In February 1986, Sherri Rasmussen was found battered and shot to death in her California home. Two weeks or so later, two men committed a burglary that became a fatal red herring. Putting two and two together to make five, detectives treated the murder as a burglary gone wrong, apparently refusing to entertain a possible suspect, police officer and later detective, Stephanie Lazarus.
The case went cold until more than twenty years later when a breakthrough in DNA profiling identified the killer as a woman. DNA was first used to solve the 1986 murder of Dawn Ashworth, but earlier that year it was unheard of.
Although the documentary makers speak to a lot of people involved and have included archive footage of both Lazarus and her victim, they get a bit silly in places. We are treated to the spectacle of detectives trailing Lazarus hoping to obtain a covert DNA sample. Don't American police forces use an exclusion database for that sort of thing? The statistics given for the likelihood of Lazarus being the perpetrator are silly. Prosecutors use this kind of absurd hyperbole to seduce juries. And were they really taking an intense degree of risk when they arrested Lazarus?
In spite of the apparent shortcomings of the case, she was convicted, and is almost certainly guilty. The motive for the killing was her obsession with the victim's husband, her former lover. Stephanie, no man is worth it. No man.
