Former LAPD detective Stephanie Lazarus was sentenced for killing a hospital nursing supervisor in 1986 in a love triangle. Patrick Healy reports for the NBC4 News at noon on May 11, 2012.
Before an ex-LAPD detective was sentenced on Friday to 27-years-to-life for the murder of a 29-year-old hospital nursing supervisor in a jealous rage 26-years ago, the victim’s family members told their stories of anguish.
John Ruetten, who discovered his bride, Sherri Rasmussen, shot to death that day in February 1986 in their Van Nuys condo, remains haunted.
“It brings me to my knees,” Reutten said from the witness stand in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. “I don’t know how I’m going to cope.
“I daydream that Sherri is with us and this senseless tragedy never occurred.”
Connie Rasmussen said her sister was a science devotee. When she took the stand Friday, she , marvelling at the irony of DNA used in the cold case.
“I can hear Sherri say, ‘Yay! How fitting that science brought closure.”
The testimony took place before former Los Angeles police detective Stephanie Lazarus was sentenced to 27-years-to-life for gunning down Rasmussen in a jealous rage.
Lazarus appeared to betray no emotion as her sentence was read. The only time she showed any emotion was when she nodded and smiled to her family members in the gallery as she was led in and out of the courtroom.
With credit for the time she already has spent behind bars - about three years - Lazarus, 52, could be eligible for parole in about 22 years.
Her brother, Stephen and mother said outside of court that she didn't get a fair trial.
"There was not a presumption of innocence," Stephen Lazarus told media outside the criminal courts building. "In fact, there was a presumption of guilt."
At the hearing, Lazarus' attorney Mark Overland immediatley filed a notice of appeal.
Lazarus, a former art theft detective, was arrested in 2009 thanks to DNA technology that was not available when 29-year-old Sherri Rasmussen was killed in her Van Nuys condominium in February of 1986.
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An eight-woman, four-man jury deliberated just under two days before finding Lazarus guilty on March 8 of the first-degree murder of Rasmussen, a Glendale Adventist Medical Center nursing supervisor.
Lazarus was motivated by jealousy after learning a man she dated, Ruetten, decided to marry Rasmussen, prosecutors argued. Ruetten testified he casually dated Lazarus after college, but he never considered her his girlfriend and continued to date other women while he was seeing her.
Ruetten discovered Rasmussen’s beaten and shot body on Feb. 24, 1986 inside the condo they shared. Rasmussen had married Ruetten just a few months before her body was found.
Prosecutors said the bullet used in the crime came from an LAPD issued .38 caliber revolver with a two-inch barrel, the same one Lazarus bought from the Police Academy just before she became a cop.
But it was DNA evidence on which prosecutors based most of their case. Prosecutors said they connected Lazarus to the crime through a saliva sample taken from a bite on Rasmussen’s shoulder.
Overland suggested the evidence was tainted because the bag holding it was torn after being in storage for 20 years.
Lazarus wasn’t initially considered a suspect because detectives at first believed the case was the result of a burglary that had been interrupted.
The case was reopened in 2004 by a LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division cold case unit that discovered there was DNA evidence in the form of a bite-mark swab.
Analysis of the swab revealed the DNA profile was from a female other than Rasmussen.
In 2009, Van Nuys homicide detectives who were reviewing cold cases reexamined the Rasmussen murder looking into whether there were any women in Rasmussen’s life who may have wanted to kill her.
Through interviews and DNA testing, detectives eliminated all but one possible female suspect - Lazarus.
Police tailed Lazarus and eventually got a DNA sample from a discarded cup and a match was made to the bite-mark swab, police said.
Lazarus was arrested in June 2009 after a sensitive interrogation by her colleagues in Robbery Homicide who worked in an office next door to hers at Parker Center. She has been in jail since and was allowed to retire from the force.
Rasmussen's father had long maintained that Lazarus should have been suspected from the start because he had been told that his son-in-law had been in a relationship with a cop who had threatened his daughter.
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