A state parole board panel Thursday recommended parole for a former Los Angeles Police Department detective who was convicted of gunning down her ex-lover’s new wife in 1986 at the condominium where the couple lived in Van Nuys.
The decision was made during the first parole suitability hearing for Stephanie Ilene Lazarus, an art theft investigator and 25-year LAPD veteran who was convicted in March 2012 of first-degree murder for the Feb. 24, 1986, killing of Sherri Rasmussen.
The grant of parole is tentative and subject to review by the state’s Board of Parole Hearings in a process that can take up to 120 days, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Gov. Gavin Newsom could then allow the decision to stand, reverse the parole grant or ask the full parole board to consider the issue.
Lazarus, now 63, is serving a 27-year-to-life state prison sentence.
She retired from the LAPD after being arrested by Robbery-Homicide Division detectives at the department’s downtown headquarters, largely as a result of DNA evidence taken from a bite mark on Rasmussen’s left forearm.
LAPD detectives had trailed Lazarus to surreptitiously get a DNA sample from her in May 2009 by collecting a drink cup and straw she had thrown in a trash can outside a Costco store.
Rasmussen, a 29-year-old Glendale Adventist Medical Center nursing supervisor, was shot three times on Feb. 24, 1986, in the Balboa Boulevard condominium she shared with her husband. Rasmussen had married John Ruetten, Lazarus’ one-time love interest, three months before her death.
Rasmussen’s father, Nels, had insisted shortly after his daughter’s killing that police investigate Lazarus — who had been an officer for two years at the time of Rasmussen’s death — but the case went cold until 2004 when investigators with the LAPD’s Cold Case Unit re-opened the case and asked the coroner’s office to locate the bite mark tissue sample, which had been stored in a freezer in an evidence room since 1986, according to a 2015 ruling by a three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal that upheld Lazarus’ conviction.
DNA testing determined that the major profile was from a female, and investigators turned their attention toward specific women who might have had reason to harm Rasmussen, according to the ruling.
The appellate court panel rejected Lazarus’ claim that the delay in bringing charges against her violated her due process rights. The panel also denied the defense’s claims that a lower court should have quashed search warrants used to search her home and computers and that jurors should not have heard a tape of her being interviewed by LAPD detectives before her June 2009 arrest.
The appellate court panel noted in its ruling that Lazarus’ DNA profile “precisely matched the profile of the person who bit Rasmussen shortly before her death.”
Lazarus had a “compelling motive to kill Rasmussen” because she had been abruptly dropped by Ruetten when he met his future wife, and Lazarus had confronted Rasmussen at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, where the 29-year-old woman worked as a nursing supervisor, the justices noted in the 78-page ruling.
Ruetten and Rasmussen were married in November 1985, a few months after Lazarus wrote Ruetten’s mother that she was “truly in love with John,” the appellate court panel noted.
“The evidence of motive and the circumstantial evidence, combined with the presence of appellant’s DNA on a wound inflicted on the victim during her struggles with her assailant, provided convincing evidence of appellant’s guilt,” Associate Justice Nora Manella wrote on behalf of the panel in its 2015 ruling.
The California Supreme Court refused in October 2015 to review the case against Lazarus.’
After the verdict, then-LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called the case “a tragedy on every level” and apologized for how long it took to “solve this case and bring a measure of justice to this tragedy.”