Los Angeles 1986 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocked Police Department 

Los Angeles 1986 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocked Police Department 

It was just after 6:00 in the evening on February 24th, 1986, when John Ruetten pulled into the driveway of his Van Nuys condominium and noticed something that didn’t belong. The garage door was hanging open. He had been married for exactly 3 months. Inside, on the living room floor, he found his wife, Sherri Rasmussen, 29 years old, a brilliant young hospital director beaten, bitten, and shot three times in the chest.

 The Los Angeles Police Department would tell him she had surprised a burglar. They would tell her father the same thing. They would repeat that story for 23 years, because the truth was something the LAPD could not bring itself to say out loud. The killer wasn’t a stranger who slipped through a window.

 The killer was already wearing their uniform. This is the story of the cold case that finally exposed one of their own. The condominium on Balboa Boulevard looked, at first glance, like the aftermath of a violent home invasion. A heavy ceramic vase lay in pieces on the floor. A tall wooden stereo speaker had been knocked sideways, its weight resting against Sherri’s head.

 The display cabinet was askew. A stereo amplifier and receiver dangled precariously off the edge of the TV set, as though someone had begun ripping the room apart and stopped mid-motion. By the foot of the stairs leading to the garage, a VCR and stereo receiver had been neatly stacked, as if waiting to be carried out. But, the longer the responding officers looked, the stranger the scene became.

There was no forced entry, not at the front door, not at the garage, not at any window. A sliding glass door upstairs had been shattered. But, the broken glass lay scattered on the driveway below, meaning the glass had been broken from the inside out. A burglar breaking out of a house, rather than into one, made no sense at all.

And, while expensive jewelry sat undisturbed in plain sight throughout the home, the one item that was missing from the master bedroom wasn’t a stereo or a watch or a piece of gold. It was the couple’s marriage certificate. Sherry herself lay on the floor in her sleep shirt and bathrobe. Her wrists bore deep abrasions from a blood-stained white nylon cord recovered near the front door.

 Her face was savagely lacerated. One wound matching the precise muzzle shape of a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. She had been pistol-whipped, struck with the ceramic vase hard enough to crack her skull, and then shot three times in the chest. One of those shots a contact wound fired with the barrel pressed directly against her body after she was already lying flat on her back on the floor.

 Two broken pieces of her fingernails lay near the foyer suggesting she had clawed at her attacker during a long and desperate struggle. And then there was the bite mark. A deep defined human bite sunk into the inner aspect of her left forearm. Forensic analysts would later determine the bite was inflicted at or within minutes of her death.

 Close enough to the moment of dying that the tissue had barely begun to respond. This was not the work of a stranger looking for electronics. This was something else entirely. Something personal. Something furious. But to understand who Sherri Rasmussen really was and why someone would want her not just dead but punished, we have to go back to the beginning.

 Sherri Rae Rasmussen had been, by every available measure, exceptional. She was born on February 7th, 1957 in Walla Walla, Washington and raised in Tucson, Arizona, the middle daughter of Nels and Loretta Rasmussen. From the earliest years of her education, it was obvious she did not move at the same pace as the world around her. She skipped the eighth grade entirely.

She graduated from Thunderbird Adventist Academy at 16. She entered La Sierra University the same year and completed her general undergraduate curriculum in a single 12-month sprint before being accepted into the nursing program at Loma Linda University. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing at 20.

 She walked straight into the coronary care unit at UCLA Medical Center. While most of her peers were still studying for their first board exams, she was already practicing and earning her Master of Science in Nursing from UCLA in 1980. The university appointed her as an assistant clinical professor and she began lecturing students who were in many cases older than she was.

By the age of 27, Sherri Rasmussen had been named director of critical care nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. She oversaw an entire critical care division. Colleagues described her as kind, authoritative, and relentlessly driven. She had goals, real concrete ones.

 She wanted to expand her clinical nursing research. She wanted to raise a family. In June of 1984, at a social gathering, she met a young mechanical engineer named John Ruetten. They fell [clears throat] in love quickly. They got engaged in June of 1985. They were married in November of that year. To celebrate the new chapter, Sherri’s father bought them a condominium in Van Nuys, choosing a unit with a built-in garage specifically because he wanted his daughter to be safe walking from her car to her front door after her late hospital shifts. He was a careful man, a

protective father. He wanted no harm to come to her, but shortly after the wedding, the couple had to install a home alarm system because the phone had begun ringing at strange hours, and on the other end there was always silence. Sherri was being stalked. She knew it. Her family knew it.

 And the person stalking her was not some anonymous shadow. She had a name. She had a face. And she had a badge. Her name was Stephanie Eilene Lazarus. She had been born in 1960 and raised in Simi Valley, California. She’d attended UCLA from 1978 to 1982, majoring in political science and sociology, and played on the school’s junior varsity women’s basketball team.

Somewhere between freshman orientation and graduation, she had met a young man named John Ruetten. They had dated, in her telling. They had hooked up occasionally, in his. The asymmetry of that memory would matter enormously, because for John Ruetten the relationship was casual, intermittent, forgettable. But for Stephanie Lazarus, John was quite simply the man she believed she was supposed to end up with.

 In 1983, Lazarus graduated from the Los Angeles Police Academy. She had been recruited as part of a deliberate departmental push to increase female representation following a federal sex discrimination consent decree. Upon graduating, she was issued among other things a Smith & Wesson Model 49, a five-shot .

38 caliber revolver with a 2-in barrel, as her personal off-duty backup firearm. She was assigned first to the Hollywood Division. Her diaries from this period show a young officer absorbing the culture around her, growing more hardened, more insular, more loyal to the badge than to anything beyond it. But through it all, she kept writing about John.

 When John met Sherri in 1984, Lazarus’s diary entries grew darker. When John and Sherri got engaged in June 1985, Lazarus wrote, in her own handwriting, “I really don’t feel like working. I found out that John is getting married. My concentration is like -10.” And then she started showing up. In the summer of 1985, Lazarus walked into Glendale Adventist Medical Center and confronted Sherri Rasmussen in her own office.

There, according to what Sherri later told her family, Lazarus delivered a sentence that should have ended any investigation before it began. She said, “If I can’t have John, no one else will, including you.” She didn’t stop there. In January of 1986, Sherri returned to her own condominium and discovered Stephanie Lazarus already inside it, in full LAPD uniform.

Lazarus claimed she had come over to wax John’s snow skis. To Sherri, the message was unmistakable. I can get to you. I have a uniform. I have a gun. I can walk into your house and there is nothing you can do about it. Sherri told her father everything. She was terrified. And 6 weeks later, she was dead.

 But here is what makes this case unbearable. From the very first day, Nils Rasmussen tried to tell the police exactly who had done it. The question is why nobody for over two decades was willing to listen. The lead detective on the case was Lyle Mayer of the LAPD’s Van Nuys division. He stood inside the condominium on the night of February 24th, 1986, looked at the stacked stereo equipment near the garage door, and reached a conclusion almost immediately.

Sherri Rasmussen had walked in on burglars. They had panicked. They had killed her. To understand how a theory this thin could anchor an entire investigation, you have to understand what the LAPD was in 1986. Los Angeles was in the grip of the crack cocaine epidemic. Gang violence was tearing through entire neighborhoods.

Homicide divisions were stretched thin. Under Chief Daryl Gates, the department had cultivated a paramilitary defensive culture that prized speed and street toughness far more than meticulous casework. Just a few years earlier, the Hollywood division, Stephanie Lazarus’ first posting, had been gutted by the Hollywood burglar scandal in which 14 officers had been fired for burglarizing local businesses while in uniform.

The department was bruised, embarrassed, and operating under an unwritten internal code, admit nothing, deny everything, demand proof. When a few weeks later, two Latino men were spotted burglarizing another home in the same Van Nuys neighborhood, the LAPD seized on it. Suspect sketches were drawn up.

 Resources were poured into chasing those two men. And when Nels Rasmussen called Detective Mayor to tell him about his daughter’s stalker, about the LAPD officer who had threatened her, confronted her at the hospital, walked uninvited into her living room in uniform, Mayor reportedly brushed him off. According to Nels, the detective told him he should stop watching so much television.

The original case file, the so-called murder book, confirms what Nels feared. The LAPD never interviewed Stephanie Lazarus during the initial investigation. Not once. Not as a person of interest. Not as a witness. Not even to rule her out. 13 days after the murder, Stephanie Lazarus walked into the Santa Monica Police Department and reported her personal backup revolver, a five-shot .

38 caliber Smith & Wesson with a 2-in barrel, stolen. She did not report it to her own department, as LAPD rules required. The LAPD never cross-referenced the report. Three days before that, Sherri’s stolen BMW had been found abandoned just 2 and 1/2 miles from the murder scene. Keys still in the ignition. Real burglars strip cars.

 Real burglars sell them. This car had simply been parked. Every single piece of physical evidence at that scene screamed that the burglary was staged. The ballistics screamed it. The bullets recovered from Sherri’s body were Federal .38 Jewel plus P rounds, the mandatory standard issue ammunition for every LAPD officer in 1986.

The bite mark screamed it. The missing marriage certificate screamed it. And still, the case went cold by the end of the year. Stephanie Lazarus, meanwhile, was promoted. In 1989, she vacationed in Hawaii with John Ruetten and resumed a brief sexual relationship with him. In 1994, she was promoted to detective.

 She eventually rose to the LAPD’s elite art theft detail, working out of the department’s iconic downtown Parker Center headquarters. She was, by every visible measure, a respected, decorated officer of the law. While she climbed, Sherri’s parents made phone call after phone call after phone call. The case was buried.

The killer had a badge, and one swab, one tiny piece of cotton that had been sitting in a coroner’s freezer for nearly two decades, was about to change everything. In 2003, the LAPD’s newly expanded cold case unit, operating under the robbery homicide division, was given a task that bordered on impossible.

 Review more than 9,000 unsolved homicides using modern forensic technologies that had not existed when the original crimes were committed. The Rasmussen file was one of those cases. In 2004, a criminalist with the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division, named Jennifer Francis, began to systematically audit the physical evidence in the file.

 She noticed something missing. The bite mark swab. The cotton-tipped sample that had been used in 1986 to collect saliva from the deep bite on Sherri Rasmussen’s forearm was not in the LAPD’s central evidence lockers. It had never been booked in. It had simply vanished into the bureaucratic machinery of the department.

 Francis kept looking, and eventually she found it, not in any LAPD facility, but in a freezer at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, where it had been quietly preserved, untouched for 18 years. Using PCR-STR technology that hadn’t even existed in 1986, Francis extracted DNA from the saliva on that swab. The result was unambiguous.

 The major DNA profile from the bite, the profile of the person who had bitten Sherri Rasmussen seconds before her death, was female, not male, not two males, female. In a single laboratory result, the official LAPD theory of the case, that two men had killed Sherri in a botched burglary had been completely demolished.

Francis brought her finding to cold case detective Cliff Shepard in early 2005. And what happened next is, in many ways, the most damning chapter in the entire case. According to Francis, Shepard refused to redirect the investigation. He told her, flatly, “This is a male-female burglary.” The case file was returned to storage.

The female DNA profile was effectively shelved, and nobody else was contacted for four more years. Francis later filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that her supervisors had pressured her to suppress the finding to protect the department from embarrassment. And that when she pushed back, she was subjected to retaliatory psychological evaluations that violated standard department policy.

A civil jury would ultimately reject her case in 2019, but the lawsuit exposed something the LAPD could no longer hide. The structural resistance to solving this case wasn’t an accident. It was institutional. It took until February of 2009, six full years after the cold case unit first opened the file, and 23 years after the murder, for a different detective to look at the evidence with fresh eyes.

His name was Jim Nuttall, and he asked one simple question that nobody in 23 years had been allowed to ask. If the killer was a woman, who were the women in Sherri Rasmussen’s life who might have wanted her dead? He compiled a list of five names. Four of them, Sherri’s sister, her mother, a close female friend, and a hospital co-worker, were quickly eliminated through reference DNA samples.

 The fifth name on his list was Stephanie Lazarus. And now, 23 years too late, the LAPD finally turned its eyes inward. There was an enormous problem with making Stephanie Lazarus the target of an LAPD investigation. She was the LAPD. She was a decorated detective. She worked inside Parker Center, the department’s downtown nerve center.

 She carried a gun every day. She had access to internal databases, internal channels, internal whisper networks. If she ever caught wind of being investigated, she could destroy evidence, flee, or worse. Not all in the robbery homicide team knew that getting a DNA reference sample from her would be the most delicate maneuver of the entire case.

 They couldn’t simply ask. They couldn’t subpoena her. They had to take it from her without her knowing. In May of 2009, an undercover LAPD surveillance team began quietly following her. They watched her shop. They watched her commute. And one day, they watched her walk into a Costco wholesale store in Southern California.

They watched her pick up a drink. They watched her sip from a plastic cup with a straw. And then they watched her throw it away in a public trash receptacle. The moment her back was turned, they took it. Inside the LAPD’s forensic laboratory, analysts extracted a partial DNA profile from the saliva on that straw.

Two days later, the results came back. The profile precisely matched the major female DNA profile recovered from the bite mark on Sherri Rasmussen’s forearm. The probability of an alternate match was eventually calculated at 1 in 1.7 sextillion, a number so astronomically high that the human brain cannot really hold it.

Now they had her. The only question was how to arrest a working LAPD detective inside LAPD headquarters without anyone getting hurt. On June 5th, 2009, detectives Dan Jaramillo and Greg Stearns of the robbery homicide division walked up to Stephanie Lazarus at her desk in the art theft detail. They were calm. They were casual.

They told her there was an art theft suspect downstairs in the basement jail facility who was asking specifically to speak with an art theft specialist. Could she come down and help? She agreed. She left her service weapon at her desk. She left her handcuffs. She rode the elevator down into the basement of Parker Center and walked into what she believed was an ordinary interview room.

It was, in fact, soundproofed, wired for video, wired for audio, and waiting. The interrogation that followed was a master class in tactical restraint. Jaramillo and Stearns spent nearly an hour making small talk. They asked about her career, her hobbies, her time at UCLA. They never gave her what’s called a Garrity warning, the formal notification that compels public employees to answer questions but grants them immunity in criminal proceedings, because they wanted to keep the conversation legally voluntary and her statements admissible.

Then, gently, they introduced the name John Ruetten. Her arms crossed, her fingers began to tap. She started to minimize. She said she could barely remember him. She said she might have slept with him once or twice. She denied any hostility toward Sherri Rasmussen, and then the detectives asked the question that broke her.

 Would she be willing to provide a voluntary DNA sample to help eliminate her from an old case? In that instant, Stephanie Lazarus understood exactly what was happening. She refused. She stood up. She tried to walk out. She was placed under arrest for the murder of Sherri Rasmussen. 23 years to the day from when she had first walked into Sherri’s hospital office and threatened her life.

But an arrest is not a conviction. And the LAPD now face something almost unprecedented, putting one of their own decorated detectives on trial for murder in front of a Los Angeles jury using evidence the department itself had nearly buried. The trial of People v. Lazarus began in early 2012 in the Los Angeles County Superior Court with Judge Perry presiding.

 The lead prosecutors, Deputy District Attorneys Shannon Presley and Paul Nunez, constructed a theme so simple and so devastating that it stayed lodged in the minds of jurors throughout the entire trial. A bite, a bullet, a gun barrel, a broken heart. The bite was the DNA, that one in 1.7 sextillion match linking Lazarus beyond any reasonable scientific doubt to the wound on Sherri Rasmussen’s arm.

The bullet was the ballistics Federal 238 Joule plus P rounds, the LAPD issued ammunition fired from a five-shot 2-in barrel revolver matching the exact specifications of the Smith & Wesson Model 49 that Lazarus had reported stolen 2 weeks after the murder. The gun barrel was the laceration on Sherri’s face, perfectly matching the muzzle profile of that very same weapon, evidence that Lazarus had pistol-whipped her victim before executing her on the floor.

 And the broken heart was Lazarus herself, read out page by page from her own diaries. The jury heard her own words about John getting married, about her concentration being -10, about her inability to focus, to function, to let go. The prosecution called a criminologist named Mark Safarik, who testified that the crime scene had been amateurishly staged to mimic a burglary, almost as if designed to mislead investigators who weren’t paying close attention.

 Lazarus’s defense attorney Mark Overland did everything he could to undermine the physical evidence rather than the narrative. He focused relentlessly on the integrity of the bite mark swab. He pointed to a hole in the paper envelope that had once held the vial, suggesting cross-contamination, suggesting tampering, suggesting that 23 years in a coroner’s freezer could have compromised the sample beyond reliability.

 He pointed to a bloody fingerprint on the living room wall that did not match Lazarus, he pointed to an unidentified male DNA profile recovered from a sleeved quilt found near Sherri’s body, and to a male hair found in the speaker wire. The original burglary theory, he argued, was still alive, but forensic analysts countered that the male DNA was likely background contamination from previous tenants of the condominium.

 The unit had been occupied by multiple people before the Ruitans moved in. And the bite mark DNA, the ballistics, the gun report, the diary entries, the hospital confrontation, the unforced entry, the missing marriage certificate together, they painted a picture too coherent to dismiss. On March 8th, 2012, after several days of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous verdict.

Stephanie Lazarus was guilty of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to 27 years to life in California State Prison. In 2015, the California Court of Appeal affirmed the conviction. The State Supreme Court declined to review the case. In 2018, the Rasmussen family won a separate civil judgment against Lazarus for $10 million in wrongful death damages, though the federal lawsuit they had filed against the city of Los Angeles and the LAPD itself, alleging a systemic conspiracy and cover-up, was dismissed on statute of limitations

grounds. It seemed finally that justice had arrived. Late, certainly. Imperfect, but arrived. And then, in November of 2023, in a small room inside a California prison, Stephanie Lazarus opened her mouth and said something nobody, not the jury, not the appellate judges, not even her own attorneys had ever heard her say. She confessed.

 It happened at her first formal parole hearing. For 37 years, Stephanie Lazarus had maintained her innocence. She had maintained it through her arrest, through her interrogation, through her trial, through her appeals, through the rejection of her appeals by both the State Appellate Court and the California Supreme Court.

 She had said nothing. And then, sitting before a parole panel in November 2023, she said, “It makes me sick to this day that I took an oath to protect and serve people, and I took Sherri Rasmussen’s life.” But the version of events she offered alongside that confession was to the families who had waited nearly four decades for the truth, something close to obscene.

Lazarus claimed she had only gone to the condominium with a nylon cord intending to tie Sherri up or strangle her if she got in the way. She claimed that during a physical struggle her revolver had fallen out of her fanny pack and that the shooting had been almost accidental, a fight gone wrong, a weapon that simply discharged.

The parole panel, astonishingly, initially recommended her release. The reaction was immediate and ferocious. The Rasmussen family was devastated. John Ruetten objected. The LAPD pushed back. And in April of 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom personally intervened, formally requesting a full board review in writing that Lazarus evaded justice for more than two decades and did not appear to begin taking full accountability until she was finally caught.

 In October of 2024, the full parole board rescinded the recommendation. And at a follow-up hearing on February 12th, 2025, Commissioner Kevin Chappell denied parole outright. He explained in plain terms that Lazarus’s account of a mutual fight and an accidental discharge was simply incompatible with the physical evidence. You do not accidentally pistol-whip someone hard enough to leave the imprint of a muzzle on their face.

You do not accidentally press a gun barrel directly against a person’s chest and pull the trigger while they are lying flat on their back. You do not accidentally inflict a bite deep enough to draw blood on a woman bound at the wrists with cord. The evidence, Sherri’s broken fingernails, her shattered skull, her contact wound, the muffling quilt wrapped around the gun, described an execution, not a struggle.

 Stephanie Lazarus remains incarcerated at the California Institution for Women in Corona. Her Her parole eligibility is set for 2028. The Sherri Rasmussen case has, in the years since the conviction, become one of the most studied investigations in modern American criminology. Police academies across the country now use it as a primary case study in cognitive bias, in the danger of premature investigative closure, and in the catastrophic cost of organizational loyalty over truth.

 Departments have modernized their evidence preservation systems precisely because the swab that solved this case was nearly lost forever. Cognitive bias training has been integrated into detective curriculums, alongside what’s called the Reid team approach, the discipline of actively testing alternative hypotheses rather than locking onto the first theory that walks through the door.

But none of those reforms, none of those textbook chapters, none of those academy lectures can return what was taken on the night of February 24th, 1986. Sherri Rasmussen was 29 years old. She had skipped a grade. She had earned a master’s degree. She had become a director of critical care nursing before most of her peers had finished training.

She had married a man she loved. She had been planning for children, for research, for a future. Her father warned the police. Her father named the suspect. Her father called and called and called and was told to stop watching TV. For 23 years, the killer climbed the same ranks of the same department that had been told, over and over again, exactly who she was.

And it was only because a swab was forgotten in a freezer, only because one criminalist refused to let the science be ignored, only because one detective finally asked the obvious question that Sherri Rasmussen’s murder was solved at all. It is a story of justice, but it is also a warning. Because somewhere, in some other freezer, in some other file box, in some other forgotten case, the next swab is waiting.

There is one question this case has never fully answered. A bloody fingerprint on the living room wall that did not match Stephanie Lazarus. An unidentified male DNA profile recovered from the quilt used to muffle the gunshots. A male hair tangled in the speaker wire. Forensic analysts ultimately concluded these were almost certainly background traces left behind by previous tenants, but almost certainly is a long way from absolutely.

 If you want to know what happens when a single piece of unexplained evidence refuses to fit the official story, and how another decades-old cold case was finally cracked open by the smallest detail everyone overlooked, the next video on your screen is where that story begins. Click it now. Because somewhere in that case, too, the truth had been sitting in plain sight the entire time, waiting for someone to finally look.