The Shocking Truth Behind a 1986 California Cold Case: The Killer Was a Cop
She had been home for less than 8 hours when her husband, John Ruetten, pulled into the parking structure of their condominium on Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys, California on the evening of February 24th, 1986 and walked through the front door into a discovery that would remain with him for the rest of his life.
Sherri Rasmussen lay dead on the living room floor having been beaten with savage force and shot three times. The apartment had been deliberately disrupted, drawers open, objects moved in the deliberate architecture of a staged break-in and investigators who walked the scene recorded it as exactly what it appeared to be.
A burglary, a random act of violence by an unknown intruder who panicked, escalated, and fled. That conclusion was wrong and someone who had been inside the LAPD building the entire time already knew it. The person who killed Sherri Rasmussen was not a stranger passing through a neighborhood on the wrong night but a woman with a name, a documented history with this family going back years, and biological evidence left on Sherri’s own skin that would sit preserved in a storage locker waiting for over two decades. Sherri’s father, Nels Rasmussen, handed police that name within the first week of the investigation when he walked into a station, identified himself, and spoke clearly. They listened, thanked him, and did not act. The name he gave them was Stephanie Lazarus, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department who would remain one for 23 more years.
And that single fact sits at the center of everything that happened next and everything that didn’t. Sherri Rae Rasmussen grew up in Tucson, Arizona, the daughter of Nels and Loretta Rasmussen in a family built around purpose, faith, and the kind of ambition that expresses itself quietly through work rather than noise. She was not a woman who drifted but rather someone who found her direction early and followed it without deviation.
By her late 20s, she held a nursing degree and had risen to director of critical care nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, a position requiring staff management, institutional standards, and the capacity to make fast calls in situations where the margin for error was a human life. Her colleagues remembered her as someone who held people to a high standard while somehow making them feel genuinely cared for.
A combination rare in any profession and rarer still in medicine. She was building exactly the life she had planned and she was 29 years old. She had met John Ruetten at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and their relationship took time to find its full shape in the kind of courtship that moves at its own pace and arrives somewhere solid.
John was steady, well-regarded, the kind of person who inspired trust without announcing himself, but what he also carried into that relationship without either of them fully registering the weight of it was a history with a woman named Stephanie Lazarus. Lazarus had dated Ruetten during their college years and by the time John and Sherri grew serious, that chapter was supposed to be over.
Lazarus had joined the LAPD and was building her career there, yet she had not released her attachment to John with any grace, appearing at his workplace and going to the hospital where Sherri worked to confront her directly in a moment Sherri put on record with her colleagues immediately and would later relate to her family.
John and Sherri married in November 1985 and had 3 months together as husband and wife, a number that will never sit comfortably in this story. At some point on the morning of February 24th, 1986, someone came to the front door of John and Sherri’s condominium and what happened after that door opened is not entirely recoverable from evidence.
What is recoverable, what the physical record makes undeniable, is the nature of the violence that followed because Sherri did not die quickly or passively but fought and the living room told that in story in the language of displaced furniture, broken objects, and the spatial evidence of a prolonged struggle in close quarters.
She was beaten with a vase and shot three times with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. And at some point during that fight, her attacker bit her hard enough and deep enough that biological material transferred. The bite mark was documented, photographed, swabbed, and sealed into evidence storage and in 1986, the technology to extract a DNA profile from a bite mark swab did not exist, so no one gave that swab a second thought.
A separate detail from the autopsy would later carry enormous weight. The weapon used to kill Sherri was inconsistent with the firearms connected to a burglary ring operating in the area, the same ring detectives would use to support their preferred theory for the next 18 years. The staging was imperfect and the physical evidence pattern, including the bite mark, the weapon, and the duration of the struggle aligned not with a panicked burglar grabbing what he could but with someone who had arrived at that apartment with intention.
Investigators noted every detail yet built their framework around the burglary narrative anyway. Nels Rasmussen flew to Los Angeles the moment he heard what had happened to his daughter, walked through the evidence, and gave detectives a name, but they were already moving in another direction. And the reason why is one of the most uncomfortable facts this case contains.
Nels Rasmussen brought investigators something specific in 1986, not grief scrambling for a target or suspicion dressed as evidence, but a name, a context, and a reason. He told detectives that Sherri had been troubled by the sustained presence of a woman, a former girlfriend of John’s, who had refused to accept the end of that relationship, describing the confrontation at Glendale Adventist Medical Center and identifying Stephanie Lazarus directly.
He gave investigators a person with a documented connection to the victim, a documented pattern of unwillingness to let go, and a documented proximity to John Ruetten. This was not a whisper but a starting point clearer than most investigators receive in the opening week of a homicide. They noted the tip and did not follow it.
The reason that decision happened is not provable as a deliberate act of institutional protection, though the outcome of that decision is documented history. Stephanie Lazarus was a fellow officer working within the same structure as the detectives now responsible for finding Sherri’s killer, and whether her status produced conscious loyalty or unconscious professional deference, the practical result was identical.
She was never formally questioned, never formally cleared, and her name was never entered into the investigative record in any form that generated action. The case moved forward as a burglary with a pair of brothers who had relevant criminal histories becoming the architecture of a working theory that hardened over time as theories do when no one challenges them.
John Ruetten lived for years under a quiet cloud of suspicion that had no basis in evidence but attached itself to his proximity to Sherri’s death anyway despite having cooperated from day one and answered every question. He was not the problem. The problem was that a man had walked into a police station in 1986, spoken a name into the right building, and been shown back out into the street.
Think about what that means. The research behind cases like this takes weeks of digging. If you want to make sure you never miss what we uncover next, subscribe. One click keeps you in the room. Biological evidence does not negotiate with institutional preference, nor does it soften with time to accommodate a more convenient theory. It simply waits.
The swab taken from the bite mark on Sherri Rasmussen’s arm in 1986 had been sealed and placed into evidence storage where it remained for nearly two decades, cataloged, preserved, not forgotten, just untouched. In 2004, forensic scientists submitted Sherri’s preserved biological material for DNA testing as part of a case review and the profile that returned was complete and immediately and fundamentally incompatible with every theory the LAPD had built around this case.
The contributor profile was female, not a burglar, and not one of the brothers whose criminal history had structured the department’s working narrative for 18 years, but a woman who had been inside that condominium, fought with Sherri Rasmussen in close quarters, and left her DNA on Sherri’s arm. The profile went into the national database and returned no match, complete silence.
But the profile was there and unambiguous and meant one thing with absolute clarity. The LAPD’s burglary theory had been wrong since the morning it was formed. Five years passed between that DNA result and the moment a detective named Jim Nudell pulled the file from the cold case unit and read it from the beginning.
Nudell had not been assigned the case but had sought it out because something in the details kept drawing him back. The staging, the weapon, the bite mark, the female profile, and one other thing, a tip from 1986, a father’s name that had never been pursued. He wrote it down on a legal pad, then wrote the name underneath it, Stephanie Lazarus, and picked up the phone to begin building a case that would have to be built without her ever knowing it was happening.
Identifying a female contributor was not the same as identifying a suspect because the profile needed a match. Jim Nudell, working alongside Detective Dan Harameo, understood precisely what they were facing as Stephanie Lazarus was not a civilian who could be approached and quietly asked to provide a comparison sample, but a 26-year LAPD veteran with a rank of detective, an active caseload, institutional standing, and the situational awareness of someone trained for decades in exactly these kinds of encounters.
One wrong signal, one misplaced conversation, one alert colleague, and the investigation would collapse. So, they needed her DNA without her awareness. Collected in a way that a courtroom would accept without hesitation. The method was patience made physical. Investigators placed Lazarus under surveillance and watched her daily routines with the same steady attention she had spent her career directing at other people.
And at a gym she frequented, she discarded a water bottle while at another location she left a cup. Investigators recovered both and the DNA extracted from those discarded objects went to the laboratory alongside the profile built from Sherri Rasmussen’s 1986 bite mark swab. Scientists placed them side by side and what returned was not a partial match or a statistical range requiring further analysis, but a full unambiguous identification.
The woman who had bitten Sherri during the struggle that killed her, the woman whose biological material had been sealed in evidence storage since February 1986, the woman Nels Rasmussen had named in the first week of the investigation and been turned away, that woman was Stephanie Lazarus who had spent 23 years walking through the LAPD building carrying her badge and working her caseload.
On January 7th, 2009, investigators brought her into a room and turned a camera on the corner wall and the camera was already running before she sat down. Stephanie Lazarus walked into that interrogation room as someone who had spent 26 years inside law enforcement knowing the rhythm of these conversations, the early generosity, the widening questions, the way investigators build toward a point without letting you see where the point is.
She sat down, placed her hands on the table, and showed that she was not walking in blind and it was evident. Investigators began with questions that feel routine asking about John Ruuten, the old relationship, and when it ended. And she acknowledged everything evenly and without hesitation in the measured ease of someone who has rehearsed the simple version of a story until it feels like memory. Okay.
“Do you know John Ruuten?”
“John Ruuten? John Ruuten? Ruuten. Ruuten. I went to school with him.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“How long did you know him?”
“Gosh, I went to school in um, let’s see. Went to UCLA 1978 I started and um, you know, met him at school at the dorms.”
“Mhm. Um, were you guys friends, close friends?”
“Yeah, we were very close friends. I mean, what’s this all about?”
“Well, it’s regarding it’s a case we’re working on and it involves John, and in there some of the statements we we reviewed, uh, you know, there’s notes and stuff they that he knew you and stuff.”
“Oh, yeah, I mean we good friends, um, lived in the dorms for I was in the dorms for 2 years um…”
“You guys lived in the same dorm?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Yeah, Dykstra.”
“Okay. Were you guys just friends or anything else or…”
“Yeah, we were we were good friends. Yeah.”
“Was there ever any relationship or anything that developed between you guys?”
“Yeah, I mean we dated. Uh-huh. You know, um, I mean, is it what what’s this all about?”
Her answers arrived at the right tempo, her expression stayed cooperative, and she gave them nothing that looked like effort. Then the questions widened and Sherri Rasmussen’s name entered the room. She said she didn’t know her well and when investigators mentioned that her name had come up in the original investigation, she expressed measured surprise and said she could not imagine why.
“Well, it’s relating to uh, his wife.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Did you know her?”
“Not really. I mean I knew that he had married years ago.”
“Uh-huh. Did you ever meet her?”
“God, I don’t know. Um…”
“Do you know who she was or anything?”
“Well, I Let me think. God, it’s been a long time ago. Um, um, I, you know, I may have met her. Um, jeez, you know, yeah. And I’m, and now I’m thinking I may I may have gone to her and say, ‘Hey, you know what? You know what? Is he dating you? He’s, but he’s bothering me,’ um, and so I’m thinking that we had a conversation about that, um, one or two maybe. You know, it could have been three. I don’t want to say I had three conversations with her.”
“Like at like at her work or at their at their house or…”
“No, I’m thinking that, I mean, you know, he obviously must have told me where she worked. I’m thinking it was a hospital somewhere in LA and I just…” [clears throat] “I mean I could have been again, what year was that? Where was I working? Um, you know, I don’t…” [clears throat] “I don’t, I’m trying to think of where… You, when did you say they got married?”
“I don’t know. I think it was like in ’85 or ’86 or something like that.”
“Yeah, we we we we just kind of picked this up. We don’t, you know, we don’t know a lot…” [clears throat] “…about it. I mean I could have been working in Hollywood, it sounds like if if that’s where I was working, um, so I could have said, ‘Okay, well, you know,’ and I went and talked to her, um, and just said, ‘Hey, you know what? You know, if he’s dating you, he’s he’s he’s calling me. Why don’t you tell him to knock it off or whatever,’ and you know, because I probably would have told him to knock it off.”
“Who would have told John?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean I would have said, ‘Hey, you know,’…”
[clears throat]
“And again…”
“But you wanted to tell her, too?”
Each answer was calibrated one beat too cleanly and each expression of confusion arrived just slightly after the place where genuine confusion would have lived.
“I, you know, I mean it just doesn’t sound familiar. I mean, I mean, what are they saying? So, I I I fought with her? So, so now I I mean I I get I get I get I’m get getting the jump or the leap. Excuse me. I haven’t eaten. Um, they’re saying, ‘Okay, I fought with her. So, I must have killed her.’ I mean, come on. I mean, that’s…”
Investigators raised the bite mark and the biological evidence preserved from the scene and her composure did not crack in one moment, but shifted in small increments. When investigators placed the DNA results in front of her and Lazarus understood that the swab taken from Sherri Rasmussen’s arm in 1986 had been matched to the cup she threw away at a gym, she asked for a union representative and the interview stopped.
“You know, do I need to get a lawyer if you’re accusing me of this? You know…”
“You don’t have to, I mean, you know, you’re here of your own free will. I mean, you know…”
“No, I know, but I mean…”
“…you know, you’re not you’re not under arrest. You can walk out whenever…”
“…leave whenever you like.”
“Well, but…”
“You know, I’m trying to give you some background of, you know, how I knew him. And now you’re telling me that some somebody’s saying that we had this big old fight, and I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Um, you know, and I don’t want to, you know, get in trouble for something that I didn’t even do or you’re saying I did something.”
“Okay. Yeah, we understand. I mean, how would you guys like it if the tables were turned on you?”
“I understand. No. No, that’s what we’re telling you. I mean, you’re free to go whenever you want. If if this makes you uncomfortable and you want to you want to…”
“Well, now you’re starting to make me uncomfortable.”
“The thing is, I mean, detectives did what they could at that time on the crime scene. Okay? And the burglary thing you’re talking about, that is an angle that they looked at. I go, ‘But now we’re looking at everything else on the case,’ cuz nobody was ever arrested on the case.”
“I don’t know that or not.”
“Okay. Now, what we’d like to do is obviously you know about all the DNA stuff and things of the nature that, you know, gets done on cases nowadays. You know, if we asked you for a a DNA swab, would you be willing to give us one?”
“Maybe. Cuz now now now…”
“Yes, because now…”
“Now I’m thinking I probably need to talk to a lawyer. Okay. I mean, what? I cuz I know how this stuff works, okay? Don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I have been doing this long time. And I and I wish I had been recording this because because now it sounds like, you know, there’s, you know, you’re telling these people saying I’m a fighting with her and now you sounds like you’re trying to, you know, I’ve been doing this long time.”
“Yeah, we know.”
“Okay. And then and now it almost sounds like you’re trying to pin something on me. Now I I got that sense.”
“Well, what it gets to on these on these cases, and you know it as well as I do, our job is to identify and eliminate some…”
“I can’t believe this.”
“So, if we ask you to a point to give us a DNA sample, a buccal swab so we can identify or eliminate you, would you be willing to do that?”
“Maybe. Cuz I know this I I I I…”
“That’s where we’re at, too. I mean, because right now from looking at the evidence, it’s, you know, it’s possible we may have some DNA at the location. That’s great. And we’re going to do what we can to try to put this thing together. And your name’s in the book. These people are pointing at you for whatever reason.”
“I don’t know why. That’s just crazy. I mean, that’s just that’s absolutely crazy.”
“And it would be irresponsible on our part not to look at it.”
“I know. Are you guys have to do your job and I guess I’m going to have to contact somebody. So…”
“That’s fair. I mean, cuz I know how this stuff works. I mean, I I I I I just can’t believe…”
“That’s I mean, we we understand that. I mean, if we were in your position, I mean, we would feel the same way.”
“I just can’t even believe it. I mean, it’s just I mean, I’m shocked. I’m really shocked that somebody would be blame saying that I did this. I mean, we had a fight and so I went and killed her? I mean, come on.”
“Well, that’s okay. All right. Well, thanks for giving me the courtesy we spoke.”
“Keep the courtesy. Thanks for your time.”
“Yeah, thank you. All right, Stephanie. Take your hand.”
Outside that room, the arrest was moving forward, and Stephanie Lazarus, a 26-year veteran and decorated detective, was placed in handcuffs and walked out of the building she had worked in for her entire adult career.
Nels Rasmussen had been right since February 1986. The trial of Stephanie Lazarus began in 2012 in Los Angeles, 26 years after Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in her home, and the prosecution built its case from the ground up. The DNA came first. The bite mark profile from 1986, the match from Lazarus’s discarded sample, and the statistical framing that left no probabilistic room for an alternate explanation.
Then came the witnesses, nurses and supervisors from Glendale Adventist Medical Center, colleagues who had worked alongside Sherri took the stand to recall Lazarus coming to the hospital, Sherri reporting the confrontation, and the discomfort that visit left on a woman who otherwise moved through her workday with calm authority.
Those witnesses put Lazarus in Sherri’s world before the murder and placed her there by choice. John Ruetten provided his account of the relationship, its nature, its refusal to end on Lazarus’s part, and the specific behaviors that had unsettled both him and Sherri in the months before their November 1985 wedding.
Placing Lazarus’s obsession not as speculation, but as witnessed fact. The defense argued compromised chain of custody and the uncertainty inherent in two and a half decades between crime and arrest. The jury watched the interrogation recording in full and deliberated for 3 days before returning on October 4th, 2012, with a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder and a sentence of 27 years to life.
Lazarus would not be eligible for parole consideration until her 70s. For Nels Rasmussen, who had spoken his daughter’s killer’s name into a police station in 1986 and been quietly shown the door, the verdict was confirmation, not comfort, not restoration, but confirmation that he had always been right. His daughter had been 29 years old and would have been 55.
The verdict attached a permanent record to what happened to her, and nothing else it could do was enough. The conviction of Stephanie Lazarus set the LAPD’s Inspector General’s review in motion, and the report that resulted was careful with its language, as institutional self-examinations tend to be, using phrases like insufficient follow-up and missed opportunities.
What those terms meant in practice was that a grieving father had entered an LAPD station in 1986, identified his daughter’s killer by name, provided documented motive and context, and been disregarded. The review stopped short of concluding that Lazarus had been actively protected by the department, but confirmed that she had not been pursued and that her name had moved through the system in 1986 without generating any action.
The distinction between active protection and institutional failure by proximity produces the same outcome for everyone still waiting for an answer, because Sherri Rasmussen was still dead either way, and Nels Rasmussen had still spent 23 years carrying a name that no one with authority would act upon. John Ruetten, who had lived under the low-grade suspicion that attaches to surviving spouses in unresolved murders, made his position on the institutional failure clear.
He had answered every question, cooperated with every request, and watched the department that employed his wife’s killer treat the case as if the answer were located somewhere it had never been, and he was not quiet about what that cost him across those years. The cold case unit that solved this case did not do so with new evidence or a technology that hadn’t been available before, but by returning to preserved evidence from 1986 and asking whether the original conclusion held.
It did not. What made Sherri’s case solvable in 2009 was not a scientific breakthrough, but one detective who pulled a file that everyone else had set down and read it as if the answer were still there. It was. Every case on this channel gets that same treatment, pulled from the shelf, read from the beginning, followed wherever the facts go.
Subscribe, and we’ll keep doing it. She had been home for less than 8 hours. That is where we started, and it is worth returning to, not because the beginning of the story changed, but because of what surrounds it now. Sherri Rasmussen woke up on February 24th, 1986, called in sick, and spent a quiet morning in the home she had built with John.
She was 29 years old with a nursing career she had constructed with intention and care, built around the act of keeping other people alive. She had a father who loved her enough to fly across the country, walk into a police station, and speak clearly into an institution that was not yet ready to hear him, and a husband who answered every question and lived under a shadow that was never his to carry.
And she had left something behind, biological evidence on the skin of the person who killed her, that sat in an evidence envelope for over two decades without degrading, without accommodating the narrative that had closed the file around it. The evidence outlasted the institution’s failure to act on it. A detective named Jim Nudell pulled a file that could have stayed on the shelf.
A laboratory compared a swab to a discarded cup. A jury watched a camera recording from a room where 26 years of composure slowly, visibly shifted. None of those moments exist without the one before them. None of them exist if Sherri doesn’t fight back. None of them exist if the swab isn’t preserved.
And none of them exist if Nels Rasmussen doesn’t walk into that station in 1986 and speak clearly, even into silence. He was right the first time, and the record now says so permanently. She had been home for less than 8 hours, and it took 23 years to say her killer’s name out loud in a room where it counted. Subscribe to Crime Files Unlocked, because every person on this channel deserve that moment, and there are more of them than any of us want to know.
