Parole again rejected for former LAPD detective who killed her ex-lover’s new wife in Van Nuys

LOS ANGELES — A state parole board panel denied parole Wednesday for a former Los Angeles Police Department detective who admitted that she shot and killed her ex-lover’s new wife in the victim’s Van Nuys condominium nearly 39 years ago.

Another parole board panel had recommended parole in November 2023 for Stephanie Lazarus, but that recommendation was subsequently rescinded last October after concerns expressed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Commissioner Kevin Chappell, who presided over the hearing, said the panel found Lazarus “unsuitable for parole at this time,” explaining that her testimony about the Feb. 24, 1986, attack on Sherri Rasmussen “does not match up with the evidence used to convict you.”

He said more of her DNA — besides DNA from a bite mark on the victim – – would have been found at the scene if the attack occurred as a “fight” about which she had testified.

Chappell noted that Lazarus described the physical assault as a “fight” and had to be corrected because it was clear that “you were the only one engaging in this extreme act of violence.”

Deputy Commissioner Vijai Desai added that the “level of minimization” that Lazarus had demonstrated seems to indicate that it is “pretty entrenched.” He said the victim’s family deserves the truth.

Chappell said Lazarus will be eligible for parole in three years — “time that we feel is necessary” — but told her that she can file a petition for an earlier hearing if there is a change in circumstances.

Lazarus, now 64, acknowledged during the hearing that she had murdered Rasmussen, saying that the victim’s right to “live a long and fruitful life was taken from her.”

“I caused unbearable heartache,” the former LAPD detective told the panel, noting that there was no amount of apologies to express her remorse.

She said she was sorry that it took 23 years for her to be arrested and was sorry that she didn’t plead guilty at her trial. She apologized to the victim and said she was continuing to honor her by “taking responsibility for my actions.”

“I am so very sorry,” Lazarus added, saying that she will never revert to the “monster” that she was the day of the killing.

She said under questioning by her own attorney, Tracy Lum, that she agreed with her first-degree murder conviction and said that she would have turned herself in if she could go back and change things.

The victim’s husband, John Ruetten, joined other family members in calling for the parole board panel to deny parole to Lazarus.

He said Lazarus used her police training to cover up the crime, saying that she is now blaming her trial attorney for her decision to go forward with a trial that traumatized the victim’s family and that she is “going to say whatever is necessary to get parole.”

“I cannot accept that anything she says is genuine,” he said, mentioning, as he has before, that his wife lost her life because she met, loved and married him.

Lazarus — a 25-year LAPD veteran who worked as an art theft investigator — is serving a 27-year-to-life term in state prison stemming from her March 2012 conviction for the killing of Rasmussen, who was shot three times in the Balboa Boulevard condominium she shared with her husband.

Rasmussen had married Ruetten, Lazarus’ one-time love interest, three months before her death.

At her first parole hearing in November 2023, Lazarus publicly admitted that she had killed the 29-year-old Glendale Adventist Medical Center nursing supervisor.

“It makes me sick to this day that I took an oath to protect and serve people, and I took Sherri Rasmussen’s life from her, a nurse,” Lazarus said, according to a transcript of her first parole hearing. “All I could think about was getting out of there before the police showed up.”

The transcript from her November 2023 parole hearing quotes Lazarus as saying, “I never got comfortable thinking I got away with this. … I didn’t do the right thing because I didn’t want to face the consequences of my actions. I didn’t want to go to prison.”

“… I will never, ever harm an individual like I did on February 24, 1986, when I murdered, callously murdered and heinously murdered Sherri Rasmussen,” the transcript quotes Lazarus as saying.

The governor subsequently asked the full parole board to review the parole grant for Lazarus, writing last April that he found that the case “warrants the consideration of the full Board of Parole Hearings to determine whether Ms. Lazarus can be safely released at this time.”

The governor noted that Lazarus had “evaded justice for more than two decades and did not appear to begin taking full accountability for the murder until she was finally caught,” while acknowledging that she “has desisted from violent conduct” since the crime and “participated in and internalized targeted rehabilitative programming, signs that she has made progress in mitigating her risk factors.”

Lazarus’ bid to be released on parole suffered a setback in May 2024, with the parole board ordering the new hearing to determine whether there was good cause to rescind the parole grant for the former LAPD detective. A three- member parole board panel determined last October that there was “good cause to rescind” the parole recommendation.

At the latest hearing Wednesday, LAPD Detective Greg Stearns and the prosecutors in the trial, Shannon Presby and Paul Nunez, joined the victim’s family members in opposing Lazarus’ parole bid.

Presby said Lazarus’ claim that her gun fell out of a fanny pack during a struggle with the victim is “just not credible,” and that she was subsequently “able to hide what she did from every person in her life.”

Lazarus’ attorney told the parole board panel that Lazarus had made “horrible choices” in 1986, but said her client takes “full responsibility for her actions” and has “shown genuine remorse” and engaged in “`extraordinary rehabilitative efforts.”

Lazarus retired from the LAPD after being arrested in June 2009 by Robbery-Homicide Division detectives at the department’s downtown headquarters, largely as a result of DNA evidence taken from a bite mark on Rasmussen’s left forearm.

LAPD detectives had trailed Lazarus to surreptitiously get a DNA sample from her in May 2009 by collecting a drink cup and straw she had thrown in a trash can outside a Costco store.

Rasmussen’s father, Nels, had insisted shortly after his daughter’s killing that police investigate Lazarus, who had been an officer for two years at the time of Rasmussen’s death. But the case went cold until 2004, when investigators with the LAPD’s Cold Case Unit reopened the case and asked the coroner’s office to locate the bite mark tissue sample, which had been stored in a freezer in an evidence room since 1986, according to a 2015 ruling by a three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal that upheld Lazarus’ conviction.

DNA testing determined that the major profile was from a female, and investigators turned their attention toward specific women who might have had reason to harm Rasmussen, according to the appellate court panel’s ruling.

The appellate court panel noted in its ruling that Lazarus’ DNA profile “precisely matched the profile of the person who bit Rasmussen shortly before her death.”

Lazarus had a “compelling motive to kill Rasmussen” because she had been abruptly dropped by Ruetten when he met his future wife, and Lazarus had confronted Rasmussen at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, where the 29-year-old woman worked as a nursing supervisor, the justices noted in the 2015 ruling.

Ruetten and Rasmussen were married in November 1985, a few months after Lazarus wrote Ruetten’s mother that she was “truly in love with John,” the appellate court panel noted.

“The evidence of motive and the circumstantial evidence, combined with the presence of appellant’s DNA on a wound inflicted on the victim during her struggles with her assailant, provided convincing evidence of appellant’s guilt,” Associate Justice Nora Manella wrote on behalf of the panel in its 2015 ruling.

The California Supreme Court refused in October 2015 to review the case against Lazarus.

After the verdict, then-LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called the case “a tragedy on every level” and apologized for how long it took to “solve this case and bring a measure of justice to this tragedy.”