Stephanie Lazarus is a convicted killer and a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department who would murder Sherri Rasmussen and get away with it for over two decades
According to court documents the LAPD attended the home of Sherri Rasmussen that she shared with her husband John Ruetten. Inside of the apartment officers would find the body of Sherri who had been beaten and shot multiple times. Officers at the time believed that it was a robbery gone wrong
The father of Sherri Rasmussen believed that police needed to investigate one of their own, Stephanie Lazarus who was previously in a relationship with John Ruetten and was upset when he moved on
However the investigation would go cold and remain that way for over two decades
Cold case detectives would revisit the case in 2008 and found DNA from a bite wound on Sherri Rasmussen matched that of Stephanie Lazarus. Soon Lazarus would be arrested and charged with murder
At trial Stephanie Lazarus would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for twenty seven years.
Stephanie Lazarus Now
Name
LAZARUS, STEPHANIE ILENE
CDCR Number
WE4479
Age
65
Current Location
California Institution for Women
Jun 04 2012
Stephanie Lazarus Video
Stephanie Lazarus Parole
A former Los Angeles police detective who killed a romantic rival and hid the murder for more than two decades won’t be released from prison — at least not yet, California parole officials decided this week.
In November, a panel of parole commissioners found that Stephanie Lazarus, 64, was suitable for release, but on Monday the state parole board voted to approve a motion saying that decision deserves additional scrutiny because it may have been “improvident.”
The board cited a letter last month from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and referred the case to a separate “rescission” hearing to determine whether the grant of parole was improper.
In the letter, Newsom said Lazarus had an excellent disciplinary record as a prisoner and had sought to improve herself. Yet she evaded justice for more than two decades in the 1986 murder of Sherri Rasmussen, 29, and didn’t “appear to begin taking full accountability for the murder until she was finally caught,” the letter says.
Lazarus was arrested in Rasmussen’s killing in 2009 and convicted of first-degree murder three years later.
Rasmsussen’s sister Connie said she was “so very happy” with Monday’s decision.
“It [will] keep her in prison,” she said by text.
A lawyer who represented Lazarus at the November hearing didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
During a parole hearing Monday, several described Lazarus, former art theft detective, as a model prisoner who has mentored younger inmates and established a nonprofit group that supplies women with textbooks and has taken responsibility for Rasmussen’s murder.
But authorities and the victim’s relatives and friends countered that Lazarus hasn’t appeared remorseful or acknowledged what one of the case’s lead investigators previously described as the “cold, calculated” nature of Rasmussen’s murder.
Opponents also challenged parole officials’ invocation of California’s youthful offender laws in the case. Lazarus was almost 26 at the time of the murder, and legislative reforms in the state have sought to shift how people younger than 26 are handled within the criminal justice system.
At the November hearing, the presiding commissioner said the law should be given “great weight” in helping the panel reach its decision, a transcript of the hearing shows.
Rasmussen’s relatives have questioned why the law was applied to Lazarus, who graduated from UCLA and had been a police officer for two years at the time of the killing. Connie Rasmussen has pointed to the psychological evaluation Lazarus underwent before she became an officer and the fact that she was found fit to carry a gun.
The lead police investigator in the murder, Greg Stearns, said at Monday’s hearing that the sophistication of the crime showed Lazarus shouldn’t be considered a youthful offender.
On Feb. 24, 1986, a few months after Rasmussen — a nurse — had married a man Lazarus previously dated, Lazarus entered the couple’s Van Nuys condo and struck Rasmussen in the head with a vase. Lazarus shot her three times in the chest with a .38-caliber pistol, using a pillow as an improvised silencer, Stearns said.
She then staged the killing to look like a robbery.
Lazarus went on to have a family and work as an art theft detective for the Los Angeles Police Department. She was convicted at trial after having asserted her innocence.
During the November hearing, Lazarus said she had no intention of killing Rasmussen — she had only planned to talk to her ex — when she went to the couple’s home. She said she didn’t turn herself in afterward because she was ashamed.
Although the commissioner who oversaw the November hearing said she had difficulty with some of Lazarus’ responses during the proceedings — including when she talked about whether she intended to kill Rasmussen when she went to the condo — she said Lazarus had shown remorse and didn’t pose a risk if she were released, the transcript shows.
After Rasmussen’s family pleaded with Newsom, the governor, to reverse the parole decision, saying Lazarus had demonstrated a “lack of candor and severe lack of insight” during the November hearing, Newsom asked the state Board of Parole Hearings to weigh in on the matter.
It isn’t clear whether a date for the rescission hearing has been set.
Stephanie Lazarus Case
When Sherri Rasmussen was found dead in her Van Nuys townhome in February 1986, bludgeoned badly and shot three times, detectives called it a burglary gone bad — a disastrously mistaken conclusion that did not budge for decades.
Rasmussen was 29, newly married and a popular nursing director at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. Her new husband, John Ruetten, came to the marriage with some dangerous baggage: an emotionally volatile ex-lover who was not over him.
This was Stephanie Lazarus, a 25-year-old patrol officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, and in retrospect, the grounds for suspecting her seem obvious. She had appeared at the victim’s workplace to harass her, and Rasmussen had expressed fear that she was being stalked.
Sherri Rasmussen was 29 and newly married when she was found fatally bludgeoned and shot in her Van Nuys townhome in 1986. (Rasmussen family)
What’s more, the bullets found in the body were the kind the LAPD issued to officers, and weeks after the murder, Lazarus reported that her backup gun, a snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, had been stolen from her car.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever know the true answer of what went wrong,” said Connie Rasmussen, 71, one of the victim’s sisters.
She remembers that her mother, who managed the family’s dental office in Arizona, kept the original detective’s business card on her desk and called relentlessly for updates.
When she thinks about the details of the murder, the evidence of personal hatred seems clear, as well as evidence of criminal sophistication. Her sister was smashed over the head with a vase. She was shot three times at close range, with a blanket wrapped around the gun to deaden the sound.
As the case languished, her father wrote a letter to then-LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, pleading for his intervention. But the agency brushed off the family. Detectives kept insisting the crime fit the pattern of a residential burglary, not a love triangle. Stereo equipment had been stacked near the stairway, as if thieves had been interrupted in their work. And two armed robbers struck another house nearby soon after.
Maybe it was investigative tunnel vision. Maybe it was the workload surrounding the crush of murders in mid-1980s Los Angeles. Maybe it was cognitive bias against the possibility it could be one of their own. Maybe, Rasmussen’s sister still wonders, someone inside the LAPD helped Lazarus along the way.
“I believe so,” Connie Rasmussen said. “There’s no way I could prove it, but yes, I do.”
No evidence has emerged to support a deliberate cover-up. The Rasmussen family sued the department, hoping the litigation would bring answers. A judge threw the case out, on statute-of-limitations grounds. Rasmussen’s parents lived long enough to see Lazarus arrested and convicted, but died without knowing why it took a quarter-century.
While the case moldered and the family grieved, Stephanie Lazarus kept her badge and her secret. She built a solid if undistinguished career at the LAPD. Prosecutors would describe her as a C-plus cop.
She promoted the DARE anti-drug program, an initiative dear to the chief. She became a detective with the art theft detail, which gave her a high public profile. She appeared in photo ops with the brass. She bantered with reporters. She went on “Family Feud.” She married another cop and adopted a girl.
By the early 2000s, detectives were diving into cold cases, but the trace evidence from the Rasmussen slaying had mysteriously vanished from the coroner’s office. Whether Lazarus stole it has never been proven, but she would have had access. And as a detective at the Van Nuys office for a time, she also would have had access to the case file, the so-called murder book.
“It’s really hard to know what could be missing, if it’s already gone,” said Matthew McGough, who wrote a 595-page account of the case called “The Lazarus Files.”
The case might have gone unsolved, save for a single piece of evidence. A saliva sample from a bite on Rasmussen’s forearm was stored separately, in a freezer at the coroner’s office. In 2005, DNA tests that had been impossible decades earlier showed that it had come from a woman, undermining the two-man burglary theory
But the LAPD failed to move aggressively on the new information, and four more years passed before a Van Nuys detective asked the obvious question: Did the victim have any female enemies? This led to Lazarus, whose DNA matched the saliva sample.
When she arrived at work downtown in early June 2009, detectives used a ruse to lure Lazarus to the jail facility downstairs, where she would be unarmed. At first, Lazarus told investigators she couldn’t recall whether she had ever met Rasmussen, but her memory soon recovered.
“I may have talked to her once or twice, or more,” she said. She bristled when it became clear that she was a suspect in the murder. “You’re accusing me of this? … Am I on ‘Candid Camera’ or something? This is insane.”
She continued to deny her guilt at her 2012 trial, where jurors saw a letter she had written to the mother of Rasmussen’s husband, a man she met in college who had become an obsession. She was devastated by his engagement, she wrote. She did not understand why he had chosen another woman.
“I’m truly in love with John,” Lazarus had written. “This year has torn me up.”
When Ruetten himself testified, he described a relationship of obvious asymmetry. He and Lazarus had become friends at UCLA, he said, and over the years they had slept together, but he did not consider her a girlfriend. He said he had slept with her after his engagement to Rasmussen, then begged Rasmussen’s forgiveness.
Lazarus, at 51, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. It was possible to frame the conviction as a redemption tale for the LAPD, with a new generation of cops making amends for the missteps of their predecessors.
But the internal investigation promised by department leaders — a probe of what accounted for the delays and blunders — seemed to go nowhere.
“It was a sham investigation,” said McGough, who spent nine years researching his book. “They quietly closed it. It’s police culture. It’s a sense of ‘This could look bad, and we’re not going to go there.’”
The Rasmussen family was stunned in November 2023, when a parole panel decided Lazarus should be released after 11 years in prison. She had taken anger-management classes and was deemed a low risk to re-offend. The decision was reversed, but Lazarus has a fresh chance at every new hearing.
What might count in her favor is her admission, after years of denials, that she killed Rasmussen. At a February 2025 hearing, she talked of having been in love with Ruetten, and of her loneliness when she learned of his engagement.
“I had been unable to have a relationship that lasted, and I felt hopeless,” she said. “I just wanted to have, I guess, what other people had.”
She would call him and hang up, just to hear him say hello. “It pacified me,” she said.
By her account, she called his home that morning in February 1986 and was enraged when Rasmussen answered. She decided to pay a visit. She found the address in a police database. She took her gun, and a cord.
“I went over there hoping to see him,” she said. “I was so angry that if she got in my way to see John, I was going to strangle her.”
She “barged in” when Rasmussen answered, and found herself in a struggle she compared to “a hellacious bar fight.” She tied Rasmussen’s wrists with the cord, explaining: “She was getting in my way to see John.”
“How would binding her wrists give you access to see John?” a commissioner asked.
“It makes no sense,” Lazarus replied.
Paul Nunez, one of the prosecutors who took Lazarus to trial, said she is still lying, with admissions calculated to win her parole while downplaying her culpability. He does not believe that Rasmussen would have opened the door to admit Lazarus. It’s more likely she picked the lock, in his view. And he considers it an insult to the victim for Lazarus to describe the assault as mutual combat. She must have known Ruetten was at work, and that his wife would be alone.
You can’t give a half story about a murder and put some of the blame on the victim,” Nunez said in a recent interview.
“This was a predator who was in a cage with the prey. She had complete control of everything. She had her weapon with her. She had tactical grappling training from the academy. She was physically fit. She was in the law enforcement Olympics.”
And she had staged the crime scene so smoothly that it apparently threw detectives off her track for decades.
“She’s a long ways away from acknowledging all of the behaviors that she demonstrated in this crime,” Nunez said.
At one point during the parole hearing, Lazarus acknowledged that she got rid of the revolver she had used to kill Rasmussen and reported it stolen. She knew detectives had her name, and assumed they would have questions.
“I figured they were coming,” she said, “and would want to see my gun.”
It took LAPD 23 years to ID one of their own as culprit in fatal love triangle – Los Angeles Times
Stephanie Lazarus Case File
Stephanie Lazarus Case
On February 24, 1986, Rasmussen lived in a condominium on Balboa Street in Van Nuys with her husband John Ruetten and worked as a nurse at a Glendale hospital. Ruetten left for work at 7:20 that morning. Rasmussen called in sick. Both Ruetten and Rasmussen’s sister tried to call Rasmussen at home several times that day, beginning at approximately 10 a.m., but Rasmussen did not answer. At approximately 9:45, a neighbor, Anastasia Volanitis, noticed the garage to Rasmussen’s condominium was open with no cars inside.2 When Ruetten returned home at 6:00 p.m., he noticed the garage door was open and Rasmussen’s BMW was missing.3 There was broken glass on the driveway from a shattered sliding glass patio door. The door from the condominium to the garage, which Ruetten had closed and locked when he left that morning, was ajar.4 Rasmussen was lying dead on the living room floor, still wearing her sleep shirt and robe.
The pathologist who examined Rasmussen declared the cause of death to be three gunshots to her chest, all fatal. One was a contact wound and at least one was inflicted while she was lying on the floor or against a similar hard surface. There were abrasions on Rasmussen’s arms, near the wrist, consistent with injury from a rope or cord.5 There were signs that Rasmussen had struggled with her assailant, including multiple contusions, lacerations and abrasions on her hands, mouth, face, head and neck. Broken pieces of two of Rasmussen’s fingernails were found on the floor near the condominium’s front door. An injury on her face was consistent with a blow from the muzzle of a gun, with a size and configuration matching a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. There was a blow to her head consistent with a broken vase found near her body.6 On Rasmussen’s left inner forearm was an apparent bite mark. The pathologist examined it under a microscope. Based on the amount of hemorrhaging and the absence of inflammation, she determined that the injury had been inflicted at or about the time of Rasmussen’s death.7
Based on distinct physical characteristics, experts in the field of identifying ammunition testified at trial that bullets recovered in or near Rasmussen’s body were “.38J Plus–P” ammunition, manufactured by Federal. In 1986, LAPD officers were required to use Federal .38J Plus–P ammunition, even when off duty and carrying a personal weapon.
A sleeved quilt found near Rasmussen’s body was taken into evidence and examined. The presence of multiple bullet holes and gunshot residue on the quilt led authorities and experts to conclude that it had been wrapped around the assailant’s weapon to dampen the sound of the gunshots. At trial, a forensic firearms expert testified that based on the location of the bullet holes in relation to linear gunshot residue that appeared to have been discharged from the cylinder, the weapon was a revolver with a two-inch barrel. Any number of guns were capable of firing the bullets found at the crime scene, but less than a dozen had two-inch barrels.
Criminalist Lloyd Mahaney took samples from the bite mark on Rasmussen’s arm at the scene.8 Investigators and criminalists also collected the two broken fingernails found near the condominium’s front door, clippings from Rasmussen’s remaining fingernails, and samples of tissue and debris from the underside of the fingernails. Additional items and samples were collected at the scene and from the interior of the BMW, including multiple fingerprints, multiple samples of what appeared to be blood, and multiple hairs.9
Stereo equipment had been pulled from a cabinet inside the condominium’s living room and stacked by the door to the garage. A drawer in a living room table had been pulled out and the contents dumped on the floor. Although there was no evidence of forced entry, and rooms containing other valuables—including additional stereo equipment—were undisturbed, the detectives who initially investigated the crime concluded that the murder was committed in the course of a burglary. Specifically, they theorized that one or two burglars had came in through an open door, were surprised by Rasmussen’s presence, and shot her during a struggle over a gun.10
In December 2004, members of LAPD’s cold case unit re-opened the case, asking the coroner’s office to locate the bite mark tissue sample, which had been in a freezer in the coroner’s evidence room since 1986.11 In 2005, Jennifer Francis, a criminalist with LAPD, examined a piece of one of the swabs under a microscope and also performed DNA testing on it. Under the microscope, she saw nucleated epithelial cells, which are found in large numbers in saliva and provide a good medium for obtaining a complete DNA profile. The DNA testing indicated the presence of two profiles: a major profile and a minor profile. The minor profile was consistent with Rasmussen’s, although there was insufficient material for a complete match.12 The major profile was complete. The DNA that comprised the major profile was from a female.
Authorities initially attempted to find a match by uploading the major DNA profile from the bite into a national database system. This was unsuccessful. In 2009, the investigation turned toward specific women who might have had reason to harm Rasmussen. LAPD officers surreptitiously obtained a sample of appellant’s DNA by taking possession of a drink cup and straw discarded by appellant. LAPD criminalist Michael Mastrocovo developed a partial DNA profile for the drink cup and straw. Stephanie Lazarus’s DNA profile matched the major profile found on the bite mark.13
Stephanie Lazarus was arrested on June 5, 2009. A criminalist swabbed her mouth in order to develop a complete DNA profile. Francis analyzed the DNA on one of those swabs. Stephanie Lazarus’s DNA profile matched the major profile on the bite mark swab at 13 loci.14
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-court-of-appeal/1707766.html
