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When Sherri Rasmussen was found dead in her Van Nuys townhome in February 1986, bludgeoned badly and shot three times, detectives called it a burglary gone bad — a disastrously mistaken conclusion that did not budge for decades.
Rasmussen was 29, newly married and a popular nursing director at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. Her new husband, John Ruetten, came to the marriage with some dangerous baggage: an emotionally volatile ex-lover who was not over him.
This was Stephanie Lazarus, a 25-year-old patrol officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, and in retrospect, the grounds for suspecting her seem obvious. She had appeared at the victim’s workplace to harass her, and Rasmussen had expressed fear that she was being stalked.
What’s more, the bullets found in the body were the kind the LAPD issued to officers, and weeks after the murder, Lazarus reported that her backup gun, a snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, had been stolen from her car.
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.
But for years she was not questioned as a suspect. Exactly why it took the LAPD 23 years to arrest Lazarus — who by then had started a family and risen to a high-profile detective position — has never been answered.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever know the true answer of what went wrong,” said Connie Rasmussen, 71, one of the victim’s sisters.
She remembers that her mother, who managed the family’s dental office in Arizona, kept the original detective’s business card on her desk and called relentlessly for updates.
When she thinks about the details of the murder, the evidence of personal hatred seems clear, as well as evidence of criminal sophistication. Her sister was smashed over the head with a vase. She was shot three times at close range, with a blanket wrapped around the gun to deaden the sound.
As the case languished, her father wrote a letter to then-LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, pleading for his intervention. But the agency brushed off the family. Detectives kept insisting the crime fit the pattern of a residential burglary, not a love triangle. Stereo equipment had been stacked near the stairway, as if thieves had been interrupted in their work. And two armed robbers struck another house nearby soon after.
Maybe it was investigative tunnel vision. Maybe it was the workload surrounding the crush of murders in mid-1980s Los Angeles. Maybe it was cognitive bias against the possibility it could be one of their own. Maybe, Rasmussen’s sister still wonders, someone inside the LAPD helped Lazarus along the way.
“I believe so,” Connie Rasmussen said. “There’s no way I could prove it, but yes, I do.”
No evidence has emerged to support a deliberate cover-up. The Rasmussen family sued the department, hoping the litigation would bring answers. A judge threw the case out, on statute-of-limitations grounds. Rasmussen’s parents lived long enough to see Lazarus arrested and convicted, but died without knowing why it took a quarter-century.
While the case moldered and the family grieved, Stephanie Lazarus kept her badge and her secret. She built a solid if undistinguished career at the LAPD. Prosecutors would describe her as a C-plus cop.
She promoted the DARE anti-drug program, an initiative dear to the chief. She became a detective with the art theft detail, which gave her a high public profile. She appeared in photo ops with the brass. She bantered with reporters. She went on “Family Feud.” She married another cop and adopted a girl.
By the early 2000s, detectives were diving into cold cases, but the trace evidence from the Rasmussen slaying had mysteriously vanished from the coroner’s office. Whether Lazarus stole it has never been proven, but she would have had access. And as a detective at the Van Nuys office for a time, she also would have had access to the case file, the so-called murder book.
If you have information on old crimes, famous, once-famous or obscure, contact christopher.goffard@latimes.com
“It’s really hard to know what could be missing, if it’s already gone,” said Matthew McGough, who wrote a 595-page account of the case called “The Lazarus Files.”
The case might have gone unsolved, save for a single piece of evidence. A saliva sample from a bite on Rasmussen’s forearm was stored separately, in a freezer at the coroner’s office. In 2005, DNA tests that had been impossible decades earlier showed that it had come from a woman, undermining the two-man burglary theory.
But the LAPD failed to move aggressively on the new information, and four more years passed before a Van Nuys detective asked the obvious question: Did the victim have any female enemies? This led to Lazarus, whose DNA matched the saliva sample.
When she arrived at work downtown in early June 2009, detectives used a ruse to lure Lazarus to the jail facility downstairs, where she would be unarmed. At first, Lazarus told investigators she couldn’t recall whether she had ever met Rasmussen, but her memory soon recovered.
“I may have talked to her once or twice, or more,” she said. She bristled when it became clear that she was a suspect in the murder. “You’re accusing me of this? ... Am I on ‘Candid Camera’ or something? This is insane.”
She continued to deny her guilt at her 2012 trial, where jurors saw a letter she had written to the mother of Rasmussen’s husband, a man she met in college who had become an obsession. She was devastated by his engagement, she wrote. She did not understand why he had chosen another woman.
“I’m truly in love with John,” Lazarus had written. “This year has torn me up.”
When Ruetten himself testified, he described a relationship of obvious asymmetry. He and Lazarus had become friends at UCLA, he said, and over the years they had slept together, but he did not consider her a girlfriend. He said he had slept with her after his engagement to Rasmussen, then begged Rasmussen’s forgiveness.
Lazarus, at 51, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. It was possible to frame the conviction as a redemption tale for the LAPD, with a new generation of cops making amends for the missteps of their predecessors.
But the internal investigation promised by department leaders — a probe of what accounted for the delays and blunders — seemed to go nowhere.
“It was a sham investigation,” said McGough, who spent nine years researching his book. “They quietly closed it. It’s police culture. It’s a sense of ‘This could look bad, and we’re not going to go there.’”
The Rasmussen family was stunned in November 2023, when a parole panel decided Lazarus should be released after 11 years in prison. She had taken anger-management classes and was deemed a low risk to re-offend. The decision was reversed, but Lazarus has a fresh chance at every new hearing.
What might count in her favor is her admission, after years of denials, that she killed Rasmussen. At a February 2025 hearing, she talked of having been in love with Ruetten, and of her loneliness when she learned of his engagement.
“I had been unable to have a relationship that lasted, and I felt hopeless,” she said. “I just wanted to have, I guess, what other people had.”
She would call him and hang up, just to hear him say hello. “It pacified me,” she said.
By her account, she called his home that morning in February 1986 and was enraged when Rasmussen answered. She decided to pay a visit. She found the address in a police database. She took her gun, and a cord.
“I went over there hoping to see him,” she said. “I was so angry that if she got in my way to see John, I was going to strangle her.”
She “barged in” when Rasmussen answered, and found herself in a struggle she compared to “a hellacious bar fight.” She tied Rasmussen’s wrists with the cord, explaining: “She was getting in my way to see John.”
“How would binding her wrists give you access to see John?” a commissioner asked.
“It makes no sense,” Lazarus replied.
Paul Nunez, one of the prosecutors who took Lazarus to trial, said she is still lying, with admissions calculated to win her parole while downplaying her culpability. He does not believe that Rasmussen would have opened the door to admit Lazarus. It’s more likely she picked the lock, in his view. And he considers it an insult to the victim for Lazarus to describe the assault as mutual combat. She must have known Ruetten was at work, and that his wife would be alone.
“You can’t give a half story about a murder and put some of the blame on the victim,” Nunez said in a recent interview.
“This was a predator who was in a cage with the prey. She had complete control of everything. She had her weapon with her. She had tactical grappling training from the academy. She was physically fit. She was in the law enforcement Olympics.”
And she had staged the crime scene so smoothly that it apparently threw detectives off her track for decades.
“She’s a long ways away from acknowledging all of the behaviors that she demonstrated in this crime,” Nunez said.
At one point during the parole hearing, Lazarus acknowledged that she got rid of the revolver she had used to kill Rasmussen and reported it stolen. She knew detectives had her name, and assumed they would have questions.
“I figured they were coming,” she said, “and would want to see my gun.”
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