When Sherri Rasmussen was found dead in his townhouse Van Nuys in February 1986, he hit badly and shot three times, the detectives described him as thieves who went wrong, a disastrously wrong conclusion that did not fall for decades.
Rasmussen was 29 years old, recently married and a popular nursing director at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center. Her new husband, John Ruetten, came to marriage with dangerous luggage: an emotionally volatile former lover that was not about him.
This was Stephanie Lazarus, a 25 -year -old patrol officer in the Los Angeles Police Department, and in retrospect, the reasons to suspect that she seems obvious. He had appeared in the victim’s workplace to harass her, and Rasmussen had expressed fear of being harassed.
Sherri Rasmussen was 29 years old and newly married when she was found fatally beaten and shot at her Van Nys country house in 1986.
(Rasmussen family)
In addition, the bullets found in the body of the type that the LAPD issued to the officers, and a week after the murder, Lázaro informed that his backup weapon, a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, with cloud, had been stolen from his car.
In this series, Christopher Goffard reviews old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consistent to the dark, immersing himself in files and the memories of those who were there.
But for years she was not questioned as suspicious. Exactly why it plays the 23 years to judge Lázaro, who by then had started a family and went up to a high -profile detective position has never responded to the leg.
“I don’t know if we will ever know the real answer or what is customary,” said Connie Rasmussen, 71, one of the victim’s sisters.
She remembers that her mother, who administered the family’s tooth office in Arizona, kept the original detective’s presentation card on her desk and highly called updates.
When you think about the details of the murder, the evidence of personal hatred seems clear, as well as the evidence of criminal sophistication. His sister was crushed on the head with a vase. They shot him three times at a short distance, with a blanket wrapped around the weapon for dad the sound.
As the case had longed for, his father wrote a letter to the then head of Lapd Daryl Gates, please for his intervention. But the agency reaped the family. The detectives continued to insist that the crime was adjusted to the pattern of a residential robbery, not a love triangle. The stereo team had stacked the legs near the ladder, as if the thieves had been interrupted in their work. And two armed thieves hit another house nearby shortly after.
Maybe it was a research tunnel vision. Perhaps it was the workload surrounding the falling in love with the murders in the mid -1980s. Perhaps it was a cognitive bias against the possibility that it could be one of theirs. Maybe, Rasmussen’s sister still wonders, someone inside the LAPD helped Lázaro on the road.
“I think so,” said Connie Rasmussen. “There is no way I can try it, but I do.”
There has been no evidence to support a deliberate cover -up. The Rasmussen family sued the department, hoping that the litigation will bring answers. A judge eliminated the case, for reasons of statute of limitations. The parents of the lung of Rasmussen enough to see Lázaro arrested and convicted, but died without knowing why he played a quarter of a century.
Defensor lawyer Mark Overland, on the left, and Stephanie Lazarus sit in the superior court just before Lazarus is declared guilty of first degree murder in the murder of Sherri Rasmussen in 1986.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
While the case was molded and the family afflicted, Stephanie Lazarus kept her badge and her secret. She builds a solid but not distinguished career in the LAPD. Prosecutors would describe it as a C-Plus police.
She promoted the Dare anti-drug program, an initiative loved by the boss. He became a detective of the art robbery detail, which gave him a high public profile. She appeared in Photo Ops with brass. She joked with journalists. She uses “Family Feud.” He married another policeman and adopted a girl.
At the beginning of the 2000s, detectives immersed themselves in cold cases, but the evidence traces of Rasmussen’s murder had mysteriously disappeared from the forensic office. If Lázaro stole it has never tried, but she would have had access. And as a detective in the Van Nuys office for a while, the so -called murder book would also have had access to the case archive.
“It is really difficult to know what might be missing, if you have already left,” said Matthew McGough, who wrote a 595 pages of the case called “Los Archives of Lázaro.”
The case could have been unsolved, except for a single evidence. A saliva sample of a bite in the Rasmussen forearm was stored separately, in a freezer in the forensic office. In 2005, DNA tests that have been impossible for decades before showed that they had come from a woman, undermining the theory of theft of two men.
“Am I in” sincere camera “or something?” Stephanie Lazarus, is shown in a picture of her interrogation, asked the researchers.
(Los Angeles Police Department)
But the LAPD could not move aggressively in the new information, and four more years passed before a by A detective for Nuys asked the obvious question: did the victim have female enemies? This led Lázaro, whose DNA coincided with the saliva sample.
When he arrived at work in the center in early June 2009, the detectives used a trick to attract Lázaro to the prison facilities, where he would be unarmed. At first, Lázaro told the researchers that he could not remember that he had had it with Rasmussen, but his memory soon recovered.
“You may have talked to Heron or twice, or more,” he said. She bristled when it was clear that she was suspicious of the murder. “Are you accusing me or this? … Am I in ‘Sincere Chamber’ or something? This is crazy.”
She continued to refuse in her 2012 trial, where jury members saw a letter she had written to the mother of Rasmussen’s husband, a man with whom she had an obsession with beer. He was devastated by his commitment, he wrote. She did not understand why she had chosen another woman.
John Ruetten, the husband of the murder victim Sherri Rasmussen, makes the victim’s impact declaration the sentence of Stephanie Lazarus.
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
“I’m really in love with John,” Lazarus had written. “This year has torn me.”
When Ruetten testified, he described an obvious relationship or asymmetry. He and Lázaro had become friends in UCLA, he said, over the years they had slept together, but he did not consider her a girlfriend. He said he had slept with her after his commitment to Rasmussen, then gave the forgiveness of Rasmussen.
Lázaro, at 51, was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to 27 years of life imprisonment. It was possible to frame the conviction as a redemption story for LAPD, with a new generation of police officers who make peace for the mass steps of their predecessors.
But the internal investigation promised by department leaders, an investigation of what explained delays and errors, seemed not to go anywhere.
“It was a simulated investigation,” said McGough, who spent nine years investigating his book. “They closed it silently. It is the police culture. It is a feeling of” this could look bad, and we are not going to go there. “
Sherri Rasmussen’s parents and other family members are outside the Courthhouse after Stephanie Lazarus is declared guilty of Rasmussen murder.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
The Rasmussen family was surprised in November 2023, when a probation panel decided that Lázaro should be released after 11 years in prison. He had tasks Ira management classes and was considered a low risk of re-actinspring. The decision was reversed, but Lázaro has a new opportunity in each new audience.
What he could tell in his favor is his admission, after years of denials, which she killed Rasmussen. In an audience of February 2025, he spoke of having been in love with the wheel and their loneliness when he learned of his commitment.
“I had a leg unable to have a relationship that lasted, and I felt desperate,” he said. “I just wanted to have, I suppose, what other people had.”
She would call and hung it, just to hear it greet. “He pacified me,” he said.
On his own, he called his house that morning in February 1986 and was enraged when Rasmussen replied. She decided to visit. He found the address in a police database. She took her gun and a cord.
“I get used to there with the hope of seeing him,” he said. “I was so angry that if she got in my way to see John, I was going to strangle her.”
She “broke up” when Rasmussen responded, and found himself in a fight he compared with “a Bar Hellaz fight.” She tied Rasmussen’s doll with the cord, explaining: “He was getting in my way to see John.”
“How would they give access to your wrists to see John?” A commissioner asked.
“It makes no sense,” Lázaro replied.
Paul Núñez, one of the prosecutors who led Lázaro to trial, said he is still lying, with admissions calculated to win his probation while minimizing his guilt. He does not believe that Rasmussen would have opened to Lázaro to admit Lázaro. It is more likely that she chooses the lock, in her opinion. And he considers that it is an insult to the victim that Lázaro will describe the assault as mutual combat. She must have known that the ruins were at work, and that her wife would be alone.
“You can’t give an average story about a murder and blame the victim,” Núñez said in a recent interview.
“This was a predator who was in a cage with the dam. He had complete control of everything. He had his weapon with her. He had a tactical grip training of the academy. He was physically fit.
And he had staged the crime scene so well that he apparently threw detectives from his track for decades.
“He is far from recognizing all the behavior he demonstrated in this crime,” said Núñez.
At one point in the duration of the probation audience, Lázaro acknowledged that he got rid of the revolver he had used to kill Rasmussen and reported it. He knew that the detectives had their name and assumed that they would have questions with Ke.
“I imagine they came,” he said, “and I would do it because to see my gun.”
