Stephanie Lazarus

Stephanie Lazarus, the Los Angeles police detective charged in the 1986 murder of an ex-boyfriend's wife, admitted to investigators the morning of her arrest that she had confronted the victim on multiple occasions, but denied having a role in the killing, according to the transcript of her interrogation. The interview transcript, which became public during a hearing in Los Angeles County Superior Court, offers a detailed account of how LAPD homicide detectives duped their unsuspecting colleague into talking about the case, and of Lazarus' disbelief and panic as she realized she was the target of the investigation . "You're accusing me of this?

On the evening of Feb. 24, 1986, LAPD homicide detectives found Sherri Rae Rasmussen's badly beaten body on the living room floor of her Van Nuys town house with wounds from three .38-caliber bullets to her chest. Weeks later, Stephanie Lazarus, a young Los Angeles police officer, called the Santa Monica Police Department to report that someone had broken into her car on 2nd Street, blocks from the pier. A gym bag had been stolen, she said. In it were clothes, some cassettes, a few dollars and her personal .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, according to several LAPD and Santa Monica police sources familiar with the investigation.

The brother of a Los Angeles Police Department detective accused of murder broke his family's silence Friday, criticizing the judge in the case for setting his sister's bail at $10 million and saying she is struggling with health issues in jail. Stephanie Lazarus, a 26-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, has been in custody since June, when she was arrested for the 1986 bludgeoning and shooting death of a woman who had married her former boyfriend. At a bail hearing in December, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry raised eyebrows throughout his courtroom with the unusually high bail, saying he believed it was a "near certainty" that Lazarus, 49, would flee if granted a lower amount.

The judge in the Stephanie Lazarus trial set bail for the LAPD detective accused of murder at $10 million Friday, saying he believed it was a "near certainty" she would flee if granted a lower amount. Lazarus, a 26-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, is accused of the 1986 bludgeoning and shooting death of a woman who had married Lazarus' former boyfriend. Lazarus, 49, was arrested earlier this year after LAPD cold-case detectives reexamined the killing and linked their colleague to it through a saliva sample that had been found in a bite mark on the victim.

Stephanie Lazarus, the Los Angeles Police Department detective accused of murdering the wife of a love interest, pined for the man and grew deeply upset when he did not return her affection, according to court testimony Tuesday. Prosecutors allege that Lazarus, a 25-year LAPD veteran, beat and shot Sherri Rae Rasmussen to death in February 1986, three months after the woman married John Ruetten, whom Lazarus had dated shortly before. Lazarus was arrested in June, 23 years after the killing, when cold-case detectives reopened the dormant investigation and linked her to the crime through DNA tests on saliva taken from a bite mark on the victim.

The odds that DNA found in the wound of a slaying victim belonged to anyone other than LAPD Det. Stephanie Lazarus were one in 400 quadrillion, a police forensics specialist testified Wednesday. Los Angeles Police Department criminalist Jennifer Butterworth told a judge that she analyzed the swab taken from a bite mark on the left forearm of Sherrie Rae Rasmussen and found it belonged to a woman, despite the theory put forth by original case detectives that Rasmussen had been beaten and shot by two men on Feb. 24, 1986.

After Sherri Rae Rasmussen was beaten and shot to death in 1986, her father urged Los Angeles police to investigate a fellow officer who had had confrontations with his daughter in the months leading up to her death, according to attorneys for the victim's family. But Nel Rasmussen's pleas, which he said he made during several interviews with police and in a letter to then-Chief Daryl F. Gates, apparently were ignored by detectives as they pursued a different theory of how his daughter had been killed.