The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  Soon after the murder, Nels was shown sketches of two Latino male suspects, and the burglary theory was explained. There was no way for him to recognize the drawings, and the whole scenario did not make sense to him. He had to wonder about the competence of these detectives. The apartment showed signs of a protracted fight. Mayer estimated that the struggle may have lasted for an hour and a half. How could his daughter have fought off two men for that long? Nels asked. There was the bite mark on her forearm, which had led Mayer’s partner, Steve Hooks, to conjecture that the suspect may have been a woman, on the theory that women are biters. But the notion was dismissed. Women don’t typically engage in breaking and entering, and fighting men have been known to use their teeth. There was also the bullet wound in the center of Sherri’s chest, and the hole and powder burns on the blanket. Mayer told Nels that his daughter had not simply been shot and killed; she had been executed. Why would a burglar do that?

  Nels asked if they had checked to see whether the lady cop had been working that day. Had they examined her? Taken pictures of her? If she had been in that fight, there would likely be marks. The answers were no. No one had ever checked up on Lazarus. Mayer or Hooks or someone apparently did talk to her on the phone eventually, and the conversation was considered enough to close that line of inquiry. There is only one brief entry in the case file that mentions her, recorded on November 19, 1987, more than a year and a half after the murder. It reads, “John Ruetten called. Verified Stephanie Lazarus, PO [Police Officer], was former girlfriend.” No arrests were ever made in the case. The evidence of Sherri Rasmussen’s murder was packed away in commercial storage.

  In the interrogation room that June day twenty-three years later, the questioning of Lazarus ground on with Jaramillo and Stearns excavating her memory from “a million years ago.”

  “And you’re saying, when you went to see her, do you remember if it was at her house or at the place she worked at?”

  “No, I’m thinking it was probably . . . for some reason I want to say, you know . . . I’m thinking that maybe the hospital was on my way to work in Hollywood. That’s maybe sounding familiar.”

  “Would you have approached her on duty?”

  “Oh, no, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t. I’m not saying you haven’t done stuff on duty, but I would be working with someone, so I wouldn’t. . . . I try to avoid doing stuff on duty.”

  “Oh, OK. So if it was en route to work, you would more than likely have gone to her work and had this discussion with her?”

  “That is sounding familiar. Now that you guys are bringing this stuff up, that sounds familiar. But, again, I mean, you know, what does it have to do with me dating him and her being killed? I don’t have anything to do with it.”

  She had gone from not remembering if she had ever met John’s wife, to dimly recalling her name, to acknowledging that they had met on several occasions, including once when she had paid a surprise visit to Sherri’s hospital office, woman-to-woman, the ex-girlfriend confronting the new wife. Was that the sort of encounter one forgets?

  By now Lazarus would have clearly seen the connection they were making, but she didn’t back off. She kept talking, apparently wanting to allow for the possibility that they really did not view her as a suspect. She also apparently did not wish to abandon the possibility that all this was happening only because her name had turned up in the old files. Stearns seemed to want that fiction maintained as well, because he rapidly retreated from the idea that this questioning was anything beyond routine.

  “Like I said, we just literally got this the other day, and we’re going through it, and you see your name.”

  “Yeah. Then you saw that I work next door.”

  “Right, we recognized the name, and we know you work next door to us, and so we are trying to get some background, we’re trying to figure this out. I mean, this is from a long time ago.” He told her again that the only reason they brought her downstairs to the interview room was to avoid exploring these personal details before her coworkers.

  “I appreciate it,” she said. “I mean, I appreciate it. This goes way back. I mean, it’s very sad, you know, obviously . . .”

  Jaramillo had another question. “Let me ask you this: Did the detectives ever reach out to you?’

  “No. No one has ever talked to me about him,” she said, and then caught herself, screwing up her face again, scratching her head. There would be a record of her having talked to a detective, and most people—even a cop—would find being questioned in connection with a homicide probe hard to forget.

  “No, I’m thinking that I did talk to a detective,” she said. “What division was it?

  “Van Nuys.”

  “Mmm . . . you know, I’m thinking that I did speak to somebody.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “I couldn’t tell you who it was. . . . He called me on the phone.”

  “Would it have been somebody in regards to this?”

  “I don’t even know if he said the name or if I would remember it, because I worked Van Nuys for a while. . . . But, yeah, I think I talked to somebody.”

  * * *

  Nels never gave up, and he also never got anywhere.

  He did get into it with John’s dad more than once over John’s refusal to sit down and discuss the facts of the case with him in detail. He and his wife put up a $10,000 reward, and cooperated with the producers of the TV show Murder One, which put together a segment about the unsolved case. He kept after LAPD detectives over the years, calling from Tucson, asking always if they had checked out the “lady cop.” When he read the first stories about DNA testing in crime labs a few years later, he called and urged the department to run tests on the forensic evidence gathered from the condo and from Sherri’s body. There were blood and hair samples, and there were swabs taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm. He was told that the department had a limited budget and could not afford to run such tests, so Nels offered to pay for the tests himself. He even had a lab willing to do the work. He was told that the DNA would do them no good without a suspect. But, Nels insisted, he did have a suspect.

  In fact, the department seemed determined to keep him from testing his theory. A detective named Phil Moritt visited the LA County coroner’s office, in the Mission Junction district, on October 11, 1993, more than seven years after the murder and not long after Nels had requested a DNA test, and signed out all of the forensic evidence that might have contained a suspect’s DNA. It is not unusual for a detective to remove evidence and deliver it for testing to a lab, and sometimes such errands involve fetching evidence from several case files. So there is no way to know whether Moritt sought only the Rasmussen material on this trip. Ordinarily such evidence is removed at the request of an investigator, but there is no record of such a request. Moritt would later tell department investigators that he had no memory of signing out the evidence. It was never returned. It is still missing.

  Lazarus was promoted to detective that year. She worked in Van Nuys, as did Moritt. It is likely that they knew each other.

  For eighteen years Sherri’s file and what was left of the evidence from the scene of her murder sat in storage. Mayer retired. In 1989, John was reunited with Stephanie on a scuba-diving trip to Hawaii. Before he met her there, he told investigators, he called Mayer to make sure no evidence had ever linked her to Sherri’s murder. It is interesting that the possibility, which he had so strongly rejected years earlier, remained in his mind. As he would recall it later, Mayer had assured him there were no suspicions about Lazarus whatsoever. Notes about that conversation are not in the Rasmussen file. So the lady cop and the widower reconnected in Hawaii. Lasting romance did not rekindle. John remarried some years later, and he and his second wife started a family. Lazarus married a fellow cop. She continued to rise in the ranks.

  And there things would surely have remained, except . . .

  In 2001, LA Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, created the Cold Case Homicide Unit to begin systema
tically combing through unsolved murder files for DNA evidence. With growing databases of genetic signatures on national computer files, such evidence could be instantly checked against the DNA profiles of millions of known criminals, greatly magnifying the potential return in mining such data. Investigators with the unit sift through stored evidence, looking for samples of blood, semen, saliva, and hair believed to have come from the murderer.

  In 2004, Jennifer Francis, a criminologist with the cold-case unit, pulled Sherri’s case and began sorting through the evidence. This was a matter of routine, but everything else that happened is not.

  Life resonates after death, in the memories and affections of loved ones, and a strong character, an impressive one, sends out wider ripples. Sherri’s file could not have failed to touch Francis. Here was a beautiful, brilliant, accomplished young woman, newly married and in love, surprised in her home and killed. And her killer had gotten away with it. Francis was certainly perplexed by Sherri’s case. When she went looking for potential DNA in the case file, she discovered the record of Moritt’s 1993 withdrawal. All the forensic samples that might have revealed the killer’s DNA were missing. But when she looked closer, comparing the carefully enumerated list of evidence with the items that Moritt later signed out, she noticed that swabs taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm had not been recorded, and yet they too were gone. They apparently had been misplaced sometime earlier, before Moritt’s visit. Where might they be?

  Francis knew well the steps in the evidence chain. Evidence recovered from the victim’s body would be held for a time in the coroner’s freezer, while the case was still active, and at some point would be gathered up and stored under the file number. What if the swabs hadn’t made it from the freezer to the file? Francis called the coroner’s office. The swabs were not on file, so they searched the freezers by hand.

  The swabs were found in a padded manila envelope that had absorbed moisture from the freezer walls, and over time the corner of the envelope with the case number on it had worn away. It still had “Rasmussen” written on its front very clearly, but evidence is stored by number, not by name. Finding the number from the name would have required more work, so apparently whoever gathered up the forensic evidence years ago had avoided the extra effort and just left the envelope in the freezer, where it sat for eighteen years. Inside the envelope was a screw-cap test tube, and inside the tube were two swabs.

  Francis sent the swabs to the lab for testing and got the results back in late January 2005. She ran the DNA signature through CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), the national law enforcement database, but there were no hits. However, the test results had shown something curious. The bite on Sherri’s arm had been made by a woman.

  Francis took this result back to the cold-case detectives, pointing out that if Sherri had been attacked by a woman, it upended Mayer’s theory that she had been killed by two Latinos burglarizing her condo. This was how she saw it, anyway. The detectives did not agree. What if one of the two the burglars had been female? It wasn’t typical—very few women are arrested for breaking and entering—but it also wasn’t impossible. In any event, there were no female suspects in the file, and the point of the DNA project was not to reinvestigate every cold case but to see if the genetic material matched a known suspect. The evidence and Francis’s revelation, much to her chagrin, went back into the box and back into storage, presumably forever.

  Or at least for four more years, until the day after Super Bowl Sunday, 2009.

  LAPD homicide detective Jim Nuttall came into work that morning, Monday, February 2, with a hangover. He and his brother, Steelers fans, had celebrated Pittsburgh’s championship a little too aggressively the night before, so Nuttall decided to ease slowly into his workday. Instead of getting out in the streets to work on a current case, he fetched a cup of coffee and decided to spend a few hours at his desk, reviewing one of the cold cases that he had been assigned.

  In recent years, murders had fallen off precipitously in Los Angeles, so detectives in the homicide units throughout the city had been given cold cases to review on top of the current murders they were working. Unsolved cases were routed to working detectives for one final review before they were closed permanently. Nuttall had a row of “murder books,” as they are called—thick blue binders full of notes, photos, diagrams, transcripts. Just inside the binder cover is a progress report, a detailed account of everything that has been discovered about the case to date.

  Right away, Nuttall saw the same contradiction that had struck Jennifer Francis.

  In the interview room, Detective Jaramillo returned to the question of whether Lazarus had ever been to John and Sherri’s home.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever gone there,” she said. “I don’t want to say I’ve never gone there and [have you say] I was there at a party. Like I said, I don’t think so.”

  “But it’s safe to say that the only time you would have been there was for something social?” asked Stearns.

  “Something social. Yeah . . . I don’t even know that I knew where they lived.”

  “But you didn’t have any issues with her, right?” asked Jaramillo.

  “No,” she said, twisting up her face at such a preposterous suggestion. “But, I mean, if he were dating me and dating her, I probably said, ‘Hey, pick,’ or something. I can’t say that we ever screamed or yelled. I mean . . . he was a pretty mellow guy. You know, I think I was pretty mellow. I don’t think we had some big huge blowup . . . I was probably going out with other guys, and he was probably going out with other girls.”

  “I mean, would you remember if she snapped on you, like, ‘Hey, that’s my man. You know, leave him alone, blah-blah-blah,’ that kind of stuff? You would remember an incident like that.”

  “Well, you know, and maybe that happened,” she said, “Gosh, it’s been so long ago. I mean that’s not ringing a bell. . . . I’m crazy,” she said, giggling nervously. “People think I’m really hyper, and I can get upset, you know, and, I mean, I forget five seconds later.”

  “Water under the bridge,” offered the detective.

  “I enjoy the job. I get excited. I’ve always enjoyed the job.”

  “You’ve got a good gig.”

  Whenever Lazarus found herself on dangerous ground she would pull back to talk again about The Job, the original premise of this conversation, just one cop pitching in to help her brothers. But the more she talked, the deeper her involvement in the story grew.

  “Like I said, this stuff has been so long ago,” she repeated. “I’m sure as soon as I walk out of here, I’ll go, ‘oh, shoot,’ twenty-five things I’ll remember.”

  “But you’ll call us, or, I mean, you’ll just come over to our desk and help us,” suggested Jaramillo.

  “I don’t know what else you need to know. Like I said, we knew friends together. A lot of the friends that we socialized [with] in the dorms, there was a group of us that we were all really close. . . . We all did stuff together, after we all graduated, we went to weddings . . .”

  “But Sherri wasn’t part of this circle?”

  “No, I don’t even know how he met her; I don’t know where they met. . . . He may have told me. That’s not ringing a bell . . . I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “Well, one of the concerns I had, just looking at some of the notes, is some of Sherri’s friends said that you and her were having a problem because of the John situation.”

  Lazarus puckered up her face and chuckled. In a while, Jaramillo came back to the subject again.

  “You know what, I just can’t say,” Lazarus said.

  “You can’t say?”

  “No, that doesn’t even ring a bell.”

  “I mean, it seems like you actually would recall something if somebody’s going off on you, right?”

  “I mean, I would think. I would think . . .”

  “And from what you’re telling me is, when you guys met at the hospital, when you guys talked, that it wasn’t,
from what you recall, confrontational on either side?”

  “I mean, I’m trying to turn my memory back,” Lazarus said, twisting her hands on either side of her head as though rewinding a spool. “And I can’t even picture the conversation.”

  “Well, let me ask, at the hospital it never got to a point where people were going, ‘Hey, hey,’ you know, or ‘Everybody go to your own corner’ type of thing?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Nothing like that?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, I really don’t. If you say people said that, that’s not ringing a bell to me at all. I mean it’s not.”

  “How about ever going to her house and having a dispute like that?”

  “If I met her ever at his apartment, maybe I could’ve met her at the apartment. I’m thinking that the hospital thing, that sounds familiar, that I met her there. I just can’t say that I’ve ever—again, was I there with other people? I don’t know. I don’t think I ever met her there or him there, meaning one or the other. I don’t think so.”

  “Because I know how my wife is. I know she wouldn’t want my girlfriends there, you know, so I don’t know if maybe she had the same mentality toward you, as far as you not being welcome there.”

  “You know what, if somebody said I was there when they were there, then that’s possible, but I just don’t recall. I mean, I don’t think so. It’s not sounding familiar.”

  Studying the murder book, which has dozens of photographs of every relevant piece of evidence found at the crime scene, Detective Nuttall saw a different story than the one Mayer had pieced together. He had been so struck by the finding that the suspected killer was female that he reported it to his supervisor, Detective Robert Bub, who assigned two other detectives, Marc Martinez and Pete Barba, to help Nuttall completely rework the case. As they saw it, Sherri had not surprised burglars working downstairs. She had herself been surprised upstairs by the armed intruder. That’s where the fight seemed to have started.