I recently spoke to McGough about his work, the culture of the LAPD and how much the top brass really knew about Sherri’s murder. Furthermore, The Lazarus Files suggests, this might not have been the last time such a crime was swept under the rug by the very people tasked with solving it. The conclusion readers will draw from his reporting is startling: There’s an excellent chance the LAPD was aware that a homicide had been committed by one of their own, and covered it up. If the case is unsolved, the chrono has no end, regardless of how much time elapses between entries.īetween the chrono and his interviews with the Rasmussens, detectives, colleagues of both the victims and the killer (who is now spending more than 25 years in prison ), McGough was able to find the gaps between the official record of the investigation and what seems to have actually transpired.
If the case is eventually solved, and an arrest made, the chrono continues through the jury’s verdict, after which time the murder book is archived. The chrono starts immediately, when the phone rings at the homicide table, and it’s as though a timer is running.
The chrono is intended to document all investigative activity, day by day and sometimes minute by minute, conducted by the detectives assigned to work a homicide case. McGough was able to do so because he obtained the LAPD’s “chrono,” short for chronological log. Throughout The Lazarus Files, there are stretches where McGough gives an almost-frustratingly granular account of what each investigator was doing - or not doing. A considerable expansion on a story he wrote for the Atlantic in 2011, the book is an examination of the victim and the killer, and their mostly parallel lives, but it’s greatest strength ( for which, as far as I can tell, there is no journalism precedent) is the degree to which the reader is walked through the original police investigation. Matthew McGough ’s The Lazarus Files, which will be published at the end of the month, may be as close as we civilians will get to such an investigation. Sherri and John (July 1984) Courtesy of Jayne Goldberg The investigation in 1986 is a completely different story, and the family has numerous questions about what was done during that time period.” The lawyer asked, on behalf of the Rasmussens, for a formal investigation. Criminal Courthouse after Lazarus’ first appearance there, Sherri’s parents, Nels and Loretta Rasmussen, watched grimly, as their lawyer told the assembled reporters something startling: “The family has nothing but praise for the LAPD of 2009. Officially, in fact, that stance didn’t change until June 2009, when a veteran LAPD detective named Stephanie Lazarus was arrested and charged with Sherri’s murder. It was a theory of the crime the department would stand behind for decades. The detectives on the scene decided Rasmussen had been the victim of a botched burglary. A disc player - on which there was a bloody fingerprint - and a VCR were on the floor. She had been bitten, struck in the head and shot three times in the chest. On February 24, 1986, John Ruetten returned home to his condo in Van Nuys, California, to find Sherri, his wife of only three months, dead in the living room.
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