Going back to the scene itself, almost nothing about it actually held up as a burglary once someone looked closely. A jewelry box sat untouched in plain view. No other room had been touched at all. A VCR and a CD player were stacked neatly by the door, except Sherri’s blood was already on top of them, meaning the violence came first and the staging came after. A sliding glass door upstairs had been shot out from outside, but Sherri was killed downstairs. Whoever fired through that window did not run afterward. They went inside and finished it. Ligature marks on her wrists, and a cord at the scene, showed she had been restrained at some point too. A former FBI profiler who testified at trial put it simply. This was not a robbery. It was an attempt to build one.
The silver BMW gone. The stereo gone. The open garage. The broken glass. All of it arranged to point at a stranger who came for things and left with a life. The jewelry box that nobody touched argued the other way. So did the blood on top of the stacked electronics, which meant the stacking happened after she was already bleeding. So did the shot through the upstairs glass that did not end in flight. A burglar who has fired a gun through a window and found a woman downstairs does not stay to finish a fight, bite a forearm, bind wrists, and then arrange a VCR. Someone who came for her does.
The case never went to trial cleanly. Stephanie’s defense spent five weeks trying to cast doubt on the DNA analysis itself, arguing the sample was too old, too degraded, too easily contaminated after two decades in storage to be trusted. It is also worth knowing what happened three years after the murder, long before any of this. John and Stephanie briefly got back together on a trip to Hawaii, and before he went, John actually called the detective on the case to ask if there was anything tying her to his wife’s death. He was told there was not. A search of Stephanie’s home turned up a journal describing how despondent she had been over losing John. In it she wrote that she saw John Ruetten’s car, put a note on it, and watched the car for half an hour. She did visit John Ruetten, but his girlfriend was over. She really did not feel like working, too stressed out about John. She had a real hard time concentrating these days.
Twenty-three years between that obsession and the day it caught up with her, and the FBI profiler’s read lined up with what prosecutors argued at trial. She let herself in. She struck Sherri with a ceramic vase. She fired one shot, then used a thick piece of fabric to muffle the two that followed, recovered later with a burn hole and gunshot residue still on it. Trace evidence from Sherri’s body went missing from police files over the years. So did the original interviews with John and with Sherri’s father. Nobody has ever fully explained why. The county’s own account put it plainly afterward. Without the DNA, this case likely never gets solved.
The jury did not need long. We, the jury in the above-entitled action, find the defendant, Stephanie Ilene Lazarus, guilty of the crime of murder of Sherri Rasmussen, in violation of Penal Code section 187(a), a felony. In March 2012 that jury needed less than a day to convict her of first-degree murder. She was fifty-two. She was sentenced to twenty-seven years to life, eligible for parole in 2034, the year she turns seventy-four. In November 2023, at a parole hearing, she finally admitted to killing Sherri Rasmussen, while telling the board she had not gone to that condo planning to do it. Even then, by her own account, what weighed on her was not really about Sherri. It was that Sherri’s death happened because Sherri had met and married John. Parole decisions on her case have gone back and forth since. As of the most recent public reporting, she remains in custody at the California Institution for Women in Corona.
The gun was never recovered. And the DNA that finally caught her had been sitting in an evidence file the entire time she worked two floors above the people who would eventually find it. A trained detective, twenty-three years later, could not seem to hold the name of the woman she was being asked about. Shelly. Sherri. It took a bite mark, and not a badge, to tell the truth about her.