It was the summer of 1987 and Margaret Mason was alone again.

With her two grown children from the first of four failed marriages out of the house and on their own, the attractive 44-year-old divorcee from Illinois was ripe for romance when she met wealthy Las Vegas real estate mogul Ronald Rudin.

This time it would be different, Margaret promised herself.  

Self-confident, good-looking, macho, charming — Ron Rudin had it all and Margaret wanted it, she told Court TV during a 1999 jailhouse interview. Margaret discerned machismo from the cowboy boots Rudin was wearing when he introduced himself after a church service and invited her to lunch at a country club.  

All the macho men in Vegas wore cowboy boots and Margaret was going to meet one, she told friends long before the 50-year-old Rudin took a seat in church behind her the day they met in 1987.

There was an instant attraction between them, and the new couple were married just three months later in Las Vegas, Margaret Mason Rudin told Court TV in 1999 after being charged in 1999 with Ron Rudin's execution-style murder on Dec. 18, 1994.

This time it would be different, Margaret hoped going into her fifth marriage in 25 years.

There has been a lot of testimony during Margaret Rudin's ongoing murder and eavesdropping trial about the couple's stormy seven-year marriage — a relationship that Margaret readily admitted to detectives could be either "very good or very bad."

But what about Margaret Rudin's other marriages? The prosecution has alleged that hidden beneath her soft voice and pretty smile is a career gold digger, who discarded her husbands one by one when she no longer had use for them. But the defense wants the jury to believe that Rudin is a sweet, loving woman who was merely seeking the perfect mate.

Starting Out  

Margaret Lee Frost and Gerald Mason were married on Feb. 2, 1962, in Winthrop Harbor, Ill. Margaret, who lived in 15 states in 15 years while growing up the daughter of a barber, was finally settling down the year after graduating high school.

Rudin with her first husband, Gerald Mason, and their children, Michael and Kristina

The couple made their home in Zion, Ill., a suburb of Chicago near the Wisconsin border. Their son Michael Mason was born in 1964. Kristina Mason followed three years later.

"He was a carpenter. We were just starting out," Margaret recalled during the 1999 prison interview.  "I can remember that when we were our happiest, he was making just $75 a week."

But money wasn't an issue when Margaret divorced Mason in 1973. Alleging emotional cruelty, she waived alimony and sought only the couple's 1969 Ford and $40 per week to support the children.  

"Over the years, it got worse. We started arguing constantly," Margaret testified at the divorce hearing in 1973. "He didn't approve of anything I did. He didn't like my friends, my dress. He wouldn't allow me to work. I became very nervous and upset."

A woman who answered the telephone at Gerald Mason's current home in Pleasant Prairie, Wis., declined comment this week on Mason's behalf. "Oh, we're not interested in that," she said before hanging up.

Divorced in an era when divorce was neither as common nor accepted as it is now, Margaret and her children were not on their own for very long. Margaret married in Illinois again in 1974, but that marriage soon fizzled. Little is known about her second husband, whom she divorced in 1976.

Philip Brown, Margaret's third husband, always believed that he was husband number two. Brown told Court TV this week that when he met Margaret in 1978, he believed that Mason had been her only husband before him.

Margaret was charming, fun and "very accommodating," said Brown, who was a 46-year-old widower when Margaret, then 36, showed up at his seven-acre spread in 1978 to buy a horse from his son.

"Margaret really knows how to please people when she wants," Brown explained.

Philip Brown and Margaret Mason were married in Las Vegas in August 1978, and again in Illinois that October. Margaret and her children moved in with Brown, who owned a company that made and installed kitchen cabinets.

"It didn't last very long. We weren't doing things like couples should do," Brown said, declining to elaborate. "There was never any great fighting. It was just not a good marriage."  

In hindsight, Brown said he wished he had gotten to know Margaret better before they made the joint, impulsive decision to get married while visiting Margaret's girlfriends in Nevada.

"We got along so well and we had such a great time, we thought it was the right thing to do," Brown said.

Brown filed for divorce in June 1979, alleging emotional cruelty. The divorce hearing was held up a few months while Margaret recovered from a hysterectomy. Brown told the judge, according to court records, that Margaret informed him in January 1979 that she regretted getting married and that she wished she had moved to Las Vegas on her own.  

Brown gave Margaret $10,000 as part of the divorce settlement in exchange for her dropping any additional claims for alimony or a share of his business.

"I tried to put it all behind me," said Brown, who has not spoken to Margaret since shortly after the divorce.

Alone Again

Margaret was jobless and living in a mobile home with her children and four other people when the new decade, the 1980s, dawned. But she wouldn't be without a man for long.  

Finally heading west to Las Vegas to start over, Margaret was introduced to her fourth husband in 1981 by her brother-in-law, attorney Robert Lepome. Once again it was a short courtship. They married in Las Vegas on April 3, 1982.

Richard N. Krafve dabbled in business but benefited from a family trust. Krafve's father, Richard E. Krafve, was the Ford Motor Company executive in charge of the Edsel car line, which was introduced with great fanfare in the late 1950s but fizzled in the early 1960s.

Margaret told Court TV that her marriage to Krafve lasted only a few years, in  part because she returned to Illinois with Kristina, who was having trouble adjusting to Vegas, until her daughter finished high school.

Unlike Margaret's other husbands, Krafve had her sign a prenuptial agreement, which basically left Krafve with everything he had before he met Margaret.

  In January 1986, Margaret sued Krafve for divorce, claiming that they were incompatible and that he verbally abused and threatened her. Krafve countersued. At one point, according to 100 pages of court documents filed in Clark County Family Court, Margaret listed her personal possessions — right down to a blue lamp in the family room.

  Margaret sought $2,500 per month in alimony for the rest of her life, or until she married. She ended up settling for lump sum payments totaling $32,000 to end the litigation and drop all future claims against Krafve. The divorce was finalized on May 29, 1987, just months before Margaret would marry her fifth and last husband.

"I value my privacy very highly ... I desire that you not intrude upon my desire for solitude and seclusion," Krafve told Court TV this month.

Although Margaret had been through three previous divorces, her split with Krafve in the mid-1980s left her more alone than the others. By that time, her children were grown up and on their own. Margaret felt a need to be part of something.

"My biggest problem has always been that ... I had never been alone. Never," she said, discussing her many marriages, in the 1999 interview. "All my life, if I was single I had the children. They were my focus. Or I had a man in my life."  

Then Ron Rudin came into her life.

"I rushed into the marriage with Ron maybe too fast because my children were grown and I was going to be alone for the first time," she said.

Margaret's friends warned her about getting too serious too soon, she said, but she would have none of that.

"He seemed very charming, very much at ease with women," Margaret recalled in 1999. "Good looking, rather low-key, self-assured and macho. I happen to like macho and I was teasing one of my friends before I met him that the next man had to wear cowboy boats because so many in Las Vegas do."

Much of the Rudins' seven-year marriage is exposed in the public record created during Margaret's ongoing murder trial — Margaret's jealousy and alleged eavesdropping, as well as regular beneficiary changes that reflected Ron Rudin's varying satisfaction with his wife.

The couple had been married just over a year when Ron Rudin sued Margaret for divorce in September 1988. Rudin sought to dissolve the marriage on grounds of incompatibility, but withdrew the action in May 1989.

He later boosted Margaret's stake in his estate to 60 percent $11.3 million, but signed a secret directive ordering trustees to block disbursements to any beneficiary under suspicion for his untimely death. That came on Dec. 18, 1994.

In the 1999 interview, Margaret insisted that she loved Rudin and has denied killing him or having any involvement in his 1994 disappearance and murder.

"He needed me and I wanted to be needed ... I loved him. I loved him a lot," she said.

Although Margaret lived with retired firefighter Joseph Lundergan for about two years in Revere, Mass., before she was captured in 1999, she has never remarried.

Court TV senior producer Andy Brooks contributed to this report.