What happened to Karen Stitt? Case explored as Hawaii man is arrested over 1982 murder of teen

A man from Hawaii has been detained after DNA tests identified him as a suspect in the 1982 murder of a 15-year-old girl, Karen Stitt, who was kidnapped from a bus stop in Northern California.

After claiming that 75-year-old Gary Ramirez's DNA matched the blood on Karen Stitt's leather jacket and the 4-foot cinder block wall where he left her, Sunnyvale police detained him in Maui last week.

According to the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office, Karen Stitt, 15, was last seen by her boyfriend on the evening of September 2, 1982, when he left her at a Sunnyvale, California, bus stop.

According to a criminal complaint, her boyfriend left after dropping Karen Stitt off as he was concerned about arriving home late.

Karen Stitt's body was discovered the following morning, close to a cinder block wall around 100 yards from the stop. According to the complaint, investigators found that she had suffered 59 stab wounds in addition to being abused.

The case was unsolved for many years until a tip led investigators to Gary Ramirez, who was apprehended on August 2 and charged with murder at his home in Maui, Hawaii, the District Attorney's Office said.

Ramirez is detained in a Maui jail while he awaits his extradition hearing in California on Wednesday.

According to the Santa Clara District Attorney's Office, Ramirez will be charged with murder, kidnapping, and r*pe after being extradited. If found guilty, he would be sentenced to life in jail without the possibility of parole.

DA Jeff Rosen of Santa Clara County stated:

"Behind every old murder file in every major police department, there is a person, heartbreak, and a mystery. The mystery of Karen Stitt's death has been solved thanks to advances in forensic science and a detective that would never, ever give up."

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DNA technology helps solve Karen Stitt’s case

Cold case investigators in Santa Clara County say they used DNA technology connected to family tree genealogy, the same investigative procedure that resulted in the Golden State Killer's capture and guilty plea in 2018.

It started with breakthroughs in DNA analysis, which allowed detectives to construct the DNA profile of an unknown male suspect in 2000 using DNA from blood and other samples found at the scene.

The DNA study allowed them to definitively rule out Karen Stitt's boyfriend as a suspect, but the complaint claimed that the profile did not match anything available in the DNA databases that were at their disposal.

It wasn't until Det. Matthew Hutchison received a tip in 2021 that he began looking into Ramirez and his brothers as potential suspects, eventually zeroing in on Gary Ramirez.

A lab established earlier this year, using a DNA sample acquired from Ramirez's child, that there was "very strong statistical support" that the DNA collected at the crime scene matched Ramirez.

According to investigators, Ramirez, a former bug exterminator, had no criminal history. Rudy Ramirez, his older brother, who also resides in Maui, claimed his brother would never murder anyone.

According to the District Attorney's Office, the plan to arrest Ramirez required "months of planning and was a coordinated effort" by Santa Clara County, Maui law enforcement, and federal authorities.

Reportedly, a grant was provided by the US Justice Department to the District Attorney's Office to aid in the investigation and prosecution of cold cases.