yes. And based on what the court decided, when he said he didn't
kill his wife in Africa's Kafue National Park, he was lying then too. Park Predators is an Audiochuck original show.
So, what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?