Its 600 pages could have been 250.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 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.ĭespite the impressive research and mostly compelling final chapter, much of the book feels like an information dump filled with irrelevant and repetitious details. Before that, he examines the quotidian lives of Sheri, John, and Stephanie while sometimes taking detours to examine dozens of other characters. McGough does not discuss how the cold-case detectives nailed Lazarus until more than 500 pages in. 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. 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. 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. John and Rasmussen’s father both told the author that they had informed homicide detectives about the harassment. The harasser, Stephanie Lazarus, worked as a young LAPD officer at the time of the murder. 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 victim was Sherri Rasmussen, a 29-year-old nurse and newlywed who was killed while alone in her home in LA.
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. An in-depth examination of a well-known murder. See Privacy Policy at and California Privacy Notice at. Visit the show's website at for contact, merchandise, and donation information You can help support the show at /truecrimeallthetime But, they had to tread carefully to take down one of their own. And when they did all signs pointed to Stephanie Lazarus. It took cold case investigators, over 20 years later, to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Many people have said this caused them to not interview key witnesses or even take a hard look at John's ex-girlfriend. From the start, police were stuck on the theory that Sherri was killed by one or multiple burglars. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss the murder of Sherri Rasmussen committed by Stephanie Lazarus. She used her police training to make the murder look like a robbery. Lazarus was still infatuated with her ex, John Ruetten, and decided to execute the woman she thought was her romantic rival. In 1986, Stephanie Lazarus was an LAPD officer who murdered her ex-boyfriend's wife, Sherri Rasmussen.
0 kommentar(er)
