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California Nurse Found Brutally Murdered in Her Home 3 Months After Getting Married
The wounds California nurse Sherri Rasmussen suffered in her final moments of life were "extensive and disturbing," but it would take more than two decades to reveal the surprising killer.
Three months after Sherri Rasmussen married the love of her life, she was in a fight for her life.
Sadly, it was one she wouldn’t win.
The California nurse was found dead in her townhome on Feb. 26, 1985 after a brutal and violent struggle. For years, detectives would believe Sherri died during a burglary gone wrong, until decades later a new batch of investigators would discover a much more personal motive and reveal a surprising killer hiding in their ranks.
“This case takes us back to a time in Los Angeles that cops still talk about. LA was different back then and so was policing,” Correspondent Josh Mankiewicz remarked in Dateline: Unforgettable about the memorable case, which was also featured on Oxygen's Real Murders of Los Angeles. “A clue buried in the case file led police to Sherri’s killer. When that name was finally revealed, it surprised even jaded reporters like me.”
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Who was Sherri Rasmussen?
There wasn’t much Sherri couldn’t do. The middle child of three daughters was athletic, tall, and so smart that she skipped two grades in school.
"In kindergarten she was advanced to a place where the teacher would just use her as an assistant,” sister Connie Rasmussen recalled.
By the age of 16, Sherri had enrolled in nursing school in Southern California. Her worried parents helped her buy a condo in Van Nuys in a gated complex with secure parking to ease their fears about the bustling city of Los Angeles.
As a nurse, Sherri quickly rose through the ranks first becoming a nurse supervisor before taking a job at the age of 27 as the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Hospital.
Her career wasn’t the only thing falling into place. Sherri had always longed for a family of her own and finally met the man of her dreams at a party. She became smitten with John Ruetten, a young engineer.
“They enjoyed running, playing tennis,” Connie said. “She was happy.”
About a year after they started dating, the happy couple tied the knot.
“If you look at the wedding pictures you can see in my sister’s eyes how excited and happy she was,” her sister Teresa Lane remembered.
The Crime Scene
But just three months into the marriage, tragedy would strike. On the morning of Feb. 26, 1985, Sherri wasn’t feeling well and called in sick to work.
When Ruetten returned home later that night, he walked in the townhome to find Sherri dead on the floor.
“Her injuries were extensive and disturbing,” said Matthew McGough, the author of the book The Lazarus Files.
It was clear that before her death, Sherri had a brutal fight with her attacker. A nearby vase had been used to bash in her head.
“The blunt force trauma injuries were particularly disturbing,” Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Rob Bub, now retired, explained. “The right side of her face, her eye was swollen and blackened. She was actually pistol whipped, possibly two times.”
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Two of Sherri’s fingernails had been ripped off during the struggle and lay near the front door. She was bitten on her inner left forearm and was shot three times. Detectives discovered a clothesline or a small thin rope near the front door.
There was also a stack of video and stereo equipment near the front door, suggesting someone may have broken in to rob the place and encountered Sherri. Her purse and brand new BMW had been taken from the home, another clue that led detectives to believe they were dealing with a burglary gone wrong.
“I believe your house was burglarized today, sometime before 10 a.m.,” lead detective Lyle Mayer told Ruetten that first night. “I believe they got in the front door by prying open your front door.”
Mayer even told Ruetten during that first interview that he was a “good judge of character” and was “fairly certain” the grief-stricken and emotional new husband had “nothing to do” with the brutal attack.
The Initial Theory
Detectives learned Ruetten had an alibi for the time of the murder, which authorities believed occurred sometime before 10 a.m. He told investigators he left the condo just before 7:30 a.m. that morning for work and saw Sherri, but noted she was still in bed.
The theory that Sherri was killed in a burglary attempt was further strengthened a few weeks later, when two suspects broke into another home in Sherri’s neighborhood, just a few blocks away. A woman reported encountering the two men after she returned home and surprised them in the act.
With her help, police were able to develop two sketches of the suspects, but no arrests were ever made.
The Case Goes Cold
As the years stretched on, the case went cold and whenever detectives did pick it back up they reached the same conclusion that Sherri had been killed by someone, or possibly two people, who had been trying to burglarize the condo.
But Sherri’s family and friends never believed the burglary theory. Sherri’s father, Nels Rasmussen, asked police to check into a disgruntled nurse who had been upset with Sherri after she was passed over for a promotion and investigate Ruetten’s ex-girlfriend, a woman Sherri had told her father had a disturbing habit of just showing up wherever they were. But detectives never did and instead kept their focus on the theory at hand.
In 2001, there was a surprising break in the case. LAPD Detective Cliff Shepard saw that a bite swab had been collected at the time of Rasmussen’s death and requested it be tested for DNA. About a year later, he learned that the swab had come back to an “unknown female’s DNA.”
“That was not what I was expecting,” Shepard said.
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Shepard believed maybe Sherri had been attacked by a male and female burglary team, but before he could dig any deeper, he was pulled off the case to serve on a task force tracking down an active serial killer.
Who killed Sherri Rasmussen?
The case remained cold until 2009, when Detective Jim Nuttall picked up the case for one final look before sending it to the archives. While reading through the case file, Nuttall was struck by one crucial detail that would take the investigation in an entirely different direction. He learned that the stereo equipment stacked by the door had Sherri’s blood on it, meaning she was already dead when the suspect stacked it by the front door.
“She’s dead or dying and if you wanted that stereo equipment you had every opportunity in the world to walk out the door with it. Why stack it and leave it?” he wondered. “At that point, you start to draw the conclusion that murder was the main goal, not the burglary.”
Now, with an entirely new theory of the case, Nuttall and a team of other detectives, including Bub, began to look for a lone female attacker.
They developed a list of five possible suspects and worked to exclude each one through DNA testing, until they came to the final suspect who was surprisingly one of their own.
Stephanie Lazarus had been a detective in the LAPD for years, helping to track down art thieves.
“Her reputation within the department was stellar,” Bub said.
But Lazarus was also Ruetten’s ex-girlfriend. The pair dated while they were at UCLA and continued to date on and off until his marriage.
Before her death, Sherri told her father that Lazarus once came into her home uninvited.
“She was sitting at her dining room table and she heard a noise and she looked up and there was John’s ex-girlfriend standing there in the living room,” Nels told Mankiewicz. “She got up and she told her to get out.”
A friend at work also told police Sherri confided that Lazarus had confronted her at work, telling her that if her marriage to Ruetten didn’t work out, she’d be waiting in the wings.
Ruetten told detectives in 2009 he’d always viewed the relationship as more of a friends with benefits type of scenario, but after he got engaged to Sherri, Ruetten called him and seemed devastated.
“It was very clear that she was trying to tell me that — that, you know, um, she really wanted to be with me,” he told detectives.
He’d later testify on the stand that after the phone call, he went to her place to try to console her and they ended up having sex. He confessed the misdeed to Sherri, who agreed to forgive him.
Rutten told police he had told the original investigators about Lazarus in 1986, even giving them her name and telling them she was a police officer on the force, but it was never followed up on.
Mayer declined an interview with Dateline, but said the family never asked him to look into Lazarus as a possible suspect.
In 2009, detectives arranged to covertly get a sample of Lazarus’ DNA by following her to a Costco and grabbing a drink cup she discarded in the trash. It was a match to the DNA left behind at the crime scene.
Investigators brought Lazarus in for questioning, but she denied having anything to do with Sherri’s murder.
“I mean if you guys are claiming that I’m a suspect, then, you know, I got a problem with that,” she said, before ending the interview and asking for a lawyer.
When she walked out of the interrogation room, she was arrested and charged with murder.
In 2012, 26 years after Sherri was brutally killed, Lazarus was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 27 years to life behind bars.
