A former Los Angeles police detective was convicted of murdering her ex-boyfriend’s wife in 2012, more than two decades after Sherri Rasmussen was killed in her Southern California condo.
But last month parole officials concluded that Stephanie Lazarus, the former detective who was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison, is eligible for parole. And Rasmussen’s relatives are outraged that the woman who hid the truth about the murder and continued to work as a law enforcement officer for more than 20 years could go free.
Lazarus, now 63 and incarcerated southeast of Los Angeles, pleaded not guilty during her trial and had not publicly admitted to her role in the 1986 killing until a parole suitability hearing on Nov. 16, according to two relatives who attended the hearing.
Connie Rasmussen, Sherri Rasmussen’s older sister, said in her family’s first interview about the decision that while Lazarus acknowledged killing Sherri during the hearing, she did not apologize to relatives and appeared to downplay the seriousness of the crime, saying that she hadn’t intended to kill Sherri when she went to the Van Nuys condo on Feb. 24, 1986.
Lazarus was convicted of first-degree murder, Connie said, but she appeared to describe her crime as manslaughter.
Sherri, a nursing director at a Los Angeles-area hospital, was shot three times in the chest with a .38 pistol and struck in the head with a ceramic vase, authorities have said. Her left arm had also been bitten.
“I was shocked,” Connie, 69, said of the parole panel’s decision. “Sherri was that person that was giving back to the community, and she didn’t deserve to be killed. And she deserves justice.”
Releasing Lazarus now, she said, “is not justice for my sister. It’s another slap in the face.”
“She had 23 years to lie and to hide the evidence and to go on with her life when she could have turned herself in,” said Connie’s daughter, Jessica Pannell, 35, who also attended the parole hearing.
When a…
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