by Mark Bowden
“Had you met his wife?” asked Jaramillo.
“I may have.”
“Do you remember her name or anything?”
“Ummm . . .” she said, straining to recall something insignificant from very long ago.
“Or what she did for a living, or where she worked, or anything about her?”
“Well, I think she was a nurse. I can’t even remember how he said he met her. It’s been so long ago.”
“Did you go to their wedding?”
“No. I didn’t go to their wedding. No. I . . . I can’t even tell you what year they got married. It’s been a million years ago. . . . Again, I don’t understand why you are talking about some guy I dated a million years ago.”
They talked more about the dating scene at UCLA. Asked if she had ever associated with Ruetten after he married, Lazarus had a curious answer. “I don’t think so,” she said. She asked again why they were questioning her about this.
“Do you know what happened to his wife?”
“Yeah. I know she got killed.”
“What did you hear about that?”
“I saw a poster at work. I’m sure I spoke to him about it. Um, I think I spoke to another friend of his about it . . .”
The crime scene was meticulously documented in 1986. It looked as if there had been a fight.
One of the living room’s tall stereo speakers was knocked over and lying beside Sherri on the rug, its top flush against her head. The wires had been removed from it. A gray ceramic vase with a heavy base lay shattered on the floor. The top two shelves of the wooden display cabinet had been knocked askew, and an amplifier and receiver dangled forward on top of the television. A decorative display of dried plants had been knocked off the coffee table and was on the floor at the foot of the couch. The drawer of a side table had been pulled out completely, its contents strewn across the rug. At the base of the stairs leading up from the living room to the second floor, a VCR and a CD player had been stacked neatly, as if assembled for carrying out but then left behind. There was a single bloody smudge on top of the CD player. There were smears of blood on the east wall of the condo and another smear on the front door. On the floor just inside the front door were two intertwined cords; one was apparently the wire from the fallen speaker. Upstairs, one of the two glass sliding doors to the back balcony was shattered. This was the glass John had seen on the pavement outside the garage. There was no sign of forced entry, and other than the disarray and the objects left on the living-room floor, there was no sign of ransacking anywhere else in the house.
Homicide detective Lyle Mayer discovered that a pink and pale green quilted blanket on the living-room chair had a bullet hole in it, with associated powder burns. He recognized two holes of what turned out to be three holes in Sherri’s chest as contact wounds—in other words, after the first shot, a gun had been placed against her chest and fired point blank, twice. It appeared that the killer had used the blanket to muffle the sound. This had been an execution.
Two bullets were recovered from Sherri’s body, both .38 caliber; one of the bullets must have passed completely through her. Any of these three shots alone would have been rapidly fatal. Somebody had wanted to make sure she was dead. In addition to the wounds on her face—it was likely she had been struck over her right eye with the vase—there was a bite mark on her inner left forearm. It would be swabbed for saliva samples, and a cast would be taken for a possible tooth comparison. There were also marks on Sherri’s wrists, which suggested that at some point they had been bound.
John told police about his day, retracing his steps for them. Over the next few weeks, police investigators under Mayer’s supervision interviewed neighbors, family members, and friends, but turned up no suspects. The silver BMW was found a week later parked on a street in Van Nuys, unlocked, keys in the ignition. Investigators found several fingerprints in it, a spot of blood, and a strand of brown hair. Research and neighborhood interviews revealed that two Latino men had been breaking into houses in the area, and that in one case they had assaulted a woman. The opinion Mayer formed that first day would not change.
“I believe your house was burglarized today, sometime before ten a.m.,” he told a distraught John that night, just hours after the shocked husband had called 911. After more than an hour of detailed questioning, the detective assured John that he, Mayer, did not suspect him of any involvement. “I believe they got in your front door,” he said. “I don’t think it was locked. . . . Once those persons or that person or whoever was inside, I believe they were trying to steal your stereo and probably some other items.”
“Why would they do anything to her?” asked John, crying. “Why wouldn’t they just run?”
“I don’t know, John,” said Mayer. “John, things happen, OK? Here’s what I think happened. I think Sherri came down the stairs. And I think she surprised them. And she was hurt, OK? . . . She was shot.”
Mayer said Sherri’s body was then dragged down to the living room. After delivering this analysis, he asked John, almost as an afterthought, whether he and Sherri had been having any problems.
“We were having the best time,” John said, sobbing. “We just got married.” It was hard not to be moved by his grief.
“No financial problems? She’s not having problems with an ex-boyfriend; or you with an ex-girlfriend?”
“No,” said John.
The interrogation of Stephanie Lazarus was a dance. For the detectives, the idea was to delay turning the conversation into a confrontation for as long as possible. Lazarus had her own moves. She kept turning the discussion to other matters, working to keep things friendly and collegial; laughing and referring to mutual acquaintances; mugging wonder, surprise, confusion, irritation; gesturing broadly with her hands; working to keep the discussion at the level of cop talk and going on about The Job, even as Jaramillo and Stearns zeroed in on darker turf. She reviewed her dating history, ticking off the men she had dated in her youth before she had met her husband, and making sure that John Ruetten was seen as a blip, just one in a fairly large group, and that their relationship was, as she said over and over again, “a million years ago.” How could they expect her to remember this stuff?
“When you heard about John’s wife being killed, what was your reaction?” asked Jaramillo.
“I obviously called the family. I called some of his friends that I knew. Obviously, it’s shocking to hear. . . . I can’t say if I initially spoke to him or not. I honestly don’t remember. I may have said to somebody, ‘Hey, have him call me if he wants to talk.’ And then he may have done that.”
“Do you know what the circumstances were regarding her death?”
“Ummm. Jeez. Let me think back. Umm. Jeez.” Here she screwed up her face as if struggling to recall an utterly insignificant detail. “I don’t know if it was a burglary or something, it’s been so many years. I can faintly think that I may have seen a flyer. It may have had her picture on it. That’s what I see. If somebody called me, I may not have known what her last name was. I may have. Maybe if you told me, I would remember it.”
“Do you know the first name?”
“Shelly. Sherri? Something. Like I said, it’s been so many years.”
“As far as you can remember, do you remember ever talking to her?”
“As I said earlier, I may have, you know. I may have talked to her.”
“You mentioned a hospital maybe—you may have talked to her at a hospital,” said Stearns.
Suddenly, Lazarus’s memory began to thaw.
“Yeah. I may have met her,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m thinking, now that you guys are bringing up all these old memories. You know. I mean, jeez,” she said, shaking her head and sighing heavily.
Lazarus was now going to change her story. Not only did she remember John’s murdered wife, they had met and talked, probably several times.
She said, “I’m thinking that, because he would date other people and I would date other people, and
I think at one point, he may have been dating her. I don’t know. Maybe he was married. I don’t even remember. And I’m like, ‘Why are you calling me if you’re dating her, or living with her, or married to her?’ I honestly don’t remember the time frame. I’m like, ‘Come on. Knock it off.’ Now I’m thinking, I may have gone to her and said, ‘Hey, you know what, if he’s dating you, he is bothering me.’ I’m thinking we had a conversation about that, one or two, maybe. It could have been three. I don’t want to say I had three conversations with her, or whatever.”
“At work or at their house?”
“No. I’m thinking, he obviously told me where she worked. I’m thinking it was a hospital somewhere in LA. I could have been . . . again, what year was that? Where was I working?” Another sigh. “I’m trying to think. When did you say they got married?”
“I don’t know. I think it was in eighty-five or eighty-six, or something like that,” said Jaramillo, disingenuously. He knew exactly when John and Sherri had been married. “We just kind of picked this up. We don’t really know a lot about it.”
Lazarus counted backward to herself.
“I could have been working in Hollywood, it sounds like, if that’s where I was working. And I went and talked to her and just said, ‘Hey, you know what, he is dating you, he keeps calling me, why don’t you tell him to knock it off or whatever.’ Because I probably would have told him to knock it off.”
“You would’ve told John?”
“Oh, yeah. I would have said, ‘Hey, you know . . .’”
“But you wanted to tell her too? You wanted them both to know?”
“Yeah, I mean, you are getting calls . . .”
“When you talked to his wife, and said, ‘Hey, he keeps calling me, he needs to knock it off,’ or what have you, was that civil?”
“Oh, I don’t think there was anything,” said Lazarus. “The conversation lasted a few moments. I can’t even remember. It wasn’t like we went out to lunch or anything.”
“But there wasn’t any arguments or fights, or it didn’t get heated?” asked Jaramillo.
“Not that I recall, no. I mean, I would think that would stand out. I would think. Now again, that’s not standing out in my mind.”
As Nels Rasmussen remembered it years later, the first thing he asked Detective Mayer the day after his daughter was murdered was, “Have you checked out John’s ex-girlfriend, the lady cop?”
Nels had answered the phone shortly before one o’clock in the morning at his home in Tucson on Tuesday, February 25, 1986. It was John’s father calling with the knee-buckling news.
There was shock, and right away the first sparks of an anger that would never go away. Nels wanted to know why, if his daughter had been killed the day before, he was just being informed of it now. Why hadn’t John called him?
Nels is a dentist, a careful, proud, conservative, capable, successful, opinionated man with a rugged tanned face and a shock of snow-white hair. His wife, Loretta, managed his practice. They were enormously proud of their talented daughter and, like many such parents, were less than thrilled about her choice of husband. Nels considered John a pleasant enough fellow but . . . unimpressive. Weak. He had specific reasons for thinking that, reasons apart from the young man’s lefty politics. He didn’t completely trust John as a man and definitely not as his Sherri’s husband. He was not the sort of man he had imagined for her at all. Now those misgivings, which were perfectly normal and which he had sublimated in the face of Sherri’s own love for John, had proved prescient in a way far more horrifying than he had ever imagined.
He asked to speak directly to John. He wanted answers. He wanted a detailed accounting of everything that had happened that day, but John’s dad, likely apprehending Nels’s hostility, refused to put his grieving son on the phone.
Nels sat up the rest of that night, his mind racing, dealing with his shock and pain by noting down everything he knew about the situation. Sherri had confided in him several times in the months since she and John had moved in together. She said this other woman—Nels didn’t know her name—had visited their home weeks before their wedding, unannounced. A lady cop. She was dark-haired, athletic, and brazen, and had dropped off a pair of water skis she wanted John to wax. Sherri told her father that she viewed the skis as nothing more than an excuse to intrude, and a provocation. What nerve! She and John had argued afterward, and he had assured her that there was nothing between him and this woman anymore, that they had been dorm pals long before lovers, and that their relationship had never gotten that serious. Still, Sherri did not want him to wax those skis.
According to Nels, John did not back her up, would not stand up to this woman, suggesting instead to Sherri that it would be better to placate her. “I’ll just wax them and that will take care of it.”
The lady cop had come by again, unannounced, to pick up the skis, Sherri told her father, which John had waxed, despite her objections. That time she asked the woman to leave after John handed over the skis, making it clear that she was unwelcome.
This had not deterred the woman at all. She had shown up again, this time in her LAPD uniform, gun strapped to her waist. She said she was on a break. John had gone to work, and Sherri was still home; usually it was the other way around. Immediately Sherri wondered if this was some kind of routine: fiancée leaves for work and old girlfriend stops by? She didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to trust John. The wedding was just weeks away. She cried on the phone while telling her father about it that night, and Sherri did not cry easily. She was used to dealing with life-and-death issues at work. But this lady cop had shaken her. She talked about it more with her father when she and John visited Tucson on her birthday. Nels and Loretta and Sherri and John had gone out to a nightclub to celebrate, and Sherri had waited until she was alone with her father on the dance floor before talking about it; he believed she didn’t want to bring it up before John. She said she wished John would just step in and tell this woman to leave them alone, but for some reason he wouldn’t do it. This old girlfriend was the only problem she had with him, and all he would do was assure her that the relationship was strictly in the past, that her intrusion was no big deal, that making an issue out of it would just worsen the situation, and that the best thing was just to ignore her until she went away.
Then there was the visit the lady cop had made to Sherri’s office at the hospital, the visit Lazarus would admit to twenty-three years later, screwing up her face with the effort to remember something so trifling: “It wasn’t like we went out to lunch or anything.” Sherri had told her father about this meeting in detail. She said the woman had burst into her office at Glendale, barreling right past the secretary outside her door. This time the lady cop was dressed in tight short-shorts and a form-fitting tube top, an outfit that shouted her sexuality and athleticism. She was shorter than Sherri, but she was fit and strong and moved with a swagger.
Nels brought all of this to Detective Mayer’s attention the day after the murder. It was why his immediate question had been, “Have you checked out John’s ex-girlfriend, the lady cop?” He would later recall that Mayer dismissed the suggestion out of hand, already wedded to the burglary theory. Nels was told that he had watched too many cop shows on TV.
It is hard to believe Mayer’s focus could remain so stubbornly narrow, but in a sense, the detective and the distraught husband had boxed themselves in on the night of the murder. Mayer seems to have seriously considered only two possibilities: one, that John had killed Sherri (most slain women are killed by their intimate partners); and two, that she had been killed by home intruders (the obvious implication of the stereo equipment hastily stacked and left on the floor). Mayer ruled out John as a suspect after talking to him at length. There was no motive, no life insurance policy, no evident trouble in their relationship. You could not help but feel for John. His pain was palpable, unmistakably genuine. The detective was a kind man, and it is clear from their conversation that night that he liked John an
d came to believe him and trust him. He told John as much at the end of their conversation. So when John dismissed out of hand the notion that an ex-girlfriend might have done this, Mayer was more inclined to believe him than Nels, the angry, grieving father, who seemed to have such irrational suspicion of and dislike for the poor, grieving widower. Speaking with the detective, John disputed Nels’s stories. He told Mayer there was no way the confrontations his father-in-law described would have happened without Sherri’s telling him about them.
Why would Sherri not have told him the same things she had told her father? She did tell him about Lazarus’s hospital visit, but not in a way that made John feel that she had been frightened or even intimidated. What Sherri had conveyed to him was her concern that there might still be something going on between him and Stephanie, which was not true. Perhaps Sherri had simply decided it would be better to deal with the Stephanie problem herself. She was strong and independent and smart. John had moved on. What could the discarded girlfriend do? That was, in effect, what Sherri told Nels the last time they spoke about it.
There may have been another reason Nels wasn’t heard. There appears to have been a degree of institutional bias at work that is shocking and perhaps even criminal. The case record suggests that one or more persons, during initial investigation and continuing through the next ten years, were not just disinclined to consider that one of their own had murdered Sherri Rasmussen—they had actively conspired to hide evidence that might have proved it. For one thing, all of the records in the Rasmussen file pertaining to Nels’s suspicions about the “lady cop,” and even the interview with John the day after the murder, in which he discussed Lazarus with Mayer, are missing. There are audio recordings and notes of every other interview in those first days, which was standard operating procedure, but there are none for the ones in which Lazarus was specifically mentioned. These are conversations remembered by both Nels and John, who were interviewed independently, without knowledge of what the other had said. As we shall see, this suspicious behavior continued in the coming years.