Las Vegas 'black widow' Margaret Rudin, 79, says she's ready to rebuild her life

It's a murder story that has it all: a millionaire businessman shot dead and dumped in the desert, an enormous inheritance and a glamorous wife convicted of the killing after spending more than two years on the lam.

But for the woman dubbed the Las Vegas 'black widow', the real story is one of a botched trial, crooked cops and a 20-year jail term and parole that only ended when her murder conviction was sensationally overturned in May.

Now free after two decades inside the Florence McClure Correctional Center for Women in North Las Vegas, Margaret Rudin, 79, says she is planning to write a series of books about her time inside and will move to Mexico for a fresh start once she gets a passport.

Her new life will be dramatically different from her prison existence where she claims she was treated as less than human and repeatedly fell from her top bunk before being put in isolation to recover – only sustained by her dream of proving her innocence.

She said: 'You think of your kids, your grandkids and think, I don't want them to believe that [I'm a killer].

'So, I kept fighting, did every appeal I could do while hoping some wonderful attorney would come along, take it on, work on it and eventually win.'

Margaret Rudin, 79, served nearly 20 years of a life sentence after her millionaire husband Ron Rudin was shot to death in 1994. She was dubbed 'the Black Widow' but is now a free woman after her 2001 murder conviction was overturned in May

Ron Rudin was a real estate developer worth at least $8million at the time of his death. His burned body was found to have been shot 4 times

Rudin holds her parole letter. She claims she was treated as less than human in prison and repeatedly fell from her top bunk before being put in isolation to recover – only sustained by her dream of proving her innocence

Four-times married and divorced when she moved to Las Vegas from Chicago in 1987, Rudin had lived 'an unconventional life' before she moved west and had a nomadic childhood that took her to 15 states in 15 years.

By the time she arrived in Nevada with her two children Michael and Kristina, she was ready to settle down.

Rudin was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years. She was released on parole after serving nearly 20 years in 2020. Above, Rudin at the time of her parole

Enter Ronald Rudin, a wealthy realtor who had also been married four times – including to a woman who died in mysterious circumstances that were later officially ruled a suicide.

The pair wed after just six weeks and had a marriage that was variously described as 'passionate' and 'tumultuous' in reports at the time of Ron's murder.

Rudin describes a marriage blighted by her husband's alcoholism and demands for attention and said she found solace in running an antique shop.

The pair had met during a Sunday service in July 1987 at the First Church of Religious Science in Las Vegas, with Rudin telling DailyMail.com his cowboy boots had caught her eye.

She said: 'He wasn't a very religious person but he was very dedicated about attending church for whatever reason he had.

'I had told one of my friends as a joke that the next man I marry is going to wear cowboy boots because so many at that time wore cowboy boots.

'One day at church, my friend started pointing. I said, what's up with you? She said, 'there's a really good-looking man on the other side of the pews and he keeps looking at you and he's wearing cowboy boots.'

'He came up to us as soon as the service was over and he ignored my friend. He said will you go to lunch with me at the Las Vegas Country Club which I thought was a braggadocious way of asking me to go without asking my friend too.

'Six weeks later, we got married because he kept pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. It was because he had a drinking problem and he had hid it as long as he could.'

Despite their differences, the marriage continued until December 18, 1994 when Ron vanished. Margaret says she spent much of their final day at her antique store but came home when Ron told her he wanted them to see a movie.

Once home, she said he changed his mind so she went to the grocery store where he had asked her to get him some ice cream.

Returning for the second time, she noticed his car had gone so went back to the shop where he later dropped in on foot to say hello. She said: 'That was it. The last time I saw him. As he left my shop.'

When he failed to return that night, Rudin reported her husband missing – only to be rebuffed by the police.

Rudin told DailyMail.com that her husband's dodgy business deals included buying and selling properties with fictitious titles 

Ron's charred remains were found in the Nevada desert inside the burned remnants of an antique trunk (above). The trunk was proven to have been purchased by Margaret

Rudin claims that the two inexperienced cops assigned to the case planned to pin her husband's murder on her from the start. She's pictured being escorted by police in 1999

To begin with, she assumed he would come home. She said: 'He was really unpredictable. He was very self-indulgent.

But I thought I would call the police and I did and they said, 'This is Vegas. Men leave all the time but they come back. We don't even take a report for 48 hours.'

'I imagine that's true – almost everybody at that time had a weakness: drinking too much, gambling too much. Probably still do.'

Just over a month later, on January 21, 1995, Ron's body was found: dumped close to Nelson's Landing in the Eldorado Mountains.

An autopsy later revealed he had been shot in the head, decapitated and burned. He was identified by a diamond ID tag spelling out his first name that had been bought for him by one of his ex-wives.

A .22 caliber pistol pulled from Lake Mead a year later was deemed to be the murder weapon after it was traced back to Ron who had reported it missing in 1988.

Rudin says she discovered he was dead from a short newspaper report published the next day but wasn't approached by police until two days after the discovery.

She says when they arrived, she was still in her nightwear and she had to ask them to be allowed to get dressed.

Rudin also told how cops had told her nephew that Ron's body had been burned but had no sense that they regarded her as a suspect.

That was all to change as the investigation proceeded, with Rudin telling DailyMail.com that the two inexperienced cops assigned to the case planned to pin the murder on her from the start – despite Ron's dodgy business dealings that Rudin says was buying and selling properties with fictitious titles.

She said: 'It was a fiasco, the whole thing. In court, they said there was blood on the wall – the police detectives who were there said there was no blood. They looked under the bed.

'They said with the amount of blood that a human body has, there would have been a scene, there would have been blood splotches and things like that.'

She denies she ever tried to hide a bloodstained mattress at her shop as prosecutors and a handyman named Augustine Lobato told her trial, saying: 'There was never a mattress there. They can say it all they want to but there was never a mattress there.'

Rudin and her defense attorney, Michael Amador during her 2001 trial. Rudin's conviction was thrown out over the inadequate defense provided by Amador in 2001

Rudin is pictured with her current attorney Greg Mullanax. 'I kept fighting, did every appeal I could do while hoping some wonderful attorney would come along, take it on, work on it and eventually win,' Rudin says

Rudin says as the investigation proceeded, a Mexican handyman working at her shop warned her that the murder would be pinned on her and offered to smuggle her over the border.

Fearing the worst, she agreed and spent 18 months in Mexico – first in Morelia, then Mazatlán, and finally Guadalajara where she lived in an American expat community and met Boston man Joseph Lundergan, now 85.

When her mother, who also lived in Boston, fell ill, he offered to smuggle her back over the border and take her to Massachusetts.

Although able to evade cops for a year, she was eventually tracked down to Lundergan's apartment after a mailman – who had recognized her from her 13 appearances on America's Most Wanted – alerted police.

Margaret Rudin was arrested after her case was mentioned 13 times on America's Most Wanted

Notoriously, she was captured after ordering a Domino's pizza – but said it had been delivered and the pair had eaten it before the cops arrived.

She described how she took cover in the bathroom of the apartment while Lundergan opened the door to police and was confronted by a highway patrolman.

Rudin said: 'The highway patrolman stepped into the bathroom with me and said, 'Are you Margaret Rudin?' I said, 'You know I am or you wouldn't be here.'

From Boston, she was extradited to Las Vegas where she went on trial in March 2001. From the meandering three-hour opening speech onwards, her defense, led by attorney Michael Amador, was a farce.

During the 10-week trial, prosecutors claimed Rudin was motivated by the prospect of inheriting Ron's millions and her anger over his alleged affair.

The defense, who were widely described as incompetent in contemporary newspaper reports, told the court Ron was a victim of his business dealings and alleged Mafia ties.

Rudin was convicted and sentenced to life in in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years.

An initial appeal failed because her defense team failed to file paperwork in time. Then, in 2003, an appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court was denied – despite defense attorney Craig Creel pointing to 27 separate errors during the initial trial and describing it as 'the singular worst example of a criminal trial I have ever seen'.

Attorney Greg Mullanax who took up the case in September 2014 said the Supreme Court conclusion noted that any one of the errors would have been grounds for a mistrial but denied Rudin's appeal on the grounds of missing paperwork.

When they amended that opinion in 2015 to give Rudin another chance to appeal, Mullanax volunteered to get involved.

A .22 caliber pistol pulled from Lake Mead was deemed to be the murder weapon after it was traced back to Ron who had reported it missing in 1988, the year after his final marriage

She told DailyMail.com she is not bitter about spending so long in prison and hopes she made a difference to the women she befriended while inside

He said: 'My initial thought was it was one of the most outrageous cases I'd ever seen. At the time, I didn't know if she was innocent or guilty – I didn't know anything about her or the underlying case.

'I really didn't care – I just saw she didn't have a fair trial or a fair appeal. Then I got hold of the case file and what made it worse was I was about halfway through the transcripts and thinking to myself, I don't even think she did it.

'This was an incompetent defense and none of the government evidence was properly challenged like it should have been. That made it worse.

'Not only is she probably innocent, she never had a fair trial, she never had a fair appeal.'

For Rudin herself, the prospect of overturning her conviction was the only thing that kept her going during her long years in jail.

She said: 'I never gave up. I never gave up and said this is going to last 20 years or this is going to get worse.

'Four times after I was 70, they put me in a top bunk and there's no ladders so when you start to get down in the middle of the night, you've got nothing to hold on to.

'Four times, I went over backwards and hit the back of my head. One time, it was so bad that they wouldn't even let the inmates see me.

'They took me to the hospital and did the surgery but when they brought me back, they still would not let the inmates see me.

'I was black and blue and had stitches and a great big scar. They just didn't care. They do not care about you in prison unless you're having sex with them [the guards].'

The case continued even after she won parole in 2020, with Nevada prosecutors attempting to take it all the way to the Supreme Court, which was denied.

Mullanax said: 'The State tried to appeal it to the US Supreme Court which we opposed because we knew if they picked it up, we'd lose.

'They're so draconian on Habeas Corpus cases. They didn't take it so it came back down to the Federal Court here in Las Vegas and that's where we got to start over in Federal Court.

'This is the first time this case has ever been heard on its merits in Federal Court. And we won.'

On May 15, U.S. District Judge Richard Boulware vacated Rudin's conviction based on her inadequate representation, while Las Vegas prosecutors said they would not attempt to have her retried.

A month later, her parole officially ended with Rudin now free to live the rest of her life as she likes.

She told DailyMail.com she is not bitter about spending so long in prison and hopes she made a difference to the women she befriended while inside.

Rudin said: 'They will not let you have any contact with people in the prison but I spent 20 years there. I did my best to do what I'm best at which was being a mother the other inmates.

'A lot of them didn't have a mother or they had drug and alcohol problems. And now I can't even talk to them. They won't allow it.

'There were girls in there I genuinely cared for and I made a difference, even a small one, in their lives. But the most important thing now is my family.'