A credenza drawer had been yanked out and its contents, mostly documents, dumped on the floor. How to support my channel:Artwork on Opensea link: https://opensea.io/collection/astoldbytheolyn-collectionArtwork on Etsy Her mother fought with her over the plan to flee and flew to Hawaii to convince her daughter not to make the trip with Walker. United States of America, Plaintiff-appellee, v. Stephanie K. Shards from a broken porcelain vase littered the floor. WebStephanie Stearns was born on September 15, 1976 in Houston, Texas, USA. Stephanie received a two-year sentence of which she served seven months in prison and six months in a halfway house. ATSWT reviewed the supposed facts surrounding the murder of the Grahams on Palmyra, and followed STEPHANIE STEARNS (aka JENNIFER JENKINS) upon her Mahany began by checking for trace evidence around the victims bodyhair, fibers, anything unusualbut he found nothing of note. You can kind of talk to him. Bub recalls, It was one of those gut-wrenching moments when he said, Yes, its a match., The Art Theft Detail where Lazarus worked was on the third floor of Parker Center, just across the hall from the Robbery-Homicide Division squad room. About that time, Nels again mentioned the ex-girlfriend to the Van Nuys detectives. L.A. has a new answer, Epic snowpack upends rhythms of life for many species in Sierra Nevada range, Decades of failures leave L.A. County facing up to $3 billion in sex abuse claims, Most California colleges dont offer rape kits on campus. This was very interesting in the beginning, but as you got into the book there were too many he said this, she said that, and this other person said something else. Once there, the couple discovered that the condition of their boat and the lack of adequate supplies prevented their return. When Butterworth analyzed the swab, it yielded a mixture of two DNA profiles, one of which matched Rasmussens. He removed the stopper and carefully swabbed the impression left by the assailants teeth. Watertown teacher running Boston Marathon for same cause that Eager to win every point, when necessary he shaves the truth. The detectives decided they would investigate the nurse first, confirming or eliminating her as a suspect. At a time when public trust is paramount, our communications team will be a key link between City Hall and the residents of Boston as, we work to create a stronger, more equitable city., An alumna of The Partnership, Inc. Next Generation Executive program for professionals of color, Garrett-Stearns also completed the Business Management Institute at Cornell University. On April 30, the detectives entered Lazaruss name into the California state gun registry, which returned a list of all the firearms she had ever registered. When he noticed the bite mark on Rasmussens arm, Mahany selected a six-inch swab housed in a tube with a red rubber stopper. Suspicion quickly fell upon a 17-year-old boy who seemed to have an unnatural interest in the second crime scene. They have also lived in Santa Clara, CA and San Jose, CA. He pleaded guilty and 10 other criminal charges were dropped. Prosecutors say Walker, in an effort to get a working boat and food supplies to continue their flight from Hawaiian authorities, brutally murdered Eleanor Graham and bragged of forcing her husband to walk the plank while the man cried for his life. WebStephanie Stearns was born on September 15, 1976 in Houston, Texas, USA. Burglars must have entered through the unlocked front door. But the way the circumstances were, there would have been too many variables involved and too much potential for screwup. The stolen BMW was found abandoned nearby about a week later, but it offered up no further clues. The detectives on the Van Nuys squad made two pacts regarding the Rasmussen case. The LAPD had collected semen at both crime scenes, and Kahn received permission to submit the evidence to a private lab for DNA analysis, which confirmed that Wildss DNA profile matched that of the rapist. Mr. Walker and Miss Stearns turned up here in October 1974, sailing the Grahams's yacht, the Sea Wind, which they had partly disguised and repainted. Soon, all that either of them find is trouble. When Ruetten rushed inside, he found his wifes body in the ransacked living room. LOS ANGELES, Nov. 25, 2010 -- New details on a Los Angeles cold case that led to the murder arrest of But he told Nels, Give me time to do what I have to do, and I think Ill be able to have an answer for you., If a case against Lazarus was going to proceed, it was inevitably going to end up with the departments Robbery-Homicide Division, the elite detective unit that handles the citys most sensitive and high-profile murder cases. Tuesday, September 4, 2007, 12 a.m. Share this story. Despite his many phone conversations with Nels, Nuttall had never met the Rasmussens in person, and he was nervous about the encounter. Walker told her terrible stories about his term in San Quentin prison at the age of 19 for armed robbery. While Stearns and Jaramillo began planning their strategy for interviewing Lazarus, Nuttall and Lisa Sanchez, another RHD detective, flew to Arizona to meet with the Rasmussen family. Sherris widower, John Ruetten, was also there. That most items in the house appeared undisturbedincluding Rasmussens jewelry box, sitting in plain view on her dresserseemed to Mayer further evidence of a rushed exit. I swear by all I hold dear I never harmed anyone in my life, the soft-spoken Stearns told jurors, who leaned forward in their seats to hear her. The call was from a technician at the crime lab. When he was arrested for killing Thora Rose, Robinson was a 45-year-old manager for a building-maintenance company in Minneapolis. He was wearing a wire. (Most egregious were her August 5th log remarks about "drooling and dreaming" anticipating possession of the SEA WIND on execution of the Grahams.) Few people could have predicted in early 1986 that the science of police work was about to take an epochal leap forward. Of those cases, 13,300 were cleared by arrest and another 2,668 were recorded as cleared other. That left 7,745 cold cases. Muff and Mac Graham Murders: Is Buck Walker Dead or Since her swearing-in on March 24, Janey has named Dion Irish, Chief of Operations; Justin Sterritt, Chief Financial Officer; Celina Barrios-Milner, Chief of Equity; and Rev. Stearns, who sobbed as she read entries from her 1974 log to the jury about the Grahams disappearance, denied there was any feud. It means Does Not Apply. DNA experts testified for both sides. Hes not going to miss this.. Move on with your lives, he advised the Rasmussens. The team had by then moved to a new, slightly more spacious squad room on the fifth floor of Parker Center, the LAPDs legendarily decrepit headquarters, but it still didnt have enough space for all the murder books that it had accumulated. We felt it best, if were going to do this and hand the package to RHD, were going to hand it to them with everything done correctly.. Mr. Walker did not appear for his sentencing. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. 661, and on one count of transporting stolen property in interstate and foreign commerce, a violation of 18 U.S.C. When the two LAPD detectives pulled up to the house, Nels came out to the driveway to greet them. He reinserted the swab into the tube, squeezed the stopper shut, and labeled it with his initials and the coroners case number. Garrett-Stearns new role includes responsibilities held by Nick Martin, who announced plans to pursue new opportunities in April and will be leaving his role on May 21., Stephanie Garrett-Stearns is a communications veteran with insight into Bostons diverse communities, said Mayor Kim Janey. All concernedprosecutors, defense lawyers, forensic scientists, judgeshad to raise their game. Her mother, Rose King, and sister, Peggy Faulkner, of San Diego, were quoted in media In February 2003, a year and a half after its formation, the cold-case unit made its first arrest, solving the 1983 murder of a young nurse and mother named Elaine Graham. They settled on Sherri Rasmussens. He escaped from prison after 42 months. In 1981, as a young cop, Lambkin had requested assignment to the Automated Information Division, which, among other responsibilities, maintained a citywide crime database that could be searched by modus operandi or other basic criteriafor instance, all liquor-store robberies in which the suspect wore a mask. The defendant will be Stephanie Stearns, 34 years old, of Simi Valley, Calif., who has served one prison term as a result of what happened seven years ago at Palmyra Island. It took 23 yearsand revolutionary breakthroughs in forensic sciencebefore LAPD detectives could finally assemble the pieces of the puzzle. The victim, Thora Rose, had been brutally killed in her apartment in October 1963. Two 15-year-old girls from neighboring villages outside Leicester, in the English Midlands, had been killed, one of them that summer and one three years earlier. and Mac's messenger, Curtis Shoemaker. "FINAL ARGUMENT" was written in response to VINCENT BUGLIOSI'S best seller "AND THE SEA WILL TELL" (ATSWT) which recounts the brutal murder and torture of MAC and MUFF GRAHAM on PALMYRA ISLA8ND August 29, 1974. The two men agreed to talk by shortwave radio at 7 P.M. on Mondays and Wednesdays. While one removed electronics from the wall unit, the other went upstairs and was surprised by Rasmussen. Next he opened a sexual-assault kit and collected a series of swabs and slides. Her boyfriend, Buck Walker, was convicted of murder in June and sentenced to life in prison. A century later, the unit could not do much about that one. It was his second homicide of the night. He escaped from McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington State in July 1979 and is still at large. As Joseph Wambaugh, the LAPD detective turned crime writer, recounted masterfully in his 1989 book, The Blooding, an unprecedented force of 200 police officers was assembled to hunt for the murderer. Her husband has never been found. Thats how it looked, at least, to the Los Angeles police detectives who arrived at a gated condo complex in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles on the evening of February 24, 1986. Without the case file, Butterworth had little information regarding theories of the case or possible suspects, and so lacked context for her discovery. Deputy D.A. Second, they promised one another that they would follow the trail of evidence wherever it led. He proposed to her that summer, and they married in November. One of them, a .38, had been reported stolen on March 9, 198613 days after the murder. Alas, poor Muff, her bones at the time of publishing, languish in the care of the FBI, forty years after her torture and murder by Stearns and Walker, still not at rest, forlorn and forgotten. Time and again she is exposed as a liar and a perjurer, yet the jury forgives lie after lie all the while ignoring the honest and forthright testimony of the Pollocks (The LEONARDS in ATSWT.) But it was certainly unusual. On June 13 of that year, LAPD homicide detectives visited the Rockingham Avenue mansion of O. J. Simpson to notify him that his ex-wife and an acquaintance of hers had been stabbed to death outside her Brentwood condominium. Two months after the Grahams vanished, Stearns and Walker sailed the Grahams yacht into Hawaii, 1,100 miles away; they were later sentenced to prison for Beside that it is full of useless repetitions and after a while that was a real pain in the ass. During those 39 years, 23,713 murders took place in Los Angeles. Jury selection began in January 1990. Perhaps for this reason, Butterworths report went into the Rasmussen case file, and the case file itself went back on the shelf, where it would sit for a few years more. Mr. Walker was walking along the dock at Ala Wai boat harbor when he saw Miss Stearns being taken into custody. FINAL ARGUMENT exposes lie after compounded lie, set forth as truth in Bugliosi's version of the "facts" surrounding the murder of the Grahams on Palmyra the August of 1974. With no direct evidence of any role Stearns played in the killing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elliot Enoki cited disputed testimony about a feud between the couples, and pointed to numerous lies and omissions admitted by Stearns in her statements to authorities. But no matter how hard they pushed him, the boy refused to confess to the first murder. Wednesday, April 26, 2023 | Today's Paper | 72.248 News. He asked Nels about women who might have wanted to harm Sherri, and Nels recounted what he had told detectives in 1986 about Ruettens cop ex-girlfriend, who his daughter said had confronted her at the hospital where she worked. In all, Rasmussen had been shot three times in the chest, the bullets piercing her heart, lungs, and spine. It wasnt until nearly two oclock in the morning that Lloyd Mahany, a criminalist from the Los Angeles County coroners office, arrived to examine the body. Nicholas Goldberg: Is God on the side of blasphemy laws? In January 1987, a bold plan was announced: the police requested that all male residents between the ages of 17 and 34 provide blood samples for DNA analysis, to eliminate themselves as suspects. Detectives have a third way to get a suspects DNA sample without running afoul of the Fourth Amendment: collect a voluntarily discarded sample. Transcripts, Video Show LAPD Detective Stephanie Lazarus Although he didnt solve every fresh case he worked, he closed enough old ones to maintain a remarkable 100 percent personal clearance rate every year from 1991 through 1996. By the end of the year, LAPD homicide detectives had solved 538 of those murders, a clearance rate of 65 percent. Not since 1901, when Scotland Yard validated fingerprinting for the purpose of criminal identification, had detectives power to solve crimes been so profoundly transformed. Prop 69 required police to collect DNA samples from all individuals arrested for a felony or a sex crime, as well as from all state-prison inmates who had been convicted of such crimes. What happened to Stephanie Stearns also known as Jennifer It seemed strange that she would not be home; he knew she had called in sick to work that morning. It evidently began in the dining room on the second floor of the townhouse, where shots were fired from a .38-caliber pistol, one of which may have hit Rasmussen. Both victims had been raped and strangled, their bodies left beside out-of-the-way footpaths. When King asked jurors to consider whether further deliberation would be unproductive, the verdict to acquit was returned less than an hour later. A careful reading of FINAL ARGUMENT answers these, and many more questions that should have been asked, but were not. Given the sensitivity of the unfolding investigation, Nuttall had to be cautious about tipping his hand. LAPD homicide detectives had always been free to work cold cases, but only as time permitted between fresh murders, which wasnt very often. It gave me the ability to be the person I am today, says Stephanie. Stephanie Stearns He got a passport as Roy Allen, providing a photograph of himself wearing a clerical collar. She is an actress, known for Dreamers (1999), Triple Threat (2005) and America's Most Wanted: She pleaded not guilty at her arraignment April 2. The lock on the drivers-side door had been punched, she said, and a blue gym bag stolen. We had kicked around the idea of doing it ourselves, doing surreptitious DNA, Bub says. Stearns and Walker had sailed to Palmyra aboard a leaky boat and were the only other people on the atoll besides the Grahams at the time of their disappearance in 1974. The DNA profiles of tens of thousands of California inmates were uploaded to the FBIs vast database. Still, as the Van Nuys unit continued to dig, other details fell uncomfortably into place. Miss Stearns came to Hawaii in the late 1960's. The inescapable conclusion for both police and terrified residents was that a serial predator was hiding among the local population. In 1985, Ruetten began dating Rasmussen seriously. There were some coincidences, but there was nothing definitive for us at this point. The chief decided that Bubs unit could hang on to the case until the DNA sample was obtained. The third, in 1989, was an accused rapist named Henry Wilds. The Manson Family Blog - Tate LaBianca Murders - TLB - True Palmyra killer released from California prison - The Since her arrest, Lazarus has steadfastly maintained her innocence. Her attirerobe, T-shirt, and pantiessuggested she had not been expecting visitors. She's working for the telecommunications giant Harris Corporation. She holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelors degree in human resources management from Michigan State University., Janeys appointment of Garrett-Stearns is her latest move to build one of the most diverse cabinets in the Citys history. WebView the profiles of professionals named "Stephanie Stearns" on LinkedIn. Mr. Shoemaker had learned from earlier radio talks of the trouble between the two couples, he testified. Someone mentioned to investigators a newspaper article about a local geneticist named Alec Jeffreys, who had developed a novel process for mapping gene variations using DNA molecules. I read the book soon after watching the TV show, and have re-read it a couple of times in the intervening years. Mayor Kim Janey announced today that she is appointing Senior Advisor Stephanie Garrett-Stearns as Chief Communications Officer. Yet contrary to expectations, Simpsons Dream Team of defense lawyers did not fight to keep DNA results out, nor did they challenge the forensic value of DNA evidence during the trial. You watch too much television, he remembers being told. They had subsisted by eating birds' eggs and by borrowing as much food as they could from any other boats that came to the atoll. He got sober and enrolled in college. In 1990, when the lifts were uploaded to a fingerprint database, the computer reported a match with a previously unknown suspect named Vernon Robinson. Im Dan Jaramillo. Stephanie Garrett-Stearns named Chief Communications Officer Chief Bratton wanted the Rasmussen family informed of the arrest in person as soon as it happened, so they didnt hear about it through the media. She was located living in Northern California, and Bub made arrangements with local law enforcement to surreptitiously collect a DNA sample from her. A blood trail down the stairs and a bloody handprint near the front door suggested Rasmussen had tried to escape or reach the panic button on the alarm panel located there, but her assailant followed. Some jurors took notes during her testimony. The captain of the Van Nuys Division and his commanding officer, the chief of the Valley Bureau, were quickly brought into the loop. Defense lawyers said Walker was solely responsible for the murder and hid it from Stearns, who testified she thought the Grahams had drowned on a fishing trip, and joined Walker on a search that found the Grahams overturned dinghy but no sign of the couple. task force to tackle the citywide backlog. The profiles matched, and Laudenberg is now serving a life sentence. Nuttall phoned Bub and told him they had identified the police-officer ex-girlfriend whom Nels Rasmussen had brought up all those years before. Shortly after their arrival, Muff and Mac Graham arrived on a second sailboat. The separate murder trials were transferred to San Francisco because of publicity in Hawaii. Were giving them this spiel of where we are and how we got here, whats been going on for 23 years, Nuttall recalls. All Rights The prosecution said Stearns helped Walker in the murder in order to get the Grahams yacht and food supply and leave Palmyra.