On February 24, 1986, a 29-year-old nursing director named Sherri Rasmusen was beaten, bitten, and shot three times inside her van Nuys condo in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Police Department called it a burglary gone wrong. The case closed, more or less. Sherri’s father told detectives he knew exactly who killed his daughter.
He gave them a name. He begged them to investigate. They told him he watched too much television. For 23 years, the real killer walked free.
She got promoted, got married, won awards, and the entire time she wore an LAPD badge. But she left one thing behind at that crime scene in the San Fernando Valley: a bite mark on Sherri Rasmusen’s arm. Inside that bite mark was a secret that would take two decades to unlock. This is the story of a murder the LAPD could have solved in 1986, of a family that never stopped fighting, and of a killer who thought her badge made her untouchable.
Sherri Ray Rasmusen was born on February 7, 1957, in Tucson, Arizona, and raised in a close-knit Seventh-day Adventist family. Her father, Nells, was quiet and determined. Her mother, Loretta, was warm and devoted. She had two sisters, Teresa and Connie.
From childhood, Sherri stood out. She graduated from Thunderbird Adventist Academy, entered nursing at Loma Linda University, and by age 27 became the director of critical care nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, the youngest person to hold that title. She was six feet tall, athletic, and carried herself with a confidence that put patients and colleagues at ease. Her father remembered her ambition: she was going to elevate the stature of nursing in the nation, and he believed her.
Worried about his daughter working late hospital shifts in Los Angeles, Nells bought her a condo in Van Nuys with a drive-in garage so she would not have to walk the street after dark. Sherri paid him rent equal to his mortgage payment. That was the kind of relationship they had: practical, loving, built on looking out for each other. In the early 1980s, a young mechanical engineering student named John Ruetten was living in Dykstra Hall at UCLA.
Also living there was a woman named Stephanie Lazarus, a political science and sociology major from Simi Valley who played on the junior varsity women’s basketball team. Between 1981 and 1984, the two had a casual, on-and-off physical relationship. Ruetten would later testify they slept together roughly 20 to 30 times over those years, but he never considered Lazarus his girlfriend. Lazarus saw things very differently.
She took the relationship far more seriously than Ruetten ever realized. She kept a footlocker of mementos connected to him, once stole his clothes while he was in the shower, and photographed him while he slept in his underwear. In June 1984, Ruetten met Sherri Rasmusen at a party in Los Angeles. The attraction was immediate.
They got engaged in June 1985 and married on November 23 of that year. For Lazarus, the engagement was devastating. She wrote in her diary that she didn’t feel like working and that her concentration was like -10. In August 1985, she wrote to her mother confessing she was truly in love with John and that the past year had torn her up inside.
Then Ruetten made a choice that would haunt him for the rest of his life. After he was already engaged to Sherri, he slept with Lazarus one final time, supposedly to give her closure. He never told Sherri. What Lazarus did next made it clear this was not a woman moving on.
By 1983, she had joined the Los Angeles Police Department. Her first assignment was the Hollywood division. Through the department, she purchased a Smith & Wesson Model 49, a . 38 caliber revolver, as her backup firearm.
In March 1985, she transferred to the quieter Van Nuys division in the San Fernando Valley. In the summer of 1985, not long after the engagement, Lazarus showed up at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, where Sherri worked. She was wearing short shorts and a tank top. She found Sherri and told her face to face that she and John were still sleeping together and that when the marriage failed, she would be there to pick up the pieces.
Sherri looked at her and said the services would not be needed. Lazarus’s response, according to what Sherri later told her father, was chilling: If I can’t have John, no one else will, including you. After that confrontation, the harassment accelerated. There were hang-up calls at the couple’s condo on Balboa Boulevard.
In January 1986, weeks before the murder, Lazarus showed up at the condo to drop off skis for Ruetten. She came back later, this time wearing her full LAPD uniform, armed. On another occasion, Sherri came home to find Lazarus standing in her own living room in uniform, uninvited. Sherri told her to get out.
Sherri confided in her father. She told Nells she believed Lazarus was following her through the streets of Los Angeles, sometimes dressed like a boy. She described Lazarus’s eyes as being able to see right through you. Nells filed every detail away.
He did not yet know how important those memories would become. On February 24, 1986, a Monday, John Ruetten left the condo around 7:20 in the morning, heading to his engineering job in Chatsworth. Sherri had been dealing with a back injury from an aerobics class and told John she might call in sick. Around 9:45 a.
m. , a neighbor noticed the Ruettens’ garage door was open and the silver BMW 318i, the car Nells had given Sherri as an engagement gift, was gone. Around noon, a maid cleaning a nearby unit heard what sounded like two people fighting and something heavy falling. She assumed it was a domestic dispute and did not call the police.
Throughout the day, Ruetten tried calling home. The answering machine, which the couple always switched on when they left the house, never picked up. He came home around 6 p. m.
There was broken glass in the driveway. The silver BMW was gone. He walked through the front door and into the living room. Sherri was on the floor.
She had been shot three times in the chest. Each wound was independently fatal. The bullets had pierced her heart, her lungs, and her spine. She had been beaten with a heavy porcelain vase that lay shattered nearby.
She had been struck across the face with the barrel of a gun hard enough to bruise the imprint of the muzzle into her skin. The coroner documented 15 separate injuries to her face. Two of her fingernails had been torn off in the struggle. Sherri had fought back with everything she had.
The evidence told the story of a woman who did not go quietly. And on her inner left forearm, there was a bite mark. The gun had been fired through a quilted blanket pressed against her body to muffle the sound. Near the front door, stereo and video equipment had been stacked neatly, as if someone had been in the middle of carrying it out.
The jewelry in the bedroom sat untouched in plain view. A bloody handprint was found on the wall next to the panic button of the burglar alarm. Sherri had tried to reach the alarm. She almost made it.
The scene was not a robbery interrupted. It was a murder dressed up to look like one. The blood on the stacked equipment was Sherri’s, and whoever arranged it had worn gloves and done it after she was already dead or dying. Sometime after 2 a.
m. , a criminalist from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office named Lloyd Mahaney arrived at the scene. He noticed the bite mark on Sherri’s forearm, took a six-inch sample of the saliva left inside the wound, and placed it in a glass tube with a red stopper. He sealed it inside a coroner’s evidence envelope and booked it into evidence the next morning.
That small tube was stored in a freezer at the coroner’s office, separate from the main LAPD case file. It would sit there untouched for nearly two decades. The investigation was led by Detective Lyall Mayor out of the LAPD’s Van Nuys division, partnered with Detective Steve Hooks. Within days, they settled on their theory: a hot prowl burglary.
Intruders entered through the front door, which had been left unlocked, were stacking electronics to steal when Sherri surprised them, panicked, killed her, took her car, and fled. It was a clean, tidy theory. It was also wrong. The problems with the burglary theory were obvious to anyone willing to look closely enough.
Burglars almost never steal the victim’s car. The jewelry was left untouched in plain view. No burglar would stack cheap electronics and leave expensive jewelry behind. And then there was the bite mark.
Detective Hooks himself noted that bites are far more commonly inflicted by women than by men in violent physical struggles. The bite mark pointed toward a female attacker. Hooks observed it, and then nothing was done about it. Nells and Loretta Rasmusen arrived from Arizona the day after the murder.
Nells sat down with Detective Mayor and told him everything. His daughter had been terrorized by a woman, an ex-girlfriend of John’s, a police officer with the LAPD. He described the confrontation at the hospital, the hang-up calls, the uninvited visits in uniform, the stalking. Nells considered this woman the prime suspect from day one.
He gave Mayor her description. He begged the detective to investigate. Mayor’s response was brief: There is nothing there. When Nells pressed the Van Nuys detectives a second time, the dismissal was even more cutting: You watch too much television.
John Ruetten also gave detectives Lazarus’s name during a second interview. He was uncomfortable, and he held back the detail about sleeping with Lazarus after his engagement, but he named her. That conversation was never properly documented in the murder book. The notes either were never made or later vanished from the file.
In 1988, Nells wrote a letter directly to LAPD Chief Daryl Gates. He named the ex-girlfriend officer. He requested intervention. He received no reply.
In 1993, seven years into their nightmare, the Rasmusens met with LAPD detectives face to face. They offered to pay out of their own pockets for private DNA testing on the evidence collected from Sherri’s body. They were turned down. The detectives told them to move on with their lives.
About 11 days after the murder, the silver BMW was recovered roughly two miles from the condo. It was unlocked, with the keys still in the ignition. Investigators found fibers, possible blood stains, and four unmatched fingerprints inside. None of them led anywhere.
Whoever took it didn’t care about it. They only needed it to stage the scene. In 1986, the Rasmusen case was recorded as one of 293 unsolved LAPD homicides that year. The department was overwhelmed.
Detectives were handling enormous caseloads, and the pressure to close cases and move on was relentless. But this was not a case with no leads. This was a case where the victim’s family walked into the police station and named the killer, and the LAPD chose not to listen. Two weeks after the murder, in March 1986, Lazarus walked into the Santa Monica Police Department and reported that her Smith & Wesson .
38 caliber backup revolver had been stolen — the same caliber used to kill Sherri Rasmusen. She filed the report with Santa Monica police instead of the LAPD, despite department regulations requiring officers to report stolen weapons internally. The gun was never recovered. Lazarus continued climbing the ranks.
She made detective in 1993. She married a fellow LAPD officer named Scott Young in 1996. By 2006, she was working in the LAPD’s art theft detail, the only full-time municipal art crime unit in the entire country. She earned media coverage in 2008 when she and her partner recovered a stolen bronze gold rush statue.
Colleagues described her as vivacious and supportive, the kind of detective you wanted on your team. Some noticed a temper underneath the surface and gave her the nickname Spizarus behind her back. But nobody connected that temper to anything violent. Investigative reporting would later reveal that interview recordings and handwritten notes referencing Lazarus had gone missing from the murder book over the years.
As an LAPD detective, Lazarus would have had plausible access to the case files during the 1990s. In November 2001, the LAPD created a dedicated cold case homicide unit. Detective David Lamin led a small team through roughly 7,745 unsolved homicide cases. They flagged approximately 1,400 cases with forensic evidence worth retesting with modern DNA technology.
The murder of Sherri Rasmusen was among them. Between 2004 and 2005, Detective Cliff Shepard pulled the Rasmusen file and began reviewing it with fresh eyes. Working alongside criminalist Jennifer Francis from the LAPD Scientific Investigation Division, he set out to determine whether the old biological evidence could still yield usable DNA. Francis tracked down the bite mark swab that Lloyd Mahaney had collected nearly two decades earlier.
The glass tube with the red stopper had been sitting in a freezer at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office since February 25, 1986. Francis ran the DNA. The result changed everything. The profile extracted from the bite mark belonged to an unidentified female, not a male burglar, not two male intruders.
A woman. The entire burglary-gone-wrong theory collapsed in a single lab report. The DNA was run through CODIS, the national DNA database maintained by the FBI. No match was returned.
Stephanie Lazarus had never been arrested or required to submit a DNA sample, so her genetic profile simply did not exist in any law enforcement database. But Jennifer Francis saw the implications clearly. She had read the case file. She knew the victim had been harassed by a third-party female before the murder, a woman connected to the victim’s husband, a woman who was an LAPD officer.
Francis suggested investigating this angle. She pushed for it. The supervising detective reportedly shut her down. The woman, he said, was not a part of this.
Francis would later allege she was pressured to steer away from the Lazarus lead and that she faced retaliation for pushing the issue. She eventually filed a lawsuit against the LAPD. A jury found for the city in 2019, and the verdict was upheld on appeal. Shepard, meanwhile, was reassigned to a serial killer task force.
The Rasmusen file went back on the shelf. Shepard would later say his single greatest regret was not going back to interview John Ruetten. One conversation with Ruetten would have produced Lazarus’s name, just as it had 19 years before when Ruetten told the original detectives and nobody wrote it down. In March 2008, a Van Nuys homicide detective named Jim Nuttle found a box near his desk.
Inside was the Rasmusen case file. Nuttle and his team cracked it open and started reading. Two things jumped out immediately: the 2005 DNA report showing the bite mark belonged to an unidentified female, and the stereo equipment staged at the front door stained with Sherri’s blood in a way that made no sense as a burglary. Nuttle’s reasoning was straightforward.
If you wanted that stereo equipment, you had every opportunity in the world to walk out the door with it. Why stack it and leave it? You start to draw the conclusion that murder was the main goal, not the burglary. The team re-theorized the case.
This was not a burglary interrupted. This was a murder staged to look like a burglary. And the killer was female. They compiled a list of five female suspects connected to Sherri Rasmusen or to the circumstances of her death.
The first three — Sherri’s sister Teresa, her mother Loretta, and a close female friend — provided DNA samples and were cleared. The fourth, a disgruntled nurse from Glendale Adventist who had clashed with Sherri over workplace issues, was eliminated through a covertly collected DNA sample. The fifth name on the list was Stephanie Lazarus. Nuttle knew he needed to talk to John Ruetten carefully without revealing the direction of the investigation.
The conversation that followed stunned him. Ruetten confirmed everything: the obsessive ex-girlfriend, the confrontations at the hospital and the condo, the visits in full LAPD uniform, the threats. Then Ruetten told Nuttle something that made his blood run cold. He had given the original detectives Lazarus’s name 23 years earlier.
He had told them she was a cop. And he had assumed for over two decades that the LAPD had investigated her and cleared her. They never investigated her, not once. The investigation became one of the most sensitive in LAPD history.
Lazarus’s husband was also a detective working out of the Van Nuys division. Lazarus herself had access to LAPD databases and case records. If she found out she was being investigated, the evidence could disappear. The team referred to her only as number five.
They worked after hours. They developed cover stories to pull her old personnel records and firearms purchase history without raising suspicion inside the department. The motive was documented in her own diary and letters. The .
38 caliber bullets matched her backup weapon. The DNA pointed to a female. But they needed one final piece: a DNA sample from Stephanie Lazarus herself. Under California law, voluntarily discarded DNA can be collected without a warrant.
If Lazarus threw something away in public, they could take it and test it. They just had to wait for the right moment. On May 27, 2009, Lazarus drove to a Costco warehouse store in Simi Valley. She made her purchases, then stopped at the Costco food court.
She picked up a lidded plastic cup with a straw and drank from it while she ate. When she finished, she carried the cup to a trash can and threw it away. She walked out and drove home. She had no idea that plainclothes LAPD officers were watching every move she made.
The moment she left the food court, they moved in and retrieved the discarded cup and straw from the trash. At the LAPD Scientific Investigation Division, a DNA profile was developed from the saliva on the straw. On May 29, 2009, the results came back. It was a match.
The statistical odds that the DNA from the bite mark belonged to anyone other than Stephanie Lazarus were 1 in 1. 7 sextillion. After 23 years in a coroner’s freezer, the bite mark on Sherri Rasmusen’s arm had finally spoken. And it said the name that Nells Rasmusen had been saying since the day after the murder.
Now they had to arrest one of their own, without giving her a chance to fight back. Chief Bratton ordered the arrest staged at Parker Center, LAPD headquarters. The plan was precise. Lazarus would be lured to the jail lockup area, where officers are required to surrender their weapons before entering.
That would eliminate the risk of a violent confrontation. Two robbery homicide detectives were selected specifically for the operation: Greg Stearns and Dan Jarmo. Neither had any personal connection to Lazarus. On June 5, 2009, at 6:40 a.
m. , Jarmo walked over to Lazarus’s desk in the art theft detail office. He told her a jail suspect was talking about stolen artwork and he needed her expertise for about five minutes. She agreed, stood up, and followed him.
Once they were inside the secured area and she had surrendered her weapon, the conversation shifted. The detectives told Lazarus her name had come up in connection with an old case, the Rasmusen homicide from 1986. Her first response was casual. She said she could barely remember Ruetten’s wife.
Then when pressed, she admitted she may have met her at a hospital, may have talked to her once or twice or more. As it became clear she was not being consulted as an expert but questioned as a suspect, her composure began to crack. She told the detectives this was insane. She asked if she was on Candid Camera.
When the detectives mentioned DNA evidence and asked whether she would be willing to provide a sample, Lazarus knew the conversation was over. She said she wanted to speak to a lawyer and stood up. She made it as far as the hallway. Robbery Homicide detectives were waiting on the other side of the door.
They placed her in handcuffs and read her Miranda rights. Stephanie Lazarus was charged with one count of first-degree murder. Nearly six months later, Judge Robert Perry set bail at $10 million. She was allowed to formally retire from the Los Angeles Police Department.
While Lazarus sat in a cell, Detective Jim Nuttle flew to Arizona and drove to the Rasmusen family home to deliver the news in person before the media got hold of it. Loretta Rasmusen, who had barely spoken to Nuttle during the investigation, crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him. After a generation of being ignored, someone had finally listened. The trial of Stephanie Lazarus began in February 2012 in Los Angeles Superior Court.
It had been 26 years since the murder. The prosecution was led by Deputy District Attorneys Shannon Presby and Paul Nunez. Presby opened with a single sentence that framed the entire case: a story about a bite, a bullet, a gun barrel, and a broken heart. The prosecution built its case on four pillars: the DNA match at odds of 1 in 1.
7 sextillion; the ballistics, with the three bullets recovered from Sherri’s body consistent with the Smith & Wesson Lazarus had purchased and then reported stolen two weeks after the murder; the motive, documented in diary entries, a letter to her mother, the hospital confrontation, and the stalking; and Lazarus’s own words from the pre-arrest interrogation. The defense mounted the only argument available. Attorney Mark Overland argued the DNA was compromised, pointing out that the bite mark swab had been stored for two decades in an evidence envelope that had developed a hole from degradation. He emphasized that no other physical evidence tied Lazarus to the crime scene: no fingerprints, no hair, no fibers, no eyewitness placing her at the condo that day.
John Ruetten took the witness stand, and the weight of 26 years of guilt was visible on his face. He wept as he described his relationship with Lazarus. He admitted under oath that sleeping with her after his engagement to Sherri was a mistake, a mistake he had carried with him for more than two decades. He told the court that Sherri was just trying to save her own life and that he lived every day knowing his past with Lazarus was the reason Sherri was dead.
The jury consisted of eight women and four men. They deliberated for approximately eight hours spread across three days. On March 8, 2012, they returned a verdict of guilty on the charge of first-degree murder. On May 11, 2012, Judge Perry sentenced Stephanie Lazarus to 27 years to life in prison, the maximum sentence available under California law: 25 years to life for the murder plus two years for the firearm enhancement.
Lazarus appealed in 2013. In July 2015, a three-judge appellate panel unanimously upheld the conviction. The California Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October 2015. Then came November 2023, 37 years after the murder, 11 years after the conviction: a parole hearing at the California Institution for Women in Corona.
Under California’s Youthful Offender Law, which grants special parole consideration to individuals who committed their crimes before age 26, Lazarus was eligible. She had been 25 years old when she killed Sherri Rasmusen. And for the first time in 37 years, Stephanie Lazarus confessed. She told the parole board that it made her sick to this day that she took an oath to protect and serve people and instead took Sherri Rasmusen’s life.
She admitted she went to the condo that February morning to confront Sherri. She admitted she planned to tie Sherri up. She said she was so angry that if Sherri got in her way to see John, she was going to strangle her. It was the first time she had ever acknowledged killing Sherri Rasmusen.
Through the investigation, the arrest, the trial, the conviction, and over a decade of incarceration, she had maintained her silence. She confessed only when her freedom depended on it. A parole panel found her suitable for release. Governor Gavin Newsom intervened, noting that Lazarus had evaded justice for more than two decades and did not appear to have begun taking accountability until she was finally caught.
In October 2024, the full parole board rescinded the grant. In February 2025, parole was denied again. Her next parole eligibility is 2028. Sherri Rasmusen was 29 years old when she died.
She had been married for three months. She was building a career that was already extraordinary by any measure. She had spent her adult life taking care of other people, working nights in coronary care units where patients came in fighting for their lives, lecturing nursing students who looked up to her, running one of the busiest critical care departments in Los Angeles before she turned 30. And then a Monday morning in February 1986 took all of that away.
Not a random crime, not a burglary gone wrong, but a deliberate act of jealousy by a woman who had decided that if she could not have John Ruetten, no one could. The case against her killer was not built on a confession or an eyewitness. It was built on a bite mark, a six-inch swab taken by a coroner’s criminalist in the middle of the night and placed in a glass tube with a red stopper. That tube sat in a freezer for 23 years while the killer got promoted, got married, won medals, and recovered stolen artwork for the same department that held the case file with her name buried inside it.
Nells Rasmusen was right from the very first day. He told the LAPD who killed his daughter. He gave them the name. He begged them to investigate.
They told him there was nothing there. They told him he watched too much television. They told him to move on with his life. He never moved on.
Not in 1988 when his letter to the chief of police went unanswered. Not in 1993 when he offered to pay for DNA testing and was turned away. It took a cold case unit, a tube with a red stopper in a coroner’s freezer, a discarded cup at a Costco in Simi Valley, and a ruse inside the LAPD’s own headquarters to prove what a grieving father knew the morning after he lost his daughter. Sherri Rasmusen deserved a full life.
She got three months of marriage and a Monday morning in February. But she also got something else eventually. She got justice — late, imperfect, and hard-won.
Bought with the patience of a family that refused to let go, the diligence of detectives who came along decades too late, and a single biological trace that a killer left behind and a coroner’s criminalist had the foresight to preserve.