A wealthy dentist testified on Wednesday that an unfamiliar shotgun they brought with them to hunt a leopard accidentally went off, wounding his wife as she hurried to pack early in the morning.
The wealthy dentist is accused of shooting and killing his wife in their cabin at the end of an African safari trip.
“My wife wasn’t killed by me. My wife could not be murdered. I wouldn’t kill my wife, Larry,” said Lawrence “he informed the jury on Wednesday.
As he spoke for more than two hours about his open marriage to Bianca Rudolph and her passing in Zambia in October 2016, his voice occasionally broke.
He claimed to have been in the bathroom when the shot was fired. When he emerged, he discovered his wife bleeding on the floor.
Rudolph, 67, is accused of planning the murder and mail fraud, according to the prosecution.
Because the insurance companies that paid him nearly $5 million for the death of his wife were based in Colorado, the trial is being heard in federal court in Denver.
If found guilty of murder, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison or the death penalty.
According to the prosecution, Rudolph killed his 34-year-old wife in order to be with Lori Milliron, who is accused of lying to a grand jury and of being an accessory after the fact. She and Rudolph are also on trial.
The prosecution informed the jury during opening arguments that during an altercation with Milliron at a steakhouse in Phoenix in 2020, Rudolph was overheard yelling, “I killed my f—-g wife for you!” after learning that the FBI was looking into his wife’s death.
Rudolph denied having admitted to killing his wife. He claimed that he and Milliron were arguing about money and how the COVID-19 pandemic, which was just getting started at the time, might damage the Pennsylvania dentistry franchise that had brought him a tidy sum.
However, he was furious since he stated that the FBI investigation was his top worry.
When Rudolph actually said, “Now they’re saying I killed my f—-ing wife for you,” he was misquoted.
Rudolph claimed that in 2000, after twice coming close to divorcing, he and his wife—who had two children—agreed to continue their marriage while having sex with other people.
After that, he claimed, their marriage’s stress decreased, and they described their situation as making them “fairly content.”
Rudolph claimed that neither Milliron nor his wife had given him any demands to stop their connection.
David Markus, Rudolph’s attorney, has contended that the murderer was not motivated by money.
When his wife passed away, Rudolph was worth more than $15 million, and the insurance settlement went into a trust for their kids.
According to the defence, Zambian officials decided two days after the incident on October 11, 2016, that it was an accident.
The insurers’ investigators came to the same conclusion and later paid $4.8 million.
The evidence, say the prosecution, suggests that Bianca Rudolph was shot from a distance of between 2 and 3.5 feet (1 metre), causing her injuries.
In a statement to “48 Hours” earlier this year, Rudolph’s attorneys said that the case was “constructed without any genuine proof, no eyewitnesses, no forensics, no anything.”
However, James Gagliano, a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent and CBS News analyst, challenges Rudolph’s account of what happened.
He told “48 Hours” that it “boggles the imagination” that two skilled hunters could have caused this by accident.