78-year-old convicted decades after delivery man found dead 15-year-old, CA officials say
More than four decades ago, 15-year-old Karen Stitt said good night to her teenage boyfriend and walked toward a California bus stop.
It was the last time she was seen alive, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office said in a Feb. 24 news release.
Stitt’s body was found the next day, 100 yards away from the bus stop, prosecutors said.
For decades, her slaying was a mystery.
But in 2022, thanks to the advancements in DNA technology, Gary Ramirez, of Hawaii, was arrested once he was identified as a suspect, prosecutors said.
Now, the 78-year-old, who once lived in Fresno, has pleaded no contest to first degree-murder in Stitt’s 1982 killing, prosecutors said.
“Today I am thinking of a young woman whose life and future were torn from her,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in the release. “Karen Stitt would have been 57 years old today. Her murder was solved by forensic science, a remarkably stubborn detective, and a determined prosecutor.”
An evening in Sunnyvale
Stitt, who had recently moved to Palo Alto from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, spent the evening of Thursday, Sept. 2, 1982, with her teenage boyfriend in Sunnyvale after taking a bus from Palo Alto, according to the district attorney’s office.
The two played video games at a 7-Eleven before wandering to a nearby putt-putt course at about midnight, prosecutors said.
Soon, Stitt’s boyfriend feared he’d be grounded for staying out past his curfew, prosecutors said.
He bid Stitt farewell as he watched her walk toward the bus stop, then he ran home, prosecutors said.
“There, snatched from the stretch of roadway choked with cruising cars, cluttered with restaurants and bars - the teenager, wearing a leather jacket, a striped shirt, pants and her boyfriend’s baseball hat with a Rush rock band insignia, disappeared,” prosecutors said.
Body found near bus stop
The next morning, a delivery man found her unclothed body “thrown over a four-foot wall near the now-gone Honey Bee Restaurant,” prosecutors said.
Her body, “concealed behind a blood-stained cinderblock wall,” was a mere 100 yards from the bus stop, according to prosecutors.
She was bound by her own clothing, and her boyfriend’s baseball cap lay nearby, prosecutors said.
Stitt “had been sexually assaulted and stabbed 59 times,” according to prosecutors.
The suspect had left behind DNA evidence on Stitt’s body, prosecutors said.
Even still, her slaying went unsolved for decades.
DNA analysis in 2000
With the “advent of DNA analysis,” evidence collected at the scene could finally be tested in 2000, Detective Matt Hutchison wrote in his statement of facts.
Through testing, investigators got a DNA profile for the suspect in Stitt’s killing, Hutchison said.
Hutchison said a DNA sample was collected from Stitt’s boyfriend.
Stitt’s boyfriend, who was “long considered a suspect,” was cleared, prosecutors said.
The DNA profile was uploaded into the Combined DNA Index System, but no matches were found, Hutchison said.
For more than two decades more, Sitt’s case remained stagnant.
Case resurgence
In 2019, a tip reignited the case.
Hutchison said he received information that one of a Fresno woman’s sons may have killed Stitt.
Hutchison then combed through obituaries and databases, according to the statement, and learned that all four brothers were still alive but did not have DNA profiles in CODIS.
After ruling out the three other siblings, Hutchison zeroed in on Gary Ramirez and used social media to find a child of his, according to the statement.
A DNA sample was collected from the child, and it was compared to the blood collected from Stitt’s crime scene, leading Hutchison to have “probable cause” that Gary Ramirez committed the crime.
Upon getting word of the probable DNA match, Hutchison told the Mercury News he opened a photo of Stitt on his laptop.
“I took a quick glance at her photo,” he told the newspaper, “and I just told her, ‘We did it.’”
Ramirez was arrested on counts of murder, kidnapping, and rape in August 2022, prosecutors said.
“For 40 years, I have suffered the heartache from the horrific loss of a beautiful girl whom I was falling in love with,” Stitt’s then boyfriend, David Woods, told the Mercury News after Ramirez’s arrest. “I hope this brings some closure for her family, myself and her other loved ones.”
Ramirez is scheduled to appear in court May 12 and is expected to be sentenced to life in prison, prosecutors said.
Sunnyvale is about a 40-mile drive southeast from San Francisco.
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 4:06 PM with the headline "78-year-old convicted decades after delivery man found dead 15-year-old, CA officials say."
