Trial
The case attracted considerable media attention. Many of its
elements—a love triangle with a woman scorned, a cold case unsolved for over 20
years, and the accused killer revealed as a police officer—seemed drawn from
the plots of popular televised police dramas and reality shows such as Snapped,
Scorned: Love Kills, and Deadly Women. The Atlantic ran a feature story about
the case before the trial, and Vanity Fair ran one by Mark Bowden afterward.
The trial began in early 2012. In Los Angeles County
Superior Court, prosecutors argued that Lazarus's motive for the murder was
jealousy over Rasmussen's relationship with Ruetten. In his opening argument,
prosecutor Shannon Presby summed up the case as, "A bite, a bullet, a gun barrel and a broken heart. That's the
evidence that will prove to you that defendant Stephanie Lazarus murdered
Sherri Rasmussen." Ruetten testified, becoming emotional and weeping
several times. He allowed that having sex with Lazarus while he was engaged to
Rasmussen was "a mistake".
In cross-examining the police detectives and other
technicians who had originally investigated the killing, Overland stressed the
original burglary theory and pointed to evidence, such as the similar burglary
that happened shortly thereafter, that he claimed supported it. He also
highlighted evidence that was not analyzed, such as a bloody fingerprint on one
of the walls, to suggest that other suspects had not been adequately excluded
from consideration. He questioned whether it could be truly inferred from the
weapon used that it was Lazarus's lost gun, as .38s were in wide use. Since the
DNA from the bite mark was central to the prosecution's case, he attacked it vigorously;
pointing to improper storage procedures and a hole the tube had left in an
envelope that he said would have allowed Lazarus's DNA to be added to it long
after it had been collected.
During the two days in which Overland presented his
case-in-chief, he focused on disputing the prosecution's theme of a lovelorn
Lazarus. He presented friends of hers who denied that she was showing any signs
of violence or despondence over her failed relationship with Ruetten at the
time of the murder. Excerpts from a contemporaneous journal were offered as
evidence; Lazarus wrote in it of dating several different men, none of them
Ruetten. He reinforced his attack on the forensic evidence, calling as his last
witness a fingerprint expert who said that some prints at the crime scene did
not match those of Lazarus.
Both prosecution and defense reiterated their themes in
closing arguments. After showing the jury of eight women and four men
photographs of a beaten, bloodied Rasmussen, prosecutor Paul Nunez told them, "It wasn't a fair fight ... This was
prey caught in a cage with a predator." Overland dismissed the entire
case as circumstantial "fluff and
fill", save for the "compromised"
bite-mark DNA sample. He moved for a mistrial after Nunez reminded the jurors
that Lazarus had provided no alibi for the time of the murder, since
defendants' refusal to testify cannot be held against them. Perry denied this
motion, saying he did not take Nunez's statement as directly suggesting Lazarus
had refused to testify and thus her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination
had not been violated.
In March, after several days of deliberations, the jury
convicted Lazarus (then 52) of first-degree murder. Later that month, she was
sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. She is serving her sentence at the
California Institution for Women in Corona.
Litigation alleging
police malfeasance
As evidence was introduced at the trial, it became apparent
that not all the evidence available and in possession of the LAPD had been
found. Recordings and transcripts of interviews with both Nels Rasmussen and
Ruetten that discussed Lazarus were absent from the file, although both
remembered them when called to testify. Other aspects of the missing interviews
are alluded to in other interviews in the file. The only mention of Lazarus
during the initial investigation is a brief note of Mayer's in which he reports
that Ruetten had confirmed that she was a "former
girlfriend".
Two lawsuits have been filed based on these allegations.
One, by Nels and Loretta Rasmussen, has been dismissed as time-barred. The
other, a whistleblower suit by criminalist Jennifer Francis (née Butterworth),
ended with a judgment in the city's favor. It alleged misconduct in not only
the Rasmussen case but other high-profile investigations, and that she and
others suffered retaliation and harassment from superiors when they tried to
report this and accurately report the results they had found.
Rasmussens
Records also showed that, in 1992, shortly after Nels
Rasmussen had offered to pay for DNA analysis on the remaining forensic
evidence from the case, all samples other than the bite swab that might have
helped to identify an attacker had been checked out of the coroner's office by
a detective named Phil Morrill. While this appeared to have been part of the
routine transfer of records to the LAPD, the evidence could not be located in
department files. This suggested that the samples were intentionally lost. Only
the bite swab, inadvertently left behind at the coroner's office, remained to connect
Lazarus to the crime.
In 2010, the Rasmussens filed a civil lawsuit against the
city, the LAPD, Ruetten (named only as an indispensable party without any
specific claims), Lazarus and 100 Does. They alleged that the coverup,
including the act of allowing Lazarus to periodically review the case file, and
the LAPD's hostility toward them, starting on the night after the murder and
continuing when they pressed the Lazarus claim throughout the 1990s, amounted
to a violation of their civil rights, intentional infliction of emotional
distress and fraudulent concealment. They further alleged wrongful death against
Lazarus and the Does.
Since the civil-rights claim included a violation of Section
1983, the city successfully petitioned for removal to federal court. After the
Rasmussens stipulated to dropping the federal claim with prejudice, waiving the
right to any further legal action against the city at that level, they were
allowed to refile an amended claim in state court, and did so in 2011. There,
the city was found to be immune from liability for all of the claims except the
civil rights violation. When the Rasmussens filed an amended complaint
consisting of just that, the judge dismissed it because he believed it was
barred by their earlier stipulation in federal court.
The Rasmussens appealed. In its response, the city raised
the statute of limitations as a defense, something it had not done when the
suit was originally filed. The appellate court upheld the suit's dismissal on
those grounds, holding that the Rasmussens' time to sue was limited once they
broke off contact with the LAPD in 1998; the last year they could thus have
filed suit was 2000. The California Supreme Court declined to hear the case in
March 2013.
Jennifer Francis
Francis filed her suit late in 2013, following the rejection
of her claim by the city and a finding by the state's Department of Fair Employment
and Housing that she had a right to sue. She alleged that after finding that
the DNA from the bite belonged to a woman, the LAPD detective supervising her
verbally steered her away from Lazarus as a suspect, without naming her. When
Nuttall called her and told her the Van Nuys detectives were working the cold
case and had identified Lazarus as a suspect, she did not share what her
supervisor had told her, for fear of retaliation.
According to Francis, the Rasmussen case was not the only
one in which she believed DNA evidence was being purposefully ignored by the
department. She was told "We're not
going there" in one case where she suggested comparing a partial
profile from one victim with that of a suspect in a string of similar unsolved
murders, also from the 1980s. Work she did on the DNA found on Jill Barcomb,
believed to have been killed by the Hillside Strangler, revealed instead that
she was a victim of Rodney Alcala. This serial killer was active around the
same time in the Los Angeles area; he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to
death in 2010. In another case, after she suggested doing DNA analyses of semen
found on two teenage girls also believed to be victims of the Hillside
Strangler, another detective discouraged her with the words, "We don't want to open that can of
worms." A short time later she learned the semen samples had been
destroyed; she could not find out why.
At the end of 2009, while prosecutors were preparing for the
preliminary hearing in the Lazarus trial, she met with an assistant D.A. and
told her about the resistance she had initially encountered over the
possibility of Lazarus as a suspect in the Rasmussen murder. Several months
later she was called into her supervisor's office and asked to relate those events.
A month later, she told Detective Nuttall, who had spearheaded the
reinvestigation that led to Lazarus's arrest, as well.
The next month, she was called into her supervisor's office,
and told to go to an employee counseling service, "because you look
stressed." She believed this was a punitive act. Francis believed that the
therapist who spoke with her seemed more interested in finding out what she
knew about the Lazarus case and who she might have shared it with. After two
sessions in which Francis declined to share that information, she was again
called into her supervisor's office and told she was not cooperating and needed
to "talk this out". She
told the therapist she was getting a lawyer, after which further sessions were
canceled as a "mistake".
Two detectives from RHD interrogated her the next month,
July 2010. She told them she was concerned that events leading to Lazarus's
arrest in which she was involved had been portrayed differently in the media
than she recalled them, putting the department in a more favorable light.
Nuttall as well, she recalled, had been placed in an equally difficult
position, since he told her that Lazarus may have learned that they had
reopened the investigation despite the precautions he and Barba had taken.
In the wake of these events, Francis claims, she was taken
off the upcoming Grim Sleeper case despite the work she had done on it,
including analysis of the DNA sample that had led the police to their suspect.
The same detective who had insisted Lazarus was not involved in the Rasmussen
killing, she noted, had played a major role in investigating the Sleeper. In
another meeting, her supervisor threatened her with more counseling and told
her she was "obsessed ...
emotional" and "shouldn't
have said anything". She was transferred to a non-analytical position.
The retaliation continued after Lazarus was convicted,
Francis claimed. She faced more retaliatory action from her supervisors, whom
she also accused of sexually harassing other female criminalists, and was again
transferred. A report from the department's Inspector General on her complaint
to Internal Affairs was delayed and appeared to have been reviewed by someone
else prior to her receipt of it.
In 2015, the parties made motions to the judge as to what
evidence could be heard by a jury at trial. At the beginning of 2017, Superior
Court Judge Michael Johnson ruled that Francis could proceed to trial alleging
a violation of state labor law. He found there were no triable issues of fact
on her claims of harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. In April 2019, a
jury found for the city.
Appeal
Lazarus filed a lengthy appeal of her conviction in May 2013
with the California Court of Appeal, Second District, and Division Four, which
has appellate jurisdiction. Her attorney, Donald Tickle of Volcano, California,
argued that Perry had erred in his rulings for the prosecution on all four
pretrial motions Overland had filed. Tickle argued that multiple precedents
supported the defense arguments over those of the prosecution, and sometimes
directly contradicted them. For example, he argued, Perry had applied the
good-faith exception to the detectives' reliance on an admittedly defective
search warrant based on the fact that the judge had issued the warrant after
reviewing the affidavit. But Tickle pointed to an existing California case,
which had expressly held that the state cannot rely purely on the warrant's
issuance by a judge to establish sufficient good faith that the search was constitutional.
Tickle also attacked Perry's rulings limiting the defense's
ability to put on evidence suggesting the initial botched burglary theory of
the crime was more credible than the prosecution claimed. The prosecution had
not moved to exclude third-party culpability evidence, despite claiming during
its opening statement that the initial investigation's conclusion was
erroneous, which led Perry to ask if they were conceding that it was.
Nevertheless, he told Overland that without "some
remarkable similarities" between the burglary that killed Rasmussen
and the one that happened nearby later, he would not allow the defense to
explore the later burglary, since there were also important dissimilarities.
Perry, Tickle said, had misread the primary California case
Overland had relied on as not applying to evidence of third-party culpability.
But he said other cases made clear the statute it interpreted did indeed cover
that. That case also imposed a lower standard of admission than "remarkable similarities". The
use of a .38 caliber weapon and a similar residence in both burglaries
established a strong possibility of a common modus operandi for both crimes, Tickle
said.
As a result of this ruling, Overland had been denied the
opportunity to cross-examine Mark Safarik, the last prosecution witness and an
FBI expert on burglaries. He had testified that the crime scene suggested a
staged burglary, as opposed to a real one that had been interrupted in
progress. Since the prosecution had told the court at a sidebar prior to
Safarik's testimony that they intended to limit their questioning to supporting
this theory, Perry similarly limited the defense on cross. However, Tickle argued,
since Safarik's own report had considered the other burglary, testimony about
that should have been allowed.
Decision
A panel of three judges—Audrey B. Collins, Thomas Willhite
Jr. and Nora Margaret Manella—heard oral argument in the case in June 2015. A
month later, they reached their decision, unanimously upholding Lazarus's
conviction.
The court's primary holding was that Lazarus and her
attorneys had failed to establish that Perry's rulings resulted in any
prejudice to her ability to mount an effective defense. Manella, writing for
the panel, conceded at the outset that Perry had incorrectly agreed with the
prosecution that delays resulting from negligence or neglect alone could not be
considered prejudicial—in fact, she said, federal and state precedent called
for a balancing test when there was evidence that an unintended delay in
prosecution might adversely affect the defendant's ability to challenge the
state's case.
But in applying it to the instant case, she found that the
state's explanations for the delays were reasonable enough, and that in turn
Lazarus did not show any reasonable likelihood of prejudice resulting from
missing evidence and unavailable witnesses. "[The
trial court]'s error did not affect the outcome", Manella wrote,
pertaining to the absence of chain of custody records for the evidence. "As [it] observed, the passage of time
was more likely prejudicial to the prosecution than the defense."
Perry had also properly denied the defense motion to
suppress evidence obtained via the search warrants of Lazarus's home, cars and
workspaces, according to Manella, since they were based on reasonable
assumptions about possibly incriminating evidence that might still be in those
places over two decades after the crime—again, supported by existing state and
federal case law. Since none of the information in the search-warrant affidavit
was known to be false or shown to have been stated with reckless disregard for
its truth, the good-faith exception was validly applied. For the same reason,
there was no basis for a Franks hearing.
"Appellant
appears to believe that Garrity applies to any statement made by a police
officer during an interview conducted by fellow law enforcement
officials", Manella wrote with regard to Lazarus's interview. "She is mistaken" since it
applies only to information coerced under the threat of termination in
explicitly criminal investigations, as opposed to statements given where an
officer "had no objectively
reasonable basis to believe she was compelled to answer the detectives'
questions," as Perry had found. Lazarus had not been ordered to submit
to the interview nor was Stearns and Jamarillo in her usual chain of command,
or working for the LAPD's internal affairs unit. "The fact that she remained in the room answering questions does
not support that she felt compelled, but only that she wished to allay
suspicion by avoiding behaving in a manner that suggested guilt."
Manella called Lazarus's argument that, regardless of what
did or did not happen in the interview, California law compelled her to answer
truthfully or be disciplined, a "novel
proposition" that relied strongly on a case decided in 1939, and 30
years before Garrity. The judge noted that while that decision was "still good law," it had been
limited by Garrity and subsequent corresponding California statutory and case
law. "Appellant, herself a former
internal affairs officer, would have been aware that in the absence of a formal
complaint or the explicit advisement required by [a state precedent], she was
under no danger of termination if she refused to cooperate with the
detectives." Nor did language in California's Public Safety Officers'
Procedural Bill of Rights Act requiring officers to cooperate apply, since
courts had previously held it applied only to administrative inquiries, not
criminal investigations.
On the issue of the admissibility of the MiniFiler DNA
results, the panel agreed with Perry that the technology was not sufficiently
different from previous DNA test kits to have required a separate hearing on
that issue—or that if it were, the defense had not delivered on its offers to
provide sufficient evidence that it was. "[Lazarus]
quoted the manufacturer's Website representing that MiniFiler would obtain DNA
results from compromised samples that previously would have yielded limited
genetic data," Manella observed, "but
the fact that the company's marketing material promised that its product was
better than other comparable products does not establish that this was a new
methodology." Since the defense had not requested either of two
specific hearing types on whether the DNA had been handled properly, it could
not raise those issues on appeal. Even if it had, the panel held that the DNA
evidence was not so critical to the case that its exclusion would have made an
acquittal more likely.
Finally, the panel held, Perry properly limited the scope of
Overland's cross-examination of Safarik, the FBI burglary expert. The
differences between the later burglary nearby—the perpetrators of that crime
had waited until the house was apparently empty, taken jewelry and then fled in
their own car after being caught in the act—and the apparent one at the Ruetten
home outweighed the similarities.
"[T]he trial court was well within its discretion in concluding appellant
had failed to raise a reasonable inference that the April burglary was in any
way connected to Rasmussen's murder", Manella wrote. "Cross-examining Safarik about a
specific burglary that occurred on a later date in a different location would
have had little bearing on the validity of his opinions and conclusions
concerning the Rasmussen crime scene."
Lazarus sought review of the decision by the California
Supreme Court, but it declined to hear her case.
Parole request
Lazarus' initial suitability parole hearing took place in
November 2023, during which she admitted to the murder. "It makes me sick to this day that I took an oath to protect and
serve people, and I took Sherri Rasmussen's life from her, a nurse," she
told a parole board panel. After the panel recommended parole and ordered a
hearing to reconsider the evidence against her, Governor Gavin Newsom asked the
full parole board to review the grant.
At the Executive Board meeting, at which Lazarus was not
present, the board heard testimony supporting her parole bid from justice
reform advocates, some of whom were themselves former inmates who had served
their time with Lazarus. They pointed to her relative youth at the time of the
crime and her exemplary behavior in prison, helping many other inmates rebuild
their lives. "I saw many women who
talked a big talk about giving back to the community. Stephanie actually
accomplished it", said Jane Dorotik, who had served 12 years alongside
Lazarus until her own murder conviction was overturned.
In opposition the board heard from Ruetten and some of
Rasmussen's relatives about the continuing pain the crime has caused them.
Rather than the act of an impulsive, lovestruck young woman, they said, the
murder's planning and execution, including the subsequent coverup, was a
calculated act that drew on Lazarus's training and experience as a police
officer, knowledge that they said she was still attempting to use to her
advantage. After recounting how she had gone to the lengths she did in
preparing the crime, including making an improvised silencer for her gun, and
covering it up afterwards, Stearns said: "Those
are not the hallmarks of youthful offense. They are the hallmarks of criminal
sophistication and maturity." Ruetten, who declined to use Lazarus's
name, was unimpressed by her confession several months earlier, saying she had
only done it in order to be paroled. "She
had 23 years to lie and to hide the evidence and to go on with her life when
she could have turned herself in", agreed one of Rasmussen's nieces.
The board ordered a rescission hearing. On October 2, 2024,
Lazarus' parole grant was rescinded.
Notes
The warning, derived
from the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in Garrity
v. New Jersey that government employees whose terms of employment require
them to cooperate with internal investigations retain their Fifth Amendment
rights against compelled self-incrimination, but can still be disciplined by
their employers for their refusal to cooperate, balances the state's interest
in conducting thorough investigations of possible employee misconduct with the
constitutional rights of the employees under investigation.
The Frye standard is
a legal test to determine whether a particular technology used to obtain
evidence is reliable enough to admit that evidence. It was established by Frye v. United States, a 1923 case where
the prosecution sought to introduce evidence that the defendants' systolic
blood pressure rose when he denied participation in a murder, suggesting he was
being untruthful; the D.C. Circuit federal appeals court affirmed a lower-court
ruling that that test had not yet gained enough supporting consensus among
scientists to be admissible.
It has since been superseded at the federal level by the
Supreme Court's holding in Daubert v.
Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. that the Federal Rules of Evidence set
the standard for the admissibility of such evidence. Most states have followed
suit, though some continue to use Frye. At the time of Lazarus's trial,
California was one of them; in 2012, the California Supreme Court adopted a
standard more in line with Daubert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sherri_Rasmussen
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