Fatal Attraction: Nineteen Years in a Freezer — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

The Megyn Kelly Show

This episode of 'MK Confidential' follows the investigation into the 1986 murder of nurse Sherri Rasmussen, focusing on a missing bite mark swab that resurfaces nearly two

Key takeaways

• A missing bite mark swab was never lost—it had been stored in a freezer for nearly two decades due to poor record-keeping.

Main topics

• Cold case investigation
• DNA analysis in criminal justice

Notable quotes

"Don't forget about me, Lloyd."

Conclusion

The episode concludes with detectives realizing they are now investigating a

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) In the fall of 2004, a fledgling criminalist named Jennifer Francis gets to pick her next case from a stack on a colleague's desk. She has just been cleared to perform DNA analysis on her own. The stack holds DNA requests from detectives all over the Los Angeles Police Department. Jennifer is the newest analyst in the unit and the only one without a backlog. She goes through the stack looking for something simple. She finds a request on a 1986 murder in Van Nuys, a nurse. The detective who submitted it wrote that the victim's blood type was O and that type A blood had been recovered inside her home, blood that could not have been hers. Jennifer reads that and thinks, this one is easy. Pick a type A stain, pull the suspect's profile, run it against the national database, compare it to the victim, close the file. She takes... the Sherry Rasmussen case. The request Jennifer picked up has been waiting for more than a year. Cliff Shepard, a cold case detective, submitted it on September 19, 2003, 17 years after the murder. Shepard works in a unit the LAPD created in 2001 to go back through murders the city never solved, between 6,000 and 9,000 of them. Detectives spent a year just cutting that list down to the ones that still had evidence. someone could test. Sherry Rasmussen's case made that list because of one line in a report from 1986. Years later, Detective Shepard pointed it out to Dateline. Speaker 4 (1:41) I saw that a bite swab had been collected by the coroner's office. I said, okay, with that swab, there should be DNA. Speaker 2 (1:51) Shepard attached two documents to his request. Detective Lyle Mayer's follow-up report from 1986 and the property log, meaning every item the LAPD booked into evidence in Sherry's case. The property log contains 29 items. The bite mark swab is not one of them. So Cliff Shepard goes looking. The coroner's office tells him they do not have it. Speaker 4 (2:18) I checked with our evidence room. They didn't have it. I looked at our property reports. It's not booked. How could that happen? Incompetence. That happened a lot? Yes. Speaker 2 (2:30) In 2003, Shepard takes a yellow highlighter to the sentence in Mayer's report describing the bite swab and writes a note in the margin asking where it is. It is that handwritten note that newbie criminalist Jennifer Francis finds when she picks up the Sherry Rasmussen case for DNA analysis and reads Shepard's request. Jennifer calls Shepard herself and asks whether she can see some crime scene photographs. It's a normal request. Shepard offers her the murder book instead. This is not normal. A murder book is the complete case file. There is only that one binder. It's irreplaceable. Detectives usually stay while an analyst reads it and then take it back. But Shepard tells Jennifer to keep it as long as she needs. A few days later, she comes back from lunch, and it is sitting on the center table of the lab. A blue three-ring binder. Jennifer shows a co-worker. Check it out, she says. a real-life murder book. Then she starts reading it. Inside, Jennifer finds a security report from Glendale Adventist Medical Center, the hospital where Sherry Rasmussen worked. It describes a nurse Sherry turned down for a promotion. It says the hospital disciplined that nurse and her boyfriend, too, a doctor, after they made harassing phone calls to Sherry. By December 22, 2004, Jennifer has finished testing the items Shepard submitted for DNA analysis. Every sample comes back as belonging to Sherry Rasmussen. Three weeks of work, and all Jennifer has is the DNA profile of a woman everyone already knows is dead. Frustrated, she thinks about the bite mark she has seen mentioned in this murder book, but not in the case's property log. If any evidence in this case carries the killer's DNA, it is that swab. People do not bite themselves. Jennifer goes back to LAPD property, which contains the 29 items listed on the log, and checks out the sexual assault kit from 1986. There are swabs and slides inside. But not one is labeled bite mark. Tracking down evidence is a detective's job. Frances is a civilian scientist with no contacts at the coroner's office, but she calls anyway because that's where evidence like this might be. A woman answers. Jennifer introduces herself, says she's calling from the LAPD crime lab, and reads off the coroner's case number. She is looking for a bite mark swab. The woman puts her on hold. Ten seconds later, she comes back on and says there is no evidence booked under that number. Jennifer hangs up, wondering whether the woman typed a digit wrong. She calls the coroner's office again the next day, hoping someone else picks up. A man answers and tells her the same thing. Nothing here. Jennifer considers calling a third time, hoping to reach someone who remembers how evidence was stored before everything went into a computer. One of the other criminalists tells her to stop. You're done, she says. You don't want to get the reputation of being a pain in the ass. You're brand new at this. You've already called twice. Jennifer knows she's probably right. So she goes back to Mayer's 1986 report and reads it one more time, looking for anything she's missed. And she finds a name, the man from the coroner's office who collected the swab in the first place, senior criminalist Lloyd Mahaney. Jennifer does the math. Almost 19 years. What are the odds this man is still on the job? She calls the coroner's office and asks for Lloyd Mahaney by name. He picks up. Jennifer asks him one question. If you swabbed a bite mark in 1986, what would you have called it? Mahaney says, bite mark swab. Jennifer tells him nobody can find it. The coroner's office says they don't have it, and neither does the LAPD. Mahaney is not surprised. When the coroner's office moved to computers, some of the old cases never made it in. To find something from 1986, you would have to pull the coroner's evidence log on microfiche. It would be a big job, and Mahaney is leaving on vacation. Then Lloyd Mahaney tells her this. We would never get rid of a bite mark swab. We don't keep clothing forever, but a bite mark swab? We would not throw that away. Jennifer tells him there's no rush. Just see if he can find it when he gets back. Before they hang up, she says one more thing. Don't forget about me, Lloyd. Lloyd Mahaney sealed that envelope at 6 minutes past 2 in the morning on February 25, 1986, and sent it downstairs into a freezer. The bite mark swab has been there ever since, almost 19 years. It isn't gone. It is still there somewhere, but no one can find it. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. Speaker 2 (8:08) AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts. And criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you. How? It's called title fraud. Your property records are public by law. Your name, address, even your signature. It's all sitting in a database anyone can access. A cyber scammer can pull your records, use