The only items taken in the alleged robbery, Taylor said, was the couple's marriage license and the victim's car, which was found nearby with the keys in it.Īt the news conference, Taylor said that days before the murder, Rasmussen "told her parents she had a problem she was dealing with and if she couldn't resolve it in two weeks she would come back." Rasmussen's hands had gunshot residue as if she had been gripping the gun from the front, he said. Rasmussen suffered a bite on the arm and was shot three times, including in the heart and spine, he said. Taylor said the fatal attack involved a struggle that moved around the condominium. Rasmussen was 6 feet tall, athletic and capable of defusing the situation, so she did not call police but did tell her father she knew the woman was an ex-girlfriend of her husband, the attorney said. In the next incident, Lazarus got into the couple's condo and confronted Rasmussen, who told her to get out, Taylor said. But he said police have acknowledged that Lazarus' name was in the case file.Īccording to Taylor, Lazarus first confronted Rasmussen at the hospital and said, "If I can't have John, no one will." In an interview, Taylor said the parents knew the woman was a police officer but did not know her name until now. Rasmussen married Ruetten in November 1985 and she was killed the following February.Īttorneys for Rasmussen's father and mother told a news conference outside court that the parents want answers to why it took so long for police to pursue Lazarus as a suspect after they had told detectives about several confrontations between their son-in-law's ex-girlfriend and their daughter, a nursing director at Glendale Adventist Medical Center.Īttorney John Taylor that when the father persisted in asking police what they had found out about the ex-girlfriend, "He was told repeatedly that he'd been watching too much TV." The case file did mention Lazarus because she had previously dated the victim's husband, John Ruetten. Police officials have said Lazarus was not a suspect in 1986 because detectives believed that two robbers who had attacked another woman in the same neighborhood were to blame. I don't know if he's been interviewed yet, but he will be, as will a lot of people," he said. Lazarus' husband, Scott Young, a detective in the San Fernando Valley, knew nothing about the slaying, Beck said. "There was a significant struggle that preceded the homicide," he said. Lazarus was identified as a suspect through a DNA match of saliva taken from bite marks on Rasmussen's body, Deputy Chief Charlie Beck said Monday. Lazarus is additionally charged with personal use of a handgun. That makes the death penalty a possibility if she is convicted, but prosecutors have not decided whether they would seek capital punishment. Los Angeles County prosecutors charged her with willful, premeditated murder with the special circumstance of murder in commission of a burglary. Lazarus, a specialist in investigating art thefts, was arrested last week after colleagues in the homicide unit across a hallway at police headquarters examined the long cold case and made what they say was a DNA match. Lazarus, 49, is accused of killing Sherri Rasmussen, who was bitten, beaten and shot in her condominium in 1986, when Lazarus had been on the police force for two years.
He was not available for comment afterward. Her attorney, Mark Pachowitz, asked only for the delay.
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