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Stephanie lazarus mugshot7/12/2023 ![]() ![]() The case intrigues because it blends soap opera suds with “CSI”-style forensics – including broken fingernails and a bite mark. Stereo components were stacked by the door and Rasmussen’s new BMW, an engagement gift, was missing. To police, it looked like a burglary gone bad. ![]() She’d also been tied up and hit over the head with a vase. She met a brutal end, beaten, bitten and shot to death in her townhouse in the suburban San Fernando Valley on February 24, 1986. Rasmussen was a tall, athletic 29-year-old hospital nursing supervisor with a pretty smile. Yes, she was a police officer, but she did not kill in the line of duty, or to protect the public, Presby alleged. Lazarus, now 51 and retired from the force, is accused of killing her college crush’s new bride in 1986, staging the crime scene to make it look like a burglary. The trial promises to tell the story of a decorated female officer who rose through the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department while allegedly hiding a dark secret: She was getting away with murder. “A bite, a bullet, a gun barrel and a broken heart, that’s the evidence that will prove to you that defendant Stephanie Lazarus murdered Sherri Rasmussen,” Deputy District Attorney Shannon Presby told jurors as an unusual criminal trial began this week in Los Angeles Superior Court. The prosecutor sounded like the narrator of a hard-boiled police drama as he carefully laid out pieces of the puzzle that led detectives to arrest one of their own in a 23-year-old cold case. ![]()
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