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Inside Sherri Rasmussen's Brutal Murder By An LAPD Officer
When California nurse Sherri Rasmussen fell in love with hard drive engineer John Ruetten, she was aware that her new husband had some baggage — but she had no idea that it would ultimately get her killed. Ruetten had a brief fling with an aspiring police officer named Stephanie Lazarus, but Lazarus had no intention of letting him go. After Rasmussen and Ruetten's engagement, Lazarus all but stalked Ruetten and even reportedly convinced him to sleep with her one last time.
On another occasion, she came to Ruetten and Rasmussen's condo with her skis and asked Ruetten to wax them for her, right in front of Rasmussen. By the time the couple got married in November 1985, Lazarus was officially part of the Los Angeles Police Department — and Rasmussen quietly told her father that she thought Lazarus was stalking her.
Finally, on February 24, 1986, Ruetten came home from work and found the unimaginable: Rasmussen had been killed, shot three times through a quilted blanket to muffle the sound. And though the LAPD would chalk the murder up to a burglary gone wrong and abandon their investigation quickly, Rasmussen's family believed from the start that Lazarus was involved. But her position within the LAPD left investigators skeptical — and Rasmussen's murder went unsolved for more than 20 years. Go inside the decades-long saga of Sherri Rasmussen's murder by clicking the link in our profile.
On February 24, 1986, the body of Sherri Rasmussen (born February 7, 1957 was found in the apartment she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, in Van Nuys, California, United States. She had been beaten and shot three times in a struggle. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) initially considered the case a botched burglary and were unable to identify a suspect. Rasmussen's father believed that LAPD officer Stephanie Lazarus, who maintained a relationship with Ruetten, was a prime suspect.
Detectives who re-examined the cold case files in 2009 were eventually led to Lazarus, by then herself a detective. A DNA sample from a cup she had thrown away was matched to one from a bite on Rasmussen's body that had remained in the files. Lazarus was convicted of the murder in 2012 and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life for first-degree murder at the California Institution for Women in Corona.
Lazarus appealed the conviction, claiming 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 guilty verdict was upheld by the California Court of Appeal for the Second District of the state (which includes Los Angeles).
Some of the police files suggest that evidence that could have implicated Lazarus earlier in the investigation was later removed, perhaps by others in the LAPD. Rasmussen's parents unsuccessfully sued the department over this and other aspects of the investigation. Jennifer Francis, the criminalist who found key evidence from the bite mark, unsuccessfully sued the City of Los Angeles, 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 LAPD's attention.
On the morning of February 24, 1986, Ruetten left the couple's condominium on Balboa Boulevard[8] in Van Nuys to go to work. Rasmussen 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 Ruetten she might call in sick, using a back injury she had incurred while doing aerobics the day before as an excuse.
At 9:45 a.m., a neighbor noticed that the Ruettens' garage door was open, with no car visible. Approximately fifteen minutes later, Ruetten made the first of several unanswered calls home over the course of the day. Rasmussen's sister also called without answer. At noon, two men, who the neighbor believed were gardeners in the compound, gave her and her husband a purse that they had found, which 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, at around 12:30 p.m.
When Ruetten returned home in the evening, he found his garage door open and broken glass on the driveway. In addition, he discovered that the BMW he bought for Rasmussen as an engagement gift was missing. Because of Rasmussen's 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, despite both of them usually activating it when leaving the house unoccupied.
Inside, Ruetten found Rasmussen 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 Rasmussen's head prior to the shooting, a bloody handprint next to the burglar alarm's panic button, and a toppled credenza. It appeared that someone at least had attempted to bind Rasmussen at some point. She had defensive wounds and a bruise on her face that appeared to have been inflicted by the muzzle of a gun. The gun had been fired through a quilted blanket, apparently to muffle the sound. The investigating criminalist also observed a bite mark on Rasmussen's arm and took a swab from it.
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