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June 5th, 2009 started routineli routinely enough for lapd detective stephanie lazarus. she took the train to union station in downtown l.a. reporting for her normal shift that morning at police headquarters in parker center. after arriving, stephanie was told to meet with two detectives, the man she didn't know from lapd's elite robbery homicide division to help them interrogate a suspect involving some stolen art work which was stephanie's beat as a detective. so lazarus went down to a secured area in the basement to meet with her two colleagues in a small interview room. because it's part o...

Had bitten sherri rasmussen during the struggle was a female. >> reporter: a woman, not two male burglaries as the original detectives had suspected all those years. but it would take a for you more years before investigators began to understand what that crucial dna test result meant. it was now 2009 and the case was cold once again. 23 years it sat with no apparent leads, no suspects, and no answers for the rasmussen family. then came that monday after the super bowl when detective jim nutall started peeking through that old case file and made a remarkable discovery. the dna test that had be...

Name had come up but not as a suspect. no notes of any conversation with her? >> no paper trail. >> reporter: she seemed to be someone above suspicion. stephanie eileen lazarus had grown up in southern, california, a tom boy of sorts and loved sports. she attended ucla where she played basketball p.m. it was during her college days that she met and dated john ruetten, long before he and sherri got married. after graduating in 1982, lazarus surprised her family by joining the lapd. this when only a handful of women entered the force. >> i don't think i knew that she was applying. >> reporter: s...

They could close the deal by somehow secretly obtaining lazarus' dna. she was tailed for days, as undercover cops waited for her to leave some small piece of herself behind. finally at a retail store, it happened. lazarus ordered a soft drink and drank it. a traipse of her saliva was on the straw which she then tossed in the trash. it was more than enough for testing. two dna samples separated by two decades. 48 hours later, jim nutall got call from his supervisor. >> it was real simple. he just said, "it's a match." >> reporter: good feeling, bad feeling? >> surreal. that moment, that call, n...

Lazarus had the means, the motive, the opportunity to kill sherry rasmussen. she seemed obsessed with john and jealous of his new wife. was she the came person was the scary eyes stalking sherri. >> reporter: sherri's purse and all of its contents stolen during the crime were recovered soon after the murder except for one item inside. >> the only thing to this day that was never recovered was john and sherri's marriage certificate. >> reporter: after three months of intense secretive investigation, nutall's team needed one last piece of evidence that would either clear detective lazarus or inc...