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Bocas del Toro, Panama. Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple.
I'm Candice DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill, available now wherever you get your podcasts. 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, Kafue 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 11th, 2016, at Tinembe Safari Camp inside Kafue National Park in Zambia, a game scout named Spencer Kokoma 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 Kuthue 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 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 longstanding 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, Leary'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. Bocas del Toro, Panama.
Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple. Survive. I'm Candace DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill, available now wherever you get your podcasts.
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, "Um, 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, Leary 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 timeframe 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, Laurie 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 Laurie'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 Laurie, 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.
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When booking with other vacation rental apps sounds like this: "This place doesn't look like the pictures." "Is there a door behind all those spiders?" it's time to try one that sounds more like a vacation. "This is perfect." "Relax, you booked a Vrbo." 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 Laurie 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 towns.
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 completely.
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. Laurie was also found guilty of perjury, accessory after the fact to murder, and obstruction of justice. In June 2023, Laurie 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. 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? No!
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Online. Penn State World Campus delivers on your time. Click the ad or visit worldcampus.psu.edu to learn more. Bocas del Toro, Panama.
Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple. Survive. I'm Candace DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
