Stephanie Lazarus

At one point, Lazarus threw Ruetten a surprise party on his 25th birthday, unaware that he had been dating other women or that he had developed a serious relationship with Rasmussen.

When she learned he was seriously involved with Rasmussen, Lazarus was despondent.

While an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1978 to 1982, John Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego, occasionally dated Stephanie Lazarus, a fellow Dykstra Hall resident and a political science major from Simi Valley, California.

Both were avid athletes; Lazarus played on UCLA's junior varsity women's basketball team.

Lazarus would steal Ruetten's clothes when he showered and take photographs of him in his underwear while he slept.

Ruetten never considered the relationship as anything more than "necking and fooling around."

In court, he later testified that they had sex "twenty to thirty times" between 1981 and 1984, but that she was never his girlfriend.

Ruetten later met Sherri Rasmussen, a graduate of Loma Linda University who was on a fast career track in critical care nursing.

She entered college at 16, and by her late 20s was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, giving presentations and teaching classes for fellow nurses.

They had sex for the first time after he graduated, when he accepted a job with hard-drive manufacturer Micropolis and she applied to the city's police academy and became a uniformed officer with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 1983.

"I'm truly in love with John and the past year has really torn me up," Lazarus wrote to Ruetten's mother in August 1985.

"I wish it didn't end the way it did, and I don't think I'll ever understand his decision."

In her own journal, she wrote, "I really don't feel like working. I found out that John is getting married."

Depressed, Lazarus visited Ruetten at his condo, and the two had sex—"to give her closure", Ruetten testified years later —for what he says was the only time before Rasmussen's death.

Later that night, Lazarus awoke a fellow officer she roomed with to commiserate.

During their engagement, Lazarus brought her skis to the apartment that Ruetten shared with Rasmussen and asked him to wax them, and despite Rasmussen's objections, he complied.

Rasmussen felt that this was a little strange, since Lazarus was dressed in flattering workout clothes, and after Lazarus left, his fiancée asked if their relationship was truly over.

Ruetten convinced her the two were just friends.

A few days later Lazarus returned to pick up the waxed skis, in uniform and armed, after he left for work.

Rasmussen was unnerved by these visits and pleaded with Ruetten to tell Lazarus to stop coming by.

Ruetten said only that there was nothing to their relationship, and that she should ignore Lazarus.

According to Nels Rasmussen, Sherri's father, Lazarus later visited Sherri at her office to tell her that things were not over between her and Ruetten, and told Sherri, "If I can't have John, no one else will."

Shortly before her death, Sherri again confided to her father her fear that Lazarus was stalking her on the street.

Ruetten and Rasmussen were married in November 1985.

On February 24, 1986, the body of Sherri Rasmussen (born February 7, 1957 ) was found in the apartment she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, in Van Nuys, California, United States.

She had been beaten and shot three times in a struggle.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) initially considered the case a botched burglary and were unable to identify a suspect.

Rasmussen's father believed that LAPD officer Stephanie Lazarus, who was formerly in a relationship with Ruetten, was a prime suspect.

On the morning of February 24, 1986, Ruetten left the couple's condominium on Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys to go to work.

Rasmussen was scheduled to give a motivational speech at work that day, a managerial tactic she did not feel was effective.

To avoid it, she told Ruetten she might call in sick, using a back injury she had incurred while doing aerobics the day before as an excuse.

Detectives who re-examined the cold case files in 2009 were eventually led to Lazarus, by then herself a detective.

A DNA sample from a cup she had thrown away was matched to one from a bite on Rasmussen's body that had remained in the files.

Lazarus was convicted of the murder in 2012 and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life for first-degree murder at the California Institution for Women in Corona.

Lazarus appealed the conviction, claiming the age of the case and the evidence denied her due process.

She also alleged that the search warrant was improperly granted, her statements in an interview prior to her arrest were compelled and that evidence supporting the original case theory should have been admitted at trial.

In 2015, the guilty verdict was upheld by the California Court of Appeal for the Second District of the state (which includes Los Angeles).

Some of the police files suggest that evidence that could have implicated Lazarus earlier in the investigation was later removed, perhaps by others in the LAPD.

Rasmussen's parents unsuccessfully sued the department over this and other aspects of the investigation.

Jennifer Francis, the criminalist who found key evidence from the bite mark, unsuccessfully sued the City of Los Angeles, claiming she was pressured by police to favor certain suspects in this and other high-profile cases and was retaliated against when she brought this to the department's attention.