To catch a leopard, the trophy hunter must track its prey. Lure the big cat with wild dogs. With hedgehogs. With a vanishing species of antelope as bait. Slaughter a southern impala, hang it high in the Mutondo trees, then wait. If you are careful and you are quiet, the camouflaged victim will leap up and succumb to the rifle. Experienced game scouts, though, recommend keeping a shotgun in the truck; once that cat is down, you’d best finish her off, before she runs away.
Over the course of a fortnight in the early autumn of 2016, Bianca Rudolph pulled the trigger on all that bait and still managed to execute a zebra. Alas, no leopard. The Zambian government had lifted its ban on leopard and lion stalking for a full season, so that rich tourists like Bianca and her husband, Larry, could freely bring their arsenals from the McMansions of America to Africa. Back in western Pennsylvania, he was a dentist worth at least $5 million from hocking pain-free tooth work on TV; she was a decent shot and a dedicated wife — marriage was hard work, Bianca expressed to friends around the time of the trip, but she wouldn’t give up on it. Out here among the tsetse flies, some 80 miles from the nearest town, their love could reload. Just the other night, they’d danced to Tina Turner singing “You’re simply the best” on a Bluetooth speaker, loud enough to stir a lion. Larry and one of the couple’s two safari guides asked Bianca if she’d like to stay out here in the national park a few extra days, to claim her prize.
“Don’t even think about it, boys,” Bianca responded, according to later testimony. She and Larry were due back in the States for her nephew’s wedding on Saturday. She looked forward to spending time with Italian relatives and their two grown kids. The hunting party initiated protocol to unload their guns, then rumbled back to camp. The Rudolphs would pack for Lusaka at dawn.
By around 5 a.m., the coffee had arrived and the baggage attendant had visited the master suite, a haute log-cabin lean-to with a view. Larry and Bianca weren’t ready, not yet. The guides charged their satellite phones in the dining hall, as first light brushed upon the banks of the Kafue River. They were nearly finished logging the vacation’s tally of carcasses when they heard, from inside the cabin, a shotgun blast.
Bianca Rudolph died at the same camp where Larry said a crocodile attacked him.
Courtesy of Sakabilo Kalembwe
Bianca’s body lay at the foot of the dresser next to the bathroom. A hole, between six and eight centimeters wide, had macerated her black T-shirt, her bra, the left side of her heart. Larry slumped over Bianca, blood staining the floor beneath her wedding ring and watch. “My wife has committed suicide,” he cried out, recalls the second guide, a local game scout named Spencer Kakoma, who tried