prevention program aimed a kids. she was twice name detective of the year. later she worked at internal affairs investigating other officers accused of wrongdoing or corruption, and then promote to the lapd s art theft unit her personal life was good too. in 1996, lazarus go married to another lap detective. together, the adopted a baby daughter. lif both at home and on the jo never seemed better. she was a happy person. she loved what she did for work. she loved her husband. loved their life but in 2009, this hig achieving cop became the focus of a homicide investigation. jim nuttall and his team o three detectives had to be mindful that lazarus had man friends on the force. he husband worked at the same station as nuttall did we were going to work behin closed doors. we were going to
sherri rasmussen. she seemed obsessed with john and jealous of his new wife. she was the woman with the scary eyes, who d been stalking sherri to nuttall, it seemed to ad up. sherri s purse and all o its contents stolen during the crime were recovered soon afte the murder, except for one ite inside the only thing to this da that was never recovered was john and sherri s marriage certificate. after three months of intense secretive investigation, nuttall s team needed one last piece of evidence that would either clear detective lazarus or incriminate her we needed a sample of her dna. our investigators were no cut out for undercover surveillance work.
the crime lab in l.a. fo analysis and 72 hours later, came an answer she was not the donor of th dna profile from the bite. that left just one possible suspect, number five on th list, john ruetten s ex-girlfriend, stephanie lazarus. nuttall called th rasmussens we came home and there was message on our phone from detective that they wanted t talk to us. i thought oh, yeah right. i thought it was just another false hope this is detective nuttall right he said that they wer opening the investigation. nels was upset with me. i was like, detective, where hav you been for the last tw decades. now nels rasmussen explaine it all. how he told detectives back in 1986 that someone wa stalking his daughter, sherri. a woman with crazy eyes. the ex-girlfriend of sherri husband. nels had never know
work after hours. we would never leave a paper trail of what we were doing they even gave lazarus code name number 5. and contrary to police procedure they decided not to tell lap headquarters that their ne suspect was a fellow detective you re doing that to protect her or to protect your investigation from her dual purpose. it woul protect the integrity of the investigation, and if she wa not involved, then nobody woul ever know about it four cops knowingly skirted department rules to investigat one of their own it was a difficult phase of her careers. she was one of us she worked our unit. had worke side-by-side with the people around us. but nuttall and his three fellow detectives didn t waiver. they methodically buil a case by exhaustingly reviewing the original files and interviewing sherri friends and family. it becam clear to them that stephanie lazarus had the means, the motive, the opportunity to kil