There's shoddy police work — and then there's the Stephanie Lazarus fiasco. How did it take over two decades to solve what should have been a cut and dry case?
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00:00OK, there's shoddy police work, and then there's the Stephanie Lazarus fiasco. How did it take
00:05over two decades to solve what should have been a cut-and-dry case?
00:09Back on February 24, 1986, John Rutten picked up his dry-cleaning after work on the way
00:14to his home in Van Nuys, Los Angeles. He called his wife Sherry Rasmussen three or four times
00:19that day, but hadn't gotten an answer. This didn't concern him too much, though, since
00:23his wife, director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, was a busy lady.
00:28Even when Rutten saw broken glass near the garage outside, he wasn't especially worried.
00:31Then he found his wife lying dead inside the house with three bullet wounds to her chest.
00:36It took until 2009, 23 years, to track down Rasmussen's murder of Stephanie Lazarus.
00:42Had you ever met his wife?
00:45I may have.
00:46Lazarus had been a police officer for two years at the time of the murder, and had a
00:50sort of friends-with-benefits relationship with Rutten during college.
00:54It took some hard-nosed police work to bring Lazarus in, a big chunk of which depended
00:58on a 2005 DNA test comparing a bite mark on Rasmussen's arm to a Costco cup Lazarus chucked
01:03in a trash can. But other evidence had been available since 1986, leading investigators
01:09to assume that someone might have been covering up for Lazarus. But even if not, some serious
01:14bungling of evidence caused a massive delay in the case.
01:17Detective Robert Bubb, a key figure in cracking the case, told investigators to treat the
01:21investigation as confidential. Bubb collaborated with a few other higher-ups to dispatch an
01:26internal affairs group's special operations section to track Lazarus. After all, they
01:30were investigating a fellow officer for a potential murder. It was that task force that
01:34retrieved the Costco cup DNA sample from him. The sample matched, the case proceeded, and
01:39three years later, in 2012, Lazarus received a 27-year sentence for first-degree murder.
01:45In other words, Lazarus didn't merely fly off the handle after confronting the wife
01:49of her ex-boyfriend, but planned to murder her when she went to Rasmussen's house back
01:53in 1986. By 2009, it had already been four years since investigators got a DNA sample
01:59from the bite mark on Rasmussen's arms as detectives revisited the case. Prior to that,
02:04the sample had been signed out in 1993, went missing, and had stayed frozen on a cotton
02:09swab for 12 years, untouched. A detective named Phil Morit had signed it out at the
02:14time, later claiming to not remember doing so.
02:17The biggest delay in the case happened between the mysterious signing out of the DNA sample
02:21on the bite mark on her arm in 1993 and the testing of that sample in 2005. The reasons
02:27for this delay seem sort of shady, especially to Rasmussen's loved ones, and still haven't
02:31been fully explained. But because Lazarus has already been convicted, explanations for
02:36the delay took a backseat to Lazarus' seat of justice. As the story goes, Phil Morit
02:41checked out all forensic samples related to the Rasmussen case back in 1993, seven years
02:46after the horrific events. Notably, this included a cotton swab of the bite mark on Rasmussen's
02:50arm.
02:51It took until 2001 for investigator Jennifer Francis to poke through Rasmussen's file and
02:56find the cotton swab missing. The sample showed up in the coroner's office in a freezer in
03:00a decaying manila envelope with Rasmussen's name on it, but no case number on top. Case
03:05numbers are how the police organize data, which is why it may have gone unnoticed. Again,
03:10Morit, for his part, said he remembered nothing about the sample.
03:13From there, it took four years to get the results of the sample's DNA test in 2005.
03:18Long before investigator Jennifer Francis found the unnumbered DNA sample in storage
03:22that had been missing for eight years, the victim's father suspected who killed her.
03:26Nels Rasmussen asked, quote,
03:27"'Have you checked out John's ex-girlfriend, the lady cop?' to Lyle Mayer, a detective involved
03:32in the investigation. This was the day after the murder in 1986."
03:36This LAPD officer, John's ex-girlfriend, had shown up where Sherry worked.
03:42Nels spoke with investigators at length in those early days of the investigation, but
03:45no records exist of such conversations. No notes, no audio recordings, nothing. Nels
03:51also pushed for DNA testing. In fact, a cotton swab sample that went missing until 2001?
03:56Detective Morit checked it out shortly after Nels made the DNA test request, but before
04:01the test could be conducted. The fact that no one followed up on the request at the time,
04:05or even realized that the sample was missing, only deepens the mystery — and highly suspicious
04:09set of circumstances.
04:11In 2009, a new generation of detectives like Robert Bubb traced the entire garbled trail
04:16of happenings and potentially shady activities all the way back to the initial crime scene.
04:21They admitted that evidence pointed to Lazarus, and as soon as they got her DNA sample, the
04:25case was all but solved.
04:27So why exactly did it take so long to arrest Stephanie Lazarus? Depends on how aggressive
04:32you want to be. Simple blunder, blue shield, or plain old sloppy police work?