A dental hygienist gave her married lover an ultimatum. He had one year to get rid of his wife of 34 years. 11 months later, his wife Bianca would be found dead with a shotgun blast to the chest in a hunting cabin. Hi everyone, my name is Sophie and today we’re going to take a look at another horrible case with you.
Bianca Rudolph was born on December 4th, 1959 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Growing up alongside her two brothers, Vince and Ralph Fenitio, she attended the University of Pittsburgh as an undergraduate student, where she would meet the man who would become both her husband and her killer. Lawrence “Larry” Rudolph met Bianca when he was in dental school at University of Pittsburgh and had two children, son Julian and daughter Anna Bianca.
Larry built a successful practice in Pittsburgh, starring in his own commercials promoting sedation dentistry, something quite unique at the time. Bianca worked in his dental office initially, but focused on raising their two children after they were born. Julian and Anna Bianca grew up in a typical suburban life outside Pittsburgh.
Larry was described as a good father, often generous and charismatic, while Bianca was an amazing mother who was beloved by her children. The couple found a way to connect through hunting. Before meeting Larry, Bianca had no hunting experience, but she became a well-respected international hunter and president of the Safari Club International Pittsburgh chapter.
Larry won the prestigious 2007 Weatherbe award, considered the Nobel Prize of trophy hunting. But beneath the surface of this picture perfect family, darker currents were already beginning to flow. There was an alleged darker side to Rudolph, both personally and professionally. In the mid 2000s, his partners at the dentistry accused him of embezzling money from the practice.
When confronted, his partners gave Larry an ultimatum. Walk away or we’re going to press charges. Larry denied the accusations but was forced out. He got his revenge by starting Three Rivers Dental Group just 500 ft from his former partner’s practice. In 2006, Larry claimed he lost his left thumb during a crocodile attack while fishing in Zambia.
Claiming he could no longer perform dentistry due to nerve damage, he filed for disability insurance and began collecting $30,000 tax-free monthly. Many former co-workers believed the incident was faked. His son, Julian Rudolph, remembered a more complex family dynamic.
“My mother brought out the best in him,” he said, “and Lorie Meyer brought out the worst.”
The cracks in Larry’s carefully constructed world were about to become a complete collapse. Lori Millerin went to work at Larry’s practice as a hygienist in 2002. Despite knowing he was married with children, they began an affair that would last for years. Maryanne verse Messen, a dental assistant at the practice, said Rudolph always had someone on the side and would come on to everybody in the office.
When the affair became public knowledge, the Safari Club International accused Larry of misconduct and expelled him from the club in 2012. The scandal was explosive. Various SCI members accused him of adultery, making false statements, and intellectual property infringement. The board voted to expel Rudolph and remove his name from all recordbook entries and awards.
Larry fought back with a defamation lawsuit and eventually won a settlement in May 2016, managing to retain his beloved Weatherbe award. Meanwhile, Bianca defended her husband. In a deposition, she spoke of the devastating effects of having to justify their marriage to friends. When asked if Larry had ever had sexual relationships with other women, Bianca said no.
She said, “I was not a long-suffering wife. I’ve never been a long-suffering wife. My husband and I have been married for 30ome years, happily married.”
But the damage was done. Those close to the situation began to sense that Larry was living a double life and it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
And then came the ultimatum that would change everything. Larry’s former office manager, Anna Grimley, knew that for years, Larry, known to those he worked with as having a volatile temper, had been carrying on an affair with an employee at his dental office, Lorie Millerin. Following the Safari Club incident, Rudolph and Bianca moved from Pittsburgh to a Phoenix residence full-time, leaving Millerin to run Three Rivers Dental on her own.
But the stress of maintaining a multi-off dental group and a long-distance affair eventually wore on Milron. In 2015, she supposedly gave Larry an ultimatum. According to her, Lorie mentioned she had been in a relationship with him for 15 to 20 years, so she gave him an ultimatum. He had to sell the offices and leave Bianca within a year.
Lorie was so tired of being on the side. Anna Grimley, a manager at Three Rivers, claimed in the Hulu docue series, she wanted to have whatever she wanted and be able to show it off. She wanted Bianca’s life. What she said to me is he has a year to get rid of Bianca or she’s leaving. The clock was ticking and Larry would soon make a decision that would destroy multiple families forever.
Larry and Bianca pumped their wealth into travel with and without each other and bought up real estate in Arizona where their daughter Anna Bianca was taking college classes. In the fall of 2016, after 34 years of marriage, the couple returned to Zambia’s Cafeway National Park. Bianca, the only one hunting, hoped to track a leopard, but instead bagged a zebra.
It would be their final trip together. But after nearly two weeks without any luck, the couple prepared to head back to the United States for a family wedding. On the morning of October 11th, 2016, as they were getting ready to travel to the airport, their game scout, Spencer Kakoma, heard a shot ring out and rushed to the couple’s cabin.
Kakoma said, “When I entered the cabin, I saw Bianca. I was very shocked.”
Bianca lay in a pool of blood. Nearby, her shotgun lay on the ground, still partially zipped in its case, although a hole had been torn through one end. Larry was crying, asking, “What am I going to tell my children?” as he knelt over his wife. Larry told Kakoma and camp manager Godfrey Nikub that he had been in the bathroom when he heard the gunshot and that he ran out to find Bianca on the floor.
But Spencer Kakoma, an experienced game scout, immediately noticed things that didn’t add up. Kakoma said he witnessed Bianca clearing the gun of live ammunition the night before. He says Larry first claimed Bianca died by suicide, shooting herself intentionally while he was in the bathroom. Later, Larry had a different version of events, no longer claiming it was a suicide, but instead saying Bianca accidentally shot herself while packing up the gun.
Things weren’t adding up for Kakoma. He says Larry was fully dressed when he rushed over to the cabin after hearing the gunshot, but local police say Larry told them he was wrapped in a towel. The story was already changing and they were still standing over Bianca’s body. What happened next would raise even more red flags.
Bianca’s body was taken to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital city, which was about 4 hours away from couple’s cabin to undergo an autopsy. Larry insisted that his devout Catholic wife be cremated and left Africa less than a week later without telling the couple’s children of their mother’s tragic fate. Local authorities went to the scene and photographed the body, which was later moved to a funeral home to await cremation.
A US embassy official decided to travel to the funeral home to investigate. Unbeknownst to Larry, the official, a former marine with decades of weapons experience, inspected Bianca’s body, measuring the shotgun wound and taking photos, estimated the distance between the muzzle of the shotgun and Bianca Rudolph’s chest at between 6.5 and 8 ft apart. When the consular chief returned to the office from the funeral home, he received a call from Larry Rudolph, who was described as livid over the fact that the consular chief had seen Bianca’s body and taken photographs.
When Rudolph met with the consular chief, he asked who would be able to access information about Bianca’s death, including the police reports, and went on to say that Bianca may have committed suicide by shooting herself with the shotgun.
An intelligence officer from the wildlife authorities arrived on the scene and later shared his observations with fellow investigators. The barrel seemed too long to him for self-infliction. The police had not collected fingerprints. And this American in the Gulf shirt, his tears dried fast. Under the officer’s questioning, he says, “Doctor Rudolph, a renowned hunter, would not explain the operation of his own shotgun.”
The agent asked himself, “What kind of a husband forgets his whereabouts when his wife of 34 years takes a bullet in his eyes?”
“I couldn’t see that softness in him,” says the officer, Musua Musei. On the phone from Lusaka, he recalls an instant suspicion. “I could see something in him, and I doubted that look. This was no accident.”
Zambian police ruled that Bianca died after the weapon accidentally discharged. The case was closed before it had really begun. But thousands of miles away in the United States, people who knew the couple were about to start asking very uncomfortable questions. Larry cashed in on $4.8 million in life insurance policies and continued to manage his thriving Pittsburgh dental practices remotely from Phoenix, where he and Bianca had built a lavish home.
His staff was instructed not to mention his wife’s death. Within a month of returning to the United States, the FBI says Rudolph started filing claims on his wife’s life insurance policies worth almost $5 million. She had several life and accidental death policies. The earliest one was purchased in 1987. An investigation into Larry’s finances found that Bianca was overinsured with nine different insurance policies from seven different companies, resulting in a $4.8 million payout upon her death.
But perhaps most damning of all, just months after Bianca was fatally shot, Millerin moved in with Larry at his Phoenix property. It seemed as if life was going on for Larry. But some of the people who knew the couple were not convinced his wife’s death had been an accident. At Larry’s practice, there was a hush in the air.
Sher Hal worked as a dental assistant in Dr. Rudolph’s Three Rivers Dental Group for nearly 8 years. She said Larry never talked about Bianca’s death ever. He was saying to everyone not to talk about it, which made it sort of suspicious. If patients ever asked about Bianca’s death, the staff at Larry’s practice had been instructed to change the subject, some former staff members say.
No flowers, no condolence calls, no sympathy cards. Fear reverberated louder than ever in 2017 when employees remember returning from a weekend to discover security cameras installed all over in the operatories above the patients in the private breakroom in the lab. That’s where Holiday recalls leaning over to a fellow assistant only for the boss to ring up the front desk from Arizona and ask why they were whispering.
Millerin had once told Grimley about the affair and confessed they had plans to move away with loads of cash that they had received from the business. By that time, Grimley was living in Las Vegas and was no longer connected to the dental office, but she couldn’t shake her suspicions and called the FBI to tell them.
“Somebody needs to look into it. You know, just take a look at everything that’s happened,” she told Dineine.
Grimley was shocked to learn she wasn’t the only one who had called the federal investigators. Days after Bianca’s death, a person identified as Bianca’s friend contacted the FBI, asking that Bianca’s death be investigated because the friend suspected foul play.
The friend told the FBI that Rudolph had affairs in the past and was having one at the time of the shooting. The friend also told investigators that she believed the cremation to have been against Bianca’s wishes because Bianca was a strict Catholic who had once expressed disapproval that the friend’s husband had been cremated.
The FBI was about to discover evidence that would turn this accidental death into one of the most complex international murder cases they had ever handled. When FBI agents began digging deeper, they uncovered a web of lies, insurance fraud, and cold-blooded calculation. They also did a pattern test using the same type of weapon, soft cover gun case, and ammunition, Peterson said, and determined that the 6 cm defect to Bianca’s heart could only have been caused if the gun was fired from at least 2 ft away.
The FBI also conducted its own ballistics tests and concluded the weapon had likely been between 1 to 3 ft away when it was fired, making it impossible for the large rifle to have been pressed into Bianca as she tried to zip up the carrying case. This was no accident. Someone had deliberately fired that shotgun into Bianca’s chest.
Evidence presented at trial proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Larry Rudolph murdered his wife Bianca while the two were on a hunting trip in Zambia on October 11th, 2016. Rudolph shot his wife through the heart with a 12- gauge shotgun that was enclosed in a soft shell case on the last day of a scheduled hunt, scheming to make the murder look like an accident.
But the most explosive evidence was yet to come. Another stunning development came from Phoenix area bartender Brian Love Lace. Love Lace reported over hearing Larry tell Milyn, “I killed my [ __ ] wife for you,” one evening during a heated argument while the pair sat at the bar of a popular steakhouse. A tip from Brian Love Lace, a bartender at Phoenix restaurant Stake 44, was considered a big bombshell at Larry’s 2022 murder trial. Lori and Larry were regulars.
Love Lace recounted in Trophy Wife, and one night in the spring of 2020, he heard Larry yell during a break in the music, “I killed my [ __ ] wife for you.”
“I’m 100% sure. There’s definitely no doubt,” Loveace said of the words he heard that night. It was crystal clear.
But Larry’s defense team would argue that those words were taken completely out of context. More than 5 years after Bianca’s death, Larry was arrested December 21, 2021 in Mexico when he and Lurie touched down to spend the holidays in Carbo. Milyn was called to testify before a grand jury about her relationship with the successful dentist. 6 weeks later, she found herself under arrest as well for obstruction of justice, perjury while on the stand, and being an accessory after the fact.
The pair went on trial together in July of 2022. Larry’s defense team fought hard against what they called a circumstantial case, defending himself and maintaining his innocence. He took the stand and claimed that his wife had accidentally pulled the trigger. Larry also testified that he and Bianca had been in an open marriage since 2000 and were reasonably happy with the arrangement.
But taking the stand may have been Larry’s biggest mistake. The jury for person said that before he testified, they were so unsure. But when he did testify, he really changed their mind to thinking that he was guilty. On August 1st, 2022, jurors found Rudolph guilty of murdering his wife.
Larry was sentenced to life in prison. Lori was convicted of being an accessory after the fact for murder, obstruction of justice, and perjury charges. She was sentenced to 17 years behind bars. During Lor’s sentencing, Anna Rudolph said directly to Miller:
“Lori, you have taken my parents. Despite everything you have done, you will never take my soul. This might be difficult to understand because you don’t have one.”
Perhaps the most devastating aspect of this case was the impact on Bianca and Larry’s children. Bianca and Larry’s children initially stood behind their father, even once issuing a statement about his innocence. So when Larry Rudolph then asked a federal judge to release him from jail pending trial, both Julian and his sister Anna Biana submitted sworn affidavit to the court, expressing their full support for their father.
“We know him better than anyone else, and we know that he is innocent,” they wrote.
But the trial changed everything for Julian.
“I can’t stand by that original statement because that was before we saw the evidence in the trial,” he said.
Prosecutors during the trial presented witness testimony, ballistics tests, and photos from the scene, including photos of Bianca Rudolph’s bloody body.
“Nothing could have prepared us for those visuals for that testimony,” Julian said it was horrific.
At the same time, according to Julian, the trial was eyeopening and the evidence presented brought a lot of clarity and answered a lot of questions for us. Julian Rudolph said his father now calls him from federal prison where he’s serving a life sentence. But Julian very rarely picks up. Unable to forgive the man convicted of fatally shooting Bianca Rudolph in 2016 so he could collect nearly $5 million in life insurance and live freely with his longtime mistress.
And said, “It’s incomprehensible to me.”
Larry, now 70, is serving life in prison at the US Penitentiary in Teroot, Indiana. Lori Millerin is serving 17 years at Federal Correctional Institution Mariana in Florida, with her release date scheduled for April 15th, 2036. What began as a dream safari in the African wilderness ended with a mother and wife dead, two children without their parents, and a web of lies that took years to unravel.
Bianca Rudolph went to Africa to hunt for a leopard, but instead became prey to the man who had promised to love and protect her for better or worse. Justice was served, but the scars left behind will last a lifetime.
