Sherri Rasmussen

Who Was Involved

Sherri Rae Rasmussen was twenty-nine years old and building the kind of life that careful, driven people build. She was the director of critical care nursing at a Los Angeles area hospital, a role that placed her in charge of life-and-death decisions while she was still in her twenties. In late 1985 she married John Ruetten, a mechanical engineer she had met through the orbit of UCLA, and the couple settled into a condominium in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles. They had been married only a few months when she was killed.

Before John married Sherri, he had spent time with another woman named Stephanie Lazarus. The two had known each other since their UCLA years. Ruetten would later testify that he had never considered Lazarus a girlfriend, but the connection mattered, because by 1986 Lazarus was a sworn officer of the Los Angeles Police Department. She would go on to a long career there, eventually working as an art theft detective. For more than twenty years, those two facts, that she had been involved with the victim’s husband and that she carried a badge, sat side by side without anyone in authority drawing a line between them.

What Happened

On February 24, 1986, John Ruetten came home to the Van Nuys condominium and found his wife dead. Sherri had been attacked inside the home she had lived in for only a short time. She had been struck in the head and shot three times in the chest. There were signs of a violent struggle. Out of respect for Sherri and her family, this account does not dwell on the particulars of how she died.

The scene was disordered, and that disorder shaped everything that followed. To the detectives who arrived that day, the condominium looked like a burglary that had turned deadly. That reading would harden into a theory, and the theory would hold for more than two decades, long after it should have given way.

The Investigation

Los Angeles police treated the killing as a botched burglary. Investigators focused on the idea that two male intruders, possibly the same pair tied to other crimes in the area, had broken in and killed Sherri when she interrupted them. Working from that premise, detectives did not seriously pursue the people closest to the marriage.

Sherri’s family did not accept the burglary story. Her father, Nels Rasmussen, had been told that his son-in-law had once been involved with a police officer, a woman who he understood had confronted and threatened his daughter. He pressed investigators to look at her. According to later reporting, he went so far as to raise his concerns with the department, and detectives brushed him off. The family’s most pointed suspicion, aimed squarely at a member of the department, went nowhere.

Yet the burglary theory had a flaw embedded in the evidence from the very beginning. During the autopsy, a bite mark was documented on Sherri’s arm, and a swab was taken from it. That swab was preserved and placed into long-term storage. At the time, it sat largely unexamined, a small piece of biological evidence waiting for science that had not yet matured.

The Breakthrough

Years later, the LAPD’s cold case unit returned to Sherri Rasmussen’s file, and the old swab finally gave up what it had been holding. DNA recovered from the bite mark was analyzed, and the result quietly demolished the original theory. The genetic profile belonged to a woman. The assumption that two male burglars had killed Sherri Rasmussen could no longer stand.

By 2009, investigators looked hard at Stephanie Lazarus, the woman the victim’s family had named all those years earlier. To test the DNA without alerting her, undercover officers followed Lazarus and recovered an item she discarded in public, and collected the saliva left on it. That covert sample was compared against the DNA from the bite mark. The two matched.

In June 2009, Lazarus was arrested at LAPD headquarters, taken into custody by the department she had served. She maintained her innocence. At trial, prosecutors built their case on the recovered forensic evidence, arguing that the saliva DNA tied her directly to the killing, while the defense attacked that evidence as old and mishandled after decades in storage. On March 8, 2012, after roughly two days of deliberation, a Los Angeles jury convicted Stephanie Lazarus of first-degree murder and found true the allegation that she had personally used a firearm. That spring, Superior Court Judge Robert Perry sentenced her to twenty-five years to life for the murder, plus two additional years for the firearm, a total of twenty-seven years to life. Then District Attorney Steve Cooley credited the persistence of the Rasmussen family and the work of investigators and prosecutors.

Where the Case Stands Today

Stephanie Lazarus remains a convicted murderer in the custody of the California prison system, and her conviction has held up under review. Her appeals, including challenges to the age of the evidence and to the DNA methods used at trial, were rejected, and the conviction was affirmed.

The later chapters have unfolded in the parole system. Because Lazarus was in her twenties at the time of the crime, she became eligible for parole consideration under a California law that gives special weight to offenders who were young when they committed their crimes. A parole panel found her suitable for release in late 2023, but that decision drew official scrutiny and was not allowed to stand, and she has remained behind bars through subsequent reviews. Notably, after years of asserting her innocence, Lazarus has acknowledged the killing in parole proceedings. The Rasmussen family, who fought for decades to be heard, has continued to oppose her release.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Rasmussen case endures for two reasons, and they pull against each other. The first is hopeful. A single swab, taken in 1986 from a wound on a victim’s arm and then preserved, carried the truth in cold storage until forensic science was ready to read it. The discipline of collecting and keeping evidence, even when no one yet knows how it will be used, is what eventually gave Sherri Rasmussen’s family an answer. This is the quiet promise of the evidence room: that what is saved can speak later.

The second reason is harder. The person who killed Sherri Rasmussen was a serving police officer, and the institution investigating the murder was the same institution that employed the killer. From the start, the victim’s family pointed at exactly the right person, and they were dismissed. For more than twenty years, an early, plausible suspect was effectively shielded by the assumptions of the very detectives charged with finding the truth. That failure does not undo the eventual conviction, but it should not be smoothed over either. The case stands as a reminder that a theory adopted too quickly can outlast the facts, that families deserve to be heard rather than waved away, and that justice delayed for a generation is still, for everyone who loved Sherri Rasmussen, justice that came far too late.