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75-year-old arrested in connection with teen’s death 40 years ago, CA officials say

Almost 40 years ago, 15-year-old Karen Stitt went on a date with her boyfriend in the Palo Alto, California area. They played video games and mini-golf, and her boyfriend later dropped her off at a bus stop in nearby Sunnyvale.

She was never seen alive again.

“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,” the Santa Clara District Attorney’s office said in a news release.

It was Sept. 3, 1982, and Karen’s body was found about 100 yards from the bus stop the next day by a delivery man. She had been raped and stabbed 59 times.

“Despite an extensive investigation, there were no significant leads for decades,” the district attorney’s office said in an Aug. 9 news release.

But advances in DNA technology and the tireless work of a detective led to a recent arrest in the case.

Seventy-five-year old Gary Ramirez, who resided in Makawao on the island of Maui, was arrested on Aug. 2 in connection with Karen’s death, according to prosecutors.

Ramirez faces charges of murder, kidnapping and rape and, if convicted, “faces lifetime in prison without the possibility of parole,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said.

“Behind every old murder file in every major police department, there is a person, heartbreak, and a mystery,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in the news release. “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.”

Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety detective Matt Hutchison received information in 2021 that one of four sons of a woman named “Rose Aguilera Ramirez may have committed the murder of Karen Stitt,” Hutchison wrote in his statement of facts.

Hutchinson 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, the FBI database.

After ruling out the three other siblings, Hutchinson zeroed in on Gary Ramirez and used social media to find a child of his. A DNA sample was collected from the child and it was compared to the blood collected from Karen’s crime scene, leading Hutchinson to have “probable cause” that Gary Ramirez committed the crime.

Ramirez is facing murder, kidnapping and rape charges and, if convicted, “faces lifetime in prison without the possibility of parole,” according to the district attorney.

The investigation is ongoing, and anyone with information is asked to contact the DA’s Office Cold Case Prosecutor Rob Baker at rbaker@dao.sccgov.org.

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