Fatal Attraction: "It’s Been a Million Years Ago" — Ep. 3 | MK Confidential

Shankar Vedantam (0:00)

Having lots of choices sounds like it would be great. Who doesn't want more flavors of ice cream? It turns out the answer is us.

Too many choices can make us anxious, overwhelmed. I'm Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain Podcast and YouTube channel. Each week, Hidden Brain brings you fascinating science-backed insights about human behavior. So the next time you have to choose, choose Hidden Brain on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or hiddenbrain.org.

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Megyn Kelly (1:02)

A woman comes out of a Costco cafe carrying oily pizza on paper plates covered in silver foil and Pepsi soft drinks. Her daughter is beside her. The little girl is not quite three years old. They step into the courtyard seating area and sit at one of the red and white outdoor tables. About 20 feet away, a Latino man sits alone at a table beside a large trash bin. It is May 28th, 2009, in Cime Valley, California.

The woman doesn't look at him. There is no reason she would. She eats with her daughter, going through napkin after napkin on the greasy pizza. The woman drinks from a wax-coated cardboard cup through a plastic straw, taking sip after sip as she talks to her daughter. The little girl points and says something and the woman laughs.

Then the woman stands up with the cup still in her hand. There is a trash bin closer to her table. She walks right past it. She walks straight at the Latino man, and for a second, he is certain she has spotted him. She takes one last pull on the straw and drops the cup in the trash bin beside his elbow, then keeps walking, holding her daughter's hand.

Ten seconds later, the man has the cup out of the trash. Fifteen seconds later, it is in a manila envelope, and the man is moving quickly through the Costco parking lot to his car. The Latino man at the table is a Los Angeles police officer from an undercover unit inside the LAPD, where its people are not called detectives. They are called operators. He has been following this woman for more than a week.

The woman with the little girl is Stephanie Lazarus. She is an LA police detective who has been with the department for more than 26 years. And now her own department is trying to find out whether she murdered Sherri Rasmussen. I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK Confidential.

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Three months earlier, February 2009, inside the homicide unit at the Van Nuys Police Station, Detective Jim Nuttall has reopened a 23-year-old murder. He has DNA from a bite mark on Sherri Rasmussen's arm and the DNA belongs to a woman. He asked John Ruetten, Sherri's husband, whether there were any women in Sherri's life who had a problem with her. And John gave him a name, Stephanie Lazarus.

John told Nuttall that Stephanie joined the LAPD before he ever met Sherri. And as far as he knows, Stephanie still works for the LAPD. One of the other detectives, Mark Martinez, runs the name through the police directory.

Bingo. Stephanie Lazarus is still on the job. She's an LAPD detective assigned to the art theft detail. None of the four detectives in that room has ever heard of her.

So now they have a person of interest in a murder, and she carries a badge. LAPD policy on that is not ambiguous. Any employee who learns of possible misconduct by another officer must report it immediately up the chain or to Internal Affairs. Stephanie Lazarus has friends in the department, and Nuttall's team does not yet have her DNA. They do not know whether Stephanie had anything to do with Sherri's murder. So the four detectives make two agreements. They will follow the evidence wherever it goes, and they will never say Stephanie Lazarus' name out loud or write it anywhere another officer might see it. Inside Van Nuys Homicide, Stephanie becomes number five.