Bite Mark, 'Broken Heart' Link Ex-LAPD Detective To Murder, Prosecutor Says
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — Three pieces of physical evidence — a bite mark, a bullet and a gun barrel — and the motive of a "broken heart" will prove that a former Los Angeles police detective murdered the woman her ex-boyfriend had recently married, a prosecutor told jurors Monday.
An attorney for 51-year-old Stephanie Lazarus, however, questioned the link between the physical evidence and his client, and suggested the DNA evidence had been mishandled over the years.
Lazarus' "obsession" with her former paramour drove her to kill Sherri Rasmussen in Van Nuys nearly 26 years ago, Deputy District Attorney Shannon Presby said during his opening statement at Lazarus' murder trial.
He showed the jury excerpts from journal entries in which Lazarus apparently expressed her torment over John Ruetten's engagement to Rasmussen.
"Stressed out about John," she wrote in a June 16, 1985, journal entry. In an Aug. 4, 1985, letter to Ruetten's mother, Lazarus declared, "I'm totally in love with John and this past year has really torn me up."
About six months later — on the morning of Feb. 24, 1986 — Lazarus "went into Sherri's townhouse, beat her in the face, bit her on the left arm and shot her three times in the chest," Presby said. "This killing was
personal."
Ruetten found his 29-year-old wife dead on the living room floor when he returned home from work later the same day. The couple had been married for just four months.
LAPD Detective Lyle Mayer, who originally investigated the case, theorized at the time that Rasmussen was slain after surprising burglars in the home.
Lazarus, a 23-year veteran of the LAPD, was arrested on suspicion of murder in 2009 after testing matched her DNA to a saliva sample collected from the bite mark on Rasmussen's arm, police said.
Referring to that crucial piece of evidence, Presby told a packed courtroom during his 40-minute presentation that "there was one thing Lyle Mayer did not know. There was one thing the defendant did not know. There was
one thing that no one could have known in 1986 — that a tiny Stephanie Lazarus was hiding in the bite on Sherri Rasmussen's arm." The probability of the DNA belonging to another person was one in 1.7 sextillion, Presby said.
The prosecutor also said ballistics evidence will connect Lazarus to the crime. Two .38-caliber bullets collected from the crime scene were the same type the LAPD used at the time, he said, and they were fired from a Smith &
Wesson revolver with a two-inch barrel — the same type of weapon that Lazarus owned at the time.
"A bite, a bullet, a gun barrel, a broken heart — that's the evidence that will prove defendant Stephanie Lazarus murdered Sherri Rasmussen, and murdered Sherri Rasmussen because she married the man that the defendant
loved," Presby said.
Ruetten, an engineer, and Lazarus met at UCLA in the late 1970s while they were undergraduates. They dated for a while but Presby said Lazarus' love for him was "unrequited." "She was not for him 'The One,"' he said. "He did not love the
defendant."
But in his opening statement, defense attorney Mark Overland painted a very different picture of the relationship.
"It was not just an obsession," he insisted, noting that Ruetten admitted to having sex with Lazarus in August 1985 -- when he was engaged to Rasmussen.
After the murder, Overland said, Lazarus "did zero, nothing to pursue John Ruetten. She never contacted him, never wrote to him, never called him. On the contrary, it was he who initiated contact" between them.
Turning to the key physical evidence, Overland said the bite mark saliva sample was compromised between the time it was collected by an LAPD criminalist at the crime scene in 1986 and the time it was analyzed by an LAPD scientist in 2009.
The sealed envelope containing the sample, he noted, had been torn open and coroner's officials violated their "chain of custody" policy.
The defense lawyer also said "millions" of the same .38-caliber bullets were sold to the general public and that those found at the crime scene could have been fired from at least 37 other firearms, "none of which Stephanie Lazarus had."
Lazarus, dressed in a black suit, showed no emotion as Presby made a presentation that included a formal portrait of her with Ruetten taken while they were dating. The photo "promised a future with John, a future that Sherri Rasmussen made impossible," the prosecutor said.
After Lazarus took out her fury on Rasmussen, Presby said, the victim was "not just dead. Her beauty was disfigured, obliterated, blotted from existence by three close-range gunshots to the chest."
Lazarus, who is in custody in lieu of $10 million bail, retired from the LAPD after her arrest.
The trial before Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry is expected to last five to six weeks.
