Stephanie Lazarus: Murder, Trial, and Parole Denials

Stephanie Lazarus is a former Los Angeles Police Department detective who is serving 27 years to life in state prison for the 1986 murder of Sherri Rasmussen, the 29-year-old nursing director who had recently married Lazarus’s former college boyfriend, John Ruetten. The killing went unsolved for 23 years while LAPD investigators pursued a burglary theory and dismissed the victim’s family when they named Lazarus as a suspect. A 2005 DNA test of a bite mark on Rasmussen’s arm, followed by a covert sample collected from a discarded drink cup in 2009, finally tied Lazarus to the crime. She was convicted of first-degree murder in 2012 and remains incarcerated at the California Institution for Women in Chino, having been denied parole most recently in February 2025.

The 1986 Murder of Sherri Rasmussen

On February 24, 1986, John Ruetten came home to the gated condominium he shared with his wife in Van Nuys and found Sherri Rasmussen dead. She had been bludgeoned with a porcelain vase and shot three times in the chest at close range. A blanket near the body carried gunshot residue, suggesting the killer had wrapped it around the gun to muffle the shots. Rasmussen had ligature marks on her wrists and a bite mark on her left forearm. She had fought.¹

Rasmussen was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. She had been married to Ruetten for three months.²

The Relationship With John Ruetten

Lazarus and Ruetten met as undergraduates at UCLA in the late 1970s and had an on-and-off sexual relationship for years, though Ruetten later testified he had never considered her his girlfriend.³ When Ruetten became engaged to Rasmussen in 1985, people around Lazarus described her as emotionally devastated. A former roommate, Michael Hargreaves, later testified about her physical strength, her shooting skills, and her fixation on Ruetten.⁴

Before the wedding, Lazarus confronted Rasmussen at the hospital where she worked. The harassment continued after the marriage. Rasmussen told her father, Nels Rasmussen, that the woman was an LAPD officer. Ruetten later acknowledged at trial that he had a sexual encounter with Lazarus even after becoming engaged.⁵

At the time of the killing, Lazarus was 25 and had been an LAPD patrol officer for about two years. She would go on to serve as a detective for 25 years, eventually in the department’s art theft unit.⁶

Why the Case Went Unsolved for 23 Years

Lead detective Lyle Mayer settled on a “hot prowl” burglary theory almost immediately. The garage door had been left open, stereo equipment was stacked near a stairway as if someone meant to carry it out, and Rasmussen’s BMW was missing. By October 1986, Mayer was telling reporters the suspects were two Latino men around five feet four to five feet six inches tall.¹

The theory had problems from the start. Rasmussen’s jewelry box sat untouched in plain view. The violence of the attack — a prolonged struggle, a bite, bludgeoning, three gunshots — did not fit a panicked thief. The bullets recovered from the body were Federal .38J Plus-P ammunition, then the required round for LAPD officers, fired from a revolver with a two-inch barrel consistent with the Smith & Wesson Model 49 registered to Lazarus. Two weeks after the murder, Lazarus reported that gun stolen.⁴⁷

The day after the murder, Nels Rasmussen told detectives his daughter had been harassed by an ex-girlfriend of Ruetten’s who was an LAPD officer. Mayer noted it in the file and did not pursue it. For years, the Rasmussens pressed the LAPD to look at Lazarus. Detectives brushed them off. One told Nels Rasmussen he watched too much television. In 1993, when he offered to pay for private DNA analysis of the crime scene evidence, detectives rejected the offer and told the family to move on with their lives.¹

When cold case investigators re-interviewed Ruetten years later, he told them he had given Lazarus’s name to police in 1986. The original detectives had never documented it.⁵

How DNA Finally Identified Her

In December 2004, the LAPD’s cold case unit asked the coroner to locate the bite-mark swab that criminalist Lloyd Mahany had collected from Rasmussen’s forearm the morning after the murder. It had been in a freezer at the L.A. County Medical Examiner’s Office for nearly two decades.⁴

In 2005, LAPD criminalist Jennifer Francis tested the swab. The result showed a major female DNA profile belonging to an unknown woman alongside a minor profile consistent with Rasmussen. That single finding destroyed the two-male-burglars theory. The detective then assigned to the case, Cliff Shepard, did not identify a suspect and moved on.⁴

In February 2009, Detective Jim Nuttall was assigned to review the file. He saw what the DNA result meant and started building a list of women in Rasmussen’s orbit. He re-interviewed Ruetten and the Rasmussens, both of whom again named Lazarus. Nothing in the file showed Lazarus had ever been interviewed or treated as a suspect.⁸

After DNA testing eliminated other persons of interest, Nuttall ordered surveillance on Lazarus. Officers watched her discard a drink cup and straw at a retail outlet, recovered the items, and sent them to the lab. The DNA on the cup matched the major profile from the bite-mark swab. The probability that the DNA belonged to someone other than Lazarus was calculated at 1.7 sextillion to one.⁹

The Arrest

On the morning of June 5, 2009, Detective Daniel Jaramillo approached Lazarus at her desk at LAPD headquarters around 6:40 a.m. and asked her to come downstairs to help with an art theft interrogation, her specialty. It was a ruse. In an interview room inside the building’s jail facility, Jaramillo and his partner Greg Stearns questioned her about Ruetten and the Rasmussen murder.¹⁰

As the questioning turned accusatory, Lazarus grew agitated. “Am I on ‘Candid Camera’ or something? This is insane. This is absolutely crazy,” she said. When she asked whether she needed a lawyer, she was told she was free to leave. As she stepped into the hallway, other detectives handcuffed her and placed her under arrest. The interview had lasted about an hour.¹⁰

Trial and Conviction

Lazarus was charged with first-degree murder on December 18, 2009, held on $10 million bail, and pleaded not guilty.¹¹ The trial, in early 2012, ran about a month.

Prosecutors matched DNA from the bite-mark swab to Lazarus at 13 genetic loci through Jennifer Francis, with independent expert Thomas Fedor of the Serological Research Institute later confirming a match at all 15 loci tested. Partial DNA profiles under Rasmussen’s fingernails were also consistent with Lazarus. The bullets were the type issued to LAPD officers and were fired from a gun consistent with the one Lazarus reported stolen shortly after the killing.⁴ Former FBI criminal profiler Mark Safarik testified that the scene had been staged to look like a burglary, calling the stereo equipment near the door an “illusion.”¹¹

Defense attorney Mark Overland argued the original burglary theory was credible, pointed to a burglary in the area six weeks after the murder, and challenged the prosecution’s ballistics analysis through expert Patricia Fant. Character witnesses said they had never seen Lazarus act violently. The defense also argued the 23-year pre-accusation delay violated her due process rights.⁴

On March 8, 2012, the jury found Lazarus guilty of first-degree murder with a handgun enhancement.¹² On May 11, 2012, she was sentenced to 27 years to life in state prison.¹³

At sentencing, Ruetten told the court: “The fact that Sherri’s death happened because she met and married me brings me to my knees.” Rasmussen’s sister Connie noted that Sherri’s fight for her life had preserved the DNA evidence that eventually identified her killer.¹³

Appeals

Lazarus challenged her conviction in state and federal court, arguing the 23-year pre-indictment delay violated her due process rights, that search warrants for her home and computers were stale and overbroad, that her 2009 statements were coerced in the absence of Miranda warnings, and that a newer DNA technique called MiniFiler required a special reliability hearing.¹⁴

On July 13, 2015, the California Court of Appeal affirmed the conviction. The court acknowledged the trial judge had applied the wrong legal standard to the delay argument but found that Lazarus had not proved LAPD negligence and had shown only minimal prejudice. It upheld the warrants, found the interrogation voluntary, and ruled MiniFiler was not new science requiring a separate hearing.¹⁴

The California Court of Appeal denied a habeas petition on February 8, 2018. Lazarus then filed a federal habeas petition arguing the delay amounted to an intentional LAPD cover-up. The district court denied it, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed on September 5, 2023, holding she failed to show “actual, non-speculative prejudice.”¹⁵

Parole: Granted, Rescinded, Denied

On November 16, 2023, Lazarus appeared before a parole board panel for the first time. She admitted killing Rasmussen, telling the panel she had brought a cord to the condominium intending to strangle anyone in her way, that her gun fell out of a fanny pack during the struggle, and that she had thrown the murder weapon into brush off the freeway and then reported it stolen. She said she was ashamed and had never been comfortable thinking she had gotten away with the killing.¹⁶ The panel recommended parole, citing her age at the time of the crime, her lack of violent conduct since, her disciplinary record in prison, and her participation in rehabilitative programming.¹⁷

Governor Gavin Newsom intervened. In an April 2024 letter, he wrote that Lazarus “evaded justice for more than two decades and did not appear to begin taking full accountability for the murder until she was finally caught,” and requested an en banc review by the full Board of Parole Hearings.¹⁸ On October 2, 2024, a three-member panel rescinded the parole grant for good cause and ordered a new suitability hearing within 120 days.¹⁹

That hearing was held on February 12, 2025. Parole was denied. Commissioner Kevin Chappell found Lazarus unsuitable, ruling that her account of the killing as a mutual “fight” did not match the evidence; if there had been a two-sided struggle, he said, more of her DNA would have been at the scene. “You were the only one engaging in this extreme act of violence,” he told her. Deputy Commissioner Vijai Desai described an entrenched level of minimization in her testimony. Members of the Rasmussen family and Ruetten spoke against release. Lazarus is next eligible for parole in 2028, though she can petition for an earlier hearing if circumstances change.²⁰²¹

Civil Suits and the Cover-Up Question

The Rasmussen family won a $10 million wrongful death judgment against Lazarus personally after a bench trial. The California Court of Appeal affirmed on January 8, 2018, holding Lazarus had waived her procedural objections by failing to raise them in time.²² A separate suit against the City of Los Angeles over the LAPD’s failure to investigate was dismissed as time-barred, and in February 2013 the California Supreme Court declined further review.²³

After the 2012 conviction, the LAPD said its internal review had found no evidence of a cover-up. Journalist Matthew McGough, who spent nine years on the case for his book The Lazarus Files: A Cold Case Investigation, wrote that no one he spoke with had been interviewed by the LAPD about the cover-up allegation and questioned how the department reached its conclusion without apparently interviewing witnesses.²⁴ John Taylor, the Rasmussen family’s attorney, said at sentencing that the LAPD should want to know why the case took so long and that there should be accountability for the lost years.¹³ No individual LAPD officer or official has faced discipline or legal consequences for the handling of the original investigation.

1
The Atlantic. The Lazarus File
2
CBS News Los Angeles. Stephanie Lazarus, Former LAPD Detective, Has Parole Denied Again
3
ABC7 News. Ruetten Testifies at Lazarus Murder Trial
4
Findlaw. People v. Lazarus
5
ABC7 News. Former LAPD Detective Who Murdered Ex-Lover’s Wife Remains Behind Bars
6
LAPD Online. Los Angeles Police Detective Arrested
7
Los Angeles Times. It Took LAPD 23 Years to Identify Police Detective as Culprit in Fatal Love Triangle
8
Justia. People v. Lazarus, B301021
9
CBS News. Bite Mark DNA Ties LAPD Detective to 1986 Murder
10
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Detective Lazarus Interrogation
11
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Detective Trial
12
NBC News. Stephanie Lazarus LAPD Detective Murder Parole
13
ABC7 News. Stephanie Lazarus Sentenced
14
Central California Appellate Program. People v. Lazarus
15
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Lazarus v. Warden, No. 21-55483
16
MyNewsLA. Ex-LAPD Detective’s Parole Recommendation Rescinded
17
NBC News. Ex-LAPD Detective Won’t Be Paroled
18
LAist. Stephanie Lazarus Granted Parole
19
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Detective Lazarus Parole Blocked
20
MyNewsLA. Parole Rejected for Ex-LAPD Detective Convicted of Murder
21
CBS News Los Angeles. Stephanie Lazarus Has Parole Denied Again
22
Findlaw. Rasmussen v. Lazarus
23
CBS News Los Angeles. Parents of Woman Murdered by LAPD Officer Can’t Sue Department
24
Matthew McGough. The Lazarus Files – Author’s Note on Sources