The Lazarus Files

An in-depth examination of a well-known murder.The book is not a whodunit. Rather, Los Angeles-based journalist McGough (Bat Boy: Coming of Age with the New York Yankees, 2005) offers a police procedural about why a 1986 murder took more than two decades to solve and whether police knowingly protected the murderer: one of their own detectives. The victim was Sherri Rasmussen, a 29-year-old nurse and newlywed who was killed while alone in her home in LA. Her parents and a few of her friends knew that she had been harassed before the murder by a longtime girlfriend of her husband, John. The harasser, Stephanie Lazarus, worked as a young LAPD officer at the time of the murder. John and Rasmussen's father both told the author that they had informed homicide detectives about the harassment. However, because McGough did not start reporting about the murder until Lazarus' 2009 arrest, he could not find definitive information in the messy, incomplete police files about the case. What the author's painstaking digging clearly demonstrates, beyond a doubt, is that the detectives assigned to the case decided nearly right away that Rasmussen was murdered during a burglary gone wrong. Adoption of that theory led to tunnel vision, which meant that the idea of a fellow officer as the perpetrator never received serious attention until two decades later, when a detective looking at cold cases stumbled on the Rasmussen file. McGough does not discuss how the cold-case detectives nailed Lazarus until more than 500 pages in. Before that, he examines the quotidian lives of Sheri, John, and Stephanie while sometimes taking detours to examine dozens of other characters. Relying on extended citations from bureaucratic memos and other opaque documents, McGough delivers a fairly unremarkable narrative until the end of the book, when the investigation of Lazarus as the potential murderer begins.Despite the impressive research and mostly compelling final chapter, much of the book feels like an information dump filled with irrelevant and repetitious details. Its 600 pages could have been 250.

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Starred review from April 1, 2019
In this engrossing true crime account, McGough, the author of a memoir, Bat Boy, and a former legal consultant for TV’s Law & Order, exposes a horrifying Los Angeles murder that was not solved for decades—and an even more disturbing LAPD cover-up. In 1986, 29-year-old nurse Sherri Rasmussen was killed in her home by someone who battered her face and shot her multiple times, leaving the corpse to be found by her husband, John Ruetten. Though there was an obvious suspect—Ruetten’s ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Lazarus, who had threatened Rasmussen—the investigating officers pursued the theory that burglars killed Rasmussen. McGough proposes a possible explanation for that choice: since Lazarus was an LAPD officer, some of her colleagues were less than diligent in exploring any possibility that led to her. Eventually, a cold case investigator tracked down DNA evidence from a bite mark on the victim’s arm that implicated Lazarus. By then an LAPD detective, Lazarus was arrested in 2009 and convicted in 2012. Despite that verdict, readers will be left with a sense that justice has not been done, since no one at the LAPD was held accountable for the many mistakes that enabled Lazarus to get away with murder for more than 20 years. This memorable and powerful work deserves a wide readership. Agent: Andrew Blauner, Blauner Books Literary.

April 1, 2019

In 1986, Sherri Rasmussen was brutally murdered in her home in Van Nuys, CA. Police believed the crime was committed in tandem with a burglary and focused their search in that direction. With little to no forensic evidence or witnesses, the case went cold. Many of Rasmussen's family and friends felt the police were looking in the wrong places and suspected that an ex-girlfriend of the deceased's husband could be involved. The police, according to McGough, were blinded by tunnel vision and did not investigate this lead. Decades later, after DNA analysis became available, her killer was finally brought to justice. As Rasmussen's family initially suspected, her husband's ex-girlfriend, LAPD detective Stephanie Lazarus, was the killer. Readers are told the identity of the killer from the beginning, making this story less of a whodunit and more of an in-depth examination of a murder and its investigation. VERDICT Despite being a bit too long and overly detailed at times, true crime fans will nevertheless be captivated by this intriguing case.--Melissa Stoeger, Deerfield P.L., IL

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