least some of them may have had a motive to harm her. three of them we eliminated for insufficient motive. reporter: two names were left. one was a co-worker. a woman named debra, she was replaced by sherry rasmussen in an official capacity and problems followed after that. reporter: there was bad blood between them. there was a motive. debra moved to northern california and he asked law enforcement to watch her and secretly try to snag a sample of dna for testing. he learned about the second woman. he contacted sherry a s sherry s former husband and stephanie lazarus, that was the other name still on the short list of suspects.
the trail kept getting colder. sherry s parents offered to have the saliva sample of the bite mark tested for dna, they even would pay for it and the l.a.p.d. declined. they said, we don t have a suspect, if we center a suspect, and we have their dna, then we have something to match. and the case sat for another decade. then the newly formed cold case unit was conducted dna tests on unsolved cases and one of them was the murder of sherry rasmussen, it took two months to find the saliva sample, buried in a refrigeration unit, the vial was poking out and the label torn but the saliva was still inside and the dna was enough to blow the case wide open. in the lab report, it indicated that the suspect, that
Transcripts for MSNBC Dateline 20190922 07:21:45 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
he pressed for more on their relationship which had started when they were students at ucla, they dated on and off until john got engaged to sherry and even then you are convinced that the relationship that john had with stephanie lazarus overlapped with his wife. we know he was engaged and he was intimate with stephanie lazarus, there was a love triangle and stephanie lazarus had deep feelings for john rutten and may have had a motive to harm sherry rasmussen. reporter: was sherry s killer a scorned lover or a jealous co-worker. we had two women on the list that had a motive. debra the nurse and stephanie lazarus. correct. a few weeks later, cops tracked down debra and secretly
Transcripts for MSNBC Dateline 20190922 07:54:15 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.