Murder of Sherri Rasmussen

Sherri Rasmussen was an American woman found dead in the apartment she shared with her new husband John Ruetten in Van Nuys, California, United States. She had been beaten and shot three times following a struggle. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) initially considered the case to have been a botched burglary. It remained unsolved for over 20 years despite her father's persistent belief that Stephanie Lazarus, an LAPD officer who had dated Ruetten prior to his marriage and stalked Rasmussen since the engagement, was a stronger suspect than police had originally believed. Detectives who re-examined the cold case files in 2009 were eventually led to Lazarus, by then herself a detective. A DNA sample she unknowingly discarded was matched to one from a bite on Rasmussen's body that had remained in the files. She was convicted of the crime in 2012, and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life for first-degree murder at the California Institution for Women in Corona. She appealed the conviction, claiming that the age of the case and the evidence denied her due process. She also alleged that the search warrant was improperly granted, her statements in an interview prior to her arrest were compelled, and that evidence supporting the original case theory should have been admitted at trial. In 2015 the verdict was upheld by the California Court of Appeal. Some of the police files suggest that evidence which could have implicated her earlier in the investigation was later removed, perhaps by others in the department. Rasmussen's parents unsuccessfully sued the LAPD over this and other aspects of the investigation. Jennifer Francis, the criminalist who found that the DNA from the bite mark was from a female, has also sued the city, claiming she was pressured by police to favor certain suspects in this and other high-profile cases and was retaliated against when she brought this to the department's attention. Background: While an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1978 to 1982, John Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego, occasionally dated Stephanie Lazarus, a fellow Dykstra Hall resident and a political science major from Simi Valley. Both were avid athletes; Lazarus played on the school's junior varsity women's basketball team. She would steal his clothes when he showered and take naked photographs of him while he slept. While the two frequently had sexual relations, Ruetten never considered the relationship as anything more than "necking and fooling around". They continued to meet for sex intermittently after they graduated, when he accepted a job with hard-drive manufacturer Micropolis[8] and she applied to the city's police academy and became a uniformed officer with the LAPD in 1983. Ruetten later met Sherri Rasmussen, a graduate of Loma Linda University who was on a fast career track in critical care nursing. She had entered college at 16, and by her late 20s was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, giving presentations and teaching classes for fellow nurses. At one point Lazarus threw Ruetten a surprise party on his 25th birthday, unaware that he had been dating other women or that he had developed a serious relationship with Rasmussen. When she learned he was seriously involved with Rasmussen, she was despondent. "I'm truly in love with John and the past year has really torn me up," she wrote to Ruetten's mother in August 1985. "I wish it didn't end the way it did, and I don't think I'll ever understand his decision." In her own journal she wrote "I really don't feel like working. I found out that John is getting married." She visited him at his condo, depressed, and the two had sex—"to give her closure", Ruetten testified years later—for what Ruetten says was the only time before Rasmussen's death. Later she woke up a fellow officer with whom she was a roommate to commiserate. During their engagement, Lazarus brought her skis to the apartment Ruetten shared with Rasmussen and asked him to wax them, and despite Rasmussen's objections, he complied. Rasmussen felt this was a little strange, since Lazarus was dressed in flattering workout clothes, and asked her fiancé after Lazarus left if their relationship was truly over. Ruetten convinced her the two were just friends. A few days later Lazarus returned, in uniform and armed, after Ruetten had left for work, to pick the waxed skis up. Rasmussen was unnerved by these visits and pleaded with Ruetten to tell her to stop coming by. Ruetten only said there was nothing to their relationship and to ignore her. According to Nels Rasmussen, Sherri's father, Lazarus later visited Rasmussen at her office. She allegedly claimed that things were not over between her and Ruetten and told Rasmussen, "If I can't have John, no one else will." Shortly before her death, Sherri again confided to her father her fear that Lazarus was stalking her on the street. Ruetten and Rasmussen were married in November 1985, but that did not stop Lazarus from inserting herself into their lives. Crime and investigation: On the morning of February 24, 1986, Ruetten left the couple's condominium on Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys before Sherri. She was scheduled to give a motivational speech at work that day, a managerial tactic she did not feel was effective. To avoid it, she told him she might use a back injury she had incurred while doing aerobics the day before as an excuse to call in sick. At 9:45 a.m., a neighbor, Anastasia Volainitis, noticed that the Ruettens' garage was open, with no car visible. About 15 minutes later, Ruetten made the first of several calls home over the course of the day, with no answer. Rasmussen's sister also made several unsuccessful calls. At noon, two men whom Volainitis believed were gardeners in the compound gave her and her husband a purse they had found that turned out to be Rasmussen's. A maid cleaning a nearby unit said she heard something that sounded like two people fighting, and then something falling, around 12:30 p.m. When he returned in the evening, he found his garage door open, broken glass on the driveway and the BMW he had bought Sherri as an engagement gift missing. Because of her morning plans, he found it strange that she would have later gone out without letting him know. The house's answering machine had not been activated as both of them usually did when leaving it unoccupied. Inside, he found her dead on the living room floor, shot three times. There were signs of a struggle, such as a porcelain vase that had apparently been broken over her head prior to the shooting, a bloody handprint next to the burglar alarm's panic button, and a toppled credenza. Rassmussen's wrists appeared to have been bound or attempted to have been at some point. She had defensive wounds, and bore a bruise on her face that seemed to have been inflicted by a gun muzzle. One of the shots had also been fired through a quilt, apparently to muffle the sound. The investigating criminalist also saw a bite mark on Rasmussen's arm, and took a swab from it. Initial investigation: LAPD detectives investigating the case quickly concluded that it had been a botched burglary. Rasmussen's attire, a bathrobe, nightgown and panties, suggested she was not expecting visitors. The housekeeper in a neighboring unit reported hearing screaming and fighting at one point during the day, but no gunshots. She had thought the whole event was a domestic dispute and had not called police. Electronic equipment appeared to have been in the process of being taken when Rasmussen had come upon the thief or thieves, and as a result jewelry had been left behind and the vehicle taken as a getaway. It was recovered a week later, having been abandoned and yielded no new evidence. The only other thing that appeared to have been taken from the apartment was the couple's marriage license. Lyle Mayer, the lead detective, did consider other possibilities. He soon ruled out the grieving Ruetten, who very shortly after the crime quit his job and moved out of the Los Angeles area, as a suspect. Nels Rasmussen and his wife Loretta told him about Lazarus' harassment, although Mayer claims otherwise. However, the police remained focused on the possibility of burglary, especially in light of one reported later in the same area in which one of the two reported suspects had been carrying a gun, possibly a .38-caliber like the one that had fired the three bullets into Rasmussen, late identified by experts as Federal .38J Plus-P. Mayer's partner, Steve Hooks, found the bite mark unusual. Bites during struggles are more commonly inflicted by women, while most burglars are men, but men have bitten opponents during fights as well, so the burglary theory stood. Cold case: The suspected burglars to whom detectives ascribed the crime remained at large, despite a follow-up newspaper story eight months later and a reward offered by the family. The LAPD, preoccupied with the violence resulting from gang wars and the crack epidemic that plagued the city at the time, was unable to devote much more attention to the case. Detectives at the Van Nuys office were, the Rasmussens say, often unhelpful when the family called, hanging up or putting them on hold. A year after the burglary the frustrated Rasmussens reiterated their offer at a press conference and called for more action. Nels Rasmussen wrote to Darryl Gates, then chief of the LAPD, about the possibility that Lazarus might have been involved. Detectives told him he "watched too much television". He continued to publicize the reward, and later worked with the short-lived television series Murder One on a segment inspired by the case. Nels in particular was unconvinced that it had been a botched burglary. His late daughter had been six feet (180 cm) tall, larger than some men and many women, and in good physical shape. It would have been a struggle for anyone trying to subdue her in close quarters, and Mayer had told him at one point that it might have lasted an hour and a half, a long time for burglars primarily after items of value in the condo. Further, whoever shot his daughter had fired directly into her chest at close range and taken the trouble to muffle the shot with the quilt, suggesting that the killing was deliberate and not the accidental byproduct of a struggle. Mayer eventually retired, and the new detective assigned to the case told Nels Rasmussen he was unable to follow up on Mayer's notes and did not think that any new leads would emerge. Rasmussen was rebuffed again in 1993, when he offered to pay for DNA testing on the evidence from the murder, now that the technology was available; he was told that the police had to have a suspect in order to proceed with testing. Lazarus briefly reunited with Ruetten in 1989; Mayer's notes show that Ruetten had called him to ask if he still considered her a suspect. In the meantime, Lazarus continued working with the Los Angeles Police Department; she went on to start her own private investigation firm, Unique Investigations. In 1987 she earned medals, including one gold, at the World Police and Fire Games in San Diego. In 1993, after stints at the department's D.A.R.E. and internal affairs divisions, she became a detective. Three years later, she married a fellow officer and adopted a daughter with him, moving back to Simi Valley; at work, she became an instructor at the police academy. Ruetten eventually remarried as well; he moved on with his life and did not pressure the police as his former father-in-law had. In the late 1990s, after the use of DNA evidence had become widespread, the LAPD formed a new unit that looked through the forensic evidence collected from the department's cold cases to see if any had the potential for new leads that could be developed through that method. Among the evidence seen as likely to do so was that collected from the Rasmussens' residence. However, it was not until 2004 that another criminalist, Jennifer Butterworth, was able to analyze it. Some of the evidence, including what might have had the suspect's DNA, was missing, having been collected in 1993 by another detective. What Butterworth did find and test was likely to contain only Rasmussen's DNA, and did. However, the property sheet listed the bite swab, which was located in the back of a freezer at the coroner's office a week later. Butterworth did not find any matches in the CODIS DNA database, but did find that the saliva in it had come from a female, undermining the initial detectives' burglary theory. Several years later she claimed that, unusually, she had access to not just the sample but the entire case file, which had been given to her to help her decide which other samples to analyze. Upon discovering that the biter (and likely perpetrator) was female, she reviewed it and came across a report of a "third-party female" having allegedly harassed the victim at her job and residence before the murder. She asked the detective supervising her if this woman had been investigated to which he supposedly responded with, "Oh, you mean the LAPD detective." He elaborated that the woman, a former girlfriend of the victim's husband, was in fact a current LAPD detective but "she's not a part of this". He insisted that the case was simply a burglary as the department had long concluded. No other detective would pursue the case, and the evidence went back into the files. Second investigation: By 2009, crime in Los Angeles had declined enough from its earlier levels that detectives began looking into cold cases to increase their clearance rates. In Van Nuys, Jim Nuttall and Pete Barba looked at the Rasmussen file and found it interesting enough to be worth pursuing. Because the DNA test pointed to a female suspect, they knew the burglary theory was invalid and they would have to start from the beginning. They looked at the case as a murder, with the burglary staged to throw the police off the trail. Many aspects of the crime were improbable for a break-in, especially one committed in daylight: Rasmussen's jewelry box, an inviting target for a burglar, was in plain view atop her dresser and had not been touched. The condo was in the middle of a gated complex, surrounded by other units from which burglars could have expected to be easily observed. The front door had an alarm warning, and had not been forced open, as it might have been if the putative burglars had not expected anyone to be at home. Inside, a key aspect of the crime scene did not make sense as the act of burglars, either. At the top of the stairs was a stack of stereo equipment atop a VCR. If, as the evidence suggested, the struggle between Rasmussen and her attacker had begun upstairs and then continued downstairs, that stack would likely have been knocked downstairs and scattered as well. It made more sense to assume that it had been stacked afterwards, when an actual burglar would have fled the scene immediately after the shooting. The forensics reinforced this theory. On a record player atop the stack was a thumb-shaped bloodstain. It had no print, suggesting whoever left it was wearing gloves to avoid leaving identification. But the blood was Rasmussen's, suggesting the equipment had been stacked after the struggle and shooting. They had been left behind, the detectives realized, to make the crime look like something other than what it really was. From the four bound volumes of the case file they developed a list of five women who might be suspects. Nuttall was taken aback when Ruetten told him over the phone that Lazarus was a police officer. By then, Lazarus had been promoted to a higher level of detective, and was working art theft cases as part of the elite Robbery-Homicide Division (RHD). As one of the two detectives in the nation's only full-time unit devoted to that specialty, she had gained some local media attention when she and her partner had recovered a statue stolen from Carthay Circle. To better understand the field, she told a local newspaper, she had begun learning to paint. Off the job, she had been active in the Los Angeles Women Police Officers Association and organized childcare for families of officers. She also made chocolate-covered cherries and homemade soap for her neighbors in Simi Valley for Christmas. Since she was still with the department, they realized they would have to proceed carefully. Still, they ranked Lazarus as the least promising of the five suspects, since from what they read in the files Lazarus and Ruetten had ended any relationship they had had over the summer before the murder. Their investigations soon eliminated all but one of the other women. The other, a former coworker of Rasmussen's who had had some disputes with her, was eliminated by a covertly collected DNA sample. With only Lazarus left, they kept their investigation a closely guarded secret. Not only did her husband work in the nearby Commercial Crimes Division as a detective, she may have had other friends who could have tipped her off. If she were the killer, she could have improved her defense; if she were not, then they could have unintentionally smeared a fellow officer who had had an unblemished service record over the course of her career, with no disciplinary investigations or civilian complaints. They only referred to her as "No. 5", worked on the case after hours or behind closed doors, and developed cover stories to explain why they wanted to look at personnel records for one particular officer from 20 years ago. They began looking into other aspects of her life during the mid-1980s. Another detective recalled that at that time, most LAPD officers had preferred a .38 as their backup or off-duty carry gun, in fact they were required to purchase for that purpose only weapons compatible with the Federal Plus-P ammunition that had been used in the murder. State and departmental records showed that Lazarus had indeed owned a Smith & Wesson Model 49 .38 at the time, and reported it stolen to Santa Monica police (but not her own department's armorer) 13 days after the murder (there was also a discrepancy between when she had told a colleague it had been stolen and the date she gave the Santa Monica police). Since the location where she had reported it stolen from was near a popular pier, they assumed she had thrown the gun into the Pacific Ocean. Without that gun, possibly the murder weapon, DNA would be the only definitive way to connect the crime to Lazarus. Nuttall and Barba theorized from their own experience about how an LAPD officer would commit a murder. It would be better to do it on a day off, and departmental records showed that Lazarus had indeed been off the day Sherri Rasmussen was killed. An officer would know better than to use his or her duty gun, since it would have to be disposed of after the crime and the penalties for losing a duty gun or letting it be stolen were severe. Instead it made sense to use a backup gun like Lazarus' .38. Lastly, a working patrol officer would know how to do just enough to make the crime scene look like an interrupted burglary to satisfy an overworked detective. Nels Rasmussen told Nuttall about Lazarus' continued contact with his daughter, which had not been in the files although he had mentioned it frequently during Mayer and Hook's interviews. Realizing that Lazarus was now their prime suspect, the detectives informed their superiors of this and arranged to discreetly collect a voluntarily discarded DNA sample from her, knowing they would have to do so without getting a warrant, which would have let her know she was under investigation for the murder. They were able to retrieve a cup she had been drinking from and thrown out while running errands off-duty. A sample was taken from it, and it matched the DNA from the bite mark on Sherri Rasmussen. Arrest of Lazarus: Rob Bub, the chief detective at Van Nuys, began letting his senior officers, all the way up to Chief William Bratton, know of the case along with senior prosecutors from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. It was transferred to RHD, which handled many of the department's high-profile cases, including the art theft bureau where Lazarus herself worked. Her arrest was planned carefully. On the day of the arrest dozens of officers arose before dawn. After being briefed on a search warrant they were told would be executed outside the city, but with few details beyond that, they went to wait near Lazarus' home in Simi Valley and that city's Metrolink station, where Lazarus commuted to the city. A short time later, detectives from the RHD who had been selected for their lack of personal connection to Lazarus called her one morning from the lockup at Parker Center, the department's headquarters. Bratton had ordered that location be used since Lazarus would have to surrender her gun in order to enter it, limiting the possibility she might resist violently when she was arrested (as was the plan immediately following the interview) or realized that she was the prime suspect. The detectives, Greg Stearns and Dan Jaramillo, told her they had someone in custody who wanted to talk about an art theft. After Lazarus had checked her gun and come to the interrogation room, they explained that this was really about some loose ends they were trying to tie up in the Rasmussen case, since her name had come up in the investigation. They claimed they wanted a private setting because while Ruetten was an old boyfriend, she was long married to someone else and did not want her private life to become the subject of office gossip. Stearns and Jaramillo knew they would have to tread carefully since Lazarus herself was well aware of police interview techniques and her rights to silence and legal counsel, which she could invoke at any time. They rambled and digressed from the subject at times, sometimes discussing unrelated police business, but eventually came back to Rasmussen. Lazarus claimed to recall little due to the intervening years, but gradually revealed more and more knowledge—including oblique acknowledgements of her visits to the Ruetten condo—until she accused her colleagues of considering her a suspect, whereupon they allowed that there was DNA evidence connecting her to the crime scene and she was free to go. She left the room and was immediately arrested and charged with the murder. Once she had been arrested, the teams in Simi Valley began searching her home and car. In her house they found her journal from the mid-1980s, with numerous mentions of her love for Ruetten and despondence over his engagement to Rasmussen (and no mentions of her gun having been stolen). Her computer showed that she had searched the Internet for Ruetten's name on several occasions in the late 1990s. As the investigating detectives had been, many other LAPD officers were stunned at the idea she might have murdered someone. Fellow detectives recalled her as vivacious and supportive (although some also recalled that her behavior when angry had led some to refer to her as "Spazarus" behind her back). A case she had been developing from her art-theft work, with elder abuse and real estate fraud aspects, had to be dropped since it was highly unlikely that it could be prosecuted successfully if the lead investigator herself were under arrest for murder. After her arrest she was allowed to retire early from the LAPD; she was held in the Los Angeles County Jail. A bail hearing was not held for almost six months. Judge Robert J. Perry surprised both sides when he set the amount at US$10 million in cash, well above what the defense had suggested and more than twice what prosecutors had proposed. The case against her was very strong, he said, and thus she might well be at risk to flee the country or obtain weapons through her husband. Lazarus' lawyer, Mark Overland, said the judge did not understand the case well and contrasted the high figure with the $1 million set for Robert Blake and Phil Spector when they were charged with murder. Several months later, her brother claimed she was not receiving adequate treatment for an unspecified cancer while in custody, either.