She’d Been Married Three Months When Her Husband’s Ex Killed Her | CALIFORNIA 1986 Cold Case SOLVED

On the afternoon of February 24th, 1986, a man named John Ruettin came home to a condominium in the Van Ny area of Los Angeles and found the front door open and his wife of 3 months dead on the living room floor. The scene told a story and the police who arrived read it the way it was meant to be read.

 Drawers had been pulled open. The stereo equipment had been partially disconnected as if someone had been interrupted in the middle of stealing it. His wife’s car was gone from the garage. It looked to every experienced eye that walked through that door like a burglary that had gone catastrophically wrong.

 A young woman who had come home at the wrong moment and surprised the wrong men. That theory would define the investigation. Detectives concluded early and firmly that Sher Rasmuson had interrupted two male burglars in the act and that they had beaten and shot her and fled for the better part of the next 23 years. That is the case they chased.

The wrong case, the wrong killers, the wrong story entirely. If cases like this one are why you’re here, the ones where the truth was sitting in an evidence envelope the whole time, waiting for the science to catch up, subscribe to Decades Cold, and tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from.

 This is exactly what we do here. Because the scene had been staged, the drawers, the stereo, the missing car, all of it was set dressing, arranged by someone who understood exactly how police read a crime scene and who wanted them to read this one as a robbery. It was not a robbery. It was something far more personal. And the people who understood that from the very first week were Sherry’s own parents who knew that in the days before she died, their daughter had been frightened of a specific woman, her husband’s former girlfriend, a woman who could not accept

that Jon had married someone else, a woman who happened to carry a badge because she was a Los Angeles police officer. The Rasmusins tried to tell the detectives and they were waved off. So the case went cold and stayed cold for more than two decades. While the person who killed Sher Rasmuson rose steadily through the ranks of the lapided became a respected decorated detective and worked for years inside the very same department that had failed to catch her.

What she never planned for the one thing she could not stage or clean or explain away was a single bite mark. This is the story of Sher Rasmuson. the  family who was right from the beginning and the tiny piece of evidence that waited 23 years to tell the truth. Sher Rasmuson was 29 years old and by any measure she was a person who had built a remarkable life very quickly.

 She was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. A demanding leadership role, the kind you don’t hand to someone who isn’t exceptional, and she’d earned it young. The people who worked with her described someone brilliant and driven and warm. She was tall and athletic with a bright, easy smile.

 She was the kind of person a room notices. And in the fall of 1985, she had married John Ruettin, an  engineer she’d fallen in love with. They were newlyweds in the most literal sense. Married only a few months. Still in that early stretch of a marriage where you’re building the shape of a shared life, figuring out the small daily rhythms of two people becoming one household.

 They had a condominium together in Vanise. She had a career she was thriving in. She had in front of her every reason to expect decades of ordinary happiness. The promotions, the children, the anniversaries, the whole long arc that everyone assumes they’ll get. But in the weeks before her death, something had begun to shadow that happiness, and Sherry talked to her family about it.

 There was a woman from Jon’s past, a former girlfriend from his college years who had not let go. According to what Sherry told her parents, this woman had actually confronted her, had come to her workplace unable or unwilling to accept that Jon had chosen someone else and married her. Sherry was unsettled by it. She mentioned it to her mother and father.

 It was the kind of thing that in an ordinary life becomes an uncomfortable memory and nothing more. The jealous ex who eventually fades away. Sherry had no way of knowing that this woman was not going to fade. And she certainly had no way of knowing that the woman frightening her carried a gun and a badge for a living. On the morning of Monday, February 24th, 1986, Jon left for work.

 Sherry, for reasons that were never fully established. She may not have been feeling well, stayed home that day rather than going into the hospital. And at some point that morning, alone in her own home, in the place where she was supposed to be safest, Sher Rasmusen was attacked. She fought. We know she fought because of what she left behind on her killer’s body and because of what her killer left behind on hers.

 But she was beaten and she was shot and she died there on the floor of the home. she’d made. She was 29 years old and she had been married for 3 months. Everything about how this case went wrong flows from the crime scene and from how convincingly it had been arranged to deceive. So, it’s worth understanding what the detectives of 1986 actually saw and why they drew the conclusion they drew. They saw a home in disarray.

 They saw drawers open and belongings disturbed. They saw stereo equipment that appeared to have been pulled loose, as if a thief had been in the middle of carrying it out. They saw that Sherry’s BMW was missing from the garage, later recovered elsewhere. And they connected all of that to a piece of local context that seemed to fit perfectly.

 In that period, there had been a pair of male burglars operating in the area, men who had confronted people during break-ins. to a detective standing in that living room in 1986. The picture assembled itself. A burglary in progress. A homeowner who came home at the wrong time. A confrontation that turned deadly.

 Two suspects already known to be dangerous already out there. It was a coherent professional sounding theory. It was also completely wrong. And it was wrong by design because a real burglar who is interrupted and panics does not, as a rule, beat and shoot a victim in the specific close personal way Sherry was attacked and then take the time to rearrange a scene.

 The staging was the tell, but only if you were willing to question the theory, and the investigation was not. Once burglary gone bad hardened into the working assumption, it became a lens, and everything got interpreted through it. Evidence that fit was emphasized. Evidence that didn’t fit was minimized or explained away or set aside for later.

 This is one of the most welldocumented dangers in all of investigative work. The theory you commit to early doesn’t just guide where you look. It quietly decides what you’re able to see. And there was one more factor pushing the investigation down the wrong road. Though no one would understand its significance for decades, the real killer knew how crime scenes were read.

 The real killer knew what a burglary was supposed to look like and how to build one. The person who staged that condo did not do it the way a frightened amateur would. It was done by someone with training, someone who understood professionally exactly what story the physical evidence would tell and who counted on the police to believe it. They did.

 Here is the part of this case that is honestly the hardest to sit with. Harder in some ways than the murder itself. Because from almost the very beginning, someone knew the truth. Sherry’s parents, Nells and Loretta Rasmusen, did not believe the burglary story. They had a reason not to. Their daughter had told them while she was still alive about the woman who wouldn’t let go.

 Jon’s former girlfriend who had confronted her, who seemed unable to accept the marriage. So when Sherry was murdered, staged to look like a robbery, her parents did the only thing grieving parents can do. They tried to tell the police where to look. They pointed toward the ex-girlfriend and they were in effect dismissed.

 The detectives were confident in their burglary theory and a jealous ex-girlfriend did not fit it. There was an added obstacle, one that would take on a terrible weight in hindsight. The woman the Rasmusins were describing was a Los Angeles police officer. Whether it was disbelief or the natural resistance of a department to the idea that one of its own could be a murderer or simply the momentum of the wrong theory, the family’s suspicion went nowhere.

 They were the parents of the victim, pointing directly at the person who did it in the first weeks of the case, and no one followed it. Imagine living inside that. Imagine burying your 29-year-old daughter. believing, knowing who was responsible, and being unable to make anyone with the power to act take you seriously. And then imagine that stretching on.

 Not for a year, for 23 years. Nells and Loretta Rasmusen carried that knowledge and that helplessness for more than two decades. They watched the case labeled a botched burglary. They watched it go cold. They grew older inside a grief that was compounded every single day by the certainty that the answer was known and ignored.

 Nell’s Rasmuson, Sher’s father, never stopped pushing. He would come to be the kind of family member every cold case detective eventually meets. The one who will not let go, who keeps the file alive through sheer refusal long after the system has moved on. And when the truth finally came out, it would vindicate them completely. But vindication that arrives 23 years late is a strange and bitter thing.

 It cannot give back the decades. It cannot undo being disbelieved. All it can do is make the record finally say what the family had been saying all along. While the investigation was busy chasing burglars who did not exist, the actual case against the actual killer was sitting quietly in an evidence envelope because Sher Rasmusen had fought for her life.

And in that struggle, her attacker had done something that would decades later become the single most important act in the entire case. Her attacker bit her. There was a bite mark on Sherry’s arm.  And here is where the ordinary, unglamorous professionalism of a 1986 investigation quietly saved everything.

 Even as the larger investigation failed, whoever processed that scene swabbed the bite mark. They collected the saliva left in that wound, sealed it, and preserved it as evidence, even though in 1986 there was almost nothing they could do with it. This is worth pausing on because it’s the hinge the whole case turns on.

 In 1986, DNA analysis was not a working forensic tool. The technology to read a genetic profile from a smear of saliva and match it to a person did not yet exist in any usable form. So that swab was at the time close to meaningless. It was a biological sample with no way to interrogate it. But someone collected it and kept it anyway, following procedure, preserving what could be preserved for a future they could not have imagined.

That bite mark was not the only physical evidence Sherry’s struggle produced. There were broken fingernails at the scene, consistent with a violent hand-to-hand fight. not the profile of a burglar surprised from across a room, but of a close personal physical struggle between two people. And there was the question of the weapon.

 Sherry had been shot, and the ballistics of that shooting would much later point in a direction that had nothing to do with anonymous burglars and everything to do with a specific person who had access to a specific kind of gun. In 1986, all of these threads were there. The bite, the nails, the ballistics, the staging that didn’t quite hold up.

 Each of them quietly contradicted the burglary theory. But you have to be willing to see the contradictions, and the investigation had already decided what it was looking at. So, the swab went into storage, and it waited. It waited while the case went cold. It waited while the killer’s career flourished.

 It waited in the dark in an evidence room for the world to invent the tool that could finally make it speak. The years did what years do to an unsolved murder. The burglary leads went nowhere because there were no burglars. The case slowed and then it stopped and then it became a cold file. One more unsolved homicide in a city that generates far too many of them.

 John Rouettin, Sherry’s husband, eventually rebuilt his life and remarried. The Rasmusins kept grieving and kept believing and kept being right in a silence no one was listening to. And on the other side of the case, the side no one yet knew existed. The person who murdered Sher Rasmuson was not lying low. She was thriving. in 1986.

 At the time of the killing, she had been a relatively new Los Angeles police officer, only in her second year on the force. Over the two decades that followed, she built a genuine career. She rose through the ranks. She became a detective. She specialized of all things in art theft, a respected veteran investigator, the kind of officer colleagues described as a cop’s cop, a good cop, someone nobody looked at twice.

 She was by every external measure a success story of the department. She carried a badge and a gun and the trust that comes with them every day for 23 years. Think about the two lives running in parallel here. In one, a family is destroyed and disbelieved, carrying a truth no one will accept, watching a murder be misfiled as a robbery.

 In the other, the murderer walks free. not just free, but decorated, promoted, trusted, hiding inside the exact institution that was supposed to solve the crime. It is one of the most disturbing arrangements in any case we’ve ever covered on this channel. The killer wasn’t a fugitive on the run.

 She wasn’t hiding in some other state under a false name. She was showing up to work at the lap catching other criminals for more than two decades. That is the situation that a small group of cold case detectives would eventually walk into without at first having any idea what they were about to find. Because in the mid200s, the LAPD began doing something that has quietly transformed policing everywhere, systematically going back through its old, cold, unsolved cases and re-examining the physical evidence with the tools of a new century. And one of

the files they pulled was the murder of Sher Rasmusen. In 2004, lapped cold case detectives reopened the Rasmusen file and did the thing the passage of time finally allowed. They found that preserved bitemark swab from 1986, the saliva that had been collected and stored and left alone for 18 years and they submitted it for DNA analysis.

 The technology that had not existed in 1986 now existed. The sample that had been meaningless could finally be read. [music] And it said something that should have detonated the entire original theory of the case. The DNA profile pulled from that bite mark belonged to a woman, not to two male burglars, to a single female attacker.

Sit with what that one result did. For 18 years, the official story of Sheri Rasmmanson’s murder had been that she was killed by men. Anonymous male criminals interrupted mid- robbery. And now, the most intimate piece of evidence in the entire case, the saliva her killer had left in a bite on her arm as they struggled revealed that the person who attacked her was a woman.

 The entire foundation of the investigation, every assumption, every wasted lead, every dismissal of the family had been built on a mistake that the physical evidence flatly contradicted. The detectives ran the female DNA profile through COTUS, the national database of convicted offenders [music] genetic profiles. If the killer had ever been convicted of a qualifying crime, her DNA [music] would be in there and this would end quickly.

It came back with no match. She wasn’t in the offender database, which as we now know makes grim sense because she wasn’t a convicted criminal. She was a police officer. She had spent her entire adult life on the other side of that database. So, the cold case unit had a genuinely stunning fact.

 The killer was a woman and no name to attach it to. The case reawakened could easily have stalled again right there. But that single correction from two men to one woman changed the direction of everything. It meant that when investigators finally sat down and asked the right [music] question, they’d be asking it about the right kind of person. And in 2009, they asked it.

 They stopped looking at the imaginary burglars entirely and started looking at the women in Sher Rasmusen’s life and [music] more pointedly the women who might have had a reason to want her dead. In February of 2009, the case was reopened again, this time with a completely new theory. The theory the physical evidence had been pointing at all along and the one Sherry’s parents had offered in the very first week.

 That Sherry had been killed by a woman and killed for a personal reason. Investigators began systematically working through the women connected to Sherry’s life, looking for the one whose DNA would match the profile from the bite mark. They started close and worked outward. Sherry’s own mother and sisters voluntarily provided DNA samples and were tested and eliminated.

 A painful but necessary step, ruling out the family so the field could narrow. [music] And then investigators went back to John Ruitten, Sherry’s widowerower, now more than two decades removed from the murder and remarried. And they reintered him about the people in Sherry’s world and in his own. And in that conversation, John told them about a woman from his past, a former girlfriend from his college years, from before he’d met Sherry.

 He explained the history that he’d never been in love with her the way she’d apparently been with him, that when he got engaged to Sherry, this woman had reached out, had wanted to see him, had made her feelings known, and then he told them the detail that changed the case forever. The woman’s name was Stephanie Lazarus, [music] and she was a veteran detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.

You can only imagine the silence in the room when that landed. The investigators chasing a female killer in a decades old murder, had just been told by the victim’s own husband that the most obvious suspect, the obsessed ex-girlfriend the family had named at the very beginning, was not just any woman. [music] She was one of them.

 She was a colleague. She was at that moment an active, working, decorated, lap detective. The suspect in a cold case murder was a member of the same police force that was investigating it. This transformed the case from a difficult cold homicide into something almost impossibly delicate because now the detectives had to build a case against a fellow officer quietly, carefully without her finding out.

 And Stephanie Lazarus was not a civilian who would never suspect she was being watched. She was a trained investigator. She knew every technique they might use because they were her techniques, too. If she got even a hint that the Rasmusening case had turned toward her, she could destroy evidence, prepare a defense, or simply understand exactly how to stay ahead of them.

 They had one shot at getting her DNA, and they had to do it without her ever knowing it was happening. The logistics of what came next are almost surreal, and they capture just how close this killer had been all along to the people looking for [music] her. As the investigation quietly focused on Stephanie Lazarus, the detectives working the case found themselves in an extraordinary situation.

 Lazarus’s own office was located near the very unit that was now secretly investigating her for murder. The suspect and the detectives building the case against her were functionally working in the same building. She was walking the same halls. She had no idea that the colleagues she passed were assembling a homicide case with her name on it.

 To get her DNA without alerting her, investigators did what has become a familiar move on this channel, but which required extraordinary care here, given who they were surveilling. [music] They put her under discrete surveillance and waited for her to discard something in public that they could legally collect and test.

 Abandoned DNA, a cup, a straw, a utensil left behind after a meal, is fair game once you throw it away. [music] In 2009, a surveillance team followed Lazarus, and at some point, she finished [music] a drink and threw away the cup. That discarded cup with her saliva on it was recovered, and then the lab did the comparison the entire case had been building toward for 23 years.

The DNA from Stephanie Lazarus’s discarded [music] cup was tested against the DNA from the bite mark on Sher Rasmusen’s arm, the saliva left behind in that wound during [music] the struggle in 1986, and it matched. It was an irrefutable forensic connection [music] between a sitting lap detective and the murder of a woman whose husband she had once dated.

 The bite mark collected and preserved by someone following procedure in 1986 when it could not be used had waited 23 years and finally [music] named the killer. Everything the family had said, everything the female DNA result had implied, all of it converged at last [music] into a single unambiguous scientific fact.

 The prosecutors would later tie the case together further. [music] There was the matter of the murder weapon, a firearm consistent with a gun that Lazarus had access to, and Lazarus had before the murder reported a personal handgun stolen, a detail that took on considerable weight in light of everything else.

 There was the staging of the scene, now understandable as the work of someone with police training, and there was motive, stated plainly. Jealousy. The prosecution’s account was that Stephanie Lazarus could not accept John Ruitt and choosing and marrying Sherry and that her inability to let go had curdled into a rage that ended in murder.

 The obsessed ex-girlfriend the Rasmussins had described in 1986 was in 2009 finally about to be named as exactly what she was. On June 5th, 2009, Stephanie Lazarus was arrested for the murder of Sher Rasmuson. and the way it was done reflected just how sensitive the situation was. She was taken into custody at LAP headquarters at the police department where she worked.

There are accounts of investigators drawing her into a setting under a pretext before making the arrest precisely because arresting an armed [music] trained veteran detective is not a routine matter. One of their own was being taken in for a murder that the department had mclassified as a burglary for more than two decades.

 The reaction inside the lapped was by every account one of profound shock. This was not a fringe figure, not an officer people had whispered about. Stephanie Lazarus was, in the words of the reporters who covered the beat, a cop’s cop, [music] a respected, decorated, longtime detective whom colleagues had trusted and worked alongside for years.

 The idea that she had committed a brutal murder in 1986, staged the scene to fool her own future colleagues and then risen through the ranks of the very department investigating [music] it was almost impossible for people who knew her to absorb. Nobody, they said, saw it [music] coming. She was held on $10 million bail and the case moved toward a trial that would force the [music] lapped and the city to reckon with a genuinely uncomfortable set of questions.

 [music] How had this happened? How had a victim’s family, pointing directly at the killer in the first week, been dismissed? How had a staged crime scene fooled trained detectives for 23 years? And how much of that failure was tangled up in the fact that the suspect wore the same uniform as the people who were supposed to catch her? The bitemark DNA had answered the question of who?  The trial would have to confront the far more painful question of how it had taken so unimaginably long.

 Stephanie Lazarus’s trial began in early 2012, 26 years after Sheri Rasmusen was murdered, and at the center of it, cutting through every other piece of testimony, was that single bite mark, the defense understood [music] exactly how damning the DNA was and fought hard against it. But the forensic connection was in the end the thing the jury could not get past.

 The saliva in that wound belonged to Stephanie Lazarus, [music] and it had been left there while Sherry fought for her life. The prosecution laid out the story the evidence told, a woman consumed by jealousy over a man who had chosen someone else who went to that condo, who beat and shot Sher Rasmusen, and who then used her training to stage the scene as a burglary and walk away, believing for 23 years that she had gotten away with it.

 On March 20th, 2012, the jury returned its [music] verdict. Guilty of first-degree murder. On May 11th, 2012, Stephanie Lazarus was sentenced [music] to 27 years to life in prison, 25 years to life for the murder, plus two additional years for the personal use of a firearm. [music] She would be sent to the California Institution for Women, where she remains.

 And finally, in that courtroom, the Rasmusen family got to speak. the parents [music] and sisters who had known and been dismissed for a quarter of a century. Sherry’s mother, Loretta, told the court about the extreme heartache and pain her family had endured. A pain she said there was no cure for. Sherry’s younger sister, Teresa, spoke through tears about the waste of it, how callous it was to take Sherry’s life, and how Sherry lived on in all of them.

 and John Rouettin stood before the court and spoke about the woman he had married and lost and how proud he had been that she’d agreed to be his wife. The Lap’s own chief, Charlie Beck, called the case a tragedy on every level, acknowledging not only that the Rasmusen family had lost a wife and a daughter, but that the department itself felt a sense of betrayal that one of its own officers had committed such a crime.

 And he said the thing that the family had waited more than two decades to hear an official finally say out loud that he was sorry it had taken them so long to solve it and bring even a measure of justice to this tragedy. The murder of Sher Rasmusen leaves us with a few truths that are bigger than this one case and they’re worth naming plainly.

The first is about the danger of a theory. This case did not go unsolved for 23 years because the evidence was missing. The bite mark existed from day one. The broken fingernails existed. The staging that didn’t add up existed. The family’s suspicion aimed precisely at the right person existed in the first week.

 Everything needed to solve this case was present in 1986. What went wrong was that investigators committed early to a story. Burglary gone bad and then without realizing it bent everything they saw to fit that story. It is one of the most important cautions in all of forensic work. The theory you fall in love with first can quietly blind you to the truth sitting right in front of you.

 The second truth is about the family and it is the one I most want you to carry out of this. Nells and Loretta Rasmusen were right. They were right from the very beginning and they were disbelieved for 23 years in part because the person they were accusing wore a badge. When the DNA finally spoke in 2009, it didn’t reveal something new.

It confirmed exactly what a grieving mother and father had been saying since the first week. There is a particular cruelty in that, in knowing the truth, telling it plainly, and being made to wait a quarter of a century for a machine to say it for you before anyone would listen. The lesson every investigator has since taken from this case is that the people closest to a victim sometimes see with painful clarity what the official theory refuses to.

 They are not always right, but they should never be waved off. And the third truth is the one that ties this case to everything we do on this channel. Stephanie Lazarus did almost everything right from a killer’s point of view. She staged the scene with a professional’s understanding of how it would be read. She kept herself out of the offender database by keeping her record clean.

She hid in plain sight inside the very institution investigating her. For 23 years, it worked. But she could not account for one thing. The small involuntary trace she left in the heat of the struggle. The saliva in a bite mark collected by someone doing their quiet job in 1986 and  preserved for a future that hadn’t arrived yet. She could stage a room.

 She could not unle her own DNA. And in the end, that single microscopic trace outlasted the lie, outlasted her career, and outlasted every year she thought she’d escaped. Sher Rasmusen was 29 years old, a gifted nurse, a newlywed, a daughter, and a sister, a woman with decades of ordinary happiness in front of her that were stolen in a single morning.

 It took far too long, 23 years too long. But the truth her family always knew was finally spoken out loud and the person who took her was finally named. If this story stayed with you, tell us in the comments where you’re watching from and subscribe because the next one is already waiting.