THE LAZARUS FILES-Matthew McGough

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infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski Good Evening, a deeply reported, riveting account of a cold case murder in Los Angeles, unsolved until DNA evidence implicated a shocking suspect, a female detective within the LAPD's own ranks. On February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty six, twenty nine year old newlywed Sherry Rasmusen was murdered in the home she shared with her husband John.

The crime scene suggested a ferocious struggle, and police initially assumed it was a burglary gone awry. Before her death, Sherry had confided to her parents that an ex girlfriend of John's, a Los Angeles police officer, had threatened her. The Rasmussens urged the LAPD to investigate the ex girlfriend, but the original detectives only pursued burglary suspects and the case went cold. DNA analysis did not exist when Sherry

was murdered. Decades later, a swamp from a bite mark on Sherry's arm revealed her killer was in fact female.

know and when did they know it? Are there other LAPD cold cases with a police connection that remain unsolved. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Lazareth Files, a cold case investigation with my special guest journalist and author, Matthew McGoff. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for a Greenness interview. Matthew McGough, thank you very much. Thank you for Johnny Man incredible. I call it an

old time almost like a classic true crime book. Incredible detail and congratulations on just an amazing edge of your seat book.

years before. So I was really on the story from day one, just because I knew who she was, and I immediately just had this curiosity and desire to first of all, know whether or not it could possibly be true that this female police attective who I've met with could possibly have been harboring a secret like this for her whole career, and the more I learned about the story, the more I wanted to know.

Tell us a little bit about them before we talk about what happened February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty six.

and she had a specialty in cardiac medicine. She was really quite extraordinary, skipped multiple grades when she was a young woman, graduated from college I think began college at age sixteen, so she was really sort of a high flyer. Sherry and John had been married for only three months when she was killed. John had attended UCLA and worked as a engineer in the computer field back in the

mid eighties. As a couple, they lived in, as you said, Van Nives, which is the middle class area of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, and they were, you know, where the murderer heard and where they lived was a condominium complex called about the Balboa Town Homes. It was somewhere where Sherry had lived by herself and then with a roommate for several years before she met John. They became engaged and he moved in with her.

that source material, John left for work. It was a Monday, Sherry called in sick tour and stayed home that day, so he left her in bed when he left for work that morning, and when he came home that evening, when he pulled up to their their condo which had it was a split level condo, so there was a garage two car garage on the ground level and then the first floor of the condo was a living room, kitchen and dining room on the second floor, and the

bedrooms on the third floor. So when he pulled up, the first thing that he noticed that was unusual was that their garage door was open and the Sherry's car was not there. So he went upstairs, discovered her body, called nine one one, and the police arrived shortly thereafter.

to have been ransacked. So when the detectives who were assigned to the case, and you had their names right, it was Detective Lyle Mayer was the lead investigator. He was the more senior detective assigned to the case, and then his partner assigned to assist was a younger, somewhat

less experienced detective named Steve Hooks. They arrived at the condo within an hour or so after John placed his call, had some initial conversations with him, and based on his demeanor, I think concluded fairly quickly that he seemed much more likely to be a witness than the suspect, that he did not have any direct involvement in the murder, and so it was necessary for them to interview him. That

happened a little bit later on that evening. But the detectives, based on their initial impression of the crime scene, the fact that Sherry's car at BMW was missing, and just the condition of the living room living room, there were some there was a drawer of an end table that was pulled and dumped out as if someone was possibly

looking for valuables. There was some stereo equipment that had been removed from an entertainment wall unit and placed near the front door inside the condo, as you know, which to the detectives suggested that Cherry may had been home alone. Burglars had entered on knowing that someone was home and that she had surprised them and the confrontation had turned

violent and then the burglars had fled. So their initial impression, based on John's demeanor and the crime scene, was that this was most likely a burglary gone wrong.

of the initially that their investigation. How did they proceed based on this?

did well that allowed the case to be solved. And not just the detectives, but forensic science personnel from the LAPD Crime Lab which is called Scientific Investigation Division, the people who were there to collect things like fingerprints and bloodstains, and you know, also a similar personnel who work for

the coroner's office there to collect evidence. But the only interviews that the detectives conducted in nineteen eighty six and the way of the murder that were actually tape recorded the way that you know, they had the ability to tape record all interviews, and I think today it's recognized as the best practice to.

best possible chance to solve the crime. So where the shortfalls exist is in what was documented back in nineteen eighty six and conversations that those initial detectives had with people who had information to suggest that it may not have been a burglary, which was their primary theory, possibly a more personal motive. But on paper, there's very very little indication that any of those conversations ever took place.

So what you were referring to is that the protocol is is that they would have all kinds of labeling as to when it was the questioning had been done, who had done it, and what was contained in that those conversations, in those interviews, and that was not as you write in this book. That's one of the features of what happened in nineteen eighty six. And because they were supposed to do follow ups, that's some of the things that were very lacking in terms of what they did in eighty six.

So when I came to the case, you know, beginning in two thousand and nine, after Stephanie was arrested, strategy for trying to get it the truth was to try to speak to people who actually lived through it and try to get their own recollections down so that I could write about the story as as clearly as possible. Through the eyes of the people who who were actually there at the time. So uh, yeah, you're you're correct. The the murder book for your listeners who are unaware

is basically to just demystify it. It's it's a three ring binder essentially, or if a case is very complex or goes on for long enough, it may spill over to multiple three ring binders, but it's a it's a compendium of all the reports, uh and information generated over the life of a homicide case, from the moment that the uh the phone rings at the homicide table that there's a you know that a murder or a dead body has been found or reported through the verdict however

many years later that is and yeah, the murder book would include pretty much everything that is known about a case, with the exception of who did it, which is the point of the investigation. So there's one murder book for each homicide that is committed. The most important document in the murder book is the chronological log, which is referred to in shorthand as the chrono, and that's sort of the running log of every investigative action that detectives take

over the course of the entire case. So it'll begin with the notification that I just described that at this time and this date, detectives were notified that there was a homicide reported at so and so address, and detectives so and so and so and so reported to the

crime scene at this time and date. And then it goes from there, and it should include everything, because the purpose of this document is to allow anyone other than the original detectives to pick it up however much you know, at any point later in the case, even months or years or decades later, and be able to understand this is what has been done to this point. This is you know, these are the scientific reports or tests that

have been completed, these witnesses have been spoken to. This is, you know, maybe a short summary of this is what the witness reported their contact information. If their name is John Smith, you would hope to have a date of birth and an address, because you can just imagine picking up a murder booker a Krano thirty years later and trying to figure out if a witness named John Smith in nineteen eighty six is still alive or where they might be today. So it's a crucial it's a crucial document.

It's the lens through which all later detectives look at the case. So one of the features of Sherry Rascus's case that is troubling is that there appears to be gaps in this original Krano. I interviewed several people who were adamant that they had had conversations with the detectives back then, and there's no record in the Krano or in the murder book that those conversations took place.

notified by anyone except John's father, Richard. What did the police When you talk about the police and the police response, normally the husband becomes for lack of any other suspects, becomes a suspect and they do question him despite that person might be grieving. Let's talk about the questioning, the interview with him, and also the polygraph test that he was asked to take.

a son in law. But Sherry and John's relationship uh uh you know, they met and fell in love fairly quickly in that soon after they met they were a couple.

to well before the murder. So that's one of the elements that possibly exacerbated things after the murder, that there just wasn't a lot of like a baseline of trust between these people who were thrust into this tragic situation not by choice at all, but just by virtue of what happened. So for the Rasmussens, one of the immediate frustrations for them was that they were not notified of the murder, either by the police or by John himself, but that it was John's father who called the Rasmussens

very late that night. Nels and Loretta, Sherry's parents, lived in Tucson, Arizona, where they had raised Sherry and her two sisters, and by the time they received notification that Sherry had been killed, it was already too late at night for them to get a flight to Los Angeles. The last flights from Tucson had already left for the day, so they did not arrive on the scene until mid

morning the following morning. You know, well, I would say maybe eighteen hours after Sherry's body was discovered by John.

And that becomes significant because, as I described a little bit earlier, the detectives really sort of made up their minds almost on the night of the murder, based on their initial impressions of John and the crime scene, that this is what had occurred, that Cherry had been interrupted a burglary, struggled with the burglar, things had escalated, and that it had ended in her murder before the burglars fled.

So when the Rasmussens arrived the next day, they had information from Sherry over the previous several months, going back, you know, six to nine months before her murder, she had been reporting to her parents a series of troubling encounters and incidents with an ex girlfriend of John, who was a Los Angeles police officer, and Sherry was a

fairly private person. She did not talk very openly, even with some of her closest girlfriends, about the issues that were going on in her marriage, but she had told her parents and several of her friends different pieces of this sort of growing problem with John's ex girlfriend, who

Sherry felt harassed and threatened by. There was an incident where the woman had gone to Sherry's workplace and told her that if this marriage doesn't work out, I'm going to pick up the pieces, and a couple of times Sherry had told her parents that the girlfriend had her

ex girlfriend had come to their condo uninvited. John had repeatedly promised that he would not have any more contact with her, but Sherry told her parents that John didn't seem willing to stand up to this ext girlfriend police officer and tell her once and for all that he had moved on from her and to leave him and his wife alone. So there was a big gap in terms of the information that Sherry's parents had and what

the detectives believed happened. And that was all within the first day of the investigation.

the extent of his extent of her injuries. But also that, as we mentioned in the introduction, there was something that under when they did the autopsy, there was something noticed other than the bullet wounds, and we got to talk about the ballistics again, talk about what kind of bullets were found and what kind of make of gun, and

that what that relevance was. But that tell us about the bitemark discovery and this sort of the police overlooking any possibility of a personal connection to this murder.

through a balcony. A glass door to the balcony near the kitchen, shattering that window, and then it seemed likely that Cherry had fled down the stairs either to the front door or to an alarm panel that was on the wall near the front door, and evidently didn't make it to either one. The fight resumed in the front entryway.

There was blood and fingernails that were found on the floor, again indicative of a very intense struggle, a bloody handprint on the wall in that same area, and then to the living room, which is where her body was found, there was a shattered like a heavy ceramic vase that was on the floor that Sherry had been struck with in the head, most likely knocking her out. And before she was shot three times at very close range in the chest, which were any of the three shots would

have been fatal. So it was a very protracted fight. And then what ends up being the key evidence in the case, and so key that if it didn't exist, I think it's fair to question whether or not the case ever would have been solved if everything had played out the way that it did except for this one piece of evidence. It may be that the Rasmussens would still be waiting for justice.

to him to look at her for very long. And one of the things that he overlooked, and that the paramedics who first arrived again, they were focused on checking her vital signs and then once they determined that, you know, once they pronounced her dead, their primary responsibility shifted from saving life to preserving the crime scene and evidence of

what clearly was a crime had been committed. So neither John nor the paramedics who initially examined Sherry's body noticed that on the inside of her left forearm she had

a very pronounced bite mark. And it seems possible, maybe likely, that during this intense struggle she had with her assailants, Sherry may have gotten control of the gun at one point and the assailant may have bid in her on the arm to make her drop the gun, and that would have happened before she was knocked out and incapacitated

and executed. So it was not until later on that night, after John had been interviewed, when the detectives were back at the crime scene with the various forensic hides personnel, that one of them noticed that there was this bite mark on her arm. And you know, to be fair to the detectives and the other personnel who were at the crime scene, we're talking about, you know, February nineteen

eighty six when this murderer occurred. So there was no such thing at that time as DNA evidence detectives or the crime lab, you know, was it had been a practice for quite a while at that time to collect blood evidence, saliva, semen, and to be able to determine whether or what a blood type a person has. You know, abo different percentages of the population have different blood types.

So if you have a very rare if you know your victim is blood type A, and you find blood type OH at the scene, there's a good chance that that could be the suspects blood. And then if you have a suspect and you get him and you test his blood and it's type OH, that can you know, corroborate or eliminate someone as a potential donor and a potential suspect. So yeah, these detectives did not have the

benefit of DNA back then. I want to make that clear that you know, when I interviewed them, they made the point that if they did have DNA back then, they would have solved it sooner, and I can't dispute that, but at that point in time, that's what they were

working with. So it was later that night that the the bitemark wound on her arm was swabbed by a coroner's criminalist forensic technician, and eventually it was stored as evidence in a freezer in the basement of the Morgue downtown LA and stayed there for the better part of two decades while science slowly caught up to it.

just get to the basic question. When they asked if there was any reason for this it, could he think of anyone that might want to do harm to his wife? Did he have any ex girlfriends? She have any girl boyfriends in the class? When he was asked that kind of question, what was John's response in nineteen eighty six.

verbatim in the book. But to paraphrase, John was asked during his initial interview with Lyle Mayer the night of the murder, if Cherry had any problems with an ex boyfriend or if he had any problems with an ex girlfriend the detective should know about, and despite all of the incidents and issues that Cherry had recounted to her friends and family, John answered no without any hesitation, and according to John, it was not until the next day when he was with the detectives at the crime scene

before the Rasmussens arrived from Tucson that one of the detectives mentioned that Cherry had been bidden and the possiblity that it could be a woman, because according to John, the detective said women bite, and that is what prompted him to bring up the uh the name of his ex girlfriend, Stephanie Lazarus, and also inform the detectives that Stephanie was an active duty LAPD officer. But that conversation when John gave them her name and identified her as

a cop, that was not tape recorded. So again it was it was a challenge and sort of a puzzle how I could piece together what happened to the best of my ability, even though some of the documentation was was was lacking. So even with John's polygraph, Grassmussen's told me that they recall hearing about John failing a polygraph

exam the week immediately after Sherry's murder. According to the LAPD's records and detective Mayor who was involved in the polygraph, that did not take place until several weeks later, so it seems that John was not asked any questions during the polygraph about Stephanie Lazarus, his relationship with her, any contacts that she had with Sherry prior to the murder, and all that documented in the detective's notes and reports is that John was unable to complete the polygraph because,

as you said, he.

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for only thirty nine to ninety nine. Go to fabfitfund dot com and use my code murder to get ten dollars off your first fabfit Fund box. Now, Matthew, we spoke about the murder book and the investigation with Lyle Mayer and his idea and other officers in homicide and LAPD that this was a burglary gone mad, are gone bad, I should say, and this case, needless to say, we have to say, goes cold despite everyone's suspicion on may

have known more. That's what Nells, Sherry's father felt that John knew something, knew more, and that Stephanie Lazarth was a good suspect, and Nell's and Loretta and their family did not want to give up. And you also introduced some other characters that were friends of Sherry's that were never interviewed in nineteen eighty six. Tell us how this case proceeds despite it going cold? What happens to renew this case and win? Yeah?

And it was not until you know, more than twenty years later, in two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine time frame, that the case lands back at the Van Nuys division and is reopened by a detective whose name is Jim Nuttle, who has no idea what he's getting into when he opens up this old murder book and notices that there is a DNA report from a few years earlier indicating that the person who bit Sherry

Rasmussen in nineteen eighty six is female. That's all that he knows from the DNA report when he opens it.

But it was enough to catch his eye and make him sit up straight in his chair, because, first of all, very very few homicides are committed by women as opposed to men, and this was a particularly violent and brutal crime, and everything in the chrono and the murder book to that point, apart from the DNA report, indicated that the prime suspects and the only suspects in this murder were these male burglary suspects who were never identified or arrested.

So just from the fact that he had females eliva on the arm of the murder victim told not All that something here doesn't line up. There must have been a wrong turn taken at some point, and that's what inspires him to go back and reinvestigate the case from the very beginning.

I'll just give a very thumbnail sketch of it. Two years after Sherry Rasmussen was killed in Van nine, there was a woman, a twenty six year old woman named Catherine Brayley, who was murdered, and similar to Rasmussen, there were some law enforcement persons of interest in that case and the team of detectives who investigated that case. There's a lot of overlap with the detectives who investigated Rasmussen, and more than overlap, really, you know, the same people.

Both of the detectives involved in Rasmussen were also involved in the investigation of Kathy Brayley's murder. And to this day, Kathy Brayley's murder remains unsolved or family and friends are still waiting for justice and answers about what happened to her. So back in two thousand and eight, Nuttle, you know, Jim Nuttle, was part of the Van Night's homicide unit, which again is not the most glamorous area of LA by a long shot, sort of off the beaten path

and kind of forgotten way out of the limelight. He was not a cold case detective. His primary responsibility was to solve fresh murder cases. But all homicide detectives are encouraged between fresh cases to try to go back and look at old cases, not only to do that for the families that are still waiting for answers.

at that time, Sherry Rasmussen and Catherine Brayley. And Nuddle did not realize the significance of either case at the time, or he probably would have got into it sooner, you know, he had other cases to work, and he ended up basically just keeping holding onto the box for safe keeping for more than a year before he finally had the

opportunity to dig into them. So it was in early two thousand and nine that he pulled the Rascus and Murder book and pretty quickly discovered that there was information here that he could work with, and it did not take him and his squad mates. It was a group of four detectives including Nuddle. Pete Barba, Mark Martinez and Jim Nuttle were the rank and file case carry detectives, and then their supervisor was a more experienced detective, the

homicide coordinators is the name of the position. His name was robbed up, But it was just these four detectives who were working together when Nuddell reopened the case, saw the female DNA report, and then within not very long, you know, matter of days, maybe a week or two tops, you know, they had developed a list of five diff print women in Sherry's life who may have had, you know, either the motive or the opportunity to harm her. And

they're feeling pretty much right away. Based on the crime scene photos, the violent Sherry was subjected to that this was not a burglary at all, that the crime scene had been staged to look like a burglary, but that the motive was far more likely to be personal.

of testing evidence in Sherry Rascussen's murder. The LAPD had formed a cold case homicide unit in two thousand and one, where they basically screened thousands of unsolved murders dating as far back as the nineteen sixties, looking for cases that had a good potential for some of these new scientific tools and advances that had come along since the murders

were committed. DNA, fingerprint databases, ballistics databases. None of those things existed back in like the sixties and seventies, and even you know, it took some time for them to be adopted into the eighties. So she received this case not really knowing very much about it. I'm skipping over some stuff that's in the book, but don't want to

spoil everything. But Francis obtains several evident samples, and when she tests them, she expects that she's going to find blood from the suspect, But all of the DNA results match Sherry's own DNA. So all of the blood that was found and collected at the crime scene in nineteen eighty six turns out to have been the victim's blood, no blood from a suspect. So in reviewing the case file, Francis no, this is a reference to this bitemark swab.

It was taken in nineteen eighty six, and even though she's not a detective, she's a crime lab analyst and a civilian, she is able to put two and two together and realize as well, people don't bite themselves, and so if I can get that bitemark swab, that is going to give me a good chance of getting the

suspects DNA rather than the victims DNA. So it was really just her tenacity, dedication, thinking outside the box, not giving up on this case that she easily could have just set aside because there were other cases waiting for her attention. But she ultimately sets in motion the events that lead to this bitemark slab being unearthed from the freezer where it had been for more than twenty years. She tests it, and she's the one who was the first to know that the person who bit Sherry Rascusen

was a woman. So she had her own suspicions based on that that the motive may have been personal for reasons that are still a little bit murkhy that I hope I'll be able to nail down one day, she reported, that information to the cold case detective who was assigned to investigate, but the case was not pursued. No specific

female suspects were pursued at that time. The case pretty much went dormant again, and it was not until two thousand and nine when Nuttle and his squad mates and Van Eyes reopened it and started talking to Jennifer Francis that the case picked up momentum and the Rascusins, you know, finally got the justice they had been waiting for.

Whereas many of those people were never interviewed or the interviews with Nells were not recorded.

female DNA donor as a suspect. When he speaks to John and asks him were there any women who may have wished to harm Sherry before she was killed, he immediately brings up the name of Stephanie Lazarus, describes her as an LAPED officer and tells Nuddle that he informed detectives of her in nineteen eighty six. Nuddle has all the records in front of him, and there's no record

of that. Then, you know, some days or weeks later, as the investigation proceeds, he has his first conversation with Nels Raspussen and poses a similar question to him, and Cherry's father says, I know who killed my daughter? Was he? Does you know the rap? One of the issues is

that the Raskissons never had Stephanie's name. They knew that there was an ext girlfriend of John's who was an LAPD officer, and they tried to get John to tell them her name, but they never got that information in eighty six, so they did not have that piece of information about her. But Nells couldn't have been clearer in that initial interview in two thousand and nine that he had a pretty good idea who may have killed Cherry, and he was not surprised to learn that there was

female DNA on her body. What was new, I think for the Rasmussens and emotional about that moment, was that they finally had someone who was listening and wanted to know what they had to say. Rather than telling them, we don't care about the information you have, we're telling

you what happened. I mean, the Rasmussens were literally told, or they told me that they were told things like you watched too much television when they tried to tell detectives in nineteen eighty six that there was a female cop who would threatened their daughter. So I tried to have empathy for everyone in the story, even including Stephanie

and John and the detectives. But yeah, what Knowls and Loretta Rasmussen have been through over the last thirty years is incredibly tragic, and it's all the more tragic that you know, there's never been any sort of accountability. You know, all the information that they've gotten, they they had to fight for. And so for me, one of the big reasons to write this book is to, you know, try

to give them answers. Obviously not just them. I live in la I want the LAPD to you know, it has a proud, very complicated history as a police department. I want a great police department in my city. And so I think when you have a failure like this, failing to identify and apprehend a murderer in your own ranks for more than twenty years, it's really imperative to try to look back and say, well, what really went

wrong here? What could be done better? You have to you have to take some lessons from it, or else what's to say it's not going to happen again. So yeah, I hope my book provides the Rastussins with some measure of com for that. There are some answers and information out there that the issue wasn't that they were watching too much TV back then. It was that there was some pretty serious breakdowns and policy and procedure that caused this thing to drag out for as long as it has.

to the detective. What's the most one of the most fascinating parts of this story in this case is is how much the reader, despite all of the detail and all of the I mean, all of the deep investigation that you've done for this, is how much John knew you You keep we did mention that he did mention to the police about the ex girlfriend, but as you read in this book, he omitted some really important details like having sex with this woman on the verger right

around his engagement, and that Sherry knew about this as well.

about his history with Stephanie. So, for instance, again the night of he's interviewed asked are there any ex girlfriends who might be a problem, and he says no, And the next day he does bring up Stephanie's name and that she's a police officer, but minimizes the relationship. When I interviewed Lyle Mayer, he was very adamant that John described her to him as an acquaintance, not an ex girlfriend.

Lyle told me that if John had been honest with him about the extent of the relationship, or if he knew any of these about any of these incidents that Sherry reported to family, that things would have gone a different way. And again, how can anyone we're talking alternative history here, like how things may have played out differently. I didn't want to go to down, you know, I didn't want to go down that rabbit hole because who can say, you know, things unfolded the.

So both of those things cannot be true. And again it's very hard, thirty years after the fact to settle that conclusively. How can I possibly do that? I feel like the best that I can do is present the information as objectively as I can and let the readers draw their own conclusions about who, you know, who has more credibility, who may be telling the truth of what really happened.

stark things that happened without conclusion. And one of the things that you include in this is that from nineteen eighty six to the present, John never called any detective inquiring about the case.

to keep this thing from slipping into oblivion completely. I think John pretty much decided.

cold case unit. And again what I want to stress to your listeners is this is an ongoing story and I intend to continue reporting it, so hopefully I'll get an opportunity to fill in some of the questions that remain unanswered in the book.