Margaret Rudin: A Gold Digger Craps Out

The Fifth Time’s Not the Charm for Las Vegas Millionaire Ron Rudin
(“For Love or Money,” Forensic Files)

If you’re looking for a sympathetic Forensic Files murder victim, you might prefer to read about Daniel McConnell or Charlotte Grabbe instead of Ron Rudin.

The Las Vegas residential real estate developer wore garish jewelry, cheated on his wives, foreclosed on homes, and evicted tenants. He accrued so many enemies, whether avowed or suspected, that he maintained an arsenal of firearms and a pack of hunting dogs inside his house and a concrete wall and barbed wire fence outside.

Bid for bucks. Of course, that doesn’t mean he deserved to be shot four times in his sleep and then thrown in the desert so that spouse No. 5 Margaret Rudin could claim her share of his $10 million to $12 million estate.

On “For Love or Money,” the Forensic Files episode about Ron Rudin’s murder, one of his ex-wives mentioned he’d done good things for people during his life — but she didn’t specify what.

For this week, I checked around and found redeeming information about the human being behind the bling. I also did background research on the elegant and proper-looking Margaret — one of many Forensic Files villains (Craig Rabinowitz, Janice Dodson) whose plans to become independently wealthy by eliminating a spouse backfired.

Illinois boy. So let’s get going on the recap of “For Love or Money” along with information from internet research:

Ron Rudin was born an only child on Nov. 14, 1930, and grew up in Joliet, Illinois. His mother, Stella, stayed at home and enjoyed a close relationship with him, according to the book If I Die by Michael Fleeman. His father, Roy, had a high-paying job as a chemical company executive.

Still, Ron didn’t live a charmed life.

At the age of 10, he saw Roy die of a heart attack.

Veteran returns. As a student, Ron tried to avoid the Korean War draft by joining the ROTC and later serving in the Illinois National Guard — but the government nabbed him anyway.

He survived overseas duty and moved to Las Vegas to make his mark on the world.

After gaining experience as a construction worker, Ron started his own real estate business, building houses and also buying and flipping existing ones. He became a gun dealer and amassed a collection valued at $3 million.

Affinity for alcohol. Ron shared his success with his mother, moving her to Nevada so they could spend more time together. He liked taking her out to dinner at the Las Vegas Country Club.

In his off hours, he enjoyed hunting and flying airplanes.

But Ron had another favorite pastime that wasn’t so wonderful: alcohol consumption. Loyal ex-wife Caralynne Rudin — who gave interviews to multiple true-crime shows — defended him, saying drunkenness didn’t make him abusive. But Margaret would claim otherwise.

Shiny, shiny. On the bright side, Ron had no interest in gambling. He stayed out of Sin City’s casinos.

Still, he did delight in flashing his wealth. He wore a six-carat diamond ring and drove a perpetually spotless black Cadillac with vanity plates reading “RRR-1.”

Another of the handsome, olive-skinned entrepreneur’s favorite accessories was a wife — five of them in all.

Wife commits suicide. He met the first two, secretary Donna L. Brinkmeyer and insurance agent Caralynne Holland, through his work. His union with Donna, whom he married in 1962, barely lasted a year. He had better luck with the glamorous-looking Caralynne. They made it work from 1971 to 1975 and stayed friends despite that Ron had cheated on her.

Next up came a horrible tragedy. Ron’s third wife, hairdresser Peggy June Rudin, shot herself in the master bedroom inside Ron’s fortress-like house at 5113 Alpine Place. She reportedly suffered from depression.

A couple of sources referred to Peggy as Ron’s one true love. (Of course, it’s possible that she died before he had a chance to get tired of her.) After Peggy’s death, which happened around Christmastime, Ron would always feel distressed when December rolled around, according to “Vegas Black Widow,” an episode of the TV series Sex, Lies & Murder

New squeeze. Media accounts didn’t mention the identity of Ron’s fourth wife, but she was inconsequential compared to his fifth, Margaret.

The pair met at the First Church of Religious Science. “She was outgoing. She was vivacious, very sociable and dressed nicely,” Michael Fleeman told KTNV-TV.

Margaret was slender and had blue eyes and a fine-boned face. Some YouTube viewers commented that she looked like Meryl Streep. Newspapers described her as a socialite.

Modest abode. The couple married in 1987, when Ron was in his late 50s; Margaret was 12 years younger and had two adult children.

Like all of Ron’s wives, Margaret lived with him in the two-bedroom two-bath abode behind the seven-foot barrier. The house lacked curb appeal but — location, location, location — it sat right behind Ron Rudin Realty’s office in a strip mall, so Ron could walk to work.

Margaret and Ron had their ups and downs.

The guy had charm. “They loved each other passionately, but they had these very, very volatile fights,” Fleeman told ABC-KTNV. “At one point [in 1988] there was gunfire, literally. A gun went off. Nobody got shot, but that’s how this relationship was.”

The couple split up and then reconciled.

Margaret would later tell 48 Hours that Ron was charismatic and mysterious and she wanted to make their relationship work in spite of his imbibing and his affair with a woman named Sue Lyles.

Kept at a distance. Ron cared enough about Margaret to bankroll her when she decided to open her own antiques shop. He bought her a Lincoln Continental.

But that didn’t mean he trusted her. One of his guns outfitted with a federally registered silencer went missing during the first year of their marriage and at some point, he suspected Margaret of taking it. Ron reported the theft to the police — his gun business was lawful and legitimate.

Ron didn’t let Margaret too close to his finances. She received an allowance.

Insidious plot. After discovering that Margaret was eavesdropping on his conversations at work, Ron removed the phone line between the house and the real estate office. She and her younger sister, Dona Cantrell, later secretly installed hidden recording devices there.

Just weeks before Christmas in 1994, Ron made a disturbing discovery, according to his best buddy John Reuther.

“He says he’s found a piece of paper in the house, ‘Margaret is diagramming out how she’s going to split up all my money, the estate with her relatives and her friends,'” Reuther told ABC-KTLV.

Nomadic upbringing. Yikes, so who exactly was the woman who Ron had taken to the altar?

Margaret Frost was born in Memphis circa 1942, and by the time she got her high school diploma, her family had moved to 15 states and she’d had to change schools 22 times, according to an interview from jail she gave to the TV series Mugshots for the episode “Margaret Rudin: Death in the Desert.”

She described her father as stern and fanatically religious.

Eager to leave home, at the age of 18, Margaret married a 20-year-old carpenter. They settled in Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, and had a son and a daughter. That union lasted 10 years and Margaret went on to acquire and divorce two more husbands before she took her act to Vegas.

No jackpot. There, she married a boat dealer, but that relationship sank quickly.

Although Margaret had snagged progressively wealthier men, she didn’t score lucrative settlements in any of her divorces, according to American Justice. (Her daughter, Kristina Mason, who appeared on Mugshots, denied that Margaret was a gold digger.)

Ron’s extramarital girlfriend, Sue Lyles, said her children had received threatening anonymous letters about the affair. Sue suspected Margaret sent them in hopes she would end the relationship.

Lateness unusual. But Margaret didn’t need to worry about Ron cheating on her for much longer. He disappeared on Dec. 18, 1994.

His employees at the real estate office got worried immediately when he didn’t show up for work — Ron always got there on time — and notified authorities.

Margaret also reported him missing but not until two days after he vanished.

Names of the disgruntled. A week later, police located his Cadillac in the parking lot of the Crazy Horse Too, a local gentlemen’s club. The car’s exterior was covered with mud, a worrisome sign because Ron liked to keep his autos glistening. Inside the vehicle, they found some small blood spots too degraded for DNA testing.

Investigators got a list of all Ron’s evicted tenants in case one of them had gone homicidal. (His buddy Jerry Stump, however, would later tell the Las Vegas Sun that Ron was a kind landlord who gave tenants extra time to come up with their rent money.)

No solid leads came until three weeks later, when hikers reported finding a skull near Lake Mojave. The discoverers knew right away it didn’t come from an animal. They could see fillings in the teeth. Lying near the scene, they found a white-gold bracelet with diamonds that spelled “Ron.” Caralynne had bought it for Ron during their marriage.

Cleanliness compromised. Someone had incinerated the remains of the corpse from the neck down.

Dental records proved the skull belonged to Ron Rudin, dead at 64.

The skull had four bullet wounds from a .22-caliber Ruger. Knife marks suggested that whoever killed Ron Rudin decapitated him.

Cosa Nostra? Investigators came to believe that someone other than Ron had left his car at the strip club (he never patronized the establishment) to throw them off course. A manager there allegedly had ties to organized crime.

Ron reportedly brushed up against the mafia in a conflict with Tony Spilotro — later portrayed by Joe Pesci in Casino — over a real estate auction, according to “Vanished in Vegas,” an episode of The Perfect Murder.

But the bedroom Margaret and Ron shared told a much more relevant story than the Crazy Horse Too.

Sounds like Scott Peterson. Margaret had recently had the room recarpeted (flaming-red flag). Her contractor, Augustine Lovato, contacted police later and said that he found sticky bloodlike residue on the old rug. The walls and ceiling lit up when detectives sprayed luminal.

She suggested the blood came from Ron’s sneezing during his frequent nosebleeds or that it was left over from Peggy’s long-ago suicide.

Police noticed Margaret referred to Ron in the past tense and started renovating the master bedroom into an office before anyone knew he was dead.

Special conditions. But she wouldn’t get much time to enjoy the remodeling job. As the investigation continued to crawl along in 1995, trustees of Ron’s estate booted Margaret out of the house and seized cars and other assets in Ron’s name. They cut off her checking account.

In Ron’s will, he stipulated that if he died by violent means, there should be an investigation into any person with financial reasons for wanting him gone —and he instructed the trustees to disinherit such an individual.

Margaret, however, didn’t know about those directives in the will. As far as she knew, Ron’s demise would mean she’d inherit millions.

Discovery in the water. That never happened, but after haggling with the trustees, Margaret received a $500,000 to $600,000 settlement in 1996.

The murder investigation continued.

A scuba diver had found Ron’s missing gun with its silencer in Lake Mead. Police determined the old-timey firearm (“That gun looks like you have to walk 10 paces before you shoot it,” wrote YouTube commenter Katelyn Young) was the murder weapon.

Gone girl. Margaret didn’t seem too worried yet. According to Las Vegas Metro Detective Phil Ramos’ interview with American Justice, she had once remarked that a “Clark County grand jury couldn’t indict a ham sandwich.”

Law officers generally don’t appreciate that kind of talk, and Margaret was indicted on charges of first-degree murder, accessory to murder, and unlawful use of a listening device.

Detectives moved to arrest her on April 18, 1997, but she had disappeared.

Border crossing. Despite that America’s Most Wanted aired segments asking for help finding her, Margaret remained on the run for years and had quite a fantastic voyage, thanks to her adeptness at changing her appearance and making fake ID cards. She used the names Anne Boatwright, Susan Simmons, and Leigh Brown.

She lived among a community of U.S. retirees in Mexico, stayed in a YMCA while working in a gift shop in Phoenix, and ended up about as far away from Las Vegas in miles and culture as one can get in the U.S. — Revere, Massachusetts.

Whatever post-Ron life Margaret hoped to attain, it probably didn’t look like the drab apartment complex where police found her after tracing packages sent between her and her family members. She was living with a retired firefighter she met in Guadalajara.

Self-protection. He and the rest of the buddies she acquired while on the lam couldn’t believe the grandmotherly lady in the black wig was a felon. “She’s just too sweet,” friend Carol Reagor told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “It’s not in her nature.”

Joseph Lundergan, another friend Margaret met in Mexico, let her stay with him briefly in Massachusetts and accepted her collect calls after she went to prison.

Margaret said that she concealed her identity because she feared her late husband’s business associates. “When you’re helpless and you’re totally alone, you do tend to, maybe, panic,” she told 48 Hours in 2001.

Israeli connection. Prosecutors made a case that while Ron Rudin lay sleeping, Margaret shot him three times on one side of the head and once on the other, put his 6-foot-tall body into the missing trunk and burned it, then left his bracelet nearby for identification.

Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but before Ron Rudin’s disappearance, Margaret had been spending a lot of time with a 40-year-old Middle Easterner named Yehuda Sharon. Police suspected the two were having an affair and that he had helped her carry Ron — how else could the featherweight Margaret haul Ron’s 220-pound body?

Yehuda, a former Israeli intelligence officer, denied everything.

Cue the violin music. The trial of the so-called Black Widow of Las Vegas kicked off in March 2001. Although the dramatic, self-indulgent storytelling used by defense team Michael Amador and Tom Pitaro annoyed the judge so much that he appointed additional defense lawyers to dilute their irritating effect — and they ultimately lost the case — they did put up a valiant fight for Margaret.

“The entire state’s case is nothing but a house of cards waiting for just a slightest breeze to knock it down,” Amador told 48 Hours.

Amador (pictured with Margaret in the image at the top of the page) portrayed his client as a “poor widow left out in the cold.” He suggested that Ron’s trustees Sharron Cooper and Harold Boscutti had reason to kill Ron. Harold alone gained $1.5 million from the estate, Amador said.

Sister vs. sister. And women rarely mutilate victims, Amador argued.

Margaret trotted out the inevitable victim-smearing, claiming Ron trafficked drugs and evaded taxes and might have fallen victim to a business associate he double-crossed.

Unfortunately for Margaret, she herself ended up double-crossed when her lookalike sister served as a witness for the prosecution.

The verdict. Dona Cantrell confirmed that the two of them had planted the listening devices and testified that Margaret was romantically involved with Yehuda Sharon and was crazy about the guy.

Yehuda admitted in court that he had rented a van around the time of Ron Rudin’s disappearance, but said it had nothing to do with the murder and he and Margaret were just friends; he helped her with her taxes.

A jury convicted Margaret of first degree murder. She showed no emotion upon hearing the decision.

High proof. Juror Coreen Kovacs mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to Margaret after the verdict. She later said the other jurors pressured her to vote guilty.

A different juror, however, told American Justice that the evidence against Margaret was so great that no lawyer could have won an acquittal.

Amador later admitted that the reason Margaret looked scared, feeble, and weak during the trial had more to do with staging than any real circumstances. “That was no accident,” Amador told American Justice. “That was a $450-an-hour makeup artist I hired from a modeling agency”

Sprung! On August 31, 2001, Judge Joseph Bonaventure gave Margaret a life sentence.

She served some of her time at Southern Nevada Women’s Correctional Facility, later renamed Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center.

In 2020, the Nevada Department of Corrections agreed to release Margaret early to settle her lawsuit over alleged civil rights violations stemming from the way she was treated in prison.

Enterprises no more. She told the media that she planned to move in with her daughter in Chicago and write books about her time in captivity. Margaret again proclaimed her innocence, blaming the Las Vegas police for her “wrongful” conviction. They “testi-lyed,” she said.

Yehuda Sharon made the news again in 2020 after he accused police of neglecting to investigate a burglary in his residence. The Las Vegas resident remains a fuzzy character who has said he supports himself as a software developer or as a seller of holy oils for church use. Some speculated his main occupation was gigolo, according to true-crime author Suzy Spencer, who appeared on Sex, Lies & Murder.

As far as an epilogue for the Rudins’ businesses, they appear to be no more. A check-cashing business moved into Ron’s old real estate office and Margaret’s nearby antiques shop was replaced by an X-rated video store.

Wait, there’s more. The house on Alpine Place, which was fortified outside but couldn’t protect Ron Rudin inside, was torn down. A commercial building now occupies the space.

You can watch the Mugshots episode on Ron Rudin on YouTube. You can see the Sex, Lies & Murder for free if you sign up for a trial subscription to Reelz.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube