LAS VEGAS — As detectives combed Margaret Rudin's home for clues to her husband's fatal shooting, she drove across town to toss a bag of incriminating evidence into a dumpster, police officers testified Wednesday in the socialite's murder trial.

The items investigators recovered from the trash bin included notes about her husband's $11 million personal fortune — her alleged motive for the crime — a newspaper article about the remote area where his body was dumped and lamp oil the prosecution claims she intended to use to set his corpse aflame.

Rudin, 57, faces life in prison for the killing of her fifth husband, Ron, a real estate developer. His charred remains were discovered in the desert near Lake Mojave in January 1995, a month after his employees reported him missing.

The defense, which points the finger at Ron Rudin's shady business associates, has struggled during the trial, now in its fourth week, but Wednesday afternoon prominent defense lawyer John Momot said he would join the team.

John Momot in court Thursday

"I'm offering my fees up for Lent," quipped Momot, who represented Sandy Murphy, the stripper convicted of killing her casino mogul boyfriend, Ted Binion. "I believe in the defense and I'm going to assist my best friend, [Rudin defense lawyer] Tom Pitaro."

His announcement was welcome news after a damaging day of testimony against Rudin. In addition to the dumpster discoveries, jurors also saw surveillance photographs of Rudin and her alleged lover, Yehuda Sharon, embracing in the airport as she boarded a plane to attend her husband's funeral.

"I observed them conversing with each other and standing very close and hugging each other," testified Los Angeles Police Officer Wayne Yoshioka, an undercover detective who snapped the photos in the California airport.

Rudin and Sharon in the airport

Investigators believe Sharon helped Rudin off her husband, and the district attorney's office gave him immunity from prosecution in anticipation of his cooperation. But Sharon told the grand jury he knew nothing of the crime and was only Rudin's financial consultant, not her lover.

The prosecution attacked that claim Wednesday with the surveillance photographs and phone records showing 37 calls between Sharon's home and Rudin's cell phone in the two months after Ron Rudin's disappearance.

During that time, Margaret Rudin became the homicide detective's chief suspect. Previous police witnesses have testified she showed no interest in finding her husband and was unemotional when told he had been murdered.

While some police officers executed search warrants on her home and business Jan. 25, 1995, others tracked her movements. Las Vegas Metro Police Officer Michael Givens said he watched as Rudin drove "very slowly" past her gated estate, then crawling with uniformed officers. Givens, who was undercover in an unmarked police car, said she eyed the house, talked on her cell phone and then drove out of the neighborhood.

He said he and other undercover officers tailed her to a parking lot where she placed calls on both her cellphone and a payphone before walking to the dumpster of a nearby butcher shop and placing something inside.

Police crime scene analyst Daniel Ford said he was summoned by other officers to the dumpster after Rudin drove off and discovered two bottles of lamp oil and a gift box containing torn-up pieces of paper. Back at the crime lab, he said, he put them together with scotch tape "like a jigsaw puzzle."

Some of the pieced-together scraps yielded several pages from a day planner for the prior week. Scrawled in list form were terms like "power of attorney" and "assets not to be put in trust." Other scraps were from an article in the travel section of the local paper about nature trips near Lake Mojave scheduled for that spring. The article, published after Rudin's body was dumped there, beckoned the public to guided hikes in "spots you may never have found on your own."

Ford also showed the jury the lamp oil he recovered, prompting an objection from Michael Amador, Rudin's lawyer, who argued that the bottles were irrelevant since tests prove Ron Rudin's corpse was burned using gasoline. Prosecutor Christopher Owens jumped at the chance to give the jury a taste of the prosecution's closing argument.

With the panel paying close attention, he told Judge Joseph Bonaventure that investigators contend Rudin gave her co-conspirators — previously identified as Sharon and Rudin's nephew Scott Stavro — the oil to torch the corpse, but they decided later to use gasoline. Rudin, he said, was still under the impression the lamp oil could be traced to the body when she dumped it.