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April 14, 2020- I have updated this answer to include information about recent burials for those who have died as a result of complications from COVID-19 on Hart Island.Hart Island, 2010 (Hart Island (Bronx) | Wikiwand)In March of 1968, a pair of children playing in an abandoned, Greenwich Village tenement in New York City discovered a young man dead on a cot, surrounded by beer bottles and religious handouts.[1] There were no obvious signs of foul play. He had no identification. The body was unknown and went unclaimed.After failing to locate his next of kin, authorities declared the man dead from hardening of the arteries — a common side effect of longtime heroin abuse — and buried him in a mass, unmarked paupers’ grave on the Bronx’s Hart Island alongside other unidentified bodies and indigent souls who had fallen on hard times.[2] And somewhere — although nobody is sure exactly where — on that island that once housed a woman’s psychiatric asylum, a men’s prison, and patients quarantined during an outbreak of yellow fever in the 1870s, is the final resting place of Peter Pan, Disney child actor Bobby Driscoll, the unlucky soul who died alone in an abadoned Greenwich Village apartment.[3]Eerily barren, the tiny uninhabited island of Hart Island sits in the shadows of Manhattan's looming skyscrapers - a short distance but a far cry from the bright lights on Broadway across the harbor. Hart Island has seen a series of incarnations since its birth; from serving as a psychiatric institution and hospital for tuberculosis patients, to an American Civil War prisoner camp.The Top 10 Secrets of Hart Island, NYC's Mass Cemetery - Untapped New YorkBut perhaps its most fascinating legacy has been its function as America’s largest mass burial site (and the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world), where more than a million unclaimed and unidentified bodies have been buried since 1868, when the island was first purchased by the city.[4]British cartographers labeled the island Hart Island, because of its shape.[5] The 131-acre island, only a mile long and 0.25 miles wide, is located at the eastern tip of the Bronx, just off the west coast of Long Island Sound, and became a part of New York City even before its present day boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island.[6]Thomas Pell, a physician from England, came to the New World and purchased a substantial amount of land from the native inhabitants in what is now The Bronx and Westchester County.[7] The year was 1654, and Hart Island was included in Pell’s purchase from Chief Wampage of the Siwanoy people.[8] The exact amount Pell paid for the land is unknown, though some rumors state it was nothing more than a cask of rum.The island's first public use was as a training ground for the United States Colored Troops in 1864.[9] During the final months of theCivil War, the Federal government used the Island as a prison camp for Confederate soldiers. An internment camp for only four months, 235 out of 3,413 captured Confederate soldiers were housed on the island.[10] Their remains were relocated to Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn in 1941.[11]During a yellow fever epidemic in 1870, a part of the Island was used to house persons confined to isolation.[12] In the later part of the 19th century the Island was home to a charity hospital for women, as well as an insane asylum.[13]Abandoned NYC: Hart Island's Crumbling Women's Lunatic Asylum - Untapped New YorkHart Island was purchased by the City in 1868 from the Hunter family of the Bronx for $75,000.[14] The following year it was established as the City's public cemetery for the burial of those persons who died indigent or whose bodies went unclaimed. On April 20, 1869. Louisa Van Slyke, an orphan who died alone in Charity Hospital at the age of 24, became the first to be buried there.[15] During the first year, 1,875 burials were performed.Photographer Jacob Riis began his photographic journey at the Potter's Field on Hart Island. He described it as follows:One free excursion awaits young and old whom bitter poverty has denied the poor privilege of the choice of the home in death they were denied in life, the ride up the Sound to the Potter’s Field, charitably styled the City Cemetery. But even there they do not escape their fate. In the common trench of the Poor Burying Ground they lie packed three stories deep, shoulder to shoulder, crowded in death as they were in life, to “save space;” for even on that desert island the ground is not for the exclusive possession of those who cannot afford to pay for it.[16]First photos taken by Jacob Riis, 1890 (The Top 10 Secrets of Hart Island, NYC's Mass Cemetery - Page 5 of 10 - Untapped New York)In 1895, the Department of Corrections.established a Branch Workhouse for aged and infirm men, narcotics addicts, and short-term inmates.[17] In the early 1900s, the Department also established a reformatory at Hart Island for young offenders aged 16 to 30, known as a "Reformatory for Misdemeanants."[18] In 1914, reformatory prisoners were transferred to another location off the Island in order to rectify the lack of segregation between adolescent and adult inmate programs. The jail was used to house aged male prisoners and overflow from other City jails.[19]During WW II, the Island was turned over to the Navy for use as a disciplinary barracks for Navy, Coast Guard and Marine personnel, with as many as 2,800 servicemen in custody.[20] In fact, probably the closest WWII ever got to the shores of America came when three German soldiers surfaced in a U-Boat near Long Island.[21] (@Shawn Michael Carey shared that Uboats actually had come as close to 30 miles of the coast of Florida) They were taken into custody and imprisoned for a time on Hart Island.No burial ceremonies (not burials) have been held since the 1950s and there are no unique markers for each plot, with one exception - the grave site of the first child to have died of AIDS in New York City, who was buried in isolation.[22] The island is also a disposal ground for amputated body parts which are kept in boxes labelled ‘limbs’.[23]A marker over the grave of the first child with AIDS buried on Hart Island. The inscription “SC-B1 1985” stands for Special Child, Baby 1, 1985 (Hart Island | The Point Magazine)In 1985, 17 bodies arrived on Hart Island.[24] The island’s hardened crews, used to burying dozens of indigent people per week, recoiled. These pine coffins were different. They had died from a widely feared nascent disease called AIDS, an illness that at the time had a skyrocketing death toll.[25] The bodies were kept out of the trenches and instead quarantined in a remote spot on the island’s southernmost tip, buried deep in individual graves.[26]Although the city only buried 17 HIV-positive people there during 1985, they continued to do so well into the ’90s. The number of HIV-positive people buried there is estimated to be in the thousands, but city officials are reluctant to provide exact numbers because of longstanding criticisms of the island’s crude handling of deaths at the time.[27]Often people who were buried there had been rejected by their families for their HIV-status.[28] At the time, many funeral homes and graveyards refused to accommodate people who had died of HIV-related illnesses for fear of contagion.[29] Hart Island became the only possible resting place for many of these unclaimed and rejected bodies as well as for poor people who couldn’t afford to bury family members killed by the epidemic.The New York Times stated that “Hart Island could be “perhaps the single largest burial ground in the country for people with AIDS.”[30]Those buried aren’t just the homeless or those without family, but include those who can’t afford to have a funeral or were simply unclaimed by relatives within a month of their deaths. Around half of those buried across the island are thought to be identified children under the age of five who died in the city hospitals.[31]A Jewish playwright, screenwriter and director, popular during the 1920s and 30s, Leo Birinski was another public figure buried on the island.[32] According to his death certificate, Leo Birinski died on October 23, 1951 at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.[33] ]aIt appears that Birinski died in poverty and probably entirely alone (without any relatives or heirs). He was buried at Potter's Field on Hart Islan. in a mass-grave ("plot 45, section 2, no. 14").[34]Riker's Island inmates preform burials 1992 (The Journey from Death to Hart Island | Urban Omnibus)Since 1976, Hart Island has been operated and maintained by the Department of Corrections. Bodies are transported by ferry from the morgue at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital on weekday mornings, amounting to around 2000 a year.[35] Prison inmates from the Riker’s Island conduct burials several times a week, organized into 70 foot long plots that can hold about 150 adults each, or 1000 children.[36]It is the largest tax-funded cemetery in the United States and does not appear on official MTA or NYC Department of Transportation maps, although a DOT ferry provides transportation to and from City Island.[37] City agencies have repeatedly refused to talk about just how many HIV/AIDS victims are buried on the island, but a 2018 investigation by The New York Times revealed records from city hospitals that indicate the number could be in the thousands.[38]Somewhere between 850,000 to 900,000 poor, homeless, or forgotten people are buried there, making it the largest public cemetery in the world.[39] Yet , aside from the inmates working there, only a very few have ever visited this burial ground. While today most of the buried are identified, the historic island remains shrouded in mystery. Some of its burial records were destroyed in a fire in 1977, leaving several gaps during which no information is available.[40] Existing burial records can now be accessed through an online database set up by the city’s Department of Corrections, which manages the burial site.Family photo of Luigi Roma (Bones emerge on Hart Island, where inmates bury New York paupers)Annette Gallo was 10 years old when her brother Peter sent her a letter, from his orphanage to hers: “Last Wednesday morning something bad happened to papa.” Papa was Luigi Roma, their father, who had died from pneumonia and tuberculosis at Norwegian Hospital in Brooklyn. Their mother had died years earlier. No one bothered to tell his children when officials buried Roma in a trench in New York City’s potter's field.[41]Roma‘s descendants traced his burial to Hart Island, the potter's field in the Long Island Sound. Annette Gallo, whose father was buried on Hart Island, is now 94 and stricken with dementia so severe she no longer recognizes her daughter.[42] She spent much of her life searching for her father’s grave.For decades, family members were not allowed anywhere near the bodies of their loved ones — only through disinterment could they lay them to rest, off the island. Even after “closure” visits to the gazebo were gradually allowed, the island’s gravesites remained off limits.[43] So did information on exactly where an individual was buried — the lack of a comprehensive database of the City’s death certificates made accessing this information very difficult. So family members not only had to come to terms with their loved one’s burial on a desolate island in the Sound; they also had to grapple with not knowing where he or she lay.Efforts to provide the public with easier access to the island have been facilitated by the Hart Island Project, which collaborated with British landscape architects Ann Sharrock and Ian Fisher, and hopes to transform the burial grounds into a public park.[44]Talks have been ongoing since 2014 regarding proposals to transfer the management of the burial site to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation in a bid to:“create a public park where citizens could visit graves” and enjoy “beautiful views” from the island, according to the vice president of the Bronx's City Island Chamber of Commerce.[45]Historic buildings on the island continue to be torn down to make room for more burials. Should the park proposal for the burial site be approved, it will join a series of parks that were formerly cemeteries, including Bryant Park, Madison Square Park and Washington Square Park.[46]The Journey from Death to Hart Island | Urban OmnibusToday the Hart Island Project strives to preserve “the histories of people whose identities have been erased” and pay tribute to the “lost souls” of the buried on the island via the Travelling Cloud Museum.[47] The interactive online map outlines where any given person is buried on the island since 1980, according to their plot number, and the amount of time they have been there.[48]The developing archive aims to uncover the anonymity among the buried, inviting the public to contribute any stories they know about any of the names charted on the map, whether that be in the form of words, images, epitaph, sound or video, “so that no one is omitted from history”, the project states.[49]Everyday more than a dozen lost souls regain their identification. Some remain on the island with a headstone, while others are restored to their families and reburied on the mainland. The exact number of individuals may never be known, but the lowest estimates begin around 900,000. Hart Island is not just a mass grave, it is a sanctuary for unwanted children, those who died battling AIDS, those who died from poverty, exposure to the elements, or addiction or those merely forgotten by society and time.Why coronavirus burials are just the latest chapter in New York’s plague historySadly, it has been brought to my attention the preparation of large burial plots on Hart Island for unclaimed and/or unidentified individuals who have died as a result of COVID-19. In response to images taken by drones four days ago, the mayor and head of the department of corrections issued the following statement:Individuals buried on the island are “because their identity is unknown at the time of their death and a next of kin could not be located to arrange for burial services, because the individual’s family could not afford burial costs, or because the individual’s family preferred that their loved one be buried on Hart Island”. [50]Aerial images taken by the Associated Press showed a large trench on the island and about 40 coffin lined up for burial by workers.[51] Before the outbreak began, there were approximately 25 burials conducted a week on the island. That number has skyrocketed, with more than 50 burials a day. [52]May the island's newest occupants rest in peace, with the dignity that was denied them while alive.Footnotes[1] Oscars flashback: The tragic life and death of former Disney star Bobby Driscoll[2] Bobby Driscoll (1937-1968) - Find A Grave...[3] Bobby Driscoll - IMDb[4] This tiny New York island is actually the world's largest mass burial site[5] Islands of the Undesirables: Hart Island[6] The Other Islands of New York City: A History and Guide (Third Edition)[7] Hart Island: The Big Apple’s Mass Burial Ground of Unknown Dead[8] Wampage: Sachem of the Siwanoy tribe - Biography, Life, Family, Career, Facts, Information[9] United States Colored Troops - Wikipedia[10] Hart's Island Prisoner of War Camp[11] Confederate P.O.W.'s On Hart's Island Are Told Of Lincoln's Murder | Abraham Lincoln[12] Potter's Field Historical Resume Excerpts[13] http:// Hart Island, circa 1890 (This tiny New York island is actually the world's largest mass burial site)[14] Purchase of Hart's Island.[15] A Chance to Be Mourned[16] a Project Gutenberg eBook.[17] Potter's Field Historical Resume Excerpts[18] NYC Parole & New Hampton Reformatory Farms[19] McKinney's Consolidated Laws of New York Annotated[20] Islands of the Undesirables: Hart Island[21] Dive to assess tanker sunk by German U-Boat off NY postponed[22] Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field[23] Hart Island | The Point Magazine[24] Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field[25] 7 New Yorkers Remember the Early Days of the AIDS Epidemic[26] Few folks know about this historic mass grave of HIV-positive people near New York City[27] Project Helps Locate Lost AIDS Victims Buried On New York's Hart Island[28] City Council pledges overhaul of public cemetery on Hart Island[29] AIDS Victims and Advocates Report Problems with Morticians[30] Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field[31] Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves[32] Leo Birinski - Broadway Cast & Staff[33] New York City's Hart Island: A Cemetery of Strangers[34] Potter's field - Wikipedia[35] This tiny New York island is actually the world's largest mass burial site[36] Bones emerge on Hart Island, where inmates bury New York paupers[37] Behind the Scenes Photos on Hart Island, NYC's Mass Burial Ground - Untapped New York[38] Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field[39] Boroughs of the Dead[40] New York's Invisible Island of the Dead[41] Bones emerge on Hart Island, where inmates bury New York paupers[42] Storms, Nature Uncover Bones on New York’s Island of the Dead[43] Department of Correction[44] The Hart Island Project.[45] City Island Chamber of Commerce[46] Beware of Zombies: The Grim Origins of Washington Square Park[47] The Hart Island Project.[48] The stark island mass burial site off of New York for the city's dead[49] The Hart Island Project (USA)[50] New York rules out mass Covid burials but admits 'devastating' Hart Island pictures are ‘unclaimed’ victims[51] As Morgues Fill, N.Y.C. to Bury Some Virus Victims in Potter’s Field[52] Why coronavirus burials are just the latest chapter in New York’s plague history

Despite the fanciful imagination of anti-reservation warriors, Reservations is not a poverty alleviation program or an upliftment program.It is a program for equal representation.Here is the proof - the Constitution of India - Article 16 (4). It allows for only reservations on the basis of residence, classes that are under-represented in the opinions of the state. It says nothing about being economically well-off.Source: Constitution of India -- with all the AmendmentsThe quacks belonging to the anti-reservation warriors publish tonnes of misinformation (garbage) on social media without having even the basic knowledge of what reservations are.This despite the fact that many of these are educated from IIT/IIMs, experienced public servants or otherwise do research before forming their opinions. Some of them lie through their teeth with out any qualms or shame. Preaching morality, while being dishonest about reservations shows the level of personal integrity they hold.It hurts to see the hypocrisy of ruling elite of India. One can feel the frustration felt by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar with the leaders of India’s freedom movement. Thanks to him we have affirmative action until all are equally represented.Is there under-representation?Please note that this is the current representation as per government data after 60 years of reservations.Figure: Break up by category of government jobs (http://persmin.nic.in/AnnualRepo... , pg 38)Despite being 31% of population the general category are 62% of government jobs. SC/ST/OBCs severely under-represented. The GC exceed even the quota limits. In other words, the entire 50.5% of seats without reservations are taken by the general category - there are no SC/STs in that list. They exceed and occupy the rest of the seats as well.Rich SC/STs are not the problemClearly, the rich SC/ST are not taking up these jobs. It is the privileged castes among the GC who take up most of the seats who cause the under-representation.Is it justified for the general category to exceed their proportional quota in jobs based on their social advantages?Rich SC/STs will expose corruption of privileged castesThe problem is that 75% of top bureaucrats in Group A are from General Category. They steal the government funds, divert it to programs, places where general category live. They scuttle every development program aimed at reaching the poor SC/ST/OBCs.They neglect education, healthcare, poverty alleviation programs of the government. They are the main reasons for India’s under-development for the last 70 years.They are keen on building statues, instead of coming up with programs to build schools and colleges where it is needed - rural areas where SC/ST/OBCs live. They give rich corporations owned by privileged castes tax-breaks, land, loans (remember Vijay Mallya gets a loan waivers, our farmers don’t).Check the caste of MD of public sector banks that sanctioned the loan to Vijay Mallya. They run these institutions like their private property and distribute public resources to next of their kith and kin. None of them faced any charges for giving away public money to private individuals without guarantees or government policy.So they don’t like any rich SC/ST coming to the positions of power like Chief Secretary, Chief Justice, CBI Chief, Auditors, Compliance officers etc. They are afraid that people like Tina Dabi will expose their corruption and nepotism.It is easy to fool a first generation SC/ST who are finding their way around in government bureaucracy. A intelligent one like Tina Dabi will be difficult to contain by blaming meritocracy. Often these castes will gaslight a new SC/ST.Look at the fate of Justice Karnan for exposing the corruption in judiciary.Calcutta HC’s Justice Karnan accuses SC of ‘upper caste’ bias over contempt noticeThis is the reason why rich SC/ST are target of the corrupt anti-reservation activists from the privileged category. They collude, aid and abet the corruption of the privileged castes in India.Any complaints against this practice will face internal disciplinary action like Justice Karnan faced for no crime other than being a whistle blower. An anti-corruption crusader like Anna Hazare.We need equal representation to expose the corruption of the privileged castes.Let’s save India from the corrupt.

The 1986 Murder of Sherri RasmussenOn February 24, 1986, the body of Sherri Rasmussen was found in the apartment she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, in California. She had been beaten and shot three times in a struggle.The LAPD initially considered the case a botched burglary, and were unable to identify a suspect but Rasmussen's father believed that LAPD officer, Stephanie Lazarus, who maintained a relationship with Ruetten, was a prime suspect.Sherri RasmussenJohn RuettenStephanie LazarusWhile an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles John Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego, occasionally dated Stephanie Lazarus, a fellow Dykstra Hall resident and a political science major from Simi Valley, California. Both were avid athletes; Lazarus played on UCLA's junior varsity women's basketball team. Lazarus would steal Ruetten's clothes when he showered and take photographs of him naked while he slept. Ruetten never considered the relationship as anything more than "necking and fooling around." They had sex for the first time after he graduated, when he accepted a job with hard-drive manufacturer Micropolis and she applied to the city's police academy, becoming a uniformed officer with the LAPD. In court, he later testified that they had sex "twenty to thirty times" between 1981 and 1984, but that she was never his girlfriend.Ruetten later met Sherri Rasmussen, a graduate of Loma Linda University who was on a fast career track in critical care nursing. She entered college at 16, and by her late 20s was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, giving presentations and teaching classes for fellow nurses.At one point, Lazarus threw Ruetten a surprise party on his 25th birthday, unaware that he had been dating other women or that he had developed a serious relationship with Rasmussen.When she learned he was seriously involved with Rasmussen, Lazarus was despondent. "I'm truly in love with John and the past year has really torn me up," Lazarus wrote to Ruetten's mother in August 1985. "I wish it didn't end the way it did, and I don't think I'll ever understand his decision." In her own journal, she wrote, "I really don't feel like working. I found out that John is getting married."Depressed, Lazarus visited Ruetten at his condo, and the two had sex "to give her closure," Ruetten testified years later, for what he says was the only time before Rasmussen's death. Later that night, Lazarus awoke a fellow officer she roomed with to commiserate.During their engagement, Lazarus brought her skis to the apartment Ruetten shared with Rasmussen and asked him to wax them, and despite Rasmussen's objections, he complied. Rasmussen felt this was a little strange, since Lazarus was dressed in flattering workout clothes, and after Lazarus left, his fiancée asked if their relationship was truly over. Ruetten convinced her the two were just friends. A few days later Lazarus returned to pick up the waxed skis, in uniform and armed, after Ruetten had already left for work.Rasmussen was unnerved by these visits and pleaded with Ruetten to tell Lazarus to stop coming by. Ruetten only said there was nothing to their relationship and that she should ignore Lazarus.According to Nels Rasmussen, Sherri's father, Lazarus later visited Rasmussen at her office to tell her that things were not over between her and Ruetten and told Rasmussen, "If I can't have John, no one else will." Shortly before her death, Rasmussen again confided to her father her fear that Lazarus was stalking her on the street. Ruetten and Rasmussen were married in November 1985.On the fateful morning, Ruetten left the couple's condominium to go to work. Rasmussen was scheduled to give a motivational speech at work that day, a managerial tactic she did not feel was effective. To avoid it, she told Ruetten she might call in sick, using a back injury she had incurred while doing aerobics the day before as an excuse.At 9:45 a.m., a neighbor noticed that the Ruettens' garage door was open, with no car visible. Approximately fifteen minutes later, Ruetten made the first of several unanswered calls home over the course of the day. Rasmussen's sister also called without answer. At noon, two men, who the neighbor believed were gardeners in the compound, gave her and her husband a purse they found that turned out to be Rasmussen's. A maid cleaning a nearby unit said she heard something that sounded like two people fighting, and then something falling, at around 12:30 p.m.When Ruetten returned home in the evening, he found his garage door open and broken glass on the driveway. In addition, he discovered that the BMW he bought for Rasmussen as an engagement gift was missing. Because of Rasmussen's morning plans, he found it strange that she would have later gone out without letting him know. The house's answering machine had not been activated, despite both of them usually activating it when leaving the house unoccupied.Inside, Ruetten found Rasmussen dead on the living room floor, shot three times. There were signs of a struggle, such as a porcelain vase that had apparently been broken over Rasmussen's head prior to the shooting, a bloody handprint next to the burglar alarm's panic button, and a toppled credenza. It appeared that someone at least attempted to bind Rasmussen at one point. She had defensive wounds and a bruise on her face that appeared to have been inflicted by the muzzle of a gun. The gun had been fired through a quilted blanket, apparently to muffle the sound. The investigating criminalist also observed a bite mark on Rasmussen's arm, and took a swab from it.LAPD detectives investigating the case quickly concluded that Rasmussen had been surprised and killed by a burglar. Rasmussen's attire (a bathrobe, nightgown, and underwear) suggested she was not expecting visitors. Although a maid in a neighboring unit reported hearing screaming and fighting earlier in the day, she did not recall hearing gunshots. She thought the whole event had been a domestic dispute and did not call police. It appeared that the perpetrator had been in the process of taking electronic equipment when Rasmussen came upon them, and as a result, jewelry had been left behind and the vehicle taken as a getaway. The abandoned BMW was recovered a week later; it yielded no new evidence. The only other thing that appeared to have been taken from the home was the couple's marriage license.Lead detective Lyle Mayer did consider other possibilities. He quickly ruled out the grieving Ruetten as a suspect. Ruetten quit his job and moved away from Los Angeles shortly after the murder. Nels Rasmussen and his wife, Loretta, told Mayer about Lazarus' harassment, and that he made a note of it. Ruetten later told police that he and Rasmussen never discussed Lazarus.Regardless, the police remained focused on the possibility of burglary, especially in light of one reported later in the same area, in which one of the two reported suspects had been carrying a gun, possibly a .38 caliber like the one that had fired the three bullets into Rasmussen that were later identified by experts as Federal .38J Plus-P. Mayer's partner, Steve Hooks, found the bite mark unusual, as bites during struggles are much more commonly inflicted by women, while the majority of burglars are men. However, because men have bitten opponents during fights as well, the burglary theory stood.The suspected burglars to whom detectives ascribed the crime remained at large, despite a follow-up newspaper story eight months later and a reward offered by the Rasmussen family. The LAPD, preoccupied with the violence resulting from gang wars and the crack epidemic plaguing the city at the time, was unable to devote much more attention to the case. Detectives at the Van Nuys office were, the Rasmussens say, often unhelpful when the family called, hanging up or putting them on hold. A year after the murder, the frustrated family reiterated their offer at a press conference and called for more action. Nels wrote to Daryl Gates, then chief of the LAPD, about the possibility that Lazarus might have been involved. Detectives told him he "watch[ed] too much television." He continued to publicize the reward, and later worked with the short-lived television series Murder One on a segment inspired by the case.Nels in particular was unconvinced that Sherri, who had been 6ft tall, had a large frame, and was in good physical shape, had been the victim of a botched burglary. It would have been a struggle for anyone to subdue her in close quarters, and Mayer had told him at one point that the events may have lasted an hour and a half, a long time for burglars primarily after items of value in the home. Further, whoever shot his daughter had fired directly into her chest at close range and taken the trouble to muffle the shot with the quilt, suggesting that the killing was deliberate and not the accidental byproduct of a struggle.Mayer eventually retired, and the new detective assigned to the case told Nels that he was unable to follow up on Mayer's notes and did not think that any new leads would emerge. Nels was rebuffed again in 1993 when he offered to pay for DNA testing on the evidence from the murder, now that the technology was available; he was told that the police had to have a suspect in order to proceed with testing. Lazarus briefly reunited with Ruetten in 1989; Mayer's notes show that Ruetten had called him and asked if he was absolutely sure there was no evidence linking Lazarus with his late wife's death.In the meantime, Lazarus continued working with the LAPD; she went on to start her own private investigation firm, Unique Investigations. In 1987, she earned medals, including one gold, at the World Police and Fire Games in San Diego. In 1993, after stints at the department's Drug Abuse Resistance Education and internal affairs divisions, she became a detective. Three years later, she married a fellow officer and adopted a daughter with him; at work, she became an instructor at the police academy. Ruetten eventually remarried as well; he did not pressure the police as his former father-in-law had.In the late 1990s, after DNA testing had become more prominent, the LAPD formed a new unit that looked through the forensic evidence collected from the department's cold case files to determine whether any had the potential for new leads through DNA testing. Among the evidence seen as likely to do so was that collected from the Rasmussen residence. However, it was not until 2004 that another criminalist, Jennifer Francis, was able to analyze it. Some of the evidence from the Rasmussen case, including that which might have contained the suspect's DNA, was missing, having been collected in 1993 by another detective.Francis did not find any matches in the Combined DNA Index System database, but did find that the saliva in it had come from a female, undermining the initial detectives' burglary theory. Several years later, Francis claimed that, unusually, she had access to not just the sample but the entire case file, which had been given to her to help her decide which other samples to analyze. Upon discovering that the biter and likely perpetrator was female, she reviewed it and came across a report of a "third-party female" who had allegedly harassed the victim at her job and residence before the murder.Francis asked the detective supervising her if this woman had been investigated, to which he supposedly responded with, "Oh, you mean the LAPD detective." He elaborated that the woman, a former girlfriend of the victim's husband, was in fact a current LAPD detective but "she's not a part of this." He insisted that the case was simply a burglary as the department had long concluded. No other detective would pursue the case, and the evidence went back into the files.By 2009, crime in Los Angeles had declined enough from its earlier levels that detectives began looking into cold cases to increase their clearance rates. In Van Nuys, Jim Nuttall and Pete Barba reviewed the Rasmussen file and found it interesting enough to be worth pursuing. Because the DNA test pointed to a female suspect, they decided the burglary theory was invalid and they would have to start from the beginning.Nuttall and Barba looked at the case as a murder, with the burglary staged to throw the police off the trail. Many aspects of the crime were improbable for a break-in, especially one committed in daylight: Rasmussen's jewelry box, an inviting target for a burglar, was in plain view atop her dresser and had not been touched. The condo was in the middle of a gated complex, surrounded by other units from which burglars could have expected to be easily observed. The front door had an alarm warning, and had not been forced open, as it might have been if the putative burglars had not expected anyone to be at home.Inside, a key aspect of the crime scene was also inconsistent with the burglary theory. At the top of the stairs was a stack of stereo equipment atop a VCR. If, as the evidence suggested, the struggle between Rasmussen and her attacker had begun upstairs and then continued downstairs, that stack would likely have been knocked downstairs and scattered as well. It made more sense to assume that it had been stacked afterwards, when an actual burglar would have fled the scene immediately after the shooting.The forensics reinforced this theory. On a record player atop the stack was a thumb-shaped bloodstain. It had no print, suggesting whoever left it was wearing gloves to avoid leaving identification. But the blood was Rasmussen's, suggesting the equipment had been stacked after the struggle and shooting. It had been left behind, the detectives realized, to make the crime look like something other than what it really was.From the four bound volumes of the case file they developed a list of five female suspects. Nuttall was taken aback when Ruetten told him over the phone that Lazarus was a police officer. By then, Lazarus had been promoted to a higher level of detective and was working art theft cases as part of the Commercial Crimes Division.As one of the two detectives in the nation's only full-time unit devoted to that specialty, Lazarus had gained some local media attention when she and her partner had recovered a statue stolen from Carthay Circle. To better understand the field, she told a local newspaper, she had begun learning to paint. Off the job, Lazarus had been active in the Los Angeles Women Police Officers Association and organized childcare for families of officers. She also made chocolate-covered cherries and homemade soap for her neighbors in Simi Valley for Christmas.Since Lazarus was still with the department, Nuttall and Barba realized they would have to proceed carefully. Still, they ranked Lazarus as the least promising of the five suspects, since they read in the files that she and Ruetten had ended any relationship they had had over the summer before the murder.Nuttall and Barba's investigations soon eliminated all but one of the other women. The other, a former coworker of Rasmussen's who had had some disputes with her, was eliminated by a covertly collected DNA sample.With only Lazarus left, they kept their investigation a closely guarded secret; not only did her husband also work in Commercial Crimes Division as a detective, she may have had other friends who could have tipped her off. If she were the killer, she could have improved her defense; if she were not, then they could have unintentionally smeared a fellow officer who had had an unblemished service record over the course of her career, with no disciplinary investigations or civilian complaints. They only referred to her as "No.5", worked on the case after hours or behind closed doors, and developed cover stories to explain why they wanted to look at personnel records for one particular officer from 20 years ago.The detectives began looking into other aspects of Lazarus' life during the mid-1980s. Another detective recalled that at that time, most LAPD officers had preferred a .38 as their backup or off-duty carry gun; in fact they were required to only purchase weapons compatible with the Federal Plus-P ammunition that had been used in the murder. State and departmental records showed that Lazarus had indeed owned a Smith & Wesson Model 49 .38 at the time, and reported it stolen to Santa Monica police (but not to her own department's armorer) thirteen days after the murder. Since the location where Lazarus had reported it stolen from was near a popular pier, they assumed she had thrown the gun into the Pacific Ocean. Without the weapon, DNA would be the only definite way to connect the crime to Lazarus.Nuttall and Barba theorized from their own experience about how an LAPD officer would commit a murder. It would be better to do it on a day off, and departmental records showed that Lazarus had indeed been off the day Sherri Rasmussen was killed. An officer would know better than to use his or her duty gun, since it would have to be disposed of after the crime and the penalties for losing a duty gun or failing to prevent its theft were severe. Instead it made sense to use a backup gun like Lazarus' .38. Lastly, a working patrol officer would know how to do just enough to make the crime scene look like an interrupted burglary to satisfy an overworked detective.Nels told Nuttall about Lazarus' continued contact with his daughter, which had not been in the files, despite him mentioning it frequently during Mayer and Hook's interviews.Realizing that Lazarus was now their prime suspect, the detectives informed their superiors and arranged to discreetly collect a voluntarily discarded DNA sample from her, knowing they could do so without having to get a warrant, which would have let Lazarus know she was under investigation. While off-duty running errands, Lazarus discarded a cup from which she had been drinking, which other police retrieved. A sample was taken from it, and it matched the DNA from the bite mark on Sherri Rasmussen.Rob Bub, the homicide detective supervisor at Van Nuys, began letting his senior officers, all the way up to Chief William Bratton, know of the case along with senior prosecutors from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. It was transferred to the Robbery-Homicide Division, which handled many of the department's high-profile cases, including the art theft bureau where Lazarus herself worked.Her arrest was planned carefully.On the day of the arrest in June 2009, dozens of officers arose before dawn. After being briefed on a search warrant they were told would be executed outside the city, but with few details beyond that, they went to wait near Lazarus' home in Simi Valley and that city's Metrolink station, where Lazarus commuted to the city.A short time later, detectives from the RHD who had been selected for their lack of personal connection to Lazarus called her from the lockup at Parker Center, the department's headquarters. Bratton had ordered that location be used since Lazarus would have to surrender her gun in order to enter it, limiting the possibility she might resist violently when she was arrested (immediately following the interview, as was the plan) or realized that she was the prime suspect. The detectives, Greg Stearns and Dan Jaramillo, told her they had someone in custody who wanted to talk about an art theft.After Lazarus had checked in her gun and entered the interrogation room, they explained that this was really about some loose ends they were trying to tie up in the Rasmussen case, since her name had come up in the investigation. They claimed they wanted a private setting because, while Ruetten was an old boyfriend, Lazarus had long been married to someone else and they did not want her private life to become the subject of office gossip. Stearns and Jaramillo knew they would have to tread carefully since Lazarus herself was well aware of police interview techniques and her rights to silence and legal counsel, which she could invoke at any time.They rambled and digressed from the subject at times, sometimes discussing unrelated police business, but eventually came back to Rasmussen. Lazarus claimed to recall little due to the intervening years, but gradually revealed more and more knowledge, including oblique acknowledgements of her visits to the Ruetten condo and a specific encounter at Rasmussen's office, until she accused her colleagues of considering her a suspect. The detectives mentioned it was possible they had DNA evidence from the crime scene, and requested DNA samples from Lazarus. Lazarus declined and thereafter left the room.She was immediately arrested and charged with the murder.Once she had been arrested, the teams in Simi Valley began searching Lazarus' home and car. In her house they found her journal from the mid-1980s, with numerous mentions of her love for Ruetten and her despondence over his engagement to Rasmussen but no mentions of her gun having been stolen. Her computer showed that she had searched the Internet for Ruetten's name on several occasions during the late 1990s.As the investigating detectives had been, many LAPD officers were stunned at the idea that Lazarus might have murdered someone. Fellow detectives recalled her as vivacious and supportive, although some also recalled that her behavior when angry had led some to refer to her as "Spazarus" behind her back. A case she had been developing from her art-theft work, with elder abuse and real estate fraud aspects, had to be dropped since it was highly unlikely that it could be prosecuted successfully if the lead investigator herself were facing a murder charge.Lazarus was convicted of the murder in 2012 and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life for first-degree murder at the California Institution for Women.Source:Murder of Sherri Rasmussen - Wikipedia1985 murder in Los Angeles by jealous off-duty cop On February 24, 1986, the body of Sherri Rasmussen (born February 7, 1957 [1] ) was found in the apartment she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, in Van Nuys , California , United States. She had been beaten and shot three times in a struggle. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) initially considered the case a botched burglary , and were unable to identify a suspect. Rasmussen's father believed that LAPD officer Stephanie Lazarus, who maintained a relationship with Ruetten, was a prime suspect . Detectives who re-examined the cold case files in 2009 were eventually led to Lazarus, by then herself a detective. A DNA sample from a cup she had thrown away was matched to one from a bite on Rasmussen's body that had remained in the files. Lazarus was convicted of the murder in 2012 [2] and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life for first-degree murder at the California Institution for Women in Corona . [3] Lazarus appealed the conviction, claiming that the age of the case and the evidence denied her due process . She also alleged that the search warrant was improperly granted, her statements in an interview prior to her arrest were compelled, and that evidence supporting the original case theory should have been admitted at trial. [4] In 2015, the guilty verdict was upheld by the California Court of Appeal . [5] Some of the police files suggest that evidence that could have implicated Lazarus earlier in the investigation was later removed, perhaps by others in the LAPD. Rasmussen's parents unsuccessfully sued the department over this and other aspects of the investigation. [6] Jennifer Francis, the criminalist who found key evidence from the bite mark, unsuccessfully sued the City of Los Angeles , claiming she was pressured by police to favor certain suspects in this and other high-profile cases and was retaliated against when she brought this to the LAPD's attention . [7] Background [ edit ] While an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1978 to 1982, John Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego , occasionally dated Stephanie Lazarus, a fellow Dykstra Hall resident and a political science major from Simi Valley, California . Both were avid athletes; Lazarus played on UCLA's junior varsity women's basketball team . Lazarus would steal Ruetten's clothes when he showered and take photographs of him naked while he slept. Ruetten never considered the relationship as anything more than "necking and fooling around." They had sex for the first time after he graduated, when he accepted a job with hard-drive manufacturer Micropolis [8] and she applied to the city's police academy and became a uniformed officer with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 1983. [9] In court, he later testified that they had sex "twenty to thirty times" between 1981 and 1984, but that she was never his girlfriend. [10] Ruetten later met Sherri Rasmussen, a graduatehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sherri_Rasmussen#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThat%27s_the_evidence_that_will%2CStephanie_Lazarus_murdered_Sherri_Rasmussen.%26text%3DThe_trial_began_in_early%2CSherri_Rasmussen%27s_relationship_with_Ruetten.?wprov=sfla1