The cup
Now they had a problem. Lazarus was a cop. She knew exactly how investigations worked. One clumsy move, like a request for a DNA sample, would warn her.
So, in May 2009, a surveillance team followed her. They watched her outside a Costco, and they watched her drop a drink cup and straw into a trash can.
When she walked away, they took it out.
The DNA from the cup and straw matched the saliva from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm.
“Now you’re accusing me of this?”
Early on the morning of June 5, 2009, Detective Dan Jaramillo walked up to Lazarus’s desk at police headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. He needed her help, he said. A man in custody downstairs claimed to have information about stolen art, her specialty.
The interview would take place in the jail. To go in, she would have to leave her gun outside.
A hidden camera recorded what came next. There was no art thief. The detectives told her they wanted to talk about an old case, and asked if she knew John Ruetten.
Lazarus talked easily about John, about UCLA and the dorms and basketball. Asked about his wife, at first she could not remember meeting her. Then her memory changed.
“And, yeah, I may have met her at a hospital,” she said. “I may have talked to her once or twice.”
The detectives asked if she had ever lost anything. “I had a gun that was stolen,” she said. Not her duty gun, she added.
When they told her that people had described fights between her and Sherri, the friendly tone was gone.
“Now you’re accusing me of this?” she said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
They asked whether she would give them a DNA swab. “Maybe,” she said, and then: “I probably need to talk to a lawyer.”
Then, almost in passing, she said: “We had a fight, and so I went and killed her. I mean, come on.”
She thanked the detectives for the courtesy and walked out of the room. She didn’t get far. Officers were waiting in the hallway, and she was arrested for murder.
“This is crazy,” she said as they read her her rights. “I’m totally in shock.”
The trial
When police searched her home, they found a diary from the mid-1980s full of entries about John. At trial, jurors also saw a letter she had written to John’s mother around the time of his engagement. “I’m truly in love with John,” she wrote. “This year has torn me up.”
Lazarus pleaded not guilty. Her lawyers attacked the bite-mark swab, arguing it had been stored and handled carelessly for more than 20 years.
Prosecutors summed up their case as “a bite, a bullet, a gun barrel and a broken heart.” In March 2012, the jury found Stephanie Lazarus guilty of first-degree murder.
On May 11, 2012, she was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. Sherri’s parents lived long enough to see her convicted. They died without ever learning why it took the LAPD 23 years to arrest one of its own.
The confession
Through her trial and her appeals, Lazarus insisted she was innocent. That changed in 2023, when she became eligible for parole. At her first hearing, she admitted she had killed Sherri.
That November, the parole panel actually recommended releasing her. After Governor Gavin Newsom raised concerns, the board took that back in October 2024.
At another hearing in February 2025, she described the morning in detail. According to the Los Angeles Times, she told the panel she had called John’s home that morning in 1986 and was enraged when Sherri answered. She drove over with her gun and a cord.
“I went over there hoping to see him,” she said. “I was so angry that if she got in my way to see John, I was going to strangle her.”
She also admitted that she got rid of the revolver and reported it stolen, because she knew detectives had her name. “I figured they were coming,” she said, “and would want to see my gun.”
The panel said her account did not match the evidence used to convict her, and denied parole.
Still behind bars
In October 2026, she went before the parole board again. She told the panel she was “truly and immensely sorry.” John Ruetten, Sherri’s family and the prosecutors who convicted her all opposed her release.
One commissioner said Lazarus was “still choosing not to be completely honest with this panel.” Parole was denied for another three years.
Stephanie Lazarus, now 66, remains at the California Institution for Women in Corona.
For 23 years, the police said Sherri Rasmussen was killed by burglars. The answer had been in a coroner’s freezer all along, and the woman it pointed to had been carrying a police badge the whole time.
