Viswa Vanapalli
When Bianca Rudolph died in October 2016, it was ruled an accident. Her husband, Lawrence, seemed to move on with his life after that. However, when federal authorities later looked into the matter, they came to believe it was no accident. They felt her life partner was responsible, partly owing to an affair with his former office manager, Lori Milliron. CBS News’ ‘48 Hours: Death on Safari’ and ABC News’ ’20/20: The Last Hunt’ highlight this complex case and its developments.
Lori Milliron Was Lawrence Rudolph’s Manager Turned Partner
Bianca died during a hunting trip with Lawrence to Zambia, Africa. She was found with a shotgun wound in her chest, and Lawrence had her cremated quickly. However, several tips received by the FBI suggested it was more than just an accident. One of Bianca’s friends called the authorities weeks after her death to report something disturbing. According to her, Lawrence had been having an affair at the time of the incident.
The woman Lawrence was seeing at the time was Lori Milliron, the manager at his dental practice in Pennsylvania. A former employee who worked there until February 2016 one stated she had an interesting conversation with Lori back then. According to her, Lori mentioned she had been in a relationship with the dentist for 15-20 years, so she gave him an ultimatum: he had to sell the offices and leave Bianca within a year. However, Lori has denied this claim, only for it to later come to light that Bianca had ended up confronting her husband with evidence of his affair, following which he allegedly said he would leave Lori.
The authorities also soon learned that Lori had moved in with Lawrence within months of Bianca’s death. Furthermore, the couple planned on staying together for long, which is why they even put in a $3.5 million offer on another house in the same area. Records show that on the day of Bianca’s funeral in October 2016, the dentist also bought a flight ticket for Lori to Arizona, where he lived. While that was later canceled, he purchased another ticket three days later for a different woman to fly to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Then, according to a bartender in an Arizona bar, Lawrence said, “I killed my [expletive] wife for you” to Lori during an argument at the bar in January 2019. Then there’s the fact her bank accounts saw several cash deposits totaling more than $200,000 by 2017, just for her to claim she didn’t remember these and didn’t know why her salary increased; she only said that Lawrence was very generous. The authorities believed these were false and misleading statements.
Lori Milliron is Still Serving Her Sentence
In February 2022, Lori was charged with nine counts of accessory after the fact, obstruction of a federal grand jury, and perjury. The authorities believed that she provided false testimony regarding certain payments that Lawrence made to her. At the time, she couldn’t explain why he had paid her substantial amounts in cash between 2016 and 2017 other than to say he was generous. She further stated she did not remember if she threatened to end their affair in the past.
In April 2022, a judge ruled that Lori and Lawrence would stand trial together. She surrendered to the authorities in Arizona in February. Then, in August of the same year, she was found guilty by a federal jury of being an accessory after the fact to the murder, obstruction of justice, and two counts of perjury in Colorado. She was acquitted on three other counts of perjury. Therefore, on June 23, 2023, the then-65-year-old was sentenced to 17 years behind bars, along with an order to pay a maximum fine of $250,000, meaning she remains behind bars to this day. In fact, she’s currently incarcerated at Marianna FCI, where she’s expected to remain until at least November 11, 2036.
Read More: How Did Bianca Rudolph Die?
