That’s not good and should not happen again. There was a very serious failure by the department - whether it was corruption or incompetence, this was a police officer that committed a murder and got away with it for more than 20 years. That’s the reason for me to do my investigation. There’s desire among a lot of people to want the police to be better and to learn from mistakes, and if there has been wrongdoing to admit those mistakes rather than deny them. A lot has happened in the last 10 years and a lot of people’s eyes have been opened. With all the cases of police corruption and violence against civilians nationwide and locally in the last 10 years do you think the conflicting statements from the Rasmussens and the police will be read differently now than they might have been in 2009? The questions were out there but felt taboo for anyone to broach. The LAPD did not want to talk about this. Nels Rasmussen and his wife, Loretta, have their account of what happened and when I interviewed Lyle Mayer he was adamant that they never mentioned this woman. The way the story unspooled it retained that surreal quality all the way through. That’s what got me to court and getting to know the people affected by it - the Rasmussens, their friends, the detectives, the prosecutors - pulled me deeper into it. I wanted to know whether this could possibly be true - that she committed a murder more than 20 years earlier and continued working as a cop the entire time. Initially, it was the surreal nature of having met this woman under very innocuous circumstances and then learning she had this insane secret. Several years after the murder, since Lazarus was not a suspect, Ruetten again began sleeping with his wife’s killer. Ruetten was never a suspect but he also was not forthright with police about what had previously happened with Lazarus. McGough, who reported on the saga for nearly a decade, takes a low-key, “just-the-facts” approach even with the elements that lend themselves to soap opera. He was a writer for “Law & Order” in 2009, and had previously met Lazarus for a book he was going to write about art theft, which at the time was her beat. “Once the trial happened and I had the benefit of police records and Stephanie’s diary and the various scientific reports, it suddenly possible to tell a story almost over the shoulder of the people who were living it at that time,” says McGough. Now, Matthew McGough has stepped into that chasm, filling in the full story with a blizzard of meticulous, sometimes overwhelming detail - his book, “The Lazarus Files: A Cold Case Investigation,” weighs in at nearly 600 pages. In 2009, a few diligent and determined detectives aided by a persistent civilian criminalist who had already been ignored by other police officers pieced together what had happened from the DNA of a bite mark on Rasmussen’s arm. The case remained unsolved eventually investigative material - including the separate interviews where Ruetten mentioned Lazarus and where Rasmussen’s father, Nels, pointedly asked police to check out the ex-girlfriend who had been hassling Rasmussen - as well as most potential DNA evidence went missing. The detectives failed to interview many relevant people, including one who witnessed Lazarus harassing Rasmussen at her job before the murder. Despite evidence to the contrary, lead detective Lyle Mayer decided almost immediately that the murder was committed by two men as part of a botched robbery gone wrong, and nothing said by family or friends changed that perspective. Stephanie Lazarus, a Los Angeles police officer, entered the home of her ex-lover, John Ruetten, and murdered his new wife, Sherri Rasmussen, beating her brutally during a struggle before shooting her three times.
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