. . . A Million Years Ago
Los Angeles Police Department detective Stephanie Lazarus has a very expressive, elastic face. At 51 she looks at least 10 years younger. Her straight brown hair is shoulder-length, with bangs that fall at an angle to either side of her forehead, and her manner is outgoing and friendly. She is pretty, even as middle age has begun to tug at her face. She smiles and laughs easily and has a wide range of comical facial expressions but also a quick, harsh temper. She can turn on a hard, weathered expression, a look that means business and that is useful for someone who has spent the last quarter-century as a cop.
On the morning of June 5, 2009, Lazarus reported for work to the Parker Center, the L.A.P.D. administration building downtown, where she was surrounded by many of her longtime colleagues and friends. She was a respected, well-known figure in the department. No, more than that. In this close-knit world, she was in her own way legendary. She had worked her way up from a patrol car to the art-theft division, a fascinating job that was about more than crime-fighting. It had a public-relations aspect to it, in that stolen art tends to be stolen from the homes and galleries of some of L.A.’s most notable citizens. Lazarus had a reputation for being tenacious, tough, and strictly by the book. In fact, in all of her years in the department, she had never had a disciplinary hearing. Not one. She had covered most of the desired positions in the department, in units such as DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), Homicide, and Internal Affairs. Everyone knew her—and couldn’t help but like her, despite her perfection. She was usually chipper and fun. She had married a fellow officer. Lazarus had started up the department’s child-care program, had initiated a child-safety/ID program. She was one of those people whom it was, simply, a privilege to know.
When Detective Dan Jaramillo asked Lazarus for help that morning, she was predictably eager to oblige. He told her that they had arrested someone who had information about an art theft, and asked her if she would go downstairs with him to the building’s basement jail facility to interrogate the suspect. They walked downstairs together, chatting amiably. Before they entered the holding area, as a matter of routine, they checked their weapons. Lazarus was led into a small interrogation room with pale-blue walls and soundproof tiles from about waist level to the ceiling. Here Jaramillo introduced her to his partner, Greg Stearns.
They asked Lazarus to take a seat in the chair ordinarily given to the interrogatee. This clearly felt odd to her. She had a concerned, querulous look on her face as she sat down, but was still very friendly and collegial. Lazarus was here to help.
“I didn’t want to bring this up in your squad room,” said Jaramillo in a friendly, confidential way.
“You’re going to bring someone in, right?” she asked.
Jaramillo ignored the question.
“We’ve been assigned a case,” he said. “And there are some notes as far as your name being mentioned.”
“Oh,” said Lazarus. She had been lured downstairs under a false pretense. “O.K.,” she said skeptically.
“Do you know John Ruetten?”
Jaramillo had pronounced it wrong, “Roo-ten,” and after a long moment she corrected him: “Do you mean John Rut-ten?”
“Yes,” said the detective.
“Yeah, I went to school with him. . . . Let’s see. I went to U.C.L.A. Nineteen seventy-eight I started, and, you know, I met him at school in the dorms.”
“Were you guys friends? Close friends?”
“Yeah. We were very close friends. I mean, what’s this all about?”
Lazarus sat forward in her chair. Challenging.
“It’s a case we’re working on that involves John, and in . . . some of the things we’ve reviewed, there’s also stuff that he knew you.”
“Oh, yeah. We’re friends. We lived in the dorms for two years.”
“You guys lived in the same dorm?”
“Yeah … Dykstra.”
“O.K.,” said Jaramillo. “Were you guys just friends or anything else?”
“Yeah. We were good friends.”
“Was there any kind of relationship or anything that developed between you guys?”
“Yeah,” said Lazarus, mildly put off. Very mildly. This was personal, but she was in her fraternal mode, which ran deep with her. She seemed determined to be helpful. “I mean, we dated,” she said. “You know … ” And then, leaning forward, she asked confidentially, cop to cop, “I mean, what’s this all about?” Clue me in here, would you, guys?
“Well, it’s relating to his wife.”
“O-kaay,” she said, drawing the word out. Why are you asking me such a bizarre question, out of the blue?
“Did you know her?”
“Not really. I mean, I knew that he got married years ago.”
“Did you ever meet her?”
“God, I don’t know.”
“Did you know who she was or anything?”
“Well, let me think.” She leaned back in her chair and looked off for a moment, closing her eyes. Her expression also conveyed annoyed surprise, but Jaramillo was speaking softly and politely and she was on board. “God, it’s been a long time ago,” she said, twisting her face at last in an exaggerated grimace, as if the question had been preposterous, but she was still willing to comply.
“I may have met her . . . jeez,” she said, raising her hands in exasperation. “You know.”
John Ruetten was crazy about Sherri Rasmussen. They met in the summer of 1984, John a talkative, charming young man with a thick mop of dark hair, as handsome as a male model, and Sherri a tall Scandinavian beauty, with light-brown hair, a broad face with high cheekbones, and wide-set eyes under dark, arching eyebrows. Both were lean and athletic, runners, and both were on a fast track. He was a recent graduate of U.C.L.A., and she was, just two years older at 27, already the director of nursing at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center.
Sherri was hot stuff. She had entered Loma Linda University at age 16 and now lectured internationally on critical-care nursing. She was beautiful and she was considered brilliant. She was also confident and directed. She was the kind of person John wanted to be, or, rather, a personification of how he saw himself in his best moments. And she fell just as hard for him. Their connection was immediate and untroubled. It was as though everything in their lives just fell away when they met, old relationships, future plans. They met, and they were together. Just like that. They were married in November 1985.
It had been a busy holiday season after the wedding, with happy visits to both sets of parents, and by Monday, February 24, of the following year they were settling into the comfortable rhythm of married life. John had started a job with an engineering company. When he left their Van Nuys condominium for work that day, Sherri was still in bed. They had gone out to a movie Sunday night. She was supposed to supervise a human-resources class for some of her nursing charges that morning, and she didn’t feel like doing it. It was mandated by the hospital, and Sherri was less than sold on its value, so she told John she was thinking about just calling in sick and staying home that day. He encouraged her to just go in and get the class over with. She was still undecided under the covers when he walked out the front door at about 7:20.
Ordinarily, Sherri left for work first. On his way in, John dropped off some laundry and was at his desk shortly before eight. He thought about calling Sherri, but he didn’t want to disturb her if she had decided to sleep in. He tried at midmorning and, when there was no answer, assumed she had decided to teach the class after all. He tried her office, but her secretary said she hadn’t yet seen her. On Mondays when she taught the class, the secretary said, she sometimes didn’t come by her office at all. John tried to call home three or four more times but did not get an answer. It was odd that the answering machine had not been turned on, but Sherri sometimes forgot.
John was not especially concerned. On his way home early that evening he ran some errands, stopping by the dry cleaner’s to pick up freshly laundered clothes, and at a U.P.S. store, and when he pulled up to the garage behind their home was surprised to see the door drawn up. The Balboa Townhomes consisted of three-story white mock-Tudor buildings with garage entrances on the ground floor in the back alley. Just above the garage was a small balcony before two sliding glass doors. The garage was just wide enough for their two cars. Sherri’s BMW was gone, and there were shards of broken glass on the pavement at the garage entrance. John’s first thought was that this must be glass from one of the car windows. She must have run into something pulling out. Weeks earlier she had clipped the door and broken the aerial on her car. He thought, Uh-oh, what did she do now? He lifted the plastic bag of dry cleaning out of the car and headed up the garage stairs to the living room. It wasn’t until he saw the inner door to their living room ajar that he grew alarmed.
Sherri was dead on the floor of the living room. She lay on her back on the brown rug, her face swollen, battered, and bloody. She was barefoot, still in her red bathrobe. At first he thought that she was, maybe, asleep, but when he saw her face he knew, as he would tell a detective later, “we were in trouble.” Those who die violently leave life in mid-stride, often with a look of terminal surprise on their face, frozen. Sherri’s robe was thrown open, her arms were raised and bent, and one long slender leg was slightly raised and bent at the knee. She looked fixed in the act of trying to get up. John touched her leg, and it was stiff. Her skin was cold. He put his fingers to her wrist to feel for a pulse. There was none.
He was struck—and “struck” is the right word—by the sheer impossibility of what he saw. You heard about such things, of course. There would be 831 homicides in Los Angeles that year. But hearing about them never made the prospect of such a thing possible in your own life. Here was Sherri, so alive to him in every way, still so vividly and shockingly present and yet irremediably, utterly gone. Her face was covered with dried blood, the right eyelid bluish and puffy and closed. Her left eye was open, staring up, and her mouth was open in a final gasp. She had been dead for hours. Just below the rim of her delicate, formfitting pink camisole, right in the center of her chest, was a black bullet hole.
John phoned 911.
You know, Lazarus had said with exasperation, a comradely protest. She wasn’t going to get angry about it, but she clearly considered questions about the wife of some long-ago boyfriend to be none of their business and totally out of line. But Jaramillo pressed on.
“Let me ask you,” he said. “You said you dated John. How long did you guys date?”
This was finally too much for Lazarus.
“I mean, what? Is this something?” she said, looking mystified.
“Stephanie, here’s the situation,” Greg Stearns said. “Basically, we knew when we saw in this chrono that maybe there was some relationship there. That’s what the chrono seems to indicate and we didn’t want to come up to you at your desk and ask those kind of questions or do anything.”
She was experienced enough at this to have realized by now that she was being played. She might have just stood up and walked out . . . but how would that look? Lazarus remained friendly, if annoyed. You could see she wanted to know what was going on, which was reason enough to stay.
“I mean, God, it’s been a million years ago,” she said.
But she was willing to proceed. She described her relationship with John in college, all the while shaking her head with bewilderment. They had hung around together with a group of friends. “I couldn’t even tell you the last time I talked to him. It was kind of a weird relationship,” she said. “We dated. I can’t say that he was my boyfriend. I don’t know if he would have considered me his girlfriend. We just dated.”
She had a circle of friends from those dorm years at U.C.L.A. with whom she had stayed in touch, she said. John was just one of that crowd.
“You met his wife?” asked Jaramillo.
“I may have.”
“Do you remember her name or anything?”
“Ummm . . . ” she said, straining to recall something insignificant from very long ago.
“Or what she did for a living, or where she worked, or anything about her?”
“Well, I think she was a nurse. I can’t remember how he said he met her. It’s been so long ago.”
“Did you go to their wedding?”
“No. I didn’t go to their wedding. No. I . . . I can’t even tell you when they got married. It’s been a million years ago”
“Do you know what happened to his wife?”
“Yeah. I know she got killed.”
“When did you hear about that?”
“I saw a poster at work.”
The crime scene was meticulously documented in 1986. It looked as if there had been a fight.
One of the room’s tall stereo speakers was knocked over and lying beside Sherri on the rug, its top flush against her head. The wires had been removed from it. A gray ceramic vase with a heavy base lay shattered on the floor. The top two shelves of the wooden display cabinet had been knocked askew, and an amplifier and receiver dangled forward on top of the television. At the base of the stairs leading up from the living room to the second floor, a VCR and a CD player had been stacked neatly, as if assembled for carrying out but then left behind. There was a single bloody smudge on top of the CD player. There were smears of blood on the east wall and another smear on the front door. On the floor just inside the front door were two intertwined cords; one was apparently the wire from the fallen speaker. Upstairs, one of the two glass sliding doors to the back balcony was shattered. This was the glass John had seen on the pavement outside the garage. There was no sign of forced entry, and other than the objects left on the living-room floor, there was no sign of ransacking.
Homicide detective Lyle Mayer discovered that a pink-and-pale-green quilted blanket on the living-room chair had a bullet hole in it, with powder burns. He recognized two of what turned out to be three holes in Sherri’s chest as contact wounds—in other words, after the first shot, a gun had been placed against her chest and fired point-blank, twice. It appeared that the killer had used the blanket to muffle the sound.
Two bullets were recovered from Sherri’s body, both .38-caliber; one of the bullets must have passed completely through her. Any of these three shots alone would have been rapidly fatal. Somebody had wanted to make sure she was dead. In addition to the wounds on her face—it was likely she had been struck over her right eye with the vase—there was a bite mark on her inner left forearm. It would be swabbed for saliva samples, and a cast would be taken for a possible tooth comparison.
John told police about his day, retracing his steps for them. Over the next few weeks, police investigators under Mayer’s supervision interviewed neighbors, family members, and friends, but turned up no suspects. The silver BMW was found a week later parked on the street in Van Nuys, unlocked, keys in the ignition. Investigators found several fingerprints in it, a spot of blood, and a strand of brown hair. Research and neighborhood interviews revealed that two Latin men had been breaking into houses in the area, and that in one case they had assaulted a woman. The opinion Mayer formed that first day would not change.
“I believe your house was burglarized today, sometime before 10 A.M.,” he told a distraught John that night, just hours after the shocked husband had called 911. After more than an hour of detailed questioning, the detective assured John that he, Mayer, did not suspect him of any involvement. “I believe they got in your front door,” he said. “I don’t think it was locked. . . . Once those persons or that person or whoever was inside, I believe they were trying to steal your stereo and probably some other items.”
“Why would they do anything to her?” asked John, crying. “Why wouldn’t they just run?”
“I don’t know, John,” said Mayer. “John, things happen, O.K.? Here’s what I think happened. I think Sherri came down the stairs. And I think she surprised them. And she was hurt, O.K.? . . . She was shot.”
After delivering this analysis, almost as an afterthought, Mayer asked John if he or Sherri had been having any problems.
“We were having the best time,” John said, sobbing. “We just got married.” It was hard not to be moved by his grief.
“No financial problems? She’s not having problems with an ex-boyfriend, or you with an ex-girlfriend?”
“No,” said John.
The interrogation was a dance. For the detectives, the idea was to delay turning the conversation into a confrontation for as long as possible. Lazarus had her own moves. She kept turning the discussion to other matters, working to keep things friendly and collegial; laughing and referring to mutual acquaintances; mugging wonder, surprise, confusion, irritation; gesturing broadly with her hands; working to keep the discussion at the level of cop talk, even as Jaramillo and Stearns zeroed in on darker turf. She reviewed her dating history, ticking off the men she had seen in her youth before she had met her husband, and making sure that John Ruetten was seen as a blip, just one in a fairly large group, and that their relationship was, as she said over and over again, a million years ago.
“When you heard about John’s wife being killed, what was your reaction?” asked Jaramillo.
“I obviously called the family. I called some of his friends that I knew. Obviously, it’s shocking to hear. . . . ”
“Do you know what the circumstances were regarding her death?”
“Ummm. Jeez. Let me think back. Umm. Jeez,” she said. “I don’t know if it was a burglary or something—it’s been so many years. I can faintly think that I may have seen a flyer. It may have had her picture on it. That’s what I see. If somebody called me, I may not have known what her last name was. I may have. Maybe if you told me, I would remember it.”
“Do you know the first name?”
“Shelly. Sherri? Something. Like I said, it’s been so many years.”
“As far as you can remember, do you remember ever talking to her?”
“As I said earlier, I may have, you know. I may have talked to her.”
“You mentioned a hospital maybe—you may have talked to her at a hospital,” said Stearns.
Suddenly, Lazarus’s memory began to thaw.
“Yeah. I may have met her,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m thinking, now that you guys are bringing up all these old memories. You know. I mean, jeez,” she said, shaking her head and sighing heavily.
Lazarus was now going to change her story. Not only did she remember John’s murdered wife, they had met and talked, probably several times.
She said, “I’m thinking that, because he would date other people and I would date other people, and I think at one point, he may have been dating her. I don’t know. Maybe he was married. I don’t even remember. And I’m like, ‘Why are you calling me if you’re dating her, or living with her, or married to her?’ I honestly don’t remember the time frame. I’m like, ‘Come on. Knock it off.’ Now I’m thinking, I may have gone to her and said, ‘Hey, you know what? If he’s dating you, he is bothering me.’ I’m thinking we had a conversation about that, one or two, maybe. It could have been three. I don’t want to say I had three conversations with her, or whatever.”
“At work or at their house?”
“No. I’m thinking, he obviously told me where she worked. I’m thinking it was a hospital somewhere in L.A. I could have been—again, what year was that? Where was I working?” Another heavy sigh. “I’m trying to think. When did you say they got married?”
“I don’t know. I think it was in ’85 or ’86, or something like that,” said Jaramillo disingenuously. He knew exactly when John and Sherri had been married.
Lazarus counted backward to herself.
“I could have been working in Hollywood, it sounds like, if that’s where I was working. And I went and talked to her and just said, ‘Hey, you know what? He is dating you, he keeps calling me—why don’t you tell him to knock it off or whatever.’ Because I probably would have told him to knock it off.”
“You would’ve told John?”
“Oh, yeah. I would have said, ‘Hey, you know … ’ ”
“But you wanted to tell her too? You wanted them both to know?”
“Yeah, I mean, you are getting calls … ”
“When you talked to his wife and said, ‘Hey, he keeps calling me—he needs to knock it off,’ or what have you, was that civil? … ”
“Oh, I don’t think there was anything,” said Lazarus. “The conversation lasted a few moments. I can’t even remember. It wasn’t like we went out to lunch or anything.”
As he remembered it years later, the first thing that Nels Rasmussen asked Detective Mayer the day after his daughter was murdered was “Have you checked out John’s ex-girlfriend, the lady cop?”
Nels had answered the phone shortly before one o’clock in the morning at his home in Tucson on Tuesday, February 25, 1986. It was John’s father calling with the knee-buckling news.
There was shock, and right away the first sparks of an anger that would never go away. Nels wanted to know why, if his daughter had been killed the day before, he was just being informed of it now. Why hadn’t John called him?
Nels is a dentist, a careful, proud, conservative, capable, successful, opinionated man with a rugged, tanned face and a shock of snow-white hair. His wife, Loretta, managed his practice. They were enormously proud of their talented daughter and, like many such parents, were less than thrilled about her choice of husband. Nels considered John a pleasant enough fellow, but . . . unimpressive. Weak. He had specific reasons for thinking that, other than the young man’s lefty politics. He asked to speak directly to John. He wanted answers. John’s dad, likely apprehending Nels’s hostility, refused to put his grieving son on the phone.
Nels sat up the rest of that night, his mind racing, dealing with his shock and pain by noting down everything he knew about the situation. Sherri had confided in him several times in the months since she and John had moved in together. She said this other woman—Nels didn’t know her name—had visited their home weeks before their wedding, unannounced. A lady cop. She was dark-haired, athletic, and brazen, and had dropped off a pair of water skis she wanted John to wax. Sherri told her father that she viewed the skis as nothing more than an excuse to intrude, and a provocation. What nerve! She and John had an argument afterward, and John assured her that there was nothing between him and this woman anymore, that they had been dorm pals long before lovers, and that their relationship had never gotten that serious. Still, Sherri did not want him to wax those skis.
According to Nels, John did not back her up, would not stand up to this woman, suggesting instead to Sherri that it would be better to placate her.
The lady cop had come by again unannounced, to pick up the skis, Sherri told her father, which John had waxed, despite her objections. That time she asked the woman to leave after John handed over the skis, making it clear that she was unwelcome.
This had not deterred the woman at all. She had shown up again, this time in her L.A.P.D. uniform, gun strapped to her waist. She said she was on a break. John had gone to work and Sherri was still home; usually it was the other way around. Immediately Sherri wondered if this was some kind of routine: fiancée leaves for work; old girlfriend stops by? She didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to trust John. The wedding was just weeks away. She cried on the phone telling her father about it that night, and Sherri did not cry easily. She talked about it more with her father when she and John visited Tucson on her birthday. According to Nels, she said she wished John would just step in and tell this woman to leave them alone. All he would do was assure her that there was nothing going on between him and her, and that the best thing was just to ignore her and eventually she would go away.
Then there was the visit the woman made to Sherri’s office at the hospital, the visit Lazarus would admit to 23 years later, screwing up her face with the effort to remember something so trifling: It wasn’t like we went out to lunch or anything. Sherri had told her father about this meeting in detail. She said the woman had burst into her office at Glendale, right past the secretary outside her door. This time the lady cop was dressed in tight short-shorts and a tube top, an outfit that shouted her sexuality and athleticism.
Nels brought all of this to Detective Mayer’s attention the day after the murder. It was why his immediate question was “Have you checked out John’s ex-girlfriend, the lady cop?” He would later recall that Mayer dismissed the suggestion out of hand. Nels was told that he had watched too many cop shows on TV.
It is hard to believe Mayer’s focus could remain so stubbornly narrow. In a sense, the detective and the distraught husband had boxed themselves in on the night of the murder. Mayer seems to have seriously considered only two possibilities: one, that John killed Sherri (most slain women are killed by their intimate partners); two, that she had been killed by home intruders (the obvious implication of the stereo equipment stacked and left on the floor). Mayer ruled out John as a suspect after talking to him at length. There was no motive, no insurance, no evident trouble in their relationship. You could not help but feel for John. His pain was palpable, unmistakably genuine. The detective was a kind man, and it is clear from their conversation that night that he liked John and came to believe him and trust him. He told John as much at the end of their conversation. So when John dismissed out of hand the notion that an ex-girlfriend might have done this, Mayer was more inclined to believe him than Nels, the angry, grieving father-in-law, who seemed to have such irrational suspicion of and dislike for the poor, grieving husband. Speaking with the detective, John disputed Nels’s stories. He told Mayer there was no way the confrontations his father-in-law described would have happened without Sherri’s telling him about it.
Why would Sherri not have told him the same things she had told her father? She did tell John about the hospital visit, but not in a way that made him feel that she was frightened or even intimidated. What Sherri conveyed to him was her concern that there might still be something going on between him and Stephanie, which was not true. Sherri may have decided it would be better to deal with the Stephanie problem herself. That was in fact what Sherri told Nels she was going to do the last time they spoke about it.
There may have been another reason Nels wasn’t heard. There appears to have been a degree of institutional bias at work that is shocking, and perhaps even criminal. The case record suggests that one or more persons, during the initial investigation and continuing through the next 10 years, were not just disinclined to consider that one of their own had murdered Sherri Rasmussen but actively conspired to hide evidence that might have proved it. For one thing, all of the records in the Rasmussen file pertaining to Nels’s suspicions about “the lady cop,” and even the interview with John the day after the murder, where he discussed Lazarus with Mayer, are missing. There are audio recordings and notes of every other interview in those first days, which was standard operating procedure, but there are none for the ones where Lazarus was specifically mentioned. These are conversations remembered by both Nels and John, who were interviewed independently, without knowledge of what the other had said. As we shall see, this suspicious behavior continued in the coming years.
Soon after the murder, Nels was shown sketches of two Latin male suspects, and the burglary theory was explained. There was no way for him to recognize the drawings, and the whole scenario did not make sense to him. He had to wonder about the competence of these detectives. The apartment showed signs of a protracted fight. Mayer estimated that the struggle may have lasted for an hour and a half. How could his daughter have fought off two men for that long?, Nels asked. There was the bite mark on her forearm, which led Mayer’s partner, Steve Hooks, to conjecture that the suspect may have been a woman, on the theory that women are biters. But the notion was dismissed. Women don’t typically engage in breaking and entering, and fighting men have been known to use their teeth. There was also the bullet wound in the center of Sherri’s chest, and the hole and powder burns on the blanket. Mayer told Nels that his daughter had not simply been shot and killed; she had been assassinated. Why would a burglar do that?
Nels asked if they had checked to see if the lady cop had been working that day. Had they examined her, taken pictures of her? The answers were no. No one ever checked up on Lazarus. Mayer or Hooks or someone apparently did talk to her on the phone eventually, and the conversation was enough to close that line of inquiry. There is only one brief entry in the case file that mentions her, recorded on November 19, 1987, more than a year and a half after the murder. It reads, “John Ruetten called. Verified Stephanie Lazarus, PO [police officer], was former girlfriend.”
No arrests were ever made. The evidence of Sherri Rasmussen’s murder was packed away in commercial storage.
In the interrogation room that June day, 23 years later, the questioning of Lazarus ground on.
“And you’re saying when you went to see her, do you remember if it was at her house or at the place she worked at?”
“No, I’m thinking it was probably … for some reason I want to say, you know … I’m thinking that maybe the hospital was on my way to work in Hollywood. That’s maybe sounding familiar”
“Oh, O.K. So if it was en route to work you would more than likely have gone to her work and had this discussion with her?”
“That is sounding familiar. Now that you guys are bringing this stuff up, that sounds familiar. But, again, I mean, you know, what does it have to do with me dating him and her being killed? I don’t have anything to do with it.”
Again, Lazarus saw the connection they seemed to be making but wanted to leave open the real chance that they weren’t. Jaramillo rapidly retreated from the idea that she was a suspect. Stearns changed course.
“Like I said, we just literally got this the other day and we’re going through it and you see your name.”
“Yeah. Then you saw that I work next door.”
“Right, we recognized the name and we know you work next door to us, and so we are trying to get some background; we’re trying to figure this out. I mean, this is from a long time ago.”
Jaramillo had another question. “Let me ask you this: did the detectives ever reach out to you?”
“No. No one has ever talked to me about him,” she said, and then caught herself, screwing up her face again. There would be a record of her having talked to a detective.
“No, I’m thinking that I did talk to a detective,” she said. “What division was it?”
“Van Nuys.”
“Mmm … you know, I’m thinking that I did speak to somebody.”
Nels never gave up. He and his wife put up a $10,000 reward and cooperated with the producers of the TV show Murder One, which developed a segment about the unsolved case. He kept calling L.A.P.D. detectives over the years, asking always if they had checked out “the lady cop.” When he read the first stories about DNA testing in crime labs a few years later, he called and urged the department to run tests on the forensic evidence gathered from the apartment and from Sherri’s body. There were blood and hair samples, and there was the swab taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm. He was told that the department had a limited budget and could not afford to run such tests, so Nels offered to pay for the tests himself. He even had a lab willing to do the work. He says he was told that the DNA would do them no good without a suspect, which may have been true, but, Nels insisted, he did have a suspect.
But he would not get to test the evidence. A detective named Phil Moritt had visited the L.A. County coroner’s office, in the Mission Junction District, on October 11, 1993, more than seven years after the murder and not long after Nels had requested a DNA test, and signed out all of the forensic samples there that might have contained a suspect’s DNA. It is not unusual for a detective to remove evidence and deliver it for testing to a lab, and sometimes such errands involve fetching evidence from several case files. So there is no way to know if Moritt on this trip sought only the Rasmussen material. Ordinarily evidence would be removed at the request of an investigator, and there is no record of such a request here. Moritt would later tell department investigators that he had no memory of signing out the samples. The evidence disappeared.
For 18 years Sherri’s file and what was left of the evidence from the scene of her murder sat in storage. Mayer retired. In 1989, John was re-united with Stephanie on a scuba trip to Hawaii. Before he met her there, he told investigators, he had called Mayer to make sure no evidence had ever linked her to Sherri’s murder. It is interesting that the possibility, which he had so strongly rejected, remained in his mind. As he would recall it later, Mayer assured him there were no suspicions about Lazarus whatsoever. Notes about that conversation are not in the Rasmussen file. So, the lady cop and the widower reconnected in Hawaii. John remarried some years later, and he and his second wife started a family. Lazarus married a fellow cop. She continued to rise in the ranks.
And there things would surely have remained, except . . .
In 2001, L.A. police chief Bernard C. Parks created the Cold Case Homicide Unit to begin systematically combing unsolved murder files for DNA evidence. Three years later, Jennifer Francis, a criminalist with that unit, pulled Sherri’s case and began sorting through what was there. This was a matter of routine, but the rest of what happened is not.
Sherri’s file perplexed Francis. The crime report stated that a swab had been taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm, but it was not listed in evidence and was not among the forensic samples that had been signed out by Moritt in 1993. It apparently had been misplaced sometime earlier. Where might it be?
Francis knew well the steps in the evidence chain. Evidence recovered from the victim’s body would be held for a time in the coroner’s freezer, while the case was still active, and at some point would be gathered up and stored under the file number. What if the swab hadn’t made it from the freezer to the file? Francis called the coroner’s office. The swab was not on file, so they searched the freezers by hand.
The swab was found in a manila envelope that had absorbed moisture from the freezer walls, and over time the corner of the envelope with the case number on it had worn away. It still had “Rasmussen” written on its front, but evidence is stored by number, not by name. Whoever gathered up the forensic evidence in 1986 had avoided the extra effort and just left it in the freezer, where it sat for 18 years. Inside the envelope was a screw-cap tube, and inside the tube were two swabs.
Francis got the lab-test results back in late January 2005. She ran the DNA signature through CODIS, the national law-enforcement database, and there were no hits. But the results showed something curious. The bite on Sherri’s arm had been made by a woman.
Francis took this result back to the Cold Case detectives, pointing out that if Sherri had been killed by a woman it upended Mayer’s theory. She knew nothing about Nels’s suspicions, nor did the Cold Case detectives. Still, if the murderer was a woman, should the entire case be re-investigated? The detectives did not agree. What if one of the two burglars had been female? It wasn’t typical, but it also wasn’t impossible. In any event, there were no female suspects in the file. The evidence went back into storage, presumably forever.
Or at least for four more years, until February 2009, when the Rasmussen case surfaced once again.
In recent years murders have fallen off precipitously in Los Angeles, so detectives in the homicide units are given cold cases for final review in addition to the current murders they are working. Van Nuys homicide detective Jim Nuttall had a row of “murder books,” as they are called—thick blue binders full of notes, photos, diagrams, transcripts. Just inside the binder cover is a “progress report,” a detailed account of everything that has been discovered about the case to date.
One of the murder books Nuttall had was for the Rasmussen case, and in reviewing it one day he saw the same contradiction that Jennifer Francis had seen: Mayer had theorized that Sherri was killed by two men committing a burglary, but the DNA report showed that the suspected killer was a woman.
In the interview room, Detective Jaramillo returned to the question of whether Lazarus had ever been to John and Sherri’s home.
“I don’t think I’ve ever gone there,” she said. “I don’t want to say I’ve never gone there and [have you say] I was there at a party. Like I said, I don’t think so.”
“But it’s safe to say that the only time you would have been there was for something social?” asked Stearns.
“Something social. Yeah, I don’t even know that I knew where they lived.”
“But you didn’t have any issues with her, right?” asked Jaramillo.
“No,” she said, contorting her face at such a preposterous suggestion. “But, I mean, if he were dating me and dating her, I probably said, ‘Hey, pick,’ or something. I can’t say that we ever screamed or yelled. I mean . . . he was a pretty mellow guy. You know, I think I was pretty mellow. I don’t think we had some big huge blowup.”
“I mean, would you remember if she snapped on you, like, ‘Hey, that’s my man. You know, leave him alone, blah blah blah,’ that kind of stuff? You would remember an incident like that?”
“Well, you know, and maybe that happened,” she said. “Gosh, it’s been so long ago. I mean that’s not ringing a bell. I’m crazy,” she said, giggling nervously. “People think I’m really hyper, and I can get upset, you know, and, I mean, I forget five seconds later.”
“Water under the bridge,” offered the detective.
“I enjoy the job. I get excited. I’ve always enjoyed the job.”
“You’ve got a good gig.”
Whenever Lazarus found herself on dangerous ground—she had gone from having no memory of John’s murdered wife to a possible love triangle to a confrontation in Sherri’s hospital office that may or may not have become heated—she would retreat to the safe ground of The Job, the original premise of this conversation, just one cop pitching in to help her brothers. But the more she talked, the deeper the story grew.
“Well, one of the concerns I had,” said Jaramillo, “just looking at some of the notes, is some of Sherri’s friends said that you and her were having a problem because of the John situation.”
Lazarus puckered up her face and chuckled. In a while, Jaramillo came back to the subject again.
“You know what, I just can’t say,” Lazarus said.
“You can’t say?”
“No, that doesn’t even ring a bell.”
“I mean, it seems like you actually would recall something if somebody’s going off on you, right?”
“I mean, I would think. I would think . . . ”
“Well, let me ask, at the hospital, it never got to a point where people were going, ‘Hey, hey,’ you know, or ‘Everybody go to your own corner’ type of thing?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Nothing like that?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, I really don’t. If you say people said that, that’s not ringing a bell to me at all. I mean, it’s not.”
“How about ever going to her house and having a dispute like that?”
“If I met her ever at his apartment, maybe I could’ve met her at the apartment. I’m thinking that the hospital thing, that sounds familiar, that I met her there. I just can’t say that I’ve ever—again, was I there with other people? I don’t know. I don’t think I ever met her there or him there, meaning one or the other. I don’t think so.”
“Because I know how my wife is. I know she wouldn’t want my girlfriends there, you know, so I don’t know if maybe she had the same mentality towards you, as far as you not being welcome there.”
“You know what, if somebody said I was there when they were there, then that’s possible, but I just don’t recall. I mean, I don’t think so. It’s not sounding familiar.”
Van Nuys detective Nuttall was struck enough by the finding that Sherri’s killer was female to report it to his supervisor, Detective Robert Bub, who assigned two other detectives, Marc Martinez and Pete Barba, to help him rework the case. Studying the murder book, they saw a different story from the one pieced together by Mayer. As they would reconstruct the event, Sherri had not surprised burglars working downstairs. She had herself been surprised upstairs by an armed intruder.
The front door showed no sign of having been forced—Mayer had been right about that—and the alarm was off, so Sherri would not have heard anyone entering stealthily. She was confronted by the intruder upstairs. Two shots were fired at her there that missed, shattering the sliding glass door. The glass was bowed slightly outward, consistent with rounds traveling in that direction. Whoever had come looking for Sherri had come to kill her.
Sherri had apparently run downstairs, trying to reach the panic button on the security panel. The killer pursued, and stopped her before she got there. They fought savagely. Sherri apparently managed to briefly wrest her assailant’s gun away and place her in a headlock. The killer then bit Sherri’s forearm to break free, and picked up the heavy gray ceramic vase from the living-room shelf and crashed it hard into her forehead. The blow was enough to daze Sherri, if not knock her to the floor. The killer then retrieved the gun and fired the first shot that hit Sherri. It went clean through Sherri’s chest. She began bleeding internally and would have had only minutes to live. She was down now for good. Using the blanket to muffle the sound, the killer then fired two more rounds into her chest, finishing the job.
Once you looked at it that way, the evidence of burglary looked less convincing. The bloody smudge on the top of the CD player was telling. It would prove to be Sherri’s blood, left by someone wearing a glove, which meant that the CD player had been gathered and stacked after Sherri was killed. If the killer had panicked after shooting her, looking to flee, why go searching for things to steal, and then leave them stacked on the floor? What it looked like to the Van Nuys detectives was not a robbery scene but an effort to make a murder scene look like an interrupted robbery.
Jennifer Francis’s DNA work showed without any doubt that Sherri’s killer had been female. So, the Van Nuys detectives wondered, what woman in Sherri’s life wanted her dead and had the presence of mind to alter the crime scene sufficiently to fool a busy L.A.P.D. homicide detective?
They noted in the comprehensive murder book that on November 19, 1987, Mayer had written, “John Ruetten called. Verified Stephanie Lazarus, PO, was former girlfriend.” What did “PO” mean? When they guessed “police officer,” they ran the name through the department directory and came up with their esteemed colleague in the art-theft division.
Nuttall and Martinez went to see John. “You have this information already, Detective,” he told them. John said that Stephanie had been Nels’s theory, and that he had never believed it. He still refused to believe it. The Van Nuys detectives next called Nels, who, after two decades of getting nowhere, was understandably annoyed. How many times did he have to tell them about Stephanie Lazarus?
The detectives tried to imagine how a cop might go about planning to murder someone. She wouldn’t do it on duty; she would do it on a day off. Lazarus had been off work on the day of the murder. A cop would be careful. She would wait until the victim was alone. After the murder, she would want to leave the scene in a way that minimized being seen clearly enough to be identified; the killer had entered the garage from the inner door and driven away inside Sherri’s BMW. Then there was the murder weapon. Martinez said he doubted that a cop would plan to commit murder with her duty gun. You would want to get rid of it afterward, and there is hell to pay in the department for losing a duty gun. The Van Nuys detectives knew that most cops have at least two weapons, a duty gun and a backup purchased privately and duly registered. Records showed that Lazarus had purchased a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson soon after graduating from the police academy. Martinez suspected that, after the murder, she would have gotten rid of it. If she became a suspect, the first thing her investigating colleagues would ask to see was both guns. It would look very suspicious to say, “I don’t know where it is” or “I lost it.”
Martinez traced the serial number of Lazarus’s backup Smith & Wesson. It turned out that Lazarus had reported the gun stolen to the Santa Monica Police in March of 1986, just weeks after the murder.
All of this evidence had been available to detectives back in 1986, if they had been looking at Lazarus. Why hadn’t they? And by now the detectives were beginning to see a pattern in the evidence missing from the case file. It sure looked as if someone inside had been trying to protect her. If ever a man had reason to be angry at the L.A.P.D., it was Nels Rasmussen.
There is a set procedure in-house for investigating a fellow police officer; you first report it up your chain of command. But the detectives did not want anyone in their Van Nuys office to know about it yet; information tends to travel fast in-house. So, as soon as they considered Lazarus a possible suspect, they called Bub, who directed them to treat the investigation for the time being as confidential.
When their suspicions gelled, four months later, in May of 2009, Bub went to their detective commanding officer, Lieutenant Steven Harer, and area commanding officer, Captain William Eaton. Eaton directed Bub to meet with Deputy Chief Michel Moore, who immediately authorized the deployment of the Internal Affairs Group-Special Operations Section to help with the probe.
It was time to get a DNA sample from Lazarus. They decided to do it surreptitiously, in order to avoid tainting her with suspicion if the lab test cleared her. A special-operations team staked out Lazarus and her adopted daughter on a trip to Costco, and after they had snacked at a table outside the store, the team retrieved a cup and straw Lazarus had used. Two days later, the lab confirmed that the mouth on that straw was the mouth that had bitten Sherri Rasmussen’s forearm in a violent struggle 23 years ago.
The decision to take Lazarus downstairs in the Parker Building for questioning before arresting her was made for two reasons. Officers have to check their weapons before entering the downstairs jail; the detectives wanted to avoid some kind of armed standoff if she flew off the handle. They also wanted to gather further insight into what had happened before letting her know what they knew.
Lazarus was still smiling and chatting jovially with the detectives an hour into the interrogation. If she was annoyed, she was doing a good job of not showing it.
“Well, like I said, we’re looking at the case. We’ve read the notes as far as Sherri’s friends saying you guys had problems or words and it got heated,” Jaramillo said. “The reason we are asking you is there was an incident at her work that occurred, and they also told us that [there was] an incident at her house.”
Lazarus screwed up her face comically, as if to say . . . whatever.
“You know what?” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “That does not sound familiar at all. Again, if someone says I was at her house and I had an incident with her? That just doesn’t sound … was John there? Did John say this happened? And other people were there? I just don’t recall. It just doesn’t sound familiar.”
“This was an incident where you showed up, you weren’t supposed to show up, and things got heated.”
Jaramillo was now referring directly to the murder. The detective was actually affording Lazarus an opportunity here. Is it possible she showed up just to talk to Sherri and they got into it verbally, and then physically? That would be bad enough, but manslaughter is not the same as cold, pre-meditated murder. She did not take the opportunity.
“At his house? That just doesn’t sound familiar. You know, it’s not sounding familiar. Not at all.”
“So, it’s not sounding familiar because you don’t remember?”
“You know what? I have to say I don’t remember because I don’t remember. It doesn’t sound familiar.”
“Would you not remember something like that in your life?”
“Well, I would think, but—”
“I mean the drama involved in, you know, the other-woman type of thing?”
“Did you ever fight with her?” Stearns asked.
“Have we ever fought?”
“Yeah. Did you ever duke it out with her?”
“No! I don’t think so.”
“You would remember that, right?” said Stearns. “That would be pretty—”
“Yeah, I would think so. Like I said, honestly, it just doesn’t sound familiar. I mean, what are they saying? So I fought with her, so . . . I must have killed her? I mean, come on.”
Here she had conceded the possibility that she had fought with Sherri Rasmussen. She had begun by pretending that she could not even remember the woman’s name. But she clung to the claim that it was all too distant to recall. “That just sounds crazy to me,” she said.
“O.K., well, this case, you know, this occurred in ’86, right?” said Jaramillo. “The detectives processed the scene, things of that nature. They did fingerprints and all that stuff. You know, the standard things. You’ve been doing this longer than I have.”
“I don’t know about that. I’ve got 26 years on, going on 26.”
“But, you know, they processed everything. They did the best they could at that time, and they looked at a lot of people and different things in this case.”
Lazarus caught his drift.
“If you guys are claiming that I’m a suspect, then I’ve got a problem with that, O.K.?” she said, her tone changing sharply. She was finished with the collegiality. “So, if you’re doing this as an interrogation and you’re saying, Hey, I’m a suspect, now I’ve got a problem. You know? Now you’re accusing me of this? Is that what you’re saying?”
“We’re trying to figure out what happened, Stephanie,” said Stearns.
“Well, you know, I’m just saying. Do I need to get a lawyer? Are you accusing me of this?”
“You don’t have to. You’re here of your own free will.”
“I know, but I mean—”
“You’re not under arrest. You can walk out,” said Jaramillo.
“You can leave whenever you’d like,” said Stearns.
She did not leave.
“Now, what we’d like to do is . . . If we asked you for a DNA swab, would you be willing to give us one?,” Jaramillo asked.
“Maybe,” she said. “Because now I’m thinking I’m probably going to need to talk to a lawyer.” Lazarus grew indignant. “I know how this stuff works—don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I have been doing this a long time. I wish I had been recording this because now it sounds like all these people saying I was fighting with her. Now you sound like you are trying to, you know . . . I’ve been doing this a long time, O.K., and now it all sounds like you’re trying to pin something on me. I got that sense.”
“You know it as well as we do. Our job is to identify and eliminate suspects.”
“I just can’t even believe it,” she said eventually, muttering to herself, and then looking back up at Jaramillo. “I mean, I’m shocked. I’m really shocked that someone would be saying that I did this. We had a fight so I went and killed her? I mean, come on.”
She stood up abruptly, thanked the detectives for giving her “the courtesy” of discussing the matter with her, and walked out of the interview room, apparently believing that she really was free to go. She got as far as the hallway, where she was formally arrested and handcuffed.
She kept repeating, “This is crazy. This is absolutely insane.”
Jaramillo read her the Miranda rights.
In March 2012, Stephanie Lazarus was convicted of the murder of Sherri Rasmussen. She was sentenced to 27 years. The Rasmussens have sued both Lazarus personally and the L.A.P.D. A preliminary ruling that the department is immune to lawsuits of this type is on appeal. According to Detective Stearns, a re-investigation by the department did not find evidence of an internal cover-up. The missing evidence from the case file means that a piece of the mystery remains unsolved.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
