Fatal Attraction: The Body in Unit 205 — Ep. 1 | MK Confidential on the Murder of Sherri Rasmussen

It is around 12 o'clock on a Monday in Van Nuys, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, 1986. Retiree Anastasia Valenitis is at home in her condo where she and her husband Gus have lived for many years, just doing chores, enjoying her day. She looks up and sees out the window two Hispanic men in work clothes crossing the driveway, coming toward her house. They look like gardeners. The men knock on her door, and when she answers, Anastasia sees one of them is carrying a brown leather woman's purse. The men don't speak any English, only Spanish. After a few attempts to communicate, one of the men just hands Anastasia the purse. She looks inside of it, finds a wallet, and in the wallet, a driver's license. Anastasia knows the face in the picture. The young woman from Unit 205, directly across their shared driveway. Her name is Sherry something. Her eyes dart over to the name on the license, Sherry Rasmussen, 29 years old. Right, the nurse. She's a newlywed. Anastasia hands the purse back to the Hispanic man and points him toward Sherry's condo just across the way. Within five minutes, the men are back, purse still in hand. No one answered at Unit 205. Anastasia takes the purse from the men. She can return it later when her neighbor is home, but her neighbor is home. Sherry has been lying in her favorite bathrobe on her living room floor dead since earlier that morning, her face beaten and smeared with blood. Six more hours pass before anyone finds Sherry. Outside, the condo complex moves through a normal Monday. Cars come and go through the gate. Neighbors leave and return. School pickups, groceries, a stop at the pharmacy. Inside Sherry's home, the refrigerator hums, clicks off and starts again. On a chair nearby sits a quilt Sherry's grandmother made for her with sleeves sewn into it so she could wear it around the house when she got cold. Then the phone rings. It is Sherry's sister, Teresa, calling during her break at work. Teresa leaves a message and says she'll try again later. At 5 p.m., Sherry's husband, John, leaves work. On the way home, he stops for the dry cleaning and picks up a package at UPS. Ordinary errands at the end of what he thinks is an ordinary Monday. And all this time, Sherry is there, lying alone on the living room floor, one eye open and unblinking, the other swollen shut. At six o'clock, John arrives home. Later that night, he tells police what he saw when he walked inside. I mean, it's right in front of me. When I walked in the door, I saw her lying on the ground. I knew right away that there was, she was dead. Before the night is over, a Los Angeles police detective will stand in John and Sherry's living room and decide he knows exactly what happened there. He will write it down and he will be very wrong. The truth will remain hidden for 23 years. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. 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That's promo code Kelly at TakeLean.com. Let's go back to the start of the day Sherry is killed, Monday, February 24th, 1986. John Rutten wakes a little before seven in the Van Nuys condo he shares with his wife of three months, Sherry. She has lived there for more than five years. John moved in last summer. That morning, Sherry stays in bed. She's thinking of calling in sick, and she asks John to call her later in the day. John showers, dresses, and takes the stairs inside the condo down to their garage. 720 is when I left. I got to work about 10 to eight. John slides into his new Mazda RX-7 coupe, backs out of the garage, and watches the door come down behind him. Sherry's silver BMW, a 1985 318i, is still parked inside. That is the last time John Rutten sees his wife alive. Across the shared driveway, Anastasia Volonitis and her husband, Gus, pull out around 8.30 a.m. They are true Angelenos and drive a few miles to a golf course to then take their walk. On the way out, the couple pass Unit 205. The garage door is closed. About an hour later, around 9.30 a.m., Gus drops Anastasia off near a neighbor's house for an errand. And as Anastasia walks back to her condo, she passes Unit 205. She notices the garage door is now open. An hour earlier, Sherry's silver BMW was inside. Now the garage is empty. It's 9.45 in the morning. In Unit 206, on the other side of Sherry's wall, a housekeeper is cleaning. She has cleaned this unit every Monday for about two years. A few hours into the morning, the housekeeper hears a heavy thud through the wall. She goes to a window and looks outside. Nothing seems wrong. As she turns away, the thud comes again. Then a scream tears through the wall. No words, just one long sound. Then it stops. She checks another window. Still nothing. She shrugs to herself and goes back to work. All day, people who love her try to reach Sherry. At 10 a.m., her younger sister Teresa takes a break at work and calls Sherry's office, as she often does. In 2020, she told Dateline what happened on this particular Monday. And her secretary said that she was homesick. So I called her at home after that. Sherry's answering machine picks up. Teresa leaves a message. The two Hispanic men bring Sherry's purse to Anastasia around noon. Anastasia takes it, planning to return it later. That afternoon, John calls the hospital and cannot reach Sherry or her secretary. He's not worried, just mildly annoyed. He assumes she went in late and forgot to call him back. Later, Peggy Daly, a head nurse and one of Sherry's closest friends, calls her house. She also gets the machine. At 5.30, Teresa gets home from work and calls her mother in Tucson. Has anyone heard from Sherry? At 6 o'clock p.m., John Rutten comes home. The garage door is all the way up. Sherry's car is gone. Broken glass lies across the pavement outside. John parks, lifts the dry cleaning from the passenger seat and starts up the short staircase from the garage. At the top of the stairs is the door into the condo with a push-button lock. That morning, John had pushed the button and heard the door catch behind him. Now it is open. There are flecks of blood on the wall beside the stairs, but John does not see them. At the top, he steps into the tiled entryway and he sees Sherry on the living room floor. Rob Bubb is a retired LAPD homicide detective. He comes to the case more than 20 years later and reconstructs what John saw when he came through that door. He opens the door, looks inside, and sees his wife, Sherry Rasmussen, she's lying on her back in the middle of the living room wearing essentially what he had left her wearing that morning when he went to work. The living room is a disaster. A shelf has come down from the entertainment unit. A corded phone and pieces of a broken vase lie on the carpet near her. A drawer from an end table has been pulled out and emptied onto the floor. John touches Sherry's calf. It is cold. He feels for a pulse. Nothing. Sherry's face is so badly injured that John does not notice the three gunshot wounds in her chest or the bite mark on her arm. He calls 911. Then John takes a hand towel and covers his wife's face. He cannot bear to look at her this way. Paramedics arrive and pronounce Sherry dead at 6.10 p.m. In Tucson, Sherry's parents are asleep when the phone rings. It is close to one in the morning. They will later express their resentment that John did not call them sooner. Sherry's father, Nels, gets out of bed and answers. It is John's father calling him. John does not deliver the news himself. Nels begins calling his daughters, first Teresa, then Connie. Both remembered the calls to NBC in 2020. Answered the phone and dad told me that she had been killed. And I sat up and screamed in bed. It was close to midnight by the time I heard. Then I started screaming. By morning, they are all on their way to Los Angeles. Sherry Rasmussen was the middle kid of three girls. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where her father, Nels, had a dental practice and her mother, Loretta, ran the front office. As a little girl, Sherry was what her dad called a mama's girl. Nels could promise her anything and she would not get in that car unless Loretta was coming too. Then Sherry got to school. Her sister, Teresa, says that Sherry was so ahead of her class that her kindergarten teacher used to use her as an assistant at just five years old. Sherry skipped seventh grade. By the end of her junior year of high school, she had finished the classes needed to graduate. So at 16, she left Tucson for Loma Linda University in California. By 23, she had a master's degree in nursing from UCLA. At 26, she was supervising an 80-bed critical care division at UCLA Medical Center. A year later, Glendale Adventist Medical Center hired her to run critical care nursing. She was 27 years old, younger than most of the nurses she supervised. At Glendale Adventist, Sherry was management now. She wore business clothes to work, but still put a white lab coat over them. Her dad had wanted her to go to medical school. Nels told Sherry more than once she would make a phenomenal doctor. Sherry thought seriously about medical school, but she told her younger sister, Teresa, there was something else she wanted more, a family. She worried becoming a doctor might mean giving that up. Sherry's priority was always her family. She was the middle sister, and she was a clown. If everything got too serious, she would make everybody laugh. She had a very unique little giggle. Sherry was all about family. Sherry was our glue. She kept us all together. She always pushed us. I would've never learned how to snow ski, except for she drug us all to Taos, New Mexico to learn how to snow ski. Even now that she's gone, I think she forces me to be a better person. Sherry Rasmussen turned 29 on February 7th, 1986. 17 days later, she is dead on her living room floor. She has been shot three times in the chest. One of the shots is fired with the muzzle pressed against her body. The skin around the wound is blistered. There is black soot inside it. One of her fingers has black soot on it too, indicating she may have tried to block the gun. Her face has been badly beaten, and on the inside of her left forearm is an oval bite mark, deep and distinct enough that a forensic dentist believes it could be compared to the teeth of a suspect. Here's retired LAPD homicide detective Rob Bubb, who later reconstructed the scene talking with Dateline in 2020. The blunt force trauma injuries were particularly disturbing. The right side of her face, her eye was swollen and blackened. She was actually pistol whipped possibly two times. A stereo speaker had fallen down, was very near her head. There were two fingernails near the front door and a clothesline or a small thin rope also near the front door of the apartment. On her left inner forearm, it was very obvious. It wasn't just small impressions, they were red and raw. Later, the medical examiner will find marks on Sherry's wrists consistent with that rope. It looks like someone tried to bind her. There are smears of blood across the entryway wall, up the closet door, on the light switch, over the floor, and the door leading down to the garage as well. Low on the wall beside that door is a bloody handprint, 13 inches off the floor. The palm is lower than the fingers. Three days later, a fingerprint analyst photographs that handprint. A week after that, the analysis confirms, it matches Sherry's left hand. Upstairs, off the kitchen, two bullets have passed through a floor-length white drape and shattered the sliding glass door behind it. Most of the glass fell onto the balcony. Some dropped to the driveway below. 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Use our promo code MEGAN at hometitlelock.com to get a free title history report, plus a free trial of million-dollar triple lock protection so you can make sure you are not already a victim. That's hometitlelock.com, promo code MEGAN, or use the link in the description. Beyond the bullet holes on the second floor and the chaotic mess on the first, detectives find a few specific items that explain the lead-up to the violence. At the base of the stairs in the entryway, directly facing the front door, lies a VCR with a disc player stacked on top. The power cords for both lay haphazardly on the floor. They look like someone put them together for a quick carryout, but left before they got the chance. Rodney Forrest is one of the first LAPD officers to arrive at the condo. The stacked-up electronics immediately stand out, as he later tells ABC. I do remember there was electronic stereo equipment right here that I saw when I came in, and that suggested to me that it was possibly a burglary, and a burglary interrupted. I put this together with the stereo equipment stacked over here, and it seemed to me that she could have struggled with the burglar, and she obviously lost that fight. Sherry's purse is missing, and everything in it. So is her new BMW. Within 30 minutes of John discovering Sherry's body, the LAPD assigns two detectives to the case. The first is homicide detective and Medal of Valor recipient Lyle Mayer. Earlier in his career, Mayer broke down a hotel room door to save a man from burning to death. The LAPD awarded him with its highest honor for his actions. By the time he's called to the Sherry Rasmussen case, Mayer has been investigating homicides for 10 years, with more than 20 served in the LAPD. Mayer's regular partner is off-duty the day Sherry is found, so he's joined by a young burglary detective, Steve Hooks. Hooks has led roughly 150 burglary investigations in his eight years on the force. As for homicide, he's assisted on a few. This is the first case Mayer and Hooks will work together. When Mayer and Hooks arrive at John and Sherry's condo, John is standing outside. Mayer spends about an hour examining the crime scene, then asks John to come down to the Van Nuys police station for an interview. John agrees. At 9 o'clock p.m., Mayer starts a tape recorder. John is the first to discover Sherry's body and likely the last to see her alive, aside from whoever killed her. Mayer needs to know whether they can eliminate John as a suspect. As they go through the interview, Mayer tells John that he's usually a pretty good judge of character and is fairly certain that John has absolutely nothing to do with this. And he gives John his explanation for what happened to Sherry. I believe your house was burglarized today, sometime before 10 a.m. I believe they got in your front door by prying open the front door. I believe they were trying to steal your stereo on probably some other items. Mayer says he believes the burglars did not know Sherry was home. She hears the commotion, comes down to the kitchen and surprises them. One of them does run, the other fights. They fight down the stairs into the entryway and into the living room. There, he kills her, shoots her, Mayer says. Then with his getaway driver gone, Sherry's killer leaves the electronics and makes off with her engagement gift from her husband, the BMW. Mayer's theory comes from more than just the condo. Los Angeles is experiencing a massive murder surge. Sherry Rasmussen is murdered in February. By the end of December, 1986, more than 800 people will have been killed within LA city limits. And the police can feel it. One officer, retired LAPD Captain Anita Ortega, described the atmosphere to ABC in 2024. Anyone that worked in the city of Los Angeles, they knew that they're gonna have their hands filled. It was out of control. The city had spent the previous summer under the threat of a serial killer known as the Night Stalker, who invaded homes and brutalized the women inside, killing more than a dozen. Here's journalist Leo Stallworth, also to ABC. It was a dark period in our history. People were terrified to leave their homes. Detective Lyle Mayer has been working homicides in this city for over a decade and has seen the rising chaos. In this environment, the idea that Sherry died at the hands of a surprise burglar makes perfect sense. That does not make it true. One piece of physical evidence flies in the face of the burglary theory. On top of the electronics stacked at the base of the stairs near the front door is a fingerprint, a bloody fingerprint. The blood is the first key. Whoever left it touched the disc player after the fight with Sherry. Given the intensity of the fight and that the disc player is intact, not smashed like the vase, this must have happened after Sherry was killed. At that point, why would a burglar grab the disc player and likely the VCR with it and then leave them behind? Burglars caught in the act typically drop what they're holding and run. This one stayed to fight, then abandoned the prize. The blood suggests a sequence of events that does not line up with a burglary. And the fingerprint? According to Detective Rob Bubb, the print itself never enters the case. He explains to Dateline NBC in 2020. Unfortunately, it was never recovered. No one lifted it. No one tested it. No one booked the stereo component into evidence. It was lost for time. The bloody fingerprint is not even closely photographed. The blood is not sampled. It's unclear why. The bloody fingerprint is noted in reports and remembered by responding officers, but that's it. The disc player and the VCR are left at the scene. Some of the strongest physical evidence against the burglar theory does not enter evidence at all. Responding officer Forrest sees a different issue with the burglar theory, this one based on target selection. He shares his concerns with ABC in 2024. I thought to myself, this is a burglar. Burglars don't usually pick a place by condos from the street. They want to get away. They pick something next to the street. They don't want to be seen. It's just strange that they would pick this place. Author and journalist Matthew McGuff, who covered the case for more than a decade, says the burglars ransacked odd places and ignored the obvious ones. Here he is speaking to Dateline in 2020. If you're looking for valuables, are you going to look in a junk drawer in the living room? Sherry had a jewelry box. It was undisturbed. Sherry's purse, one of the few items of value actually missing from the home, is returned to neighbor Anastasia Volonitis the same day she is murdered. On the night of the 24th, her BMW is still missing. Police find her BMW 11 days later, unlocked and abandoned on a residential street with the keys in the ignition. The car's radio and other parts still intact, and it seemed totally undamaged. Mayer described the neighborhood where it is found as, quote, a very, very, very bad old area. The detectives working the case take the car's location as further support for the burglar theory, but the obvious questions about it being intact and undisturbed go unanswered. Police never find out where the car had been for those 11 days since Sherry was murdered. Tuesday, February 25th, the morning after his wife is shot, John Rutten arrives at the Van Nuys police station for a 10 a.m. interview. It is not recorded and earns a single line in the day-off report, re-interviewed deceased's husband. Three months later, the detectives expand on that in a follow-up report, quote, There were no changes in his account of what happened. It appeared as though John was truthful, and he obviously was still in shock over the death of his wife. At 10.30 on day two, Mayer and Hooks take John back to the condo to see what, if anything, is missing. Sherry's body is gone. The bloodstain is still in the living room carpet. Upstairs, the shattered glass door has not been repaired and is still wide open to the air. No cardboard, no duct tape, nothing. The walkthrough of the crime scene is not recorded. Three months later, the three-ring binder that LAPD detectives use to document a homicide investigation known as a murder book, gives it a single-line summary. John could identify nothing missing inside the condo except Sherry's purse and its contents. Also missing is their marriage license. While John is back inside the condo with Mayer and Hooks that Tuesday morning, Sherry's parents, Nels and Loretta Rasmussen, are still trying to get to Los Angeles. They have been awake all night. They take the first flight they can get out of Tucson. It stops in Phoenix. After takeoff, something goes wrong with an engine, and the plane turns back for an emergency landing. Nels and Loretta barely notice. When the plane lands and everyone is ordered off, they remain sitting in their seats until a flight attendant comes down the aisle to get them. They just want to get to Los Angeles. The flight attendant walks them to another gate, and Nels and Loretta make the next flight. At LAX, they meet their daughter, Connie, rent a car, skip the hotel, and drive straight to Van Nuys. By around noon, they are at the police station. Roughly 18 hours have passed since John found Sherry's body, and her family knows almost nothing about what the police have found. Nels and Loretta give their names at the front desk. An officer calls upstairs to homicide. They wait. Finally, a man comes out of an interview room, and John is behind him. The man is Detective Lyle Mayer. Later, when Mayer finishes meeting with Nels and Loretta, he gives Sherry's sister, Teresa, his business card and tells her to call him if she has any questions or any information that might help. The family keeps Detective Mayer's card for years. They remember it going soft at the edges from being handled so often. From the beginning, Mayer had made a promise. He made it to John on tape that first night. We're gonna catch these persons, or this person, all right? You gotta have a little faith in me. We're very successful at what we do. Very, very successful. They do not catch anyone. Not that year. Not that decade. Not for 23 years. Before we leave the night Sherry died, there is one more thing to see. It is just after midnight. John Rutten's first interview with detectives is over. He sits in the hallway and waits. He sobs quietly. Around him, radio dispatchers call out addresses and codes. Phones ring and ring until whoever is calling gives up. John's parents are driving up from San Diego. Sherry's parents still do not know. John cannot bring himself to make the call to tell them their daughter is dead. Back at the condo, Sherry is still lying on the living room floor. Two men from the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office pull up at the condo and walk in with their evidence kits. Walter Rainey is an investigator. Lloyd Mahaney is a senior criminalist. This is their second homicide of the night. Their first was a woman found dead in the backseat of a locked yellow Ford Pinto in a Panorama City parking lot. Mahaney and Rainey are working that scene when word comes another body is waiting in Van Nuys. Lloyd Mahaney has a reputation at the coroner's office. He does not improvise. He collects evidence in the same order every time and writes down every step. Trace evidence first, fibers from Sherry's robe, hairs from around her neck. Each sample goes into its own envelope labeled by hand, sealed with evidence tape and Mahaney's initials written across the seal. Mahaney opens a sexual assault kit, lays out its contents neatly on the carpet near Sherry's head. Swab tubes, slide envelopes, a coroner's checklist. He works through it one item at a time. Then Mahaney sees something on the inside of Sherry's left forearm, a bite mark. Mahaney carries spare swabs for exactly this purpose. If he sees a bite, he swabs it. Blood might belong to the victim. Saliva left behind in a bite mark probably does not. He reaches into his kit. The tube he takes out is clear plastic, roughly the size and thickness of a cigar. A red cap screws onto the top. Attached beneath it are two cotton-tipped wooden sticks. Tiny holes in the bottom of the tube allow the swabs to air dry. Mahaney wets them with distilled water, then runs one across the upper teeth impression, the other across the lower. He screws the red cap back on and labels the tube, left arm, bite mark. His initials and the date, case number 86-2676. Then the tube goes into a fresh evidence envelope. On the front, Rasmussen, Sherry, swabbed bite mark, left arm. And the time, 2.06 a.m. Lloyd Mahaney seals it. No one in that room knows what this swab will one day be able to tell them. In 1986, DNA testing is not yet available to criminal investigators. Saliva can be tested for blood type, useful for excluding someone, maybe for narrowing the field, but nothing close to what DNA will eventually make possible. Mahaney's envelope reaches the coroner's evidence room on the morning of February 25th. Bite mark swabs have their own rule. Keep them frozen, filed by case number in a secure basement room. So the envelope marked Rasmussen, Sherry, goes downstairs into a freezer, case number 86-2676, stuck between evidence from other people's cases. Lloyd Mahaney never knew Sherry Rasmussen. He spent a few hours in her home that night and followed his procedure. He wet two swabs, labeled a tube, sealed an envelope. And because he did, something from the person who bit Sherry is preserved. In 1986, no one knows how to read it. One day, they will, but not for nearly 19 years. And that ability will change everything about this case. I'm Megan Kelly. Next time on MK Confidential, Sherry's family keeps pushing for answers, evidence disappears, and investigators begin to ask, was the burglary theory wrong from the start?