The Detective Thinks She's Being Asked About a Stolen Painting — 23 Years After the Murder

On February 24, 1986, Sherri Rae Rasmussen — a 29-year-old director of nursing at a Los Angeles hospital, married three months — was found shot to death inside her Van Nuys condominium. Detectives concluded it was a burglary interrupted. Her parents told them, within weeks, to look at someone else: a woman who had confronted their daughter at work the summer before, and who was a serving Los Angeles police officer. They were told they watched too much television. A swab taken from a bite mark on Sherri's forearm went into a freezer at the county coroner's office in 1986 and stayed there. In 2005 it was finally tested, and the dominant DNA profile turned out to belong to a woman — which ended the burglary theory entirely. The report sat in the file for four more years before anyone acted on it. In 2009, cold case detectives read it, built a list of five women, and eliminated four. The fifth was an LAPD detective in the art theft detail. A discarded drink cup matched the bite mark. She was arrested on June 5, 2009, convicted of first-degree murder in March 2012, and sentenced to 27 years to life. CHAPTERS 00:00 The alarm code she set herself 05:37 A vial in the coroner's freezer 11:37 The theory that closed the door 17:13 What her parents told the detectives 23:12 Nineteen years in cold storage 28:43 The report nobody had read 34:21 A question about a stolen painting 40:03 Twenty-six years to a verdict Every case on this channel is reconstructed from court records, police statements, and verified reporting. Sources for this case: the California Court of Appeal opinion in People v. Lazarus (2015), the Los Angeles Police Department's own account of the investigation, the Los Angeles County coroner's findings as introduced at trial, contemporaneous national reporting on the arrest, trial and sentencing, and reporting on the 2023, 2024 and 2025 parole proceedings. The Evidence Room investigates real cold cases that stayed unsolved for decades — and the forensic breakthroughs that finally closed them. These were real people. We tell their stories with respect for the victims and for the families who waited. Subscribe for a new case file every week. #coldcase #truecrime #forensics #dnaevidence #unsolved #documentary