1986 murder in Los Angeles
On February 24, 1986, the body of Sherri Rasmussen (born February 7, 1957) was found in the apartment she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. She had been beaten and shot three times in a struggle. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) initially considered the case a botched burglary and were unable to identify a suspect. Rasmussen's father believed that LAPD officer Stephanie Ilene Lazarus, who was formerly in a relationship with Ruetten, was a prime suspect.
Detectives who re-examined the cold case files in 2009 eventually focused on Lazarus, by then a detective. A DNA sample from a cup she had thrown away was matched to one from a bite on Rasmussen's body that had remained in the files. Lazarus was convicted of first-degree murder in 2012 and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life at the California Institution for Women in Chino.
Lazarus appealed the conviction, claiming the age of the case and the evidence denied her due process. She also alleged that the search warrant was improperly granted, her statements in an interview prior to her arrest were compelled, and that evidence supporting the original case theory should have been admitted at trial. In 2015, the guilty verdict was upheld by the California Court of Appeal for the Second District of the state (which includes Los Angeles). During a 2023 parole hearing, Lazarus confessed to the crime; the panel hearing her request initially granted it but it was rescinded by the full board late in 2024.
Some of the police files suggest that evidence that could have implicated Lazarus earlier in the investigation was later removed, perhaps by others in the LAPD. Rasmussen's parents unsuccessfully sued the department over this and other aspects of the investigation. Jennifer Francis, the criminalist who found key DNA evidence from the bite mark, unsuccessfully sued the City of Los Angeles. She claimed that she had been pressured by police to favor certain suspects in this and other high-profile cases and was retaliated against when she brought this to the department's attention.
Background.
While an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1978 to 1982, John Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego, occasionally dated Stephanie Lazarus, a fellow Dykstra Hall resident and a political science major from Simi Valley, California. Both were avid athletes; Lazarus played on UCLA's junior varsity women's basketball team. Lazarus would steal Ruetten's clothes when he showered and take photographs of him in his underwear while he slept. Ruetten never considered the relationship as anything more than "necking and fooling around". They had sex for the first time after he graduated.
At that time he accepted a job with hard-drive manufacturer Micropolis. She was admitted to the city's police academy and became a uniformed officer with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 1983. In court, he later testified that they had sex "twenty to thirty times" between 1981 and 1984, but that she was never his girlfriend.
Ruetten later met Sherri Rasmussen, a graduate of Loma Linda University who was on a fast career track in critical care nursing. She entered college at 16, and by her late 20s was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. She also gave presentations and taught classes for fellow nurses.
At one point, Lazarus threw Ruetten a surprise party on his 25th birthday, unaware that he had been dating other women or that he had developed a serious relationship with Rasmussen. When she learned he was seriously involved with Rasmussen, Lazarus was despondent: "I'm truly in love with John and the past year has really torn me up," Lazarus wrote to Ruetten's mother in August 1985. "I wish it didn't end the way it did, and I don't think I'll ever understand his decision." In her own journal, she wrote, "I really don't feel like working. I found out that John is getting married." Depressed, Lazarus visited Ruetten at his condo. The two had sex—"to give her closure", Ruetten testified years later—for what he says was the only time before Rasmussen's death. Later that night, Lazarus awoke a fellow officer she roomed with to commiserate.
During the engagement of Ruetten and Rasmussen, Lazarus brought her skis to the apartment the couple shared, and asked him to wax them. Despite Rasmussen's objections, he complied. Rasmussen felt that the visit and request was strange, especially since Lazarus was dressed in flattering workout clothes. After Lazarus left, Rasmussen asked her fiancé if their relationship was truly over. Ruetten convinced her the two were just friends. A few days later, after Ruetten had left for work, Lazarus returned to pick up the waxed skis. She was in uniform and armed.
Rasmussen was unnerved by these visits and pleaded with Ruetten to tell Lazarus to stop coming by. Ruetten said there was nothing to their relationship, and that she should ignore Lazarus. According to Nels Rasmussen, Sherri's father, Lazarus later visited Sherri at her office to tell her that things were not over between her and Ruetten. She told Sherri, "If I can't have John, no one else will."
Ruetten and Rasmussen married in November 1985. Shortly before her death, Sherri again confided to her father, telling him she feared that Lazarus was stalking her on the street.
Crime and investigation.
On the morning of February 24, 1986, Ruetten left the couple's condominium on Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys to go to work. Rasmussen was scheduled to give a motivational speech at work that day, a managerial tactic she did not feel was effective. To avoid it, she told Ruetten she might call in sick, using a back injury she had incurred while doing aerobics the day before as an excuse.
At 9:45 a.m., a neighbor noticed that the Ruettens' garage door was open, with no car visible. Approximately fifteen minutes later, Ruetten made the first of several unanswered calls home over the course of the day. Rasmussen's sister also called, getting no answer. At noon, two men, who the neighbor believed were gardeners in the compound, gave her and her husband a purse that they had found, which turned out to be Rasmussen's. A maid cleaning a nearby unit said she heard something that sounded like two people fighting, and then something falling, at around 12:30 p.m.
When Ruetten returned home in the evening, he found his garage door open and broken glass on the driveway. In addition, he discovered that the BMW he bought for Rasmussen as an engagement gift was missing. Because of Rasmussen's morning plans, he found it strange that she would have later gone out without letting him know. The house's answering machine had not been activated, although both of them usually activated it when leaving the house unoccupied.
Inside, Ruetten found Rasmussen dead on the living room floor, shot three times. There were signs of a struggle, such as a broken porcelain vase, a bloody handprint next to the burglar alarm's panic button, and a toppled credenza. It appeared that someone had attempted to bind Rasmussen at some point. She had defensive wounds and a bruise on her face that appeared to have been inflicted by the muzzle of a gun. The gun had been fired through a quilted blanket, apparently to muffle the sound. The investigating criminalist also observed a bite mark on Rasmussen's arm and took a swab from it for DNA.
Initial investigation.
LAPD detectives investigating the case quickly concluded that Rasmussen had been surprised and killed by a burglar. Rasmussen's attire (a bathrobe, nightgown, and underwear) suggested she was not expecting visitors. Although a maid in a neighboring unit reported hearing screaming and fighting earlier in the day, she did not recall hearing gunshots. She thought the whole event had been a domestic dispute and did not call the police. It appeared that the perpetrator had been in the process of taking electronic equipment when Rasmussen came upon them. Jewelry had been left behind and the vehicle taken as a getaway. The abandoned BMW was recovered a week later; it yielded no new evidence. The only other item that appeared to have been taken from the home was the couple's marriage license.
Lead detective Lyle Mayer did consider other possibilities. He quickly ruled out Ruetten as a suspect. Ruetten quit his job and moved away from Los Angeles shortly after the murder. Nels Rasmussen and his wife, Loretta, told Mayer about Lazarus's harassment, and saw that he made a note of it. Ruetten later told police that he and Rasmussen had never discussed Lazarus.
The police remained focused on the possibility of burglary, especially in light of one reported later in the same area, in which one of the two reported suspects had been carrying a gun, possibly a .38 caliber like the one that had fired the three bullets into Rasmussen. The bullets were later identified by experts as Federal .38J Plus-P. Mayer's partner, Steve Hooks, found the bite mark unusual, as bites during struggles are much more commonly inflicted by women, while the majority of burglars are men. However, because men have bitten opponents during fights as well, the burglary theory stood.
Cold case.
The suspected burglars to whom detectives ascribed the crime remained at large, despite a follow-up newspaper story eight months later and a reward offered by the Rasmussen family. The LAPD, preoccupied with the violence resulting from gang wars and the crack epidemic plaguing the city at the time, was unable to devote much more attention to the case. The Rasmussens said that detectives at the Van Nuys office were often unhelpful when the family called, hanging up or putting them on hold. 
A year after the murder, the frustrated family reiterated their offer of a reward at a press conference and called for more action. Nels wrote to Daryl Gates, then chief of the LAPD, about the possibility that Lazarus might have been involved. Detectives told him he "watch[ed] too much television." He continued to publicize the reward, and later worked with the short-lived television series "Murder One" on a segment inspired by the case.
Nels Rasmussen in particular was unconvinced that Sherri – who was tall, had a large frame, and was in good physical shape – had been the victim of a botched burglary. It would have been a struggle for anyone to subdue her in close quarters. Mayer had told him at one point that the events may have lasted an hour and a half, a long time for burglars who were believed to be primarily after items of value in the home. Further, whoever shot his daughter had fired directly into her chest at close range and taken the trouble to muffle the shot with the quilt. This suggested that the killing was deliberate and not the accidental byproduct of a struggle.
Mayer eventually retired, and the new detective assigned to the case told Nels that he was unable to follow up on Mayer's notes and did not think that any new leads would emerge. Nels was rebuffed again in 1993 when he offered to pay for DNA testing on the evidence from the murder, now that the technology was available; he was told that the police had to have a suspect in order to proceed with testing. Lazarus briefly reunited with Ruetten in 1989. Mayer's notes show that Ruetten had called him and asked if he was absolutely sure there was no evidence linking Lazarus with his late wife's death.
In the meantime, Lazarus continued working with the LAPD. She also started her own private investigation firm, Unique Investigations. In 1993, after stints at the department's Drug Abuse Resistance Education and internal affairs divisions, she was promoted to detective.
Three years later, she married a fellow officer and adopted a daughter with him, moving back to Simi Valley. At work she became an instructor at the police academy. Ruetten eventually remarried as well; he did not pressure the police as his former father-in-law had.
In the late 1990s, after DNA testing had become more prominent and techniques improved, the LAPD formed a new unit that looked through the forensic evidence collected from the department's cold case files to determine whether any had the potential for new leads through DNA testing. Among the evidence seen as likely to do so was that collected from the Rasmussen residence. However,