Los Angeles’ Most Shocking Cold Case Solved — Her Husband’s Ex Killed Her on Their Wedding Day

Stephanie Lazarus now faces murder charges. Prosecutors say that almost 25 years ago, she beat and shot the wife of an ex-boyfriend and that DNA evidence proves it.  Stephanie Lazarus appeared at Sherri Rasmussen’s place of work at Glendale Adventist and told Sherri Rasmussen, “If I cannot have John, nobody can.

”  Picture the happiest day of your life. The dress, the flowers, the man you love standing at the end of the aisle waiting for you. Now picture coming home from your honeymoon, unpacking your suitcase, still humming the song they played at your reception, and never making it to your next anniversary. Never making it to spring.

That is what happened to Sherri Rasmussen. And the woman who took her life wasn’t hiding in the shadows. She wasn’t a stranger. She wore a badge. She carried a gun the city gave her. She went to work every single day while Sherri’s father begged someone, anyone, to just look at her name. For 23 years, nobody listened.

This is Sherri’s story. Before we go any further, if you are new here, welcome to Vanished Women and Children. This channel exists because these stories matter. Because women and girls go missing. They are murdered. They are failed by systems that were supposed to protect them. And the world moves on while their families are left standing still.

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Now, let’s go back to Van Nuys. Before she was a cold case number in an LAPD filing cabinet, Sherri Rasmussen was someone’s whole world. She was born on February 7th, 1957 in a family that raised her to care deeply, genuinely, actively care about other people. She became a nurse at 20 years old not because it was easy, but because something in her was drawn to the rooms where people were most afraid.

The intensive care unit, the critical care ward, the place where life and death sat inches apart and a good nurse could make all the difference. By the time she was 27 years old, Sherri Rasmussen was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center in Los Angeles. 27. She wasn’t just good at her job, she was exceptional.

The kind of person her colleagues looked to when things got hard. The kind of leader who remembered your name, your family, your birthday. People who worked with Sherri didn’t just respect her, they remembered her. Years later, they still would. Her sister Connie described her as kind and gentle, compassionate, and hardworking.

But those words don’t fully paint her. They tell you what she was, not who she was. Let me try to tell you who she was. Sherri loved to move. She ran, she played tennis, she did aerobics on early mornings before the world was fully awake. The kind of person who found joy in the simple act of being alive inside her body.

She was tall, athletic, and according to everyone who knew her, she walked into a room and you noticed. Not because she was loud, because she was present, fully, warmly, unmistakably present. She had a laugh that her family has never forgotten. She had dreams that stretched years into the future.

 She was the big sister, the daughter who called, the friend who showed up. She was the kind of woman who left a book half read on the nightstand because she fell asleep thinking about something that made her smile. And then she met John Ruetten at a party and something shifted. John was a mechanical engineer, steady, warm, athletic like Sherri was.

They bonded over tennis and running. They moved in together. And for Sherri, who had always longed for a family of her own, something in her settled into place. Her sister Teresa would later say, “If you look at the wedding pictures, you can see in my sister’s eyes how excited and happy she was.” On November 23rd, 1985, Sherri Rasmussen became Sherri Ruetten.

She was 28 years old. She had her whole life ahead of her. She had just returned from her honeymoon. She had a husband, a condo in Van Nuys, a career she loved, and a future so bright it almost hurts to look at directly. Three months later, she was dead. But to understand what happened to Sherri, you have to understand the shadow that had been following her long before February of 1986.

Her name was Stephanie Lazarus. Stephanie and John Ruetten had met at UCLA in the late 1970s, both there to graduate in 1982. John was in mechanical engineering. Stephanie was studying political science. They were both athletic, both ambitious. They began a casual on-and-off relationship.

 But according to John’s later testimony, he never considered Stephanie his girlfriend. For Stephanie, it seems, the definition was entirely different. When John met Sherri, Stephanie found out the way people do, through social circles, mutual friends, the way a world shrinks. Stephanie joined the LAPD after graduation, a patrol officer working the streets of Los Angeles.

And somewhere in the years between college and Sherri’s wedding day, something inside Stephanie Lazarus stopped being casual and became something else entirely. At a party John threw for his 25th birthday, he told Stephanie about Sherri. That he was serious about her. That she was the one. Stephanie was devastated.

She wrote a letter to John’s mother in 1985, a letter that would surface decades later at trial. “I’m truly in love with John,” she wrote, “and the past year has really torn me up. I wish it didn’t end the way it did. And I don’t think I’ll ever understand his decision.” John, trying to give her closure, made a decision he would regret for the rest of his life.

He was intimate with Stephanie one final time before his wedding, so she could have closure. Instead, the visits intensified. Stephanie Lazarus began appearing in Sherri’s world. She showed up at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, where Sherri worked, and allegedly confronted her directly. “If I can’t have John,” she reportedly said, “nobody else will.

” Think about that sentence. Hold it in your mind because Sherri heard it. And Sherri was frightened enough by it that she told her father. She didn’t tell John. She didn’t want to cause trouble. She didn’t go to the police because the police were Stephanie Lazarus. What could she do? She was a young woman who had done nothing wrong except fall in love with a man someone else wanted.

 And she was now being told by a sworn officer of the law that her life was a problem to be solved. In early February of 1986, Sherri told her father that she believed Lazarus was stalking her on the street. She feared her. She said so out loud. And yet, and this matters, Sherri Rasmussen still got up every morning and went to work.

 Still loved her husband, still made plans for their future because she was brave, because she believed the way good people often do that it would somehow be all right. It wasn’t. The morning was a Monday. Sherri had hurt her back doing aerobics. It wasn’t serious, just the kind of ache that makes you call in sick, curl up, and rest. She told John she’d stay home.

He kissed her goodbye and left for work. Nobody knows exactly what happened in that condominium between morning and midday. But the evidence tells the story of something savage and prolonged. Sherri did not go quietly. She fought. The crime scene showed a woman who refused to stop fighting. Bruises from a brutal physical struggle, a deep bite mark on her forearm from her attacker, stereo equipment moved near the front door in what later investigators would recognize as staging.

A staged robbery. Someone trying to make the unthinkable look ordinary. Sherri was struck with a vase and then she was shot three times in the chest. She was 29 years old. She had been married for three months. When John Ruuten came home that evening expecting to find his wife, he found her on the floor of their living room.

He called 911. The police arrived. And in a cruelty almost too heavy to describe, the woman who had murdered Sherri Rasmussen was almost certainly among the people who would hear about the crime that very night. Because the LAPD is a small world and Stephanie Lazarus worked there. This is the part that is the hardest to tell.

Sherri’s father, Nels Rasmussen, knew. He knew almost immediately. He went to the LAPD shortly after his daughter’s murder and told them what Sherri had told him, that John’s ex-girlfriend, a police officer named Stephanie Lazarus, had confronted Sherri at work and threatened her. He gave them a name.

 He gave them a motive. He gave them everything a grieving father could give to the people whose job it was to find his daughter’s killer. They didn’t listen. Instead, LAPD investigators fixated on a botched burglary theory. The stereo equipment. The stolen BMW found 2 miles away 10 days later. A few weeks after Sherri’s murder, two men had robbed a woman at gunpoint in the neighborhood and police seized on the coincidence like a lifeline.

They chased sketches of suspects. They followed leads that went nowhere. They closed the door on the most important lead they had. Nels Rasmussen would spend the next 23 years watching the LAPD fail his daughter. He held press conferences. He offered a $10,000 reward. He kept calling. He kept showing up. His wife, Loretta, did the same.

They aged through those years carrying an open wound that never closed. The particular agony of knowing who did it and watching the world refuse to believe you. There is a word for what this family endured. It is not cold case. A cold case is a bureaucratic phrase, a filing status, a temperature metaphor. What the Rasmussen family endured was something else.

 It was a stolen life, yes. But it was also a stolen answer. Every year that passed without an arrest wasn’t just a failure of investigation. It was a victory for the woman who walked out of that condo and went back to work wearing a badge. Time doesn’t heal these wounds. It just makes the silence louder. There’s something important you need to understand about Stephanie Lazarus.

Something that makes this case so deeply chilling and so important for us to sit with. She was not hiding. She was not in exile. She was not skulking in the shadows. She was promoted. She was celebrated. She spent 25 years rising through the ranks of the LAPD, eventually becoming a veteran detective in the art theft unit.

By April of 2009, the same spring she would be arrested for Sherri’s murder, she was featured in LA Weekly’s annual LA People issue. She told the paper she had taken up oil painting. The person we should fear most is not the stranger under the bridge. It is the neighbor who helps you carry groceries. The colleague who remembers your birthday.

The decorated officer who gives interviews about art. It is the person so embedded in the ordinary fabric of life that the idea of their guilt becomes almost structurally impossible to accept. That is exactly what Stephanie Lazarus relied on. That is exactly how she survived. And the LAPD, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not, helped her.

Think about what it means that Sherri’s own father named a suspect on day one and was ignored. Think about what it says about whose safety the system prioritized. Sherri Rasmussen was a woman. The woman being accused was a cop. And for 23 years, the cop won. But here is the thing about evidence. Sometimes it waits.

A bite mark had been noted at Sherri’s autopsy on February 24th, 1986. It was there in the photographs, there in the report. The tissue sample was collected and sealed into an evidence freezer at the coroner’s office. In 1986, no one could read what that tissue contained. But someone put it in a freezer and closed the door.

And for 23 years, the freezer held. In 2001, the LAPD launched its cold case unit. Three years later, in 2004, investigators with the unit pulled Sherri’s file. They went back to the coroner’s office and retrieved the bite mark tissue. A forensic analyst ran the DNA. The result was stunning. The person who bit Sherri Rasmussen was a woman.

That changed everything. For 23 years, the investigation had been shaped around the assumption of two male burglars. The DNA destroyed that assumption in a single test. Investigators now began building a new list. A list of women who had been in Sherri’s world. It was short. They worked through it methodically.

Sherri’s sister, her mother, her close friend. A nurse at Glendale Adventist with whom there had been workplace tension. Each one submitted DNA and was cleared. The fifth name on the list was Stephanie Lazarus. By 2009, Lazarus had been a detective for over two decades. She worked literally across the hall from the cold case unit.

Investigators knew this case required extraordinary care. A misstep could destroy a prosecution, and arresting a sitting LAPD detective for murder would send shockwaves through the entire department. So, they watched her. They followed her. And in May of 2009, they watched Stephanie Lazarus finish a drink at a Costco and throw the cup and straw in the trash. They retrieved it.

 The DNA from that cup and straw matched the DNA from the bite mark on Sherri Rasmussen’s forearm. It was, as investigators later said, irrefutable. On June 5th, 2009, LAPD Detective Daniel Harameyio walked up to Stephanie Lazarus at her desk at department headquarters. He told her he needed her help interrogating a man with information about stolen art, her specialty.

She followed him downstairs to the jail facility where she could not bring her weapon. Inside the interview room, the conversation shifted. When investigators finally alluded to the evidence tying her to Sherri’s death, Stephanie Lazarus said, “Am I on Candid Camera or something? This is insane.

 This is absolutely crazy.” Minutes later, she walked out of the room and she was arrested in the hallway. Nels Rasmussen, Sherri’s father, held a press conference the day of Lazarus’s court appearance. He stood before the cameras and told the world what he had been telling the Los Angeles Police Department for 23 years. The likeliest suspect was one of their own.

The Rasmussen family attorney told reporters, “They provided information on the first day that there was a woman who was problematic.” 23 years. He had said it on day one. The marriage license, the one item taken from Sherri and John’s home alongside the stage stereo equipment, was never found. Investigators believe Lazarus took it.

 A souvenir of a union she could not stand to exist. John Ruetten had also apparently received one last visit from Lazarus sometime after the murder. He later testified at a parole hearing that he believed she used her police training to cover up the crime and that she would say whatever was necessary to get what she wanted.

“I cannot accept that anything she says is genuine,” he said. In March of 2012, 26 years after Sherri’s murder, Stephanie Lazarus was found guilty of first-degree murder by a jury of her peers. She had maintained her innocence throughout the trial. It didn’t matter. The DNA was there. The bite was there. The motive was there.

The truth was there. Judge Robert Perry sentenced her to 27 years to life in state prison, the maximum under California law. Lazarus was 52 years old. She had been a detective for over two decades. In 2023, at a parole hearing, Stephanie Lazarus finally said the words that had been absent for 37 years. “I will never ever harm an individual like I did on February 24th, 1986.

” The transcript read, “When I murdered, callously murdered, and heinously murdered Sherri Rasmussen.” She had confessed. Not in 1986 when Sherri’s body was still warm. Not in the years when Nels Rasmussen stood at press conferences begging for answers. Not during the trial when she pleaded not guilty. Only when parole was the goal.

The parole board initially found her suitable for release. California Governor Gavin Newsom asked for a review. The board reversed the decision. As of this recording, Stephanie Lazarus remains behind bars. And Sherri Rasmussen, who loved to run in the morning, who went into nursing because she wanted to care for people in their most frightening moments, who was 29 years old and three months married, and full of a future that belonged to her by right, remains buried in a cemetery in California.

Her sisters, Teresa and Connie, still speak about her publicly, still fight for her memory, still show up to parole hearings to make sure the room knows what was taken. Nels Rasmussen, who fought for his daughter for more than two decades, did not live to see justice come. Sherri’s mother, Loretta, did not either.

They went to their graves carrying the answer, knowing who did it, knowing the system had ignored them, without seeing a conviction. That is not a cold case. That is a crime layered on top of a crime. There is something this case asks us to sit with, and it is uncomfortable. When Sherri Rasmussen told her father she was being stalked by a police officer, what was she supposed to do? Call the police? The police were the person stalking her.

When Nels Rasmussen gave detectives a name on the very first day, why was he dismissed? Because investigators could not wrap their minds around the idea that one of their own had done it. Because the institution protected itself, perhaps without even fully knowing it was doing so. Because a woman’s fear, even a woman as accomplished and credible as Sherri Rasmussen, was not enough to put a cop under a microscope.

The system failed Sherri, specifically and personally and repeatedly. This is not about one bad investigation. This is about what happens when the people responsible for protecting us carry their own blind spots, their own loyalties, their own inability to believe that someone ordinary, someone they see every day, could do something monstrous.

Stephanie Lazarus attended work every day after murdering Sherri. She attended fellow officers retirement parties. She gave press interviews. She made oil paintings. And no one looked because no one wanted to see. The person who takes a life and then goes back to their ordinary life is not an aberration. They are what violence actually looks like.

Not a monster in the dark. A person with a desk, a badge, a parking spot, a routine. A person who knows that ordinariness is the best disguise there is. Not case number such and such. Not a cold case statistic. Not a bite mark in a forensic file. Her name was Sherri. She went into nursing because she wanted to help. She ran in the mornings.

She fell in love with a man she met at a party and she danced at her own wedding with the kind of happiness that her sister said you could see in her eyes in the photographs. She called her dad. She was kind to her patients on their worst days. She was 29 years old and she had just come home from her honeymoon.

She fought for her life when someone came to take it. The crime scene said so. She did not go without a fight. She was brave right up to the very end. And for 23 years, a woman who killed her went to work every day in the same building as the people who were supposed to find out what happened. She crossed the hall from the cold case unit. She attended department events.

She got promotions. If justice means anything, it means that the silence finally broke. That the bite mark in the freezer waited long enough for someone to ask the right question. That on June 5th, 2009, a woman who thought she had gotten away with it walked into an interrogation room thinking she was going to help question someone about stolen art.

And instead, heard the evidence of her own crime read back to her. That moment belongs to Sherry. It belongs to Nels Rasmussen, who never stopped saying her name. It belongs to her sisters, who show up to every parole hearing and make sure the room knows what was lost. It does not undo what was done. Nothing does.

 But it is the only thing that was left to give. May Sherry Rasmussen rest in peace. If this story has settled in your chest the way it settled in mine, if you’re sitting with the weight of it, the anger of it, the grief of it, I want to hear from you. Drop a comment below. Tell me what part of this case stayed with you the most.

Was it the system’s failure to listen to her father? Was it the 23 years Lazarus sat across the hall from the cold case unit? Was it Sherry herself, the woman who deserved so much more time? And tell me where in the world you’re watching from. These stories cross every border. Women and children are failed by systems on every continent, and knowing that people everywhere are paying attention to these stories, that matters.

If you are new here, Vanished Women and Children is the channel that tells the stories the world too often sets aside. The women, the children, the vulnerable, the ones the system was supposed to protect. Subscribe. Share this video. Leave a comment. Because the more voices there are in this space, the harder it becomes to look away.

Sherry’s father never stopped saying her name. Neither will we.  Mhm.