How Did Detective Get Away With Murder for Over 20 Years?

Fast forward now to January 2005 and criminalist Jennifer Francis, the new DNA analyst looking for her next task, hears 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 LA 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. Shepard 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. What 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. Another 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 investigators 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. That 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. And so she does. On February 8th, 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. Jennifer 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.