Newlywed Sherri Rasmussen was brutally murdered in 1986, but it took 23 years for police to catch her killer, police officer Stephanie Lazarus. If the killer was in the LAPD all along, why'd it take decades to figure it out?
Category
๐ ๏ธ
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Newlyweds Sherry Rasmussen was brutally murdered, but it took 23 years for the LAPD to catch
00:05her killer, fellow police officer Stephanie Lazarus. If the killer was in the LAPD all
00:10along, is that why it took decades to figure it out?
00:14On the evening of February 24, 1986, John Rutten returned from work to the Van Nuys,
00:18California, condo he shared with his wife for three months. Inside, he found a nightmare.
00:24On the floor of the living room, amid the remains of a broken vase and an overturned
00:27telephone, lay his dead wife, 29-year-old Sherry Rasmussen. She'd been brutally beaten
00:33and shot three times in the chest.
00:36Because someone had stacked electronics on the floor and the victim's BMW was missing,
00:40Los Angeles police quickly decided Rasmussen was the victim of a botched burglary. After
00:45that, the investigation went exactly nowhere for 23 years. It's clear that Rasmussen had
00:50suffered before Lazarus shot her three times at point-blank range using a thick robe to
00:55muffle the noise. There were ligature marks on her wrists, and a cord was found at the
00:59scene, indicating that Lazarus had tied her up at some point. Lazarus had also repeatedly
01:03bludgeoned the victim in the head. Among Rasmussen's other wounds were extensive facial injuries
01:08and a bite mark on her left forearm.
01:11The assailant or assailants were grabbing at anything they could find to make sure this
01:15woman didn't breathe another breath.
01:17In 1986, with DNA technology still in its early days, the R-moon didn't help investigators
01:23in their search for the killer. But more than 20 years later, it became the key to
01:26solving the cold case. But the original investigation was bungled from the start.
01:32Rutten and Stephanie Lazarus first met at UCLA in the late 1970s and dated casually
01:36on and off for several years.
01:38Stephanie never mentioned Sherry to me, or the fact that John was in another relationship.
01:46That's because the relationship was mostly one-sided. Stephanie thought of John more
01:49as a boyfriend, but he had much more, let's just say, casual feelings about her.
01:55According to Matthew McAuliffe's The Lazarus Files, a cold case investigation, Lazarus
01:59and Rutten slept together once after his engagement, after which Lazarus began to harass her rival
02:03at work, even bragging about having had an affair with Rutten.
02:06In 1989, three years after Rasmussen's murder, Rutten and Lazarus rekindled their relationship
02:11on a trip to Hawaii. Before the trip, Rutten reportedly contacted Detective Mayer to make
02:16sure there was no evidence tying Lazarus to the crime. Mayer assured him there wasn't.
02:21So for a while, Rutten was unknowingly having sex, again, with his wife's killer.
02:26Eventually, the couple drifted apart. Rutten remarried and had a family. Lazarus went on
02:31to marry a fellow police officer, adopt a daughter, and rise through the ranks of the
02:35LAPD to become a detective specializing in art theft.
02:38I asked Detective Lazarus, what do you know about art? And her answer was, it hangs on
02:43the wall.
02:44If you're seeing the irony of the LAPD promoting someone who knows nothing about art to lead
02:49art detective, it probably explains a lot about this case.
02:54From the onset, the LAPD believed Rasmussen had come home and interrupted a burglary.
02:58In their defense, this theory was later bolstered by an armed break-in in the same neighborhood
03:03involving two unidentified men who were never apprehended. But not everyone was so convinced.
03:09Detectives ignored the pleas of Rasmussen's father, Nels, to look into Lazarus as a potential
03:13suspect. Lyle Mayer, the lead detective on the original case, repeatedly denied that
03:17Nels had ever mentioned Lazarus to him. However, according to Vanity Fair, who interviewed
03:22Nels,
03:23The first thing Nels Rasmussen asked Detective Mayer the day after his daughter was murdered
03:26was,
03:27Have you checked out John's ex-girlfriend, the lady cop?
03:30He was always diverted. He was told repeatedly that he'd been watching too much TV.
03:37John Rutten was also concerned about Lazarus, and investigators never interviewed witnesses
03:41who'd seen Lazarus harassing Rasmussen at the hospital where she worked not long before
03:45the murder. Obviously, Rutten was convinced enough of her innocence to rekindle that relationship
03:50for a brief time. But you'd have to wonder, did he ever think about all the evidence that
03:54pointed to Lazarus? Turns out, there wasn't that much.
03:58There's a lot of evidence in the case that went missing over the years, including trace
04:03evidence collected from Sherry's body.
04:06Later, interviews from Rutten and Nels Rasmussen also went missing from police files.
04:11On the surface, the electronics on the floor in Rasmussen's missing car seemed to support
04:15the burglary theory, but there were other elements that didn't fit that scenario. For
04:19one, no other rooms had been looted.
04:22According to the Los Angeles Times, Mark Safaric, a former FBI criminal profiler who testified
04:27at Lazarus' trial, explained,
04:29What I saw was an attempt to create an illusion.
04:32According to prosecutors in 2023, what actually happened was a premeditated attack by Lazarus,
04:37who was furious that her former lover โ who never actually considered her his girlfriend
04:41โ married somebody else.
04:44The evidence that finally nailed Lazarus came from a bite mark she'd left on Rasmussen's
04:47left arm. In 2005, Jennifer Francis from the cold case unit looked at the files and realized
04:53a swab taken from the bite mark was missing. She tracked it down to a coroner's freezer,
04:57where she learned that the bite had come from a woman โ a brand new clue in a 20-year-old
05:01cold case.
05:02But even then, when she brought the development to her colleagues, they didn't think it was
05:06reason enough to reopen the case. It wasn't until 2009, during another cold case review,
05:11that a different set of detectives decided that the fact that the bite mark came from
05:14a female meant the case was worth revisiting. The lab was able to extract a usable amount
05:19of DNA from traces of saliva taken from the wound, even though it had been sitting in
05:23storage for more than two decades.
05:25And around the same time, the detectives noticed that Lazarus โ a colleague whose office
05:29was right down the hall โ was listed in the case files as a former girlfriend of Rutten.
05:34That was enough for them to open a covert investigation of their co-worker, recovering
05:37her DNA from a cup and straw she'd thrown away. The DNA matched, and in 2009, Lazarus
05:43was taken into custody at LAPD headquarters.
05:45I'm really shocked that somebody would be saying that I did this. I mean, we had a fight,
05:51and so I went and killed her? I mean, come on."
05:53Steve Cooley, the L.A. County D.A. at the time of Lazarus's arrest and conviction, told
05:57the Associated Press,
05:59Had it not been for DNA, the case might not have been solved.
06:02In 2012, following a five-week trial, a jury took less than a day to find Lazarus guilty
06:07of first-degree murder. A judge sentenced her to 27 years to life in prison. In November
06:132023, Lazarus finally admitted to killing Rasmussen, but said she hadn't been planning
06:17to do it when she went to the condo that day. Lazarus didn't feel the need to apologize
06:21to the family.
06:23The fact that Sherry's death occurred because she met and married me brings me to my knees.
06:28Lazarus is currently serving her sentence at the California Institution for Women in
06:32Corona. Initially set to be paroled in November 2023, a state parole panel blocked her release.
06:38Her next parole hearing is tentatively set for February 2025.
06:43What's the most disturbing part of the Stephanie Lazarus case? I guess it depends on the tape.
06:47Who removed all the evidence? Was it just sloppy police work, or was it the murderer
06:51who had access to the files? Why did the case get stonewalled in 2005? There are a few mysteries
06:57in this case we'll never solve.