Murder of Sherri Rasmussen Part I

 On February 24, 1986, the body of Sherri Rasmussen (born February 7, 1957) was found in the apartment she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. She had been beaten and shot three times in a struggle. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) initially considered the case a botched burglary and was unable to identify a suspect. Rasmussen's father believed that LAPD officer Stephanie Ilene Lazarus, who was formerly in a relationship with Ruetten, was a prime suspect.

Detectives who re-examined the cold case files in 2009 eventually focused on Lazarus, by then a detective. A DNA sample from a cup she had thrown away was matched to one from a bite on Rasmussen's body that had remained in the files. Lazarus was convicted of first-degree murder in 2012 and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life at the California Institution for Women in Chino.

Lazarus appealed the conviction, claiming the age of the case and the evidence denied her due process. She also alleged that the search warrant was improperly granted, her statements in an interview prior to her arrest were compelled, and that evidence supporting the original case theory should have been admitted at trial. In 2015, the guilty verdict was upheld by the California Court of Appeal for the Second District of the state (which includes Los Angeles). During a 2023 parole hearing, Lazarus confessed to the crime; the panel hearing her request initially granted it but it was rescinded by the full board late in 2024.

Some of the police files suggest that evidence that could have implicated Lazarus earlier in the investigation was later removed, perhaps by others in the LAPD. Rasmussen's parents unsuccessfully sued the department over this and other aspects of the investigation. Jennifer Francis, the criminalist who found key DNA evidence from the bite mark, unsuccessfully sued the City of Los Angeles. She claimed that she had been pressured by police to favor certain suspects in this and other high-profile cases and was retaliated against when she brought this to the department's attention.

Background

While an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1978 to 1982, John Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego, occasionally dated Stephanie Lazarus, a fellow Dykstra Hall resident and a political science major from Simi Valley, California. Both were avid athletes; Lazarus played on UCLA's junior varsity women's basketball team. Lazarus would steal Ruetten's clothes when he showered and take photographs of him in his underwear while he slept. Ruetten never considered the relationship as anything more than "necking and fooling around". They had sex for the first time after he graduated.

At that time he accepted a job with hard-drive manufacturer Micropolis. She was admitted to the city's police academy and became a uniformed officer with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 1983. In court, he later testified that they had sex "twenty to thirty times" between 1981 and 1984, but that she was never his girlfriend.

Ruetten later met Sherri Rasmussen, a graduate of Loma Linda University who was on a fast career track in critical care nursing. She entered college at 16, and by her late 20s was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. She also gave presentations and taught classes for fellow nurses.

At one point, Lazarus threw Ruetten a surprise party on his 25th birthday, unaware that he had been dating other women or that he had developed a serious relationship with Rasmussen. When she learned he was seriously involved with Rasmussen, Lazarus was despondent: "I'm truly in love with John and the past year has really torn me up," Lazarus wrote to Ruetten's mother in August 1985. "I wish it didn't end the way it did, and I don't think I'll ever understand his decision." In her own journal, she wrote, "I really don't feel like working. I found out that John is getting married." Depressed, Lazarus visited Ruetten at his condo. The two had sex—"to give her closure"; Ruetten testified years later—for what he says were the only time before Rasmussen's death. Later that night, Lazarus awoke a fellow officer she roomed with to commiserate.

During the engagement of Ruetten and Rasmussen, Lazarus brought her skis to the apartment the couple shared, and asked him to wax them. Despite Rasmussen's objections, he complied. Rasmussen felt that the visit and request was strange, especially since Lazarus was dressed in flattering workout clothes. After Lazarus left, Rasmussen asked her fiancé if their relationship was truly over. Ruetten convinced her two were just friends. A few days later, after Ruetten had left for work, Lazarus returned to pick up the waxed skis. She was in uniform and armed.

Rasmussen was unnerved by these visits and pleaded with Ruetten to tell Lazarus to stop coming by. Ruetten said there was nothing to their relationship, and that she should ignore Lazarus. According to Nels Rasmussen, Sherri's father, Lazarus later visited Sherri at her office to tell her that things were not over between her and Ruetten. She told Sherri, "If I can't have John, no one else will."

Ruetten and Rasmussen married in November 1985. Shortly before her death, Sherri again confided to her father, telling him she feared that Lazarus was stalking her on the street.

Crime and investigation

On the morning of February 24, 1986, Ruetten left the couple's condominium on Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys to go to work. Rasmussen was scheduled to give a motivational speech at work that day; a managerial tactic she did not feel was effective. To avoid it, she told Ruetten she might call in sick, using a back injury she had incurred while doing aerobics the day before as an excuse.

At 9:45 a.m., a neighbor noticed that the Ruettens' garage door was open, with no car visible. Approximately fifteen minutes later, Ruetten made the first of several unanswered calls home over the course of the day. Rasmussen's sister also called, getting no answer. At noon, two men, who the neighbor believed were gardeners in the compound, gave her and her husband a purse that they had found, which turned out to be Rasmussen's. A maid cleaning a nearby unit said she heard something that sounded like two people fighting, and then something falling, at around 12:30 p.m.

When Ruetten returned home in the evening, he found his garage door open and broken glass on the driveway. In addition, he discovered that the BMW he bought for Rasmussen as an engagement gift was missing. Because of Rasmussen's morning plans, he found it strange that she would have later gone out without letting him know. The house's answering machine had not been activated, although both of them usually activated it when leaving the house unoccupied.

Inside, Ruetten found Rasmussen dead on the living room floor, shot three times. There were signs of a struggle, such as a broken porcelain vase, a bloody handprint next to the burglar alarm's panic button, and a toppled credenza. It appeared that someone had attempted to bind Rasmussen at some point. She had defensive wounds and a bruise on her face that appeared to have been inflicted by the muzzle of a gun. The gun had been fired through a quilted blanket, apparently to muffle the sound. The investigating criminalist also observed a bite mark on Rasmussen's arm and took a swab from it for DNA.

Initial investigation

LAPD detectives investigating the case quickly concluded that Rasmussen had been surprised and killed by a burglar. Rasmussen's attire (a bathrobe, nightgown, and underwear) suggested she was not expecting visitors. Although a maid in a neighboring unit reported hearing screaming and fighting earlier in the day, she did not recall hearing gunshots. She thought the whole event had been a domestic dispute and did not call the police. It appeared that the perpetrator had been in the process of taking electronic equipment when Rasmussen came upon them. Jewelry had been left behind and the vehicle taken as a getaway. The abandoned BMW was recovered a week later; it yielded no new evidence. The only other item that appeared to have been taken from the home was the couple's marriage license.

Lead detective Lyle Mayer did consider other possibilities. He quickly ruled out Ruetten as a suspect. Ruetten quit his job and moved away from Los Angeles shortly after the murder. Nels Rasmussen and his wife, Loretta, told Mayer about Lazarus's harassment, and saw that he made a note of it. Ruetten later told police that he and Rasmussen had never discussed Lazarus.

The police remained focused on the possibility of burglary, especially in light of one reported later in the same area, in which one of the two reported suspects had been carrying a gun, possibly a .38 caliber like the one that had fired the three bullets into Rasmussen. The bullets were later identified by experts as Federal .38J Plus-P. Mayer's partner, Steve Hooks, found the bite mark unusual, as bites during struggles are much more commonly inflicted by women, while the majority of burglars are men. However, because men have bitten opponents during fights as well, the burglary theory stood.

Cold case

The suspected burglars to whom detectives ascribed the crime remained at large, despite a follow-up newspaper story eight months later and a reward offered by the Rasmussen family. The LAPD, preoccupied with the violence resulting from gang wars and the crack epidemic plaguing the city at the time, was unable to devote much more attention to the case. The Rasmussens said that detectives at the Van Nuys office were often unhelpful when the family called, hanging up or putting them on hold.

 

A year after the murder, the frustrated family reiterated their offer of a reward at a press conference and called for more action. Nels wrote to Daryl Gates, then chief of the LAPD, about the possibility that Lazarus might have been involved. Detectives told him he "watch[ed] too much television." He continued to publicize the reward, and later worked with the short-lived television series Murder One on a segment inspired by the case.

Nels Rasmussen in particular was unconvinced that Sherri – who was six feet (1.8 m) tall, had a large frame, and was in good physical shape – had been the victim of a botched burglary. It would have been a struggle for anyone to subdue her in close quarters. Mayer had told him at one point that the events may have lasted an hour and a half, a long time for burglars who were believed to be primarily after items of value in the home. Further, whoever shot his daughter had fired directly into her chest at close range and taken the trouble to muffle the shot with the quilt. This suggested that the killing was deliberate and not the accidental byproduct of a struggle.

Mayer eventually retired, and the new detective assigned to the case told Nels that he was unable to follow up on Mayer's notes and did not think that any new leads would emerge. Nels was rebuffed again in 1993 when he offered to pay for DNA testing on the evidence from the murder, now that the technology was available; he was told that the police had to have a suspect in order to proceed with testing. Lazarus briefly reunited with Ruetten in 1989. Mayer's notes show that Ruetten had called him and asked if he was absolutely sure there was no evidence linking Lazarus with his late wife's death.

In the meantime, Lazarus continued working with the LAPD. She also started her own private investigation firm, Unique Investigations. In 1993, after stints at the department's Drug Abuse Resistance Education and internal affairs divisions, she was promoted to detective.

Three years later, she married a fellow officer and adopted a daughter with him, moving back to Simi Valley. At work she became an instructor at the police academy. Ruetten eventually remarried as well; he did not pressure the police as his former father-in-law had.

In the late 1990s, after DNA testing had become more prominent and techniques improved, the LAPD formed a new unit that looked through the forensic evidence collected from the department's cold case files to determine whether any had the potential for new leads through DNA testing. Among the evidence seen as likely to do so was that collected from the Rasmussen residence. However, it was not until 2004 that another criminalist, Jennifer Francis, was able to analyze it. Some of the evidence from the Rasmussen case, including that which might have contained the suspect's DNA, was missing, having been collected in 1993 by another detective.

Francis did not find any matches in the Combined DNA Index System database, but did find that the saliva in it had come from a female, undermining the initial detectives' burglary theory. Several years later, Francis claimed that, unusually, she had access to not just the sample but the entire case file, which had been given to her to help her decide which other samples to analyze. Upon discovering that the biter (and likely perpetrator) was female, she reviewed it and came across a report of a "third-party female" who had allegedly harassed the victim at her job and residence before the murder.

Francis asked the detective supervising her if this woman had been investigated, to which he supposedly responded with, "Oh, you mean the LAPD detective." He said that the woman, a former girlfriend of the victim's husband, was a current LAPD detective but "she's not a part of this." He insisted that the case was simply a burglary, as the department had long concluded. No other detective would pursue the case, and the evidence went back into the files.

Second investigation

By 2009, crime in Los Angeles had declined, and detectives were assigned to look into cold cases to increase the department's clearance rates. In Van Nuys, Jim Nuttall and Pete Barba reviewed the Rasmussen file and found it worth pursuing. Because the DNA test pointed to a female suspect, they decided the burglary theory was invalid, and they would have to start from the beginning.

Nuttall and Barba looked at the case as a murder, with the burglary staged to throw the police off the trail. Many aspects of the crime were improbable for a break-in, especially one committed in daylight: Rasmussen's jewelry box was in plain view atop her dresser and had not been touched. The condo was in the middle of a gated complex, surrounded by other units from which burglars could have expected to be easily observed. The front door had an alarm warning, and had not been forced open, as it might have been if the putative burglars had not expected anyone to be at home.

Inside, a key aspect of the crime scene was also inconsistent with the burglary theory. At the top of the stairs was a stack of stereo equipment atop a VCR. If, as the evidence suggested, the struggle between Rasmussen and her attacker had begun upstairs and then continued downstairs, that stack would likely have been knocked downstairs and scattered as well. It made more sense to assume that it had been stacked afterwards, although a burglar would have fled the scene immediately after the shooting.

The forensics reinforced this theory. On a record player atop the stack was a thumb-shaped bloodstain. It had no print, suggesting whoever left it was wearing gloves to avoid leaving identification. But the blood was Rasmussen's, suggesting the equipment had been stacked after the struggle and shooting. It had been left behind, the detectives realized, to make the crime look like something other than what it was. From the four bound volumes of the case file, they developed a list of five female suspects. Nuttall was taken aback when Ruetten told him over the phone that Lazarus was a police officer. By then, Lazarus had been promoted to a higher rank of detective and was working art theft cases as part of the Commercial Crimes Division.

As one of the two detectives in the nation's only full-time unit devoted to that specialty, Lazarus had gained some local media attention when she and her partner had recovered a statue stolen from Carthay Circle. To better understand the field, she told a local newspaper, she had begun learning to paint. Off the job, Lazarus had been active in the Los Angeles Women Police Officers Association and organized childcare for families of officers. Still, the detectives ranked Lazarus as the least promising of the five suspects, since they read in the files that she and Ruetten had ended any relationship they had had over the summer before the murder.

Nuttall and Barba's investigations soon eliminated all but one of the other women. The other, a former coworker of Rasmussen who had had some disputes with her, was eliminated by a covertly collected DNA sample. With only Lazarus left, they kept their investigation a closely guarded secret. Her husband also worked as a detective in Commercial Crimes Division, and she may have had other friends who could have tipped her off. If she were the killer, she could have improved her defense; if she were not, then they could have unintentionally smeared a fellow officer who had had an unblemished service record over the course of her career. There was no record of disciplinary investigations or civilian complaints. They referred to her only as "No. 5", worked on the case after hours or behind closed doors, and developed cover stories to explain why they wanted to look at personnel records for one particular officer from 20 years ago.

The detectives began looking into other aspects of Lazarus's life during the mid-1980s. Another detective recalled that, at that time, most LAPD officers had preferred a .38 as their backup or off-duty carry gun; in fact, they were required to purchase only weapons compatible with Federal Plus-P ammunition, which had been used in the murder. State and departmental records showed that Lazarus had owned a Smith & Wesson Model 49 .38 at the time. Thirteen days after the murder, she reported it stolen to Santa Monica police (but not to her own department's armorer).  Since the location where Lazarus had reported it stolen from was near a popular pier, they assumed she had thrown the gun into the Pacific Ocean. Without the weapon, DNA would be the only definite way to connect the crime to Lazarus.

From their own experience, Nuttall and Barba theorized about how an LAPD officer would commit a murder. It would be better to do it on a day off. Departmental records showed that Lazarus had been off the day Sherri Rasmussen was killed. Officers would know better than to use their duty gun, since it would have to be disposed of after the crime and the penalties for losing a duty gun or failing to prevent its theft were severe. Instead, it made sense to use a backup gun such as Lazarus's .38. Last, a working patrol officer would know how to do just enough to make the crime scene look like an interrupted burglary to satisfy an overworked detective.

Rasmussen's father Nels told Nuttall about Lazarus's continued contact with his daughter. This was not recorded in the files, although he had mentioned it repeatedly to Mayer and Hook during interviews. Realizing that Lazarus was now their prime suspect, the detectives informed their superiors and arranged to discreetly collect a voluntarily discarded DNA sample from her, knowing they could do so without having to get a warrant. The latter would have alerted Lazarus that she was under investigation. While off-duty, Lazarus discarded a cup from which she had been drinking, which other police retrieved. A sample taken from it matched the DNA from the bite mark on Sherri Rasmussen.

Arrest of Lazarus

Rob Bub, the homicide detective supervisor at Van Nuys, began letting his senior officers, all the way up to Chief William Bratton, know of the case along with senior prosecutors from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. It was transferred to the Robbery-Homicide Division (RHD), which handled many of the department's high-profile cases. This included the art theft bureau where Lazarus worked.

On the day of the arrest in June 2009, dozens of officers arose before dawn. After being briefed on a search warrant they were told would be executed outside the city, but with few details beyond that, they were assigned to wait near Lazarus's home in Simi Valley and that city's Metrolink station, where Lazarus commuted to the city.

A short time later, detectives from the RHD, who had been selected for their lack of personal connection to Lazarus, called her from the lockup at Parker Center, the department's headquarters. Bratton had ordered that location be used since Lazarus would have to surrender her gun and equipment belt in order to enter it, limiting the possibility she might resist violently when she was arrested (immediately following the interview, as was the plan) or realized that she was the prime suspect. The detectives, Greg Stearns and Dan Jaramillo, told her they had someone in custody who wanted to talk about an art theft.

After Lazarus had checked in her gun and entered the interrogation room, they explained that this was really about some loose ends they were trying to tie up in the Rasmussen case, since her name had come up in the investigation. They claimed they wanted a private setting because, while Ruetten was an old boyfriend, Lazarus had long been married to someone else and they did not want her private life to become the subject of office gossip. Stearns and Jaramillo knew they would have to tread carefully since Lazarus was well aware of police interview techniques and her rights to silence and legal counsel, which she could invoke at any time.

They rambled and digressed from the subject at times, sometimes discussing unrelated police business, but eventually came back to Rasmussen. Lazarus claimed to recall little due to the intervening years, but gradually revealed more and more knowledge—including oblique acknowledgements of her visits to the Ruetten condo and a specific encounter at Rasmussen's office—until she accused her colleagues of considering her a suspect. The detectives mentioned it was possible they had DNA evidence from the crime scene, and requested DNA samples from Lazarus. Lazarus declined and thereafter left the room. As she walked into the hallway, she was met by officers who placed her under arrest.

Once she had been arrested, the police officer teams in Simi Valley began searching Lazarus's home and car. In her house they found her journal from the mid-1980s, with numerous mentions of her love for Ruetten and her despondence over his engagement to Rasmussen (it had no mentions of her gun having been stolen). Her computer showed that she had searched the Internet for Ruetten's name on several occasions during the late 1990s.

Many other LAPD officers were stunned at the idea that Lazarus might have murdered someone. Fellow detectives recalled her as vivacious and supportive (although some also recalled that her behavior when angry had led some to refer to her as "Spazarus" behind her back). A case she had been developing from her art-theft work, with elder abuse and real estate fraud aspects, had to be dropped. The police believed that it was unlikely to be prosecuted successfully if the lead investigator were facing a murder charge.

After her arrest, Lazarus was allowed to retire early from the LAPD; she was held in the Los Angeles County Jail. A bail hearing was not held for almost six months. Judge Robert J. Perry surprised both sides when he set the amount at $10 million in cash, well above what the defense had suggested and more than twice what prosecutors had proposed. The case against Lazarus was very strong, he said, and thus, she might well be at risk to flee the country or obtain weapons through her husband. Lazarus's lawyer, Mark Overland, said the judge did not understand the case well and contrasted the high figure with the $1 million set for Robert Blake and Phil Spector when they were charged with murder. Several months later, her brother claimed she was not receiving adequate treatment for an unspecified cancer while in custody.

Pretrial defense motions

In October, Overland moved to have the entire case dismissed on the grounds that the initial investigators should have identified Lazarus as a suspect but failed to do so. In support, he cited missing aspects of the original file such as recordings of interviews, Sherri Rasmussen's blood toxicology report, as well as a polygraph test Ruetten allegedly failed. The motion noted Nels Rasmussen's belief that Lazarus was a suspect at the time of the murder, and his ensuing efforts to get the LAPD to take that theory seriously. Because of this failure, he argued, Lazarus's due process rights had been adversely affected since the quality of evidence had degraded in the intervening 23 years.

Overland argued that the truth-in-evidence provisions of the California Constitution required that the long delay in bringing charges which adversely affected the quality of the evidence which might otherwise have allowed him to make a better case that there were other suspects, or that the evidence against Lazarus was not as solid as the prosecution claimed, should be considered sufficiently negligent on the state's part to justify dismissing the case. For example, a witness who could have corroborated the prosecution's account of the confrontation between Rasmussen and Lazarus at the hospital had died in 2000. Prosecutors argued in response that Perry was required to apply federal standards, under which such a delay could only be considered prejudicial if it was shown to have been intentional. Perry agreed, and let the case proceed.

Following that denial, Overland moved to quash the search warrants that had been executed on Lazarus's home, vehicle and spaces she used at work, and suppress the evidence obtained from them. They were, he argued, based on stale information and did not sufficiently establish a nexus between the places searched and the likelihood of finding evidence there; Lazarus had not moved to her present residence, he observed, until 1994, eight years after the murder, and the affidavit in support of the warrant did not provide any reason why evidence might be found there. At times the affidavit, Overland claimed, was deceptive, with the submitting detective asserting that the murder weapon might be found there, when Nuttall and Barba had already theorized that Lazarus had reported it stolen two weeks after the murder and irretrievably disposed of it.

Perry admitted he was "uncomfortable" admitting some of the seized evidence, in particular from Lazarus's personal computers and other electronic storage devices at her home, since either she had not had them or they had not existed at the time of Rasmussen's death, but he felt that since an experienced judge had issued the search warrants, the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applied and all the evidence obtained could be admitted. Overland's subsequent motion for a Franks hearing, which would have allowed them to cross-examine the detective who had filed the search-warrant affidavit to better determine whether the evidence obtained was admissible, was also denied on the same basis.

Overland's next motion, heard late in 2010, sought to bar the use of statements Lazarus made during her videotaped interrogation at Parker Center. He argued that, per the Garrity warning usually given to government employees under investigation, California law compelled her to answer questions as a police officer or face disciplinary action for refusing to cooperate with an investigation, entitling her to automatic use immunity for those answers. The prosecution argued that that only applied where there was an active administrative proceeding, which had not started against Lazarus until after her arrest. Perry agreed with them on the point that Overland's argument was overbroad.

A year later, Perry denied the last of Overland's significant pretrial motions. The criminalists had used MiniFiler, a new product to type Lazarus's DNA. Overland argued that it was sufficiently different from previous technology that she was entitled to a Frye hearing, to determine whether its results were of sufficient scientific validity to be admissible. Perry ruled that it was just another form of the PCR method commonly used to test DNA samples.