These voluminous records included Lazarus’s LAPD personnel file and many reports and documents from the original LAPD investigation of Sherri Rasmussen’s murder. Afterward, I obtained the complete court file, trial transcript, and copies of all the trial exhibits. Over the next three years, I attended every court proceeding in the case, including every day of the monthlong trial in 2012, which ended in Lazarus’s conviction for first-degree murder. I returned to court for the next hearing, and the one after that. Did a respected police detective really commit murder and carry that secret for her entire career?Ī few days after Lazarus’s arrest, I attended her arraignment in a downtown L.A. My chance encounter with Lazarus made me intensely curious to learn the truth. In April 2008, about a year before she was arrested, I had actually met Lazarus at Parker Center, LAPD headquarters, and interviewed her at length for a book I was planning to write about art theft, Lazarus’s beat at that time. It was not merely the sensational nature of the allegations-a veteran LAPD detective accused of the cold case murder of a romantic rival-that drew me to the story on day one. My work on the book began on June 5, 2009, the day Stephanie Lazarus was arrested for murder. This book is the product of nine years of investigative reporting. THE LAZARUS FILES: A COLD CASE INVESTIGATION by Matthew McGough
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For those interested in my reporting process and how I came to know the facts recounted in THE LAZARUS FILES, my note to readers at the end of the book is reprinted in full below.
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