Sherri Rasmussen

On February 24, 1986, Sherri Rasmussen, a 29-year-old hospital nursing supervisor, was found beaten and shot to death in the condominium she shared with her husband John Ruetten in Van Nuys, Los Angeles. The scene was staged to look like a burglary, with items strewn about and a stereo stacked by the door. Sherri had been beaten severely, bitten on the arm, and shot three times with a .38 caliber revolver.

The investigation initially focused on two men seen near the home, and the case was classified as a burglary-homicide. However, Sherri's father repeatedly told detectives that an LAPD officer named Stephanie Lazarus—Ruetten's ex-girlfriend—had been harassing Sherri before the murder and had even confronted her at the hospital. These leads were not aggressively pursued, and the case went cold.

In 2004, cold case detective Jim Nuttall reopened the file and noticed the bite mark evidence had never been tested for DNA. When the DNA was finally analyzed, it matched a female profile in the California DNA database: LAPD detective Stephanie Lazarus, who had been on the force for over 20 years by that time. Investigators secretly obtained a fresh DNA sample from a cup Lazarus discarded and confirmed the match.

Lazarus was arrested in June 2009 in a carefully orchestrated confrontation at Parker Center. The dramatic arrest of an active-duty LAPD detective shocked the department. At trial in 2012, Lazarus was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 27 years to life. The case became a landmark example of how DNA evidence can solve decades-old crimes and exposed troubling questions about whether Lazarus's position as an LAPD officer had shielded her from earlier investigation.