July 11, 2022 • 47 mins
Author Matthew McGough has spent years investigating a cold case that led him to a Los Angeles police detective and a department that ignored some vital clues to a murder. McGough will take us through the murder of 29-year-old newlywed Sherri Rasmussen and how her killer got away with it for decades.
Written, researched, and hosted by Kate Winkler Dawson/producer Alexis Amorosi/mixer Ryo Baum/sound designer Andrew Eapen/composer Curtis Heath/web designer Ilsa Brink
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
It took more than two decades for this police officer
who committed a cold blooded off duity murder crime of
passion to be arrested, and even after the arrest was made,
the family sought answers about why it took so long
and made accusations of a cover up, and those questions
were covered up by the police department.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked on Exactly Right. I've
traveled around the world interviewing people for the show. I've
interviewed some people in person and some from my home
studio over zoom, and they are all excellent writers. They've
had so many great true crime stories. We want to
(01:00):
tell you those stories with details that have never been published.
Tenfold More Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices
that writers make, good and bad. It's a deep dive
into the stories behind the stories. Journalist Matthew McGoff has
worked for years on his true crime book The Lazarus Files.
(01:21):
It's a very twisty case about an LAPD police officer
who got away with murder for more than twenty years.
It turns out that McGoff had actually interviewed Detective Stephanie
Lazarus for a story about art theft. And then something
odd happened at mcgoff's other job as a writer for
the TV show Law and Order.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I went into work at Law and Order and people
were throwing around ideas for the new season of episodes,
and someone mentioned that coming into work that morning, they'd
heard on the radio that LAPD officer had been arrested
for a call case murder. And my boss kind of
dismissed the ideas, you know, we've done that on the
show before. And then he said, but it was a
female police officer, and again it was like, yeah, we
(02:06):
did that in season thirteen or fourteen or whatever. And
then he said she worked in art theft. And that's
when I kind of almost fell off my chair. And
I was trying to place the name of this woman
that I had sat down with here earlier, because I
remembered she had a very distinctive name. And then it
came to me and I said, was it Stephanie Lazarus?
(02:27):
And my colleague who'd heard the report on public radio,
was like, yeah, that's her name. And then they were like,
your friend got arrested for murder. And I was like, no, no,
she's not my friend. She's a police detective. And I
interviewed her a year ago. I really wanted to know
what the true story was, starting with did this police officer,
(02:51):
who was very cordial, actually commit this murder that she
was accused of. It was a brutal crime of passion,
cold blooded killing, not on duty kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Let's start from the beginning. So this is nineteen eighty six,
southern California, right, and let's start from the beginning of
who the victim is.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Sherry Rasmussen. Who's the victim in this case? Very extraordinary
young woman. She was in her twenties. I think she
may have been twenty nine when she was murdered. She
was a hospital nurse, but really precocious and incredibly successful
for her age. She was the director of critical care
nursing at Glendell Adventist Hospital here in Los Angeles, and
(03:33):
the position and responsibility she had would have typically been
handled by someone who was many, many years older than her,
and it was sort of a trend throughout Cherry's life.
She skipped two grades in school. She began college when
she was sixteen years old. She had her master's degree
in nursing from UCLA when she was just barely in
(03:53):
her twenties. She was very vivacious, attractive woman, sort of
had it all in terms of professionally, just kind of
tall and lanky, kind of like a Princess Diana type look,
but very very high achieving, very selfless, very dedicated to
her career and transforming nursing. She lectured internationally at various conferences. Really,
(04:18):
one of the tragedies of what happened is we'll never
know how much more she may have accomplished over the
course of the rest of her life. But even in
her twenty nine years, she made a tremendous impact. And
the biggest thing that had happened in her life prior
to her murder was that she had just gotten married
three months before she was killed. She married a guy
(04:40):
named John Rudden, and they had just embarked on their
life together.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Tell me about that day. February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Six, February twenty four, nineteen eighty six, was the date
that Sherry was killed, and it was a weekday. She
was supposed to work, but decided not to go into
work that morning, called and sick, so she wasn't really
expecting to be at home that day. She should have
been in the office and just made a decision when
she woke up that she wasn't going to go into work,
(05:09):
so her husband John left her in bed when he
went to work shortly after seven am that morning, and
when John returned home at six pm, the first thing
he noticed was that the garage door to their condo
was open and Sherry's car was missing. And their condo
was part of a complex in Van nuys All. The
(05:31):
condos had the same architectural layout. It was like a
split level where the garage was on the ground level
and then above that is the living room, and then
above that is a level that has the dining room
in the kitchen, and then the bedrooms are on the top.
It's sort of a vertically oriented townhouse style. So when
he pulled into the garage, it was open, and he
(05:52):
noticed that there was broken glass that was on the
pavement in front of the garage, and he wasn't sure
what was wrong. When he went up the stairs from
the garage into the living room, he saw that the
door between the living room and the garage was open,
and when he went inside, he discovered Sherry's body on
the floor of the living room. There had been a
(06:13):
very significant struggle.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
She had a lot of.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Injuries, bruises, and she had also been shot three times
in the chest.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
So beaten to death and shot both.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Yeah, the crime scene and the evidence extended from the
second floor of the condo, so the kitchen area down
into the first floor, and there was quite a bit
of blood evidence that was around, and Sherry was lying
on her back in the living.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Room aside from the car. Is there anything else that's missing?
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Eventually it's determined that their marriage.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
License was missing.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Wow, okay, but not very much else. There was a purse.
Sherry's purse was taken, but it was recovered later that day.
And there was some stereo equipment that had been removed
from an entertainment center nineteen eighty six. So it's kind
of like big bulky flat screen TVs and things like
that big piece of furniture that holds TV and a
(07:08):
video disc player and a cassette recorder or whatever high
fi audio would have been in nineteen eighty six, some
of those items had been yanked out of the entertainment
center and stacked by the front door of the condo,
left there. I think John was devastated to find his
wife and managed to call nine to one one and
(07:31):
the police showed up, and they were the ones who
initiated the investigation, And it does seem that beginning that night,
their first impression of what happened was that it was
a botched robbery, and the police theory from the very
beginning that they queued to for the next twenty some
years was that Sherry had interrupted a burglary. Again, this
(07:54):
happened during the day, on a weekday when most people
would be expected to be at work, so the police
theory of the crime was that a burglar or more
than one burglar, had entered the condo believing no one
was spare. Cherry had surprised them or confronted them, and
there was an altercation and it escalated and ultimately she
(08:15):
was killed. At first glance, it looked like a bosch robbery,
but nothing of value really except for the car was
taken from the condo, So that doesn't really mesh with
a burglary or robbery motive because there was jewelry and
other items that were left undisturbed that had value. Also,
most burglars, if confronted, would want to get away, like
(08:37):
their first impulse would be to flee.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Right, not to fight, not a confrontation, or.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
To commit a murder.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
And also the severity of the injury she suffered, the
intensity of the hand to hand, She was really fighting
for her life for a long time, like thirty minutes
or more, based on how much ground would thin the
condo was covered, and the blood that was in different
places around the condo, And so the intensity of the
(09:07):
fight suggests pretty strongly a personal motive as opposed to
a stranger a burglar. They're looking for low hanging fruit
in terms of what place is going to be easy
to burgarize. Take some property, fence the property, move on
to the next place.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
So let me ask you a series of questions that
can result in short answers from you. What kind of gun?
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (09:30):
So let's talk about the gun. So Sherry was shot
three times. There were a couple of slugs that were
recovered from the crime scene and from those bullets and
ballistic testing, they were able to determine that Cherry was
shot with a thirty eight caliber gun. This was a
two inch thirty eight caliber revolver, which was a very
(09:52):
very common backup weapon that LAPD officers we'd use. We
know that there were shots that were fired both upstairs
in the second floor of the condo because the glass
that I mentioned that was on the ground when John
Rudden came home, that was actually glass from a balcony door.
There was a little overhang, a small, little balcony big
(10:14):
enough for a barbecue grill, okay, that was off the
kitchen directly over the garage door, and that's where the
confrontation began. And at least one shot was fired and
it went through the glass window and shattered glass fell
down on the pavement in front of the garage door.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
All right, So let's get some background real quick, because
we've talked about Sherry and John and they got married.
What is John's overall demeanor and situation in life before
all of this happens.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
John's a handsome, tall guy, but did not have a
ton of girlfriends. He grew up in San Diego, and
he attended UCLA. And while he was attending UCLA, he
became friends more than friends with a woman named Stephanie
Lazarus who was a year behind him at UCLA, and
(11:07):
they sort of had an ambiguous relationship, and among their
friends at UCLA, it was sort of widely known that
Stephanie pined for John, really really wanted to be his girlfriend,
and John did not. They were friends, close friends, met
each other's families, spent a lot a lot of time together,
(11:28):
but he did not want to be Stephanie's boyfriend, although
they did hook up.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
And have sex and mixed signals.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, their relationship was very ambiguous and kind of unequal
in terms of ardor Stephanie really wanted to be with
John and felt like he was the one she was
not dating anyone else or apparently interested in anyone else.
And they would be together and then they would take
time off, but they would always sort of drift back
(11:58):
together again. That was the pattern of John and Stephanie's
relationship from college and in the years after college.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
How many years are we talking about between when they
met at UCLA and the time when he is married.
Let's start there.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah, several years and I think the dynamic was such
that they would drift back together, and then I think
John would maybe feel some remorse or it would be
too intense, and then they would have some time apart.
But they were friends also, and so again they would
sort of drift back together. And I think John maybe
(12:34):
dated a couple of other women in those other periods,
but there's no indication that Stephanie did. She was very
much set on John as being the one who she
wanted to be with, and she would confide to some
friends about difficulties in the relationship with John that he
didn't feel as strongly for her as she did for him.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
And then he meets Sherry.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
He falls head over heels in love with Sherry, and.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
This happens quickly, right, doesn't this happen pretty swiftly?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Yeah. I think from the time that John met Sherry
until the time that they're engaged is maybe about one year, Okay,
But yeah, John's feelings for Sherry are sort of what
Stephanie had wanted for herself. He's just head over heels
in love with her. They met sometime in I think
nineteen eighty four, and they're immediately a couple.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
So in this time period this one year from meeting
until proposal and marriage and all of that. Is he
in contact with Stephanie as anything more than just friends
at this point.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, Now, this information is a bit fragmentary because it
comes from a couple of different sources. One it's John.
The story that he tells in all of these interviews
is not consistent. It evolves over time. In his earliest interviews,
there's no relationship with Stephanie. Twenty some years later, he
(14:00):
admits having sex with Stephanie during his engagement with Sherry,
and even after Sherry's murder he had.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Sex with Stephanie.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
So it's hard to pin down exactly during the time
that John and Cherry were falling in love and becoming
a couple. We know that Stephanie learned of John's engagement
to Sherry and called him very upset and asked to
see him, and John did go to see Stephanie and
they ended up having sex that night. And then we
(14:30):
also know that subsequent to that, Stephanie went to Sherry's workplace,
the hospital where she worked, and told her that she
had had sex with John recently and said that something
along the lines of when this marriage ends I'm going
to be there to pick up the pieces.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Did she tell people? Did she tell her parents or
her friends about this encounter?
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Sherry was very private, and part of what was so
difficult for her that she loved John and she wanted
her relationship with John to endure, and she was in
a marriage, and she wanted to be married to John,
and so even as these things are happening, there's a
(15:15):
degree to which she's protecting her husband. So she told
her parents, and she told friends that Stephanie came to
the hospital and threatened her, but she stopped short of
telling them that her fiancee, who she intended to marry,
had cheated on her during the engagement. She did not
(15:35):
divulge that to her parents, which is understandable to a degree,
because it wasn't like she called the marriage off. John
never told Sherry that he had had sex with Stephanie.
Stephanie went to the hospital and told Sherry that, and
then she came home that night very upset and said, John,
is this true? And he said, yes, it is true,
(15:56):
and I'm so sorry, and please don't call this off.
And I in over my head and I didn't know
what else to do, and it was the last time,
and I won't have contact with her anymore, and Sherry
forgave him, so from that perspective, she was ready to
move on. But she was confiding in her parents and
several friends more than one, that there was this woman
(16:18):
who was a LAPD officer. There were times that Sherry
felt like she was being followed, so clearly it's stalking behavior,
but there wasn't really a name for it. So there
were a lot of incidents in the month leading up
to the murder that were very concerning to Sherry, and
(16:39):
throughout that time, John was giving Sherry reassurance it's over,
I'm not going to talk to her anymore. It seemed
like Sherry wanted John to be more definitive in terms
of telling Stephanie, you're not welcome at our house, don't
come to our house anymore. I'm not going to be
with you. I've moved, don't bother my wife, don't go
(17:02):
to my wife's workplace. Like there's various ways to put
your foot down and just say, hey, it's.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Over between us, back off.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, let me live my life and you live your
life and stop doing what you're doing. John, for whatever
reasons within himself and his personality. Again, Sherry's father didn't
love John, didn't respect him so much. He felt like
John sort of had a weak personality. Yeah, not standing
up for himself or not definitive wishy washy or narcissistic.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
I mean this is very narcissistic behavior. You can take
it that way too. He wants the attention, he's got
this beautiful woman. He's got a beautiful wife and a
beautiful woman planning for him.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Again, I think what Sherry was wanted and was asking
for from him was a definitive, clear break, and John's
attitude was I'm not going to contact her. It would
only make things worse for me to confront her. So
that never happened. And then again things continued. So John
knew a lot about this history, and Sherry's family and
(18:07):
friends knew a lot about this history. And then the
murder happens three months after they're married.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
So we're back at February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty six,
in the house, and it looks on the surface to
be a botch robbery. But anybody who's really going to
take a closer look and start talking to people in
her family and in her immediate circle is going to
find out that she's being stalked and that her husband
has had an onagonof again relationship with a woman who
(18:35):
seems really unstable because she has been confronting her former
lover's wife. So at this point, enter the detective who
I think is at the center of your story. Tell
me a little bit about this man who walks in
and surveys the scene and comes up with a botch
robbery and essentially shuts down all other motives or other suspects.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
So Cherry was killed in the Van Ny Sectional, Los Angeles,
which is in the San Fernando Valley, so it's within
the jurisdiction of the LAPD and more specifically the Van
Nu's Division of the LAPD, so there's a small homicide unit.
It's not a particularly high crime area of LA compared
to many other areas of.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
The city in the eighties.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
And the case is assigned to a detective whose name
is Lyle Mayer, who's a veteran detective, had been an
LAPD officer since going back to the mid to late
nineteen sixties and had had many years of experience working homicide.
And he shows up at the crime scene and walks
the crime scene and then interviews John, the victim's husband,
(19:40):
And that interview was tape recorded, and I obtained a
copy of the tape recording, so I know what was
said that night. And at the end of the interview,
Mayor asked John point blank, was there an ex girlfriend,
ex boyfriend, anything like that? And John says no. He
answers no that night. So subsequent to asking questions just
(20:01):
basic background about what was your job, what was her job,
how long were you married, he basically tells John, here's
what I think happened. Basically gives a voice to this
burglary theory. So that's also how we know that it
was that quick that night that they settled on this theory.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Do you think that if John had said, yes, I've
been having on again off against sex with a woman.
She's an LAPD detective, that this would have changed Detective
Mayor's mind about the botched robbery at all.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Well, to answer that question, we have to talk about
what happens the next day.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Okay, So botch robbery is what he says.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Again, there's a lot of blame to go around for
how this went the way that it did, and some
of it lies at John Rudden's feet, no doubt, because
he had an opportunity. He knew a lot more than
what he divulged to the cops. And he was asked
point blank the night of the murder, is there an
next girlfriend? Is there an ex boyfriend?
Speaker 3 (21:12):
And he said no.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And also part of what's going on in this story
is there's like an estrangement between John's family and Sherry's family.
So it's not totally uncommon in marriages, but the two
dads did not see eye to eye politically, and so
there was some tension through the engagement and stuff like that.
The dads would argue and talk politics, and Nell's Rasmussen,
(21:36):
Sherry's father, didn't fully respect John, thought he was sort
of wishy washy. And on the night of the murder,
John came home and found Sherry, and he called nine
to one one and then he called his own parents,
his mom and dad, and told them what had happened,
and they got in their car and drove up from
San Diego. John did not call Sherry's parents.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Oh no, did he let the police call them.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Zh One called them until almost midnight, So about five
to six hours after John discovered Cherry's body. The Rasmussen's
get a call at their home and it's John's father
who breaks the news to the Rasmissens that Sherry has
been murdered and Nell's Sherry's father asks to speak to John.
He says to John's dad, put John on the phone,
(22:22):
and John won't come to the phone. And because of
that delay, it was too late in the evening for
the Rasmussens to get a flight to Los Angeles. If
they had been told at six pm or something, they
probably could have gotten on a plane, but with that delay,
they had to wait until the following morning to take
the first available flight to LA. So what I described
(22:42):
in terms of John's first interview with the police, the
initial police walked through of the condo, and even a
second walk through of the condo Saturday morning, all of
that happens before Sherry's parents are on the ground in
LA And so it's during that second day morning walked through.
It's John and his mother and Detective Mayor and a
(23:04):
second younger detective who was sort of assisting Mayor. They're
walking through the condo and the body has been removed
by the coroner the night before. But again there's a
lot of blood that's still in the carpet, and it's
undoubtedly very disturbing for John to walk through what had
been his home. He never spent another night there in
(23:25):
the condo. But the detectives mentioned to him that Sherry
was bidden on the arm, which was because her other
injuries were so severe. John had not even noticed that
the night before, and the second detective, his name is
Steve Hooks, who was assisting Mayor, said women bite, something
(23:47):
along the lines of men don't bite. Women bite, and
John at that point says, there's this woman, this friend
of mine, Stephanie Lazarus, and she's an LAPD officer, and
you guys should talk to her. So John, it's belated,
but the day after the murder, he does provide the
(24:08):
detectives with the full name and that she's an LAPED officer,
and he does that in front of his mom and
the other detective. And there's no record of that, but
John testified to that under oath, and Lyle Mayer, when
I interviewed him, conceded that John did mention that the
day after the murder.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So John finally says, you should talk to Stephanie Lazarus.
She's a police officer does mayor talk to.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Her open question.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
There's no record that he ever spoke to her.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
I'm surprised that he doesn't focus it on John. A
little bit more too me is the husband. He really
is honed in on the botched robbery. What do you
think it was that flipped a switch for him that
made him ignore everything else, even the husband, even ignoring John.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
This is part of what was so so disturbing about
how the LAPD handled things after Stephanie was arrested and evencted.
It's pretty important to figure out what exactly went wrong.
But the LAPD essentially did the exact same thing that
they did in nineteen eighty six, which was like fingers
(25:12):
and ears and basically saying we're not going to go there,
we're not going to look at that, which to me,
the futility of that is it just extends the story.
And if there's nothing to hide, then there should be
nothing to fear from an investigation, and you do a
thorough investigation and you put it to bed. Again, it's
not Lyle Mayer's fault that Stephanie Lazarus committed a murder.
(25:36):
People of all walks of life commit crimes. It doesn't
matter what your profession, or your social class or your
upbringing is.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Things happen.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
So if Lyle Mayer wanted to protect his reputation, or
if the LAPD wanted to protect their reputation, the best
thing that they could have done and should have done,
is just investigate it. Just look at her if you
don't think that she did it. Dozens of times the
Rasmussens contacted the police, They wrote to America's Most Wanted
(26:06):
and a Current Affair and tried. They did everything in
their power to get the police to look at this
female police officer. So again, at some point it's like,
is this an oversight or is this a police culture
thing where it's power and control. Yeah, and it's we're
not going in that direction, no matter what you say.
(26:27):
And I don't think it's motivated by any personal fondness
for Stephanie or anything. I think it's just police culture
closing ranks, closing ranks, circling the wagons. We're not going there.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, let's leave nineteen eighty six, and we've left it
with Detective Mayor saying, bosh robbery and of course we've
not found the robbers. But we'll be on the lookout.
We've got Stephanie who eventually gets promoted from being a
police officer to being a detective.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Yeah, she became a detective and she worked in internal
affairs and then she worked is the detective at Van
NY's where this murder occurred and was an open case
at that time, And there's documentation from the case file
that's missing. We don't know how it went missing when
it went missing, but we do know that Stephanie worked
(27:16):
in Van Nuys for several years during the nineteen nineties
and had unfettered access to the murder book. So she
logged a lot of years as a detective. But there's
no commendations in her record at all for running into
gunfire solving a murder case.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Okay, so John moves on. Is I assume he's going
to get married and maybe have kids at.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Some point John moves on.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
At some point in the early nineties, he reconnects with
Stephanie and they have sex once or twice he said
on the witness end, and then shortly after that he
meets a woman who he marries and has kiss with,
and Stephanie teaching a dare class actually in Oregon, meets
a young Oregon police officer who she ends up moving
(28:00):
down to LA and they marry and end up adopting
a daughter several years after they get married.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So how do we get then from nineteen eighty six
to twenty twelve? And I will give people a hint
that has something to do with that infamous bitemark that
police found on Sherry's body.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
In nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
When this murder happened, there was no such thing as
DNA analysis. First ever forensic use of DNA to solve
a murder case was not until the following year, nineteen
eighty seven, and then it was a couple of years
after that that it came to the United States, and
then OJ Simpson obviously made DNA a household word, And
(28:41):
in the early two thousands, the LAPD established a cold
case homicide unit that was intended to go back and
look at unsolved cases and leverage some of these forensic
advances like DNA analysis, fingerprint computers, ballistics databases, things like
that that did not exist previously and try to solve
(29:01):
these old cases. So the night of the murder, at
the crime scene, there was a conscientious criminalist, someone who
worked for the coroner's office, who took a bitemark swab
of the wound that was on Sherry's arm. It was
a deep, pretty severe bite mark. Teeth marks were visible,
and that bitemark swab was stored at the coroner's office
(29:23):
sat in a freezer for the next twenty some years undisturbed.
When DNA evidence was first becoming better known, like pre
OJ the years before OJ, Nells requested a meeting with
the lapd Lyle Mayer. The original detective had retired, but
the case had been handed off to another detective, and
(29:44):
they offered to pay for DNA evidence.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
The restis instead on the saliva that was found on
her arm in the bite mark.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, I read an article about this new thing called DNA,
and have you guys considered doing DNA? And the detective
told them first, well, it's very expensive and I don't
know that we have it in the budget to do that.
And nell said, I'll pay for it. Whatever it costs,
I'll pay for it. And then the detective responded, well,
(30:13):
you have to have someone to compare it to, and
we don't have a suspect in this case. We haven't
found a burglar who committed it. And nels was well,
actually there is a suspect, this female police officer who
I've mentioned dozens of times, and terribly shortly after that conversation,
when the ras Missens offered to pay for DNA evidence,
(30:36):
a Van Nuys homicide detective went to the coroner's office
and checked out all of the evidence that had been
collected at the crime scene on the night of the murder,
and all of that evidence went missing, with the exception
of one piece of evidence, the bititemark swab, which because
it was biological evidence, it was stored separately. Bite mark
(31:00):
swabs were stored in a freezer, whereas the other evidence
that was collected that night, which would have been things
like fibers and hares that were collected off of Sherry's
body that very well may have incriminated Stephanie, went missing
in nineteen ninety three, checked out by a Van Nuy's
homicide detective. He signed out for it. He later, after
(31:21):
Stephanie was arrested, he was confronted and he conceded that
it was his signature, but said that he had no
recollection of checking it out, that he never worked the case.
And again that's sort of the limit of the information
it's available, Like, how do I drill down further beyond that?
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Everybody's unreliable. John's unreliable, right.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
And you're talking about a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is all
about passing the buck and no one being ultimately responsible.
So you asked about the bitemark swab. Miraculously, it was
the one thing that did not disappear. Amazing was evidence
that the coroner had collected. And in two thousand and
one the LAPD founded a cold case unit and they
(32:03):
started combing through I think it was nine thousand unsolved
murders that had been committed in LA between nineteen sixty
something and the late nineties. And what those detectives when
they were screening those cases were looking for was basically
low hanging fruit cases that have some sort of biological
evidence something that's suitable for DNA testing.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
So a drive by.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Shooting it's not a good candidate for DNA analysis. However,
a burglary murder in an indoor crime scene with evidence
that's been collected and a bitemark swab and a lot
of blood evidence at the crime scene, samples of which
were taken, is a very promising candidate for reinvestigation. So
(32:47):
Sherry's case was flagged in two thousand and three and
a request was made for DNA analysis to.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Be done on evidence in that case.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
They run the DNA and it's one of the heroes
in the story is a criminalist at the LAPD crime Lab.
Now we're in the two thousands. Her name is Jennifer Francis. Ironically,
this is the first case she ever did DNA testing for.
She had just been certified as a DNA analyst, and
she tracked down the bitemark swab which was in the
(33:19):
coroner's basement freezer for twenty some years, and she tested
it and she determined that it was a mix of
two women's DNA. You can tell from DNA analysis whether
it's X chromosome, Y chromosome, whether it's a male or
a female donor. And she expected to find female DNA
because Sherry was a woman and some of her skin
(33:41):
cells and the skin was broken, there would be blood
in her DNA. But she was shocked to find a
second DNA profile and that it was another woman. And
again it shouts out that this is something with a
personal motive, not a burglary. How many female arm burglars
are they're running around Van Nuys in nineteen eighty six,
(34:05):
not very many. And the detective in the cold case
unit who was assigned the case was a guy named
Cliff Shepherd. Kind of an old time veteran detective. I think,
a similar personality type to Lyle Mayer in terms of
not very collaborative with other detectives, old school attitude, liked
to do things his way, would get angry when challenged.
(34:28):
And Jennifer had access to some of the documentation from
the case file, so she saw this is two women.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
This is Sherry and another woman.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
And from the case file she read that Sherry had
disciplined another nurse at the hospital where she worked before
the murder, and that this woman had made obscene phone
calls to Sherry that was documented in the records. So
Jennifer reading, she's not a detective, she works on the
crime lab, she's a civilian, she working her first ever
(34:58):
comicide case, is like, oh my god, I just solved
this murder. The nurse did it. There's a woman who
had a beef with the victim, made obscene phone calls
to her, and there's a bite mark and it's a
woman who bit her. So she types up her analysis report,
which is just the science, not her theory that the
(35:19):
nurse did it, just the bare bones. This is a
female DNA profile with these characteristics, and a second DNA profile,
also female, with these characteristics, and she sent it off
to Shepherd, expecting the case is going to get solved
in no time.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Nothing happens.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Eventually, Jennifer follows up and calls Shepherd and says, what's
going on with Rasmussen and Shepherd tells her that he's
looking at male female burglary teams from the nineteen eighties
who may have been active in the valley, and Jennifer,
thinking of the nurse, says to Shepherd, what about the
(35:57):
other woman the nurse is who she's thinking king of?
Shepherd replies to her, you mean the police officer ex girlfriend.
She had nothing to do with this. Interesting, Jennifer says,
what police officer ex girlfriend? Because there's nothing in the
murder book about that, So Jennifer didn't see that. How
does Shepherd even know about that when there's nothing documented
(36:21):
about a police officer ex girlfriend. And at that point
things sort of go negative for Jennifer. She ends up
being retaliated against and could be a story for another interview,
but I'll just say that for me what I learned.
Jennifer's one of the primary reasons that this injustice was
(36:43):
turned around and one of the major heroes in the story.
And she has that conversation with Shepherd in two thousand
and five, and the case gets transferred out of the
cold case unit back to Van Eys, which is the
same unit that the case started with, obviously different detectives.
We're now in two thousand and nine, not nineteen eighty six,
(37:05):
and there's a detective named James Nuttall who comes in
one morning and opens up the case, opens the murder book,
he reads through it and burglary, so on and so forth,
and then he sees Jennifer's four year old DNA report
that says a female suspect and his immediate thought is
this isn't a burglary, And within a matter of days
(37:27):
he calls Sherry's parents and asks them, Hey, I'm just
going over this case and it came back to me
and we're just doing our due diligence, and let me
ask you, you know, were there any women who may
have had a motive to harm Sherry? And mom and
Dad say yes, yes, and here's her phone number. Well,
the one piece that they didn't have that John had
(37:49):
was her name. Oh, Cherry never told her parents Stephanie
Lazarus's name, So that was the one piece that they
were never able to provide themselves. But we know that
John provided it to the police.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
And it's so interesting because of course there's no cell
phones in eighty six, so there's no way for them
to really be able to track phone calls and reference back.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
No, and John really went into a shell after the murder.
And so again there's a world in which if John
and the rass missions had shared information and had teamed
up and put pressure on the LAPD together, maybe things
would have gone a different way. But the way that
(38:32):
they did go was John wanted to believe the police
were telling him this was a burglary. And again it
just goes to the psychological dimensions of It's the same
thing with Lyle Mayer and Cliff Shepherd in two thousand
and five. No one wants to believe that this is true.
No one wants to believe that a police officer would
(38:53):
be capable of committing a murder like this and going
into work the next day.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
A female police I think is that that's the key
is female police officer part of this.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
As an investigator, you have to check it out either way,
that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
All you have to do is check it out.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
If you don't check it out, that's the problem.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
So they find her, they get her DNA sample, they
compare it.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
And it's a match.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah, well there's steps along the way where again they
don't want to believe it. What those detectives when they
reopen to what they're trying to do is eliminate her
as a suspect.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
That's what they're trying to do.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
They're trying to say, yeah, there's just no way, there's
just no way that this woman. They looked her up
in group mail or whatever, they can see she's still here.
Her husband was assigned to the Van Nu's division. These
guys are investigating this, and they also had to make
a decision because the LAPD and a lot of police departments,
(39:50):
the policy is, if you become aware of misconduct or
potential misconduct, you have to report it up the chain
of command, so either to your boss or to ins
her own affairs. If you become aware of any misconduct,
you have to report it. That's what the policy is. Okay,
So finding out a police officer may have committed a
murder twenty some years ago, I'm pretty sure that's a misconduct.
(40:13):
But these guys knew that she was still an active
police officer, and they didn't know who she was friends
with and how it might get back to her that
they were reinvestigating this case and looking at her. So
they had to make a decision. You know what, We're
not going to put it up the chain of command
just yet. We're going to investigate this thing in secret,
just the four of us. We're going to swear each
(40:36):
other to secrecy. We're not going to tell our spouses.
We're not going to tell anyone what we're up to
until we either eliminate her as a suspect or god
forbid incriminator. And the problem that they ran into is
they just were not able to eliminate her every time
they dug deeper. So they found out, oh, she reported
(40:58):
her gun stolen three three weeks after the murder.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Yeah, this is not looking good.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
So it led up to them. Eventually they told their lieutenant,
who told the chief of police, and a surveillance team
was put on Stephanie, and they collected her DNA sample
and it was compared to the bite mark and it
was a match.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Okay, and she goes on trial and is convicted.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
I'm assuming three years after she was arrested. Yeah, she
went on trial and was convicted of first degree murder
and sentenced to I think twenty five or twenty seven
to life.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Does she confess ever or does she say anything? No, No,
she denies it.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
She never took the witness stand. I wrote to her
several times requesting an interview. I had interviewed her, remember
how this all started, Like, I interviewed her before she
was arrested. She's never responded. She did not testify at
the trial. She did not make a statement before her sentencing.
She's never expressed remorse. She's never confessed the last time
(41:58):
that she spoke publicly or not even publicly. You know,
she was interviewed right before she was arrested. They confronted
her with the DNA results.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Does John Sherry's husband ever show any kind of regret
or remorse?
Speaker 2 (42:11):
He does, And I want to be fair to John.
He did make a statement where he took responsibility to
a degree for what had happened, and he did express
something along the lines of the fact that if Sherry
had not met him, that she would still be alive today.
But to me, what's troubling about John is how he
(42:34):
hurt his own credibility by letting the truth out so
incrementally over time and not understanding that if you just
put it all out there on the table to begin with,
it protects you. It just looks terrible when you're telling
different versions of the story and with each subsequent version
(42:56):
you're admitting to more.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Contact with Stephanie.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
And I can understand to a degree why you would
not want to come out with that your wife is murdered,
you were unfaithful to her, When or exactly are you
gonna put that out before the funeral, But at the
same time you have to, Yeah, it doesn't help to
bottle it up and let it out in pieces later.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
So he valued himself more than he valued his wife
is really what it comes down to to me.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Well, he's talked in his interviews about nothing's going to
bring Sherry back, that it's just moving on and just
trying to move on, and that nothing that he can
do is going to undo what happened. Before, and so
I do think there's like a certain circling of the
wagons that happens within his family and protecting John, and
(43:46):
he does project a feeling he's very wounded. He wears
it on his sleeve, and it's like a protective thing
because if someone is so bereft, are you going to
press that person? Are you gonna worse in their emotional
discomfort by accusing them of lying or something like?
Speaker 4 (44:04):
No?
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Like, but he uses that as sort of a shield
against scrutiny or further questions, like he knew Stephanie's name.
The Rasmussens did not. They asked him, what is the
name of your ex girlfriend? John would not tell them.
And then when they would go to his parents or
someone else and say we need John to cooperate, their
(44:25):
response was can't you see John as devastated? Yeah, why
are you beating up on John? Can't you see that
he is a victim here as well?
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah? I have zero sympathy for that guy, like zero,
lesson zero disgusting. What is the takeaway that you have
from this story that.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
The police have a long way to go to changing
their culture. This is a murder committed by a police officer,
and very credible accusations of a long running cover up
of a murder committed by a police officer, with multiple
police officers for many years looking the other way. That
(45:02):
is something that warrants an investigation. The LAPED did not
do an investigation. I'm going to the people who are
as high as you can go within the hierarchy, and
what are they doing. They're doing exactly what Lyle Meyer
did in nineteen eighty six and exactly what Cliff Shepherd
did in two thousand and five. Its fingers in the
(45:25):
ears and hoping that this is going to go away
or not my problem, or someone else will deal with it,
or whatever the excuse or the rationalization is. But it's unacceptable.
It's galling.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
On the next episode of Wicked Words, Deborah Blum on
the efficiency of poisons as murder weapons.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
To be a poisoner, you have to plan ahead.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
You can't be an impulse.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Poisoner can say I'm super.
Speaker 4 (45:57):
Mad at you, or I really want your fortune, and
so I'm just going to rush over and research the
best possible poison and get back to you later. You
can lose your temper with a gun. You can be
fearful with the breck right, but you have to think
ahead and plan if you're going to be a poison.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
My new book, All That Is Wicked is available for
pre order now, including the audiobook. All that Is Wicked
is based on our first season of tenfold War Wicked.
You might think you know the whole story of Killer
Edward Rulof's crimes, but there's so much more. My book
American Sherlock is also available. This has been an exactly
right tenfold War media production. The producer is Alexis Imirosi.
(46:49):
Our mixer is Ryo Baum. Our sound designer is Andrew Epen.
Curtis heath is. Our composer Nick Toga did the artwork.
Ilsa Brink designed the website. The execute producers are Georgia Hartstark,
Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram
and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at
(47:09):
tenfold More and if you know of a historical crime
that could use some attention, especially if it happened in
your family, email us at info at tenfoldmore Wicked dot com.
We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for
Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
It took more than two decades for this police officer
who committed a cold blooded off duity murder crime of
passion to be arrested, and even after the arrest was made,
the family sought answers about why it took so long
and made accusations of a cover up, and those questions
were covered up by the police department.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked on Exactly Right. I've
traveled around the world interviewing people for the show. I've
interviewed some people in person and some from my home
studio over zoom, and they are all excellent writers. They've
had so many great true crime stories. We want to
(01:00):
tell you those stories with details that have never been published.
Tenfold More Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices
that writers make, good and bad. It's a deep dive
into the stories behind the stories. Journalist Matthew McGoff has
worked for years on his true crime book The Lazarus Files.
(01:21):
It's a very twisty case about an LAPD police officer
who got away with murder for more than twenty years.
It turns out that McGoff had actually interviewed Detective Stephanie
Lazarus for a story about art theft. And then something
odd happened at mcgoff's other job as a writer for
the TV show Law and Order.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I went into work at Law and Order and people
were throwing around ideas for the new season of episodes,
and someone mentioned that coming into work that morning, they'd
heard on the radio that LAPD officer had been arrested
for a call case murder. And my boss kind of
dismissed the ideas, you know, we've done that on the
show before. And then he said, but it was a
female police officer, and again it was like, yeah, we
(02:06):
did that in season thirteen or fourteen or whatever. And
then he said she worked in art theft. And that's
when I kind of almost fell off my chair. And
I was trying to place the name of this woman
that I had sat down with here earlier, because I
remembered she had a very distinctive name. And then it
came to me and I said, was it Stephanie Lazarus?
(02:27):
And my colleague who'd heard the report on public radio,
was like, yeah, that's her name. And then they were like,
your friend got arrested for murder. And I was like, no, no,
she's not my friend. She's a police detective. And I
interviewed her a year ago. I really wanted to know
what the true story was, starting with did this police officer,
(02:51):
who was very cordial, actually commit this murder that she
was accused of. It was a brutal crime of passion,
cold blooded killing, not on duty kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Let's start from the beginning. So this is nineteen eighty six,
southern California, right, and let's start from the beginning of
who the victim is.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Sherry Rasmussen. Who's the victim in this case? Very extraordinary
young woman. She was in her twenties. I think she
may have been twenty nine when she was murdered. She
was a hospital nurse, but really precocious and incredibly successful
for her age. She was the director of critical care
nursing at Glendell Adventist Hospital here in Los Angeles, and
(03:33):
the position and responsibility she had would have typically been
handled by someone who was many, many years older than her,
and it was sort of a trend throughout Cherry's life.
She skipped two grades in school. She began college when
she was sixteen years old. She had her master's degree
in nursing from UCLA when she was just barely in
(03:53):
her twenties. She was very vivacious, attractive woman, sort of
had it all in terms of professionally, just kind of
tall and lanky, kind of like a Princess Diana type look,
but very very high achieving, very selfless, very dedicated to
her career and transforming nursing. She lectured internationally at various conferences. Really,
(04:18):
one of the tragedies of what happened is we'll never
know how much more she may have accomplished over the
course of the rest of her life. But even in
her twenty nine years, she made a tremendous impact. And
the biggest thing that had happened in her life prior
to her murder was that she had just gotten married
three months before she was killed. She married a guy
(04:40):
named John Rudden, and they had just embarked on their
life together.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Tell me about that day. February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Six, February twenty four, nineteen eighty six, was the date
that Sherry was killed, and it was a weekday. She
was supposed to work, but decided not to go into
work that morning, called and sick, so she wasn't really
expecting to be at home that day. She should have
been in the office and just made a decision when
she woke up that she wasn't going to go into work,
(05:09):
so her husband John left her in bed when he
went to work shortly after seven am that morning, and
when John returned home at six pm, the first thing
he noticed was that the garage door to their condo
was open and Sherry's car was missing. And their condo
was part of a complex in Van nuys All. The
(05:31):
condos had the same architectural layout. It was like a
split level where the garage was on the ground level
and then above that is the living room, and then
above that is a level that has the dining room
in the kitchen, and then the bedrooms are on the top.
It's sort of a vertically oriented townhouse style. So when
he pulled into the garage, it was open, and he
(05:52):
noticed that there was broken glass that was on the
pavement in front of the garage, and he wasn't sure
what was wrong. When he went up the stairs from
the garage into the living room, he saw that the
door between the living room and the garage was open,
and when he went inside, he discovered Sherry's body on
the floor of the living room. There had been a
(06:13):
very significant struggle.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
She had a lot of.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Injuries, bruises, and she had also been shot three times
in the chest.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
So beaten to death and shot both.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Yeah, the crime scene and the evidence extended from the
second floor of the condo, so the kitchen area down
into the first floor, and there was quite a bit
of blood evidence that was around, and Sherry was lying
on her back in the living.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Room aside from the car. Is there anything else that's missing?
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Eventually it's determined that their marriage.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
License was missing.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Wow, okay, but not very much else. There was a purse.
Sherry's purse was taken, but it was recovered later that day.
And there was some stereo equipment that had been removed
from an entertainment center nineteen eighty six. So it's kind
of like big bulky flat screen TVs and things like
that big piece of furniture that holds TV and a
(07:08):
video disc player and a cassette recorder or whatever high
fi audio would have been in nineteen eighty six, some
of those items had been yanked out of the entertainment
center and stacked by the front door of the condo,
left there. I think John was devastated to find his
wife and managed to call nine to one one and
(07:31):
the police showed up, and they were the ones who
initiated the investigation, And it does seem that beginning that night,
their first impression of what happened was that it was
a botched robbery, and the police theory from the very
beginning that they queued to for the next twenty some
years was that Sherry had interrupted a burglary. Again, this
(07:54):
happened during the day, on a weekday when most people
would be expected to be at work, so the police
theory of the crime was that a burglar or more
than one burglar, had entered the condo believing no one
was spare. Cherry had surprised them or confronted them, and
there was an altercation and it escalated and ultimately she
(08:15):
was killed. At first glance, it looked like a bosch robbery,
but nothing of value really except for the car was
taken from the condo, So that doesn't really mesh with
a burglary or robbery motive because there was jewelry and
other items that were left undisturbed that had value. Also,
most burglars, if confronted, would want to get away, like
(08:37):
their first impulse would be to flee.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Right, not to fight, not a confrontation, or.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
To commit a murder.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
And also the severity of the injury she suffered, the
intensity of the hand to hand, She was really fighting
for her life for a long time, like thirty minutes
or more, based on how much ground would thin the
condo was covered, and the blood that was in different
places around the condo, And so the intensity of the
(09:07):
fight suggests pretty strongly a personal motive as opposed to
a stranger a burglar. They're looking for low hanging fruit
in terms of what place is going to be easy
to burgarize. Take some property, fence the property, move on
to the next place.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
So let me ask you a series of questions that
can result in short answers from you. What kind of gun?
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (09:30):
So let's talk about the gun. So Sherry was shot
three times. There were a couple of slugs that were
recovered from the crime scene and from those bullets and
ballistic testing, they were able to determine that Cherry was
shot with a thirty eight caliber gun. This was a
two inch thirty eight caliber revolver, which was a very
(09:52):
very common backup weapon that LAPD officers we'd use. We
know that there were shots that were fired both upstairs
in the second floor of the condo because the glass
that I mentioned that was on the ground when John
Rudden came home, that was actually glass from a balcony door.
There was a little overhang, a small, little balcony big
(10:14):
enough for a barbecue grill, okay, that was off the
kitchen directly over the garage door, and that's where the
confrontation began. And at least one shot was fired and
it went through the glass window and shattered glass fell
down on the pavement in front of the garage door.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
All right, So let's get some background real quick, because
we've talked about Sherry and John and they got married.
What is John's overall demeanor and situation in life before
all of this happens.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
John's a handsome, tall guy, but did not have a
ton of girlfriends. He grew up in San Diego, and
he attended UCLA. And while he was attending UCLA, he
became friends more than friends with a woman named Stephanie
Lazarus who was a year behind him at UCLA, and
(11:07):
they sort of had an ambiguous relationship, and among their
friends at UCLA, it was sort of widely known that
Stephanie pined for John, really really wanted to be his girlfriend,
and John did not. They were friends, close friends, met
each other's families, spent a lot a lot of time together,
(11:28):
but he did not want to be Stephanie's boyfriend, although
they did hook up.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
And have sex and mixed signals.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, their relationship was very ambiguous and kind of unequal
in terms of ardor Stephanie really wanted to be with
John and felt like he was the one she was
not dating anyone else or apparently interested in anyone else.
And they would be together and then they would take
time off, but they would always sort of drift back
(11:58):
together again. That was the pattern of John and Stephanie's
relationship from college and in the years after college.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
How many years are we talking about between when they
met at UCLA and the time when he is married.
Let's start there.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah, several years and I think the dynamic was such
that they would drift back together, and then I think
John would maybe feel some remorse or it would be
too intense, and then they would have some time apart.
But they were friends also, and so again they would
sort of drift back together. And I think John maybe
(12:34):
dated a couple of other women in those other periods,
but there's no indication that Stephanie did. She was very
much set on John as being the one who she
wanted to be with, and she would confide to some
friends about difficulties in the relationship with John that he
didn't feel as strongly for her as she did for him.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
And then he meets Sherry.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
He falls head over heels in love with Sherry, and.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
This happens quickly, right, doesn't this happen pretty swiftly?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Yeah. I think from the time that John met Sherry
until the time that they're engaged is maybe about one year, Okay,
But yeah, John's feelings for Sherry are sort of what
Stephanie had wanted for herself. He's just head over heels
in love with her. They met sometime in I think
nineteen eighty four, and they're immediately a couple.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
So in this time period this one year from meeting
until proposal and marriage and all of that. Is he
in contact with Stephanie as anything more than just friends
at this point.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, Now, this information is a bit fragmentary because it
comes from a couple of different sources. One it's John.
The story that he tells in all of these interviews
is not consistent. It evolves over time. In his earliest interviews,
there's no relationship with Stephanie. Twenty some years later, he
(14:00):
admits having sex with Stephanie during his engagement with Sherry,
and even after Sherry's murder he had.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Sex with Stephanie.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
So it's hard to pin down exactly during the time
that John and Cherry were falling in love and becoming
a couple. We know that Stephanie learned of John's engagement
to Sherry and called him very upset and asked to
see him, and John did go to see Stephanie and
they ended up having sex that night. And then we
(14:30):
also know that subsequent to that, Stephanie went to Sherry's workplace,
the hospital where she worked, and told her that she
had had sex with John recently and said that something
along the lines of when this marriage ends I'm going
to be there to pick up the pieces.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Did she tell people? Did she tell her parents or
her friends about this encounter?
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Sherry was very private, and part of what was so
difficult for her that she loved John and she wanted
her relationship with John to endure, and she was in
a marriage, and she wanted to be married to John,
and so even as these things are happening, there's a
(15:15):
degree to which she's protecting her husband. So she told
her parents, and she told friends that Stephanie came to
the hospital and threatened her, but she stopped short of
telling them that her fiancee, who she intended to marry,
had cheated on her during the engagement. She did not
(15:35):
divulge that to her parents, which is understandable to a degree,
because it wasn't like she called the marriage off. John
never told Sherry that he had had sex with Stephanie.
Stephanie went to the hospital and told Sherry that, and
then she came home that night very upset and said, John,
is this true? And he said, yes, it is true,
(15:56):
and I'm so sorry, and please don't call this off.
And I in over my head and I didn't know
what else to do, and it was the last time,
and I won't have contact with her anymore, and Sherry
forgave him, so from that perspective, she was ready to
move on. But she was confiding in her parents and
several friends more than one, that there was this woman
(16:18):
who was a LAPD officer. There were times that Sherry
felt like she was being followed, so clearly it's stalking behavior,
but there wasn't really a name for it. So there
were a lot of incidents in the month leading up
to the murder that were very concerning to Sherry, and
(16:39):
throughout that time, John was giving Sherry reassurance it's over,
I'm not going to talk to her anymore. It seemed
like Sherry wanted John to be more definitive in terms
of telling Stephanie, you're not welcome at our house, don't
come to our house anymore. I'm not going to be
with you. I've moved, don't bother my wife, don't go
(17:02):
to my wife's workplace. Like there's various ways to put
your foot down and just say, hey, it's.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Over between us, back off.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, let me live my life and you live your
life and stop doing what you're doing. John, for whatever
reasons within himself and his personality. Again, Sherry's father didn't
love John, didn't respect him so much. He felt like
John sort of had a weak personality. Yeah, not standing
up for himself or not definitive wishy washy or narcissistic.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
I mean this is very narcissistic behavior. You can take
it that way too. He wants the attention, he's got
this beautiful woman. He's got a beautiful wife and a
beautiful woman planning for him.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Again, I think what Sherry was wanted and was asking
for from him was a definitive, clear break, and John's
attitude was I'm not going to contact her. It would
only make things worse for me to confront her. So
that never happened. And then again things continued. So John
knew a lot about this history, and Sherry's family and
(18:07):
friends knew a lot about this history. And then the
murder happens three months after they're married.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
So we're back at February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty six,
in the house, and it looks on the surface to
be a botch robbery. But anybody who's really going to
take a closer look and start talking to people in
her family and in her immediate circle is going to
find out that she's being stalked and that her husband
has had an onagonof again relationship with a woman who
(18:35):
seems really unstable because she has been confronting her former
lover's wife. So at this point, enter the detective who
I think is at the center of your story. Tell
me a little bit about this man who walks in
and surveys the scene and comes up with a botch
robbery and essentially shuts down all other motives or other suspects.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
So Cherry was killed in the Van Ny Sectional, Los Angeles,
which is in the San Fernando Valley, so it's within
the jurisdiction of the LAPD and more specifically the Van
Nu's Division of the LAPD, so there's a small homicide unit.
It's not a particularly high crime area of LA compared
to many other areas of.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
The city in the eighties.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
And the case is assigned to a detective whose name
is Lyle Mayer, who's a veteran detective, had been an
LAPD officer since going back to the mid to late
nineteen sixties and had had many years of experience working homicide.
And he shows up at the crime scene and walks
the crime scene and then interviews John, the victim's husband,
(19:40):
And that interview was tape recorded, and I obtained a
copy of the tape recording, so I know what was
said that night. And at the end of the interview,
Mayor asked John point blank, was there an ex girlfriend,
ex boyfriend, anything like that? And John says no. He
answers no that night. So subsequent to asking questions just
(20:01):
basic background about what was your job, what was her job,
how long were you married, he basically tells John, here's
what I think happened. Basically gives a voice to this
burglary theory. So that's also how we know that it
was that quick that night that they settled on this theory.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Do you think that if John had said, yes, I've
been having on again off against sex with a woman.
She's an LAPD detective, that this would have changed Detective
Mayor's mind about the botched robbery at all.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Well, to answer that question, we have to talk about
what happens the next day.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Okay, So botch robbery is what he says.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Again, there's a lot of blame to go around for
how this went the way that it did, and some
of it lies at John Rudden's feet, no doubt, because
he had an opportunity. He knew a lot more than
what he divulged to the cops. And he was asked
point blank the night of the murder, is there an
next girlfriend? Is there an ex boyfriend?
Speaker 3 (21:12):
And he said no.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And also part of what's going on in this story
is there's like an estrangement between John's family and Sherry's family.
So it's not totally uncommon in marriages, but the two
dads did not see eye to eye politically, and so
there was some tension through the engagement and stuff like that.
The dads would argue and talk politics, and Nell's Rasmussen,
(21:36):
Sherry's father, didn't fully respect John, thought he was sort
of wishy washy. And on the night of the murder,
John came home and found Sherry, and he called nine
to one one and then he called his own parents,
his mom and dad, and told them what had happened,
and they got in their car and drove up from
San Diego. John did not call Sherry's parents.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Oh no, did he let the police call them.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Zh One called them until almost midnight, So about five
to six hours after John discovered Cherry's body. The Rasmussen's
get a call at their home and it's John's father
who breaks the news to the Rasmissens that Sherry has
been murdered and Nell's Sherry's father asks to speak to John.
He says to John's dad, put John on the phone,
(22:22):
and John won't come to the phone. And because of
that delay, it was too late in the evening for
the Rasmussens to get a flight to Los Angeles. If
they had been told at six pm or something, they
probably could have gotten on a plane, but with that delay,
they had to wait until the following morning to take
the first available flight to LA. So what I described
(22:42):
in terms of John's first interview with the police, the
initial police walked through of the condo, and even a
second walk through of the condo Saturday morning, all of
that happens before Sherry's parents are on the ground in
LA And so it's during that second day morning walked through.
It's John and his mother and Detective Mayor and a
(23:04):
second younger detective who was sort of assisting Mayor. They're
walking through the condo and the body has been removed
by the coroner the night before. But again there's a
lot of blood that's still in the carpet, and it's
undoubtedly very disturbing for John to walk through what had
been his home. He never spent another night there in
(23:25):
the condo. But the detectives mentioned to him that Sherry
was bidden on the arm, which was because her other
injuries were so severe. John had not even noticed that
the night before, and the second detective, his name is
Steve Hooks, who was assisting Mayor, said women bite, something
(23:47):
along the lines of men don't bite. Women bite, and
John at that point says, there's this woman, this friend
of mine, Stephanie Lazarus, and she's an LAPD officer, and
you guys should talk to her. So John, it's belated,
but the day after the murder, he does provide the
(24:08):
detectives with the full name and that she's an LAPED officer,
and he does that in front of his mom and
the other detective. And there's no record of that, but
John testified to that under oath, and Lyle Mayer, when
I interviewed him, conceded that John did mention that the
day after the murder.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So John finally says, you should talk to Stephanie Lazarus.
She's a police officer does mayor talk to.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Her open question.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
There's no record that he ever spoke to her.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
I'm surprised that he doesn't focus it on John. A
little bit more too me is the husband. He really
is honed in on the botched robbery. What do you
think it was that flipped a switch for him that
made him ignore everything else, even the husband, even ignoring John.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
This is part of what was so so disturbing about
how the LAPD handled things after Stephanie was arrested and evencted.
It's pretty important to figure out what exactly went wrong.
But the LAPD essentially did the exact same thing that
they did in nineteen eighty six, which was like fingers
(25:12):
and ears and basically saying we're not going to go there,
we're not going to look at that, which to me,
the futility of that is it just extends the story.
And if there's nothing to hide, then there should be
nothing to fear from an investigation, and you do a
thorough investigation and you put it to bed. Again, it's
not Lyle Mayer's fault that Stephanie Lazarus committed a murder.
(25:36):
People of all walks of life commit crimes. It doesn't
matter what your profession, or your social class or your
upbringing is.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Things happen.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
So if Lyle Mayer wanted to protect his reputation, or
if the LAPD wanted to protect their reputation, the best
thing that they could have done and should have done,
is just investigate it. Just look at her if you
don't think that she did it. Dozens of times the
Rasmussens contacted the police, They wrote to America's Most Wanted
(26:06):
and a Current Affair and tried. They did everything in
their power to get the police to look at this
female police officer. So again, at some point it's like,
is this an oversight or is this a police culture
thing where it's power and control. Yeah, and it's we're
not going in that direction, no matter what you say.
(26:27):
And I don't think it's motivated by any personal fondness
for Stephanie or anything. I think it's just police culture
closing ranks, closing ranks, circling the wagons. We're not going there.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, let's leave nineteen eighty six, and we've left it
with Detective Mayor saying, bosh robbery and of course we've
not found the robbers. But we'll be on the lookout.
We've got Stephanie who eventually gets promoted from being a
police officer to being a detective.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Yeah, she became a detective and she worked in internal
affairs and then she worked is the detective at Van
NY's where this murder occurred and was an open case
at that time, And there's documentation from the case file
that's missing. We don't know how it went missing when
it went missing, but we do know that Stephanie worked
(27:16):
in Van Nuys for several years during the nineteen nineties
and had unfettered access to the murder book. So she
logged a lot of years as a detective. But there's
no commendations in her record at all for running into
gunfire solving a murder case.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Okay, so John moves on. Is I assume he's going
to get married and maybe have kids at.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Some point John moves on.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
At some point in the early nineties, he reconnects with
Stephanie and they have sex once or twice he said
on the witness end, and then shortly after that he
meets a woman who he marries and has kiss with,
and Stephanie teaching a dare class actually in Oregon, meets
a young Oregon police officer who she ends up moving
(28:00):
down to LA and they marry and end up adopting
a daughter several years after they get married.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So how do we get then from nineteen eighty six
to twenty twelve? And I will give people a hint
that has something to do with that infamous bitemark that
police found on Sherry's body.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
In nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
When this murder happened, there was no such thing as
DNA analysis. First ever forensic use of DNA to solve
a murder case was not until the following year, nineteen
eighty seven, and then it was a couple of years
after that that it came to the United States, and
then OJ Simpson obviously made DNA a household word, And
(28:41):
in the early two thousands, the LAPD established a cold
case homicide unit that was intended to go back and
look at unsolved cases and leverage some of these forensic
advances like DNA analysis, fingerprint computers, ballistics databases, things like
that that did not exist previously and try to solve
(29:01):
these old cases. So the night of the murder, at
the crime scene, there was a conscientious criminalist, someone who
worked for the coroner's office, who took a bitemark swab
of the wound that was on Sherry's arm. It was
a deep, pretty severe bite mark. Teeth marks were visible,
and that bitemark swab was stored at the coroner's office
(29:23):
sat in a freezer for the next twenty some years undisturbed.
When DNA evidence was first becoming better known, like pre
OJ the years before OJ, Nells requested a meeting with
the lapd Lyle Mayer. The original detective had retired, but
the case had been handed off to another detective, and
(29:44):
they offered to pay for DNA evidence.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
The restis instead on the saliva that was found on
her arm in the bite mark.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, I read an article about this new thing called DNA,
and have you guys considered doing DNA? And the detective
told them first, well, it's very expensive and I don't
know that we have it in the budget to do that.
And nell said, I'll pay for it. Whatever it costs,
I'll pay for it. And then the detective responded, well,
(30:13):
you have to have someone to compare it to, and
we don't have a suspect in this case. We haven't
found a burglar who committed it. And nels was well,
actually there is a suspect, this female police officer who
I've mentioned dozens of times, and terribly shortly after that conversation,
when the ras Missens offered to pay for DNA evidence,
(30:36):
a Van Nuys homicide detective went to the coroner's office
and checked out all of the evidence that had been
collected at the crime scene on the night of the murder,
and all of that evidence went missing, with the exception
of one piece of evidence, the bititemark swab, which because
it was biological evidence, it was stored separately. Bite mark
(31:00):
swabs were stored in a freezer, whereas the other evidence
that was collected that night, which would have been things
like fibers and hares that were collected off of Sherry's
body that very well may have incriminated Stephanie, went missing
in nineteen ninety three, checked out by a Van Nuy's
homicide detective. He signed out for it. He later, after
(31:21):
Stephanie was arrested, he was confronted and he conceded that
it was his signature, but said that he had no
recollection of checking it out, that he never worked the case.
And again that's sort of the limit of the information
it's available, Like, how do I drill down further beyond that?
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Everybody's unreliable. John's unreliable, right.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
And you're talking about a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is all
about passing the buck and no one being ultimately responsible.
So you asked about the bitemark swab. Miraculously, it was
the one thing that did not disappear. Amazing was evidence
that the coroner had collected. And in two thousand and
one the LAPD founded a cold case unit and they
(32:03):
started combing through I think it was nine thousand unsolved
murders that had been committed in LA between nineteen sixty
something and the late nineties. And what those detectives when
they were screening those cases were looking for was basically
low hanging fruit cases that have some sort of biological
evidence something that's suitable for DNA testing.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
So a drive by.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Shooting it's not a good candidate for DNA analysis. However,
a burglary murder in an indoor crime scene with evidence
that's been collected and a bitemark swab and a lot
of blood evidence at the crime scene, samples of which
were taken, is a very promising candidate for reinvestigation. So
(32:47):
Sherry's case was flagged in two thousand and three and
a request was made for DNA analysis to.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Be done on evidence in that case.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
They run the DNA and it's one of the heroes
in the story is a criminalist at the LAPD crime Lab.
Now we're in the two thousands. Her name is Jennifer Francis. Ironically,
this is the first case she ever did DNA testing for.
She had just been certified as a DNA analyst, and
she tracked down the bitemark swab which was in the
(33:19):
coroner's basement freezer for twenty some years, and she tested
it and she determined that it was a mix of
two women's DNA. You can tell from DNA analysis whether
it's X chromosome, Y chromosome, whether it's a male or
a female donor. And she expected to find female DNA
because Sherry was a woman and some of her skin
(33:41):
cells and the skin was broken, there would be blood
in her DNA. But she was shocked to find a
second DNA profile and that it was another woman. And
again it shouts out that this is something with a
personal motive, not a burglary. How many female arm burglars
are they're running around Van Nuys in nineteen eighty six,
(34:05):
not very many. And the detective in the cold case
unit who was assigned the case was a guy named
Cliff Shepherd. Kind of an old time veteran detective. I think,
a similar personality type to Lyle Mayer in terms of
not very collaborative with other detectives, old school attitude, liked
to do things his way, would get angry when challenged.
(34:28):
And Jennifer had access to some of the documentation from
the case file, so she saw this is two women.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
This is Sherry and another woman.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
And from the case file she read that Sherry had
disciplined another nurse at the hospital where she worked before
the murder, and that this woman had made obscene phone
calls to Sherry that was documented in the records. So
Jennifer reading, she's not a detective, she works on the
crime lab, she's a civilian, she working her first ever
(34:58):
comicide case, is like, oh my god, I just solved
this murder. The nurse did it. There's a woman who
had a beef with the victim, made obscene phone calls
to her, and there's a bite mark and it's a
woman who bit her. So she types up her analysis report,
which is just the science, not her theory that the
(35:19):
nurse did it, just the bare bones. This is a
female DNA profile with these characteristics, and a second DNA profile,
also female, with these characteristics, and she sent it off
to Shepherd, expecting the case is going to get solved
in no time.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Nothing happens.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Eventually, Jennifer follows up and calls Shepherd and says, what's
going on with Rasmussen and Shepherd tells her that he's
looking at male female burglary teams from the nineteen eighties
who may have been active in the valley, and Jennifer,
thinking of the nurse, says to Shepherd, what about the
(35:57):
other woman the nurse is who she's thinking king of?
Shepherd replies to her, you mean the police officer ex girlfriend.
She had nothing to do with this. Interesting, Jennifer says,
what police officer ex girlfriend? Because there's nothing in the
murder book about that, So Jennifer didn't see that. How
does Shepherd even know about that when there's nothing documented
(36:21):
about a police officer ex girlfriend. And at that point
things sort of go negative for Jennifer. She ends up
being retaliated against and could be a story for another interview,
but I'll just say that for me what I learned.
Jennifer's one of the primary reasons that this injustice was
(36:43):
turned around and one of the major heroes in the story.
And she has that conversation with Shepherd in two thousand
and five, and the case gets transferred out of the
cold case unit back to Van Eys, which is the
same unit that the case started with, obviously different detectives.
We're now in two thousand and nine, not nineteen eighty six,
(37:05):
and there's a detective named James Nuttall who comes in
one morning and opens up the case, opens the murder book,
he reads through it and burglary, so on and so forth,
and then he sees Jennifer's four year old DNA report
that says a female suspect and his immediate thought is
this isn't a burglary, And within a matter of days
(37:27):
he calls Sherry's parents and asks them, Hey, I'm just
going over this case and it came back to me
and we're just doing our due diligence, and let me
ask you, you know, were there any women who may
have had a motive to harm Sherry? And mom and
Dad say yes, yes, and here's her phone number. Well,
the one piece that they didn't have that John had
(37:49):
was her name. Oh, Cherry never told her parents Stephanie
Lazarus's name, So that was the one piece that they
were never able to provide themselves. But we know that
John provided it to the police.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
And it's so interesting because of course there's no cell
phones in eighty six, so there's no way for them
to really be able to track phone calls and reference back.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
No, and John really went into a shell after the murder.
And so again there's a world in which if John
and the rass missions had shared information and had teamed
up and put pressure on the LAPD together, maybe things
would have gone a different way. But the way that
(38:32):
they did go was John wanted to believe the police
were telling him this was a burglary. And again it
just goes to the psychological dimensions of It's the same
thing with Lyle Mayer and Cliff Shepherd in two thousand
and five. No one wants to believe that this is true.
No one wants to believe that a police officer would
(38:53):
be capable of committing a murder like this and going
into work the next day.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
A female police I think is that that's the key
is female police officer part of this.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
As an investigator, you have to check it out either way,
that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
All you have to do is check it out.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
If you don't check it out, that's the problem.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
So they find her, they get her DNA sample, they
compare it.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
And it's a match.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah, well there's steps along the way where again they
don't want to believe it. What those detectives when they
reopen to what they're trying to do is eliminate her
as a suspect.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
That's what they're trying to do.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
They're trying to say, yeah, there's just no way, there's
just no way that this woman. They looked her up
in group mail or whatever, they can see she's still here.
Her husband was assigned to the Van Nu's division. These
guys are investigating this, and they also had to make
a decision because the LAPD and a lot of police departments,
(39:50):
the policy is, if you become aware of misconduct or
potential misconduct, you have to report it up the chain
of command, so either to your boss or to ins
her own affairs. If you become aware of any misconduct,
you have to report it. That's what the policy is. Okay,
So finding out a police officer may have committed a
murder twenty some years ago, I'm pretty sure that's a misconduct.
(40:13):
But these guys knew that she was still an active
police officer, and they didn't know who she was friends
with and how it might get back to her that
they were reinvestigating this case and looking at her. So
they had to make a decision. You know what, We're
not going to put it up the chain of command
just yet. We're going to investigate this thing in secret,
just the four of us. We're going to swear each
(40:36):
other to secrecy. We're not going to tell our spouses.
We're not going to tell anyone what we're up to
until we either eliminate her as a suspect or god
forbid incriminator. And the problem that they ran into is
they just were not able to eliminate her every time
they dug deeper. So they found out, oh, she reported
(40:58):
her gun stolen three three weeks after the murder.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Yeah, this is not looking good.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
So it led up to them. Eventually they told their lieutenant,
who told the chief of police, and a surveillance team
was put on Stephanie, and they collected her DNA sample
and it was compared to the bite mark and it
was a match.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Okay, and she goes on trial and is convicted.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
I'm assuming three years after she was arrested. Yeah, she
went on trial and was convicted of first degree murder
and sentenced to I think twenty five or twenty seven
to life.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Does she confess ever or does she say anything? No, No,
she denies it.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
She never took the witness stand. I wrote to her
several times requesting an interview. I had interviewed her, remember
how this all started, Like, I interviewed her before she
was arrested. She's never responded. She did not testify at
the trial. She did not make a statement before her sentencing.
She's never expressed remorse. She's never confessed the last time
(41:58):
that she spoke publicly or not even publicly. You know,
she was interviewed right before she was arrested. They confronted
her with the DNA results.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Does John Sherry's husband ever show any kind of regret
or remorse?
Speaker 2 (42:11):
He does, And I want to be fair to John.
He did make a statement where he took responsibility to
a degree for what had happened, and he did express
something along the lines of the fact that if Sherry
had not met him, that she would still be alive today.
But to me, what's troubling about John is how he
(42:34):
hurt his own credibility by letting the truth out so
incrementally over time and not understanding that if you just
put it all out there on the table to begin with,
it protects you. It just looks terrible when you're telling
different versions of the story and with each subsequent version
(42:56):
you're admitting to more.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Contact with Stephanie.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
And I can understand to a degree why you would
not want to come out with that your wife is murdered,
you were unfaithful to her, When or exactly are you
gonna put that out before the funeral, But at the
same time you have to, Yeah, it doesn't help to
bottle it up and let it out in pieces later.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
So he valued himself more than he valued his wife
is really what it comes down to to me.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Well, he's talked in his interviews about nothing's going to
bring Sherry back, that it's just moving on and just
trying to move on, and that nothing that he can
do is going to undo what happened. Before, and so
I do think there's like a certain circling of the
wagons that happens within his family and protecting John, and
(43:46):
he does project a feeling he's very wounded. He wears
it on his sleeve, and it's like a protective thing
because if someone is so bereft, are you going to
press that person? Are you gonna worse in their emotional
discomfort by accusing them of lying or something like?
Speaker 4 (44:04):
No?
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Like, but he uses that as sort of a shield
against scrutiny or further questions, like he knew Stephanie's name.
The Rasmussens did not. They asked him, what is the
name of your ex girlfriend? John would not tell them.
And then when they would go to his parents or
someone else and say we need John to cooperate, their
(44:25):
response was can't you see John as devastated? Yeah, why
are you beating up on John? Can't you see that
he is a victim here as well?
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah? I have zero sympathy for that guy, like zero,
lesson zero disgusting. What is the takeaway that you have
from this story that.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
The police have a long way to go to changing
their culture. This is a murder committed by a police officer,
and very credible accusations of a long running cover up
of a murder committed by a police officer, with multiple
police officers for many years looking the other way. That
(45:02):
is something that warrants an investigation. The LAPED did not
do an investigation. I'm going to the people who are
as high as you can go within the hierarchy, and
what are they doing. They're doing exactly what Lyle Meyer
did in nineteen eighty six and exactly what Cliff Shepherd
did in two thousand and five. Its fingers in the
(45:25):
ears and hoping that this is going to go away
or not my problem, or someone else will deal with it,
or whatever the excuse or the rationalization is. But it's unacceptable.
It's galling.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
On the next episode of Wicked Words, Deborah Blum on
the efficiency of poisons as murder weapons.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
To be a poisoner, you have to plan ahead.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
You can't be an impulse.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Poisoner can say I'm super.
Speaker 4 (45:57):
Mad at you, or I really want your fortune, and
so I'm just going to rush over and research the
best possible poison and get back to you later. You
can lose your temper with a gun. You can be
fearful with the breck right, but you have to think
ahead and plan if you're going to be a poison.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
My new book, All That Is Wicked is available for
pre order now, including the audiobook. All that Is Wicked
is based on our first season of tenfold War Wicked.
You might think you know the whole story of Killer
Edward Rulof's crimes, but there's so much more. My book
American Sherlock is also available. This has been an exactly
right tenfold War media production. The producer is Alexis Imirosi.
(46:49):
Our mixer is Ryo Baum. Our sound designer is Andrew Epen.
Curtis heath is. Our composer Nick Toga did the artwork.
Ilsa Brink designed the website. The execute producers are Georgia Hartstark,
Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram
and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at
(47:09):
tenfold More and if you know of a historical crime
that could use some attention, especially if it happened in
your family, email us at info at tenfoldmore Wicked dot com.
We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for
Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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