evidence. you can t rely on the scientific results. reporter: overland said hair, blood, fingerprints found at the crime scene did not come from lazarus. the shots that were fired? he insisted several other types of guns besides stephanie that could have fired those bullets. as for motive? the defense argued there was no evidence that stephanie lazarus was object sessessed with sherr husband john. john was still calling her and stephanie went to tell sherri, look, you guys are getting married, i m telling him not to call me. reporter: after five weeks, it was up to the jury. loretta and nells rasmussen had waited a long longer than that. the two of you feel confident? as confident as you can be with a jury. you never know what is jury is
focusing his attention on that very same woman who also happened to be a member of the lapd. here is josh man ko witnesskiew more of the smoking gun. for two decades the lapd had two theories that she was killed by a botched burglary and science rewrote the script and this cold case suddenly was almost too hoted to hand to han. the prime suspect was a lapd detective stephanie lazarus. as jim newsall went through the murder book he found almost nothing on lazarus even though she was the ex-girlfriend of the husband of sherri rasmussen. there was only one notation in the criminology in 1986. a detective had written stephanie lazarus. p.o., police officer, as if her
detectives wanted to speak to stephanie to elicit a statement, perhaps a confession, but they would have to do it without revealing how deeply implicated she was in sherri rasmussen murder so another secret plan was hatched. this time to get stephanie s side of the story and all of it would be captured on tape. stephanie lazarus is asked by fellow detectives to help in an interrogation, only to discover she is the suspect. coming up. when dateline continues. when dateline continues. e diamond almonds. oh, come on! sriracha? woo! don t fight your cravings. eat em. all the flavors you crave in a superfood. blue diamond almonds. crave victoriously. geico would like to take a moment to say thank you to our military service members at home and abroad for all their hard work and sacrifice. we all sleep easier knowing you re out there
trail of what we were doing. reporter: they even gave lazarus a code name number 5. and contrary to police procedure, they decided not to tell lapd headquarters that their new suspect was a fellow detective. you re doing that to protect her or to protect your investigation from her? dual purpose. it would protect the integrity of the investigation and if she was not involved, then nobody would mp knever know about it. reporter: four cops knowingly department rules to investigate one of their own. it was a difficult phase of her careers. she was one of us. she worked our unit. had worked side-by-side with the people around us. reporter: but nutall and his three fellow detectives didn t waiver. they methodically built a case by exhaustingly the original files and interviewing sherri s friends and family and it became clear to them that stephanie
prevention program aimed at kids and twice named detective of the year. later she worked at internal affairs investigating other officers accused of wrongdoing or corruption and then promoted to the lapd s art theft unit. her personal life was good, too. in 1996, lazarus got married to another lapd detective. together, they adopted a baby daughter. life both at home and on the job never seemed better. she was a happy person. she loved what she did for work. she loved her husband. loved their life. reporter: but in 2009 this high achieving cop became the focus of a homicide investigation. jim nutall and his team of three detectives had to be mindful that lazarus had many friends on the force, her husband worked at the same station as nutall did. we were going to work behind closed doors and work after hours. we would never leave a paper