The Lazarus Files: A Cold Case Investigation

PART ONE

Sherri, John, and Stephanie

1

The Aftermath

(February 24, 1986)

Sherri Rasmussen, a twenty-nine-year-old hospital nurse, was just one of 831 people murdered in Los Angeles in 1986.

Sherri’s husband, John Ruetten, came home from work at six p.m. on Monday, February 24, and discovered her lifeless body. Sherri and John had been married for only three months. The young newlyweds lived in the Balboa Townhomes, a well-kept but nondescript condominium complex in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles.

Van Nuys was a middle-class community in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. As late as the 1940s, Van Nuys was mostly sunbaked farmland. After World War II, its orange and walnut groves were uprooted for vast tracts of single family homes. Practically overnight, the character of Van Nuys changed from rustic to suburban. Major companies like General Motors and Anheuser-Busch built massive plants in Van Nuys that employed thousands. Prosperity fueled more development, until few traces remained of the once bucolic landscape. The streetscape that supplanted it was flat and unglamorous, with broad boulevards lined by all manner of businesses. The 1970s brought more change to Van Nuys. Many single family homes were torn down and replaced by higher-density apartment buildings. Violent crime increased. From 1970 to 1975, the LAPD’s Van Nuys Division averaged about a dozen homicides per year. Over the next five years, the Van Nuys murder rate doubled.

The Balboa Townhomes, built in 1980, were well secured compared to other residences nearby. A six-foot wall surrounded the entire condo complex, which spanned the 7100 block of Balboa Boulevard, a major north–south thoroughfare through the Valley. The only gaps in the wall were a locked pedestrian gate, which opened by key or from inside by buzzer, and an electric car gate. Past the car gate was a paved interior driveway bordered on each side by rows of three-story condos.

John sensed that something was wrong as he pulled up in his car that night. Their unit’s garage door was open, which was highly unusual, and no cars were parked inside. John knew Sherri had called in sick to work that morning, so there was no reason for her car to be gone. The pavement in front of the garage door was strewn with broken glass. To John it looked like auto glass. It reminded him of a minor driving mishap Sherri had a few months before, when she clipped her car while backing out of the garage. John wondered if she might have done something similar, like broken her taillight or side mirror. John figured maybe she took her car to get fixed and forgot to close the garage.

John and Sherri had had a burglar alarm system installed just two months earlier. They typically armed the alarm only when they were both out, and before they went to sleep. When John left for work at 7:20 that morning, Sherri was still in bed. John had not thought to set the alarm, or to make sure that their front door was locked. The front door unlocked automatically when opened from inside. If they didn’t manually lock the door afterward, it remained unlocked. John and Sherri rarely used the front door, mostly only to let the cat in or out, or when they had guests. Their friends tended to use it because it was closest to the condo’s visitor parking.

Sherri’s younger sister, Teresa, and her husband, Brian, had visited with Sherri and John the day before, a Sunday. Teresa was five months pregnant with her and Brian’s first child. During the visit, Sherri gave her a present, a maternity bathing suit and swim cap she bought to encourage Teresa to exercise during her pregnancy. Sherri, Teresa, and Brian also took a drive in Sherri’s BMW to a pet store to look at saltwater aquariums. Sherri’s car was stylish and still new. She let Brian drive. Sherri and John had bought the BMW 318i for Sherri nine months earlier, the same weekend they got engaged, in lieu of a diamond ring. Sherri decided having a car was more practical. After Teresa and Brian went home, a friend of John’s, Mike, also visited John and Sherri at home.

On his way to work the next morning, John dropped off some clothes at the dry cleaner’s. He arrived at his office at about ten minutes to eight. John had started work about six weeks earlier as an engineer at a company named Micropolis, which made computer disk drives. Around 10:00 a.m., he called home, to see how Sherri was feeling, but got no answer. A little later, he tried again. The phone rang and rang. John then called the hospital and spoke with Sherri’s secretary, Sylvia. Sylvia told him that Sherri was out of the office, teaching a class. Unbeknownst to John, Sherri’s sister Teresa also tried calling her at home and left a message on the answering machine. Sherri did not return the calls. John finished work around five o’clock. On his way home, he ran a few errands, stopping to collect their dry cleaning plus a package at the UPS store.

John drove past the broken glass and parked in his usual spot in the garage. He took the dry cleaning and started up the short staircase inside the condo. John’s unease deepened when saw that the door at the top of the stairs was wide open. He was certain he had closed and locked that door when he left that morning. As John walked upstairs, he did not see that the wall alongside him was flecked with bloodstains.

The stairs up from their garage opened onto a tiled entryway near the front door. John saw Sherri lying in the middle of their living room, which was in disarray. A shelf of their entertainment wall unit had collapsed. A corded telephone and pieces from a broken vase were strewn on the carpet around her. A drawer from a nearby end table had been pulled out and its contents dumped in a heap. In the entryway, right at John’s feet, two video components were stacked on the floor. John stepped past them into the living room, where, amid the detritus, Sherri lay motionless on her back.

Sherri was dressed in a short rust-colored robe, which she wore over a sleeveless undershirt and panties. Her right arm appeared frozen in place, with her hand raised to the ceiling. Her left hand, with its wedding ring, rested on her chest.

John couldn’t understand why Sherri would be on the floor. He wanted to believe she was sleeping. He draped the dry cleaning across the back of their living room sofa and approached her body with trepidation.

I hope she’s okay, John thought. But one look told John that she was not. Sherri’s face was badly bruised, and her complexion the wrong color. Her left eye was open and unblinking. Her right eye was swollen shut and crusted with blood. More blood was smeared across her forehead. Sherri’s lips were parted slightly, as if in midgasp.

Tentatively, John touched his wife’s calf. Her leg felt stiff and cold. John tried to find a pulse and couldn’t. But it was her face, so beautiful just that morning, that most unnerved him. He could tell from her eyes that she was gone. Sherri’s facial injuries were so disturbing to John that he did not notice the three gunshot wounds in her chest, or the bite mark on the inside of her left forearm.

John picked the phone handset up off the floor and dialed 911. Ten or fifteen seconds later, a dispatcher came on the line.

I think my wife is dead, John said. The operator took the address and told him not to call anyone else. Just wait there, somebody is on the way, the operator promised. John set the phone down and paced the living room. If it even occurred to him to call Sherri’s parents and notify his in-laws of her death, he could not bring himself to make the call.

John didn’t know what to do with himself while he waited. He went back to Sherri and looked at her again, which only made him feel worse. He took a hand towel and draped it over Sherri’s face, less for her dignity than to spare himself the distress of seeing her injuries. Even with Sherri’s face covered, John still felt too upset to stay in the living room with her body. He walked back down to the garage and looked around to make sure no one else was there. He considered waiting by the front door to meet the authorities and let them in. Then he decided he should stay near the phone in case someone called. The wait was only a few minutes but seemed interminable. John felt he couldn’t take it, being there alone. He wanted someone else to be there with him and Sherri’s body.

The 911 operator had routed the call to the Los Angeles Fire Department, which dispatched an ambulance. Two firefighter-paramedics arrived at the condo at 6:08 p.m. John was standing near the front door, crying, when they came inside.

The paramedics removed the makeshift shroud that John had placed over Sherri’s face. Her blunt force trauma was so extensive that the paramedics, like John, did not initially notice her gunshot wounds. Sherri had no pulse or respiration. It was obvious that there was nothing they could do. They pronounced her dead at 6:10 p.m.

The paramedics saw the broken vase on the floor as they checked her vital signs. Once it was clear she was dead, they stepped back from the body, so as not to disturb any potential evidence. The paramedics’ responsibility had shifted from saving a life to keeping everyone away until the LAPD showed up. The paramedics led John to the kitchen, one flight up from the living room and out of view of Sherri’s body, and assured him the police would be there soon. John felt like he was in shock. John kept telling the paramedics, I didn’t think this could happen here.

The paramedics ceded control of the scene at 6:20 p.m., when the first LAPD patrol unit arrived. LAPD officer Rodney Forrest, a training officer assigned to the Van Nuys Division, and his partner, an LAPD reserve officer, were on patrol when they heard the radio call for a possible homicide at 7100 Balboa.

One of the paramedics was waiting outside by the ambulance when Forrest drove up. The paramedic said that a husband had come home and found his wife dead. The paramedic led the officers to the front door. The second paramedic stood in the entryway. Past him, Forrest could see into the living room, where the victim’s body lay with a towel over her face. The paramedics explained that the husband had placed it there before they arrived, and they replaced it after their examination, because he could not bear to see her face that way.

Forrest and his partner set about clearing the condo, which entailed checking room by room for any suspects. They found John sitting upstairs at the kitchen table, distraught, with his head in his hands. Forrest told John that he needed to leave the premises. Forrest watched John and the paramedics walk out the front door.

Once the condo was cleared, Forrest radioed the watch commander, the officer on duty at the Van Nuys station responsible for managing police response. Forrest informed him of the homicide and requested a supervisor at the scene. He then instructed his partner to stand at the front door and start the crime scene log. The log, the first document in any homicide investigation, is intended to record everyone who enters and leaves the crime scene. Without one, it would be impossible to determine later whether a fingerprint or other trace evidence came from a potential suspect or was left inadvertently after the murder by authorized personnel.

Forrest’s report to the watch commander was relayed to Leslie Al Durrer, the commanding officer of Van Nuys detectives. Durrer was a Lieutenant II, among the highest-ranked officers in the division. The detectives who worked under Durrer were assigned to various tables, each dedicated to investigating a different species of crime: homicides, robberies, burglaries, auto thefts, and so on. Detective work was organized along the same lines in all of the LAPD’s geographic divisions.

Durrer in turn notified Roger Pida, the detective in charge of the Van Nuys homicide table. Pida was a Detective III, the LAPD’s highest detective rank. As the Van Nuys homicide coordinator, Pida was responsible for allocating cases among his detectives, supervising their investigations, and signing off on their reports.

By 6:30 p.m., half an hour after John discovered Sherri’s body, Pida had assigned the case to two detectives, Lyle Mayer and Steve Hooks. Pida called and gave them the address.

Mayer was by far the more seasoned of the two detectives. Mayer had more than twenty years on the job, and more than a decade’s experience as a homicide investigator. He had worked homicide in Van Nuys for five years, since 1981, and had cut his teeth as a detective, earlier in his career, on the homicide tables at the LAPD’s Hollywood and Rampart Divisions. Mayer’s rank in 1986 was Detective II. In addition to working cases, detectives of Mayer’s rank were expected to train and supervise lower-ranked detectives. Mayer’s assertive personality reflected the great pride he took in his investigative experience and his status as a homicide detective.

Hooks in 1986 was eight years into his LAPD career, and still a Detective I. Along with being younger, less experienced, and lower ranked than Mayer, Hooks was also more reserved. Although Hooks later joined the Van Nuys homicide unit, he was assigned to the burglary table when Pida tapped him to work with Mayer on Sherri’s case. It was standard LAPD practice whenever the homicide table was overloaded or short-staffed to pull detectives off other tables and loan them to homicide. Sherri’s case was the first time Mayer and Hooks had worked together as partners.

According to the crime scene log, the first from the detective bureau to arrive was Lt. Durrer, the commanding officer, at 7:24 p.m. Hooks logged in at 7:48, Mayer at 7:52, and Pida, their supervisor, at 8:04 p.m. Forensic personnel from the LAPD crime lab started to arrive around the same time. By nine o’clock, three hours after John called 911, nearly twenty LAPD personnel had responded to the crime scene.

John remained outside the condo amid all this activity. The detectives’ initial impression, based on the crime scene, was that Sherri was killed during an attempted burglary. Still, in order to eliminate John as a suspect, the detectives would need to interview him. In addition to being the victim’s husband, John was also the last known person to see her alive. John agreed to go to the Van Nuys station to be interviewed.

Mayer, the lead investigator, would question John. Mayer left for the station at 9:00 p.m. Hooks remained behind to monitor the forensics team’s search for clues and physical evidence. Durrer and Pida, the detectives’ supervisors, logged out from the crime scene at 9:25.

As John was driven to the station, the LAPD’s investigation had only just begun. No one at the time could have predicted how many years the truth would remain hidden, and at what cost to all involved.

2

Sherri Rasmussen

(1957 to 1984)

Before Sherri and John met, the condo had belonged to Sherri. Sherri’s parents, Nels and Loretta Rasmussen, had purchased it for her six years earlier, in 1980.

Back then, Sherri was in her early twenties and studying for her master’s degree in nursing at UCLA. She also worked at the time as a staff nurse at UCLA Medical Center, to help pay her way through school. Her hours were irregular and long, and often required her to commute to work late at night. The crime rate in Los Angeles was far higher then than it is today.

Sherri was young and beautiful and planned to live alone. Her parents were naturally concerned for her safety. Nels and Loretta lived in Tucson, Arizona, where they had raised Sherri and her two sisters. Coming from Tucson, Nels regarded Los Angeles warily. He and Sherri had looked at countless places for Sherri to live before they chose the condo in Van Nuys, largely because it felt safe.

Although Nels loved all three of his daughters, he was especially close to and protective of Sherri. Sherri was the middle child, but the last of the three to get married. Because Sherri was single, she was more available than her sisters to spend time with her parents. After Sherri moved into the condo, she and Nels talked nearly every night, sometimes for hours.

The Rasmussens had always been a loving and tight-knit family. Nels was a dentist with a thriving practice in Tucson. Loretta worked full time as Nels’s office manager. They had been a couple since they were teenagers, in the early 1950s, growing up in rural Washington State. Nels and Loretta met at Columbia Academy, a Seventh-Day Adventist high school, where they dated briefly but broke up before graduation.

Nels lived with his parents, older sister, and younger brother on a small farm in Amboy, about twenty miles from Mount St. Helens. Amboy had one gas station, one grocery store, and four beer parlors. Everyone in town knew Nels as Junior.

Nels Senior was a logger with a reputation as an expert timber faller. Nels’s father’s work regularly took him into the woods and away from his family for weeks at a time. Being the de facto man of the house at a tender age shaped the younger Nels’s character and work ethic.

Nels never gave much thought when he was young to what career he wanted. No one in his family had been to college or talked to him about how to plan for the future. After high school, Nels followed his father’s example and became a logger. Logging jobs were transient. Nels and his father sometimes had to drive hundreds of miles to find work. On one such trip in 1952, when Nels was eighteen, he dozed off behind the wheel and flipped their truck. Nels’s father escaped injury, but Nels’s left leg was badly broken.

Nels was in a full body cast for months. Being laid up and unable to work made him miserable. His thoughts returned to Loretta, who by then had left for college. Nels’s mother wrote a letter to Loretta and told her, If you still care for Junior, he’s now in a weakened condition. Loretta visited when she came home for Thanksgiving. Nels and Loretta married less than a year later, in 1953. Nels was nineteen and Loretta eighteen. Loretta soon became pregnant.

Nels resumed logging after his leg healed. When Loretta went into labor, he was at a camp fifty miles away and could not be contacted. A neighbor took Loretta to the hospital, where she gave birth to their first daughter, Connie, in 1954.

The young family lived with Loretta’s mother and father, also a logger. Nels came home as often as he could. One night, Loretta asked Nels, Why don’t you go to school?

What would I do? I have no idea what I’d be interested in.

You should be a dentist.

Why would I want to be a dentist?

Well, my dentist gets a new car every year.

Nels thought, Gee whiz. I like cars. That sounds good. When Connie was six months old, they moved to Walla Walla, Washington, where there was a Seventh-Day Adventist college. Nels started classes at Walla Walla University in the fall of 1954. In addition to his studies, Nels worked full-time hours at the school’s dairy to pay his tuition and the family’s living expenses. To supplement the meager food that they could afford to buy, Loretta canned fruit and vegetables from her mother’s garden.

In summer 1956, Loretta became pregnant with their second child. Nels resolved that he would not miss this birth, as he had Connie’s. When I take you to the hospital, I’m going to stay until you have the baby, he promised her.

Nels majored in chemistry. His faculty mentor was an old, distinguished professor, Dr. George Bowers. Bowers was the chemistry department chairman and a former president of the university. Bowers enjoyed a reputation as a harsh grader. Nels had heard that he needed a GPA between 3.5 and 3.8 to be admitted to dental school. Early in the year, Nels went to see Bowers, who told him, In my class, I give you a test every day. That’s 40 percent of your grade. I give four tests during the quarter. That’s 60 percent of your grade. Nels needed an A.

On February 7, 1957, Loretta delivered a baby girl, whom they named Sherri Rae. Nels was true to his word and accompanied Loretta to the hospital. In doing so, he missed a day of classes, and one of Bowers’s daily tests.

A few months later, at the end of the school year, Nels received his grades. Bowers had given him a B in chemistry. At home that night, Nels told Loretta he had kept close track of his marks and felt certain he had earned an A.

At Loretta’s suggestion, Nels went to see Bowers. If you look at my record, I have an A, but I got a B, Nels told his professor. Nels said that he needed an A to get into dental school.

Bowers checked his own grade book. You got a B. You missed one day.

Nels explained that he was at the hospital that day for Sherri’s birth. Nels wondered aloud what his average was otherwise. I’m not asking for any gifts, but what do you have me down as percentagewise for the whole quarter?

95.4 percent, Bowers answered. 96 is an A. That’s a B. I explained to you at the beginning of the year how my grading is.

If you believe it’s a B, it’s a B, Nels said. He got up and walked out. Graduation loomed. Nels knew he was out of time to raise his GPA. Before his final grades were in, he applied to the dental school at Loma Linda University, also a Seventh-Day Adventist institution, sixty miles east of Los Angeles.

Nels and Loretta interviewed at Loma Linda while his application was pending. The admissions officer showed Nels his college transcript. Nels saw that Bowers had changed his grade to an A.

Nels enrolled at Loma Linda’s School of Dentistry in 1957. In 1960, Loretta gave birth to their third daughter, Teresa. While Nels attended school, Loretta ran a day care center out of their home, which had a small fenced-in yard. This allowed Loretta to care for Sherri and baby Teresa while also helping to support the family.

Sherri was a Momma’s girl as a toddler. Nels could never persuade Sherri to join him and Connie on their trips to the store unless Loretta came with them. Nels would put Connie and Sherri in the car, but as soon as he slid behind the wheel, Sherri would look around and ask, Is Mommy going?

No, Nels would explain. Mommy has to stay with the kids, because their mommies haven’t come picked them up yet. Sherri would flee the car faster than Nels could stop her. Nels even tried to bribe Sherri with promises of ice cream to get her to come. Nothing was enough to convince Sherri to leave her mother’s side.

When Nels completed dental school in 1961, Loma Linda gave Loretta and all the other graduates’ wives a mock diploma for a Ph.T.—Putting Hubby Through. Soon after graduation, when Sherri was four years old, Nels and Loretta moved their family from California to Tucson, Arizona.

Nels opened his dental office in a working-class neighborhood in South Tucson. Loretta was Nels’s full-time office manager and receptionist. To save money, Nels did all of his own lab work. Each day at five o’clock, after his last appointment, Nels and Loretta would come home. Loretta would cook dinner for their family and put the children to bed. After he ate and spent time with his daughters, Nels would go back to the office to cast crowns, wax dentures, or whatever else his patients needed done. Nels worked in the lab many nights until three o’clock in the morning.

With Loretta’s help, Nels’s dental practice blossomed. Within a few years, he was able to fulfill a dream that he had harbored since high school: owning his own boat.

Nels chose a 19-foot ski boat with a powerful Chevy engine and a top speed of 40 miles per hour. In summer, the family would head to Lake Apache outside Tucson almost every weekend. Nels and Loretta would work late, load their camper, and haul it and their boat to the lake. The next morning, Nels would wake the girls at sunrise. Daylight’s burning. Let’s get up. Let’s go, was Nels’s usual wake-up call. Then they’d get out on the lake, smooth and inviting in the early morning.

Rasmussen family photo, November 22, 1963 (clockwise from top: Nels, Loretta, Sherri, Teresa, Connie)

All three girls learned to water-ski on Lake Apache. Teresa, at age three and a half, was so light the rope stayed on the surface of the water as it pulled her along. The boat could tow as many as eight skiers at once. Nels issued a standing challenge that he would give $25 to any boy who could stay up longer than Connie and Sherri. Connie, Sherri, and a challenger would grab a tow rope, and Nels would gun the big Chevy engine. Nels never had to pay up, not even once. The girls were his pride and joy. Nels wouldn’t have traded a daughter for five sons.

For school, Nels and Loretta sent the girls to Tucson Seventh-Day Adventist Elementary. It was a tiny church school, with fewer than a dozen students per grade. The campus consisted of two rectangular buildings in an L shape, alongside a large cement slab used for recess. Each building held two classrooms. Each classroom held two grades, and one teacher.

The school’s principal, a pastor named Carl Groom, lived with his wife, Ruth, in a home on the school grounds. Pastor Groom taught seventh and eighth grades, and Mrs. Groom some of the younger grades. Groom was athletic and well liked by the students. Some days, if a class completed its lessons early, Groom would let them play sports all afternoon. Years later, Groom would perform Sherri and John’s wedding ceremony.

Sherri was an eager and naturally disciplined student. Nels and Loretta never had to get after Sherri to study. She was organized and planned out how much time she spent on this or that subject. Her intelligence and competence were evident to her teachers, who sometimes relied on her in class to make their jobs easier.

In fourth grade, Sherri had a math teacher, Mrs. Mapara, who was visiting from overseas and not fluent in English. Because the students had difficulty understanding her, Mrs. Mapara eventually delegated math lessons to Sherri. One day when Sherri was at the blackboard explaining a math problem to her classmates, Mrs. Mapara criticized how Sherri held the pointer. After publicly scolding Sherri for holding the stick wrong, she told the class, Everyone laugh at Sherri. Everyone laughed. Sherri held the stick the way Mrs. Mapara wanted and resumed the lesson. When Sherri finished the math problem, she set the pointer down and said, Everyone laugh at Mrs. Mapara. Mrs. Mapara kicked Sherri out of class and sent her to the principal.

Groom called Nels and Loretta and explained the situation. I’ve got a problem, Groom said. I have a teacher whom I have to please, and I have a student that I know has been mistreated. What do I do?

Follow your best guidance, Nels replied. Sherri’s young. She’ll recover.

Groom explained to Sherri how she might have handled the situation better. After Groom spoke with Sherri, he told Nels he greatly respected Sherri for listening and accepting his advice.

Sherri’s role within her family, as she grew older, was the peacemaker. Sherri got along equally well with her sisters and her parents, so it didn’t matter which member of the family was ticked off. Sherri could smooth it over and, more often than not, turn their frustrations into laughter.

When Sherri was finishing sixth grade, Groom went to Nels and Loretta and told them, I think we’re wasting Sherri’s time. I think she should do seventh grade during the summer and graduate next year. She’s bored. She’s ready for high school.

That summer, working with Groom, Sherri completed the coursework for seventh grade. Sherri’s eighth grade class was two boys and five girls, including her friend Emily Hindman, whose family lived a few miles from the Rasmussens. Although Sherri was a year younger than her classmates, she earned the top marks in her grade. To keep Sherri engaged, Groom had her write independent research papers on topics in science, history, and other subjects and then present them to the class.

Nels and Loretta considered Groom’s academic demands good for Sherri’s development. Sherri always had the drive to do well in school, but Nels sensed she sometimes seemed uncomfortable being at the top of her class. Some of her friends weren’t doing as well and didn’t feel school was important, as Sherri did. Groom helped Sherri understand that she should not be ashamed of her gifts. Before Sherri skipped the seventh grade, she would bring home her schoolwork to show her parents but wouldn’t talk about it with great pride. In eighth grade, this changed.

Because of Sherri’s modest demeanor, her intelligence and achievements provoked no resentment among her older classmates. Sherri was voted the class president, and she delivered a speech at graduation.

Sherri’s eighth grade graduation, with Pastor Carl Groom

Sherri Rasmussen’s eighth grade school photo

Sherri’s closest friend in adolescence was her classmate Emily. Emily saw Sherri as happy and extremely intelligent, but serious-minded. Sherri shared with Emily her worries that she could be doing more than she was. Emily never knew what to say when Sherri expressed her feelings of inadequacy. From Emily’s perspective, she felt awed that Sherri was so intelligent that she could skip a whole grade. Emily had never heard of anyone skipping a grade before.

Sherri and Emily both participated in their church’s youth ministry, a scouting-like program called Pathfinders. One night after Pathfinders, Sherri and Emily were sitting in the backseat of Emily’s parents’ car. That night’s sermon was about the coming return of Jesus, which would precipitate the end of the world. Sherri and Emily were pious girls. The sermon left them convinced that Jesus would appear before they reached adulthood. The two friends sat in the car and cried together. Emily would never forget how Sherri looked that night, dressed in her white fur coat. Emily thought Sherri looked so beautiful in the dim light, her eyes brimming with tears. Sherri loved Jesus. But like any young person, Sherri wanted to grow up first.

For high school, Sherri followed her sister Connie to Thunderbird Adventist Academy, a coed boarding school located on an old military airfield in Scottsdale, Arizona. Connie was three years older but, because Sherri had skipped a year, only two grades ahead. Sherri’s roommate her freshman year was Donna Hancock, a sophomore who had roomed with Connie the year before. Donna initially thought of Sherri as Connie’s shy little sister. Although Sherri was younger than everyone else at the school, she was taller than many other girls, even as a freshman. Donna wondered if Sherri was quiet in part because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

Relations at Thunderbird between male and female students tended to be regimented, consistent with the school’s Christian ethos. Girls and boys lived in separate one-story dormitories across campus. There were two grassy hills on campus, which students referred to as the boys’ hump and the girls’ hump. At certain times of day when intermingling was discouraged, the girls would lie out on the grass in view of the boys, and vice versa. Once a month, students were permitted to go to the mall together. The girls typically went in a pack. Sherri was popular among both the girls and the boys but related to the boys mostly as friends. Sherri went out on a few dates but never had a serious romance or a steady boyfriend in high school.

For illicit thrills, students sometimes sneaked out of the dorm late at night to walk to the nearest Tastee Freez, a few miles away. When the urge for ice cream seized them, Sherri and Donna would jimmy the screen on their dorm room window. The screens had locks, which were checked from time to time but weren’t hard to repair before the next check. Once they were outside, and certain the dorm monitors had not heard their escape, Sherri and Donna would set off on foot for the Tastee Freez. Rather than use the roads around the old air base, they trekked straight through the desert, as the crow flies. Neither gave much thought to rattlesnakes, coyotes, or other perils they might encounter walking through the desert, in darkness, to get ice cream. Sherri and Donna saw it as an adventure and always made it safely.

Every six weeks, Thunderbird students were allowed to go home for four days. Donna’s family lived in Bullhead City, Arizona, close to the California and Nevada state lines. Some breaks Sherri went home with Donna. Other breaks Donna went with Sherri to Tucson. Donna thought the Rasmussens were a wonderful family. She especially loved Nels, whose generosity seemed limitless. Whenever Thunderbird took school outings to Tucson, Nels always treated everyone to lunch.

Sherri continued to excel academically. By the end of her junior year of high school, she had completed all the classes required to graduate. The old familiar feelings of boredom began to gnaw at her. In fall 1973, for the second time in four years, Sherri skipped a grade.

Donna had already graduated from Thunderbird and enrolled as a freshman at La Sierra College in California. La Sierra was affiliated with Loma Linda University, Nels’s alma mater for dental school. La Sierra agreed to accept Sherri’s credits. Within weeks, Sherri and Donna became roommates again, this time on the La Sierra campus. When Sherri began college classes in September 1973, she was just sixteen years old.

Sherri’s high school photo, circa 1973

Sherri’s older sister, Connie, was also at Loma Linda, studying nursing. Connie had planned on becoming a nurse since she was four years old. A great-aunt on Loretta’s side of the family was an accomplished nurse who had devoted her life to improving public health standards on the island of Guam. She was greatly admired within the family, and Connie had resolved to follow her example. Sherri looked up to both her older sister and her aunt. During Sherri’s freshman year of college, she decided she also wanted to pursue a career in nursing.

Donna marveled at Sherri’s precociousness as a college student, and the ease with which she mastered coursework that Donna found challenging. As freshmen at La Sierra, Sherri and Donna had many of the same prerequisites. Sherri studied hard for her classes, although it seemed to Donna that she didn’t need to. Donna thought Sherri was capable of memorizing anything. La Sierra did not allow students to keep cars on campus unless they achieved a certain grade point average. Sherri qualified to have a car in January of her freshman year.

Sherri had had her driver’s license for less than a year. Nels had taught her to drive in the family’s four-wheel-drive Toyota, a car the Rasmussen girls nicknamed Herbie. Soon after, returning from a family trip to Lake Apache, Sherri was behind the wheel when Nels corrected her driving somewhat harshly. Sherri didn’t appreciate the advice and announced, I’m not driving anymore.

Well, pull it off the road, then, Nels replied. We’ll wait.

Sherri pulled onto the shoulder and placed Herbie in park. The family sat by the side of the road, in silence, as minutes passed. Nels adjusted the passenger seat and leaned back, as if he was about to settle in for a long nap. More minutes passed in silence. Okay, I’ll drive, Sherri finally relented.

Sherri was growing up in other ways as well. By that spring, Sherri and Donna had both started to date boys. Donna’s romance, with a classmate named Lynn Robison, was more serious. Sherri had an on-and-off relationship with a sophomore named Paul. Connie had also fallen in love. During her sophomore year, Connie and her fiancé decided they didn’t want to wait any longer to get married. At the time, Loma Linda had a policy that discouraged nursing students from marrying before graduation. Connie got married anyway. The school stripped Connie of her academic honors and forced her to take a year off.

Near the end of Sherri’s freshman year, she applied to enter the nursing program at Loma Linda. Sherri was admitted and switched campuses as a sophomore in the fall of 1974. The move ended Sherri’s brief relationship with Paul. Donna, who was studying education, stayed at La Sierra. Although Sherri and Donna lived on different campuses twenty miles apart, they remained close friends. Almost every weekend, Donna stayed at Sherri’s place, or vice versa.

During their summers, Sherri and Connie worked as student nurses at the school’s teaching hospital, Loma Linda University Medical Center. Their work shifts were eight hours long, and often overnight. Connie and Sherri had always been close, as sisters and as friends, but never colleagues. The sisters worked in different departments but sought each other out on their breaks.

Sherri was assigned to the hospital’s Surgical Intensive Care Unit, where she gained her first experience of caring directly for patients. Connie was impressed that Sherri knew how to use the ICU’s computer, which monitored patients’ conditions and relayed information to the nurses. The computer was so enormous that it took up an entire wall. It was not just the size and complexity of the computer that intimidated Connie, but the high-stakes nature of nursing in an ICU, caring for patients who were gravely ill. Connie liked interacting with patients, getting to know them as people and comforting them, but Sherri was unfazed by the high-tech, fast-paced atmosphere in the ICU. Connie didn’t know how she did it. Sherri was still a teenager who wore her hair in a ponytail, but she demonstrated a preternatural ability to handle life-and-death decisions. Anyone who worked with Sherri could tell she had a special gift, which she tried to use to help other people.

Sherri and her sisters had lots of fun times, too. Sherri and Connie went home to Tucson often. The family went to football and basketball games at the University of Arizona, everyone decked out in red and blue. Nels and Loretta sold the family ski boat, which had figured so prominently in their girls’ childhoods, and bought a bigger boat, a 36-foot motor trawler, which they christened The Tucson Queen. Nels kept it at a marina in San Diego, the nearest oceanfront city to Tucson. Sherri and Connie would drive down from Loma Linda to meet their parents and Teresa for family cruises up the coast to Catalina Island.

Teresa, four years younger than Sherri, was in eighth grade at the time. When it came time for Teresa to get braces, Nels sent her to a dental school classmate whose practice was in Loma Linda. Teresa flew in monthly for her appointments. Sherri and Connie would pick her up at the airport and take her to the orthodontist and then home with them for the weekend.

On one of Teresa’s visits, Sherri confided to her sister that she felt torn between becoming a nurse and going to medical school. Nels had told Sherri on many occasions that she would make a phenomenal doctor. Sherri believed she might, but also felt she could accomplish so much in nursing. Sherri did not want Connie to feel overshadowed if she left nursing and pursued medicine instead. Sherri also aspired to start a family one day and worried that if she became a doctor, she would have to sacrifice a family life. Sherri did not want to miss out on being a mother.

In the fall of 1975, Connie, her husband, and Sherri moved into a two-bedroom trailer home near the Loma Linda campus. Connie and her husband took the larger, back bedroom. Sherri’s front bedroom had an extra pullout bed. Teresa started high school that fall at Thunderbird, the same boarding school her sisters had attended. Compared to her older sisters, Teresa had a bit of a wild streak. Teresa was unhappy at Thunderbird from her first day of freshman year.

In mid-September, Donna married her boyfriend, Lynn. Donna asked Sherri to be a bridesmaid. The entire Rasmussen family was invited to the wedding. Teresa was looking forward to it because she had a crush on Donna’s brother.

Freshmen were not allowed to leave the Thunderbird campus without permission. The school initially approved Teresa’s request. Donna’s parents and brother were traveling from Scottsdale to the wedding and offered Teresa a ride. Just before the trip, the school told Teresa she could not leave unless one of her parents signed her out in person. Teresa knew that was impossible. When Donna’s mom came to pick her up, Teresa neglected to mention that she was going AWOL from campus.

After Teresa arrived at the wedding with Donna’s family, and it became clear what she had done, Nels and Loretta gave her an ultimatum: return to Thunderbird, or move back home and go to public school in Tucson. Teresa had only attended small church schools. The idea of being a new student at a big school terrified her.

Sherri offered Teresa a third option, to come live with her and Connie and enroll at Loma Linda Academy, the university-affiliated high school on campus. The school year at Loma Linda Academy had not yet begun, so Teresa hadn’t missed any classes. Nels and Loretta agreed.

Teresa never went back to Thunderbird. Two weeks later, Sherri went to Scottsdale, packed up her little sister’s dorm room, and moved her into their two-bedroom trailer in Loma Linda. Teresa spent the next two years sleeping on the pullout couch in Sherri’s bedroom.

Because Sherri had twice skipped a grade, and Connie took a year off from nursing school to get married, the sisters ended up as classmates their junior year at Loma Linda. Although Connie was nearly three years older, she was not uncomfortable that Sherri had caught up to her in school. Connie believed Sherri had a special intellect that she tried to keep secret. As smart as Sherri was, she wasn’t the type to make anyone around her feel stupid.

The sisters shared their joys, problems, and sorrows with one another during the time they lived together. Teresa and Connie never forgot the emotional impact one patient made on Sherri, a teenage boy about her own age. Sherri was still a student nurse assigned to the ICU at Loma Linda. The boy was a motocross rider, and had been racing his motorcycle out in the sand dunes when he crashed and suffered a serious head injury. By the time he was brought to the ICU, he had slipped into a coma.

For weeks on end, Sherri came home from work and told her sisters about him. Sherri said caring for the boy was one of the toughest things she’d ever done. She described how she sat and talked to him, even though she wasn’t sure he could hear her. Sherri cried as she recounted their one-sided conversations.

In June 1977, Sherri and Connie graduated together from Loma Linda. Sherri’s grades earned her an invitation to Sigma Theta Tau, a nursing honor society, but she declined because Connie was not also selected.

Nursing school graduates traditionally receive a pin to signify their admission into the profession. Loretta’s great-aunt, who had inspired them to become nurses, attended their pinning ceremony. Loretta got Teresa a pretty floral headband to wear for the occasion, so she wouldn’t feel less important than her sisters.

In July 1977, at the age of twenty, Sherri was granted her nursing license by the State of California. She continued to work as a staff nurse in the ICU until August. Over the summer, she visited schools with master’s in nursing programs, including the University of Houston, Tulane, and UCLA. Sherri liked UCLA the most.

In September, Sherri was hired as a nurse in the Coronary Care Unit at UCLA Medical Center. Teresa, meanwhile, was starting her junior year of high school. Sherri and Teresa got an apartment together in Van Nuys. Teresa enrolled at San Fernando Valley Adventist Academy. The following June, Sherri was admitted to the master’s in nursing program at UCLA. Soon after Sherri got the news, Nels handwrote her a letter to congratulate her and offer his encouragement for the next stage of her career:

The sacrifices you will have to make over the next two years will be considerable but it will be the most rewarding experience of your young life. Let your leadership abilities surface and step out and make your way to the top. Remember the world waits for no one. The contributions you make to nursing will make a better person out of you and you will enjoy your profession so much more if you give of yourself …

Sherri and Connie at Loma Linda graduation, June 1977

To be a leader you must be an expert in your field. Learn while you’re young to motivate others to guide and influence, but listen to others as well. Maintain your honesty and humility and be ready to experience some lonely times. To be a leader you give a lot but in time the hidden rewards are seen and you are accepted by your peers. This brings great pride and sense of accomplishment. I want you to always remember I’m as close as the nearest phone. We all need a friend from time to time to talk to. I hope I will always qualify …

Congratulations & Good Luck. Your Dad, Nels Jr. Love ya.

Sherri entered the master’s in nursing program at UCLA in September 1978. She and Teresa, by then a senior, moved into an apartment in Westwood, close to the UCLA campus. Teresa drove herself daily to and from her high school in the Valley.

Sherri’s workload included a full slate of classes, as well as intensive clinical training in the form of nursing shifts at UCLA Medical Center. Sherri’s clinical focus was cardiac care, treating patients with serious heart problems.

Sherri often came home from her clinical rounds bone-tired. Teresa attributed Sherri’s exhaustion partly to her physical exertions on the job, such as performing CPR on multiple patients during a single shift. Teresa thought Sherri’s fatigue also reflected the emotion that she could not help but bring to her work and invest in her patients, knowing that she held their lives in her hands.

Her social life took a backseat to her schoolwork and clinical responsibilities. Sherri went on a handful of dates, and was asked out on many more, but she was more intent on finishing her master’s degree than finding a boyfriend. When Sherri socialized, it was usually with classmates, or nurses and residents she knew from the hospital. Sherri joined a study group of half a dozen nursing students. Sherri was the only nonsmoker in the group. By the time they graduated, she had persuaded all but one of them to quit smoking. It wasn’t her style to lecture, badger, or scold. Sherri was respectful and encouraging in a way that got to people in their quiet moments. She made people around her want to be better.

Teresa, despite being in high school, had a more active social life than her older sister. Nels nicknamed her two boyfriends Pencil Neck and Snake Charmer. Sherri felt responsible for Teresa and sometimes called Donna to ask for advice—for instance, if Teresa wanted to go out on a date and Sherri didn’t think it was a good idea. She worried about Teresa and didn’t want to disappoint her parents or have anything happen to her younger sister on her watch. During Teresa’s senior year, Snake Charmer gave her a kitten. It was supposed to be a gift, but because he had no money at the time, Teresa paid for it. Sherri and Teresa named the kitten Bozo, to honor its supposed benefactor.

After Teresa graduated from high school, in 1979, she left Bozo with Sherri. Teresa moved back to Tucson and enrolled at the University of Arizona. Halfway through her freshman year, Teresa visited Donna’s parents and reconnected with Donna’s brother and a friend of his, Brian Lane. Teresa and Brian had gone on a few dates at Thunderbird Academy before Teresa moved to Loma Linda. Teresa had an extra ticket to the Arizona State basketball game in Phoenix that night and invited Brian to come along. Three months later, Teresa and Brian got engaged.

Sherri was awarded her master’s degree by UCLA in March 1980, at age twenty-three. Even after Sherri was officially credentialed as a Cardiovascular Clinical Nurse Specialist, Nels tried to persuade her to consider medical school. Look at your understanding of the heart’s problems, and your abilities, Nels told his daughter.

Sherri heard her father out. When he finished, she put her arm around him and said, No, Dad. I’m going to stick with nursing. But I’m going to make you proud.

That summer, Nels and Sherri set out to find a new place for her to live in Los Angeles. It seemed to Nels that they drove from Long Beach to Northern California looking at options. Nels purchased the condo in Van Nuys in August 1980, the same year the Balboa Townhomes complex was built. He liked that the neighborhood seemed safe and that the condo complex was relatively secure. Because the unit had a drive-in garage, Sherri would be able to come home from work at all hours and not have to worry about walking alone on the street.

The condo was a split-level unit, and quite spacious, especially for one person to live in alone. Above the two-car garage was the first floor, with the front entryway and living room. The second floor, up a short staircase from the living room, had a dining area with a built-in bar, and the kitchen. Next to the kitchen was a small breakfast room fronted by a balcony with a sliding glass door. The balcony, large enough for a charcoal grill and a few chairs, was directly over the unit’s garage door and overlooked the interior of the condo complex. Stairs from the second-floor dining area led to the top floor, with the master bedroom, a guest bedroom, a small den, and a laundry room.

Although the deed to the condo was issued in Nels’s name, Sherri wrote a rent check to her father every month equal to the mortgage payment. Sherri had come of age in the 1970s, amid increasing social consciousness of feminism and equal rights for women. Being financially independent from her parents was very important to her.

On November 23, 1980, nine months after they met, Teresa and Brian married. Teresa didn’t want to choose between Connie and Sherri as her matron of honor, so she asked both sisters. Soon after the wedding, Sherri and Bozo moved into their new home, unit 205 of the Balboa Townhomes in Van Nuys.

Sherri’s master’s degree helped her earn a promotion at UCLA Medical Center, to head nurse of the Coronary Care and Coronary Observation Units. The two units, both on the fourth floor of the hospital, had ten and twenty-two beds, respectively. Sherri had previously worked in the CCU as a staff nurse. In her new position, Sherri had round-the-clock responsibility for nursing care in both units. In addition to her clinical and administrative duties, Sherri had to manage a staff of nurses, several of whom were former peers. Nearly all the nurses who Sherri supervised were older than her. Despite the potential pitfalls, Sherri was liked and respected by the doctors and her fellow nurses. In the hierarchy at UCLA Medical Center, head nurses reported to nursing supervisors. When the hospital was short-staffed for nursing supervisors, Sherri was one of the head nurses often tapped to fill the role.

Among Sherri’s best friends she met at UCLA Medical Center were two staff nurses, Jayne Ryan and Anita Kramer, who were also in their twenties.

Jayne had worked part time at UCLA for four years, since 1976, while she earned her bachelor’s degree at Cal State Los Angeles. The youngest child and the only girl in a family of seven kids, Jayne grew up in Harrow, Ontario, a small town twenty-five miles over the border from Detroit. When she met Sherri, Jayne lived with another nurse, Nancy, in a small house in West Los Angeles.

Anita enjoyed a reputation among her fellow nurses as a matchmaker. She had introduced a friend of hers to a classmate of Jayne’s, and the couple fell in love and got married. A few years later, Anita would introduce Sherri to John Ruetten, who was a childhood friend of Anita’s boyfriend, Matt Gorder.

Nursing shifts at the hospital were long and unpredictable. Sherri was known for her ability to remain calm under pressure, whatever was happening. Jayne was walking one day through the CCU, past the beds for their most critically ill patients, when she heard Sherri call out, Excuse me, Jayne, can you give me a hand for a minute? Jayne sensed urgency but no panic in Sherri’s voice. Jayne turned to see Sherri standing over a patient who had gone into cardiac arrest. Sherri was doing one-person CPR. Yeah, I can! Jayne said, rushing over to help. Sherri was always focused and unflappable in such moments.

Sherri told Nels about another incident that occurred while she was a nurse at UCLA, which might have ended tragically had she not been there that day. Sherri had a patient in her unit, a woman with advanced heart disease, who was in critical condition. Sherri had been treating her for some time, long enough to become familiar with her husband. One day, when Sherri was on duty, the woman suddenly went into cardiac arrest. A team of cardiologists rushed to her side, along with Sherri and other nurses. They were able to resuscitate her, but only briefly, before her heart gave out. There was nothing more anyone could do.

Sherri was in the patient’s room afterward cleaning up when another nurse rushed in, panicked. The nurse told Sherri that the woman’s husband was in the waiting room with a gun, demanding to see the doctors who had failed to save his wife. The doctors within earshot had fled, which had left the nurse to seek help from Sherri. Sherri went out to the waiting room and calmly approached the husband. Sherri put her arm around him and told him nothing would be accomplished by doing anything with the gun. Sherri asked him to give it to her, and he complied.

In other situations, when she felt the circumstances warranted it, Sherri did not shrink from confrontation. She strongly believed that nurses played just as important a role as physicians in caring for patients. It bothered her when doctors treated nurses as less than their equals.

One afternoon, Sherri was on her way to the hospital’s pharmacy when two doctors came down the hallway from the opposite direction. Both doctors, a cardiac surgeon and the chief resident, had self-important personalities. The two men were deep in conversation and oblivious to everyone in their path. Sherri later recounted to Jayne what happened. As the doctors approached, Sherri thought, Well, I can either walk between them, which is rude, or I can get up against the wall until they go by. Then she thought, I have as much right to walk down this hall as they do. How dare they take up the entire hall? I’m not going to flatten myself against the wall for them. Sherri kept walking and refused to yield. When she bumped into the chief resident, he shot her a look. Sherri held her ground. You’re taking up the entire hall, she said. You’re not God. Sherri then continued on to the pharmacy.

Sherri expected everyone she worked with to meet the same standards of patient care to which she held herself. One day when Sherri was working with Jayne, Nels and Loretta called to tell Sherri her grandmother had been taken to the hospital in Tucson. Sherri immediately left work, went to LAX, and caught the first flight home. From the airport in Tucson, she went straight to the hospital where her grandmother was admitted. Sherri still had her UCLA nursing uniform on. She walked right up to the resident on duty and said, I need a report on my grandmother’s condition. What’s going on? What are you doing? The resident didn’t have the answers she demanded. Sherri asked to speak with the attending physician. The resident looked at her name tag, which read HEAD NURSE, CORONARY CARE UNIT. That her uniform was from a hospital five hundred miles away was beside the point. Sherri could be very assertive when necessary. She wasn’t going to accept a vague report on her grandmother’s condition.

Sherri’s friend Jayne had a physical education requirement for her bachelor’s degree at Cal State L.A. One of the options was a self-defense class. Jayne and Sherri were both safety conscious. After a series of rapes on the UCLA campus, the hospital issued rape whistles to all the nurses, to keep on their key chains. For nurses whose shifts ended late at night, UCLA provided shuttles and escorts to the parking lot. The warnings were drummed into them: Don’t walk out there alone. Take the shuttle. Call an escort. Jayne went to her self-defense class weekly. After each class, Sherri asked Jayne, What did you learn this week?

Jayne related to Sherri the lessons the instructor had imparted: If you think someone’s following you, turn around and look at them. Let them know you’re aware of them. Walk in another direction. If somebody attacks you, drop everything that you’re carrying.

One time, Sherri asked Jayne, What do you do if that person has a gun?

Jayne said she didn’t know and would ask the instructor.

Next class, the instructor advised Jayne, Well, you either need to talk your way out of it, or you need to run away. Sometimes it’s better to try to talk your way out of it. You need to be very careful, because you’re at a disadvantage.

Around the same time, Sherri had a frightening experience at home. Her friend Donna was visiting Los Angeles and staying with her. Sherri and Donna came home late one night from Knott’s Berry Farm, where they had met