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. Not really sure why this matters, but 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.
