When Sherri Rasmussen was found dead in his house in town in Van Nuys in February 1986, unhappy and pulled three times, detectives called her a burglary that went wrong – a disastrously erroneous conclusion that did not move for decades.
Rasmussen was 29 years old, newly married and director of popular nursing care at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center. His new husband, John Rueten, came to marriage with dangerous luggage: an ex-emotionally volatile lovers who was not above him.
It was Stephanie Lazarus, a 25 -year -old patrol officer in the Los Angeles police service, and retrospectively, the reasons for his suspect seem obvious. She appeared in the victim’s workplace to harass her, and Rasmussen had expressed his fear of being hunted down.
Sherri Rasmussen was 29 years old and newly married when she was found fatally matraquized and pulled in her town in town in Van Nuys in 1986.
(Rasmussen family)
In addition, the bullets found in the body were those that the LAPD delivered to the officers, and weeks after the murder, Lazarus reported that his emergency pistol, a Smith & Wesson revolver with Snubré nose had been stolen from his car.

In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the Forgotten, the consequence of the dark, the diving in the archives and the memories of those who were there.
But for years, she has not been questioned as a suspect. Exactly why it took 23 years at the LAPD to stop Lazarus – who had then created a family and rose to a high -level detective position – was never answered.
“I do not know that we will never know the real answer of what was 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 business card on her desk and called relentlessly for updates.
When she thinks about the details of the murder, proof of personal hatred seems clear, as well as evidence of criminal sophistication. Her sister was broken over her head with a vase. She was shot down three times at close range, with a coated blanket around the pistol to put the sound to sleep.
While the case languid, his father wrote a letter to the chief of the LAPD Daryl Gates, pleading for his intervention. But the agency pushed the family. The detectives continued to emphasize the crime which corresponds to the scheme of a residential burglary, not to a love triangle. Stereo equipment had been stacked near the stairs, as if thieves had been interrupted in their work. And two armed thieves struck another house nearby shortly after.
It may be a vision of the investigation tunnel. It was perhaps the workload surrounding the crushing of murders in the mid-80s in Los Angeles. It was perhaps a cognitive bias against the possibility that it is one of their own. Maybe Rasmussen’s sister still wonders, someone inside the LAPD helped Lazarus along the way.
“I believe it,” said Connie Rasmussen. “There is no way I can prove it, but yes, yes.”
No evidence appeared to support a deliberate concealment. The Rasmussen family continued the department, hoping that the dispute would provide answers. A judge threw the case, for reasons of limitation status. The parents of Rasmussen lived long enough to see Lazarus arrested and condemned, but died without knowing why it took a quarter of a century.
Defense lawyer Mark Overland, on the left, and Stephanie Lazarus seated in front of the Superior Court just before Lazarus was found guilty of first degree murder during the murder of Sherri Rasmussen in 1986.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
While the case collapsed and the family afflicted, Stephanie Lazarus kept his badge and her secret. She has built a solid career although not distinguished at the LAPD. Prosecutors would describe it as a C-Plus cop.
She promoted the Dare Anti-Drug program, an initiative dear to the chief. She became a detective with the details of the flight of art, which gave her a high public profile. She appeared in photo sessions with brass. She planted with journalists. She made the “family quarrel”. She married another cop and adopted a girl.
In the early 2000s, detectives plunged into cold cases, but the evidence of the massacre of Rasmussen had mysteriously disappeared from the Coroner office. If Lazarus stole, it has never been proven, but she would have had access. And as a detective at the Van Nuys office for a while, she would also have had access to the case file, the so-called murder book.
“It is really difficult to know what could be missing, if it has already disappeared,” said Matthew McGough, who wrote a 595 -page account of the case called “Lazarus files”.
The case could not have been resolved, except for a single evidence. A saliva sample of a bite on the Rasmussen forearm was stored separately, in a freezer at the Coroner office. In 2005, DNA tests that had been impossible for decades earlier showed that he came from a woman, undergoing burglary theory with two men.
“Am I on the” frank camera “or something like that?” Stephanie Lazarus, shown in a manager of her interrogation, asked the investigators.
(Los Angeles police department)
But the LAPD failed to move aggressively on the new information, and four more years passed before a detective from Van Nuys asked the obvious question: did the victim had female enemies? This led to Lazarus, whose DNA corresponded to the saliva sample.
When she arrived at work in the city center in early June 2009, detectives used a cunning to attract Lazarus to the bottom of prison, where she would not be armed. At first, Lazarus told investigators that she did not remember if she had never met Rasmussen, but her memory quickly recovered.
“I may have spoken to him once or twice or more,” she said. She bristled when he became clear that she was suspect in murder. “Do you accuse me of this?” … Am I on “frank camera” or something? It’s crazy. “
She continued to deny her guilt during her 2012 trial, where the jurors saw a letter she had written to the mother of the husband of Rasmussen, a man she met at the university who had become an obsession. She was devastated by her engagement, she wrote. She did not understand why he had chosen another woman.
John Rueten, the husband of the murder victim, Sherri Rasmussen, made his declaration of impact on the victim during the conviction of Stephanie Lazarus.
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
“I’m really in love with John,” wrote Lazarus. “This year tore me.”
When Rueten himself testified, he described an obvious asymmetry relationship. He and Lazarus had become friends at the 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 with Rasmussen, then begged the forgiveness of Rasmussen.
Lazarus, at 51, was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life in life. It was possible to frame condemnation as a story of redemption for the LAPD, with a new generation of cops making amends to the false steps of their predecessors.
But the internal investigation promised by the heads of department – an investigation of what explained delays and errors – seemed to go nowhere.
“It was an impossible investigation,” said McGough, who spent nine years looking for his book. “They have quietly closed it. It is police culture. It’s a feeling of “it might look bad, and we’re not going to go.”
The parents of Sherri Rasmussen and the other members of the family stand outside the courthouse after Stephanie Lazarus is found guilty of the murder of Rasmussen.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
The Rasmussen family was amazed in November 2023, when a parole panel decided that Lazarus should be released after 11 years in prison. She had taken anger management courses and was considered a low risk to reoffend. The decision was reversed, but Lazarus is new to each new hearing.
What could count in her favor is her admission, after years of denial that she killed Rasmussen. During a February 2025 hearing, she spoke of being in love with Rueten and her solitude when she learned her commitment.
“I couldn’t have had a relationship that lasted and I felt hopeless,” she said. “I just wanted to have, I guess, what the others had.”
She called him and hang up, just to hear him say hello. “It pacified me,” she said.
According to her story, she called her home that morning in February 1986 and was rabid when Rasmussen replied. She decided to visit. She found the address in a police database. She took her weapon and a cord.
“I went there hoping to see him,” she said. “I was so angry that if she put me on the way to see John, I was going to strangle him.”
She “broke” when Rasmussen responded and found herself in a struggle she compared to “an infernal bar fight”. She attached Rasmussen’s wrists with the cord, explaining: “She set me up to see John.”
“How would you bind your wrists give you access to see John?” A commissioner asked.
“It makes no sense,” replied Lazarus.
Paul Nunez, one of the prosecutors who took the Lazarus trial, said that she was still lying, with calculated admissions to win her parole while minimizing her guilt. He does not think Rasmussen would have opened the door to admit Lazarus. It is more likely that she has chosen the lock, in her opinion. And he considers that it is an insult to the victim of Lazarus to describe the assault as a mutual fight. She should know that Rueten was at work and that her wife would be alone.
“You cannot tell half a story about murder and put part of the blame on the victim,” said Nunez in a recent interview.
“He was a predator who was in a cage with the prey. She had total control of everything. She had her weapon with her. She had a tactical grapple formation of the Academy. It was physically fit in shape. She was at the Olympic Games for the Application of Laws. ”
And she had staged the crime scene so that she apparently threw detectives from her track for decades.
“She is far from recognizing all the behaviors she has demonstrated in this crime,” said Nunez.
At one point during the parole hearing, Lazarus admitted that she got rid of the revolver she had used to kill Rasmussen and pointed out her stolen. She knew that the detectives had her name and assumed that they would have questions.
“I thought they came,” she said, “and would like to see my weapon.”
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