They also ignored these potential witnesses, failing to interview most of them and later claiming that the Rasmussen family, who had repeatedly contacted police and mentioned Lazarus (her name is in the case file) hadn’t actually contributed any information or leads. A friend points out the patently ridiculous oddities here, like why Rasmussen would take on two men with a gun in a vicious fight rather than try to get away.
Rasmussen’s friends and family were suspicious and pressed detectives to investigate her, but they were set on a burglary theory. She couldn’t let him go and began stalking and threatening Rasmussen, even showing up at the hospital where she worked. Lazarus’s connection to Rasmussen was through the latter’s husband, John Ruetten, Lazarus’s college friend and former hookup buddy. As cold case detectives homed in on her, they had to employ special methodology to ensure nothing leaked, and that Lazarus couldn’t look up information about the now-active case while at work, something they suspected she’d been doing over the years. Did a respected police detective really commit murder and carry that secret for her entire career?Īt the time of her arrest, Stephanie Lazarus was a detective in the enviable art theft division. My chance encounter with Lazarus made me intensely curious to learn the truth. In April 2008, about a year before she was arrested, I had actually met Lazarus at Parker Center, the LAPD headquarters, and interviewed her at length for a book I was planning to write about art theft, Lazarus’s beat at that time. The murderer was more unusual – a female LAPD detective, a position she’d also held at the time of the murder.
As in many recent cases, new testing of old DNA evidence – here, an allegedly misplaced swab from a bite mark on Sherri’s arm – was the key in solving it. In 2009, a decades-old cold case, the 1986 murder of Sherri Rasmussen, a young newlywed nurse in Van Nuys, heated up when a suspect was finally arrested. Book review: The Lazarus Files, by Matthew McGough ( Amazon / Book Depository)
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