Fatal Attraction: Nineteen Years in a Freezer — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

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1:00In the fall of 2004, a fledgling criminalist named Jennifer Francis gets to pick her next case from a stack on a colleague's desk. She has just been cleared to perform DNA analysis on her own. The stack holds DNA requests from detectives all over the Los Angeles Police Department. Jennifer is the newest analyst in the unit and the only one without a backlog. She goes through the stack looking for something simple. She finds a request on a 1986 murder in Van Nuys, a nurse. The detective who submitted it wrote that the victim's blood type was O and that type A blood had been recovered inside her home, blood that could not have been hers.

1:45Jennifer reads that and thinks, this one is easy. Pick a type A stain, pull the suspect's profile, run it against the national database, compare it to the victim, close the file. She takes the Sherry Rasmussen case. The request Jennifer picked up has been waiting for more than a year. Cliff Shepard, a cold case detective, submitted it on September 19, 2003, 17 years after the murder. Shepard works in a unit the LAPD created in 2001 to go back through murders the city never solved, between 6 ,000 and 9 ,000 of them. Detectives spent a year just cutting that list down to the ones that still had evidence someone could test.

2:30Sherry Rasmussen's case made that list because of one line in a report from 1986. Years later, Detective Shepard pointed it out to Dateline. I saw that a bite swab had been collected by the coroner's office. I said, okay, with that swab, there should be DNA. Shepard attached two documents to his request. Detective Lyle Mayer's follow-up report from 1986 and the property log, meaning every item the LAPD booked into evidence in Sherry's case. The property log contains 29 items. The bite mark swab is not one of them. So Cliff Shepard goes looking. The coroner's office tells him they do not have it.

3:16I checked with our evidence room. They didn't have it. I looked at our property reports. It's not booked. How could that happen? Incompetence. That happened a lot? Yes. In 2003, Shepard takes a yellow highlighter to the sentence in Mayer's report describing the bite swab and writes a note in the margin asking where it is. It is that handwritten note that newbie criminalist Jennifer Francis finds when she picks up the Sherry Rasmussen case for DNA analysis and reads Shepard's request. Jennifer calls Shepard herself and asks whether she can see some crime scene photographs. It's a normal request.

3:59Shepard offers her the murder book instead. This is not normal. A murder book is the complete case file. There is only that one binder. It's irreplaceable. Detectives usually stay while an analyst reads it and then take it back. But Shepard tells Jennifer to keep it as long as she needs. A few days later, she comes back from lunch, and it is sitting on the center table of the lab. A blue three-ring binder. Jennifer shows a co-worker. Check it out, she says. A real-life murder book. Then she starts reading it. Inside, Jennifer finds a security report from Glendale Adventist Medical Center, the hospital where Sherry Rasmussen worked.

4:44It describes a nurse Sherry turned down for a promotion. It says the hospital disciplined that nurse, and her boyfriend too, a doctor, after they made harassing phone calls to Sherry. By December 22, 2004, Jennifer has finished testing the items Shepard submitted for DNA analysis. Every sample comes back as belonging to Sherry Rasmussen. Three weeks of work, and all Jennifer has is the DNA profile of a woman everyone already knows is dead. Frustrated, she thinks about the bite mark she has seen mentioned in this murder book, but not in the case's property log. If any evidence in this case carries the killer's DNA, it is that swab.

5:30People do not bite themselves. Jennifer goes back to LAPD property, which contains the 29 items listed on the log, and checks out the sexual assault kit from 1986. There are swabs and slides inside, but not one is labeled bite mark. Tracking down evidence is a detective's job. Frances is a civilian scientist with no contacts at the coroner's office. but she calls anyway because that's where evidence like this might be. A woman answers. Jennifer introduces herself, says she's calling from the LAPD crime lab, and reads off the coroner's case number. She is looking for a bite mark swab. The woman puts her on hold.

6:17Ten seconds later, she comes back on and says, there is no evidence booked under that number. Jennifer hangs up, wondering whether the woman typed a digit wrong. She calls the coroner's office again the next day, hoping someone else picks up. A man answers and tells her the same thing. Nothing here. Jennifer considers calling a third time, hoping to reach someone who remembers how evidence was stored before everything went into a computer. One of the other criminalists tells her to stop. You're done, she says. You don't want to get the reputation of being a pain in the ass. You're brand new at this.

6:55You've already called twice. Jennifer knows she's probably right. So she goes back to Mayer's 1986 report and reads it one more time, looking for anything she's missed. And she finds a name. The man from the coroner's office who collected the swab in the first place. Senior criminalist Lloyd Mahaney. Jennifer does the math. Almost 19 years. What are the odds this man is still on the job? She calls the coroner's office and asks for Lloyd Mahaney by name. He picks up. Jennifer asks him one question. If you swabbed a bite mark in 1986, what would you have called it? Mahaney says, bite mark swab. Jennifer tells him nobody can find it.

7:49The coroner's office says they don't have it, and neither does the LAPD. Mahaney is not surprised. When the coroner's office moved to computers, some of the old cases never made it in. To find something from 1986, you would have to pull the coroner's evidence log on microfiche. It would be a big job. And Mahaney is leaving on vacation. Then Lloyd Mahaney tells her this. We would never get rid of a bite mark swab. We don't keep clothing forever, but a bite mark swab? We would not throw that away. Jennifer tells him there's no rush. Just see if he can find it when he gets back. Before they hang up, she says one more thing.

8:34Don't forget about me, Lloyd. Lloyd Mahaney sealed that envelope at six minutes past two in the morning on February 25th, 1986, and sent it downstairs into a freezer. The bite mark swab has been there ever since, almost 19 years. It isn't gone. It is still there somewhere, but no one can find it. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

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10:25Police Department was doing while that envelope sat untouched in the coroner's freezer. It is April 10th, seven weeks after Sherry Rasmussen was killed. Two blocks from Sherry's condo, a woman named Lisa Revali comes home to find two men inside her apartment. One runs past her and out the door. The other points a gun at her, backs away, and disappears out the door. Detective Lyle Mayer hears about it the next morning. Revali walks him through her place. It is laid out almost exactly like Sherry's, and the burglars had stacked her stereo equipment by the door. To Mayer, the resemblance is enough.

11:04He connects the two cases. Years later, retired LAPD homicide detective Rob Bubb tells Dateline why it was not a stretch to call the two cases related. No, not at all. Not with the proximity, the time of day, and basically the same M.O. Mayer calls a press conference and brings composite sketches of two men. We have obtained fingerprints in the crimes. We are of the opinion at this point that the suspects may be illegal aliens. Nobody is ever charged in the burglary from April 10th. Mayer would say years later that his detectives arrested around 20 people and ran every one of their fingerprints against the crime scene.

11:50None of them matched. On April 7th, 1987, one year and six weeks after Sherry's murder, Lyle Mayer files a progress report on the Rasmussen investigation. Its conclusion is one sentence. No additional leads have developed in this case. In Tucson, Sherry's parents, Nels and Loretta Rasmussen, keep pushing. In October 1986, they put up a$10 ,000 reward and fly to Los Angeles for a press conference. The LA Times runs Sherry's photograph beside composite sketches of the two men police believe killed her. Local radio picks it up, so does the evening news. A year later, in November 1987, Nels and Loretta do it again.

12:39Another press conference, another round of coverage. The reward leads nowhere. Loretta telephones the Van Nuys detectives many times over the years. The calls are brief, and she often comes away feeling like the detectives just want her off the phone. In August 1990, Nels writes to the television program America's Most Wanted. Quote, we feel this case has not been thoroughly investigated, and we would appreciate any help in this matter. Unquote. The letter produces nothing. Nels keeps going anyway. Years later, Connie remembers to NBC how relentless her father became. As a father, he had felt a responsibility to protect her.

13:23And the only way that in her death he could protect her was to find out who killed her. He would constantly re-dissect the information that we knew. In 1991, Lyle Mayer retires from the L.A. Police Department, and Sherry's case passes to whoever is running the homicide desk in Van Nuys. Around 1992, Sherry's longtime friend, Donna Robison, tells the family she has a relative who can arrange an exciting new analysis called DNA testing. Sometime in 1992 or 1993, Nels and Loretta fly to Los Angeles with their daughter, Connie, and drive to Van Nuys Station to ask the LAPD about DNA tests of the evidence in Sherry's case.

14:10The Rasmussons remember it this way. Nels goes in and asks the officer at the front desk where they should park. Anywhere on the street outside, the officer says. Loretta had called ahead and made an appointment. Upstairs, the three of them are put in a small room and left there. It looks like the kind of room where police interview suspects. They wait for more than an hour. They had expected to meet with Lyle Mayer. Instead, the detective who finally comes in is someone they have never seen before. His name is Steve Fisk. Mayer has retired, Fisk tells them, and he has taken over Sherry's case.

14:50Fisk sets a thin folder on the table between them. It stays closed. He never opens it and never takes a note. Connie looks at that folder and thinks, if the LAPD were working my sister's case, it would be thicker than that. What do you want to know, he asks. The family asks about the fingerprints from Sherry's case. Have they been run through the FBI database? Fisk tells them they're still working on it. By this time, Sherry has been dead more than six years. Fisk tells them it is a cold case with no leads and that if anything changes, he'll let them know. Then Nels asks him a question. Have you run the DNA?

15:34Fisk tells him DNA testing is expensive and that the LAPD's budget cannot cover it in Sherry's case. Nell says, fine, I'll pay for it. I even have a person who would do it. Fisk tells him that would do no good. They have no suspect, and he says they need one before they can run DNA. The detective asks whether Nell's is still suspicious of John Rutten. Nell says he does not believe his son-in-law killed Sherry. However, he does believe John knows something, that he's holding back something. Nels points to the closed folder on the interrogation room table and tells Fisk that what matters is already in there, in the LAPD's own records.

16:19Fisk does not even look at it. Connie gets the distinct sense that he wants her and her family to leave. After less than an hour, they do. They did meet with us, but it was also more of a, it was like a show. They walk out of the Van Nuys police station to find a parking ticket on their windshield. Nels goes back inside and says the police told him to park there. He is met with an instruction that he will have to pay it anyway. After meeting with Fisk, the Rasmussons call Sherry's friend Donna and tell her the police turned down Nels' offer to pay for DNA testing. Donna's memory is the only record outside of the family that the conversation with LAPD ever happened at all.

17:05There is no reference to the meeting in the LAPD murder book. The next entries in the case log come in October 1993, when detectives run latent or barely visible fingerprints from the crime scene against databases in California and other western states. No hits. They also pull lists of nearby police interactions and state prison parolees from around the time Sherry was murdered. These, too, will come up empty. Then, on October 11th, a detective named Phil Morritt goes to the L.A. County Coroner's Office and signs out the trace or transfer evidence from Sherry's case. This is the evidence that the coroner's criminalist, Lloyd Mahaney, collected the night Sherry died.

17:50There are two teams that collect evidence at an L.A. murder scene. One is the coroner's office. They collect the body and everything touching it. In Sherry's case, this includes fibers found on her robe and loose hairs from her neck. The LAPD has its own team of criminalists in its Scientific Investigations Division. They collect the evidence that is not directly touching the body. Bullet casings, fingerprints, bloodstains on the walls, that sort of thing. That evidence was booked into LAPD property. One day, Jennifer Francis will test it and find only Sherry's DNA. The trace evidence from the body went into the coroner's property room the morning after Sherry died.

18:39At this point in our story, it has sat undisturbed for seven years. At 1225 p.m., for reasons unknown, Morit signs out all of that coroner's trace evidence. From there, it vanishes. There is no record that this evidence was ever returned to the coroner. No record of what happened to it at all. Some of the most critical evidence in the case, which could positively ID a suspect, gets checked out and is never returned. and no one knows where it went. It simply disappears. There is no mention of any of this in the murder book. In fact, there's no entry for anything from October 11th. Years later, detectives working Sherry's case show Morit the signature from the county coroner's office.

19:32He confirms that it is his, but tells them he does not remember picking up the evidence nor ever even working the Rasmussen case. And yet there is one piece of evidence that Morit left behind at the coroner. It is hidden away in a basement freezer and its label is fading. It would be tough to find one tiny cigar-sized test tube that will remain hidden for another 12 years. The bite mark swab from Sherry's left arm. It is still in the freezer, where it has been since the morning after the murder seven years ago. Everybody's talking about weight loss injections because the results can be so dramatic.

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21:35Listen to Smartless now on the SiriusXM app. Download it today. Fast forward now to January 2005 and criminalist Jennifer Francis, the new DNA analyst looking for her next task. Here's the phone ring in the LAPD crime lab. She picks up. It's been a week since she spoke with Lloyd Mahaney about the bite mark and asked him not to forget about her. The call is from a supervisor at the L.A. County Coroner's Office. We found your bite mark swab. He and his team had just spent six hours in the freezer hunting for it. Jennifer calls Detective Shepard from the cold case unit with the news. We found the swab.

22:18Shepard asks why they missed it when he asked, and Jennifer tells him about the newfangled computer system. When the swab arrives in mid-January, she sees another reason and why it took several hours in the cold to find. The evidence envelope is in rough shape, worn by years of being shuffled around the freezer as other evidence was crammed in and out around it. Mahaney's handwriting on Sherry's name is so faded, Jennifer can barely read it to confirm. There is a hole in the top right corner of the envelope. The red cap of the plastic sample tube peeks out. At some point, it pierced clean through the envelope, right where Mahaney had written the case number.

23:00What remains of it is illegible. Bite mark swabs are filed by case number. With no legible case number on the envelope, finding the swab required a bit of detective work of its own. But the tape sealing the envelope is intact. The tube is intact. And so are the two swabs inside. So on January 27, 2005, Jennifer Francis puts a sample of cells from the swab under a microscope. It looks like saliva. This is a good sign. She starts the sample through DNA analysis. As the computer runs, it draws the profile as a row of peaks across her screen. It draws big, tall spikes, meaning the sample is strong.

23:47Another good sign. The whole process takes 30 minutes. The profile reaches the sex marker, the part that shows whether the DNA came from a man or a woman, XY or XX. Jennifer expects a male result. She remembers the investigator's prevailing theory from the murder book about two burglars. Besides that, most murders are committed by men. She stares at the computer screen, waiting. An XY reading would cause the line to peak again. It stays flat. Jennifer looks at the flat line. Wait. Her first thought is Sherry. Is the computer showing Sherry's DNA? Maybe the bite broke the skin and the swab picked up some of Sherry's blood.

24:35That would explain a female result. When the computer finishes, Jennifer takes the final profile and puts it side by side with Sherry's. They do not match. There is another woman's DNA in the bite mark from Sherry's arm. A woman bit Sherry Rasmussen. Jennifer has read the murder book, and her mind goes straight to the nurse from the hospital security report, the one who harassed Sherry after missing out on a promotion. However, Jennifer does not suggest this idea, even as a theory. She is expected to stay in her lane as a criminalist, analyze the evidence, let detectives come up with the theories.

25:15And so she does. On February 8, 2005, Jennifer sends her report to Detective Shepard. The result catches him off guard. She called me and said, hey, this is an unknown female's DNA. That is not what I was expecting. But the surprise does not change his basic theory of the crime. Shepard now looks for a male-female burglary team. The violence at the scene still makes him think a man had to be involved. He explained that reasoning to Dateline in 2020. I believed that, okay, there's a woman and then there's a man. That Sherry had been clubbed from behind, knocked down or unconscious, and then somebody stood over her and shot her.

26:02Jennifer does not understand why Shepard fixates on a burglary in light of this new DNA evidence. She thinks the personal motive is at least worth a look, but it's Shepard's case and she is only a criminalist. No arrest follows. No suspect is identified. Jennifer moves on to other cases. Sherry's case goes quiet again. Fast forward three years to March 2008. Van Nuys homicide, where Sherry's case started more than two decades earlier, is moving offices. Someone plunks a box of files next to Jim Nuttall's desk. Nuttall is a three-year homicide detective. He has spent all three of those years in Van Nuys.

26:48He is not thrilled to see this box. Two detectives are about to retire, and Nuttall's wife is eight and a half months pregnant. He's taking time off next month, trying to button up loose ends before the baby comes. He's also got no idea who left the box beside his desk. Inside it are two faded blue binders, murder books from cases waiting to be solved. Nuttall came up under an old-fashioned supervisor who believed that reading old, unsolved cases is the best way to learn. So Nuttall has read, and he has learned. He does not recognize the books in his newly acquired file box. Catherine Braley killed in Van Nuys in 1988.

27:31The other, Sherry Rasmussen, 1986. Jim Nuttall has tried his hand at investigating exactly one cold case, the murder of a biker and bookie who went by Sid the Squid. He read the murder book, spoke to witnesses, and eventually arrived at a final suspect, a fellow biker who beat Sid the Squid to death over money. However, Nuttall hit a brick wall at the DA's office. He had only circumstantial evidence connecting his suspect to the murder, nothing physical. He presented his case and the DA turned it down. No arrest, no charges. The blue book goes back with the others, unsolved. Jim comes away convinced that solving a cold case requires physical evidence, no matter how compelling the argument a detective makes.

28:21The homicide unit moves locations. He drops the box on the empty desk next to his own in the new office space. His baby comes. He takes his leave and returns and tackles other cases. The box sits there undisturbed for nearly a year. Super Bowl Sunday 2009. The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Arizona Cardinals 27-23 on a touchdown with 35 seconds left. Nuttall watches with a house full of friends and a fridge full of beer. Nuttall later describes that Sunday to NBC's Dateline. Super Bowl Sunday is like a holiday to me, so we were having a good time. and we were up late. The next morning is Monday, February 2nd.