by Mark Bowden
The front door had apparently been unlocked—Mayer had been right about that—and the alarm system was off, so Sherri would not have heard anyone entering stealthily. Two shots had been fired upstairs, and both rounds had gone through the sliding glass door, shattering it. The glass was bowed slightly outward, consistent with rounds traveling in that direction. It appeared to Nuttall that whoever had come looking for Sherri that morning had come to kill her. One round, probably the first shot fired, had gone clean through her chest and then out through the glass door. Once hit by that round, she had begun bleeding internally and had only minutes to live. Given Sherri’s training as an emergency-care nurse, she may well have known that. But in the first moments she would still have had strength, and she appears to have used it to grab the gun and wrestle it away. The other shot through the door was low on the glass, consistent with a shot fired during a struggle over the weapon.
Sherri got the handgun, but instead of shooting her attacker, she ran down the stairs with it, apparently heading for the panic button on the security panel inside the front door. The killer pursued her. Smear marks on the walls along the stairs suggest that Sherri was spitting up blood into her hands, which then marked everything she touched, thus tracing her path clearly. The killer appeared to have caught her from behind on the first floor, where there was a violent struggle. Sherri was most likely pulled away from the wall panel. Her fingernails were broken, and there were blood marks on the floor in the foyer suggesting that Sherri had been dragged into the living room. Now she would be weakening and feeling dizzy, but with enough strength to wrestle with the killer—the bite mark on her forearm suggested that she managed to put the killer in a headlock. Escaping Sherri’s grasp, the killer grabbed the heavy gray ceramic vase off the living-room shelf and crashed it hard into Sherri’s forehead. She went down now for good. At that point Sherri’s wrists were bound with the wire and cord found on the floor in the foyer. Using the pink and pale green blanket to muffle the sound, the killer then fired two more rounds into Sherri’s chest, finishing the job. The cords were removed from her wrists and discarded.
Once Nuttall had thus reframed the confrontation, the evidence of burglary that had convinced Mayer looked like a deliberate attempt to mislead. The bloody smudge on the top of the disc player was telling. It would prove to be Sherri’s blood, left by someone wearing a glove, which likely meant it had been gathered and stacked after Sherri was killed. The coroner had determined that she had been killed at about eight o’clock in the morning, which meant the condo had been perfectly silent until John returned home that evening. If the killer had panicked and fled after shooting her, which is entirely plausible, why would she go around the condo looking for things to steal, and then leave them stacked on the floor? The drawer in the living-room side table had been pulled out and left leaning against the legs, with the contents relatively undisturbed. What it looked like to the Van Nuys cold-case detectives was an effort to make the scene look like a burglary.
The killer had then gone out through the inside living-room door to the garage and driven off in Sherri’s BMW. That was how the detectives, at least initially, pieced together evidence from the crime scene. Jennifer Francis’s DNA work showed that Sherri’s killer was most likely female. At the very least she had fought with a woman shortly before she was killed. The execution shots suggested that whoever shot Sherri was determined to kill her. So, the Van Nuys detectives wondered, what woman in Sherri’s life wanted her dead and would have the presence of mind to alter the crime scene sufficiently to fool a busy LAPD homicide detective?
They noted in the comprehensive murder book, that on November 19, 1987, Mayer had noted, “John Ruetten called. Verified Stephanie Lazarus, PO, was former girlfriend.” What did “PO” mean? When they guessed “police officer,” they ran the name through the department directory and came up with their esteemed colleague in the art-theft division.
Nuttall and Martinez went to see John Ruetten. “You have this information already, detective,” he told them. John said that Stephanie had been Nels Rasmussen’s suspect, but that he had never believed it. He still refused to believe it. The detectives next called Nels, who, after twenty-three years of getting nowhere, was understandably annoyed even to be asked the question. How many times did he have to tell them about Stephanie Lazarus?
With those interviews done, full of information that both supported and attenuated the Lazarus theory, the detectives drew up a list of six women who knew Sherri well enough to possibly have had a motive to kill her. They excluded no known possibility. The list included Sherri’s mother and sister. Lazarus was number five.
They had the bite-mark evidence. The DNA from that swab, they strongly suspected, was from the killer. One by one the other five women were ruled out. The detectives obtained DNA samples from them—in one case surreptitiously, by rooting through trash—and in each case the sample didn’t match. That left Lazarus, whom they were loath to accuse. If they were right it would cause a stink in the department, and if they were wrong they would needlessly smear a prominent fellow detective—a move bound to have adverse consequences for them. Still, the facts about number five kept adding up alarmingly well.
The detectives tried to imagine how a cop might go about planning to murder someone. She wouldn’t do it on duty; she would do it on a day off. Lazarus had been off work on the day of the murder. A cop would be careful. She would wait until the victim was alone. If Sherri had been killed at about eight that morning, that means whoever did it had waited until John left for work (at 7:20 a.m.), and made sure he wasn’t coming right back before heading into the house. After the murder, she would want to leave the scene in a way that minimized the chance that she would be seen clearly enough to be identified; the killer had entered the condo’s garage from the inner door and driven away inside Sherri’s BMW.
Then there was the murder weapon. Martinez said he doubted that a cop would plan to commit murder with her duty gun. You would want to get rid of it afterward, and there is hell to pay in the department for losing a duty gun. The Van Nuys detectives knew that most cops have at least two weapons, a duty gun and a backup, purchased privately and duly registered. Records showed that Lazarus had purchased a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson soon after graduating from the police academy. Martinez suspected that she would have gotten rid of it after the murder. If she became a suspect, the first thing her investigating colleagues would ask to see was both guns.
It would look very suspicious to say, “I don’t know where it is” or “I lost it.”
That wouldn’t do.
“Were you like one of those young cops, like, ‘Oh, I got a paycheck!’ and bought a new car?” Jaramillo asked Lazarus.
Stearns and Jaramillo’s conversation with their colleague bobbed and weaved. The detectives would zero in on something touchy and then back off into comfortable banter. Lazarus no doubt recognized the technique. They were toying with the idea that she had killed Sherri Rasmussen, but she still didn’t know how serious they were about the notion, how much they thought they knew. As long as the conversation continued, there was still a chance she could lay their suspicions to rest.
“Oh, no. I’ve only had like a few cars my whole life,” she said.
“So what did you have when you came on the job?”
“Well, my first car was a sixty-eight Chevelle; then I had a Toyota. Some type of Toyota. Hatchback, but I forgot what the name of it was.”
“Like a Corolla or a Tercel? Something like that?”
“Tercel. Tercel. And then my truck.”
“Were there any policies on it?”
“Like what?”
“Was there any general car-wreck thing? Stolen?”
“No, my car’s never been stolen. Broken into . . .”
“Tell me about this car being broken into.”
“My car’s been broken into several times.”
“Oh, really? Did you ever lose anything?”
“Yeah, now
that you mention it. Let’s see. I had a gun that was stolen. I had other stuff that was stolen.”
“It’s not your duty gun, was it?”
“No.”
“Good. Was it ever recovered?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not that I know of.”
The Van Nuys detectives had made a request to have the serial numbers of Lazarus’s backup Smith-Wesson traced. Nuttall and Barba were driving through a dust storm south from San Francisco when they were called with results. When they heard, they pulled over to the side of the road to let it sink in. Lazarus had reported the gun stolen to the Santa Monica Police in March of 1986.
Often when circumstantial evidence begins to mount in a case, there arrives one key piece evidence pushes suspicion to certainty. The stolen-gun report was that piece of evidence. The timing was just too convenient for it to be a coincidence. The fact that Nuttall, Martinez, and Barba had been able to predict it added weight. By now they had also noticed the convenient absence of key records in the file. It sure looked as if someone inside had been working to protect Lazarus. This was going to be big. If ever a man had reason to be angry at the LAPD, it was Nels Rasmussen.
There is a set procedure in-house for investigating a fellow police officer. You first report it up your chain of command. But the detectives did not want anyone in their Van Nuys office to know about it yet; information tends to travel fast in-house. Nuttall, Barba, and Martinez had taken to referring to Lazarus simply as “number five” in their work. They phoned their supervisor, Detective Bub, at home.
The information went straight up the chain of command. Bub went to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Steven Harer, who went to the area commander, Captain William Eaton. Eaton directed Bub to meet with Deputy Chief Michael Moore. Everyone agreed: the investigation was solid. It was time to get a DNA sample from Lazarus. Moore authorized the deployment of the Internal Affairs Group’s Special Operations Division to help.
They decided to do it surreptitiously, in order to avoid tainting Lazarus with suspicion if the lab test cleared her. A special operations team staked out Lazarus and her daughter on a trip to Costco and recovered a cup and straw after the pair had snacked at a table outside the store. Two days later the lab confirmed that the mouth on that straw was the mouth that had bitten Sherri Rasmussen’s forearm in a violent struggle twenty-three years earlier.
The decision to take Lazarus downstairs in the Parker Center for questioning before arresting her was made for two reasons. Officers have to check their weapons before entering the downstairs jail; the detectives wanted to avoid some kind of armed standoff if she flew off the handle. Lazarus was known to have a temper. They also wanted to gather further insight into what had happened before letting her know what they knew.
Lazarus was still smiling and chatting jovially with the detectives an hour into the interrogation. If she was annoyed, she was doing a good job of not showing it.
“Well, like I said, we’re looking at the case. We’ve read the notes as far as Sherri’s friends saying you guys had problems or words and it got heated,” Jaramillo said. “The reason we are asking you is, there was an incident at her work that occurred, and they also told us that [there was] an incident at her house.”
Lazarus screwed up her face comically, as if to say, Whatever. She threw up her hands.
“You know what?” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “That does not sound familiar at all. Again, if someone says I was at her house and I had an incident with her? That just doesn’t sound . . . Was John there? Did John say this happened? And other people were there? I just don’t recall. It just doesn’t sound familiar.”
“This was an incident where you showed up, you weren’t supposed to show up, and things got heated.”
Jaramillo was now referring directly to the murder. The detective was actually offering Lazarus something here. Was it possible she showed up just to talk to Sherri, and they got into it verbally—and then physically? That would be bad enough, but manslaughter is not the same as cold, premeditated murder. She did not take the opportunity.
“At his house? That just doesn’t sound familiar. You know, it’s not sounding familiar. Not at all.”
“So it’s not sounding familiar because you don’t remember?”
“You know what? I have to say ‘I don’t remember’ because I don’t remember. It doesn’t sound familiar.”
“Would you not remember something like that in your life?”
“Well, I would think, but—”
“I mean the drama involved in, you know, the other-woman type of thing?”
“Did you ever fight with her?” Stearns asked.
“Have we ever fought?”
“Yeah. Did you ever duke it out with her?”
“No! I don’t think so.”
“You would remember that, right?” said Stearns. “That would be pretty—”
“Yeah, I would think so. Like I said, honestly, it just doesn’t sound familiar. I mean, what are they saying? So I fought with her, so . . . I must have killed her? I mean, come on.”
Lazarus continued to deny any memory of fighting with Sherri Rasmussen, contorting her features dramatically to express her astonishment. “That just sounds crazy to me,” she said.
“OK, well, this case, you know, this occurred in eighty-six, right?” said Jaramillo. “The detectives processed the scene, things of that nature. They did fingerprints and all that stuff. You know, the standard things. You’ve been doing this longer than I have.”
“I don’t know about that. I’ve got twenty-six years on, going on twenty-six.”
“But, you know, they processed everything. They did the best they could at that time, and they looked at a lot of people and different things in this case.”
Lazarus caught his drift.
“If you guys are claiming that I’m a suspect, then I’ve got a problem with that, OK,” she said, her tone changing sharply. She was finished with collegiality. “So if you’re doing this as an interrogation, and you’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m a suspect,’ now I’ve got a problem. You know? Now you’re accusing me of this? Is that what you’re saying?”
“We’re trying to figure out what happened, Stephanie,” said Stearns.
“Well, you know, I’m just saying. Do I need to get a lawyer? Are you accusing me of this?”
“You don’t have to. You’re here of your own free will.”
“I know, but I mean—”
“You’re not under arrest, you can walk out,” said Jaramillo.
“You can leave whenever you’d like,” said Stearns.
She did not leave. She listened, stern-faced now, as Jaramillo explained that detectives, as she well knew, had to consider every angle.
“Now, what we’d like to do is . . . If we asked you for a DNA swab, would you be willing to give us one?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Because now I’m thinking I’m probably going to need to talk to a lawyer.” Lazarus grew indignant. “I know how this stuff works, don’t get me wrong. You’re right, I have been doing this a long time. I wish I had been recording this, because now it sounds like all these people saying I was fighting with her. Now you sound like you are trying to, you know . . . I’ve been doing this a long time, OK, and now it all sounds like you’re trying to pin something on me. I get that sense.”
“You know it as well as we do,” said Stearns. “Our job is to identify and eliminate suspects.”
“I can’t even believe this,” said Lazarus, shaking her head slowly and leaning it down into her open left hand.
Jaramillo told her that he “may have” some DNA from the crime scene.
“That’s great,” she said.
“And we are going to do what we can to put this to rest,” he said. “Your name is 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 absolutely crazy.”
“And it would be irres
ponsible on our part not to look at it.”
“I know. You guys have to do your job, and I guess I’m going to have to contact somebody.”
“That’s fair,” said Stearns.
“Because I know how this stuff works. I just can’t believe it.”
“We understand that. If we were in your position, we would feel the same way.”
“I just can’t even believe it,” she said, muttering to herself now, and then she looked back up at Jaramillo. “I mean, I’m shocked. I’m really shocked that someone would be saying that I did this. We had a fight so I went and killed her? I mean, come on.”
She stood up abruptly, thanked the detectives for giving her “the courtesy” of discussing it with her, and walked out of the interview room, apparently believing that she really was free to go. She got as far as the hallway, where she was formally arrested and handcuffed.
She kept repeating, “This is crazy. This is absolutely insane.”
Stearns read her the Miranda rights.
“Do you want to talk to us right now?” he asked, when he had finished.
“No,” she said. “This is crazy. I’m like in shock. I’m totally in shock.”
In March 2012, Stephanie Lazarus was convicted of the murder of Sherri Rasmussen and sentenced to twenty-seven years. In court, prosecutors interpreted the sequence of events during the fatal encounter in a way that slightly differed from the detectives’ reading of the evidence in the summer of 2011 (when this story was written), but the accounts added up the same way. Lazarus had entered the condo and surprised, fought with, and then killed Rasmussen. The Rasmussens sued the LAPD, alleging that key evidence that pointed to Lazarus was removed from the file, but lost the case. According to Detective Stearns, an internal investigation of the missing evidence did not support the claim that anyone inside the department had deliberately covered up her involvement.