Fatal Attraction: Nineteen Years in a Freezer — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential
September 10, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readFatal Attraction: Nineteen Years in a Freezer — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential
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. Looking for something simple, she finds a request on a 1986 murder in Van Nuys: a nurse, blood type O. "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.
What she doesn't know is that she's about to uncover a piece of evidence that has been sitting in a coroner's freezer for nearly two decades — and that the DNA inside it will eventually point to a killer who is, at that very moment, working as a detective inside the Los Angeles Police Department.
The Missing Swab
The request Jennifer picked up had been waiting for more than a year. Cold case detective Cliff Shepherd submitted it in September 2003, 17 years after the murder. Shepherd worked in a unit the LAPD created in 2001 to go back through the city's unsolved murders — between six and nine thousand of them. Sherry Rasmussen's case made the cut because of one line in a 1986 report: a bite mark swab had been collected by the coroner's office. "With that swab, there should be a DNA," Shepherd later told Dateline.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Main Outline
- 2 (00:00) **Episode Opening and Advertisements** - Promotional content for Mike Lawler campaign and Gernavic pain medication
- 3 (01:31) **Jennifer Francis Takes the Sherry Rasmussen Case** - A new criminalist picks a cold case from 1986, believing it will be simple DNA work
- 4 (03:36) **The Missing Bite Mark Swab** - Shepherd discovers the critical evidence was never booked into LAPD property and cannot be found
- 5 (05:07) **Jennifer Reads the Murder Book** - She discovers a hospital security report about a nurse who harassed Sherry after being turned down for a promotion
- 6 (06:04) **Jennifer Hunts for the Swab** - She checks the sexual assault kit, calls the coroner's office twice, and is told to stop before she gets a reputation
- 7 (07:40) **Lloyd Mahaney Remembers** - Jennifer finds the name of the criminalist who collected the swab and calls him directly
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
“MK Confidential” picks up nineteen years after Sherri Rasmussen's murder, when a rookie crime lab analyst picks up a cold case that seems simple: one blood type, one stain, an easy match. Instead, Jennifer Francis finds a bite mark swab that no one can locate — not the LAPD, not the coroner's office, not even the property log. She tracks down the man who sealed it in 1986, and asks him not to forget about her.
Megyn traces the two decades in between: a parking ticket handed to grieving parents who offered to pay for DNA testing themselves, a box of critical evidence signed out in 1993 and never seen again, and a detective who closes the file with one sentence: no additional leads. Then, in 2005, the bite swab turns up in a freezer, and the DNA inside it belongs to a woman. Four years later, a detective reading the case notices a bloody fingerprint on stereo equipment, and the burglary theory falls apart in his hands.
By the end, investigators have a name — and she has a badge number. This is Episode 2 of the Sherri Rasmussen story.
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