Getting Away with a Murder... and a Cover Up.

I'm not quite sure why this morning's log-on page brought me to a re-hash of an LAPD detective, Stephanie Lazarus, having been charged with a decades old murder based on her DNA having been found on the victim, Sherri Rae Rasmussen.

The police of course tried to say the investigation was a regrettable incident of tunnel vision but its a very strange tunnel indeed. Sure there were a couple of items placed by the door as if a burglar was assembling his loot prior to removing it, but a lousy VCR and a disc player sure ain't much to commit a murder over. It was quite obvious right from the start that although even burglars who do kill to get away from a crime scene when a homeowner returns unexpectedly that such surprised burglars primarily want to get away. They don't make a long, drawn-out battle of it that ranges over two floors of the home and they don't make it a massively violent and highly emotional over-kill.

Now it can be assumed that the loot was going to be fenced but just how much money does the average burglar think he can get by fencing a stolen marriage license? So don't tell me that the LAPD detectives investigating this "burglary" were too dumb to realize that a stolen marriage license means a highly personal motive and that the assembled valuable items were merely staging. I mean lets face it, the detectives may or may not have been corrupt but they most certainly were not bumbling idiots. They knew what they were doing. And it seems what they did was to ignore the obvious implications of the purloined marriage certificate and to avoid papering the file with excessive adverse statements. All the statements by the victim's family to the investigators about the prior girlfriend seem to have been kept verbal and not memorialized by the investigators into memoranda for the file. Even over the years, it seems that adverse paperwork was being kept out of the file.

Rising young star in the LAPD, rapid promotion to detective, eventual promotion to an elite Art Squad even though she knew nothing about art. Don't tell me that woman didn't have a happy and rewarding life after she committed the murder. Sure she is the clink now and that is not too happy a retirement for her so she surely did not get off scott free but let's face it, she sure fared better than if she had not been an LAPD patrolman at the time of the killing!

Intensely emotional overkill, protracted fight, shooting and biting and beating the victim. Attributed to two men, at least one of whom was armed. Yeah, LAPD, that really makes sense! A female homeowner returns unexpectedly and finds two male burglars one of whom has a gun so she immediately goes on the attack? And that theft of the marriage certificate! Why just think of all the dough the burglars thought they would get from some fence for that item! Its obviously not an item of any value whatsoever to a burglar or a fence or pawnshop owner. I can just see burglars searching out items of great and obvious value and coming up with someone's marriage certificate!

Tunnel vision? A mistake in the investigation? Inexperienced investigators? Nah. The LAPD was not that stupid back then. And they are not that stupid now! They didn't want to have an embarrassing result then, so it was an investigation that went nowhere. Either that or the investigators really and truly thought that a marriage certificate was an item that a burglar would truly want to steal. Which of those two alternatives do you think is more reasonable?