A state parole board panel denied parole Wednesday for a former Los Angeles Police Department detective who admitted that she fatally shot her ex-lover’s new wife in the victim’s Van Nuys condominium nearly 39 years ago.
Another parole board panel had recommended parole in November 2023 for Stephanie Lazarus, but that recommendation was subsequently rescinded last October after concerns expressed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Commissioner Kevin Chappell, who presided over the hearing, said the panel found Lazarus “unsuitable for parole at this time,” explaining that her testimony about the Feb. 24, 1986, attack on Sherri Rasmussen “does not match up with the evidence used to convict you.”
He said more of her DNA — besides DNA from a bite mark on the victim — would have been found at the scene if the attack occurred as a “fight” about which she had testified.
Chappell noted that Lazarus described the physical assault as a “fight” and had to be corrected because it was clear that “you were the only one engaging in this extreme act of violence.”
Deputy Commissioner Vijai Desai added that the “level of minimization” that Lazarus had demonstrated seems to indicate that it is “pretty entrenched.” He said the victim’s family deserves the truth.
Chappell said Lazarus will be eligible for parole in three years — “time that we feel is necessary” — but told her that there could be an earlier hearing if there is a change in circumstances.
Lazarus, now 64, acknowledged during the hearing that she had murdered Rasmussen, saying that the victim’s right to “live a long and fruitful life was taken from her.”
“I caused unbearable heartache,” the former LAPD detective told the panel, noting that there was no amount of apologies to express her remorse.
She said she was sorry that it took 23 years for her to be arrested and was also sorry that she didn’t plead guilty at her trial. She apologized to the victim and said she was continuing to honor her by “taking responsibility for my actions.”
“I am so very sorry,” Lazarus added, saying that she will never revert to the “monster” that she was the day of the killing.
She said under questioning by her own attorney, Tracy Lum, that she agreed with her first-degree murder conviction and said that she would have turned herself in if she could go back and change things.
The victim’s husband, John Ruetten, joined other family members in calling for the parole board panel to deny parole to Lazarus.
He said Lazarus used her police training to cover up the crime, saying that she is now blaming her trial attorney for her decision to go forward with a trial that traumatized the victim’s family and that she is “going to say whatever is necessary to get parole.”
“I cannot accept that anything she says is genuine,” he said, mentioning, as he has before, that his wife lost her life because she met, loved and married him.
Lazarus — a 25-year LAPD veteran who worked as an art theft investigator — is serving a 27-year-to-life term in state prison stemming from her March 2012 conviction for the killing of Rasmussen, who was shot three times in the Balboa Boulevard condominium she shared with her husband.
Rasmussen had married Ruetten, Lazarus’ one-time love interest, three months before her death.
At her first parole hearing in November 2023, Lazarus publicly admitted that she had killed the 29-year-old Glendale Adventist Medical Center nursing supervisor.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Lazarus acknowledged that she had previously confronted Rasmussen at the hospital where she worked in the fall of 1985 after seeing her business card inside Ruetten’s apartment. She said she told the victim that she and Ruetten had sex since he met Rasmussen.
She said she didn’t remember how she had gotten the phone number for the condominium that Rasmussen and Ruetten shared, explaining that she could have called 411. She said she was depressed and despondent over a relationship that had fallen apart the week before and that she “just wanted to hear his voice” the day of the killing.
“When I heard her voice, it just like set me off,” she said, telling the panel that she decided to go over to the condominium “to see John.”
Lazarus acknowledged that she had probably used LAPD records months earlier to get the address of the condominium, and said she brought along a cord because she was “so angry” that she was going to strangle the woman if she got in her way of seeing her former lover.
She said the two became involved in a fight in which she thought Rasmussen was “getting the best of me,” and said that two shots rang out after her own gun “came out of” her fanny pack during the struggle. Under questioning, she agreed when she was asked if was more of an assault than a fight.
Lazarus said she picked up a blanket, wrapped it around the gun to “deaden the sound” and then shot the victim three times in the chest, describing herself as “enraged.” She said she subsequently reported to Santa Monica police that someone had broken into her car and stolen the gun used in the killing.
She said after the killing that she was “out of it, in disbelief that I could have done such a horrific crime,” but acknowledged that she saw the murdered woman’s husband after the killing.
“I enjoyed having sex with him,” she said.
Lazarus told the panel that she informed Ruetten that she wanted to cut off contact with him after meeting her now ex-husband, with whom she adopted a daughter.
She said she has taken courses on subjects including healthy relationships and anger management while behind bars.
“I do not believe that I would ever have this same situation in my life,” she said.
Following the parole board panel’s parole recommendation in 2023, the governor asked the full parole board to review the parole grant for Lazarus. Newsom wrote last April that he found that the case “warrants the consideration of the full Board of Parole Hearings to determine whether Ms. Lazarus can be safely released at this time.”
The governor noted that Lazarus had “evaded justice for more than two decades and did not appear to begin taking full accountability for the murder until she was finally caught,” while acknowledging that she “has desisted from violent conduct” since the crime and “participated in and internalized targeted rehabilitative programming, signs that she has made progress in mitigating her risk factors.”
Lazarus’ bid to be released on parole suffered a setback in May 2024, with the parole board ordering the new hearing to determine whether there was good cause to rescind the parole grant for the former LAPD detective. A three-member parole board panel determined last October that there was “good cause to rescind” the parole recommendation.
At the latest hearing Wednesday, LAPD Detective Greg Stearns and the prosecutors in the trial, Shannon Presby and Paul Nunez, joined Ruetten and the victim’s family members in opposing Lazarus’ parole bid.
Presby said that Lazarus’ claim that her gun fell out of a fanny pack during a struggle with the victim is “just not credible,” and that she was subsequently “able to hide what she did from every person in her life.”
Lazarus has continued to “fail to take full accountability for the murder,” Nunez said.
“This was not just murder. This was the crime of disfigurement …,” he said, telling the panel that Lazarus “posed as a hero for so many years” while working as a police officer.
One of the victim’s nieces, Rachel Buck, said, “She betrayed her oath and ruthlessly executed my aunt …”
“She has not demonstrated true accountability,” she said of Lazarus.
Another of her nieces, Jessica Pannell, urged the panel not to allow Lazarus to walk free.
“Sherri was denied her future … Her murderer should not be given the chance to reclaim her life,” she said.
She called her aunt’s killing a calculated “execution” to eliminate someone Lazarus saw as an obstacle, and said her aunt’s killer admitted her guilt only when it served her own interest.
One of the victim’s sisters, Teresa Lane, said she was “never able to say goodbye to Sherri because of the brutal attack she received.”
“All my family wants is justice for Sherri,” she said.
She said there was “no way” that her sister would have allowed Lazarus into the condominium.
Another of the victim’s sisters, Connie Rasmussen Wilkenson, said Lazarus continues to “minimize her role” and has “failed to tell the truth to this board.”
Lazarus’ attorney told the parole board panel that Lazarus made “horrible choices” in 1986, but said her client takes “full responsibility for her actions” and has “shown genuine remorse” and engaged in “`extraordinary rehabilitative efforts.”
She said Lazarus had been “candid and forthright.”
Lazarus retired from the LAPD after being arrested in June 2009 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’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 reopened 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 appellate court panel’s ruling.
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 2015 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.”