CALIFORNIA 1986 Cold Case Solved After 23 Years — The Killer Wore a Badge

On February 24th, 1986, a 29-year-old nursing director named Sher Rasmusen was beaten, bitten, and shot three times inside her van condo in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Police Department called it a burglary gone wrong. Case closed, more or less. Cherry’s father told detectives he knew exactly who killed his daughter.

 He gave them a name. He begged  them to investigate. They told him he watched too much television. For 23 years, the real killer walked free. She got promoted. She got married. She won awards. And the whole time she was wearing  an LAPD badge. But there was one thing she left behind at that crime scene in the San Fernando Valley.

 A bite mark on Sher Rasmusen’s arm. And inside that bite mark was a secret that would take two decades to unlock. This is the story of a murder the LAPD could have solved in 1986. The story of a family that never stopped fighting and the story of a killer who thought her badge made her untouchable. If you believe forgotten victims deserve to have their stories told, subscribe to this channel.

 We cover cold cases that everyone else gave up on. And this one  sat cold for 23 years before the truth finally came  out. To understand how Sherry Rasmuson  ended up dead on her own living room floor, you need to understand the kind of person she was. Because she wasn’t just a name in a case file. She was someone who mattered.

 Sherry Ray Rasmusen was born on February 7th, 1957  in Tucson, Arizona and raised in a close-knit 7th Day Adventist family. Her father, Nells, was a quiet, determined man. Her mother, Loretta, was warm and devoted. She had two  sisters, Teresa and Connie. Teresa would later say that Sherry was the glue that held the family together.

 From childhood, she stood out. Her sister Connie remembered that in kindergarten the teacher sir the teacher used Sherry as an assistant  because she was so far ahead of the other kids. She was bright, driven, and kind in a way that people remembered decades later. She graduated from Thunderbird Adventist Academy and started college at Lassiier University when she was just 16 years old.

 She transferred to Lomol Linda University for their nursing  program and entered the profession at 20. From there, she moved to UCLA Medical Center, working in the coronary care unit, one of the highest pressure environments in  any hospital. She earned her master’s degree from UCLA by the time she was 23. She became head nurse of UCLA’s coronary care and observation unit and served as an unpaid assistant clinical professor, lecturing nursing students on top of her regular shifts.

 By the time she was 27, she was the director of critical care nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center in Los Angeles, the youngest person to hold that title. She was 6 feet tall, athletic, and carried  herself with a confidence that put patients and colleagues at ease. Her mother, Loretta, once said Sherry liked taking care of people and making sure things were done right, that people were cared for  properly.

 Her father, Nells, remembered something Sherry told him about her ambition. She said she was going to elevate the stature of nursing in the nation, and he believed her. She was on her way. Nell’s worried about his daughter working late hospital shifts in Los Angeles. So, he bought her a condo in Van NY with a drive-in garage specifically so she would not have to walk the street after dark.

 Sherry paid him rent equal to his mortgage payment. That was the kind of relationship they had. Practical, loving, built on looking out for each other. Sher Rasmusen was not just a victim. She was a woman who saved lives for a living, who outworked everyone around her, and who  was building something meaningful.

 The story of what happened to her is not just a crime story. It is the story of what was stolen from the world when she died. If you are already pulled into this story, a like on this video helps more people find it. Now, let me tell you how Sherry met the man who changed everything. In the early 1980s, a young mechanical engineering student named John Ruitton was living in Dickstra Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He was from San Diego, quiet, focused on his studies. After graduating in 1981, he took a job at Data Products, a computer peripherals manufacturer, and later moved to Micropolis, a hard drive company based in Chadzsworth in the San Frernando  Valley. He was building a conventional engineering career. Nothing flashy.

 Also living in Dickstra Hall during Rouettton’s time at UCLA was a woman named Stephanie Lazarus.  She was a political science and sociology major from Seami Valley who played on the junior varsity women’s basketball team. She was outgoing, athletic, and competitive. And  she was interested in John Ruiten.

 Between 1981 and 1984, the two had a casual on andoff physical  relationship. Ruitten would later testify under oath that they had slept together roughly 20 to  30 times over those years, but that he never considered Lazarus his girlfriend. He described it as friends with  benefits, necking and fooling around.

 Nothing serious on his end. He did not introduce her to his family. He didn’t consider them a couple. Lazarus saw things very differently. She took the relationship far more seriously than Ruin ever realized. She kept a foot locker of momentos connected to him. She once stole his clothes while he was in the shower.

 She photographed him while he slept in his underwear. That photograph would later be introduced as evidence at trial. Friends and acquaintances would later say she was deeply attached in a way that Ruettin either did not see or chose not to acknowledge. In June 1984, everything shifted. Ruettin met Sher Rasmusen at a party in Los Angeles.

 The attraction  was immediate. They started dating and it became clear quickly that this was different from anything Rouettin had experienced before. Sherry was warm, ambitious, grounded. She was the kind of person who made the people around her feel like they mattered. Within a year, Ruitten was in love in a way he had never been with Lazarus.

 He and Sherry got engaged in June 1985 and married on November 23rd of that year at a ceremony surrounded by both families. For Lazarus, the engagement was devastating. She wrote in her diary after learning the news that she didn’t feel like working and that her concentration was like -10. In August 1985, she wrote a letter to her mother confessing that she was truly in love with John  and that the past year had torn her up inside.

She said she wished it hadn’t ended the way it did and that she didn’t think she would ever understand his decision. And then Ruitin made the choice that would haunt him for the rest of his life. After he was already engaged to Sherry, he slept with Lazarus one final time.  He would later say on the witness stand that he did it to give her closure. He called it a mistake.

 He wept when he admitted it. He never told Sherry. That single decision did not cause what happened next. Lazarus’s obsession was already in motion long before that night, but it gave Lazarus a reason to believe the door was still open, and that belief would prove fatal. What Lazarus did next made it clear that this was not a woman moving on.

 By 1983, Stephanie Lazarus had joined the Los Angeles Police Department. Her first assignment was the Hollywood division, one of the roughest in the city. Through the department, she purchased a Smith and Wesson Model 49, a 38 caliber revolver as her backup firearm. In March 1985, she transferred  to the quieter Devincure Division in the San Fernando Valley.

 In the summer of 1985, not long after the engagement, Lazarus showed up at Glendale Advent Medical Center, where Sherry worked as the director of critical care nursing. She was wearing short shorts and a tank top. She found Sherry and told her face to face that she and John were still sleeping together. She told Sherry that when the marriage failed, she would be there to pick up the pieces.

 Sherry looked at her and said the services would not be needed. Lazarus’s response, according to what Sherry later told her father, was chilling. If I can’t have John, no one else will, including you. After that confrontation at the hospital, the harassment accelerated. There were hang-up calls at the couple’s condo on Baloa Boulevard.

  In January 1986, just weeks before the murder, Lazarus showed up at the condo to drop off skis for Rouett and to wax. She came back later, this time wearing her full LAPD uniform. She was  armed. On another occasion, Sherry came home to find Lazarus standing in her own living room in uniform, uninvited.

Sherry told her to get out. Sherry confided in her father. She told Nells that she believed Lazarus was following her through the streets of Los Angeles, sometimes dressed like a boy. She described Lazarus’s eyes as being able to see right through you. Nells listened carefully. He was a practical man, not someone who panicked easily.

 But something about these conversations with Sherry disturbed him deeply. The visits in uniform. The armed woman standing in his daughter’s living room uninvited. The stalking in disguise. This was not normal jealousy. This was something darker. He filed it all away. Every detail. every conversation.

 He did not yet know how important those memories would become. He did not know that within weeks  his daughter would be dead on the floor of the condo he bought to keep her safe, or that the woman Sherry feared would walk free for 23 years because the LAPD refused to listen to a father who was telling them the truth.

This is what Sher Ras Muen’s final morning looked like. February 24th, 1986, a Monday. Los Angeles was overcast. John Ruitton left their condo on Balboa Boulevard around 7:20 in the morning, heading to his engineering job in Chadzsworth. Sherry had been dealing with a back injury from an aerobics class and was dreading a motivational presentation she was supposed to give at the hospital that day.

 She told Jon she might call in sick. At 9:45 that morning, a neighbor in the complex noticed that the Ruitan’s garage door was open and the silver BMW 318i, the Car Nells had given Sherry as an engagement gift, was gone. At the time, nobody thought much of it. Around noon, a maid cleaning a nearby unit heard what sounded like two people fighting, something heavy falling.

 She assumed it was a domestic dispute and did not call the police. Around the same time, two men believed to be gardeners found Sherry’s purse outside and returned it to a neighbor. Throughout the day, Rouettin tried calling home from work. The phone rang and rang. The answering machine, which the couple always switched on when they left the house,  never picked up.

He came home around 6:00 in the evening. There was broken glass in the driveway. The silver BMW was gone. Something was wrong. He walked through the front door and into the living room. Sherry was on the floor. She had been shot three times in the chest. Each wound was independently fatal.

 The bullets had pierced her heart, her lungs, and her spine. She  had been beaten with a heavy porcelain vase that lay shattered nearby. She had been struck across the face with the barrel of a gun hard enough to bruise the imprint of the muzzle into her skin. The coroner would document 15 separate injuries to her face, including a lacerated frenulum from the pistol whipping.

 Two of her fingernails had been torn off  in the struggle. Sher Rasm had fought back with everything she had. The living room showed signs of a prolonged  violent struggle. a toppled credenza, broken furniture. The evidence told the story of a woman who did not go quietly. She fought for her life in that condo on Balboa Boulevard.

 And on her inner left forearm, there was a bite mark. Whoever attacked Sherry had bitten her during the struggle, hard enough to leave a clear impression in the skin. The gun had been fired through a quilted blanket pressed against her body to muffle the sound. Someone had taken precautions to keep the neighbors from hearing the shots.

 Near the front door, stereo and video equipment had been stacked neatly, as if someone were in the middle of carrying it out. Sherry’s BMW was missing from the garage. A bloody handprint was found on the wall next to the panic button of the burglar alarm. Sherry had tried to  reach the alarm. She almost made it, but the jewelry in the bedroom sat untouched in plain view.

The most portable, most valuable items in the condo had not been taken, and whoever stacked that stereo equipment had done it while wearing gloves. After Sherry was already dead or dying, the blood on the equipment was hers. It was not the scene of a robbery interrupted. It was a murder dressed up to look like one.

 Sometime after 2  in the morning, a criminalist from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office named Lloyd Mahaney  arrived at the scene. He processed the evidence methodically and then he noticed the bite mark on Sherry’s forearm. He opened  a swab kit, took a 6-in sample of the saliva left inside the wound, and placed it in a glass tube with a red stopper.

He sealed it inside a coroner’s evidence envelope and booked it into evidence the next morning. That small  tube was stored in a freezer at the coroner’s office, separate from the main LAPD  case file. It would sit there untouched for nearly two decades. It would outlast the lead detective’s career.

 It would outlast multiple chiefs of police. and it would eventually solve the murder of Sher Rasmusen. This case sat cold for 23 years. If you think every victim deserves a second chance at justice, hit subscribe. We tell the stories that almost stayed buried, and this one is far from over. The investigation into Sher Rasmusen’s murder was led by Detective Lyall Mayor out of the LAPD’s Van NY division  partnered with Detective Steve Hooks.

 Within days, they had settled on their theory. This was a hot prowl burglary. Intruders entered through the front door, which had been left unlocked after a friend visited the  previous evening. They were stacking electronics to steal when Sherry surprised them. They panicked, killed her, took her car, and fled. It was a clean, tidy theory.

 It fit into the kind of crime that Los Angeles saw every day in the mid 1980s. It let the detectives close the file without asking uncomfortable questions. And it was wrong. The problems with the burglary theory were obvious to anyone willing to look closely enough. Burglars almost never steal the victim’s  car. They drive their own.

A daytime break-in at a gated condo  complex was unusual and risky. The stereo equipment stacked near the front door had Sherry’s blood on it in a thumbrint-shaped printless stain. Meaning whoever arranged that equipment was wearing gloves and did it after Sherry was already dead or dying. That is staging.

 That is someone trying to make a murder look like something else. The jewelry in the bedroom, the most portable and most valuable property in the entire condo, was left untouched in plain view. No burglar would stack cheap electronics and leave expensive jewelry behind. And then there was the bite mark. Detective Hooks himself noted that the bite was unusual for a burglary.

 In violent physical struggles, bites are far more commonly inflicted by women than by men. The bite mark pointed toward a female attacker. Hooks observed it and then nothing was done about it. Nells and Loretta Rasmusen arrived from Arizona the day after the murder. Nells sat down with Detective Mayor and told him everything.

  His daughter had been terrorized by a woman, an ex-girlfriend of John’s, a police officer with the LAPD. Sherry had described the confrontation at the hospital, the hang-up phone calls, the uninvited visits in uniform,  the stalking. Nells considered this woman the prime suspect from day one.

 He gave Mayor her description. He  begged the detective to investigate. Mayor’s response was brief. There is nothing there. When Nells pressed the Vanise detectives a second time, the  dismissal was even more cutting. You watch too much television. John Ruitan also gave detectives Lazarus’s name during a second interview.

 He was uncomfortable and he held back the detail about sleeping with Lazarus after  his engagement, but he named her. That conversation was never properly documented in the murder book. The notes either were never made or later vanished from the file. In 1988, 2 years after the murder, Nells wrote a letter directly to LAPD Chief Daryl Gates.

 He named the ex-girlfriend officer. He requested intervention. He received no reply. In 1993, 7 years into their nightmare, the Rasmusens met with LAPD detectives face to face. They offered to pay out of their own pockets for private DNA testing on the evidence collected from Sherry’s body. They were turned down. The detectives told them to move on with their lives.

About 11 days after the murder, the silver BMW 318i was recovered  near Zomar Avenue and Cohasset Street, roughly 2 mi from the condo in the San Fernando Valley. It was unlocked with the keys still in the ignition. Investigators found fibers, possible blood stains, and four unmatched fingerprints inside.

None of them led anywhere. The car had been abandoned, not hidden. Whoever took it didn’t care about it. They only needed it to stage the scene. At the end of 1986, the Rasmusen case was recorded as one of 293 unsolved LAPD homicides for that year. Los Angeles recorded 831 murders total. The department was overwhelmed.

Detectives were handling enormous case loads, and the pressure to close  cases and move on was relentless. In that environment, a burglary homicide with no immediate leads was easy to shove. But this was not a case with no leads. This was a case where the victim’s family walked into the police station and named the killer, and the LAPD chose not to listen.

 Lyall Mayer retired from the department in 1991 without ever investigating  the lead that Nells Rasmusen had handed him on a plate. The case file sat in a box. The bitemark swab sat in a freezer at the coroner’s office and the woman who killed Sher Rasmusen sat at a desk inside an LAPD station polishing her badge.

 While the Rasmusen family was writing letters and begging for meetings and being told to move on with their lives, Stephanie Lazarus was building exactly the kind of career she wanted. 2 weeks after the murder, in March 1986, Lazarus walked into the Santa Monica Police Department  and reported that her Smith and Wesson 38 caliber backup revolver had been stolen, the same caliber used to kill Sher Raz Muen.

She filed the report with Santa Monica police instead of the LAPD despite department regulations requiring officers to report stolen weapons internally. The gun was never recovered. That detail would not surface for decades. Lazarus continued climbing the ranks. She made detective in 1993. She married a fellow LAPD officer named Scott Young in 1996.

  They adopted a daughter around 2007. By 2006, she was working in the LAPD’s RT theft detail, the only full-time municipal art crime unit in the entire country. She trained under veteran detective Don Rissik and earned media coverage in 2008 when she and her partner recovered a stolen bronze gold rush statue called Dan the Miner from a park in Cara Circle.

 She competed in police athletic events and won medals. She traveled to police Olympics competitions. Colleagues in the art theft detail described her as vivacious and supportive, the kind of detective you wanted on your team. Some of them had noticed a temper underneath the surface and given her the nickname Spizarus behind her back.

 But nobody connected that temper to anything violent. She was a cop’s cop. Think about that for a moment. the woman who had beaten,  bitten, and shot a 29-year-old nurse inside her own home, who had staged a fake burglary to cover her tracks, and reported her murder weapon stolen to a different police department to avoid  internal scrutiny, spent the next two decades solving crimes, recovering stolen artwork, and building a reputation as one of the department’s most dedicated officers.

She sat in LAPD  offices. She attended department functions. She worked cases. She earned commendations. And she worked in the same department that held the case file on the unsolved murder of Sher Rasmusen. A file that at one point had contained notes mentioning her name. Notes that over the years would mysteriously disappear.

 And the file itself was not untouched. Investigative reporting would later reveal that interview recordings and handwritten notes referencing Lazarus had gone missing from the murder book over the years. Lazarus, as an LAPD detective,  would have had plausible access to the case files during the 1990s.

 Whether she tampered with the evidence remains an allegation, never formally proven, but the gaps in the file are documented, and they are difficult to explain. In November 2001, the LAPD finally created something the department had needed for decades, a dedicated cold case homicide unit. Detective David Lamin was tasked with leading a small team through roughly 7,745 unsolved homicide cases from 1960 to 1998.

They sorted, categorized, and flagged  approximately 1,400 cases that had forensic evidence worth retesting with modern DNA technology. The murder of Sher Rasmusen was among them. Between 2004 and 2005, Detective Cliff Shepard pulled the Rasmusen file from the pile and began reviewing it with fresh eyes.

 Working alongside criminalist Jennifer Francis from the LAPD Scientific Investigation Division, he set out to determine whether the old biological evidence could still yield usable DNA. Francis  tracked down the bitemark swab that Lloyd Mahaney had collected at the crime scene nearly two decades earlier.

 The glass tube with the red stopper sealed  inside its coroner’s evidence envelope had been sitting in a freezer at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office since February 25th, 1986. It had survived there precisely because it was stored separately from the main LAPD case file. If it had been kept with the murder book, there is no guarantee it would have still been intact.

 Francis ran the DNA. The result changed everything. The profile extracted from the bite mark belonged to an unidentified female, not a male burglar, not two male intruders, a woman. The entire burglary gone wrong theory, the foundation, the LAPD had built its case on for 19  years collapsed in a single lab report.

 Everything the original detectives had assumed,  everything they had told the Rasmusen family, everything that had kept the case frozen for two decades was demonstrably wrong.  The DNA was run through cod, the national DNA database maintained by the FBI. No match  was returned. The unknown woman’s profile was not in the system.

 Stephanie Lazarus had never been arrested or required to submit a DNA sample. So, her genetic profile simply did not exist in any  law enforcement database. But Jennifer Francis saw the implications clearly. She had read the case file. She knew that the victim had been harassed by a third-p party female before the murder, a woman connected to the victim’s husband, a woman who was an LAPD officer.

 Francis suggested investigating this angle. She pushed for it. The supervising detective reportedly shut her down. The woman, he said, was not a part of this. Francis would later allege that she was pressured to steer away from the Lazarus lead and that she faced retaliation for pushing the issue. She would eventually file a lawsuit against the LAPD, claiming she had been punished for trying to follow the evidence where it led.

 The case went to trial in 2019 and a jury found for the city of Los Angeles. The verdict was upheld on appeal. But the fact that a criminalist had identified the right suspect in 2005 and been told to stand down is one of the most troubling elements of this entire case. Shepard, meanwhile, was reassigned to a serial killer task force.

 The Rasmusen file went back on the shelf. Shephard would later say his single  greatest regret was not going back to interview John Ruitten. One conversation with Ruitten would have  produced Lazarus’s name, just as it had 19 years before when Ruitten told the original detectives and nobody wrote it down.

 The case could have been solved in 2005. The evidence was right there. The DNA was tested. The result pointed directly  to a female killer. and someone decided not to follow the lead. The tube with the red stopper went back into  storage. It would wait three more years for someone willing to listen to what it had to say. In March 2008, a Vanise homicide detective named Jim Nuttle found a box near his desk.

 Inside was the Rasmusen case  file. Nuttle along with his partner Pete Barbara, supervisor Rob Bub, and Detective Mark Martinez cracked it open and started reading. Two things jumped out at Nutall immediately. The first was the 2005 DNA report showing the bite mark belonged to an unidentified female. The second was the stereo equipment staged at the front door stained with Sherry’s blood in a way that made no sense as a burglary.

Nuttle’s reasoning was straightforward. If you wanted that stereo equipment, he said later, you had every opportunity in the world to walk out the door with it. Why stack it and leave it? You start to draw the conclusion that murder was the main goal, not the burglary. He and his team re theorized the case from scratch.

This was not a burglary interrupted. This was a murder staged to look like a burglary. And the killer was female. They compiled a list of five female suspects who had any connection to Sher Rasmusen or to the circumstances of her death. The process  was methodical. They would eliminate each woman one by one, either through alibi evidence or DNA comparison against the unknown female profile from the bite mark.

 The first three were eliminated quickly. Sherry’s sister Teresa, her mother Loretta, and a close female friend all provided DNA samples. All cleared. Their profiles did not match the evidence from the crime scene. The fourth suspect,  a disgruntled nurse from Glendale Adventist Medical Center, who had clashed with Sherry over workplace issues, was eliminated through a covertly collected DNA sample.

 Four down. The fifth name on the list was Stephanie Lazarus. Nuttle knew he needed to talk to John Ruitten carefully without revealing the direction of the investigation. He made contact. The conversation that followed stunned him. Ruettin  confirmed everything. The obsessive ex-girlfriend, the confrontations at the hospital and at the condo, the visits in full LAPD uniform, the threats, and the fact that Stephanie Lazarus was not just a jealous woman.

 She was a trained, armed Los Angeles police officer. Then Ruitton told Nuttle something that made the detectives blood run cold. He had given the original detectives Lazarus’s name 23 years earlier. He had told them about the ex-girlfriend. He had told them she was a cop. And he had assumed for over two decades that the LAPD  had investigated her and cleared her.

 They never investigated her, not once. And the conversation between Ruin and the original detectives was never properly documented in the murder book. The notes either were never written or had been removed from the file at some point during the intervening years. The investigation became one of the most sensitive in LAPD history.

 Lazarus’s husband, Scott Young, was also a detective working out of the Vanise division. Lazarus herself had access to LAPD databases and case records. If she found out she was being investigated, the evidence could disappear. She might run. The team referred to her only as number five. They worked after hours.

 They developed cover stories to pull her old personnel records and firearms purchase  history without raising suspicion inside the department. The evidence was building. The motive was documented in her own diary and letters. The 38 caliber bullets matched her backup weapon. The DNA pointed to a female, but they needed one final piece to lock it down.

 A DNA sample from Stephanie Lazarus herself. The detectives briefed their chain of command all the way up to LAPD Chief William Bratton. They coordinated with Deputy District Attorney Shannon Presby and the DA’s office. Everyone understood the stakes. They were about to investigate a decorated colleague for murder.

 Under California law, voluntarily discarded DNA can be collected without a warrant. If Lazarus threw something away in public, they could take it and test it. They just had to wait for the right moment. On May 19th, 2009, the detectives met with the LAPD’s Professional Standards Bureau at an offsite location to coordinate surveillance.

 This was not a typical stakeout. Their target was a trained detective who knew how to spot a tail, who understood surveillance techniques, and who had spent decades working the streets of Los Angeles. One wrong move, one suspicious vehicle, one face she recognized from inside the department,  and the entire operation would be burned.

 For about a week, plain clothes officers tailed Lazarus through her daily routine in and around the San Fernando Valley and Seami Valley. They watched her run errands. They watched her drive to and from work. They watched her eat. And they waited for the moment she would discard something with her DNA on it. It came on May 27th, 2009.

Lazarus drove to a Costco warehouse store in Seami Valley, the same suburban community where she had grown up. She walked through the massive aisles, made her purchases, and then stopped at the Costco food court. She picked up a litted plastic cup with a straw and drank from it while she ate. When she finished her meal, she stood up, carried the cup to a trash can, and threw it away.

She walked out of the Costco and drove home. She had no idea that plain clothes LAPD officers were watching every move she made. The moment she left the food court, they moved in and retrieved the discarded cup and straw from the trash. At the LAPD Scientific Investigation Division, a DNA profile was developed from the saliva on the straw.

Technicians compared it against the 23-year-old profile extracted from the bite mark on Sher Rasmusen’s  arm. On May 29th, 2009, the results came back. Supervisor Rob Bub was on his day off when his phone rang. The lab confirmed what Nuttle’s team had suspected for months. It was a match.

 Bub would later describe that phone call as one of those gut-wrenching moments. The statistical odds that the DNA from the bite mark  belonged to anyone other than Stephanie Lazarus were 1 in 1.7 sexilion. That is 17 followed by 20 zeros. In practical terms, it was certainty. After 23 years in a coroner’s freezer, the bite mark on Sherry Ras Mucin’s arm had finally spoken.

 And it said the name that Nell’s Rasmusen  had been saying since the day after the murder. Now they had to arrest one of their own. And they had to do it without giving her a chance to fight back. Chief Bratton ordered the arrest staged at  Parker Center, the LAPD headquarters building in downtown Los Angeles. The plan was precise.

 Lazarus would be lured to the jail lockup area of the building where officers are required to surrender their weapons and equipment belts before entering. That would eliminate the risk of a violent confrontation with a trained armed detective. Two robbery homicide division detectives were selected specifically for the operation. Greg Sterns and Dan Jarmo.

Neither of them had any personal connection to Lazarus. They had never worked with her. She would not recognize their faces. June  5, 2009, 6:40 in the morning. Harmo wearing a concealed wire walked over to Lazarus’s desk in the art theft detail office. “Stephanie,”  he said, “do you know me?” “I am Dan Jarmo.

 I work over here on the other side.” He told her he had a jail suspect who was talking about stolen artwork.  He needed her expertise for about 5 minutes. She agreed. She stood up, left her desk, and followed him. Once they were inside the  secured area and she had surrendered her weapon, the conversation shifted. The detectives told Lazarus her name had come up in connection with an old case, the Rasmusen  homicide from 1986.

Lazarus’s first response was casual. She said she could barely remember Ruettin’s  wife. Then when pressed, she admitted she may have met her at a hospital, may have talked to her once or twice or more. Her answers were careful, measured, and vague. As it became clear that she was not being consulted as an expert, but questioned as a suspect, her composure began to crack.

 She told the detectives this was insane. She asked if she was on candid  camera. She said she could not believe what was happening. When the detectives mentioned that DNA evidence had been recovered from the crime scene and asked whether she would be willing to provide a sample for  comparison, Lazarus knew the conversation was over.

She said she wanted to speak to a lawyer and stood up from the table. She made it as far as the hallway. Robbery Homicide Division detectives were waiting on the other side of the door. They placed her in handcuffs and read her Miranda rights. The woman who had walked into that building every day for over two decades, who had carried a badge and a gun and the authority of the Los Angeles Police Department  was now in custody for the murder of Sher Rasmusen.

 She was booked into the very jail facility she had been lured to under false pretenses. The stolen art ruse  had worked perfectly. She had surrendered her weapon voluntarily before the interrogation even began. Stephanie Lazarus was charged with one count of firstdegree murder. Nearly 6 months later, Judge Robert Perry set bail at $10 million.

It was a number designed to ensure she would not walk free before  trial. She was allowed to formally retire from the Los Angeles Police Department, ending a career that had lasted more than 25 years and spanned some of the most turbulent decades in the department’s history. While Lazarus sat in a cell in Los Angeles, Detective Jim Nuttle boarded a plane.

 He flew to Arizona. He drove to the Rasmusen family home to deliver the news in person before the media got hold of it. Loretta Rasmusen, who had barely spoken to Nuttle during the investigation, crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him. 23 years of silence, of dismissal, of being told to move on and that there was nothing there.

 And now a detective had come to their door to say they finally knew the truth. The trial of Stephanie Lazarus began in February 2012 in Los Angeles Superior Court. Judge Robert Perry presided. The courtroom was packed. Down the hall, OJ Simpson trial judge Lance Edo occasionally stopped by to sit in on the DNA testimony.

 It had been 26 years since the murder of Sher Rasmusen. The prosecution was led by Deputy District Attorneys  Shannon Presby and Paul Nunees. The defense was handled by Mark Overland. Presby opened with a single sentence that framed the entire case. He described it as a story about a bite, a bullet, a gun barrel, and a broken heart.

 The prosecution built its case  on four pillars. The first was the DNA. The bite mark match at odds of 1 in 1.7 seextilian. The second was ballistics. The three bullets recovered from Sherry’s body were federal 38 plus P rounds, consistent with the Smith and Wesson revolver Lazarus had purchased through the police academy.

 and then reported stolen to Santa Monica police two weeks after the murder. The third was motive, the diary entries, the letter to her mother, the hospital  confrontation, the stalking, the obsessive behavior documented by multiple  witnesses over the course of a year. And the fourth was Lazarus’s own words from the pre-arrest  interrogation where she admitted knowing more than she first let on.

 Paul Nunez  in his closing argument described Sherry Ras Mucin as prey caught in a cage with a predator. The defense mounted the only argument available. Attorney Mark Overland told the jury that the DNA was compromised. He pointed out that the bitemark swab had been stored  for two decades in a coroner’s freezer inside an evidence envelope that had developed a hole over time from degradation.

He argued this could have allowed contamination or tampering. He emphasized that apart from the DNA, no other physical evidence tied Lazarus to the crime scene. No fingerprints matching Lazarus, no hair, no fibers, no eyewitness  placing her at the condo that day. He pointed to a bloody fingerprint on the wall that had never been analyzed or matched.

 He referenced a similar burglary that had occurred nearby around the same time. And in his closing argument, he called the prosecution’s entire case fluff and fill, arguing it was built on a single piece of compromised biological evidence that had sat in an imperfect storage environment for 20 years. It was a reasonable defense strategy given the circumstances.

 The prosecution had overwhelming DNA evidence but limited corroborating physical proof. The question was whether the jury believed the science. John Ruitan took the  witness stand and the weight of 26 years of guilt was visible on his face. He wept  as he described his relationship with Lazarus. He admitted under oath that sleeping with her after his engagement to Sherry was a mistake.

 a mistake he had carried with him for more than two decades. He told the court that Sherry was just trying to save her own life, that she had fought back against someone who came into their home to kill her, and that he lived every day knowing his past with Lazarus was the reason Sherry was dead. The jury consisted of eight women and four men.

They deliberated for approximately  8 hours spread across 3 days. On March 8th, 2012, they returned a verdict of guilty on the charge of first-degree murder. The gun use allegation was found true. On May 11th, 2012, Judge Perry sentenced Stephanie Lazarus to 27 years to life in prison.

 That was the maximum sentence available under California  state law. 25 years to life for the murder plus 2 years for the firearm enhancement. Before sentencing, the family addressed the court. Loretta Rasmusen  spoke of the extreme pain the family had endured and how every day they missed Sherry’s laughter and her love.

 Ruettin in tears apologized to the Rasmusen family. He said that knowing Sherry met her death because she met and married him brought him to his knees. Chief Charlie Beck issued a public statement calling it a tragedy on every level and apologizing that it had taken so long to solve. District Attorney Steve Kulie said the case demonstrated the power of DNA evidence.

 Without it, he said the case might never have been solved. Lazarus said nothing. The conviction was not the end of the story. Lazarus appealed in 2013, arguing that the age of the evidence denied her due process, the search warrant was flawed. Her pre-arrest statements  were improperly obtained, and evidence supporting the burglary theory had been wrongly excluded.

 In July 2015, a three judge appellet panel unanimously upheld the conviction. The California Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October 2015. The institutional damage to the LAPD was significant. The missing interview recordings and notes referencing Lazarus, the lack of documentation around Ruitten naming her as a suspect, the repeated dismissals of the Rasmusen family.

 Criminalist Jennifer Francis, the woman who had tested the DNA in 2005  and tried to point the investigation toward a female suspect, later sued the LAPD. She claimed she had been pressured to steer away from the Lazarus lead and had faced retaliation. A jury found for the city of Los Angeles in 2019 and the ruling was upheld on appeal.

The Rasmusen’s  own civil suit against the city was dismissed on statute of limitations grounds. Then came November 2023, 37 years after the murder, 11 years after the conviction, a parole hearing at the California Institution for Women in Corona. Under California’s Youthful Offender Law, which grants special parole consideration to individuals who committed their crimes before the age of 26, Lazarus was eligible for a hearing.

She had been 25 years old when she killed Sher Rasmusen. And for the first time in 37 years, Stephanie Lazarus confessed. She told the parole board that it made her sick to this day that she took an oath to protect and serve people and instead took Sher Rasmusen’s life from her, a nurse. She admitted she went to the condo on Baloa Boulevard that February morning to confront Sherry.

 She admitted she planned to tie Sherry up. She said she was so angry that if Sherry got in her way to see Jon, she was going to strangle her. It was the first time she had ever acknowledged killing Sher Ras Mucin. Through the investigation, the arrest, the interrogation, the trial, the conviction, the sentencing, and over a decade of incarceration, she had maintained her silence.

 She confessed only when her freedom depended on it. A parole panel found her suitable for release. Governor Gavin Nuome intervened, noting that Lazarus had evaded justice for more than two decades and did not appear to have begun taking accountability until she was finally caught. In October 2024, the full parole board rescended the grant.

 In February 2025, parole was denied again. Commissioner Kevin Chapel told Lazarus that her version of events did not match the evidence used to convict her. Deputy Commissioner Vji Desai said the level of minimization she showed appeared deeply entrenched. John Ruitin attended the hearing.

 He referred to Lazarus only as the inmate. He told the board they were not there 38 years later because of an impulsive act. They were there because of skillful deception and complete disregard  for the suffering of others. He said the inmate used her police training to cover up the crime and lied for decades until her only option was to pursue parole.

  Sherry’s sisters, Teresa and Connie, told the board that Lazarus was a cold, calculating killer whose only reason for confessing was to get out of prison. Stephanie Lazarus remains incarcerated  at the California Institution for Women in Corona, California. She is 64 years old.

  Her next parole eligibility is 2028. Sherry Rasmusen was 29 years old when she died. She had been married for 3 months. 3 months. She and John Ruitton were still in the earliest chapters of their life together. They had just moved into the condo on Baloa Boulevard in Vanise. They were building a future. She was building a career that was already extraordinary by any measure.

She had spent her entire adult life taking care of other people, working  nights in coronary care units where patients came in fighting for their lives. And she fought alongside them, lecturing nursing  students who looked up to her, running one of the busiest critical care departments in Los Angeles before she turned 30.

 Her father said she wanted to elevate the stature of nursing in the nation. She was on her way. And then a Monday morning in February 1986 took all of that away. Not a random crime, not a burglary gone wrong. A deliberate act of jealousy by a woman who had decided that if she could not have John Ruitin, no one could.

 The case against her killer was not built on a confession. It was not built on an eyewitness. It was not built on a fingerprint or a fiber or a strand of hair. It was built on a bite mark, a 6in swab taken by a coroner’s criminalist in the middle of the night and placed in a glass tube with a red stopper.

 That tube sat in a freezer for 23 years while the killer got promoted, got married, won medals, and recovered stolen artwork for the same department that held the case file with her name buried inside it. Nells Rasmusen was right  from the very first day. He told the LAPD who killed his daughter.

 He gave them the name. He begged them to investigate. They told him there was nothing there. They told him he watched too much television. They told him to move on with his life. He never moved on. He never stopped. Not in 1988  when his letter to the chief of police went unanswered. Not in 1993 when he offered to pay for DNA testing and was turned away.

 Not in all the years that followed when the  silence from the LAPD was deafening and the case file gathered dust in a box that nobody wanted to open. Nells Rasmuson carried the truth for 23 years. And when detective Jim Nuttle finally knocked on his door in Arizona in June 2009 to say they had arrested Stephanie Lazarus, Nells did not say, “I told you so.

” His wife, Loretta, crossed the room and hugged the detective. Because after  a generation of being ignored, someone had finally listened. It took a cold case unit, a tube with a red stopper in a coroner’s freezer, a discarded cup at a Costco in Seami Valley, and a ruse inside the LAPD’s own headquarters to prove what a grieving father knew the morning after he lost his daughter.

 Sher Rasmusen deserved a full life. She got 3 years of marriage and a Monday morning in February. But she also got something else eventually. She got justice. late, imperfect, and hard one. Bought with the patience of a family that refused to let go. The diligence of detectives who came along decades too late and a single biological trace that a killer left behind and a coroner’s criminalist had the foresight to  preserve.

And that is what cold case redemption looks like. If you believe Sherry’s story deserves to be heard, share this video. And if you want to see more cases where the forgotten finally found justice, subscribe to Cold Case Redemption. We will see you in the next one.