On the afternoon of February 24, 1986, John Rutten returned home from work in Van Nuys, Los Angeles. He climbed the stairs to his second-floor apartment and pushed open the slightly ajar door. Inside, he found his new wife lying on the living room floor in a pool of blood. They had been married exactly three months. Sherri’s wedding ring was still on her finger.
For the next 23 years, the woman who killed Sherri Rasmussen continued to wear a police uniform, go to work every morning, and advance her career. She worked in the same building where detectives investigated the murder she had committed.
The Los Angeles Police Department concluded on the very first night that the killing was a botched burglary. A prowler had stumbled upon the homeowner and killed her to escape. No one questioned that conclusion for two full decades.
Meanwhile, Sherri’s father, Niels Rasmussen, knew the name of his daughter’s killer since 1986. He gave that name to the police and begged them to investigate. He wrote letters. He met with them in person. He never gave up. They told him he watched too much television.
Sherri Rasmussen was born on February 7, 1957. She was the middle of three sisters and so bright that she skipped two grades, entering university at age 16. Her father initially hoped she would become a doctor, but Sherri chose nursing, believing it would let her balance career and family. By 23, she had a master’s degree and was teaching at UCLA. In her late 20s, she became the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, the youngest woman to hold that position in the hospital’s history.
At the hospital, people remembered Sherri not just for her competence but for her demeanor. She listened to patients. She remembered everyone’s names. She was the kind of person you wanted beside your bed in the worst of times.
In June 1984, Sherri met John Rutten at a party. He was a computer engineer who later said he was drawn to her smile and laugh from the first moment. They dated and married in November 1985.
But John Rutten entered the marriage carrying a secret he never revealed to Sherri. There was another woman who was still obsessed with him, who still appeared in his life, and who refused to accept that he had chosen someone else.
What makes this case so painful is that Sherri knew she was in danger. She had confronted the person threatening her directly. She spoke openly with her father in the weeks before her death. No one listened.
The morning of February 24, 1986, began like any other. Sherri stayed home and did not go to work that day. Rutten left the house at 7:20 a.m., seeing his wife for the last time as she lay in bed. He forgot to turn on the alarm system and was never sure if he had locked the door.
A neighbor noticed the apartment garage was still closed at 8:30 a.m. By 9:30 a.m., the garage was open and Sherri’s new BMW was gone. Investigators later determined the murder occurred between 8:30 and 10:00 a.m., when the neighborhood was quiet and no one noticed anything.
Late in the afternoon, Rutten finished work and returned home. He saw the open garage and the missing car. It was strange, but Sherri was a nursing director and emergencies happened often. He walked upstairs. The front door was swinging. He pushed it open and saw his wife lying on the living room floor in a pool of blood. He called 911 in terror.
Detective Lyle Mayer arrived at the scene that night. Within minutes, he reached a conclusion that would define the entire investigation for the next 23 years. He looked around the apartment, saw electronics stacked near the door, and told Rutten he believed the home had been burglarized before 10 a.m. He thought the intruders had forced the front door open.
But when other investigators examined the front door more closely, they found no signs of forced entry. The door was simply unlocked, or opened from the inside, or Sherri had let the person in. This detail did not change the course of the investigation.
The crime scene told a more complex story than a simple robbery. Sherri Rasmussen did not die quickly or easily. She was beaten severely about the head with multiple objects. A vase in the living room was shattered. The butt of a gun was used to strike her face at least twice. The right side of her face was swollen and bruised. Her eyes were blackened. Broken glass was scattered on the floor. Deep scratch marks on the front door showed desperate last attempts to escape.
Three bullets were fired into her chest from a .38 caliber gun. The attacker used a pillow as a makeshift silencer so no one would hear the shots. On Sherri’s left arm was a deep bite mark, evidence of a direct physical struggle. This was not the struggle of a panicked thief but of someone fighting over a weapon in close combat. Two of Sherri’s fingernails were broken. She had been restrained.
A forensic technician collected a sample from the bite mark and placed it in the freezer. A routine procedure. No one paid attention to its significance that night.
The pile of video and audio equipment near the front door was neatly arranged, not scattered, as if someone had placed it there after everything was over. Sherri’s wallet and new BMW were stolen. The couple’s marriage certificate was missing, but no jewelry was taken. A detail no thief would overlook. Diamond rings and gold chains are worth far more than a piece of paper. But no one questioned this inconsistency.
One first responder noticed John Rutten sitting at the table, appearing to cry, but his crying did not seem intense enough given that his wife was dead on the floor. The detective told Rutten he was an expert at judging people and was certain the husband had nothing to do with it, dismissing the most important man who should have been investigated based on first impressions alone.
Another investigator at the scene noted that burglars usually do not choose a home in the middle of a neighborhood. They look for an escape route and typically choose a house near the street. It was strange they chose this particular home. This comment was not enough to change anything.
Rutten had a solid alibi, confirmed by his coworkers. He was in the office all day. He was cleared.
When Sherri died, the news reached the Rasmussen family not from John but from his father. When Niels asked to speak with his son-in-law, the response was that John did not want to talk. When the Rasmussen family went to the police station, John continued to refuse to speak with them, claiming the police would not allow it.
At the funeral, John spoke publicly about Sherri for the last time, then left Los Angeles and never returned.
Meanwhile, Niels began telling the police what he knew, things Sherri had told him in the weeks before her death. Stephanie Lazarus, an LAPD officer, was Rutten’s former girlfriend. She was the woman who had harassed Sherri repeatedly. She was the woman Sherri feared.
The detective listened to Niels and dismissed him. There was nothing to it. Then he told him bluntly that he watched too much television. That phrase would stick in the Rasmussen family’s minds for the next 23 years.
Five weeks after Sherri’s murder, two men broke into another home in the same neighborhood, less than a mile away. The homeowner returned and surprised them inside. One of them brandished a gun. They fled. Witnesses described two Latino men in their early 20s, one armed. A sketch was made and circulated across the city.
The police immediately believed these were the same people who killed Sherri. Same neighborhood, same time period, same type of weapon. The burglary theory gained more credibility. No one was ever arrested. The burglary theory held for another 23 years thanks to those two unknown men.
Sherri’s BMW was found 11 days later, parked on a street 3.2 kilometers away. All fingerprints had been wiped clean. The wallet was also found, also without fingerprints. Then silence.
The Rasmussen family never gave up. A year after the murder, they held a press conference, renewed the reward, and called for more action. Niels wrote directly to Police Chief Daryl Gates about the possibility of Lazarus’s involvement.
In 1988, Sherri’s sister suggested to famous true crime writer Ann Rule that she write a book about the case. Rule was interested and asked a retired LAPD detective to inquire about the Lazarus angle. A few days later, Rule called back. Someone had told her the case was highly sensitive. Rule did not write the book.
Lazarus continued going to work every morning at the LAPD, walking the hallways of the same building where the murder file bearing Sherri Rasmussen’s name sat quietly in storage, waiting to be solved.
Mayer retired in 1991. The Rasmussen file moved to a new detective who met with the family and told them frankly he could not follow Mayer’s notes and did not believe any new leads would emerge. Niels Rasmussen flew from Tucson to Los Angeles to hear that. He would fly to Los Angeles many more times in the years that followed.
Each time the file changed hands, the family traveled again, sat in the interrogation room again, sat across from a new detective holding a file, then returned to Tucson with broken hearts. Every meeting felt like a performance, not a real investigation.
In 1993, Niels read about developments in DNA testing and realized this could be the key. He offered to pay for the testing out of his own pocket. No department budget, no requests, only permission to examine the stored evidence. His request was denied. He was told the police must have a suspect before conducting the test. He had had a suspect since 1986. No one listened.
Then the strangest thing happened in all those 23 years. Much of the evidence related to the mysterious case disappeared from the file. Someone divided the contents of the murder file in half. The official reason was that the file had become too large for the storage space in the cold case office. Half the murder file was removed due to lack of space. The Rasmussen family found no explanation for this.
In 1997, a glimmer of hope appeared. A former coworker of Sherri’s hospital secretary called the police and recounted an incident from January 1986 when Lazarus came to confront Sherri in her hospital office. The secretary had told her coworker about it immediately after it happened. This was direct eyewitness testimony of Lazarus’s behavior before Sherri’s murder. No effort was made to follow up on that information. Three years later, the secretary died, and her firsthand account died with her.
While the Rasmussen family fought to keep the case open, Stephanie Lazarus built her career at the LAPD. In the 1990s, she worked in the personnel division, the unit responsible for personal information about officers and suspects. She knew exactly who was under investigation and who was not.
One of her coworkers in that division recalled that Lazarus once mentioned she had been questioned as part of a murder investigation involving the missing wife of her ex-boyfriend who had possibly been shot. She told this casually in the office among colleagues as an ordinary story. No one suspected anything.
Lazarus later rose to the rank of detective. Her office was in the same hallway as the offices of the detectives investigating the Rasmussen case. Same hallway, same building, same organization. As an officer, she was fully aware of the stages of the investigation, the evidence under study, and whether her name appeared on any list.
Two weeks after Sherri was killed, Lazarus reported her backup .38 caliber gun missing to the Santa Monica Police Department. But she did not report it to the LAPD as all officers were required to do. A month later, she reported the purchase of a replacement gun to the LAPD. These two events, the lost gun and the failure to report it to the proper department, then the immediate purchase of a new gun, remained in two separate files at two different agencies. No one connected them for 23 years.
In 2001, the LAPD created a cold case unit dedicated to more than 9,000 unsolved murders spanning over two decades. The Rasmussen file, now 15 years old, did not reach a detective with time to handle it. Instead, it was assigned to a criminalist named Jennifer Francis. She was not a detective or an investigator but a crime scene analyst.
Francis began examining the evidence boxes herself, reading every page of the file, and gradually saw what four previous investigators had missed. She found detailed notes about the bite mark on Sherri’s left arm, the deep bite from which a swab had been taken on the first night at the crime scene.
But something was wrong. The file stated that investigators had obtained only one blood type from that bite. Francis immediately realized this was scientifically incorrect. A bite mark should produce two genetic profiles, one from the victim and one from the biter. The file suggested Sherri had bitten herself, a theory Francis found biologically and factually unreasonable.
So where was the bite swab? Francis examined the evidence locker. It was not there. She called every forensic lab in the city, one by one, explaining what she was looking for. None of them had the swab.
After six hours of calls and waiting, a forensic pathologist at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office said he had found something. A torn envelope with a faded label, almost unreadable, sitting in the freezer since 1986. Inside the torn envelope was a small glass vial, still intact, containing the swab.
After years in the freezer, a faded label, a damaged envelope, but the sample was still intact. Francis sent it for testing immediately. The result: DNA from a female, not Sherri. Another woman had bitten Sherri Rasmussen during the struggle on February 24, 1986.
Francis also carefully read the notes about Niels Rasmussen’s efforts over the years. The letters, the meetings, the name Lazarus mentioned again and again, then dismissed again and again. Francis’s theory began to form. The person who had been stalking Sherri and was Rutten’s ex-girlfriend was the same person who had bitten Sherri during the struggle and killed her.
Francis pushed her findings to the cold case unit. She was ignored. She pushed to the scientific division. Ignored. She pushed to the homicide and robbery division. Ignored. She pushed to internal affairs. This time, instead of being ignored, she faced backlash.
Wherever she went, her superiors turned their focus not to the evidence but to her, questioning her mental state and accusing her of being emotional, paranoid, and obsessed with the Sherri case. She was forced to attend mandatory counseling sessions with a therapist appointed by the LAPD. But what shocked Francis more than being sent to the therapist was the content of those sessions. The therapist did not ask about her mental health. The therapist asked who she had spoken to about the case and what information she had shared with anyone outside the department.
Francis realized this was not counseling. It was an interrogation. A deputy district attorney called her crazy. Her lab colleagues treated her as a burden and advised her to find another hobby. She was marginalized from major cases and relegated to peripheral work.
Francis was walking the same path Niels Rasmussen had walked 15 years before her. The only person who saw the truth and was crushed by the system for it.
That same year, Detective Cliff Shepard also noticed the bite mark in the file and independently requested further testing. The results confirmed what Francis had found: DNA from a female. Shepard said he had not expected that. This discovery completely overturned the 15-year theory about two male burglars. Most home invaders are male, and biting during a struggle was not the behavior of a panicked thief but of someone fighting face to face with Sherri Rasmussen.
The question was no longer who robbed Sherri’s home but who killed her.
Lazarus met Rutten at UCLA in the late 1970s when they were both college students. For Rutten, it was a casual relationship with no commitments. He dated many other people during the same period and did not consider Lazarus a real girlfriend. For Lazarus, he was the love of her life. This contrast, two people looking at the same relationship and seeing two completely different things, was the foundation of the entire tragedy.
Lazarus’s destructive obsession was not new in 1985 or 1986. Things became clear when they were still at university. Rutten later revealed to investigators that while they lived in UCLA housing, Lazarus stole his underwear and snuck into his room to photograph him while he slept. He knew about it, yet he continued the relationship. He continued having sex with her even after his engagement to Sherri because he did not want to hurt her.
In August 1985, when news of the marriage became clear, Lazarus wrote to her mother: “I really love John, and this past year has torn me apart. I wish it hadn’t ended this way, and I don’t think I will ever understand his decision.”
But Lazarus did not accept the decision. From June to August 1985, she went directly to the hospital where Sherri worked during official hours, wearing short shorts and a sleeveless shirt, as if proving something. She reached Sherri’s office and told her directly: “John and I are still intimate, and when your marriage falls apart, I will be there to pick up the pieces.”
Sherri replied with equal frankness: “You won’t need your services.” Lazarus left, saying finally: “If I can’t have John, no one else will, not even you.”
Then she began appearing outside Sherri and Rutten’s home. One morning, after Rutten had left for work, Sherri opened the door and found Lazarus standing in the living room wearing her LAPD uniform. Sherri asked her to leave, and she left. But it did not stop there.
Sherri began being followed at least five times in one week. The same person appeared at the stores she visited, at the gym she went to, on the roads she usually took. Sherri described the stalker to her father as someone with eyes that pierce through you.
In early February 1986, three weeks before her murder, Sherri met her father in Tucson and told him she feared Lazarus was following her in the streets, sometimes disguised as a young man. Sherri never revealed the stalker’s name to the police, something the Rasmussen family later admitted with regret.
On February 14, 1986, Valentine’s Day, Lazarus’s roommate moved out. She lived alone. A week later, on February 23, a friend of Rutten’s from UCLA visited the apartment. The next day, Sherri Rasmussen was found dead.
In November 2009, Detective James Nuttall from the robbery and homicide division contacted Jennifer Francis. Francis had been waiting for this moment for more than five years, but she was afraid because everything she had been through during those years had taught her a clear lesson: not everyone at the LAPD wanted to know the truth.
Francis told Nuttall she did not believe it was a robbery and that the evidence may have been tampered with. But she did not reveal her full theory. She did not mention Lazarus’s name. She did not elaborate on what she was certain Nuttall already knew.
Nuttall had seen the DNA results and drawn his own conclusions. He had read dozens of letters from Niels Rasmussen over the years and seen Lazarus’s name repeated again and again, ignored again and again. He reviewed the initial 1986 interview with John Rutten and realized the detective had been too hasty in his conclusions as well.
He soon realized something more important. Over 23 years, none of the three detectives who reopened the case had conducted a second interview with John, the only person who knew the full story about Lazarus.
Nuttall decided to form a secret investigation team within the department, consisting only of himself, Francis, and three other detectives he trusted completely. The goal was to prove that one of their own had killed Sherri Rasmussen.
The first step was locating John Rutten, who had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, remarried, and had children long ago. Nuttall arranged an interview with him and used a completely different tone from everything before. Rutten did not hesitate to answer direct questions about his ex-girlfriend. He did not avoid embarrassing details. He not only mentioned Lazarus’s name but recounted every confrontation, the hospital visits, the time Lazarus stood in their living room wearing her police uniform. All the information that had not been recorded in the file for 23 years.
Rutten also admitted what he had not said explicitly before. During his engagement to Sherri, he continued having sex with Lazarus. He was fully aware of how obsessed she was with him, yet he refused to end the relationship definitively. The Rasmussen family later commented that he had not been honest with her. Instead of facing the matter directly, he stalled. He did not act like a husband who loved his wife.
Now Nuttall had the name, the motive, and the record. But investigating an active police officer presented challenges no ordinary case faced. He could not request a DNA sample from Lazarus without strong justification. She had the right to refuse, and the request would immediately expose the investigation. He could not interrogate her directly because she would know immediately, and she could warn her colleagues, destroy evidence, or disappear.
Lazarus’s office was in the same hallway where the detectives investigating her worked. Any change in her colleagues’ behavior around her could be noticed immediately.
Nuttall’s decision was a special surveillance unit, completely secret, leaving no trace in the department’s regular records system. The surveillance team followed Lazarus for weeks at work, on her way home, in her daily activities.
Then, at a store, Lazarus bought a drink, finished it, and threw the plastic cup into a trash can as she left. The surveillance team recovered the cup. The DNA from the saliva on the cup’s rim was sent to Francis immediately.
Francis compared the sample with the swab taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm. The sample that had been in the freezer since 1986, the sample she had spent six hours searching for, was an exact match.
The person who bit Sherri Rasmussen during the struggle on February 24, 1986, was Stephanie Lazarus.
On June 5, 2009, Nuttall ordered Lazarus to be lured to the suspect treatment unit, the only room in the entire LAPD building where no one was allowed to bring weapons, by pretending they needed her help interrogating a difficult suspect. Lazarus entered the interrogation room completely unaware of what was happening.
At first, she said she did not remember meeting Sherri Rasmussen. When pressed, she said: “Maybe I talked to her once or twice when it turned out she was a suspect. Are you accusing me of this? That’s ridiculous.”
She asked for a lawyer and stood up. As she was leaving the interrogation room, she was immediately arrested. The news spread throughout the department. Lazarus’s colleagues who had worked with her for 23 years stood in the hallway in shock at what they were hearing.
The trial began in February 2012 at the Los Angeles County Superior Court, 26 years after the night John Rutten called 911 from his apartment in Van Nuys. It was one of the most anticipated trials in LAPD history, not only because of the brutality of the crime but because the defendant who appeared in court wore the uniform of the same institution that was prosecuting her.
Lazarus denied the charge and did not testify. She remained silent throughout the three weeks, showing no emotion on her face.
The prosecutor, Shannon Presby, opened her argument with one sentence that summarized the entire case: one bite, one bullet, one gun barrel, and a broken heart.
Nuttall’s investigation lasted four months. The trial lasted three weeks. The jury reached its verdict in less than a day.
The evidence presented by the prosecution was cumulative. Each layer was strong on its own, and when combined, they formed a complete picture with no room for any defense.
The first layer was the DNA from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm. The sample that had been in the freezer since 1986. The sample Jennifer Francis spent six hours searching for. The sample that matched perfectly with the DNA from the plastic cup Lazarus threw in the trash can outside the store. Conclusive evidence.
The second layer was Lazarus’s backup .38 caliber gun, matching the type of bullets found at the crime scene. Lazarus reported the gun missing to the Santa Monica Police Department two weeks after the crime instead of reporting it to the LAPD as all officers were required to do. Then she bought a replacement gun a month later and reported it to the LAPD. The two events remained in two separate files for 23 years. Now they were placed side by side before the jury.
The third layer was Lazarus’s diaries about Rutten, handwritten pages recording the depth of her obsession with a man who never considered her his girlfriend.
The fourth layer was Rutten’s testimony from the witness stand about all the confrontations Sherri had told him about. Lazarus’s words at the hospital: “If I can’t have John, no one will.”
Rutten cried several times while testifying. When asked how he felt, he said: “The fact that Sherri’s death happened because she met me and married me makes me feel completely shattered.”
The crime scene itself was reanalyzed, the fifth layer, 26 years later. The front door had not been forced open despite the detective’s conclusion in 1986. The electronics were neatly arranged, not ransacked in panic. The marriage certificate was missing, but no jewelry was stolen. A burglar does not leave diamond rings.
Jennifer Francis took the witness stand to present the DNA results and recount what happened to her when she tried to bring those results to the right people. She was called crazy, sent to counseling sessions, and advised by colleagues to find another hobby.
Niels Rasmussen also took the witness stand. The father who wrote to the police chief, who was told he watched too much television, who flew from Tucson to Los Angeles countless times, delivered the warning he had tried to give from day one.
Defense attorney Mark Overland fought the case on all fronts. He emphasized the original burglary theory and pointed to the similar break-in nearby as evidence that the police’s suspicions in 1986 were not unfounded. He challenged the DNA analysis from the bite mark, citing a small hole in the storage envelope and arguing the preservation process did not meet standards, theoretically allowing Lazarus’s DNA to be added later. He claimed the .38 caliber gun was not necessarily Lazarus’s because that caliber was the most common in the LAPD at the time.
These arguments were not enough. After several days of deliberation, the jury returned to the courtroom with the verdict: guilty of first-degree murder.
Stephanie Lazarus was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 27 years at the California Institution for Women in Chino. She was allowed to retire from the LAPD after her arrest and continued to receive her pension while in prison, something the Rasmussen family could not fully accept.
Niels and Loretta Rasmussen lived long enough to hear the verdict, but they passed away without getting an answer to the question that had haunted them their entire lives: why did it take 23 years?
Sherri’s sister said after the verdict that it was like a light wave of relief after everything was over. Relief that her father finally found answers.
John Rutten sat on the witness stand at the 2012 trial and cried repeatedly under the weight of what he had known for a long time but lacked the courage to face directly. He admitted that having sex with Lazarus after his engagement to Sherri was a mistake, a word insufficient to describe the grave consequences.
At the 2024 parole hearing, Rutten stood before the board and said: “I lied for decades until the only option was to seek parole. Sherri’s parents lost their daughter because Sherri loved me and married me. For me, the pain never fades.”
Niels Rasmussen lived long enough to see Lazarus in handcuffs and to hear the verdict in 2012. But he died without receiving a satisfactory answer to the question he carried for 23 years. Why did the police not listen to him from day one? Why was Lazarus’s name recorded but never investigated? Why did a father who knew the truth have to wait a quarter century to be believed?
Before his death, Niels recorded a video statement to be used at any future parole hearings. He looked directly into the camera and said: “If you look at the damage she inflicted on my daughter’s face, it looks like she wanted to destroy the beauty that Sherri radiated.”
That statement was shown at the 2023 parole hearing. The voice of a dead man still speaking in the courtroom, still protecting his daughter. It will be shown again every time Lazarus attempts parole in the future.
Sherri’s legacy is not limited to legal battles or parole hearings. It lives in the hearts of people who carry her with them every day without needing to say it. Sherri’s niece entered nursing school because of the aunt she never met. The youngest granddaughter in the family wore Sherri’s wedding dress on her own wedding day, carrying a part of that woman she never met on the most important day of her life.
Lazarus continued her fight from behind bars. In 2023, for the first time since her arrest in 2009, she admitted to killing Sherri. Not out of remorse but because it was a necessary condition for any chance of parole. This admission came 37 years after Sherri’s murder.
“I feel sick to this day when I think that I swore to protect people and serve them, and then I took the life of Sherri Rasmussen.”
In November 2023, the parole board tentatively approved her release. The decision was reversed after angry reactions from the Rasmussen family, from Rutten, and from the public. In February 2025, a new hearing ended in denial. Commissioner Kevin Chappell said bluntly: “Your account of the 1986 attack does not match the evidence. You alone committed this heinous violent act.”
As of 2026, Stephanie Lazarus, now in her 60s, remains incarcerated at the California Institution for Women in Chino. The Rasmussen family lives with the fact that Sherri’s killer still receives a pension from the LAPD while in prison, and no questions have been fully answered about those 23 lost years.
The Sherri Rasmussen case is now taught in American criminal investigation training courses. Not because of the DNA or because the killer was a police officer, but because of something simpler and more dangerous. An investigator reached a conclusion in the first minutes, and the entire investigation system followed that conclusion instead of challenging it.
The detective decided on the night of February 24, 1986, that it was a burglary. For 23 years, every thread, every piece of evidence, every statement was read through that lens. When Niels Rasmussen named Lazarus, there was no evidence. When he offered to pay for DNA testing in 1993, a suspect had to exist first.
The right answer existed since 1986, provided by two people, the father and the husband. But no one wanted to look at it.
The second lesson, though less important, is that a forensic technician on the night of February 24, 1986, collected a sample from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm and placed it in the freezer. A routine procedure. No one knew what it would become that night. But that was the only reason the case was solved. If that sample had been discarded, if that envelope had not been preserved, if the freezer had not existed when Jennifer Francis called, Stephanie Lazarus would never have been arrested.
The question the Rasmussen family never received a satisfactory answer to: why did the LAPD not investigate Lazarus in 1986, when both Niels and Rutten had provided her name while she was a police officer, and all the evidence pointed to her? There is no evidence of an organized cover-up, but there is also no convincing explanation for this negligence.
The Rasmussen family filed a lawsuit against the LAPD. The case was dismissed due to the statute of limitations. Lazarus still receives her pension from the LAPD while in prison to this day.