The 1986 Cold Case Shattered by a Bite
Newlyweds Sherri Rasmussen was brutally murdered, but it took 23 years for the LAPD to find her killer, fellow police officer Stephanie Lazarus. If the killer was in the LAPD all along, then why it took decades to figure it out? For 23 years, the Los Angeles Police Department searched for the person who killed Sherri Rasmussen, and for 23 years, that person carried an LAPD badge. She walked the same hallways.
She passed the same detectives in the same corridors. She rose through the ranks until she became a respected investigator herself. For a time, her office sat only a short distance from the unit that would eventually be assigned to find her. The killer the department was looking for was one of their own, and almost no one in that building had any idea.
When Sherri Rasmussen was attacked inside her own home in 1986, she fought back. At some point in that struggle, she bit her attacker hard enough to break the skin. In 1986, that bite was nothing more than a wound, one more detail in a violent scene. The person who killed her understood a great deal about how police read a crime scene, and she staged the rest of it with care.
But she could not clean a bite, and she could not have known that the trace of saliva left inside it would, more than two decades later, become the single piece of evidence that gave her a name. Because in 1986, no one in American law enforcement could read DNA. The science did not exist yet. This is the story of a murder built to look like a burglary committed by someone who knew exactly how burglaries and murders are investigated, and who very nearly carried the secret to the end of her life. It is the story of how one
desperate bite, frozen and all but forgotten in an evidence freezer, reached across 23 years to reveal that the killer was not a stranger who had broken in. She was a Los Angeles police officer, and the woman she killed had been married for 3 months. Before we go further, I’d like to know who I’m sitting with tonight.
Tell me in the comments where you’re watching from. I read everyone, and it means a great deal to see the towns and the countries you write in from. And if you’d like to keep hearing these stories, the cold cases that finally found their answer, subscribe and stay with us. Now, Los Angeles, 1986. Sherry Rasmussen was 29 years old.
She was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, a woman who had risen quickly and young in a demanding profession. Tall, athletic, remembered by the people who knew her for a warm and ready smile. She was good at a hard job, and she had just begun the life that was supposed to come after the hard work paid off.
She had been married for only 3 months to John Ruetten, a young engineer, and the two of them had a condominium in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles in the ordinary, hopeful future of a couple just starting out. But Ruetten had a past, the way everyone does. Before Sherry, he had been involved for years, on and off, with a woman he had known since their university days, a woman named Stephanie Lazarus, who had gone on to join the Los Angeles Police Department.
And by the accounts that would matter terribly later, Lazarus had never accepted that the relationship was over. Sherry had told the people closest to her about it. She confided to a friend that Lazarus had come to her workplace at the hospital and confronted her, and that the confrontation had ended with a sentence Sherry never forgot, that if Lazarus could not have John, then no one would.
About a month before her death, Sherry came home and found Stephanie Lazarus already inside her residence, standing in the living room in full police uniform. Sherry did not know how she had gotten in, and in the days just before the murder, Sherry told her father she believed the officer had been calling her, even stalking her.
These were not vague anxieties. They were specific, and Sherri named the source of them out loud while she was still alive to do it. On the 24th of February, 1986, a Monday, Sherri had stayed home from work. She had hurt her back doing aerobics and was resting. That evening, John Ruetten came home to the condominium and found her dead.
She had been beaten and fatally shot inside their own living room, still in her bathrobe. The room was in disarray, overturned furniture, broken glass, a smashed sliding door upstairs, and stereo equipment had been stacked near the front door as though a thief had been interrupted while carrying it out. Sherri’s BMW was gone from outside, later recovered abandoned a couple of miles away.
Everything about the scene, on its surface, told the same tidy story. A burglar had broken into an empty home, and a young woman had walked into the middle of it. But, there were details that did not belong in that story. Sherri had fought hard. Her fingernails were broken. The evidence of someone who had struggled against a stronger attacker to the very end. And on her arm was a bite.
During the autopsy, investigators swabbed that bite for saliva and preserved the sample carefully, even though in 1986, there was nothing on Earth they could do with it. They kept it the way you keep something when instinct tells you it matters and the science to prove it has not been invented yet. The Los Angeles Police Department concluded that Sherri Rasmussen had died in a burglary gone wrong, and it is worth being fair about why.
The signs had been arranged to point that way, the missing car, the stacked stereo, the smashed door. And then reality seemed to confirm it. In the days and months after the murder, two men robbed women at gunpoint in the same area, once after a victim walked in on a break-in just blocks from Sherri’s home. To detectives, those two men looked like the answer.
They became the primary suspects. They were never found, but the theory hardened around them anyway, and the investigation faced outward toward two male strangers who had picked the wrong house. Consider what 1986 actually meant for a case like this. DNA was not yet a tool in American criminal investigation.
The first conviction in the country to rest on genetic evidence was still ahead. And the notion that saliva could one day be turned into a name would have sounded like fantasy. An investigation in 1986 stood on three legs: fingerprints, eyewitnesses, and motive. Here, there were no usable fingerprints. There were no witnesses, and the one person with an unmistakable motive was waved away.
Now, look again at how the scene had been built. The burglary signs, the stolen car taken to suggest a thief, the smashed door, the stacked electronics, the absence of any fingerprint worth tracing. This was not the chaos left by someone in a panic. It was the work of someone who understood precisely how detectives read a room, what they look for, what they quietly rule out.
What a botched burglary is supposed to look like in a report. She had thought of everything. There was one person who never accepted the burglary story. Sherri’s father, Nels Rasmussen. He knew his daughter had been frightened by Ruetten’s former girlfriend, the police officer, and he did not believe the timing was a coincidence.
He told investigators by name to look at Stephanie Lazarus. They brushed him aside. In 1988, two years on, he wrote a letter directly to the LAPD’s chief of police asking that the ex-girlfriend simply be ruled in or out. He never received a reply. He kept calling the assigned detective, and at one point he was told he had watched too much television.
A father stood in front of the department that was supposed to be looking for his daughter’s killer, pointed at the person he believed had done it, and was treated as a nuisance. The case slowed, then stalled, then went cold. The bite mark swab went into a freezer, logged, sealed, and all but forgotten. It stayed cold for nearly two decades.
Then, in 2004, LAPD cold case detectives pulled the Rasmussen file open again and found, still preserved, the swab taken from the bite on Sherri’s arm. By now, the world had changed. DNA testing existed, and it had become one of the most powerful tools in the history of criminal investigation. They sent the swab to the laboratory, and the result rewrote the entire case in a single line.
The DNA in the bite was female. It did not belong to Sherri. The attacker the department had spent 18 years imagining as two male burglars had, the whole time been a woman. They ran the profile through CODIS, the national database that holds the DNA of convicted offenders. There was no match. Whoever this woman was, she had never been arrested for anything that would have placed her DNA in the system. She had no record at all.
The most powerful database in American law enforcement looked at her genetic profile and returned nothing because the woman it belonged to had spent her entire life on the other side of the law. In 2009, a detective named Jim Nuddle and his partner reopened the case around a question no one before had been willing to ask out loud, which woman in Sherri Rasmussen’s life might have wanted her dead.
They built a list of the women connected to Sherri and worked through it methodically, clearing each one by interview and DNA comparison. The list shrank name by name until only a single name was left standing, the same name a grieving father had given the department 23 years earlier, Stephanie Lazarus. By now, she was no longer a young patrol officer.
She was a decorated 25-year LAPD veteran, a respected detective in the department’s art theft unit, the kind of officer her colleagues described as a cop’s cop. The detectives quietly building a murder case against her worked in the same headquarters she did. Then they pulled the thread that should have been pulled in 1986.
Sherri had been shot with a .38 caliber revolver loaded with the ammunition LAPD officers of that era were required to carry. When detectives searched the firearms records, they found that Stephanie Lazarus had purchased exactly that kind of weapon after graduating from the police academy. And 13 days after Sherri Rasmussen was murdered, Lazarus had reported that gun stolen, not to her own department, but to the Santa Monica police, a separate agency, in a report about a theft from her car.
The two departments never connected the missing gun of a young LAPD officer to the unsolved murder of a nurse across the city. The murder weapon had been made to vanish into the gap between two police records. She had thought of everything. In a moment, how detectives take a DNA sample from one of their own without letting her know she’s the suspect.
If these are the cases you want to keep hearing, take a second and subscribe. It genuinely helps these stories reach more people. The detectives now faced a problem unlike any ordinary investigation. They had a female DNA profile and a prime suspect, but they could not simply ask a fellow officer for a sample. She would understand instantly what the request meant.
She, of all people, knew exactly how these cases were built, because building them had been her own profession for two decades. To approach her directly was to lose everything. So they did to her what detectives do to any suspect they cannot approach. They followed her and they waited for her to leave something behind. They tracked her to a Costco in Simi Valley.
When she finished a drink and dropped the empty cup into a trash can outside the store, they recovered it. The saliva on that cup went to the laboratory and was compared against the saliva preserved from the bite on Sherri Rasmussen’s arm, frozen since 1986. It matched. The genetic material a dying woman had left in the teeth marks on her own body belonged to the decorated detective who had spent 23 years inside the LAPD.
To question her without tipping her off, detectives told Lazarus they needed her expertise on an art theft matter, her own specialty, and brought her into an interview room. Then they turned the conversation to the name Sherri Rasmussen. Her composure changed. On the 5th of June 2009, Stephanie Lazarus was arrested at LAPD headquarters for the murder of Sherri Rasmussen, 23 years after the killing.
Taken into custody inside the walls of her own department, she retired from the force. In 2012, a jury convicted her of first-degree murder. The bite mark DNA, the ballistics, and the vanished gun leaving no room for reasonable doubt, and she was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. Return at the end to the bite.
In the last minutes of her life, Sherri Rasmussen, a young woman fighting an armed stronger attacker in the middle of her own living room, bit the person who was killing her. It was not strategy. It was the pure refusal of someone who would not die quietly, who fought to the very end. She could not have known what that act would do, and neither could the woman she bit.
In 1986, it was only a wound. But Sherri left a mark on her killer, and 23 years later, that mark finally spoke. Stephanie Lazarus had thought of everything. The staged burglary, the stolen car, the missing fingerprints, the murder weapon disposed of and reported stolen to another department. Every single thing a trained officer knows to control.
She had thought of everything except the woman in front of her, who in her final moments left behind the one piece of evidence that no killer in 1986 could have imagined needing to hide.
