This poor man suffered a pretty gruesome death.
His remains fit in a little bag.
A number of people affiliated with organized crime
might have been involved.
There was just something wrong with that picture.
This case became driven by the forensic evidence.
There were bits of brain matter
left on the ceiling.
I looked at the bullets and considered that maybe
they had been used in a silencer.
Many murder cases are simple,
but this case was very different.
He wasn't the nicest person in the world,
but he didn't deserve to get murdered like that.
I spent 33 years as a officer of the Metropolitan Police Department.
My last 12 years were as a homicide investigator.
I got into law enforcement
because my father was a police officer.
I remember him coming home with his uniform on,
and his brass buttons shining,
and he's got a gun on his side,
and he puts bad guys in jail...
And I thought, man, that's what I wanna do.
As an investigator, I'm often asked,
"What does a murderer look like?"
And I tell people, "Look in the mirror."
When my partner Jimmy and I were assigned to this case,
it was the first big major high-profile investigation
that we had received in Homicide...
Detective Ramos.
Guns and drugs and ***
and everything that
people really wanna sink their teeth into,
like some Hollywood movie.
This case had it all.
We received a call.
Some fishermen were out at the lake
and they found something that scared 'em.
It was a very typical desert scene outside of Las Vegas...
and there was this charred area
where someone had built a campfire,
was what it appeared.
There were the outlines and the remains of an hump-backed trunk,
an antique type trunk.
And then as we looked closer
into this pit of burnt debris,
we also saw small human remains...
Bones, foot bones,
finger bones...
And 15 feet away was
a perfectly intact human skull.
And in fact we could see bullet holes on the skull.
Next to the skull was a gold bracelet
that was encrusted in diamonds,
and in those diamonds it spelled out the name "Ron":
R-O-N.
Ron Rudin was a mysterious missing persons case.
Four weeks earlier,
this well-known man had just vanished.
One of his wives had given him a gold bracelet,
and his name was spelled out in diamonds.
We said, "Look, here's the bracelet.
It's gotta be Ron Rudin's skull."
Someone did as much as they could
to conceal the remains,
but the skull didn't burn
all the way to disintegration.
A forensic anthropologist
was able to look at the back of the skull
where the vertebrae came in contact with the skull,
and he said, "I think I see
some knife marks on these vertebrate."
It's possible that the head
had been removed from the body itself
prior to the fire starting.
Decapitation occurs usually with
some type of sharp instrument.
The vertebrae are interlocked,
and so there's really no way to
take someone's head off of their body
without chipping the bone.
And that would let us know
that it wasn't the fire that decapitated an individual,
but a tool was used.
The skull had rolled away because it had been separated from the body.
Somebody cut the poor man's head off
and stuffed it in the trunk with him
before they set it on fire.
The body was completely charred.
The hump-back trunk had been charred as well,
leaving the clasps and some of the metal brackets behind.
But there was a couple pieces of wood
that survived the fire that
gave us an indication of what color the trunk was.
We knew that it was blue on the outside
and it had wallpaper on the inside.
But there was still enough left
where we could lay out the metal straps
and we could get the overall dimensions of the trunk.
This trunk had to be used to dispose of the body.
The remains were taken to the Medical Examiner's office.
During the examination of the skull,
the Medical Examiner told us
that there were five bullet holes,
indicating that he had been shot five times.
And in fact I believe there were
three bullet fragments that were still intact.
We knew that it was a small caliber weapon,
which was very fortunate,
because that was physical evidence
of what was used to kill him.
The only identifying item of evidence that was there
was a gold bracelet.
But the bracelet itself being there
wasn't scientific proof that those remains belonged to Ron Rudin,
so we had to get some scientific proof.
We had dental records
and his teeth were still in place.
Had it not been for that,
I don't think we ever would've been able to
scientifically identify those remains.
Fire has the ability
to cover up a lotta crimes,
but what it can't do is burn teeth.
Teeth require 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit or more to burn.
Our teeth are pretty much
protected from high temperatures.
Each one of us have a unique set of teeth
and a unique way our teeth have been restored.
Those records that one gets when they go to the dentist
gives us a really good tool
in the identification of individuals.
The Medical Examiner was able to say,
"Yeah, this is what's left of Ron Rudin,
and now you have a murder case."
We had to speak with the man's wife,
his next of kin,
the one who had to make the missing person's report.
I called her up and I said,
"Margaret, there's been of development."
And she said,
"Oh, he's been found, hasn't he?"
We started to establish
what we call a victimology...
You try and find out
everything you can about your victim...
Who he visited every day, what his habits were,
what he would do before work, after work...
We learned so many things about the private Ron Rudin
versus the public Ron Rudin.
In public he was well-known,
well-respected in the business community,
a real estate developer who had millions...
A workaholic like no one can describe.
But he had a dark side.
He was a playboy,
and he was unfaithful to every wife that he had.
Ron would frequent topless bars,
gentleman's clubs.
We had to listen to different stories about Ron,
and his background,
and the people that he associated with,
and the activities that he was involved in.
Ron was a colorful character,
and so there were some allegations
that he had been involved with gun dealers,
and some unsavoury gun dealers.
He had a very large gun collection,
and there was the belief that
he always carried a gun in his boot.
He also had a lot of enemies
because of the way he conducted his real estate business.
If you bought a home from Ron Rudin,
he would finance it himself.
But if you were one day late on your payment,
he would foreclose, and boom, you were out.
And he made a lot of enemies that way.
Ron Rudin suffered a pretty gruesome death,
and some people say that was poetic justice
for a man who lived a terrible lifestyle...
A deceptive man, a very untrustworthy man.
But he didn't deserve to get murdered like that.
We started looking into
what the circumstances were of his disappearance.
His black Cadillac was found not far from
the Crazy Horse topless bar.
'Course the first thought was that somehow
he had been apprehended there at the Crazy Horse.
The club was Mob-associated,
and owned by the Mob.
So there was a connection there for someone to say,
"Well, the Mob killed him and there's proof of it."
Back in the 50's and 60's,
the Mob had a pretty big influence here in Las Vegas.
They had quite a bit of ownership in a lot of the hotels.
They skimmed a lot of money,
and along with them running the hotels in Las Vegas came
all the crime that was associated with the mob...
drug dealers,
drug users, gamblers,
*** and all.
It's called "Sin City" for a reason.
One of the things about
the car being found at the topless club was, um,
that the car had been parked
in the back alley of the club,
where most patrons don't go.
It's where the employees go, the dancers go,
and that's where they park to get into
the back door of the club.
One of the bartenders
was a former detective with our department.
He had been convicted of going over to the dark side,
joining the Mob,
and was part of their criminal activity in Las Vegas...
A former police detective seduced by the Mob.
However,
one of the things that we
determined quickly was that there was no Mob association
between Ron Rudin and his activities.
He wasn't involved in any competing business with the Mob,
and if the Mob would've had anything to do with his disappearance,
they're not gonna put
a key piece of evidence in one of their clubs.
That's silly to think that.
Somebody wanted us to believe the Mob had
something to do with his disappearance
because his car's in the parking lot of a Mob-owned topless club.
It was a poor attempt to throw us off.
There was a lotta leads, a lot of lookin' around.
Had he been at the Crazy Horse that night?
Had he not? What was his car doing there?
There was an effort made to try to associate
the vehicle with the crime scene and so forth.
So we looked at soil and samples
taken from the crime scene where the body had burned,
looking for something to link that
with debris from the floorboards of the car.
Despite all my efforts,
it just sorta went nowhere.
Inside the car
were little specks of blood...
But this blood was in such small amounts
it had no scientific value for us.
All we could say is that it was human blood,
but we couldn't type it,
we couldn't get a DNA profile from it.
The car didn't help us find out what happened to Ron Rudin.
We gotta find out all the other who,
what, when, where, and why questions.
So we started talking to
the people who reported him missing.
And that's we found out that
his wife Margaret refused to report him missing
for several days.
She was telling all her family,
"He's just gone somewhere. He does this all the time."
Ninety-nine percent of murder investigations,
the person that you have to focus on first
is the one who is closest to the victim...
A spouse, live-in boyfriend, girlfriend, somethin' like that.
We wanted to move past Margaret
if she had nothing to do with it.
Margaret Rudin was a very attractive woman.
Always very gracious,
very gentle and kind
in the way she presented herself.
Margaret's hobby was collecting antiques,
and she'd opened an antiques store
in Ron's strip mall that he owned attached to his home.
They were an attractive couple.
He was an attractive man, she was an attractive female,
and people tend to take notice of attractive people in that regards.
Two socialites getting together
and both being very connected here in town.
We called up and said, "Margaret,
can we come and speak to you right now?"
And she says, "Sure, c'mon up."
So we go to the house,
and I said, "Well, Margaret",
"we need to sit down and we need to go over
"everything you can remember "about the last time you spoke to him...
"What happened, what did you guys talk about,
where were you..."
And she says, "Okay, yeah,
but I'm just so upset right now."
"Can you give me a minute?" And we said, "Yeah, of course."
And she goes over to the desk that had been left open,
and she starts going through all these papers.
And I said, "Margaret, is there anything we can help you with?"
She goes, "No, I'm just looking for his insurance policy."
And I thought, okay,
well what about, "What happened to my husband?
How did he die? Where did you find him?"
Your husband's been murdered!
We need to talk about what happened.
I'm watching her,
and I said again, "We need to talk and refresh your memory.
The last time you saw him, what were you doing?"
And she starts going like this.
She's digging her first knuckle into her eye...
To myself I'm thinking,
"What're you doing? You're gonna hurt yourself."
Are you okay, ma'am?
And it occurred to me
she was trying to make herself cry.
She was trying to
injure her eye so that tears would come out.
Is there a friend nearby that we can call?
No..
She said, "I'm just too upset to
talk anymore. Can you come back another time?"
We said, "Sure, of course, we understand."
So Jimmy and I looked at each other.
Y'know, we kinda shook our heads.
The reaction was just not what we had expected.
I'd never seen a reaction like that
in the 300-plus murders that I've investigated.
She wasn't crying. She wasn't upset.
She was just like...
we're having an everyday conversation.
In the meantime, y'know, in the back of our minds,
we're saying this lady had something to do with her husband's disappearance.
We get to the office,
and Jimmy and I are just looking at each other and saying,
"What in the world is this woman up to?"
And then as we walked in the door,
Jimmy's phone
is ringing on his desk.
"Hello, Detective Vaccaro."
It was an attorney,
and he said, "I've been retained by Margaret Rudin.
If you wanna talk to her, you have to talk to me first."
We didn't even get a chance to get back to the office
before she lawyered up, as we call it.
So we thought, "Okay, here we go.
The game's on."
We could not focus on anybody else until we
eliminated her as a suspect.
We thought, have we covered every base?
Is there any possibility that there was
someone other than Margaret responsible for Ron's murder?
Every single lead that came in, we followed up on it.
Every single one.
We didn't discard any lead that we had.
One of the theories that Margaret had, uh,
proposed was that Ron
had been abducted by Colombian drug lords.
Vegas was a hub for gang activity,
and Las Vegas did play a role
in the distribution of cocaine
that was coming in from South America.
Margaret would say, "Well, he's been running guns
to Colombian drug lords for years."
He was licensed by the government to sell firearms.
He had an amazing collection of guns.
He converted his walk-in closet
into a huge gun safe.
There had to be...
500 guns in this closet.
Margaret tried to expand on that
and try and make it a plausible theory.
But while we were able to document
that he was going to South America with guns...
he wasn't running guns for the Colombian drug cartel.
They were for hunting expeditions.
He would only take one shotgun with him.
This story was another red herring...
Do you remember the date?
And from that point on,
we really started digging.
And we found a lotta bizarre things about Margaret.
She, like Ronald, had been married a many times.
Her marriage to Ron was her fifth marriage.
Each ex-husband was very wealthy.
Ron had substantial wealth.
Some estimates were upwards of 13 million dollars.
She'd married into money,
hoping that she would live
a lifestyle of the rich and famous.
But from day one,
this marriage was tumultuous.
The relationship became very turbulent.
It was clear to me
that the trust has been lost in that relationship.
They fought all the time.
There was a domestic violence incident
where there was actually shots fired in the house.
In fact,
not long after Ron had married Margaret,
he discovered that one of his weapons was missing.
He had indicated that he believed
she might have taken the gun.
Ron's will spelled out,
"If I die under mysterious circumstances,
or have a violent death,"
he wanted an extraordinary investigation done...
and that if anybody was gonna kill him for his money,
he didn't want them to get his money.
Ron's closest friends told us Margaret wiretapped his office
and put listening devices on his phones.
She ultimately had the ability to intercept
and listen to each one of his phone calls.
She could hear his phone conversation
with one or two of these women
that he was having an affair with.
She not only learned of his infidelity,
but by intercepting his phone calls,
what Margaret was learning is that
Ron was actively changing his will.
Her amount that she'd receive under the will
was getting smaller and smaller and smaller...
Her antique store was...
doing terrible, failing, costing Ron a lot of money.
He had given her thousands of dollars
to get this off the ground.
He told her,
on the night before he disappeared,
that he was cutting off her allowance for the store,
he was turning off her cell phone,
and he was turning in her Lincoln Continental
that she was leasing.
And so Margaret's cash cow was drying up.
We believed that there was
an awful lot of financial motive in having him killed.
However, we had no direct physical evidence
linking Margaret to the crime.
We prepared a press release
that it was a murder investigation now.
And then we received a call from a young man
who identified himself as Augustine Lovato,
and he had a very interesting story to tell us...
Detective Ramos.
And that just turned everything
upside down.
OKay. Bye.
Augustine Lovato says,
"I have information about that Ron Rudin case."
He began to tell us that the lady
whose husband was killed
hired me to clean up their bedroom,
and we said, "What?"
"She said that her husband had a bloody nose
and he got blood on the mattress
and there was blood on the carpet
so she wanted me to clean it up."
He said, "There was a pool of blood on the entire top half
of the mattress and it was just stinky and nasty."
I said, "you're sure it's blood..."
He goes, "I'm positive it's blood."
And he said, "and right below the bed,
on the carpet, it was soaked with blood."
He said, "and then I looked on the wall" above the headboard
and there was one of these glamour shots of the lady
and there were little droplets of blood on the picture
and as I'm looking at it I'm thinking,
"oh my gosh how did the blood from a bloody nose
get up on this picture?"
And he said, "it just gave me the creeps,
but she was paying me to get rid of it so I,
you know, I did what the lady told me to do."
And he told us where he had taken the mattress
and we drove there and there it was sitting right there
soaked in blood, boom.
We were on the right track with Margaret.
We were able to get a search warrant
based on the evidence that we collected
from Augustine Lovato's statement,
so we served the search warrant on the house.
We had to find conclusive evidence that a crime
had occurred in that specific location.
One of the techniques that we used
was spraying a chemical agent called luminol
in the bedroom where we theorized
that Ron had been killed.
Luminol is a chemical that is used
to help detect trace amounts of blood
that may be found at a crime scene.
So Luminol is typically sprayed on an area
that you think has blood
and the luminol actually interacts with the iron
found in haemoglobin to create a blue light
that you see for a quick moment.
We sprayed the luminol
and this wall lit up like the Milky Way,
it was just glowing with blood.
Blood that was not visible to the naked eye
because whoever, and we believed it was Margaret,
had tried to clean the blood off of the wall.
Removing blood is almost impossible
as much as you try and try and scrub and clean,
there'll still be the smallest amount that's left.
There's a phenomenon in criminalistics
called high velocity mist.
We believe that when the first bullet entered his skull
it created a hole
and when the subsequent bullets entered the skull
the pressure that was inflicted on the inside of the skull
caused a mist of blood to come out
in the existing holes.
High velocity mist
has a very unique spray or aerosol like pattern,
that's very distinguishable from something
like a passive drop, say if you cut your hand
or if you were to be hit with a bat
it wouldn't create the same pattern.
There were actual bits of brain matter and skull matter
that was still left on the ceiling,
but then another bizarre twist
in this case happened.
We found out that one of Ron's wives,
I believe it was his third wife,
this lady had committed suicide on that bed.
Shot herself in the head,
and the blood spray from that incident
was still present on the wall.
With blood, the amazing thing is,
if something happened 20 years ago,
there's very much a high likelihood
that that blood will still be there.
And we had to research that,
and find out well this blood pattern here
belonged to Ron Rudin when he was killed.
This blood pattern here belonged to his wife
when she committed suicide.
If you suspect that there's
multiple blood profiles that are in a room,
you could use a lot of things to actually separate them out.
So one may be the actual blood spatter analysis
where you're looking at the direction,
the size, the shape of the spots,
but then furthermore you may do some DNA testing.
We had no base DNA identity for Ron.
Ron did not have any children, you know,
if you if you have offspring you can
get a DNA profile from your offspring,
but he didn't have any.
We found a handkerchief on Ron's side of the sink,
that had little droplets of blood on it
and we learned from his maid
that Ron would dab himself
with that handkerchief
when he cut himself shaving.
That was the only reference that we had
to Ron's DNA profile.
We needed to match the DNA profile
from the droplets of blood on the handkerchief,
with all the other blood that we believed was Ron's,
because of the circumstances.
But there was still that little one percent chance
of well how do you know this is Ron Rudin's DNA,
couldn't it have been a stranger?
I suppose it could have.
That just caused us to dig our heels in more
and just focus on what we had,
and go out and find more evidence.
It was believed that his body
was placed in a humpback trump.
The trunk was believed to have been
an antique piece.
We knew that it was blue on the outside
and it had wallpaper on the inside
from what was left at the crime scene.
I found a receipt in Margaret's files
that described the purchase of a humpback trunk
with the interior with wallpaper,
it spelled it out and the dimensions matched
the dimensions of the of the framework,
and I thought "found it."
So I called the dealer,
gave him the receipt number and described the trunk,
he says, "Yeah, I remember selling that trunk
to that really nice lady from Las Vegas."
He described it perfectly.
The evidence that we had all pointed to Margaret.
To this point, it's all circumstantial
but we were hoping that
we would get more evidence to follow up on.
So we took the case to a Grand Jury.
When we began to present
this case to the Grand Jury,
we were presenting it more to gather up evidence
to find out just what the state of the evidence is.
Margaret was not co-operating with us;
Wasn't telling us anything.
We were not permitted to speak to Margaret
without a lawyer present.
But when you're the focus of an investigation
by the law enforcement agency
and evidence is being presented to a Grand Jury
the target of that investigation has the opportunity
to go in front of the Grand Jury and defend themselves.
But they don't have the right
to have an attorney present during that examination.
We were hoping that Margaret would avail herself
to defend her actions, but she never did
she never did take that opportunity.
In our minds, the evidence was all there,
but we were looking at it from our point of view
from a cop's point of view.
And they said we just don't have enough
and as an investigator it's very frustrating.
I thought this case was stalled.
I thought, it's going to be a cold case.
After the initial thrust of the investigation had calmed down,
we still had other cases to work,
but in our downtime we were always focusing on what,
what are we missing on the Rudin case?
What else can we do on the Rudin case?
Stew Bell was the elected DA at the time
and he had come down and seen me and indicated
that this case was growing old
and he wanted to do something about it.
And so Stew Bell gave me the assignment
of presenting it to a second Grand Jury.
The forensic evidence,
the blood evidence in the room,
all over the ceiling,
on the floor,
on the carpets
became a very important part of this case.
We needed conclusive scientific proof
that yes indeed that blood belonged to Ron Rudin.
The handkerchief was the only reference that we had
to Ron's DNA profile.
Now one could argue that well how do you know
that was Ron's blood that was on that handkerchief?
A good defense attorney is going to work on that
and beat it to death.
At that time, DNA profiling was in its infancy
and Ron's living relatives weren't close enough
that we could have got a DNA profile from them.
On most murder scenes you have a body bag
and you have a full-size body
that you take to the Medical Examiner.
Poor Ron in this case, you know,
his remains fit in a little bag.
There was just a skull and some burnt bones.
However, during the Grand Jury presentation
we were able to extract DNA from the teeth
that were in the skull.
If a body is completely burned
and there's no tissue,
teeth are going to hold up.
In the tooth is the nutrient center called the pulp.
And that pulp has a location
where there is a rich source of DNA.
That pulp can be used to compare
against the blood from the victim you have.
We removed the pulp from the tooth
in Ron Rudin's skull and said yep,
the blood on the mattress, the blood on the ceiling,
the blood on the wall all have the same DNA profile
as the tooth that was in the skull found out at the lake.
It was one of the very first times
that the pulp in the tooth was used to identify
a DNA profile.
In fact,
it was one of the first times here in Las Vegas
that it was admitted as evidence in court.
We've got a pretty good case on Margaret,
we just need that one little bit more
to tip the scales in our favor.
The Grand Jury had been convened
and having looked at the trace evidence,
I was part of that.
I was called to testify,
and during one of the breaks
I heard the deputy District Attorney
talking to one of the crime scene analysts,
saying next week bring in the bullets,
we'll get those entered into evidence.
And I went on alert and immediately I said,
"Bullets, what bullets? We've not examined any."
The bullets and the bullet fragments
that were found within the skull were deformed
to the point that they were still identifiable,
but just barely identifiable.
The forensic pathologist had looked at them
and said they were too damaged, they were of no value,
and so the detectives
just never submitted a request on those.
In this case, the bullets did look very damaged
but it turned out that a lot of the marks on them
which were very, very coarse marks
were actually gun marks.
I kept thinking what could cause
this kind of coarse character to the marks
and one of the possibilities that came to mind
that maybe a suppresser or a silencer had been used.
And so in my efforts to evaluate that
I thought you know where can I get some samples
of bullets from a silencer for comparison.
And I remembered a gun recovered
under unusual circumstances.
In the Summer of 1996
at Lake Mead,
there was an area that was reserved for scuba diving.
This one diver saw a white plastic bag
on the bottom of the lake.
They opened it up and wow.
There was a 22 semi-automatic pistol
with a silencer.
The park ranger called the police department,
he called us the homicide section,
but that information hadn't been passed on to Jimmy and I.
So we weren't aware of it.
The gun had been wrapped in countless plastic baggies.
Baggie after baggie after baggie.
Certainly it was hoped that the gun
would never be found again.
They said it was a bull barrel Ruger
which is a term for a target barrel gun
and as soon as I looked at it,
I realized it was not a bull barrel
it was a suppressor, a silencer.
When a gun is fired the bullet exits the barrel
and behind it is a wave of high pressure gas
and that is what you will perceive of as sound.
A suppressor delays that wave exiting
makes it take a little longer to get out
and so the sound is reduced.
It's more of a poof,
because it was a little unusual
we proceeded to clean it and put it back together
and test fire it.
Okay, I've got a 22 short here.
The chamber's loaded.
We looked at the bullets,
but we couldn't link it to anything.
So the gun went to the evidence vault
where it was stored,
and the test fires went into our evidence storage
in the laboratory.
Later on when the Grand Jury had been convened,
I remembered the test fires from the gun from the lake,
and so I pulled those out of evidence
to see if the marks from a silencer were similar
to the marks we were seeing on the bullets that killed Ron Rudin.
As I put those test fires from the suppressed weapon
on my scope and compared them
to the bullets removed from Ron Rudin's head,
I started seeing what appeared to be
the marks lining up.
And of course I'm thinking
this is just a random gun found in the lake,
this can't be, but the more I looked,
it became clear to me that there was a relationship
between those bullets and the gun from Lake Mead.
So I made some enquiries with the bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms
and found that there was a record of this gun.
It had belonged to Ron Rudin.
I called The DA and I said
you are not going to believe this,
but I've got the gun that killed Ron Rudin
and his response was, "What?"
The Eureka moment was the gun.
The gun being identified as,
number one the murder weapon,
number two that it had belonged to Ron
and number three that it disappeared
shortly after Margaret came into the picture.
That was the coup de grace moment.
Who else is going to be in the man's bedroom
with that gun at two o'clock in the morning
when he's asleep to be in a position
to shoot him in the head five times?
The Grand Jury began deliberations
around one o'clock in the afternoon,
and by three o'clock they had given us a true bill,
or an indictment and said,
yep there is enough evidence here
to hold her for trial.
Go get her, boys.
Margaret knew that we were coming after her,
but Margaret Rudin had disappeared off the face of the earth.
Once the Grand Jury indictment was handed over,
we realized Margaret Rudin was gone.
She took off and was in the wind.
Both Jimmy and I looked at each other and said,
"Here we go the hunt is on."
We had no idea where to start looking
so we just entered her into a national database,
listed all of her aliases.
While she was on the run,
Margaret kept two or three different wigs,
a couple of bottles of hair dye.
She went to great lengths to conceal her identity
and she was successful at it for a while,
for almost two years.
Phoenix Police department received a tip.
The caller said,
"This woman that's wanted is my neighbor."
A Phoenix police officer responded to that call,
but we weren't able to get a photograph to him in time.
This officer actually spoke to Margaret.
He said, "Do you know who Margaret Rudin is?"
"Oh no sir, I have no idea, who is she?"
"Well she's wanted for murder."
"No, that couldn't possibly be me."
Later on he went back to find her
she had gone at a moment's notice.
She just took off.
From Arizona she ended up in Mexico.
We had gotten another series of tips
and they said "Yes, she's in Mexico,
I know that because friends are speaking to her
and they know where she is."
Margaret had a series of friends in a little
communication network that she would use,
and that's how she was able to contact her family
and they were able to contact her.
Ultimately, one of her friends said enough is enough,
I'm not gonna be part of this helping a fugitive
and called the FBI and said,
"I know how to get a hold of where Margaret's at."
She's no longer in Mexico
she's in a little town named Revere:
It was a suburb of Boston.
It was one of the best takedowns
that I can remember.
It was a classic piece
of stick and whistle 101.
The cops in Revere saw a pizza delivery guy
go to the apartment
so the cops stop the pizza delivery kid
as he walked away.
And the cops put on the pizza delivery uniform,
a little hat and a jacket and they went back
and knocked on the door.
And they said, "Margaret do you know why we're here?"
And she said, "Yeah, it's about that Vegas thing."
She fought extradition,
we had to wait for a governor's warrant
and once she got back to Vegas
she had three attorneys defending her.
I don't mean to say
that many murder cases are simple
but many murder cases are simple.
There's eye witnesses that are left,
there's a smoking gun.
The murderer is standing over the body many times.
This case was very different in that regard.
We had to be able to prove this case
beyond a reasonable doubt,
and that's why each and every piece of evidence
became so important to us.
It was hours and hours and hours of,
you know, good old fashioned police work
bolstered by a new science
that was just being brought into police work.
The finding of the gun in the lake,
and the ballistics matching the projectiles
that were found in Ronald Rudin's skull
and his remains became overwhelmingly powerful,
at least in the eyes of the state.
Between the ballistics and the DNA, you know,
they both came together and gave us
that final piece of evidence,
irrefutable evidence that she was responsible
for this poor man's death,
and a gruesome death at that.
It's sad to that think this poor guy was killed
by one of his own guns.
I guess that old adage,
live by the sword die by the sword,
sure turned out to be the case here.
Of course, the jury had the last say in this matter.
After about a month long trial she was convicted
and received a sentence of 20 to life
for her part in Ron's murder
and she's still in jail today.
It's a classic story of greed,
power,
money,
revenge.
I can tell you just about everybody is capable
of becoming a murderer at some point.
If you piss somebody off enough,
they're going to take the revenge on you.