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The trail kept getting colder. sherry s parents offered to have the saliva sample of the bite mark tested for dna, they even would pay for it and the l.a.p.d. declined. they said, we don t have a suspect, if we center a suspect, and we have their dna, then we have something to match. and the case sat for another decade. then the newly formed cold case unit was conducted dna tests on unsolved cases and one of them was the murder of sherry rasmussen, it took two months to find the saliva sample, buried in a refrigeration unit, the vial was poking out and the label torn but the saliva was still inside and the dna was enough to blow the case wide open. in the lab report, it indicated that the suspect, that ....
He pressed for more on their relationship which had started when they were students at ucla, they dated on and off until john got engaged to sherry and even then you are convinced that the relationship that john had with stephanie lazarus overlapped with his wife. we know he was engaged and he was intimate with stephanie lazarus, there was a love triangle and stephanie lazarus had deep feelings for john rutten and may have had a motive to harm sherry rasmussen. reporter: was sherry s killer a scorned lover or a jealous co-worker. we had two women on the list that had a motive. debra the nurse and stephanie lazarus. correct. a few weeks later, cops tracked down debra and secretly ....
Trail of what we were doing. they even gave lazarus a code name. number five. and contrary to police procedure they decided to not tell l.a.p.d. headquarters that their new suspect was a fellow detective. you are doing it to protect her or to protect your investigation from her? dual purpose. it would protect the integrity of the investigation and if she was not involved, then nobody would ever know about it. four cops, knowingly skirted department rules to investigate one of their own. it was a difficult phase of our careers. she was one of us. she worked our unit. had worked side-by-side with the people around us. but nutall and his three fellow detectives did not waiver. they methodically built a case by exhaustively reviewing the original files and interviewing sherry s friends and family. it became clear to them that stephanie lazarus had the means, ....
Rasmussen had waited longer than that. did you feel confident? as confident as you can feel with a jury. you never know what they will do. we the jury in the above entitled action, find stephanie eline lazarus guilty of the murder of sherry rasmussen and we find it was of the murder of the first degree. the day the rasmussen family thought would never come finally did, as their attorney explained. the family is overwhelmingly relieved that again, their suspicions and today s verdict reflects and confirms the identity of the person who killed their daughter, and the intent with which she did it. it s a tremendous relief. reporter: for the lazarus family, their wife, daughter, sister, and once decorated detective was now a convicted killer. we really did not expect this ....
Guys are bringing up all the old memories. detectives turned up the heat. did you have a fight with her? did i fight? yeah, did you duke it out with her. you would remember that, that would be pretty yeah, i would think so. most of us can remember without difficulty the number of fist fights we have had in the course of our lives. at one point she answers know when asked if she remembers attacking sherry or being attacked and then another point does not recall. it does not sound familiar, so, i fought with her, so, now i, i, i, i am getting the jump. they say, look, i must have killed her. i mean, come on. after about 45 minutes, lazarus realized she was the prime suspect in sherry s murder. now, you are accusing me of this? is that what you are saying? we are trying figure out what happened, stephanie. ....