SOLVED AFTER 23 YEARS: The Case of Sherri Rasmussen

now that's fine me and you know what you just sleep there i'm going to do some work and support this family your little moocher when you're gonna get a job and start paying some rent huh hey guys it's bella welcome back to my channel i hope you're all having a wonderful day today so i'm going to tell you guys about a crazy case today but before we get into it i just want to thank today's sponsor care of i'm sure you guys are aware that i'm obsessed with care of it's where i've been getting my vitamins and my collagen forever now it's truly just the best and easiest thing ever you go on their website you take a quick quiz on your lifestyle diet health goals and from that they'll recommend a tailor plan for you and you can go on and retake this quiz and get a new tailor plan every time something changes you know maybe pregnancy maybe your health goals change whatever the case may be so the vitamins i take are iron because i have an iron deficiency i also take keratin because it promotes 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off your first month of care of you also just have to use the code isabella so leave all of that in the description down below for you to check out and let's go ahead and get into today's case so today i'm going to be telling you guys about the murder of sherry rasmussen sherry was born on the 7th of february in 1957 to nels and loretta rasmussen she was born in walla walla in washington but her parents raised her and her two sisters connie who was her older sister and theresa who was her younger sister in tucson arizona and they were a very tight-knit close family nels was a dentist and he owned his own practice and loretta worked full-time as the manager there and they did pretty well for themselves throughout her life cheri was known to be a really kind compassionate and gentle girl she attended tucson's seventh-day adventist elementary school and right from the jump she was really intelligent but also very hard working her parents said they never had to tell her to study or go do homework because she was always on it she actually finished elementary school a year early so all of her grade seven course work she actually did in the summer holidays of grade six um and then she went to the thunderbird adventist academy for high school her closest friend in high school emily said she was always happy she was extremely intelligent but she was also like a very serious minded person she just always felt inadequate or like she could be doing more after graduating from high school she got accepted into la sierra college in california and started in september of 1973 when she was just 16 years old her older sister connie was already at college studying to be a nurse and her great aunt was also a very accomplished nurse so she really looked up to both of them and in her freshman year of college she decided to also pursue a career in nursing toward the end of her freshman year she decided to apply to the nursing program at loma linda which is where her sister connie was studying and she got accepted she started in the fall of 1974 and then in june of 1977 her and connie actually graduated at the same time in september of 1978 she decided to pursue her master's degree in nursing at ucla and she was also working as a staff nurse at their medical center to help pay her way through school so it was just a huge workload because on top of having a full set of classes she also had some really intensive training in the form of nurse shifts and i just imagine that she was so tired at the end of each day but she got through it and she was awarded her master's degree from ucla in march of 1980 at just 23 years old and she was officially credentialed as a cardiovascular clinical nurse specialist in august of that year her father nels purchased her condo unit 205 of the balboa town homes in van nuys where she lived with her cat bozo and eventually a roommate to one of her best friends from the ucla medical center named jane and although her dad did pay for it she definitely wanted to be financially independent she didn't want to rely on them so every single month she wrote him a check for the full amount of the mortgage that he would be paying that month the complex was pretty secure as well it was like this six foot high wall that went around the whole complex and then in order to get in whether you were driving in whether you were walking in you had to have a certain little key card thanks to sherry's master degree she was hired by the glendale adventist as director of critical nursing at just 27 years old so she was just killing it in her career and then just a few months after that she met the man that she would eventually marry and up until that point she hadn't really been too interested in dating because she was very focused on her work but it was may of 1984 her friend anita invites her to this party with her fiance and a bunch of her fiance's friends including this one guy named john rutten john was born on the 5th of september in 1958 in eugene oregon to margaret and richard he had three siblings a brother named tom and two sisters named gail and jeannette and he was this like tall good-looking guy he'd grown up in san diego graduated high school in 1977 and enrolled in ucla he graduated from ucla in 1981 with a mechanical engineering degree and got a job as a computer engineer at a company called data products sherry was this tall beautiful accomplished woman and when i say tall i mean tall like she was six foot one she was like a supermodel john saw her from across the room at this party and was like okay wow he went over to talk to her they got along really well um he asked his friend for her phone number so he could call up and ask her out and when he did she invited him over to her condo and cooked him beef stroganoff yum and yeah they hit it off right away john described it as like a love at first sight kind of thing i don't think sherry's family were like the biggest fans of jon but she was clearly very happy they were in love and all they wanted was for her to be happy it wasn't long before they got engaged they got engaged in may of 1985 and instead of an engagement ring they decided to upgrade sherry's car trade the toyota room for something a little fancier and john bought her a 1985 bmw sedan instead they also decided that because they were going to be getting married that it was time for jon to move into the condo so sherry let her roommate jane know jay moved out on july 1st and john moved in pretty soon after that and after he did nells also transferred the ownership of the condo over to john sherry and then on the 23rd of november in 1985 at the first congregational church in pasadena they got married and in mid to late december they went on their honeymoon at sandals beach resort in jamaica before returning home to celebrate christmas with sherry's family in tucson at around christmas john also left his job at data products to work at a new company called micropolis which is like a disc drive manufacturer and so we had some new hours he was going to be working from 8 a.m till 5 p.m just meaning that he would leave for work before sherry did so on monday 24th of february 1986 sherry and john both wake up at about 7am sherry stayed in bed for a while john got up and got ready for work because he had to leave at about 7 20. sherry wasn't feeling the best that day so she decided she was probably gonna call in sick to work she asked john to call her later on in the morning and he left for work at around 7 20 a.m dropped some dry cleaning off and got to work at around 7 50. john tried calling sherry at around 10 a.m and she didn't answer and he tried calling half an hour later and again she didn't answer so he thought um maybe she's just gone into work so he calls her secretary and she says you know i haven't seen her today but i don't normally see her on mondays anyway because she teaches the class today she just goes straight to that class so but it was like a little strange because at home the answering machine wasn't turned on he couldn't leave a message if she had gone into work then she would have turned that on you know this is the 80s you have to manually turn it on she turned it on every time she left the house so it was weird if she had left she hadn't turned that on or if she was home and she wasn't answering his calls sherry's sister teresa also tried calling her office and got her secretary at around 10 am and her secretary told her that she hadn't come in that day because she called in sick later that day john leaves work at around p.m he makes a couple of stops on the way home picks up his dry cleaning he stops at the bank and he gets home at around 6 p.m when john gets home he notices that the garage is open despite the fact that he closed it when he had left and the way that their condo is set up right so there's the front of the condo like the street kind of view of the condo in the complex and then the garage is around the back of the condo and it's in this like communal driveway that they have and they live directly across from these two people and you know they kind of know everyone well enough to say hello have a bit of a chat and these two people their neighbors directly across from them go on walks every single day so they left for their walk at around 8 30 a.m and they noticed that the garage door was closed just like john had closed it but then when they got home from their walk at about 9 45 am they noticed that it was open and there were no cars in the garage so like i said when john gets home the garage door is still up sherry's car is still not there and he also notices a bunch of glass on the driveway from their patio so again the way the condo is set up is at the back of the house is their garage above their garage is this little patio with two glass doors that leads into their bedroom those two glass doors had been smashed and that's what all the glass on the driveway was from just to kind of give you more of an idea of how this place is set up i guess so john's already sketched out by this because it looks like a weird situation not to mention sherry's not there and she always just tells him like hey i'm just popping out or that sort of thing and he had no idea where she was so he parked his car in the garage and in the garage there's a door that leads straight from the garage into the living room he goes inside the house and immediately upon entering he finds the dead body of his wife sherry and she's still in the nightgown that she'd been wearing when he left she was found lying on her back and it was clear that she had been severely beaten both of her eyes were swollen she had lacerations to her head her neck her body her face and she also had a bite mark on her inner left forearm by the time he got there riga mortis had almost completely set in so she had been there for a while and she was so stiff that her arm and legs were kind of slightly off the ground john rushes over to her immediately and she's stiff she's cold to the touch but still he's trying to find a pulse he's trying to help her he calls 9-1-1 and police and paramedics arrive soon after and they start gathering evidence they carry out a sexual assault kit they get swabs of the bite marks they start trying to gather fingerprints from around the scene dna samples from the blood around the scene because it's like a bunch of blood around the scene on top of the injuries i've already mentioned investigators find that she has these abrasions on her wrist which shows that she had been tied up with either a rope or a cord of some kind and they actually do find some rope and some cord that are just near the front door there was an injury on her head that was consistent with a broken vase that was found just near her body two broken pieces of her fingernails were found near the front door indicating that she put up one hell of a fight and was fighting so hard that her fingernails broke off it was also found that she had been shot in the chest three times which despite all of her other injuries was determined to be her cause of death they found one exit wound on the back of her body so one of the bullets had gone straight through her the other two bullets were recovered from inside of her body and they were determined to have been shot from a 38 caliber handgun on a chair in the living room they found a colorful quilted blanket which had two holes in it as well as powder burns so it was determined that this was likely used as a muffler for the sound of the gunshots two of the shots were fired at close range so they would have held the quilt up to her held the gun to that and then fired and then the other third shot was fired from a distance like from across a room okay so i'm going to read you guys a little bit of the detective's logs from when they arrived at the scene two ligature type items small rope with blood and a speaker wire lie on the entryway tile floor and partially on the living room rug two fingernails lie on the entryway top floor near the front door to the right is a closet door with blood smeared a foot or so from the floor continuing inside the wall protrudes slightly and more smeared blood appears near the light socket on the wall west from the light socket on the brown tile floor blood is smeared on the floor just past the light socket is a door leading to the downstairs garage partially ajar blood is smeared approximately halfway up the store beside the door leading to the garage was a short carpeted staircase to the second floor at the base of the staircase on the bottom was a filco vcr and on top of that was a sony digital disc player a bloody fingerprint appears on top of the disc player continuing in a westerly direction is a single end type table with a lamp the drawer to this table has been completely pulled from the table and the contents have been partially dumped on the floor on top of this sherry and john had recently installed an alarm system and near the alarm system there was also a hand print of blood indicating that sherry had tried to trigger the alarm let somebody know that she needed some help but didn't quite make it also inside the house it was very evident that there was quite a struggle in the lounge room they had these like tall stereo speakers and one of them had been completely pulled from the wall all of the wires had been pulled out and it was just lying on the floor near sherry's body shelves upstairs were knocked over as well as the glass patio door had been smashed as i mentioned but there were no signs of forced entry into the house the lead detective on this case was detective lyle mayer and look to be honest he did not do the best job he basically said alright boys this is a burglary gone wrong let's wrap it up in recent months there had been a few burglaries in the area and then two months after the murder there was this really similar burglary that happened just down the road it was carried out by these two latino males who had a handgun and it was very similar situation so they both lived in these big complexes with the security walls um they both had the same sort of setup at the condo the garage that led directly into the living room and then at both burglaries it seemed like they were trying to steal a stereo equipment you know as i mentioned at sherry and john's condo there was a vcr player and a disc player that was stacked on top of each other at the base of the stairs so police basically theorized that they'd come here to steal this stereo equipment they didn't realize sherry was home when they found out sherry was home she like came downstairs and was like what the hell's going on they killed her in the moment of everything they forgot to take all of the stuff that they had originally come there to steal and left with nothing except the car they left in the car and the car was found about 10 days later two and a half miles away from the condo and the keys were still in the ignition everything looked completely untouched there actually was one thing that was taken and it was john and sherry's marriage certificate and i don't know i'm no detective but i feel like this would be a massive clue for me right such an obscure thing to steal like for what purpose would anybody need their marriage certificate it also just seemed like the house had been staged to look like a robbery you know nothing had actually been taken things had just kind of been knocked over they didn't even grab jewelry you know like sherry had a jewelry box at home they didn't take anything from it it just seemed really strange like how are you gonna go there for the sole purpose of stealing and then not steal anything so anyway police are like okay these two latino males robbed this other house they drew up a sketch of these guys and they were like okay that's probably our guys let's look for them case closed i mean obviously they had a little look into john to just look like they were doing their jumps i guess because you always have to look into the spouse but he had no motive they'd been happily married for three months by this point and in fact just the day before was their three-month anniversary and john had purchased her three roses for three months he also had an air tight alibi he'd been at work all day multiple people could confirm this sherry's parents nels and loretta were told about the murder at about 1am and immediately sheri's father nels is like you need to check out john's ex-girlfriend he actually didn't know her name sherry had never told him a name but sherry and nels were really close they spoke on the phone almost every single day and on a few occasions she had brought up john's ex-girlfriend because she was a nutcase she was also an lapd officer and when he told detectives about this they literally told him to stop watching so much television so let me tell you a little bit about john's ex because she was an absolute doozy her name was stephanie lazarus and as i mentioned she was an lapd officer she was born on the 4th of may 1960 in santa monica to shelton and carroll and she and john met at ucla when john was a sophomore and stephanie was a freshman and they both lived on the top floor of dixter hall and a bunch of people on this floor all became friends stephanie was athletic she was on the junior varsity basketball team she was a bit of a prankster and she was like a very outgoing person and from my understanding stephanie and john were on very different pages about what kind of relationship they had stephanie was really into john but john didn't seem to notice that he also just thought they were really good friends they made out a couple of times during college but never had sex they went on trips to san diego together stephanie became really good friends with john's mother margaret with his brother tom with his sister janet and even some of john's family got some mixed vibes about what their relationship was as i mentioned john graduated from ucla in 1981 and he got an apartment at canoga park and then summer after he graduated he and stephanie slept together for the first time stephanie graduated in 1982 with a degree in political science and sociology and after she graduated they continued to hang out they saw each other maybe like two three times a month um they would occasionally have sex they would sometimes take trips together sometimes stephanie would stay the night at john's place when stephanie graduated from ucla she went into the lapd and when she finished the lapd academy training she bought a new condo john and his brother tom were the ones who helped her move in paint the whole place like they really did seem pretty close stephanie threw him a surprise birthday party for his 25th birthday all the while john is seeing other people he's been seeing other people the whole time because he thinks that he and stephanie are just kind of friends who mess around sometimes you know nothing ever really comes of these dates and so he always ends up messing around with stephanie again he thought it was obvious that they were just friends so he never bothered like speaking to her kind of asking her what she thought about the relationship because he thought it was a really obvious that it was just kind of like a friends with benefits sort of situation stephanie was well aware about the fact that he didn't feel for her the way that she felt for him and she was always you know complaining about it to her friends and how it upset her and writing about it in her journal and that sort of thing but she never told john about it anyway on the 4th of june in 1985 stephanie finds out that john and sherry are engaged and she's devastated because all this time she was hoping that one day her and john would end up together this is actually what she wrote in her diary from the day that she found out we didn't do much i didn't really feel like working i found out that john is getting married i was very depressed this is very bad my concentration was negative 10. so that night stephanie calls john she's crying she's like i really need to see you can you please come over and john agrees and remember this is still june of 1985. sherry and john haven't moved in together yet i don't think sherry knows about stephanie and john definitely doesn't tell sherry that he's going to see stephanie when he gets to stephanie's house she's still crying he says he's known her for seven years and he's never seen her that upset and she starts confessing her love for him and she's like you know i love you i've loved you all this time and i just couldn't let you get married without telling you jon felt like he was really clear about the relationship about the fact that they were just friends and he told stephanie he didn't feel the same way and stephanie was like okay but can i just sleep with you one last time and john agrees and he sleeps with her and he rationalizes it by saying oh you know i feel really bad that she doesn't have any closure and it's my fault if i just sleep with her she can get some closure he's engaged by this point mind you i don't know the whole thing seems kind of sleazy to me you've been sleeping with this girl for seven years despite the fact that you don't feel the same way about her as she feels about you even though she knows that um you know obviously she's not going to be the one to cut it off with you because she likes you so it seems kind of mean to continue to sleep with her and not make things very very clear and now you've cheated on your fiance but i digress so fast forward a month or two to july or august in 1985. on one of her days off stephanie decides to pay a little visit to the glendale adventist medical center which is where sherry works if you remember she was apparently wearing a really provocative outfit like these little tiny sports shorts and a little tiny tank top she asked sherry's secretary of sheri's in she's not she's at lunch so she sits and waits and she sees sherry coming back and she goes up to her and she's like hey can we have a little chat they go into sherry's office they close the door they're in there for a couple of minutes and then stephanie leaves and sherry's still in there she comes out a little while later and it's very clear that she's been crying her secretary said that she was visibly upset and she decided to go home even though it was only the middle of the day because she was so upset so cheri calls her parents that night she tells them what happened she told them john's actually come to visit her at the hospital and that she told her if i can't have him nobody can she said when their marriage failed that she would be there to pick up the pieces she also told them that she was dressed in a very provocative outfit which sherry felt like she was doing to show off the fact that she was athletic and was in good shape nells could just tell that sherry was devastated and really upset about the whole thing when john got home sherry told him all about stephanie's little visit and she also told him something that she didn't tell her parents she told him that stephanie had told her that john had gone to her apartment and they had had sex john admitted that they had sex he said he'd made a terrible mistake and not to let it ruin what they had which if she did choose to break it off would she really be ruining what you guys have or would it have been you by sleeping with her i don't know anyway he begged for sherry's forgiveness she forgave him and he didn't contact stephanie again he didn't even contact her about the hospital incident a little while later on the 6th of august stephanie sent john's mum a letter you heard that right john's mom she sent her a letter to be fair john's mom did send her a letter first with a couple of photos in it and she just felt like she was unable to reply she was so devastated about john so let me read you this letter dear mrs rutten i wanted to thank you for the pictures the reason it has taken me so long to respond is because i had to build up my courage for now i don't know when or if i'll ever see you or your family again i do want you to know a few things though i'm truly in love with jon and this past year has really torn me up i wish it hadn't ended the way that it did and i don't think i'll ever understand john's decision i do want you to know that your family has meant so much to me i really have learned a lot from your family and hope someday i can find something that i care for as much i hope if you ever need anything you'll contact me love always stephanie p.s say hello to your husband and janet um but it doesn't end there it gets even crazier because sometime between december of 1985 and january of 1986 stephanie randomly shows up at sherry and john's condo unannounced uninvited she brings a pair of skis and she's like john oh john can you please wax my skis for me sherry told her dad that night that she felt really uncomfortable that stephanie stayed a lot longer than she would have liked her to and that sherry had to be the one to ask her to leave because john didn't have the balls to do it himself she also asked john not to take the skis but he did and then she asked him not to wax the skis but he did and he was like if i just wax the skis that'll be the end of it and she'll leave us alone forever i don't know if he was really dumb and truly believed that or if he's kind of a sleazeball i don't know the next week stephanie shows up again uninvited she didn't tell them that she was coming and sherry was honestly confused by how easily she was even getting to their condo because you know they lived in a gated complex you needed a key card to get in she had no idea how stephanie was just showing up like that sherry said that this one was a shorter visit she took the skis and she left and later on nells thought about this and he didn't realize it at the time but looking back he was like you know maybe she wasn't there just to get her skis wax or even just to see john maybe she was there so she could get an idea of where john and sherry lived and kind of scoped the place out and like i said sherry never told her father stephanie's name she always just referred to her as john's ex-girlfriend so nels is telling the police like check out the ex-girlfriend check out the ex-girlfriend i know she's an lapd officer i don't know who she is ask john like just go and check this woman out anyway that um that actually wasn't the last incident with stephanie so there was another time it was a weekday in january mid-january and sherry decided to stay home a little bit later than she normally would before heading into work john had started his new job already so he'd left for work and at around 10 a.m stephanie randomly shows up in their living room inside the house sherry didn't hear her enter she had no idea how she got in and she was also in uniform so it just seemed like she was like on a break or something on a work day when sherry was like uh what the frick stephanie was like oh i'm here to see john and sherry was like get out of my house and don't come back sherry told her dad that night that john didn't have the will to stand up to her which is honestly so pathetic sherry and nels did speak about possibly reporting the incident but cheryl was just worried that it would inflame the situation that if she went to lapd and was like hey one of your officers is harassing me that they would just laugh at her and honestly it's sad that she had to feel like that you know lapd is very like they look out for their own they protect their own people so she had reason to feel like that but it's just sad that she had to sherry also told her parents that she felt like she was being followed there was this one specific incident and they were out for dinner john and sherry on a friday night and it was at this like open plan restaurant and she saw this person who was just looking at her and when that person noticed that sherry had spotted them they moved to a different spot and she told her father that it was somebody who was dressed like a boy which obviously you wouldn't say that if they were a boy so i think that indicates that it was a female that was following them also at around the time that jon moved into sherry's apartment they started getting these like random calls and they would get this call like once a week for a couple of months where somebody would call the home phone they'd pick up and nobody would answer and they just hang up and they never found out who it was now on top of all of this rat at stephanie's condo she had a roommate named michael hargraves and she would talk to him all the time about all of this stuff how much she liked john she said she was in love with john and john was like her standard right she was really picky because she wanted a tall athletic handsome man just like john she came home one night crying that she was devastated and said that john dumped her she also told him about the time that she showed up to the hospital to visit sherry and said she wasn't that good looking and he ended up moving out two weeks before the matter my sweet beautiful oh oh oh oh oh oh mia are you okay so there have been all these incidents and nelson's like please just look into the ex-girlfriend we don't think this was a burglary and the detectives are like did you hear something i didn't hear anything detective maya doesn't interview stephanie once he doesn't write her name down in their case notes he doesn't write down the multiple times that both nels and john have brought her name to their attention and he never considers her a suspect there's also this document that lapd used in every single homicide investigation called the chrono or the chrono it's a chronological log and it documents all investigative activity day by day sometimes minute by minute and it basically has everything you need to know about a case so if a detective retires another detective needs to pick up the case whatever it's all there in this document these documents are usually eventually typed up but they always keep the handwritten version as well and something very sketchy about this case is that they lost the first three months of the chrono original handwritten document from this case or lost should i say and after that burglary takes place two months after the murder basically the whole chrono is just about that and trying to find these two suspects from that burglary so the only mention of stephanie and all of these case notes in the whole case file is this one little note that says john rutten called stephanie lazarus verified pio was former girlfriend after this the case kind of goes cold it doesn't get closed but they don't really look into it because they're just like yeah it was a bad glory over the next few years the rasmussen's regularly contact the lapd trying to get updates on their daughter's case in 1993 the lead detective on the case detective mayor actually retires and they're like yes maybe we can actually get somewhere get somebody who cares about the case at around the same time all of this new dna testing technology is coming out it's this massive thing a bunch of cold cases are getting reopened they're getting solved and nels is feeling really good he's hoping they can get some dna testing done in his daughter's case and it might get them a new lead or something so he makes an appointment to meet the new detectives on the case and they meet up and they basically tell him we've had no new leads this is a burglary we don't have the funds to do dna testing we don't have any suspects anyway to test the dna against and nels is like i'll pay for it i'll pay for the dna testing and they're like no no thanks not interested and they basically told him to move on with his life and the case went cold again over the following years john and stephanie end up getting together again and before they do john calls up the detectives on the case and he's like hey i just want to check that there's no connection with stephanie and my wife's case like there's no possibility that she was involved i mean to me if you suspect her enough to call detectives to clear your conscience then you probably know that you shouldn't be doing this anyway like maybe you know what you're doing is a little bit weird but they went on a scuba diving trip to hawaii together with a couple of college friends they also ended up sleeping together twice after sherry's death they never got together in any sort of formal relationship they lost contact stephanie ended up marrying another lapd officer named scott young in 1996 and together they adopted a daughter john also moved on with his life and started a family and got married honestly if i was sheri i'd be haunting them from my grave if someone put me through all of that grief in my relationship i mean i probably would have left but if for some reason i didn't and this person who has done all the stuff put me through so much grief in my relationship and my husband ends up going and getting with them after i'm dead oh it's over it's over for you both in the years following sherry's death stephanie really makes a name for herself she gets up the ranks at the lapd and she's really well respected and a highly revered officer she started by working at dare which is the drug abuse resistance education department she talks at schools and she even appeared on an episode of family feud where they ran like a week-long special of america's finest she then went on to work in the internal affairs unit which is the unit responsible for investigating fellow officers their corruption if they're doing anything wrong or shady and i mean the irony of that right in 2008 she started working for the department of art theft and fraud which is in the commercial division of the lapd it's a very high profile position there's a lot of press there's a lot of attention stephanie had never faced a disciplinary hearing in her career she had been named detective of the year twice and she was just a very well respected woman eventually in 2001 the lapd cold case homicide unit is established now because dna testing has started making all of this progress there's all of this new dna technology the lapd were given a 50 million dollar budget to use for dna testing to go back and look at cases again that have sufficient evidence so they're looking through all of these cold cases and in 2003 a detective submits sherry's case to the crime lab to get some of the dna tested it doesn't get picked up until december of 2004 by a lab technician named jennifer francis and she starts looking into it she tests the blood the fingernails and it all comes back as sherry's dna sherry's blood she then goes to test the saliva swab from the bite mark on sherry's arm and at first she can't find it anywhere like it took the coroner's office six hours of looking through their freezers to find it in the back of the freezer and it had been sitting there for 18 years but anyway they do get it um it's really hidden it's like they tried to get rid of all of this evidence but they accidentally forgot this one piece in the back of the freezer and she sends it off for testing she gets the results back in 2005 and january of 2005 and it's actually a female's dna she then runs it through the computerized criminal database comes back with no matches and she's like okay this is really weird so she contacts the detective on the case and he's basically like okay um it was probably just a female burglar or maybe there was two maybe it was like a female helping out her male burglar francis has had a look through the case files and she sees that there's this one woman's name who pops up over and over again she's another nurse at the hospital sherry was working at and she says what about this other woman and she just refers to her as other woman she doesn't bother saying you know this other nurse or whatever because it's just this one woman that's kind of popped up over and over and over again and the detective replies and he goes oh the lapd officer nah she's not involved in this he didn't mention stephanie's name to francis he just said that the victim's husband had an on-again off-again relationship with an lapd officer and francis was like okay what because she didn't even see any mention of this police officer and she wasn't even referring to this police officer when she asked about the other woman like there's hardly any mention of her in the chrono or chrono just this one tiny little note of her so it wasn't even like a thought in francis's mind i just think it was weird that when somebody mentions a woman in a case and that's immediately what your mind goes to when you immediately dismiss it like that's so shady to me but anyway he pretty much dismisses the case says it was probably just a female involved in the burglary and the case goes cold again it wasn't until the 2nd of february in 2009 that the case gets picked up again and this time by a detective named jim nuttle he starts going through this box of cold case files and he comes across sherry's file he reads the file he reads that they think it's a burglary that two men are involved and then he reads the dna that came back and sees it's a females and he's like okay something's not adding up here you know finally a guy with common sense right so he takes this to his supervisor robert bubb and he actually takes this seriously and he assigns two more detectives to the case mark martinez and pete barbara so they start looking through the case notes and they put together a list of five women who have been mentioned in these case notes and they want to eliminate them they want to compare their dna to the saliva swab and three of these women are eliminated pretty quickly her mother loretta her sister teresa and her roommate jane the fourth name on the list was a nurse named deborah putnam and she and sherry didn't really get along i think sherry actually took her job but they managed to get some dna off something that she had discarded and eliminated her which left just one name left on the list and that name was stephanie lazarus it's a little scary for them actually because like i mentioned she's this really high up well-regarded well-respected police officer she's got a lot of connections they start looking into her in private they actually work in the same building as her just across the hall from her so they've got to do this on the download they give her a code name which is number five they don't leave a paper trail and they don't tell anybody who's not working on the case about the case you know as i've mentioned the lapd has some issues with protecting their own covering things up for their own people and then i want to be embarrassed if it turns out she had nothing to do with it they didn't want there to be a chance of a cover-up none of that sort of thing they find out during their investigation that during the mid-80s lapd officers actually had 38 caliber guns as their backup guns or their off-duty guns and if you remember a 38-caliber gun is what was used to shoot sherry they put stephanie's name into the state gun registry and they find out that 13 days after sheri's murder that stephanie has reported to the santa monica police department that a blue bag has been stolen from her car inside this blue bag is some cassette tapes some clothes and you guessed it a 38 caliber five shot smith wesson revolver i mean it's super sketchy because she didn't report this to her own department she only reported this to the santa monica police department and this was 13 days after sherry's murder it does mean for these detectives that they can't prove or disprove that this was the gun that was used to kill sherry so they're pretty reliant on getting stephanie's dna so for the next week they have undercover officers following her in the hopes you know she drinks something puts it in the bin and then on the 28th of may 2008 she goes to costco with her daughter she gets a pizza she gets a soda after she's finished eating and drinking she throws the stuff in the bin and she leaves and as soon as she is out of view detectives go into that bin they pick out that soda cup and they go and send it off for evidence and when it comes back it is an exact match to the saliva from the bite mark on sherry's arm so after they get this information back robert barb and jim nuttall take this case to two detectives who don't know stephanie they're quite new and so they don't have any bias which is very important in this situation the detectives are dan jaramillo and greg stearns they take this to the d.a and organized to get a warrant for her arrest and then on the 5th of june in 2008 it's all happening so they want to keep things kind of on the down low they don't want to arrest her in the middle of lapd headquarters and make this big scene so they staged this fake interview down in the jail in the lapd headquarters which is in the basement and it's really smart because in order to get down to the jail you actually have to relinquish your guns so she was going to be unarmed so they go up to stephanie and they're like look we have this guy down in the jail we want to interview him because he has some information relating to an art theft can you come and give us a hand and she's like sure thing so they take her down there into an empty interrogation room because this perp who has some information on art theft is not real and they interrogate her for over an hour the whole hour and 10 minutes is actually up on youtube so if you guys are interested i'll link that down below for you to check out i don't want to talk about this in the squadron because i don't know who people are listening and if we go to my side everybody's always wondering what everybody else is doing okay but uh like we're talking about being business that we've been assigned a case that we've been looking at okay it's a new case and reviewing the case there's some notes to see as far as your name being mentioned oh okay do you know john rutin john john rutten oh yeah i went to school with him lived in the dorms for i was in the dorms for two years um you guys lived in the same dorm yeah okay yeah dijkstra okay were you guys just friends or anything else or yeah we were good friends yeah was there any relationship or anything to develop between you guys yeah i mean we dated uh you know um i mean is it what's this all about well it's relating to uh his wife okay okay did you know her not really i mean i knew that he got married years ago uh-huh did you ever meet her god i don't know i i may have met her um jeez i mean are you guys is this something i mean you said i was going to interview somebody about art and how you guys are here's i mean stephanie here's the situation it's basically we you know we knew that this when we saw this in the in in this chrono that maybe you know there was some relationship there that's what the chrono seemed to indicate and we didn't want to come up to you at your desk and ask those kinds of questions or do anything you know how up there people can see what's going on if you go into an interview room or people are in there getting supplies so we wanted to afford you some privacy some confidentiality to talk about this because we thought it might be you know something you know you're married to someone else obviously and so forth and that you may not want to you know talk about these things in that setting where someone you know we don't want the rumor mill or gossip or any of that kind of stuff it's fine i mean you know i don't it was kind of a weird relationship i mean we we we dated um i can't say that he was my boyfriend i don't know that he would have considered me his girlfriend um we just we dated we did things i played sports in college he played basketball his brother played basketball um we just you know it just didn't work out have you ever met his wife i may have do you know do you remember her name or anything or um um or what she did for a living or where she worked or anything about her well i think she i'm gonna say that i think she was a nurse um and i can't even remember how he said he met her uh yeah i mean i i yeah i mean it's been so long ago well do you know what happened to his wife yeah i know she got killed what did you hear about that like i saw a poster at work um i'm sure i spoke to him about it do you know where he moved after did he move after he got married or do you know or oh i'm sure he did did you know where he was living or somewhere in the valley but you didn't have any issues with her right no i mean you know obviously if he was dating me and dating her i probably said hey pick or something you know you know back then i can't say that we ever screamed or yeah you know it's i mean he was a pretty mellow guy you know um i think i was pretty mellow i don't i don't think we had some big huge blow up to say you know why we stopped dating or you know well one of the concerns i had looking at some of the notes is some of sherry's friends said that you and her were having a problem because of the john situation that's why i'm asking as far as what the friends are saying in regards to this you know the problems that they're saying you were having with with sherry i mean it seems like the relationship is just going on even playing that just uh i i i don't have a recollection of that at all no no and because from what you're telling me is when you guys met at the hospital i mean you guys talked but it wasn't from what you recall confrontational from either side i i mean i'm trying to you know turn my memory back you know and i'm trying i can't even i can't even picture the you know picture the the conversation i mean i can't even picture the conversation well let me ask you i mean at the hospital it never got to the point where people were going hey hey you know go to everybody go to your own corner type of thing i don't think so nothing like that i don't think so so if we ask you to point to give us a dna sample a buckle swab so we can identify or eliminate you should be willing to do that maybe because i know this i i i that's what we're at too i mean because right now from looking at the evidence it's you know it's possible we may have some dna at the location that's great and we're going to do what we can to try to put this thing together and your name's in the book these people are pointing at you for whatever reason i don't know why that's just crazy i mean that's just that's absolutely crazy and it would be irresponsible in our part not to look at it i know you guys have to do your job and i guess i'm gonna have to contact somebody so that's fair i mean because i know how this stuff works i mean i i i i just can't believe it that's i mean we understand that i mean if we were in your position i mean we would feel the same way i just can't even believe it i mean it's just i mean i'm shocked i'm really shocked that somebody would be blame saying that i did this i mean we had a fight so i went and killed her i mean come on that's stephanie you know you have the right to remain silent do you understand yes anything you say may be used against you in court do you understand yes you have the right to the presence of an attorney before and during any questioning do you understand yes if you cannot afford an attorney want to be appointed for you free of charge before any questioning if you want do you understand yes if you want to talk to us right now no all right okay this is crazy this is i'm like i'm like in shock i'm totally in shock they have to be really careful here because she's a cop she knows her rights she's been a cop for a really long time so they kind of just have to act like they're having a casual conversation they say to her oh do you know john rutin and they say his name wrong and she's like oh um john rutten and they're like yeah that's the one and they're like look we're looking into his case we know he's an ex-boyfriend of yours we just kind of want to get more of an understanding of the case so we wanted to ask you about it we didn't want anyone to overhear and maybe start a bit of gossip because this might be a sensitive subject to you we're not interviewing you you're free to go at any time you're not under arrest but what she didn't know is that if she left at any time there were officers waiting outside to arrest her immediately towards the end of the interview they're like hey can we get a dna sample from you we just want to eliminate you you know tick all of our boxes do our due diligence and she gets a bit defensive and she's basically like wow i can't believe you're accusing me i want to talk to my lawyer before i give you a dna sample and she leaves and they arrest her a few days later she is formally charged with murder she pleads not guilty and her bail is set at 10 million which was like nobody was expecting it to be so high but obviously she's a massive flight risk not only that but her husband is an lapd officer so it could be a really messy situation if she has all of this access to firearms and guns her trial started on the 6th of february in 2012 and stephanie this whole time is claiming that she's innocent so we don't exactly know what truly happened to sherry but the prosecution basically theorized that sherry is upstairs in her bedroom and stephanie gets into the house somehow whether the front door is unlocked because john can't remember if it was unlocked or if it was locked or if stephanie picked the locks because it came out in the trial that in the months leading up to the murder stephanie had been showing off all of her little lock picking tools that she had gotten they found out that she had these two books called the complete guide to professional locksmithing and modern locksmithing and there was also an entry in her journal from the week of the murder about lock picking so there's that so this could definitely explain why there was no forced entry so anyway she gets inside she finds sherry upstairs in her bedroom and she takes a shot and the shot goes straight through her and it penetrates the patio glass doors which is why they're shattered because they were shattered from the inside out which is why all of the glass was on the driveway outside they then have this big struggle we don't know exactly what happened but can only assume that it's really big because the house was a mess there was stuff everywhere pulled down from the walls there was a bite mark there's fingernails that have been ripped off but at some point stephanie gets her gun and using the quilt to muffle the sound of the gunshots she shoots sherry twice in the chest killing her also something i haven't mentioned yet is that it was actually determined that the bite mark on sherry's arm was likely caused while she was dying or after she was already deceased which i just think is insane during the trial it also came out that stephanie had three days off at the time of sherry's murder so she had no alibi it also became clear during this trial just how much misconduct there was in this case the lapd looks after their own and that is exactly what they did they didn't interview stephanie they didn't look into her they didn't even write her name down in the case notes and like if you thought she was innocent why not just interview her and rule her out obviously they knew something sketchy was going on otherwise why would they have tried so hard to cover her name up and erase it from this case i mean there was three months missing of this chronological log in this case and not only that but the amount of times people brought up john's ex-girlfriend and her name was only mentioned once in this tiny little note something's not adding up they actively tried to hide evidence in this case and they also destroyed dna so that it couldn't potentially get back to her i mean that's why it was so hard to find that vial with the saliva swab in it it seems like they were trying to destroy evidence but they just forgot about this in the back of the freezer and that's why it sat there for 18 years it's honestly like they believed that she did it or they knew that she did it and that's why they tried so hard to erase her name from the case by the end of the trial the jury deliberated for just over 24 hours and on the 8th of march in 2012 they came back and found stephanie lazarus guilty of first degree murder on the 11th of march the judge sentenced her to 27 years to life in a state penitentiary with an extra two years for personal use of a firearm but she was credited over 1 000 days for good behavior and time already served which i personally just don't think is good enough like she murdered this woman in cold blood stephanie immediately launched an appeal but she was denied and the conviction was upheld the rasmussen's actually tried to sue the lapd for their mishandling of the case and the fact that they had brought stephanie to their attention so many times and they never looked into her and turns out she was guilty unfortunately though the statue of limitations meant that they couldn't sue them after 1998. and that is all of the information that i have for you guys on this case i would love to chat with you in the comments down below about your thoughts because i think this is such a crazy one i mean great she got 27 years to life but i still just don't think it's enough i don't think she should have been credited those thousand days of time already served and it's just so sad that she got away with this for over 20 years purely because the police didn't want it to be one of their offices like this is not some petty crime this is a murder i hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your day and hopefully i will see you in my next video bye guys

Channel: Bella Fiori

Views: 807,611

Rating: 4.949317 out of 5

Keywords: stephanie lazarus, lazarus files, the lazarus files, the lazarus interrogation, stephanie lazarus interrogation, mystery monday

Id: jeK1UZe5noA

Length: 52min 25sec (3145 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021