The case had remained unsolved until investigators in the department’s cold-case unit, newly bolstered as a result of the city’s plummeting homicide rate, reviewed it as part of a systematic check of old files using technology that was not available at the time of the crimes. Rasmussen was told at one point, “you have been watching too much TV,” and ultimately investigators concluded that the killing had probably resulted from a botched burglary. Ruetten who was a police officer, though he did not know her name. Rasmussen had pressed detectives to look into a former girlfriend of Mr. Rasmussen’s father, Nels Rasmussen, would not comment, but his lawyer, John C. The department is now reviewing the original investigation to determine whether Detective Lazarus was overlooked as a suspect. Her husband of three months, John Ruetten, found the body when he returned to their condo in the San Fernando Valley. Rasmussen and her attacker engaged in a “dramatic” fight, Chief Beck said, before she was shot three times and left for dead. Rasmussen’s car disappeared, along with her marriage certificate, during the attack, family members said. Prosecutors will have the option of pursuing the death penalty because the police assert that Detective Lazarus committed robbery Ms. Now on leave without pay, Detective Lazarus is to be arraigned July 6 and is being held in the county jail without bail.
Detective Lazarus, a 25-year veteran, was a patrol officer then with two years on the force. She definitely did.”ĭetective Lazarus was arrested June 5 at police headquarters and charged with the 1986 beating and shooting death of Sherri Rasmussen, 29, whom Ms. “People can hold dark secrets and hold them very well for a long period of time. “I don’t know that everyone is capable of homicide, but certainly you never know who is capable of homicide,” Chief Beck said in an interview.
Only a few police officers in Chief Beck’s career have been charged with deliberately killing someone off duty, and he never imagined investigating one of his own seasoned detectives for such a crime. She is a Los Angeles police detective, and she has been charged with killing the wife of a former lover more than 20 years ago.ĭeputy Chief Charlie Beck, who supervises hundreds of detectives and has seen his share of sensational crimes in a 32-year career here, is still shaking his head at the whirlwind turn of the case.
To her colleagues, she was a basketball-crazed jokester who threw herself into work but delighted in pranks like kidnapping a stuffed bear for a candy “ransom.”īut to the police and prosecutors, Stephanie Lazarus, the 49-year-old mother of a toddler whom friends and co-workers could not praise enough, is a killer. LOS ANGELES To her neighbors, she was the kindly friend who delivered chocolate-covered cherries at Christmastime and passed hours in the garage building doors and cabinets.
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