Killer Realizes She’s Been Caught 23 Years Later | The Case of Sherri Rasmussen
This is Stephanie Lazarus. She’s the main suspect in a murder case that’s still unsolved after 23 years. The reason is, she’s an LAPD detective. The police think she killed Sherri Rasmussen, the wife of John Ruetten, a devoted husband who adores her. But on the night of February 24th, 1986, things would take a turn for the worse.
After John claims he found his wife, Sherri, dead on the floor, investigators turn to a polygraph to see if he’s telling the truth. After the interrogation, the results show John failed the polygraph. But with no concrete evidence, he’s set free. For over 20 years, it remains a cold case, no arrests. Nobody knows what really happened to Sherri.
But after all this time, Sherri’s father becomes obsessed with discovering what happened to his daughter. As the last person to have spoken with her, he knows that their final conversation may hold the key to solving the case. According to Sherri’s father, John’s ex-girlfriend, Stephanie, an LAPD detective, matches the description Sherri has given.
Investigators are stunned, because Stephanie is one of their own. Los Angeles, February 24th, 1986, 6:00 PM, John Ruetten returns home from work. As he approaches the townhouse, the garage door is open, and his wife’s car is missing. Odd, but Sherri runs the nursing wing at Glendale Adventist, and emergencies are common.
John climbs the steps. The front door is ajar. He pushes it open. Inside, on the living room floor, lies Sherri in a pool of blood. He picks up the phone and calls 911. It’s kind of an eerie feeling to be here after 30 plus, almost 40 years. As I walked in, I saw Sherri Rasmussen on the ground. She had been covered with a towel, and one of the paramedics raised the towel for me to see her face, and she had considerable trauma to her face.
This is actually a murder. The scene suggests a break-in with stereo equipment scattered all across the floor. Without doing a complete examination, the officer notices that someone has tied up Sherri, bitten her deep on the left forearm, brutally struck her on the head with various objects, and shot her three times in the abdomen.
She also left deep claw marks in the front door in some sort of desperate struggle. As he outlines all the gruesome details to his colleagues, the policeman can’t help but hear quiet sobbing coming from the adjacent dining room. I noticed John Ruetten. He was sitting at the table, and he seemed to be sobbing, and his crying should have been more extreme with his wife laying there on the floor, dead.
When asked about his security system, John admits he forgot to set the alarm that morning and isn’t sure if he locked the door. He explains that Sherri was still in bed and that the neighborhood felt safe. As suspicious elements began to add up, the police couldn’t help but question, why would the burglar pick a townhouse right in the middle of the street? Uh, burglars don’t usually pick a place five condos from the street.
They wanna get away. They pick something next to the street. It’s just strange that they would pick this place. I thought to myself, this is a burglary? Sherri was all about family. Sherri was my big sister. She was my best friend. She would always encouraged people, and she always exuded confidence. I am the oldest sister of Sherri Rasmussen.
My dad had called, and he told me that Sherri had been killed. I just started screaming. I couldn’t believe it. Sherri Rasmussen, a young woman with a bright future ahead of her, gifted in school, she entered college at 16, skipping two grades. Her father had hoped she would pursue a career in medicine, but Sherri became a nurse instead, convinced it would allow her to balance her career with the family life she longed for.
By the age of 23, she had already obtained her master’s degree and was teaching at UCLA. A very good listening technique is while you’re doing it, the eye contact. That gives the nonverbal clue to the patient that you are, in fact, listening. Everywhere, people complimented Sherri for her intelligence, calming presence, and natural leadership.
By her late twenties, she had already become the Director of Nursing at Glendale Adventist. And in the spring of 1984, she met her future husband, John Ruetten. I first remember hearing about John when Sherri called me and told me that she had met somebody at a party. Three weeks later, I went out there and met John for the first time.
I asked John, “How did you meet Sherri?” And he told me that he saw Sherri from across the room, and she had this beautiful smile and laugh. Just seeing him say that and hearing him, I was happy for Sherri. They looked great together. They were affectionate, and I loved John, because my sister loved John. However, Sherri’s dad, Nels, pushes aside these feelings when he receives the phone call announcing Sherri’s passing as it wasn’t from John himself, but from his father.
Telling me that Sherri had been murdered. And so I told his dad, “I want to talk to John,” and he said, “John doesn’t feel like talking.” When the Rasmussens arrive at the police station, they finally reunite with John. But, to their surprise, he still refuses to talk, insisting that the police won’t allow him.
For them, the exchange is unsettling, and John’s secretive attitude is difficult to read. The Rasmussen’s wonder if this is the reaction of a man in shock or if he’s holding back to protect himself or someone else. I thought his behavior was odd. He wouldn’t talk to us. He was more concerned about himself than about Sherri.
Basic homicide 101, look at the spouse. It’s in her own home. Her husband had just left her that morning. She hasn’t been anywhere. You don’t have to be a detective to think, I wonder if he did it. As John is escorted into an interrogation room by a detective, Nels ponders their exchange or lack thereof. The 51-year-old is sure his son-in-law is lying, because Sherri’s family, friends, and colleagues all know that in the year leading up to her murder, something disturbing was happening.
A strange figure in disguise was constantly stalking her. She mentioned she had been followed five different times in the last week. This person kept appearing in places that Sherri would go. She couldn’t go out to the store or go to the gym without having this person show up. And she said that the person that was following her had eyes that could penetrate you.
They could see right through you. On top of that, John’s ex-girlfriend also began harassing Sherri after their wedding. A colleague of hers witnessed one of the encounters. She told me that John’s ex-girlfriend had come to her office at the hospital dressed provocatively. And confronted Sherri about John and said that if she couldn’t have John, nobody could.
As detectives questioned John, another officer speaks with the Rasmussens. Nels struggles to process what he’s hearing. According to the authorities, thieves killed his daughter in a failed robbery where they stole nothing but her purse and car. It wasn’t a robbery. No, they couldn’t convince me of it. Nels immediately starts talking about the stalking and harassment his daughter suffered during the months leading up to her murder.
Still, the officer in front of him retorts that without a name, there’s nothing they can do. Sherri never disclosed a name for the ex-girlfriend. It would’ve been nice had we had that, ’cause we would’ve shared that with the detectives. Nonetheless, Nels follows up with one alarming incident where John’s ex-girlfriend broke into Sherri’s townhouse and started fighting with his daughter in her own living room before running away.
One of the original detectives in this case told me personally, they had never heard any of those alleged incidents, and none of them were entered into the official case record known as the murder book. I just want to thank you all for coming, and I want you to know that Sherri was the best professional in the world.
She was the best wife that anybody could ever have, and she was the best sister and daughter. She wanted to make everybody happy. This is the last time John ever speaks publicly about Sherri. In the audience, Nels Rasmussen sits, filled with grief and anger. A month has passed, and the police haven’t moved an inch.
Nels doesn’t know what John has told them, but they never consider his son-in-law a suspect. On the contrary, the police stick to their burglar theory, even stating that the Rasmussens had been watching too much TV when Nels and his family tried to convince them to investigate Sherri stalker and John’s ex-girlfriend.
The first five weeks, I mentioned it so many times that he kinda lost his cool with me and said that there was no need to to go there, because there was nothing there. The next month, less than a mile from Sherri’s townhouse, an actual burglary took place. A woman coming home was surprised by two men inside.
One ran for the door, while the other pointed a revolver at her. Sherri Rasmussen was killed with a gun. So, the question is, are they the same burglars who murdered Sherri? A police artist talked to the woman at the home who said there were two young males, and the police artist drew sketches. Same neighborhood, same time, same weapon.
However, this time, no one was hurt. Either the police were actually onto something or fate was playing a cruel trick on the Rasmussens. Convinced the burglary and Sherri’s murder are linked, detectives plastered the city with the suspects’ faces. Weeks go by with no leads, then months. The police eventually find the two items the thief stole from Sherri’s property, her car and purse, both cleaned free of prints, and then, silence.
For almost 15 years, the Rasmussens have remained entirely in the dark. I had come to the conclusion in my mind that it was never gonna be solved, and it was something that I would have to deal with, the unknown of what happened. In 1991, Nels Rasmussen is back home in Arizona, still carrying the weight of Sherri’s unresolved murder.
Determined to get justice for his daughter, he follows every development in forensic science, watching closely, as DNA testing begins to revolutionize the field. Around the same time, the case’s lead detective retires, handing over his stalled investigation to someone else. For Nels, it feels like an opening.
He wastes no time and contacts the new man in charge with a plan he believes could break the case. Nels Rasmussen, reading about DNA and the advances that that’s brought to criminology, offers to pay for DNA testing, and the department says no. Correct. It’s just not the way the quote, unquote, business end of the department works.
Before Nels can convince anyone at the LAPD to give his idea a shot, something very strange happens. Various pieces of evidence related to the case mysteriously disappear. Not only that, but someone trims the murder book of half its contents on the premise that it has grown too large for the Cold Case Office storage room.
The mishandling of the case is becoming increasingly difficult for the Rasmussens to bear who continue to try to get in touch with the police or speak with someone, anyone who will take them seriously. As a father, he had felt a responsibility to protect her, and the only way in her death he could protect her was to find out who killed her.
He would constantly redisect the information that we knew. For the next 10 years, every time the case changes hands, the family flies from Tucson to Los Angeles to meet the new detectives, and each time, Nels and his two remaining daughters return home heartbroken by their lack of progress. They put us in a interrogation room, and they came in with a little skinny folder about this big.
They did meet with us, but it was also more of a, it was like a show. It’s now November, 2001. The LAPD can no longer ignore advances in forensic science and establishes a cold case unit dedicated to DNA profiling. Sherri’s file, now 15 years old, lands on the desk of an overextended detective with no time to treat it properly.
Instead of letting it gather dust, the case is handed off to a criminalist, Jennifer Francis. She begins combing through the boxes of evidence herself and eventually stumbles across a detailed entry about a bite mark Sherri received during the struggle with her killer. It was a alligator clutch. Strangely, the file claims investigators sampled only one blood type, but bite marks should always yield two profiles, one from the victim and one from the perpetrator.
The entry seemed to suggest Sherri might have bitten herself, a theory Francis finds baffling. She knows the original detective failed to recover prints and other key evidence from the scene, but surely, someone from his forensic team had swabbed the wound. With her boss’s help, she digs through boxes upon boxes of paperwork until she uncovers an old property log from 1986, listing the crucial swab she has been searching for.
I checked with our evidence room. They didn’t have it. I looked at our property reports. It’s not booked. How could that happen? Incompetence. That happen a lot? Yes. But Francis refuses to give up. She calls every coroner in the city until she finally gets a lead. After spending six hours combing through the morgue’s freezers, an LA county coroner informs her he had found a torn envelope with its fading label damaged.
Against all odds, the glass tube containing the swab was still inside and in one piece. She immediately runs a battery of tests, and the result points to an unknown female, directly contradicting the theory of a male duo. Further down the file, Francis also learns about Nels Rasmussen and his numerous attempts to inform the police about Sherri’s stalker and John’s ex-girlfriend.
Francis’ own theory begins to take shape. What if the two were one in the same, and she was the one who bit and killed Sherri? But when Francis brings this to the detective, he dismisses it outright and adds one detail Francis has yet to learn. John’s ex-girlfriend is not just any woman, she’s an LAPD detective.
Well, this plays to everybody’s favorite conspiracy theory that cops cover for other cops. No matter what. You’re outta your mind. Did you tell the detectives that John’s ex-girlfriend was a member of the LAPD? Well, that’s how I identified her. Why do you think it was that detectives didn’t look at John’s ex-girlfriend? I think it was because she was a police officer.
Why can’t that just be sloppy police work? Why does that have to be a coverup? Why can’t that be just sort of tunnel vision and a rush to judgment? They’re more intelligent than that. You gotta give ’em more credit than that. Unbeknownst to Nels, his only ally at this time is within the LAPD. Jennifer Francis relentlessly pushes the case, first to the cold-case unit, then to the scientific division, later to robbery homicide, and even to internal affairs.
Yet, everywhere she goes, supervisors turn their attention not to the evidence, but to her. They question her mental state, claiming she’s too emotional, paranoid, and obsessed with Sherri’s case. Soon, Francis is ordered into mandatory counseling with an LAPD-sanctioned therapist, a move that, inside the department, brands her as unstable and potentially unfit for duty.
Even worse, the sessions aren’t at all concerned with her wellbeing, but rather with what she knows about the case and who she has talked to. For Francis, this is no longer a matter of paranoia or conspiracy, this feels like retaliation. A deputy DA calls her crazy. Colleagues treat her as a liability and systematically push her off major cases.
Around the lab, people belittle her, telling her to get a hobby. What she doesn’t realize is that she’s retracing the same path as Nels Rasmussen, who, decades earlier, had also been ridiculed by the authorities despite being the only one able to see through the conspiracy. Then, in November, 2009, everything changes.
Francis receives a call from robbery homicide. A detective named James Nuttall is asking about her findings. She has been waiting more than five years for this moment, the Rasmussens, 23, but fear holds her back. She feels like she can’t trust anyone anymore. She tells the detective that she doesn’t believe it was a burglary and that the evidence may have been tampered with, but she doesn’t share her theory with him.
Yet, Nuttall has her results right in front of him and quickly puts two and two together. He knows that the only DNA not matching Sherri’s belongs to another female and has already read dozens of letters Nels sent over the years urging police to investigate John’s ex-girlfriend. From this point on, the detective decides to form a secret circle within the homicide department with Jennifer, who came to trust him over the first few months of the investigation, himself, and three other detectives.
Nuttall sets out to prove once and for all that someone from within their ranks violently attacked and killed Sherri Rasmussen inside her own home in 1986. When they said it was a police officer, I went, “You’re kidding, absolutely kidding.” A police officer committed this crime. I couldn’t imagine that. Nuttall and Francis don’t waste a minute.
Digging deep within the case files, they find John’s original 1986 interview with the first detective in charge of the case, who, to say the least, was quick to jump to conclusions and not very insistent towards the man who should have been his first suspect. To Nuttall, something’s off with the interview.
Why did the detective jump to conclusions so fast? Why did John Ruetten lie? According to Nels and Sherri’s colleague, his ex-girlfriend was quite problematic, and Sherri wasn’t afraid to bring it up in conversation. But what really throws Nuttall off is that there’s nothing else to listen to. In 23 years of investigations, three other detectives reopened the case, but none of them ever considered conducting a second interview with John to ask about Nels’s claims, but he knows he won’t be the fourth to pass on the idea.
He contacts John, who relocated to the Bay Area, remarried, and had children since then, and sets up an interview. From the get go, he adopts a very different tone, wasting no time to bring up his ex. The story at the hospital, the home invasion, the stalking, he doesn’t miss a beat and even recalls information that had never been recorded in their files until recently.
Not only does John give their suspect a name, he also explains that while he and Sherri were engaged, he had been cheating on her with Lazarus, even though he knew she was obsessed with him. In college, when the two were dating, she used to steal his underwear and sneak into his dorm to take pictures of him as he slept.
He should have been frank with her instead of leading her on and kept putting fuel to the fire. He tried to protect himself by diverting the information about Stephanie. He didn’t behave as a husband that loved Sherri. By that point, Lazarus is no longer a police officer, but a full-fledged detective. She’s armed and her office is just down the hall from Nuttall.
To make sure nobody intervened with their investigation as they had with Francis, the detective decides to send men to follow her around and recover anything she throws in the trash. From this endeavor, they recover a used soda cup and send it to Francis, who then confirms that Lazarus’ DNA matches the one found on the bite mark.
Nuttall then prompted his team to lure her into the LAPD Suspect Treatment Unit, the only place in the building where no guns were allowed, and to falsely claim that they needed her help for an interrogation with a difficult suspect. They were kind enough to come to our home.
I let my parents know that they had made the arrest. I mean, I cried, because I was so excited, number one that’s justice for my sister, but also for my dad. Nels was upset with me, and he was very animated. It was sort of like, “Detective, where have you been for the last two decades? I have explained this to your organization.
I’ve explained this to your investigators.” He was always diverted. He was told repeatedly that he’d been watching too much TV. For the first time since Sherri’s murder, everyone is on the same side. Jennifer Francis presents her DNA test results and recounts the retaliation she endured within the LAPD. Nels Rasmussen steps forward with the warnings he tried to give from the start and how he was ignored for decades.
And John Ruetten, whose testimony had been tampered with and whose contact with Sherri’s family was restricted by police, finally speaks openly. Together, they testify. The fact that Sherri’s death occurred because she met and married me brings me to my knees. Nuttall’s investigation takes four months. The trial lasts three weeks.
The jury comes to a conclusion in less than a day. After 26 years of struggle, Sherri and her family finally received justice. We, the jury, in the above entitled action find the defendant, Stephanie Eileen Lazarus, guilty of the crime of murder of Sherri Rasmussen. It was just like a rush of relief that it’s over.
Relief for my father, that he finally was vindicated and he had his answers. In 2023, Lazarus admits, 37 years too late, that she killed Sherri. In exchange for her confession, she’s offered a shot at parole. By then, Nels had already passed away, but before his death, he recorded a statement to be used at hearings.
The board saw it in 2023, and it will be shown again whenever Lazarus attempts to get released in the future. If one looks at the damage that she did to my daughter’s face, it’s almost like she wanted to destroy the beauty that Sherri exuded. Today, Sherri’s legacy continues not only through her family’s long-lasting fight for justice, but also in the lives of the Rasmussens next generation.
My mom always told me stories about when Sherri and her were in nursing school and how Sherri really liked the hard cases with the cardio patients. I always thought, well, you know, I can totally see why she would totally love this, the nursing and taking care of people. And I went into nursing school because of my Aunt Sherri.
My youngest daughter, Jessica, got married in February, and my mom said, “Well, why don’t you try on Sherri’s wedding dress? She liked Sherri’s wedding dress, so my mom said, “Go ahead.” So she took a little bit of her aunt with her on her special day. That’s one example of how we keep her in our lives every day.
