On February 24, 1986, the body of Sherri Rasmussen (born February 7, 1957) was found in the condominium she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. She had been beaten and shot three times. 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, formerly in a relationship with Ruetten, was a prime suspect due to her continued attraction to Ruetten and confrontations with Rasmussen. The investigation stalled after several months; the case went cold for over two decades afterwards.
Detectives who re-examined the files in 2008 focused on Lazarus, by then a detective. A covertly taken DNA sample matched one from a bite on Rasmussen's body. Lazarus was convicted of first-degree murder in 2012 and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life. On appeal, Lazarus argued that the age of the case and the evidence denied her due process, 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. The conviction was upheld in 2015; California's Supreme Court declined to hear any further appeal. During a 2023 parole hearing, Lazarus confessed to the crime. The panel hearing her request initially granted it but it was rescinded by the full board in late 2024.
Some of the police files suggest that evidence which could have implicated Lazarus earlier in the investigation was later removed or tampered with. Lazarus herself plausibly had access to these files during the 1990s; other LAPD officers may have been involved. Rasmussen's parents unsuccessfully sued the department over this and other aspects of the investigation. The criminalist who found key DNA evidence from the bite mark lost a suit claiming she had been pressured by police to favor certain suspects in this and other high-profile cases and faced retaliation for bringing this to the department's attention.
Background
While an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1978 to 1982, John Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego, occasionally dated Stephanie Lazarus, a fellow Dykstra Hall resident from Simi Valley majoring in political science and sociology. Their friends said she seemed to take the relationship more seriously than he did. Both were avid athletes; Lazarus played on UCLA's junior varsity women's basketball team. She stole Ruetten's clothes when he showered and photographed him in his underwear while he slept. Ruetten never considered the relationship anything more than "necking and fooling around". They had sex for the first time after he graduated. After that they saw each other two or three times a month, occasionally taking trips together. Some of those encounters resulted in sex.
Following his 1981 graduation Ruetten accepted a job with Dataproducts, a maker of computer peripherals. After graduating, a year later, Lazarus considered law school. She decided on law enforcement instead and was admitted to the city's police academy. At that time, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was trying to increase the number of women on the force in response to a consent decree following a sex-discrimination lawsuit brought by former female officers. After completing a special eight-week pre-academy training program, she graduated and became a uniformed officer in 1983. Classmates recalled that she was particularly tenacious during physical combat training, especially in exercises where trainees had to retain control of a weapon. During her training, Lazarus described Ruetten as her college boyfriend, and she was his date at Dataproducts' 1983 Christmas party, where they had a photo taken together. He later testified that they had sex "20 to 30 times" between 1981 and 1984, but that he never considered her his girlfriend. Upon graduation Lazarus settled in a Granada Hills condo and purchased a Smith & Wesson Model 49 .38-caliber revolver through the department as her backup firearm.
Ruetten later met Sherri Rasmussen, a graduate of Loma Linda University who was on a fast career track in critical care nursing. Born in Walla Walla, Washington and raised in Arizona, Rasmussen began college at La Sierra University at 16 after graduating from Thunderbird Adventist Academy. After her freshman year she was accepted at Loma Linda's nursing program and transferred there. Upon graduating, she worked at UCLA Medical Center's coronary care unit and studied for the master's in nursing UCLA awarded her in 1980. Afterwards, her father, Nels Rasmussen, bought Sherri a condo in Van Nuys with a drive-in garage so she would not have to walk along the street after returning from work late at night. She paid him rent equal to his monthly mortgage payment.
After earning her degree, Rasmussen was promoted to head nurse of UCLA's coronary care and observation unit. She also was appointed an unpaid assistant clinical professor of nursing, giving lectures to students. By her late 20s Rasmussen was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. She also gave presentations and taught classes for fellow nurses. At a June 1984 party Sherri met Ruetten; they began dating shortly afterwards.
For her first assignment as a uniformed LAPD officer, Lazarus drew the Hollywood division, an area notorious at the time for high levels of street crime. Morale among the predominantly male officers was poor in the wake of the "Hollywood Burglars" scandal in which 14 officers were ultimately fired after two were prosecuted for burglarizing video stores while on duty. Chief Daryl Gates closely oversaw the internal affairs investigation. He observed later that Hollywood seemed to have higher rates of police misconduct than other divisions. "There is something about the place," he wrote, "an almost carnival atmosphere that suggests 'here, anything goes'".
A female colleague of Lazarus's at Hollywood, one of the few other women in the division and a teammate on the department's women's basketball team, recalls her as being an asset to the team primarily through her tight and physical defensive play and willingness to work with others. Teamwork at Hollywood went further than the requirements of the job. Officers upheld the blue wall of silence in the face of misconduct investigations, regularly telling each other to "Admit nothing. Deny everything. Demand proof." A diary Lazarus started while working at Hollywood documents her acculturation to the department, showing her increasingly identifying with the LAPD above all, accepted by fellow officers for her efforts to fit in and maintaining a detached, often nonchalant, attitude when responding to sometimes brutal crimes and their traumatized victims.
Lazarus told the friend that her training officer, James Tomer, regularly sexually propositioned her; her repeated refusals led to workplace rumors that she was a lesbian. Later, Tomer faced departmental charges of narcotics theft. Lazarus was called to testify at his disciplinary hearing; Tomer was acquitted and later won a verdict against the department over the charges in federal court, arguing he had been framed, the first time the department had been successfully sued over an internal affairs investigation (the verdict was later overturned on appeal). After a year on probation, she was promoted and transferred to the quieter Devonshire division, covering Northridge, Chatsworth and Granada Hills, in March 1985. She rented the spare bedroom in her condo to a fellow officer.
Ruetten–Rasmussen relationship and effect on Lazarus
Lazarus had thrown Ruetten a surprise party on his 25th birthday, unaware that he had been dating other women or that he had developed a serious relationship with Rasmussen. In a May 1985 diary entry, she mentions visiting Ruetten and his girlfriend, the first time she met Rasmussen. The following month Lazarus was depressed after learning that Ruetten and Rasmussen had become engaged a week earlier. In her diary, she wrote, "I really don't feel like working. I found out that John is getting married ... My concentration is like -10". Later that night, she awoke her roommate, a fellow officer, to commiserate. He recalled later that he had never seen her cry until then. Lazarus visited Ruetten at his condo later that month, shortly before he moved in with his fiancée. The two had sex—"to give her closure", Ruetten testified years later—for the last time before Rasmussen's death. He did not tell Rasmussen about the encounter. Lazarus was still not over Ruetten. In August she wrote to her mother: "I'm truly in love with John and the past year has really torn me up ... I wish it didn't end the way it did, and I don't think I'll ever understand his decision." An LAPD women's basketball teammate at the California Police Olympics around that time recalls Lazarus mentioning a boyfriend from UCLA named John.
Sometime in July or August, on a day off, Lazarus visited Rasmussen at work, wearing tight short shorts and a tank top. Lazarus told her that she and John were still having sex and that when their marriage failed, "I'll be there to pick up the pieces". Rasmussen responded that "your services won't be needed." Lazarus left saying "If I can't have John, no one else will. Including you." While Rasmussen did not report the incident to hospital security, she complained to her father about it and confronted Ruetten when he returned from work that evening. He admitted the infidelity and asked Sherri to forgive him, but did not contact Lazarus or take any action to prevent further contact as from his perspective any relationship with her was long over.
Ruetten and Rasmussen married in November as planned. Her concerns about Lazarus lingered. Since Ruetten had moved in with her they had been receiving occasional hang-up calls. Before leaving on their honeymoon near the end of the year, the couple installed a burglar alarm in their condo. Sherri set the alarm code as 1123, their wedding anniversary, which a friend advised her was a poor choice. Ruetten left Dataproducts for Micropolis, a hard drive manufacturer in Chatsworth.
In late 1985, Lazarus seemed to her friends and coworkers to be moving on from Ruetten. She began working part-time security at Los Angeles Pierce College in Woodland Hills and dated again. Near the end of the year she drafted a personal ad in her diary. But in January, Lazarus brought her skis to the condo and asked Ruetten to wax them. Despite Rasmussen's objections, he complied. Rasmussen felt that the visit and request was strange, especially since Lazarus was dressed in flattering workout clothes. After Lazarus left, Rasmussen asked her husband if their relationship was truly over. Ruetten convinced her the two were just friends. After failing to persuade her husband to not wax the skis and just return them, Rasmussen told him not to drop them off at Lazarus's apartment. A few days later, after Ruetten had left for work, Lazarus returned to pick up the waxed skis, in uniform and armed.
On another occasion later that month, Rasmussen again confronted Lazarus when, after Ruetten had gone to work one morning, Rasmussen found her in the couple's living room, in uniform. Lazarus left after being firmly asked. Rasmussen told her father about the incident but not Ruetten, and did not believe reporting it to the police would be effective. On a visit with her parents in Tucson in early February, Nels Rasmussen tried to persuade John to move there, assuring his son-in-law he could get him an engineering position through connections. Sherri again confided in her father, after they returned to Los Angeles, telling him she feared that Lazarus was stalking her on the street, sometimes posing as a young man.
On February 14, 1986, Lazarus's roommate moved out. A week later, on February 23, one of Ruetten's friends from UCLA visited the couple's condo. Unlike their usual habit of entering through the garage, the front door was used during the visit, and Ruetten inadvertently left it unlocked afterward.
Crime
On the morning of February 24, 1986, Ruetten left the couple's condominium on Balboa Boulevard at approximately 7:20 a.m. for work. Rasmussen had been scheduled to deliver a motivational presentation at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, a workplace initiative she reportedly viewed as ineffective. She told Ruetten that she might call in sick instead, citing a back injury she sustained during an aerobics class the previous day. After making a few stops, Ruetten arrived at Micropolis about 30 minutes later.
At 9:45, a neighbor noticed that the Ruettens' garage door was open, with no car visible. Approximately 15 minutes later, Ruetten made the first of several unanswered calls home over the course of the day. He found it strange that the answering machine did not respond, since both of them turned it on when leaving the condo unoccupied. Rasmussen's sister, a nurse at another local hospital, also called, getting no answer. At noon, two men, who the neighbor believed were gardeners in the compound, gave her and her husband a purse 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.