This case is shocking.
Obviously it's not every day that a LAPD detective
is arrested for a cold-case murder,
let alone a female detective, and that the circumstances
of the case were so salacious, so sensational,
so many surreal turns, a love triangle.
The case was on a knife's edge
between being solved and never being solved
for most of its history.
I'm crazy (laughs)!
As the evidence in the case came out,
it wasn't really a whodunit,
but how she got away with it, that's what I wanted to know.
My name is Matthew McGough.
I'm the author of "The Lazarus Files:
"A Cold Case Investigation."
"The Lazarus Files" is about the murder
of Sherri Rasmussen, a newlywed hospital nurse
who was killed in Los Angeles in 1986.
(foreboding music)
23 years later in 2009, the LAPD arrested one
of its own detectives, Stephanie Lazarus,
for the murder of Sherri Rasmussen.
(sudden snapping) What initially attracted me
to the case was a chance encounter I had
with Detective Stephanie Lazarus a year
before she was arrested for murder.
I was interested in writing about art theft,
which was Detective Lazarus's last assignment
before she was arrested for murder.
And in 2008, I interviewed her.
Stephanie was professional, cordial.
I obviously had no reason to suspect
that she might be hiding a horrible secret
that she had committed a murder
more than two decades earlier and gotten away with it.
Well one of the concerns I have is,
looking at some of the notes,
is some of Sherri's friends said
that you and her were having a problem
(Stephanie laughing) because of the John situation.
(Stephanie sighing heavily and chuckles)
Stephanie was involved in a love triangle
with Sherri's husband John Ruetten,
who she had dated before John and Sherri met.
Sherri was really a remarkable person,
very intelligent, skipped numerous grades.
I think she graduated from college
when she was 16.
And she had a drive to work in nursing
and to really revolutionize the field of nursing,
so very high achiever professionally.
And her life was cut off in its prime,
again, just a few months after she had married.
Although the LAPD originally investigated
and insisted that Sherri had been killed
on a botched burglary, her family suspected,
from the very beginning,
that there was an ex-girlfriend, police officer, of John
who may have been involved in Sherri's murder.
Was there ever any relationship or anything
that developed between you guys?
Yeah, I mean, we dated.
I mean, what's this all about?
John Ruetten, Sherri's husband, he brought
to the attention of detectives the day after the murder
that he had an ex, Stephanie Lazarus,
who he told them was an LAPD detective.
And according to John, he encouraged the detectives
to investigate her as a suspect.
John also testified under oath
during Stephanie's trial that he was informed
by detectives that Stephanie had nothing to do
with Sherri's murder.
Do you know what happened to his wife?
Yeah, I know she got killed.
God, that's been a million years ago.
But eventually the case went cold.
Have a seat. Okay.
The tide began to turn in the early 2000s
when DNA analyst named Jennifer Francis
performed DNA testing and determined
that it was female DNA on Sherri's body.
A few years after that a group of homicide detectives
in the Van Nuys division, the same unit that had failed
to solve the case 20 years earlier,
picked up this dormant cold case.
And within a few months had put together a case
implicating one of their own colleagues,
one of the most shocking outcomes
of a murder investigation in the history of the LAPD.
I'm looking at the notes,
and people are kinda,
I mean, they're pointing the finger at you.
Well, I mean, that's not ringing a bell to me,
so I don't know.
I don't know what to tell you.
I mean, that just sounds crazy to me.
Stephanie continues to insist
on her innocence although she's convicted
and all of her appeals have been denied.
If you guys are claiming that I'm a suspect,
then I got a problem with that, okay?
I think time will tell what sort of impact the book has
on the LAPD.
Now it almost sounds like you're trying
to pin something on me.
Now I got that sense.
Well what it gets to on these cases,
and you know it as well as I do,
our job is to identify and eliminate suspects.
I can't believe this.
There is a lot of unanswered questions.
We know who killed Sherri, but we don't know a lot
about how Stephanie got away with it.
And most importantly, no one has been held accountable
for any of the mistakes that allowed a police detective
to get away with a cold-blooded murder
for more than 20 years.
And there is a lot of evidence in the case
that went missing over the years,
including trace evidence collected from Sherri's body
that was inexplicably checked out
from the coroner's office by a LAPD detective
in the early 90s and was never seen again.
After Stephanie was arrested 23 years later,
the Rasmussens publicly alleged a cover up.
He was always diverted.
He was told repeatedly that he'd been watching too much TV.
And requested the LAPD to investigation
of how one of their own detectives got away
with murder for so long.
The LAPD never did any investigation of what went wrong.
This story is not finished.
(low sustained piano note)
(moves into gentle music with piano)