Cop accused in cold killing case

It should have been so different. Back in April Los Angeles Police Department detective Stephanie Lazarus, a 25-year veteran and a member of an elite unit charged with investigating high-end art thefts and forgeries, was being lauded by the LA Weekly as "a serious Tyne Daly look-alike a la Cagney & Lacey".

Ironically, Lazarus joined the force when the 1980s cop show about a pair of female detectives in New York - Daly was the dark-haired one - reflected real efforts to attract more women to police work.

But in a town where reality and Hollywood noir often overlap, Lazarus soon found herself embroiled in a far more chilling scenario. On June 5 Lazarus was arrested and charged with killing Sherri Rae Rasmussen, a 29-year-old nurse married to Lazarus' ex-boyfriend, in 1986, a cold case from the grave. Police sources call it an apparent "crime of passion".

Lazarus had been lured from her third-floor office at the Parker Centre, the LAPD's downtown headquarters, on the pretense that a suspect held in a basement jail had information on one of her cases.

She was arrested after she had checked in her sidearm whilst clearing security.

The criminal complaint says the murder occurred during a burglary, a "special circumstance" that could make Lazarus the first California policewoman to face the death penalty. She has pleaded not guilty and is held without bail.

Police had assumed Rasmussen's killer was a man. But when detectives revisited the case and a DNA test showed her assailant was a woman Lazarus became a prime suspect.

Could the 49-year-old detective, who has a solid police record, including a stint with internal affairs, have bashed then shot another woman over two decades ago?

Watching Lazarus, clad in an orange jail jumpsuit, her cuffed hands secured to a waist chain, her hair tied in a pony tail, as she conferred with her attorney in a pre-trial court appearance this week, it was hard to say.

LA's finest were stunned by the news one of their own was an alleged killer.

"It's an absolute shock to everyone," says LAPD Commander Pat Gannon. "Stephanie Lazarus worked maybe 25 feet outside my door. This was not the person people knew after 20 plus years of working around her."

Deputy LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said: "People can hold dark secrets and hold them very well for a long period of time. She definitely did."

Stunned colleagues said Lazarus, who is married to a fellow detective and has an adopted daughter, was liked, worked hard and was "quick to give you a hug or tell a joke".

In 1986 Lazarus was a uniformed patrol officer with two years' service. She had been seeing John Ruetten, who broke off their affair and later wed Rasmussen.

On February 24, 1986, three months after they married, Ruetten returned to the couple's Van Nuys condo and found his wife dead.

Rasmussen had stayed home after hurting her back in an aerobics class.

She had been savagely beaten then shot three times. The bullets reportedly came from a .38 calibre revolver.

Marks on Rasmussen's wrist, and cord found nearby, suggested she might have been bound.

A thick bathrobe, rent by bullets, was used to muffle the shots.

Nonetheless, a maid in an adjacent condo heard screams and sounds from Rasmussen's place around noon.

But the maid did not call police and the body was found that evening.

When two men robbed a woman at gunpoint in the area shortly afterwards - they were never caught - detectives reasoned that Rasmussen was killed after she stumbled on a burglary.

Stereo gear was stacked near her body. Rasmussen's car was stolen. Oddly, so was the couple's marriage licence. It was a theory that appears to have led investigators down the wrong path.

Eventually, the case petered out and Rasmussen's murder joined over 9000 other homicides, from the 1960s onwards, dumped into the LAPD's cold case cache.

But even as detectives pursued the burglary angle the victim's father, Nels Rasmussen Jr., a retired dentist who lives in Arizona, doggedly insisted police examine a LAPD officer who allegedly had repeatedly threatened Sherri Rae. Rasmussen did not know the officer's name.

But he told detectives, in interviews after the murder and in a letter to then LAPD Chief Darryl Gates, that she was Ruetten's "ex-girlfriend, who is a LAPD officer".

Moreover, said Rasmussen, his daughter had had multiple confrontations with this female officer in the months before the murder.

Speaking via his attorney, John Taylor, at a press conference after Lazarus made her first court appearance last month, Rasmussen said his daughter had told him a young female LAPD officer had shown up at LA's Glendale Adventist Hospital, where Sherri Rae worked as a nursing director, and said, "If I can't have John, no one can".

Furthermore, said Rasmussen, his daughter found the same officer, wearing uniform, in her Van Nuys condo.

She also believed the policewoman was stalking her on city streets.

Which possibly makes for interesting circumstantial evidence.

Lazarus' lawyer, Mark Overland, says Rasmussen's claims are inadmissible hearsay, gleaned from the victim.

But detectives ignored Rasmussen's suspicions, telling him, says Taylor, "You've been watching too much TV."

Lazarus did appear on the case radar; Ruetten named her as an acquaintance and she is mentioned in the murder book.

In hindsight, another red flag might have made Lazarus a suspect. The murder weapon was never found.

In March 1986, Lazarus reported her personal .38 calibre revolver stolen from her car, which was parked near the beach in Santa Monica.

"We've searched her home, her car, her office," says Gannon. "We don't know where it is. It might easily have been thrown into the ocean."

Overland says that although Rasmussen was shot three times only one bullet was found. He contends analysis of the bullet suggests it was "either a .38 or a .357" round.

He also wonders why, if Lazarus was guilty, she didn't report her gun stolen before rather than after the crime.

If the District Attorney is correct, and Lazarus did beat then shoot Rasmussen, then it is still unclear how she might have done this.

Overland says his client is 1.6m. He says the victim was 1.8m.

Given the height difference he asks, if Lazarus is guilty, why didn't she "go in shooting"?

Of course, she may have already been in the condo - the burglary count - and surprised Rasmussen. But until the trial all is conjecture.

Ironically, it is LA's falling murder rate that focused attention on Lazarus. Fewer present day homicides have allowed the LAPD to focus resources on cold cases, using DNA techniques. So far some 1000 homicides cases have been reviewed, with around 30 per cent producing useful DNA evidence.

In 2005 blood and saliva found at the Rasmussen crime scene was tested and revealed a woman's DNA profile. When detectives began to work the case this year, Lazarus, who worked across the hall from homicide, came under suspicion.

A DNA sample taken from a straw used by Lazarus and surreptitiously recovered by an undercover cop [Overland says it was a plastic cup] allegedly matched the genetic profile of evidence from the crime scene.

It appears to be the breakthrough in solving the two-decades-old slaying.

But Overland says he will challenge the DNA evidence "in terms of collection, storage, contamination, analysis and subjective interpretation".

Given that the LAPD has mishandled DNA evidence in the past [notably in an ongoing scandal in which 12,000 "rape kits", semen, saliva and other material taken from victims, have piled up, threatening to expire as evidence when a two-year statute of limitations clocks in], the defence may find this a profitable field in which to test the case against Lazarus.

Meanwhile, questions remain about why the LAPD apparently overlooked a prime suspect who worked just feet away from the homicide department.

Why, in particular, did investigators apparently ignore Rasmussen's claims?

In the absence of any official explanation theories abound. The LA Weekly wondered if Lazarus "may have benefited from 1980s political correctness and [a] LAPD image crisis".

The Weekly, quoting Taylor, said the Rasmussens spoke "at length" to Lyle Mayer, the detective handling the case, about their suspicions but "never got a straight answer".

Why this was so is uncertain.

The Weekly suggests detectives might have been blinded by a prevailing PC climate, in which the LAPD was under pressure to hire more women so that the total force was 20 per cent female.

Then there was pressure following fallout from cases involving bent cops.

In one case two officers were sentenced to life imprisonment for scheming to drug, torture and kill an exotic dancer to collect $100,000 life insurance.

In the second case an officer was given 15 years to life after being convicted in a "murder for hire" plot.

Gannon says the Weekly's theories are "gibberish."

He insists that in the pre-DNA era the detectives assigned Rasmussen case followed a strategy they thought best. "Obviously the original investigators erred."

The LAPD says it is investigating the original case and making up for lost time, with detectives taking a dental cast from Lazarus to see if her teeth match a bite mark found on the victim.