At the time, he didn't know her name - just that she was his son-in-law's ex-girlfriend - an L.A. That's because Nels had his own idea about who was responsible for his daughter's killing. ".it wasn't a robbery," Nels Rasmussen tells Maureen Maher. But the Rasmussen family just wasn't buying any of it. Even fingerprints they found led nowhere. But there seemed to be little evidence that could tie anyone specifically to this crime. Police even had sketches drawn of those two men, who they considered suspects in Sherri's murder. "…a few weeks later, two men tried to commit a similar burglary in the area and it bolstered their theory," explains Rubin. And they pointed to that as indication this was a burglary gone bad. The crime scene includes… two pieces of electronics equipment stacked at the foot of the stairs. "…the lead detective in the case very quickly hatched on the idea that Sherri Rasmussen had happened upon two men as they were trying to burglarize the house and that they killed her after being discovered. Rubin learned that investigators back then wasted little time theorizing what had happened. "The presumption," Rubin explains, "is the attacker hit Sherri over the head - perhaps stunning her … which perhaps gave the attacker time enough to pull out the gun and shoot Sherri." The place was a mess," according to Joel Rubin, a Los Angeles Times police reporter who has been looking into how police investigated this case 24 years ago. She had been beaten badly about her face and there was blood on the walls. In the winter of 1986, the dramatic spike in street crime was beginning to strain the Los Angeles Police Department as cops were called to investigate yet another killing this time in a quiet, gated community in Van Nuys, the scene of Sherri Rasmussen's murder. "Why wasn't he camped outside the police station? I don't understand it!" "I would have expected that John would have been much more involved in the investigation… and demand answers," she says.Įspecially, as months - and then years - went by with no resolution to the case. At age 27, she was named director of critical care nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, where she sometimes lectured.īut police were off chasing other leads, and Sherri's friend, Jayne Goldberg, says that Ruetten just quietly faded out of sight, leaving her quite angry. Her parents say Sherri excelled at everything she did. "I don't believe that you can understand the grief… a part of your life has just been taken away forever," Nels Rasmussen tells Maher in an exclusive interview. The pain is most obvious when the family visits Sherri's grave. "You start the grieving process all over again, one more time." "It doesn't make the pain any less," she says. She says she never could have anticipated that only just now - more than 20 years after her sister's murder - there's been arrest. You never think something like this is gonna happen to you," says Teresa. "…Sherri was the glue that held the family together all the time….and made everything that much better," says Sherri's younger sister, Teresa, tells "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Maureen Maher.īut in February 1986, Sherri would be attacked, beaten and shot to death in her Los Angeles home.
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