When Sherri Rasmussen was discovered useless in her Van Nuys townhome in February 1986, bludgeoned badly and shot 3 times, detectives known as it a housebreaking gone dangerous — a disastrously mistaken conclusion that didn’t budge for many years.
Rasmussen was 29, newly married and a well-liked nursing director at Glendale Adventist Medical Heart. Her new husband, John Ruetten, got here to the wedding with some harmful baggage: an emotionally unstable ex-lover who was not over him.
This was Stephanie Lazarus, a 25-year-old patrol officer with the Los Angeles Police Division, and looking back, the grounds for suspecting her appear apparent. She had appeared on the sufferer’s office to harass her, and Rasmussen had expressed concern that she was being stalked.
Sherri Rasmussen was 29 and newly married when she was discovered fatally bludgeoned and shot in her Van Nuys townhome in 1986.
(Rasmussen household)
What’s extra, the bullets discovered within the physique had been the type the LAPD issued to officers, and weeks after the homicide, Lazarus reported that her backup gun, a snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, had been stolen from her automobile.
On this sequence, Christopher Goffard revisits outdated crimes in Los Angeles and past, from the well-known to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the recollections of those that had been there.
However for years she was not questioned as a suspect. Precisely why it took the LAPD 23 years to arrest Lazarus — who by then had began a household and risen to a high-profile detective place — has by no means been answered.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever know the true reply of what went mistaken,” stated Connie Rasmussen, 71, one of many sufferer’s sisters.
She remembers that her mom, who managed the household’s dental workplace in Arizona, stored the unique detective’s enterprise card on her desk and known as relentlessly for updates.
When she thinks concerning the particulars of the homicide, the proof of non-public hatred appears clear, in addition to proof of prison sophistication. Her sister was smashed over the pinnacle with a vase. She was shot 3 times at shut vary, with a blanket wrapped across the gun to deaden the sound.
Because the case languished, her father wrote a letter to then-LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, pleading for his intervention. However the company dismissed the household. Detectives stored insisting the crime match the sample of a residential housebreaking, not a love triangle. Stereo tools had been stacked close to the stairway, as if thieves had been interrupted of their work. And two armed robbers struck one other home close by quickly after.
Possibly it was investigative tunnel imaginative and prescient. Possibly it was the workload surrounding the crush of murders in mid-Nineteen Eighties Los Angeles. Possibly it was cognitive bias in opposition to the likelihood it could possibly be one among their very own. Possibly, Rasmussen’s sister nonetheless wonders, somebody contained in the LAPD helped Lazarus alongside the way in which.
“I consider so,” Connie Rasmussen stated. “There’s no means I may show it, however sure, I do.”
No proof has emerged to assist a deliberate cover-up. The Rasmussen household sued the division, hoping the litigation would carry solutions. A decide threw the case out, on statute-of-limitations grounds. Rasmussen’s mother and father lived lengthy sufficient to see Lazarus arrested and convicted, however died with out figuring out why it took a quarter-century.
Protection lawyer Mark Overland, left, and Stephanie Lazarus sit in Superior Courtroom simply earlier than Lazarus is discovered responsible of first-degree homicide within the 1986 killing of Sherri Rasmussen.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Instances)
Whereas the case moldered and the household grieved, Stephanie Lazarus stored her badge and her secret. She constructed a strong if undistinguished profession on the LAPD. Prosecutors would describe her as a C-plus cop.
She promoted the DARE anti-drug program, an initiative expensive to the chief. She grew to become a detective with the artwork theft element, which gave her a excessive public profile. She appeared in photograph ops with the brass. She bantered with reporters. She went on “Household Feud.” She married one other cop and adopted a lady.
By the early 2000s, detectives had been diving into chilly circumstances, however the hint proof from the Rasmussen slaying had mysteriously vanished from the coroner’s workplace. Whether or not Lazarus stole it has by no means been confirmed, however she would have had entry. And as a detective on the Van Nuys workplace for a time, she additionally would have had entry to the case file, the so-called homicide e-book.
“It’s actually exhausting to know what could possibly be lacking, if it’s already gone,” stated Matthew McGough, who wrote a 595-page account of the case known as “The Lazarus Information.”
The case may need gone unsolved, save for a single piece of proof. A saliva pattern from a chew on Rasmussen’s forearm was saved individually, in a freezer on the coroner’s workplace. In 2005, DNA checks that had been inconceivable many years earlier confirmed that it had come from a lady, undermining the two-man housebreaking idea.
“Am I on ‘Candid Digital camera’ or one thing?” Stephanie Lazarus, proven in a body seize from her interrogation, requested investigators.
(Los Angeles Police Division)
However the LAPD failed to maneuver aggressively on the brand new info, and 4 extra years handed earlier than a Van Nuys detective requested the apparent query: Did the sufferer have any feminine enemies? This led to Lazarus, whose DNA matched the saliva pattern.
When she arrived at work downtown in early June 2009, detectives used a ruse to lure Lazarus to the jail facility downstairs, the place she could be unarmed. At first, Lazarus advised investigators she couldn’t recall whether or not she had ever met Rasmussen, however her reminiscence quickly recovered.
“I could have talked to her a few times, or extra,” she stated. She bristled when it grew to become clear that she was a suspect within the homicide. “You’re accusing me of this? … Am I on ‘Candid Digital camera’ or one thing? That is insane.”
She continued to disclaim her guilt at her 2012 trial, the place jurors noticed a letter she had written to the mom of Rasmussen’s husband, a person she met in school who had turn into an obsession. She was devastated by his engagement, she wrote. She didn’t perceive why he had chosen one other girl.
John Ruetten, the husband of homicide sufferer Sherri Rasmussen, provides his sufferer influence assertion through the sentencing of Stephanie Lazarus.
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Instances)
“I’m actually in love with John,” Lazarus had written. “This 12 months has torn me up.”
When Ruetten himself testified, he described a relationship of apparent asymmetry. He and Lazarus had turn into associates at UCLA, he stated, and through the years they’d slept collectively, however he didn’t think about her a girlfriend. He stated he had slept together with her after his engagement to Rasmussen, then begged Rasmussen’s forgiveness.
Lazarus, at 51, was convicted of first-degree homicide and sentenced to 27 years to life in jail. It was attainable to border the conviction as a redemption story for the LAPD, with a brand new era of cops making amends for the missteps of their predecessors.
However the inside investigation promised by division leaders — a probe of what accounted for the delays and blunders — appeared to go nowhere.
“It was a sham investigation,” stated McGough, who spent 9 years researching his e-book. “They quietly closed it. It’s police tradition. It’s a way of ‘This might look dangerous, and we’re not going to go there.’”
Sherri Rasmussen’s mother and father and different members of the family stand outdoors the courthouse after Stephanie Lazarus is discovered responsible of Rasmussen’s homicide.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Instances)
The Rasmussen household was shocked in November 2023, when a parole panel determined Lazarus ought to be launched after 11 years in jail. She had taken anger-management courses and was deemed a low danger to re-offend. The choice was reversed, however Lazarus has a contemporary probability at each new listening to.
What would possibly rely in her favor is her admission, after years of denials, that she killed Rasmussen. At a February 2025 listening to, she talked of getting been in love with Ruetten, and of her loneliness when she realized of his engagement.
“I had been unable to have a relationship that lasted, and I felt hopeless,” she stated. “I simply needed to have, I suppose, what different individuals had.”
She would name him and grasp up, simply to listen to him say good day. “It pacified me,” she stated.
By her account, she known as his house that morning in February 1986 and was enraged when Rasmussen answered. She determined to pay a go to. She discovered the deal with in a police database. She took her gun, and a wire.
“I went over there hoping to see him,” she stated. “I used to be so offended that if she obtained in my strategy to see John, I used to be going to strangle her.”
She “barged in” when Rasmussen answered, and located herself in a battle she in comparison with “a hellacious bar struggle.” She tied Rasmussen’s wrists with the wire, explaining: “She was getting in my strategy to see John.”
“How would binding her wrists offer you entry to see John?” a commissioner requested.
“It is not sensible,” Lazarus replied.
Paul Nunez, one of many prosecutors who took Lazarus to trial, stated she remains to be mendacity, with admissions calculated to win her parole whereas downplaying her culpability. He doesn’t consider that Rasmussen would have opened the door to confess Lazarus. It’s extra doubtless she picked the lock, in his view. And he considers it an insult to the sufferer for Lazarus to explain the assault as mutual fight. She will need to have identified Ruetten was at work, and that his spouse could be alone.
“You’ll be able to’t give a half story a couple of homicide and put a few of the blame on the sufferer,” Nunez stated in a current interview.
“This was a predator who was in a cage with the prey. She had full management of all the things. She had her weapon together with her. She had tactical grappling coaching from the academy. She was bodily match. She was within the regulation enforcement Olympics.”
And she or he had staged the crime scene so easily that it apparently threw detectives off her observe for many years.
“She’s an extended methods away from acknowledging all the behaviors that she demonstrated on this crime,” Nunez stated.
At one level through the parole listening to, Lazarus acknowledged that she removed the revolver she had used to kill Rasmussen and reported it stolen. She knew detectives had her title, and assumed they might have questions.
“I figured they had been coming,” she stated, “and would wish to see my gun.”
