The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  Jones, it turns out, had been in both Colorado Springs and New Orleans on the dates in question. So in 2008, as his two-year Florida sentence drew to a close, he was flown out to Colorado Springs to stand trial. It was a novel prosecution, because the Colorado woman had died in the interim of causes unrelated to the crime. As a result, Deputy District Attorney Brien Cecil had no victim to put on the stand. Instead, he fashioned a case out of two of the other rapes, calling as witnesses Budnytska and one of the New Orleans victims, both of whom supplemented the DNA evidence by pointing out Jones as their attacker in the courtroom. Cecil argued that their cases showed a “common plan, scheme, or design” that was as much Jones’s signature as his trail of semen.

  The New Orleans victim proved to be a very effective witness. Her memory was clear and her statements emphatic, the outrage still evident six years later, along with her chagrin at the poor judgment she had displayed that night. Inna, on the other hand, was every bit as bad on the stand as the Miami prosecutors had feared. One of Jones’s lawyers made much of the different stories she had told police. Her struggles with English further confused matters.

  Jones pleaded not guilty to all charges in the Colorado case. He argued through his lawyers (he did not testify) that the sex had been consensual, and that the woman claiming rape had been a prostitute. But where jurors in Colorado might have been able to accept two prostitutes in different states at different times unaccountably filing rape charges after turning a trick, and in both cases immediately describing their attacker as a huge black man with glasses, they clearly choked on a third. There was no evidence that any of the victims were prostitutes. And then, of course, there was the DNA.

  Michael Lee Jones is serving what amounts to a life sentence at the Fremont Correctional Facility in Colorado. He received a term of twenty-four years to life for one count of sexual assault and twelve years to life for the second count, of felonious sexual contact. He is thirty-eight years old and will not be eligible for his first parole hearing until 2032. The state estimates his term will last until he dies.

  Budnytska won a $300,000 settlement from the hotel and the hotel’s security company.

  Ken Brennan is back doing his private detective work in Miami. He is enormously proud of the efforts that have locked Jones away. “The cases they got him on, they’re just the tip of the iceberg,” he predicted. “Once other jurisdictions start checking their DNA files on cases when this guy was at large, I guarantee you they will find more.”

  So far his hunches have been pretty good.

  . . . A Million Years Ago

  Vanity Fair, July 2012

  Los Angeles Police Department detective Stephanie Lazarus has a very expressive, elastic face. At fifty-one she looks at least ten years younger. Her straight brown hair is shoulder-length, with bangs that fall at an angle to either side of her forehead, and her manner is outgoing and friendly. She is pretty, even as middle age has begun to tug at her face. She smiles and laughs easily and has a wide range of comical facial expressions but she is mercurial—she has a quick, harsh temper. She can also turn on a hard, weathered expression, a look that means business and that is useful for someone who has spent the last quarter century as a cop.

  On the morning of June 5, 2009, Lazarus reported for work at the Parker Center, the LAPD administration building downtown, where she was surrounded by many of her longtime colleagues and friends. She was a respected, well-known figure in the department. No, more than that. In this close-knit world, she was in her own way legendary. She had worked her way up from a patrol car to heading the art-theft division, a fascinating job that was about more than crime fighting. It had a public-relations aspect to it, in that stolen art tends to be stolen from the homes and galleries of some of LA’s most notable citizens. It was a coveted job in the LAPD. There was no getting bogged down with a heavy caseload, no being under the thumb of a supervisor. The unit had only two detectives; they met fascinating people, and there was a great deal of freedom in choosing which cases to pursue. And there was no doubt Lazarus deserved it. In all of her years in the department, she had never had a disciplinary hearing. Not one. This was unheard of, and it had made Lazarus famous. She had covered most of the desired positions in the LAPD, in units such as DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), Homicide, and Internal Affairs. She was widely known in the department and well liked, despite her gloss of perfection. She could be chipper and fun. She had married a fellow detective, and together they had adopted a child. She had survived a bout with cancer. Lazarus had started up the department’s childcare program, had initiated a child-safety/ ID program. She was one of those people whom it was, simply, a privilege to know.

  When Detective Dan Jaramillo asked Lazarus for help that morning, she was predictably eager to oblige. He told her that they had arrested someone who had information about an art theft and asked her if she would go downstairs with him to the building’s basement jail facility to interrogate the suspect. They walked downstairs together, chatting amiably. Lazarus was led into a small interrogation room with pale blue walls and soundproof tiles from about waist level to the ceiling. Here Jaramillo introduced her to his partner, Greg Stearns.

  They asked Lazarus to take a seat in the chair ordinarily given to the interrogatee. This clearly felt odd to her. She had a concerned, querulous look on her face as she sat down, but she was still very collegial. Lazarus was here to help.

  “I did not want to bring this up in your squad room,” said Jaramillo, in a friendly, confidential way.

  “You’re going to bring someone in, right?” she asked.

  Jaramillo deflected the question. He repeated what he had started to say and then went on: “People are always listening [up there], wondering what everybody else is doing . . .”

  He made it clear, without alarming her, that the art-theft story had been a ruse. This was about something else, something that concerned her. The detectives had her full attention.

  “We’ve been assigned a case,” said Jaramillo. “And there are some notes as far as your name being mentioned.”

  “Oh,” said Lazarus. The look on her face was theatrically bewildered. “OK,” she said, skeptically.

  “Do you know John Ruetten?”

  Jaramillo had pronounced it wrong, “Root-en,” and after a long moment she corrected him. “Do you mean John Rutt-en?”

  “Yes,” said the detective.

  “Yeah, I went to school with him. . . . Let’s see. I went to UCLA. Nineteen seventy-eight I started, and, you know, I met him at school, in the dorms.”

  “Were you guys friends? Close friends?”

  “Yeah. We were very close friends. I mean, what’s this all about?”

  Lazarus sat forward in her chair. Challenging.

  “It’s a case we’re working on that involves John, and in . . . some of the things we reviewed, there’s notes and stuff that he knew you.”

  “Oh, yeah. We were friends. We lived in the dorms for two years.”

  “You guys lived in the same dorm?”

  “Yeah. . . . Dykstra.”

  “OK,” said Jaramillo. “Were you guys just friends, or anything else?”

  “Yeah. We were good friends.”

  “Was there any kind of relationship or anything that developed between you guys?”

  “Yeah,” said Lazarus, mildly put out. Very mildly. This was personal, but she was in her fraternal mode, which ran deep with her. She seemed determined to be helpful. “I mean, we dated,” she said. “You know . . .” And then, leaning forward, she asked confidentially, cop to cop, “I mean, what’s this all about?” Clue me in here, would you guys?

  “Well, it’s relating to his wife.”

  “O-kaay,” she said, drawing the word out. Why are you asking me such a bizarre question, out of the blue?

  “Did you know her?”

  “Not really. I mean, I knew that he got married years ago.”

  “Did you ever meet her?”

  “God, I don�
��t know.”

  “Did you know who she was or anything?”

  “Well, let me think.” She leaned back in her chair and looked off for a moment, closing her eyes. Her expression also conveyed annoyed surprise, but Jaramillo was speaking softly and politely, and she was on board. “God, it’s been a long time ago,” she said, twisting her face at last in a bewildered grimace, as if the question had been preposterous but she was still willing to comply.

  “I may have met her. . . . Jeez,” she said, raising her hands in exasperation. “You know.”

  John Ruetten was crazy about Sherri Rasmussen. They met in the summer of 1984, John a talkative, charming young man with a thick mop of dark hair, as handsome as a male model, and Sherri a tall Scandinavian beauty with light brown hair, a broad face with high cheekbones, and wide-set eyes under dark, arching eyebrows. Both were lean and athletic, runners, and both were on a fast track. He was a recent graduate of UCLA, and she was, just two years older at twenty-seven, already the director of nursing at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center.

  Sherri was hot stuff. She had entered Loma Linda University at age sixteen and now lectured internationally on critical-care nursing. She was beautiful, and she was considered brilliant. She was also confident and directed. She was the kind of person John wanted to be, or, rather, a personification of how he saw himself in his best moments. And she fell just as hard for him. Their connection was immediate and untroubled. It was as though everything else in their lives just fell away when they met, old relationships, future plans. They met, and they were together. Just like that. Over Memorial Day weekend in 1985, they drove down to San Diego, where John’s parents lived and where Sherri’s kept a boat, and announced their engagement. John put down his life savings on a silver BMW that same weekend and gave it to Sherri as a present—he drove a red Mazda RX-7, so now they both had cars that announced jaunty horizons. They were married in November 1985. Months earlier, John had moved into Sherri’s Van Nuys condominium, up in the San Fernando Valley region of LA, against the dramatic backdrop of the Transverse mountains.

  It had been a busy holiday season after the wedding, with happy visits to both sets of parents, and by Monday, February 24, of the following year, John and Sherri were settling into the comfortable rhythm of married life. John had started a job with an engineering company. When he left their Van Nuys condominium for work that day, Sherri was still in bed. Ordinarily, she left for work first, but they had gone out to a movie Sunday night and gotten home late, and she was not eager to be off. She was supposed to supervise a human resources class for some of her nursing charges that morning, and she didn’t feel like doing it. It was mandated by the hospital, but Sherri was less than sold on its value. She told John she was thinking about just calling in sick and staying home that day. He encouraged her to just go in and get the class over with. She was still undecided and under the covers when he walked out the front door at about 7:20.

  On his way to work, John dropped off some laundry and was at his desk shortly before eight. He thought about calling Sherri—they normally talked often during the day—but he didn’t want to disturb her if she had decided to sleep in. He tried mid-morning, and when there was no answer assumed she had taken his advice and decided to teach the class after all. He tried her office, but her secretary said she hadn’t seen her yet. On Mondays when she taught the class, the secretary said, she sometimes didn’t come by her office at all. John tried to reach her at home three or four more times but did not get an answer. It was odd that the answering machine had not been turned on, but Sherri sometimes forgot. He was not especially concerned.

  On his way home early that evening John ran some errands, stopping by the dry cleaner to pick up the freshly laundered clothes, and a UPS store, and when he pulled up to the garage behind the condo, was surprised to see the door drawn up. The Balboa Townhomes consisted of white three-story mock-Tudor buildings with garage entrances on the ground floor in the back alley. Just above the garage was a small balcony before two sliding glass doors. John and Sherri sometimes sat out there side by side in deck chairs. On either side of the garage door were two small trees staked in planters. Their ten-speed bikes and a tool bench were against the back wall. There was no space for clutter; the garage was just wide enough for their two cars. Sherri’s BMW was gone, and there were shards of broken glass on the pavement at the entrance. John’s first thought was that this must be glass from one of her car windows. She must have run into while something pulling out. Weeks earlier, she had clipped the door and broken the aerial on her car. He thought, “Uh-oh, what did she do now?” That might also explain why she had not closed the garage door. If she were flustered, she might have just driven off. He lifted the plastic bag of dry cleaning out of the car and headed up the garage stairs to the living room. It wasn’t until he saw that the inner door to their living room was ajar that he grew alarmed.

  Sherri was dead on the floor of the living room. She lay on her back on the brown rug, her face swollen, battered, and bloody. She was barefoot, still in her red bathrobe. At first he thought that she was, maybe, asleep, but when he saw her face he knew, as he would tell a detective later, “we were in trouble.” Those who die violently leave life in mid-stride, often with a look of terminal surprise on their face, frozen. Sherri’s robe was thrown open, her arms were raised and bent, and one long, slender leg was slightly raised and bent at the knee. She looked fixed in the act of trying to get up. John touched her leg, and it was stiff. Her skin was cold. He put his fingers to her wrist to feel for a pulse. There was none.

  He was struck—and “struck” is the right word—by the sheer impossibility of what he saw. You heard about such things, of course. There would be 831 homicides in Los Angeles that year. But hearing about them never made the prospect of such a thing possible in your own life. John walked around the living room wordlessly, staring at his wife’s unnaturally stiff body, trying to accept that she was not going to get up. More than grief or wonder or confusion, one feels stunned by the sudden appearance of the impossible, as if one has collided hard with an invisible wall. Here was Sherri, so alive to him in every way, still so vividly and shockingly present and yet irremediably, utterly gone. Her face was covered with dried blood, the right eyelid bluish and puffy and closed. Her left eye was open, staring up, and her mouth was open in a final gasp. She had been dead for hours. Just below the rim of her delicate, form-fitting pink camisole, right in the center of her chest, was a black bullet hole.

  John phoned 911.

  “I think my wife is dead,” he said.

  He paced the living room and stared down at her with disbelief. Then he took a blanket and covered her. He could not stand being in the room with her body, with the reality of her death, but he also felt he could not leave. He paced some more, walked back down to the garage, and then came back up to the living room, standing over her, bobbing slowly back and forth, too numb to cry or even feel, waiting for the police to arrive and make this nightmare official.

  “You know,” Lazarus had said with exasperation. Her tone and expression made it clear that being asked about the wife of a former boyfriend was not only none of their business but also totally out of line. But Jaramillo pressed on, speaking in the same soft, insistent voice. He was not going to fully explain himself, at least not yet.

  “Let me ask you,” he said. “You said you dated John. How long did you guys date?”

  This was finally too much for Lazarus.

  “I mean, what? Is this something?” she said, looking mystified. “I mean, you said this was going to be about art, and now you change our . . . I mean?”

  She was not going forward without some kind of explanation. So Jaramillo’s partner, Greg Stearns, explained.

  “Stephanie, here’s the situation,” Greg Stearns said. “Basically, we knew when we saw in this chrono that maybe there was some relationship there. That’s what the chrono seems to indicate, and we didn’t want to come up to you at your desk and ask thos
e kind of questions or do anything . . .”

  As Stearns explained, Lazarus listened with a pained smile on her face, nodding at intervals briskly and mechanically, saying “OK” nervously to indicate that she understood.

  She was experienced enough with this kind of work to realize by now that she was being played. She might have just stood up and walked out . . . but how would that look? Whatever options occurred to her, she remained friendly, if annoyed. You could see she wanted to know what was going on, which was reason enough to stay. How much did these detectives have? Were they just poking around in the old files, just getting started, chasing down every angle, or did they have something? It was prudent to assume they had more than they were letting on.

  “I mean, God, it’s been a million years ago,” she said.

  But she was willing to proceed. She described her relationship with John in college, all the while shaking her head with bewilderment. They had hung around together with a group of friends. “We did things. I played sports in college. He played basketball. His brother played basketball. It didn’t work out. I don’t know what to tell you . . .” John had been just one of a circle of friends from those dorm years at UCLA with whom she had stayed in touch. Nothing special. They had gone to Hawaii together at some point, but had not spoken in years. “I couldn’t even tell you the last time I talked to him. It was kind of a weird relationship,” she said. “We dated. I can’t say that he was my boyfriend. I don’t know if he would have considered me his girlfriend. We just dated.”