Here's Why It Took So Long To Arrest Stephanie Lazarus

Back on February 24, 1986, John Ruetten picked up his dry cleaning after work on the way to his home in Van Nuys, Los Angeles. He'd called his wife, Sherri Rasmussen, three or four times that day, but hadn't gotten an answer. This wasn't too much of a cause for concern, though, because Rasmussen — director of nursing at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center— was a busy lady. Even when Ruetten saw broken glass near the garage outside he wasn't especially concerned. Then he found his wife lying dead inside the house with three bullet wounds in her chest.

Vanity Fair relates the portrait that the police later painted. Rasmussen had run downstairs, presumably to hit the house alarm, fought an assailant and had a nearby vase smashed against her head, and then in a dazed state was shot three times. There was no evidence of a break-in, though the stereo system was upended.

It took until 2009 — 23 years — to track down Rasmussen's murderer, Stephanie Lazarus. Lazarus had been a police officer for two years at the time of the murder and had a sort of friends-with-benefits relationship with Rasmussen's husband, John Ruetten during college, and the two had even been intimate after he became engaged to Rasmussen, according to abc7. 

It took some hard-nosed police work to bring Lazarus in, a big chunk of which depended on a 2005 DNA test comparing a bite mark on Rasmussen's arm to a discarded Costco cup of Lazarus'. The case ran cold before and after then. But other evidence had been available since 1986, leading investigators to conclude that someone, maybe, was covering up for Lazarus. But even if not, some serious bungling of evidence caused a massive delay in the case.

Just to be clear, there's no single, central reason why it took so long for the LAPD to hunt down one of their own. It's a combination of factors resulting in suspected — but not confirmed — silence within the department's own ranks. In fact, there was such suspicion amongst investigators come early 2009 of a cover-up that detectives bypassed the chain-of-command to avoid then-suspect Stephanie Lazarus catching wind of the investigation.

Detective Robert Bub, a key figure in cracking the case, told investigators to treat the investigation as confidential. Bub collaborated with Lieutenant Steven Harer, Captain William Eaton, and Deputy Chief Michel Moore to dispatch an Internal Affairs Group-Special Operations Section to track Lazarus and retrieve the aforementioned Costco cup DNA sample from her. The sample matched, the case proceeded, and three years later in 2012 Lazarus received a 27-year sentence for first-degree murder. First-degree murder means that Lazarus didn't merely fly off the handle after confronting the wife of her ex-boyfriend, but planned to murder her when she went to Rasmussen's house back in 1986.

But by 2009, it had already been four years since investigators got a DNA sample from the bite mark on Rasmussen's arms as detectives revisited the case. Prior to that, the sample had been signed out in 1993 — seven years after the murder — went missing, and had stayed frozen on a cotton swab for 12 years, untouched. A detective named Phil Moritt had signed it out at the time, later claiming to no remember doing so. 

The biggest delay in Sherri Rasmussen's murder case happened between the mysterious signing out of the DNA sample on the bite mark on her arm in 1993 and the testing of that sample in 2005. The reasons for this delay aren't exactly satisfactory — especially not to Rasmussen's loved ones — and still haven't been fully explained. But because Rasmussen's murderer, Stephanie Lazarus, has already been convicted, explanations for the delay have become less important than Lazarus seeing justice.

As Vanity Fair tells the tale, the aforementioned detective, Phil Moritt, checked out all forensic samples related to the Rasmussen case back in 1993, seven years after the murder. Notably, this included a cotton swab of the bite mark on Rasmussen's arm. Note that DNA testing entered its infancy with the 1987 arrest and trial of rapist and murderer Colin Pitchfork. DNA testing has come a long way since then, but still, the option was available in the late '80s and early '90s. That chance vanished along with Rasmussen's sample in 1993.

It took until 2001 for investigator Jennifer Francis to poke through Rasmussen's file and find the cotton swab missing. The sample showed up in the coroner's office in a freezer in a decaying manilla envelope with Rasmussen's name on it, but no case number on top. Case numbers are how the police organize data, which it why it might have gone unnoticed. Moritt, for his part, said he remembered nothing about the sample. From there it took four years to get the results of the sample's DNA test, in 2005.    

Long before investigator Jennifer Francis found the unnumbered DNA sample in storage that had been missing for eight years, the victim's father suspected who'd killed her. Per Vanity Fair, Nels Rasmussen, father of the slain Sherri Rasmussen, asked, "Have you checked out John's ex-girlfriend, the lady cop?" to Lyle Mayer, a detective involved in the investigation. This was the day after the murder in 1986.

Nels spoke with investigators at length in those early days of the investigation, but no records exist of such conversations — no notes, no audio recordings, nothing. Either the person responsible for making such records didn't do their job, or the records were destroyed, or those at the precinct — as we alluded to before — couldn't face the possibility that a cop had been the one responsible for the murder of Sherri Rasmussen. Nels also pushed for DNA testing. In fact, the cotton swab sample that went missing until 2001? Detective Phil Moritt checked it out shortly after Nels made the DNA test request, but before the test could be conducted. Why no one followed up on the request at the tim, or even realized that the sample was missing, only deepens the mystery and highly suspicious set of circumstances.

Come 2009, a new generation of detectives like Robert Bub traced this entire, garbled trail of happenings and potentially shady activities all the way back to the initial crime scene. They admitted that evidence pointed to Lazarus, and as soon as they got her DNA sample, the case was all but solved.