According to this witness, the victim's townhouse, with its alarm company sign on the door and its location in plain view of other houses, was an unlikely target for a burglar. Prosecutor Nunez, on February 16, 2012, put his last witness on the stand, a FBI criminal profiler who testified that the killer had staged part of the murder scene to throw off investigators. Detectives had told him that Sherri had been murdered when she interrupted a burglar. After the murder, the idea that Lazarus had killed his wife never crossed Ruetten's mind.
To calm her down, he agreed to have sex with her. The 53-year-old witness described how the defendant had reacted to the news he was marrying Sherri Rasmussen. On February 14, the prosecutor put John Ruetten on the stand. Defense attorney Mark Overland aggressively cross-examined the prosecution's DNA experts in an effort to plant seeds of doubt regarding the reliability of physical evidence this old. He also emphasized how it proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had murdered Sherri Ruetten. Deputy District Attorney Paul Nunez, after showing the jury of six men and six women the murder scene photographs, spent the first week establishing the integrity of the DNA evidence.
#Stephanie lazarus interview trial#
The Lazarus trial got underway on February 6, 2012. Lazarus would await her trial in the Los Angeles County Jail. The district attorney's office charged the retired police officer with first-degree murder. This meant that Stephanie Lazarus was the only person in the world who could have bitten Sherri Ruetten. According to DNA expert Jennifer Francis, the sample from the suspect's mouth matched the crime scene saliva. With Lazarus in custody, an investigator had the opportunity to swab the inside of her mouth for a higher quality saliva sample. This linkage to the murder scene provided detectives with probable cause to take Lazarus into custody. The comparison resulted in a partial DNA match. A DNA analyst compared saliva traces from the soda can to the Rasmussen bite mark residue. That year, a detective who had followed the suspect to a Costco store retrieved a soda can she had thrown into a trash container. In 2009, after Stephanie Lazarus retired from the force as a highly decorated detective specializing in art theft, the cold-case investigators turned their attention to her. While members of Sherri's family suspected that Stephanie Lazarus had killed Sherri, the LAPD, perhaps unwilling to investigate one of their own, stayed with the intruder theory. In 2005, a DNA analysis of the saliva traces swabbed from the victim's bite wound revealed that the killer was a woman. The 1986 Sherri Ruetten case fell into that category. In 2005, the LAPD formed a squad of cold-case investigators who re-opened hundreds of old, unsolved murders that featured biological evidence capable of being DNA tested. That year she married a fellow police officer and shortly thereafter the couple had a daughter. In 1993 the LAPD promoted Lazarus to detective. (From saliva, a forensic serologist at the time could only determine the donor's blood type.) Detectives on the case, thinking that Sherri Ruetten had interrupted a burglar, did not suspect officer Stephanie Lazarus. The Los Angeles County coroner estimated that the 29-year-old victim had been murdered around noon.Ī crime scene investigator, in the era before DNA identification, had the presence of mind to swab the victim's bite mark with cotton and place the sealed evidence in the coroner's freezer.
Dressed in a red robe and a pink T-shirt, Sherri Ruetten had been struck over the head with a heavy vase, tied-up, beaten, bitten and shot to death. At six that evening, John Ruetten returned to his townhouse in the San Fernando Valley to find his wife of three months sprawled on her back on the living room carpet. Stephanie Lazarus also took a day off from the LAPD. On the morning of February 24, 1986, Sherri Ruetten (nee Rasmussen), still employed at the hospital, called in sick. Notwithstanding Lazarus' smoldering objection, Ruetten and Rasmussen were married in November 1985. At one point Lazarus threatened that if she couldn't have John Ruetten nobody could. At the hospital where Rasmussen worked as a nursing supervisor, the jilted, distraught cop confronted her rival. Lazarus responded to the revelation by becoming hysterical.
A year later Ruetten shocked Lazarus with the news that he was marrying a woman named Sherri Rasmussen. In 1984, Stephanie joined the Los Angeles Police Department as a patrol officer. But for John Ruetten, it wasn't a serious relationship. After college, Lazarus and Ruetten continued to see each other and even took trips together. In the early 1980s, Stephanie Lazarus, a student at UCLA, fell in love with John Ruetten who also attended the university.
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