Despite his many phone conversations with Nels, Nuttall had never met the Rasmussens in person, and he was nervous about the encounter. The night before, and all through the morning, he went over in his head exactly what he was going to say to them: “The hardest part was, I thought, Man, Nels is going to undress this. He’s going to know I know. He’s not going to miss this.”

When the two LAPD detectives pulled up to the house, Nels came out to the driveway to greet them. The whole family was waiting inside. “He walks me in,” Nuttall recalls, “and I drew a blank on what I was going to say.” The awkward silence was broken when Loretta crossed the room to where Nuttall stood, and hugged him. “Here’s this woman who never said two words to me,” Nuttall says. “She just walked across the room and she gave me a hug.” Before the detectives left, Nuttall made one last plea for the family’s patience.

The detectives returned to Los Angeles and dove back into the case with Stearns and Jaramillo. One of the thorny issues still to be resolved was how and where to confront Lazarus. “Chief Bratton didn’t want anybody approaching her when she had a gun or access to a gun,” Nuttall explains. “There was no way anybody was going to sign off on us going into the house with a search warrant in the middle of the night and it maybe ending in tragedy.”

In the end, they decided to stage the interview at Parker Center’s Jail Division, located on the floor directly below the Robbery-Homicide Division and the Art Theft Detail. Firearms were not allowed in the jail, so it would not seem unnatural for all three detectives—Stearns, Jaramillo, and Lazarus—to surrender their guns before entering. The plan was for the RHD detectives to request Lazarus’s help interviewing a jailed suspect who claimed to have information on an art-theft case. When she arrived at the interrogation room—one equipped with recording equipment to videotape the interview—they would shift gears and gradually turn to the Rasmussen case. Given how many suspects Lazarus had arrested herself over the years, she was undoubtedly well aware of her rights to silence and to legal counsel. The unknown factor was how long she would wait before invoking one or both. “Everything I knew about Stephanie, she was sharp,” Nuttall says. Stearns and Jaramillo’s goal would be to keep her talking as long as possible, while simultaneously assuring her that she was free to leave at any time.

She would be—but only technically. As Stearns and Jaramillo would know, but Lazarus could hardly suspect, the moment she ended the interview and walked out of the room, she would be arrested, regardless of what she had told them. The interview was scheduled for early in the workday on Friday, June 5.

Chief Bratton wanted the Rasmussen family informed of the arrest in person as soon as it happened, so they didn’t hear about it through the media. Nuttall was tapped for the job. He called the Rasmussens and said he was coming back and would need to see them again on Friday morning. Nels replied that he had a doctor’s appointment. Nuttall recalls, “I said, ‘Nels, if you can reschedule it, you may want to reschedule.’”