This is an L.A. Times Studios podcast.

In February 1986, a man named John Routon came home from work and entered his Van Nuys townhome.

In the living room, he found the body of the woman he had recently married.

Sherry Rasmussen was 29, a popular nursing

director at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. She had been badly bludgeoned. She had been shot three

times. In the struggle, someone had bitten her arm. LAPD detectives came to a quick, but disastrous conclusion that dominated the agency's approach to the investigation and in many ways warped it.

Detectives thought it looked like a burglary gone bad.

It looked like Sherry, who had called in sick from work that day, had surprised people trying to rob the place

and had been killed in the ensuing struggle.

Her car had been stolen from her garage,

a detail that seemed to support that theory.

And there were other details.

There was some stereo equipment

that had been torn from an entertainment center and left near the front door

of the condo. This is Matthew McGough, who wrote the definitive book on the case.

Which the detectives interpreted as this burglar had been preparing to steal this stereo equipment and got interrupted and rushed out and left it there.

Plus, two armed robbers struck another house nearby soon after.

But Sherry Rasmussen's family was convinced that there was a more personal motive.

Basically, Sherry had complained to friends and her parents that she had a stalker.

And it seems clear that it was a woman because she made comments like,

I'm being followed by someone who's dressed like a man.

You wouldn't say that a man is dressed like a man.

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