California 1986 Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community

She called in sick that morning, February 24th, 1986, Monday. Sherri Rasmussen had a motivational presentation scheduled at work. A workplace initiative she thought was ineffective and didn’t believe in. Her back hurt from an aerobics class the day before. She told her husband she was thinking about staying home.

He kissed her goodbye, walked out the door at 7:20 in the morning, and drove to his new job at a company in Chatsworth. She was still in her nightgown when the door closed behind him. By 6:00 that evening, John Rothen had been calling home all day with no answer. He called her office. She hadn’t come in. He drove home.

He found broken glass on the driveway. Her car was gone. He went inside. She was on the living room floor. The evidence suggests a serious confrontation. Three months. That’s how long the marriage had lasted. 92 [clears throat] days. Welcome to Cold Case Unlocked. For 23 years, the woman who did this drove to work every morning, sat behind a detective’s badge, and walked the same hallways as the evidence of what she had done.

Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from. We read everyone. New here? Hit like and subscribe. It keeps the files open. Now, back to Van Nuys. Her name was Sherri Ann Rasmussen, born February 7th, 1957. Raised in Arizona. She was advanced past kindergarten because her teacher used her as a classroom assistant.

 That’s the kind of child she was. She enrolled in college at 16, transferred to Loma Linda University’s nursing program, graduated and went straight to UCLA Medical Center’s Coronary Care Unit, earned her master’s degree from UCLA in nursing. By 27, she was director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. Teaching, presenting, building something real.

Her sister Connie said simply, “When she did something, she did it 100%. She was also 6 ft tall, athletic, competitive.” Her father Nels Rasmussen described her as the kind of person who would not go down without an extraordinary fight. That detail would matter more than anyone understood in 1986. Her sister Teresa said Sherri was the glue that held the family together, that she made everything better just by being in it.

She had longed for a family of her own. She found that in John Rutten, a mechanical engineer she met at a party in June 1984. She became smitten immediately. They enjoyed running together, playing tennis. Her sister Connie said simply, “She was happy. If you look at the wedding pictures,” Connie said, “you can see it in Sherri’s eyes.

” They married in November 1985 and moved into a condominium on Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys, the same condo her parents had bought her years earlier, specifically because it had a drive-in garage, so she wouldn’t have to walk along the street late at night coming home from work. She paid her father rent equal to his mortgage. She set the burglar alarm code as 1123, her wedding anniversary.

 A friend told her it was too obvious, too easy to guess. She said she would change it. She never did. What Sherri didn’t know, what she was only beginning to understand in the months before February 24th, was that someone else had never stopped watching John Rutten, and that person was not going to let him go quietly. John Rutten and Stephanie Lazarus had both lived at Dykstra Hall at UCLA between 1978 and 1982.

They were in the same dormitory. They became physically involved. John described it later under oath as necking and fooling around. He said he never once considered her his girlfriend. He testified they had intimate moments 20 to 30 times over 4 years, but that it was never serious. At least not on his end. On Stephanie’s end was a different story entirely.

She stole his clothes when he showered. She photographed him in his underwear while he slept. She threw him a surprise birthday party on his 25th, unaware he had been dating other women the entire time, and that whatever she believed they had was already finished in his mind. After graduating UCLA, she chose law enforcement, joined the LAPD Academy, graduated in 1983, and described Ruetten to her classmates as her college boyfriend.

She was his date at a company Christmas party. They had a photograph taken together, and soon she purchased a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver as her backup firearm through the department, a detail that will become the center of the investigations. In June 1985, she learned that John was engaged to Sherri Rasmussen.

What she wrote in diary later that day reads, “I really don’t feel like working. I found out that John is getting married. My concentration is like minus 10.” That night she woke her roommate, a fellow LAPD officer, to tell him. He said he had never seen her cry before that night. Weeks later, she visited John at his condo before he moved in with Sherri.

They had some intimate time. “To give her closure,” John said at trial. He did not tell Sherri. He did eventually confess the encounter. He asked for forgiveness. Sherri gave it. She loved him, and she wanted the marriage to work. What she didn’t know was that Stephanie was not finished. In July of 1985, on a day off in tight shorts and a tank top, Lazarus walked into Sherry’s office at Glendale Adventist Medical Center.

She told Sherry she and John were still together. She also said that when the marriage failed, she would be there. Sherry told her her services would not be needed. Stephanie walked out the door and she turned around. “If I can’t have John, no one else will, including you.” Sherry went home and told her father.

Nels listened. He told John. John admitted the final encounter with her and asked Sherry not to leave over it. He did warn Stephanie to stop. He did not cut contact. He told Sherry she was reading too much into it. He told her she was just a friend. They got married in November as planned, January 1986. Stephanie arrived at the condo with her skis and asked John to wax them.

She was wearing flattering workout clothes. Sherry found the entire visit strange. She asked John whether it was truly finished. He convinced her it was. She asked him not to personally return the skis. He agreed. A few days later, after John had already left for work, Stephanie came back to collect the waxed skis in her police uniform, armed, alone in the apartment with the woman John had chosen instead of her.

There was another incident that same month. Sherry came downstairs one morning and found her already inside the living room, in uniform. She asked her firmly to leave. She left. Sherry told her father. She did not tell John. She did not believe reporting it to the police would help. Stephanie was the police.

 Nels Rasmussen tried. He told John to make it stop. He offered to help John find an engineering position in Tucson just to get the couple away from Los Angeles. Nothing worked. And by early February 1986, Sherry was telling her father she thought she was being followed on the street five times in a single week. Someone who appeared and disappeared.

Someone who turned away the moment Sherry looked directly. She told her father this woman had eyes that looked right through you. She was trying to hold the marriage together. She didn’t want John to feel like everything was already falling apart. So, she stayed quiet where she should have been loud.

 And on the night of February 23rd, 1986, when a friend of John’s visited the condo and they entered through the front door rather than the garage, John inadvertently left that front door unlocked when the friend left. The next morning he kissed her goodbye and walked out at 7:20 a.m. Stephanie had her own apartment at the time. Her roommate had moved out 10 days earlier. She had the day off.

 At her 2023 parole hearing, she described what happened next. She said she had called the condo that morning hoping to hear John’s voice. Sherry answered. She said the sound of Sherry’s voice enraged her. She said she resolved to go to the condo. She said she planned to bind Sherry and wait for John to come home. She admitted sitting before the parole board 37 years later that this plan made no sense. The front door was unlocked.

What happened inside that apartment in the hours that followed was written in the physical evidence left behind. Evidence that the first investigators on scene chose to read as a burglary rather than what it actually was. The struggle began and moved through rooms. A porcelain vase broken. A phone overturned.

Sherry was bound. She fought. She was 6 ft tall and she was in exceptional shape and she did not stop fighting. She clawed toward the front door. She pressed a bloody hand against the wall beside the burglar alarm panel reaching for the panic button and missed it by inches. Then three shots fired through a folded quilt draped over a chair, the fabric muffling the sound.

The barrel pressed so close against Sherri’s body, it left a bruise on her face. The medical evidence showed that multiple shots were fired despite the first being fatal. Then the staging began. Stephanie staged the stereo equipment near the base of the staircase as though someone had been in the process of collecting it to carry out.

She left the jewelry box sitting on the dresser in plain view untouched. She took the BMW. She also took the marriage certificate. 13 days later she filed a police report with Santa Monica PD claiming her .38 caliber revolver had been stolen from her car near a pier. She did not report it to her own department’s armorer as required by law and policy.

She bought a replacement a month later and reported that one correctly. The first one the one that mattered, she has never said where it went. The BMW was found 11 days after the crime parked 2 miles away on a residential street. Keys in the ignition. Every surface was wiped. Not a usable fingerprint anywhere. It had been left near a school for troubled youth as if someone hoped a teenager would be tempted to take it for a joy ride and become a convenient suspect.

Every case on this channel takes days of real research through the records. Real families. Real system failure. If this one is getting to you, hit like and subscribe. It keeps Cold Case Unlocked going. Now, back to the investigation and the sentence that changed everything. The night John Ruetten found Sherri, lead detective Lyle Mayer sat across from him and said, “I believe your house was burglarized today.

Once those persons or that person or whoever was inside, I believe they were trying to steal your stereo and probably some other items.” The theory was locked before the forensic team had finished processing the scene. The next morning when Nels and Loretta Rasmussen learned their daughter was gone, Nels had one question for the police.

Not who found her, not what happened. The very first thing Nels Rasmussen asked was, “Have you checked out John’s ex-girlfriend, the lady cop?” Mayer [clears throat] told him there was nothing there. That was day two. And that door, the only door that led anywhere, stayed shut for 23 years. What followed was a catastrophic institutional failure dressed up as an active investigation.

A nearby burglary involving two men, one armed, gave investigators the borrowed bones of a theory they never let go of. Composite sketches of two suspected male burglars went out across Van Nuys. Tips came in. All led nowhere. The marriage certificate taken from the condo was never found. Nels flew from Tucson to Los Angeles to meet every new detective who inherited the case.

He brought his notes. He brought the same name. Each time he was sent home with nothing new. In 1987, a note appeared in the investigation log for the first time. A A had noted John Ruetten had called to confirm Stephanie Lazarus was a former girlfriend. That was the first time her name appeared in any official record.

Nothing was done with it. In 1989, 3 years after Sherri’s death, John Ruetten learned that Lazarus was going to Hawaii on a trip with friends. He called Mayer first, the lead detective, to make sure there was nothing tying Stephanie to the crime. Mayer told him there wasn’t. John went to Hawaii.

 He saw Stephanie there. They were intimate. He said later he had been a stupid and young man. He was 30 years old at the time. His wife had been gone for 3 years. He knew who the most likely suspect was. He called to confirm she was clear before joining her on vacation. In 1993, Nels offered to pay for DNA testing himself out of his own pocket because the technology now existed and he believed the bite mark evidence would change everything.

He was told the department needed a suspect first before running any tests. He said, “I have a suspect.” They told him to move on. He did not move on. He wrote to LAPD Chief Daryl Gates. He was told he watched too much television. He got Sherri’s case onto a true crime television program. He [clears throat] contacted writer Ann Rule about a book.

 She said a retired LAPD detective friend told her the case was too hot to handle. Rule did not write the book. Mayer retired in 1991. His partner was reassigned. New detectives inherited the file and found pages missing that should have been there. Recordings of Nels’s early interviews with investigators, the ones specifically mentioning Stephanie, were gone.

Other interviews remained intact. Nels’s conversations about the lady cop were the ones that disappeared. Stephanie Lazarus, meanwhile, was promoted to detective in 1994. She started a private investigation firm. She organized child care for families of officers. She married a fellow LAPD officer. She adopted a daughter.

 She moved to Simi Valley. She became an academy instructor. She was twice assigned to the Van Nuys division during the 1990s. The same division where the Rasmussen murder book sat in a cabinet in the detective’s office. Former colleagues recalled that she frequently volunteered for overnight shifts at Van Nuys when it was quiet, when supervision was minimal, when there was little reason to go into the field.

By 2008, she was working high-profile art theft cases. She had recently helped recover a statue stolen from a historic Los Angeles neighborhood. She organized fundraisers. She was, by all visible evidence, an exemplary officer and a respected colleague. Nobody knew. Nobody looked. Nobody was allowed to look. In 2004, a criminalist named Jennifer Francis joined the LAPD’s cold case DNA unit and received the Rasmussen file.

She read every page. She noticed the bite mark entry was incomplete. The swab taken from the wound in 1986 wasn’t in the evidence log. She called the coroner’s office. It was not there. She searched the freezers by hand for 6 hours. At the back of one freezer, behind other containers, they found a torn envelope with a label that had partially faded.

The name Rasmussen was still readable. Inside, still viable after 18 years of storage in a damaged envelope, was the original cotton swab from the bite wound. Francis ran the test. The DNA was female. It did not match Sherri. An unknown woman had bitten Sherri Rasmussen during whatever happened in that apartment and left biological material behind that had survived nearly two decades.

Francis reviewed the case file. She found a reference to a third-party female who had harassed Sherri at work and at home before her death. She asked the detective supervising her work whether this woman had been investigated. He told her yes and told her this woman wasn’t just an ex-girlfriend.

 She was an LAPD detective. He told Francis the case was a burglary. He told her the detective was not part of this investigation. Francis did not accept that. She took her findings to the cold case unit. It was redirected. The scientific division, same thing. Robbery-homicide, redirected. Every door, the same answer in a different language. Stop pushing.

Then the consequences started. Her supervisor said she was paranoid, obsessive. Her supervisor, Harry Klen, who Francis said had a documented history of retaliating against women in the crime lab that the department had tolerated for years, questioned her mental stability. She was ordered into mandatory counseling with a that building, that order carries one meaning. It marks you.

The therapist, Francis said in her sworn statement, seemed less interested in her well-being than in finding out what she knew and who she had told. Her casework was quietly reassigned. Colleagues told her to get a hobby. A deputy district attorney called her crazy. She said in her declaration, “Initially, I remained silent out of fear of backlash and retaliation in the crime lab and from the department.

She had done the job. What she received in return was what that building does to people who find things it doesn’t want found. In March 2008, Detective Jim Nudell came into work one morning and found a box on the floor near his desk. Two cold case files. One was Sherri Rasmussen’s. Nudell read Francis’s 4-year-old DNA report.

Female DNA, unknown suspect. And looked at the crime scene with fresh eyes. The jewelry box untouched on the dresser. The stereo stacked near the door with a blood stain on top consistent with a gloved hand placing it there after the shooting. A bloody thumb print on the record player at the top of the stack.

Never photographed in identifiable detail. Never collected. Never entered into evidence by the original team. A gated complex surrounded by other units. A burglar alarm on the front door that had not been forced. None of this was a burglary. None of it had ever been a burglary. Nudell and his partner, Pete Barba, went back to John Ruetten.

John told Nudell he had given Stephanie’s name to the LAPD 23 years ago. That conversation Nudell discovered had never been documented. Not a word. They developed a list of five female suspects. They eliminated four. Stephanie was number five. The last one standing. The one they had been most cautious about naming because she worked in the same building, on the same floor, and her husband was also a Van Nuys detective.

They worked the case after hours. They referred to her only as number five. They never wrote her name in any notes. State Department records confirmed she had owned a .38 caliber revolver in 1986. 13 days after the murder, she had filed a theft report claiming it was stolen from her car near a pier, not to her own department’s armorer as required, and with no record of any damage to her vehicle consistent with a break-in.

It had disappeared from the official record at precisely the moment investigators were looking for a murder weapon. Nuddle and Barba theorized she had thrown it into the Pacific Ocean. She admitted at her 2023 parole hearing she had disposed of it to avoid being identified. She has never said where. They needed her DNA covertly, without alerting her.

For a week, officers tracked her movements. On May 28th, 2009, Stephanie and her daughter stopped at a Costco in Simi Valley. They sat outside together and had a snack. She used a plastic cup. She got up and walked away. Left the cup on the table. Officers collected it the moment she was gone. It went to Jennifer Francis, the criminalist who had spent five years being called paranoid, sent to mandatory counseling, watched her work reassigned, and her professional reputation quietly managed by the institution she served.

She ran the comparison herself. The DNA from the cup matched the DNA from the bite mark on Sherri Rasmussen’s left forearm. 23 years, one bite, one swab in a torn envelope at the back of a freezer that someone had somehow failed to remove. On June 5th, 2009, at 6:40 in the morning, Detective Daniel Jaramillo from the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division walked up to Stephanie at her desk in Commercial Crimes and told her he needed her expertise downstairs.

They had a man in custody with information about stolen art, her specialty. She agreed immediately. She followed him to the basement jail facility, the one place in the entire building where no one, regardless of rank, was permitted to carry a weapon. >> [clears throat] >> She handed over her firearm at the entrance.

 Inside the interrogation room, two detectives, Greg Sterns and Daniel Jaramillo, began quietly. They said her name had come up in some old notes. Nothing major, just some things they wanted to clear up away from the eyes of colleagues upstairs. They said they wanted to keep her private life private. Stephanie was relaxed. She talked about UCLA, the dormitory, and John Retten.

“Nothing serious,” she said. They had dated a little. Things just drifted apart. It had been a million years ago. They worked their way around to Sherri. She said she thought Sherri might have been a nurse. Couldn’t really remember. Said it was a long time ago. Then they asked if she knew what had happened to her.

“Yeah, I know she got killed. I saw a poster at work. I probably spoke to him about it. I know she got killed.” Said with a detachment of someone recalling a minor news story. In a room with the men who had spent months piecing together exactly what she had done. As Sterns laid out the evidence, the female DNA, the bite mark, the possibility of a comparison sample, the composure shifted. Small cracks.

 She said she might be willing to provide a swab. Then she said she needed to speak with someone. Then, “Am I on candid camera? This is insane. This is absolutely crazy.” She stood up and walked out of the room toward the exit. At the end of the corridor, officers were waiting. She was placed in handcuffs 23 years, 3 months, and 11 days after she walked out of Sherri Rasmussen’s home.

The trial began in January 2012. 3 weeks. The prosecution’s opening was eight words, a bite, a bullet, a gun barrel, and a broken heart. John Ruetten testified. He wept multiple times. He said the final encounter with Stephanie after his engagement was a mistake. He was asked by the prosecutor why he hadn’t forcefully pushed her as a suspect in 1986.

He said it had never crossed his mind that she had anything to do with it. He said Mayer had told him shortly after the murder that Stephanie had been cleared. He looked at the defendant when he said it. He said on the stand that the fact Sherri had died because she married him brought him to his knees.

 Nils Rasmussen testified. 23 years of phone calls. Folders that arrived thinner each time he flew out from Tucson. The first question he had ever asked the lady cop. And the answer he was given, nothing there. Nothing there for 23 years. Jennifer Francis testified. The swab, the freezer, what she found. What the department did to her for finding it.

After several days of deliberation, the jury returned. Stephanie Lazarus was found guilty of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison plus two additional years for the use of a firearm. Every appeal was denied. She was allowed to retire from the LAPD before the conviction.

 She began collecting her pension immediately. By 2017, she’d received nearly $67,000 of it. In November 2023, under a California law providing special consideration for crimes committed while under 26, she had been 25 when she went to that condo. She sat before a parole board for the first time. She confessed.

 She said it made her sick to this day that she had taken an oath to protect and serve and had taken Sherri Rasmussen’s life. She said she had called that morning hoping to hear John’s voice. She said Sherri answered and it enraged her. She described going to the condo, the binding, the shots through the quilt. The panel initially recommended parole.

At the full board hearing, John Ruetten said the confession was made to get out. He said she had 23 years to come forward and had used those years to lie and hide the evidence and keep living her life. Sherri’s niece said the same thing directly. She had 23 years to turn herself in. Then the board heard from Nels Rasmussen.

 He had died on June 20th, 2020. He never saw this hearing. But before he died, he recorded a statement to be played in that room every time Stephanie Lazarus applied for parole. Every time. For as long as the recording exists. He spoke about what had been done to his daughter’s face. He said it was almost as if the person who did it had wanted to destroy the beauty that Sherri carried.

 That it was not just what it appeared to be on the surface. That it was something more deliberate. In October 2024, the full board rescinded the parole grant. In 2025, a new request was denied. The commissioner told her directly, “You were the only one engaging in this extreme act of violence.” She will be eligible again in 2028.

 Her mother, Loretta Rasmussen, died September 1st, 2022. Her two surviving sisters, Teresa and Connie, will be there to oppose it. The LAPD has never opened an internal investigation into how evidence disappeared from this case. The name of the detective who checked trace evidence out of the coroner’s office in the early 1990s has never been made public.

 The handwritten investigative notes required by protocol have never been located. The recordings of Nelson’s interviews specifically naming Stephanie have never been explained. No officer has ever been disciplined. Jennifer Francis lost her whistleblower lawsuit. The Rasmussen family’s lawsuit was dismissed as time-barred. Every legal pathway taken by every person harmed by how this was handled has been blocked, dismissed, or ruled expired.

Matthew McGough, who spent years on this case and wrote the book The Lazarus Files, said in 2025 that the LAPD internal review was a sham, that investigators knew what they might find if they actually looked. “It’s police culture,” he said, “a sense of this could look bad and we’re not going to go there.” Nobody went there. Nobody was made to.

Sherri Ann Rasmussen, born February 7th, 1957. Her kindergarten teacher used her as a classroom assistant because she was already that capable. She enrolled in college at 16. She was director of nursing at 27. She was the glue that held her family together. She was happy, genuinely, visibly happy in those wedding photographs her sister still talks about.

She called in sick on a Monday morning because her back hurt and she didn’t believe in the presentation she was supposed to give. She was still in her nightgown when her husband walked out the door. She had been married for 92 days. Her niece wore Sherri’s wedding dress on her own wedding day. She wanted to carry a piece of her aunt into one of the most important moments of her life.

The marriage certificate taken from that condominium on February 24th, 1986 has never been found. If someone in your life is making you feel unsafe, even someone with a uniform, a badge, a position of trust, say it loudly, in writing, to someone outside the system they belong to. Name them specifically. Don’t soften it to protect the relationship. Sherry told her father.

She told John. She told colleagues. Everyone she told did something with the information except the one thing that would have mattered. She was trying to hold her marriage together. She was trying not to make it worse. That instinct is understandable. It is also what left her alone in that apartment on a Monday morning when her back hurt and she had decided to stay home. Say it. Write it down.

Name them. Do it now before you need to. If this case stayed with you, drop a comment. Tell us which moment hit hardest. Hit like, subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next one.