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Hey everybody, welcome back to our podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. And I'm the husband. We just want to say thank you to all of our new listeners who are tuning in. Also, we did hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube this week.
And that was a really, it was a pretty big deal for Garrett and I. Yeah, we were pretty excited. We were recording ourselves when we hit it. We were excited. Also, if you are listening on podcasts, please subscribe and leave us a review. It helps us out so much. And if you're tuning in on YouTube, please also subscribe, leave a comment, and turn on notifications so that you can be notified every single time we upload a video. Okay, Garrett, what are your 10 seconds? My 10 seconds for this week? Well, our anniversary is on the 19th. That's true. Four years. Yeah. Married.
We know it all. Just kidding. Oh, yeah. Together close to six? Yep, close to six. Actually, these 10 seconds have been really fun. We posted a picture of Garrett using his new grill because the saga went on for so long and a lot of you were really asking to see it. And so we posted a picture of it and that was fun. So we will update you with our lawn, a picture of our grass next to see how that ends. Not looking very good. Still. Yeah, still. Still.
Okay. Our case today was requested by Colby. So thank you, Colby, for sending this in. And our case sources are a 48 hours episode called One of Their Own, CBSnews.com, FilmDaily.co, VanityFair.com, and TheCinemaholic.com.
Our case begins in Los Angeles, California in February of 1986. A young Scandinavian descent woman named Sherry Rasmussen was working as a nursing administrator. Sherry became a nurse at the young age of 20, having entered college at age 16. Whoa. So she's literally a genius. Good for her. Around age 27, she was named director of critical care nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center.
Sherry's parents, Nelson Loretta Rasmussen, say that their family was very tight-knit growing up and Sherry liked taking care of people. Sherry was motivated and wanted to excel, telling people that she was going to elevate the stature of nursing in the nation.
When she did something, she did it 100%. I mean, I think this is pretty obvious. She did go to college at age 16. At the time of our story, in 1986, Sherry was not only excelling at her career, but she had also just married the man of her dreams. His name was John Rutten, and according to 48 Hours, he was a young engineer that she'd met in 1984, so just two years earlier.
Life was going amazing for 29-year-old Sherry, but on February 24th, 1986, everything was about to change. Newlyweds Sherry and John were living in Van Nuys, California. Sherry had actually stayed home from work this day, and it kind of depended on the source as to why, but she didn't go to work.
So when John came home from work around 6 p.m. after running some errands and after having his calls to home go unanswered all day, he was in horror as he entered the house to come across a bloodied and beaten Sherry. Oh. Dead from what appeared to be multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, two in the upper torso and a third to the abdomen.
So he just came home to see his wife and she was dead. She had stayed home that day. He had been calling. She wasn't answering. He came home. She's bloodied. She's been beaten up and shot and she's dead in their living room. What? Okay. John had noticed when he'd come home that the garage door was open, which they didn't leave open. And Sherry's BMW that he had bought her for an engagement present was missing. Her body was on the living room floor and the sliding glass door of their Balboa townhome was shattered.
Sherry was on her back on the living room rug, barefoot and still in her red bathrobe, according to Vanity Fair. There appeared to be signs of a struggle in the home. The vase was knocked over. Chairs were overturned. It looks as if the last two gunshots had been fired through a quilt in order to quiet them. So was she not going to work because she wasn't going to work or because she got fired?
Because something happened to her. Like I said, the sources varied. She woke up that morning. Some sources said that she just didn't want to. She was doing like a presentation about this one study at the hospital and she like didn't believe in the study. So she didn't want to go give it. So she decided to stay home from work. Others said she had been injured in an aerobics class. So I don't know the exact reason, but it didn't have anything to do with what was about to happen.
Okay. So the shots through the quilt mean that Sherry was beaten and then shot once. And then once she was incapacitated, someone grabbed the quilt and finished the job. So they made sure she was dead by firing the last two through the quilt. And there was also what appeared to be a bite mark on the inside of Sherry's arm, like a hard one enough that they were like, that's a bite mark. Yeah.
LAPD began investigating the murder of Sherry Rasmussen. They didn't ask around much about Sherry's life, not her friends, her family. Did she have any enemies? So the investigation starts and normally police would be like, Hey, does she have any enemies? Right? They don't ask her friends and family, anything like that. Nothing about Sherry's actual life.
They obviously immediately bring John in for questioning and he seems to be in shock. He just showed up and his wife is dead. Police ruled out John rather quickly, who after saying a couple words at a memorial for her, disappeared out of the investigation of his wife's murder and moved away from L.A. soon after.
Okay, so he just moved. He moved out of LA. The investigation happens, the memorial happens, and he doesn't like follow up with the cops. Hey, do you have any news? Who killed her? Do you know what happened? He kind of backs off the investigation and ends up just moving out of LA. So people found it suspicious that he didn't stick around, obviously, and try to figure out who had done it. He wasn't advocating for her. He wasn't fighting to find who had murdered her. And Sherry's parents actually asked the lead detective on the case
Lyle Mayer to look into new leads, to dig into Sherry and John's life, possibly coworkers, ex-lovers. Essentially everyone in Sherry's life is trying to tell the cops like, hey, can you look into this? Can you look into that? Have you asked around about this? And they're like, no, no, no, we can handle this. But they're not asking any of those questions. All the typical questions that we know are asked.
So instead, police decide that Sherry had been shot in a burglary gone wrong. I wonder if the husband was scared. Like he's acting scared. You think? Kind of. But police are like, okay, this is just a burglary gone wrong. This has nothing to do with Sherry's life. Nothing to do with John and Sherry's life. Like this is someone broken. The freak accident and blah, blah, blah. Wrong time or wrong place, wrong time. Right.
So police conclude that two men had entered the house and were surprised by Sherry at some point thinking nobody was home. And then they beat her and shot her.
They came to this conclusion because they noticed that there were two electronics, a VCR player and a CD player stacked on top of each other at the foot of the stairs, almost as if they had been collected there. And then something had been interrupted and they had shot Sherry and ran out and didn't take the thing. I was going to ask, was anything taken? Cause the CD player and the,
The VCR. VCR was sitting there. Yeah, not DVD. When they said electronics, like, oh, DVD player. But then I was like, oh, wait, we're not there yet. Obviously, this is indication enough. But the problem is, is the only thing that was actually missing from the house, what you just asked, was the car, obviously. Remember, he showed up, her BMW was gone. But also the couple's wedding license, like the piece of paper.
Like, oh, you're allowed to get married? That was missing. And this wasn't fishy to cops at all? Like, oh, just the wedding license was... Just the wedding license. Okay. And everything else that looked like it had been being taken. Like, the cords were pulled out. It was stacked up. But then they just didn't take it or whatever happened. And I kind of get where cops are thinking based on the evidence. Like, this was a burglary. Like, that's a little weird. But it's also weird just that they come into... Like...
And then they take the car, but they don't actually end up taking all the stuff that they had piled up ready to take. You know what I mean? The cops also further confirm this story because two days later in the same neighborhood, there was another attempted burglary in a house with two men. So two men tried to break into a house and burglarize it. Then they ran away.
Police actually had sketches drawn up of the suspects and sent it out. No one could come up with anything. Sherry's BMW was recovered a week after her murder, but no clues came from it.
It was just recovered. They couldn't find anything about it. A $10,000 reward was offered after fingerprints came back inconclusive in the home and in the car. And despite all the efforts, Sherry Rasmussen's case went cold. The suspects from the attempted burglaries were never found. The sketches, they were never found.
It wasn't until the late 90s when DNA testing became more widely known, as we know, and used that LAPD decided, like many other places, we're going to create a unit that just looks into cold cases since we now have all this new DNA testing. But in LA, there are many cold cases. And so Sherry's didn't actually get touched until 2004. Oh, wow. And this is when Jennifer Butterworth looked into the case.
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Jennifer found that the investigation had been rather small and that some of the evidence in the file had actually gone missing. There were videotaped interviews like interrogations that were missing. What?
I don't know. Okay. But you know what was still in the file? The DNA collected from the bite mark on Sherry's body the day of the murder. So they had swabbed that bite mark and found someone else's DNA. Jennifer ran the DNA through the database. Obviously, this is taking time and didn't find a match. But she was able to conclude that the DNA from the bite mark was female.
Oh, but they said there was two guys... That broke in. That broke in. So Jennifer also, while going through the case file, found a note about a woman that...
that Sherry had complained to friends and family about prior to her murder. So I was just going to ask, where's the husband in all of this? He's gone. Like he's gone at this point. And is he like following up? No. What's he doing? He never followed. He doesn't. He's kind of like the silent piece of this case. Okay. Like you feel like he should be there. He should be involved. And throughout this whole time of them, it being a cold case and them starting to open it up, he's nowhere to be found. Just Sherry's parents, friends, family, stuff like that. Got it.
Jennifer finds it. She's like, oh, Sherry had complained to friends and family about this person, this woman harassing her. And then those friends and family had told police. Bye.
back when this investigation started the day of Sherry's murder, Jennifer took the findings, the female bite mark and the notes of like a possible suspect, a woman to her superior and said, Hey, I found this. I don't think this was a burglary. It's an unsolved case. I think it was a woman. Like she said, there was someone harassing her and the DNA from the bite mark is from a woman. Can we please like reopen this and look into it?
And the superior insisted, no, Sherry's death was from a burglary gone bad. There could have been a woman there with the two men. And despite the fact that they had no idea who had done it, the case was closed again. I'm so confused. Yeah, I'm confused. I bet you are. I guess I just don't get...
- Something's fishy. - Something's fishy. - Something's fishy. - This is now two times that this case has been looked at and the investigation has been brushed aside. Even amateur rookies like us know, okay, well you should be asking about her life. You should be asking these questions. Jennifer put her findings back in the box and closed it up. They were not going to solve the case this time. And it went cold again until 2009 when Jim Nuttall and Pete Barba decided to review the case.
They both immediately felt like the burglary theory was bogus. Nothing had been taken. How were they so sure it was a burglary? Jim and Pete, like Jennifer, felt like there had to be a connection between the female involved in the notes and the bite mark DNA evidence. So they went to work. They began testing and eliminating all female suspects until they narrowed it down to one. The woman who Sherry had reported to have harassed her before the murder.
They also learned that both John and Sherry's parents had brought up this exact woman to cops back in 1986, asking the LAPD to look into her multiple times, that Sherry had complained multiple times about her. They said her name to the cops. I don't get why no one has looked into her. I don't understand. She's not even listed as...
being interviewed. She wasn't even talked to by cops. This woman was John's ex-girlfriend. So it's not even like some random woman far-fetched out there that cops like, no, that's just a coincidence. No, John's ex-girlfriend was harassing her. She had told friends, family, John,
And after her murder, both John and her parents said, you need to look into this girl. She's been harassing her. And they didn't. They said, nope, it was a burglary gone bad. Also, they could have just taken her DNA.
And they would have been able to see if it matched the bite mark within seconds. Yes. Right now? No, like back then they could have done it. Well, I don't know. Maybe they didn't have like the comparing technology back then as well. Yeah, I'm not sure. But they might have. Like they might have been able to do it. I know like fingerprints were more relied on and they tested fingerprints and maybe it was inconclusive. Okay.
John and this girlfriend had had an on and off again sexual relationship before he began dating Sherry. So it was the relationship right before Sherry. And it wasn't a relationship. It was a sexual relationship. Got it.
John had actually liked this girl, but the woman was too intense for him doing things like stealing his clothes or taking pictures of him while he slept, like weird things. And he was like, hey, we're not even dating. So this is just weird.
The woman wanted to exclusively date John, but he was dating around as he was seeing her. And it was around this time that John met Sherry and began to like her and they began to be serious. So then this sexual relationship he was having with this ex, he kind of just said, "Nevermind, I'm getting in a serious relationship now." This woman obviously found out about this new girl and went over to John's home to talk to him about it and they ended up sleeping together.
So he was exclusively seeing Sherry. Oh, whoa. Okay. And he slept with his old girl. But they weren't married yet. They weren't married yet. Not that it matter. I'm just timeline wise. You're just timeline wise. This was the last time that John says that he would sleep with her. But there are rumors that it did actually happen again after the marriage. Okay. But I couldn't find like a clear source on that. So we'll just leave it at that.
As he became more exclusive and serious with Sherry pretty fast, like I said, they got married only after two years. His relationship with this other girl kind of fell off. Yeah. But the woman wasn't taking the new reality too well. She kept in contact with John, showing up to his house randomly, even showing up to the house after Sherry had moved in.
after they had been married. She even showed up to Sherry's workplace after her and John were married and told her that, you know, if I can't have John, no one can. She was totally being stalked by her then. Stalking her, harassing her, showing up to her workplace. What did the husband say in all this? Like, hey, your ex-girlfriend's stalking me. I'm not sure, and this is hard because this is kind of like hearsay, but it seemed like Sherry's parents felt as if John wasn't doing enough to...
to close off that relationship with that woman. We don't know. Apparently she showed up to the house early on saying, can you wax my skis? John said, yes, took them, wax them. And Sherry had told him, I'm uncomfortable with you, her showing up here and you waxing her skis. Like you were just with her and he, you know, he did it anyways. Okay. So, and it was a source of contention between John and Sherry. Sherry felt like I just, this is hard. Does he like her? Is he still seeing her? She didn't know.
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Dot com code husband. CB distillery dot com code husband. Sherry told multiple people, friends and family about John's ex-girlfriend that she was showing up to places that Sherry was stalking her, harassing her. Even that at one point this woman would dress up like a man and follow her around in disguise like around town.
That's so weird. Like you should be able to get a restraining order. Exactly. And despite the police knowing all of this right after she was murdered, John's ex-girlfriend was never looked into. I'm so confused. Why? There's got to be a reason. Let's hear it. Because this woman, John's ex-lover was a cop, was a cop.
Holy crap. She was a detective. Well, now at this point caught up, she was a detective for the Los Angeles police department. But at the time of the murder, she was just a cop. So it all adds up. So that's why the superior said, no, this is over. And like everyone was like, no, it's. They knew her name. They knew her name the day that Sherry was murdered. They knew her name and said, no, we're not looking into her. No, we're not looking into her. Okay.
So what happens? So when Jim and Pete were now caught up, new detectives, new people on this case, right, had eliminated all other females besides this female. She was a detective now. Her name's Stephanie Lazarus. And she was John's like ex-girlfriend, sexual relationship, whatever you want to call it, and was harassing Sherry.
And the awkward part is, is Jim and Pete are like, okay, well, we've narrowed it down to her. And Stephanie Lazarus worked right across the hall from them. They are literally in the same department. So what year, sorry, what year are we in right now that they're investigating this? So we're in like 2009. It's been 23 years. Okay. Since she died. So she's been working.
For 23 years. For a long time as a detective. This case has been cold for a while to the point where Jim and Pete, and she's moved her way up. She was just a patrol cop, then she was a cop, then she moved her way up. Now she's a detective. Stephanie being right across the hall from them and her being their main suspect, they were uncomfortable, to say the least. This is not a fun thing to discover when you're working a cold case. So not only was their main suspect one...
One of them. This was also meant that years earlier, when police had all the same evidence that they did to this point, they had ignored the truth. Although back then they had no affirmative evidence that this, you know, the said bite mark was female. Stephanie should have at least been considered and talked to. Like if friends and family, multiple of them were saying, hey, Stephanie, you need to look at her. And she wasn't even talked to or thought about. So crazy. That's bad. That's not good work right there.
So Jim and Pete proceed cautiously, working after hours or behind closed doors, and they only refer to Stephanie as number five. So in all their paperwork, it's number five. It took a while, but they were able to covertly get Stephanie's DNA to test against the swab collected from the bite mark on Sherry's body. They actually followed her around and collected a cup of
that she had thrown away in a public trash can and then took the DNA off the straw and compared it to the DNA from the bite mark. And it was a match. Detective Stephanie Lazarus had bit Sherry Rasmussen the day of her murder.
After months of stalking and harassing her. Okay. This evidence is hard to deny. It's hard to deny. You don't have a fresh bite mark with fresh DNA. The day someone gets murdered after accusation, after accusation of stalking and harassing and go, well, they're, that's a pretty good suspect.
Pete and Jim slowly begin letting people know about the match, finally making it up to their superiors and the L.A. D.A.'s office because Stephanie would need to be arrested and charged. And she's one of their own. So is are they going to just sweep it under the like? How are they going to handle this? So how old is she at this point? Forties? Yes. She's older. I mean, she's.
It's been 23 years. So they tell Stephanie, they're like, hey, Steph, can you like come down for an interview? We actually have a suspect here who knows something about like what you've been working on. So we want you to talk to him. She's like, yeah, okay. So she goes on this interview that she thinks is for someone else. And they set it up in a place that she would have to surrender her gun.
To come into like you can't go into the interview rooms with your guy. Okay. So and they do that on purpose because they don't want her armed because she's the suspect. Detective Greg and Dan held the interrogation where Stephanie swore she knew nothing about Sherry's death. And I'm going to actually read an excerpt from Vanity Fair about this interrogation. Like word for word what was said.
They go into the interview room and she sits down and they say, hey, so we've been assigned a case. And there are some notes as far as your name being mentioned, like your name gets brought up.
And she says, oh, OK. They say, do you know John Rutten? And they actually pronounce Rutten wrong. And so she goes, do you mean John Rutten? And they say yes. And she goes, yeah, I went to school with him. Let's see. I went to UCLA 1978. I started and, you know, I met him at school in the dorms. They ask, were you guys friends, close friends? She says, yeah.
we were close friends. I mean, what's this all about? The detectives say it's a case we're working on that involves John. And, um, and some of the things we've reviewed, there's also stuff that, you know, he kind of knew you and some time goes on. And then they ask, was there any kind of relationship or anything that developed between you guys? She said, no,
I mean, we dated, you know, what's all this about? And he's like, well, it's relating to his wife. She says, okay. They say, do you know her? She goes, no, not really. I mean, I knew they got married. Did you ever meet her? She says, I don't know. This whole interrogation goes on after this and
they're like well did you ever have did you ever talk to her and she's like no i never spoke to her i don't think and they're like okay okay time goes on they're like well we have multiple people saying you did talk to her actually maybe i did talk to her i think i did talk to her at the hospital maybe you went to the hospital to talk to her oh i did think i go to the hospital at one point because i went to warn her that he was still talking to me while they were dating but we know that's not what she said so as this interrogation goes on she's
She's quickly escalating her story. She's kind of digging herself in a hole too. At this point, they already know that they have her DNA or that they have her match. But she has no idea. She has no idea.
So Stephanie, who's a UCLA graduate, like you heard, had eventually actually married another detective. So at the time of this interview, she's married. During these 23 years, Stephanie had also survived thyroid cancer. She started a daycare program for LAPD officers, and she also had adopted a little girl. So she's now a mom. She's married. She's excelled to...
Detective status. Stephanie was arrested and charged with the murder of Sherry at this interrogation. Oh, wow. She actually got up to leave and they were like, actually, you're getting arrested.
After a trial and jury deliberation, Stephanie Lazarus was found guilty of first degree murder. She was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. Holy crap. She will be eligible for parole in 2034. Oh, that's far away. At the time of her sentencing, she was 52 years old, according to FilmDaily.co. And her sentencing was in March of 2012. Wait, so had she killed...
- How'd she kill her? Like what happened? - So she went in saying not guilty. She hasn't said to this day what happened. - So no one knows. - No one knows. They drew up the conclusion, these new detectives drew up the conclusion that she went to the house knowing she was going to kill her. She walked in,
attacked her, ended up shooting her and then tried, she's a cop. What gun did she use? So. Sorry, I'm bouncing all over. I know, I know, but now you're putting it together. The gun that was used two weeks after the murder, Stephanie filed a complaint or like a, a,
Oh, like her gun wasn't working or something? Her gun was stolen. Two weeks after Stephanie's murder. Holy crap. Two weeks after Sherry's murder, Stephanie went to a different police station than what she worked for. Like a completely different county.
And filed her gun missing. It wasn't her work gun, just a gun that she owned, said it got stolen. So they have no way to track, like it could be in the ocean for all they know at the time, 23 years later. But that gun that she said was stolen could have been used with the type of bullets that they found in Sherry. So it's completely possible that this gun was used. So they think Stephanie showed up, killed her, tried to stage it to look like a burglary, took the BMW, left, deserted it, and then...
Just waited. Wow. The original detective that investigated this denies ever being told about Stephanie by John friends or family. So he's like, no, no one ever told me the evidence that's missing.
The tapes, the interrogation interview tapes of them telling about Stephanie. Oh, so no one knows. No, there's no, the missing evidence is the evidence of the official interrogations of them bringing Stephanie's name up. So obviously more people were involved.
So they deny, they deny that there's a coverup. They deny that that happened and no one has been charged for a coverup because there's no evidence. All you have is the family going, no, we said multiple times, we called them, told them multiple times, look into Stephanie. Even after they said it was a burglary, they said, no, look into Stephanie. I can't believe how many people can kill someone. It seems so normal. You know what I'm saying? Like,
Like she killed someone, but then she gets, now she has like, she adopted someone like, like she's living her life. And she still to this day denies it as well as her team. Like her defense team says, no, no way. This was shady police work. Apparently the tube that the DNA was in had actually gotten left in the freezer in the coroner's office and not taken to the case file. And so it had kind of like gotten rusty on the edges, but it was still in the tube. Yeah.
But I mean, that's not good for an investigation. I can't imagine being Sherry's loved ones in this situation and feeling like you were right all along. They had been saying Stephanie all along and no one cared. No one was listening, at least the people who could do something about it. And then once evidence comes forward proving you right, hey, it was Stephanie. They still deny. No, you never told me. I completely gaslight him. No, we never knew about that.
John Rutten has been, since this, remarried and has stayed awfully distanced from everything. Like, even though they found the killer and everything, he hasn't been involved. Sherry's family doesn't want the memory of Sherry to die. They've specified this in interviews. So take this time to remember her. Take a moment to think about her being the hardworking, confident, beautiful, kind, and intelligent woman that she was. That we're remembering Sherry. Her family doesn't want her memory to die.
And that is the case of Sherry Rasmussen. Wow. That was crazy. Insane. Yeah. The whole time you're like, well, why? Why? Well. Yeah. She was a cop. She was a cop. You guessed that pretty fast. I kind of think there was more people involved. And like you said, we'll never know. And we usually don't speculate things on the podcast, but it's just crazy. I do think it's a little weird that the friends and family and even John had mentioned Rasmussen
look into this girl. And no one did. She works for you. She's a cop and she was never looked into. And then the tapes just vanished. Yeah. A little weird. But yeah, that is the story of Sherry Rasmussen. And any imagery that goes along with this will be on our social media. We just want to say thank you again for listening. We love you guys so much and we will see you next week for another episode. I love it. And I hate it. Goodbye. Bye.