John Ruetten left the condominium on Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys at about 7:20 on the morning of Monday, February 24, 1986. His wife of three months, Sherri Rasmussen, was staying home. She was 29 and the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. Around 12:30 that afternoon a housekeeper working nearby heard what sounded like a fight. When Ruetten came home that evening, Sherri was on the living room floor with three gunshot wounds to the chest. A porcelain vase lay in pieces. Her BMW was gone from the garage. It would take the LAPD 23 years to arrest her killer, who had worn a badge the entire time.

A Nurse, an Engineer, and an Ex-Girlfriend With a Badge

Sherri Rasmussen finished nursing school at Loma Linda University and was running a hospital nursing department before she turned 30. She began dating John Ruetten, an engineer, in June 1984. They married in November 1985.

Ruetten had another history. At UCLA he had dated Stephanie Lazarus on and off, a relationship he treated as casual and she did not. Lazarus joined the LAPD in 1983. After Ruetten got engaged in June 1985, according to what Sherri later told her family, Lazarus showed up at the hospital and warned her: if she could not have John, no one else would, including Sherri. Sherri’s father, Nels Rasmussen, remembered that conversation.

February 24, 1986

The scene inside the condo told a story of a fight, not a quiet burglary. There was a bloody handprint near the panic button of the alarm panel. The vase had been broken over Sherri’s head. On her left forearm was a bite mark, and a criminalist swabbed it for saliva that day. The three shots had been fired through a quilted blanket. Someone had stacked stereo equipment at the bottom of the stairs.

Sherri’s BMW 318i turned up eleven days later about two miles away, keys still in the ignition. Two weeks after the murder, Officer Stephanie Lazarus walked into a Santa Monica police station and reported that her personal five-shot Smith & Wesson .38 revolver had been stolen from her car.

“There’s Nothing There”

Detectives Lyle Mayer and Steve Hooks decided the case was a burglary gone wrong, possibly two intruders. Nels Rasmussen did not accept that. He told the detectives about the ex-girlfriend, told them she was a police officer, told them about the threat at the hospital, and kept telling them. Mayer’s answer, which the family repeated for decades, was “there’s nothing there.” The Rasmussens offered a reward. Ruetten was never interviewed at length about Lazarus. Within months the case was cold, and it stayed cold while the woman Nels kept naming was promoted to detective and spent a career investigating art theft.

A Swab in the Coroner’s Freezer

In 2004, LAPD criminalist Jennifer Francis pulled the Rasmussen file during a review of old cases. The envelope holding the bite-mark swab was missing from the department’s evidence. She tracked down the original criminalist and eventually found it in a freezer at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, where it had sat for 18 years. The saliva produced a DNA profile in 2005, and the profile belonged to a woman. Francis read the old reports, noted the third-party female who had harassed Sherri, and raised it with a supervising detective. By her account he brushed it aside. This is the kind of forgotten sample that has since driven how DNA genealogy is cracking cold cases.

A Cup at Costco and a Room at Parker Center

In March 2008 cold case detectives Jim Nuttall and Pete Barba took another look. They built a list of five women and eliminated them until only Lazarus remained. She had been off duty that day and owned a .38 of the right caliber. In May 2009 investigators followed her to a Costco in Simi Valley and retrieved a cup and straw she threw away. The DNA matched the bite mark.

On June 5, 2009, detectives Greg Stearns and Dan Jaramillo asked Lazarus to come downstairs at Parker Center to consult on an art theft. She checked her gun, as jail rules required. Then they told her the interview was about Sherri Rasmussen. For nearly an hour she claimed to barely remember the woman. When they mentioned DNA, she said, “If you guys are claiming I’m a suspect, then you know I got a problem with that,” and asked to leave. She was arrested in the hallway. Bail was set at $10 million.

“A Bite, a Bullet, a Gun Barrel and a Broken Heart”

The trial opened in early 2012 before Judge Robert Perry. Deputy District Attorney Shannon Presby summed up the case as “a bite, a bullet, a gun barrel and a broken heart.” Jurors heard that the odds of the bite-mark DNA belonging to someone other than Lazarus were 1.7 sextillion to one. The defense attacked the chain of custody and the swab’s missing years. The jury deliberated about a day. On March 8, 2012, it convicted Lazarus of first-degree murder. On May 11, 2012, Perry sentenced her to 27 years to life. Loretta Rasmussen told the court, “Every day we miss her laughter and her love.” An appeals court upheld the conviction in 2015, and the California Supreme Court declined to review it.

Parole Granted, Then Taken Back

On November 16, 2023, a parole panel at the California Institution for Women in Corona recommended Lazarus for parole. For the first time she admitted the killing, telling the panel it made her sick that she had taken an oath to protect and serve and then taken a nurse’s life. Sherri’s sister Connie called the decision “another slap in the face.” Governor Gavin Newsom, pressed by the family, sent a letter on April 4, 2024, asking the full Board of Parole Hearings to review the grant. On May 21, 2024, the board ordered a rescission hearing. On October 2, 2024, a panel found good cause and rescinded the grant.

A fresh suitability hearing followed on February 12, 2025. Commissioner Kevin Chappell found Lazarus, then 64, unsuitable for release; a deputy commissioner cited a “level of minimization” that seemed deeply entrenched. The denial runs three years, making her next eligible in 2028. As of August 2026 she remains at Corona.

Why This Case Still Matters

Sherri Rasmussen’s father handed detectives the answer in 1986 and was told there was nothing there. The evidence that eventually proved him right was collected on day one and then lost inside the system for 18 years. That pattern, evidence sitting untested in a freezer, is the same one behind the arrest in the Golden State Killer case and the identifications in the Bear Brook murders. The Lazarus case adds a harder question: what happens when the suspect is inside the department doing the investigating. The LAPD has faced years of questions about why the ex-girlfriend named in the original file went uninterviewed for 23 years.

The .38 revolver that Lazarus reported stolen in March 1986 has never been recovered; she has since told the parole board she threw it into bushes near a freeway.

Related Cases

• How DNA genealogy is cracking cold cases — the forgotten-evidence revolution reaching decades-old files.
• The Golden State Killer — a former cop who hid inside the system for 40 years.
• The Bear Brook murders — four bodies in barrels, identified through genetic genealogy.

Sources

• NBC News: Ex-LAPD detective who hid murder for decades won’t be paroled, reversing earlier decision
• CBS Los Angeles: Stephanie Lazarus has parole denied again
• LAist: Parole rescinded for former LAPD detective convicted of murder
• CNN: Retired L.A. detective sentenced to 27 years to life for 1986 murder
• CBS News: Bite mark, DNA tie LAPD detective to 1986 murder
• Wikipedia: Murder of Sherri Rasmussen

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