An elderly man who eluded suspicion for four decades after he viciously stabbed a teen girl in Sunnyvale will likely spend the rest of his life in prison after he was sentenced Monday in a San Jose courtroom.
Gary Gene Ramirez, 78, who was extradited from Hawaii in 2022 after a cold-case investigation that featured a refreshed DNA examination, pleaded no contest to first-degree murder in February for the 1982 death of 15-year-old Palo Alto resident Karen Stitt.
Judge Hanley Chew sentenced Ramirez to a term of life in prison with parole eligibility in 25 years, when he would be 103 years old.
Karen Stitt, 15, shown in an undated photo, had recently moved from Pennsylvania to Palo Alto when she was stabbed 59 times and left for dead next to a Sunnyvale garden center in 1982. Gary Gene Martinez has been sentenced for her murder in Santa Clara County court. (Courtesy of Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office)
Authorities contend that sometime after midnight on Sept. 3, 1982, Ramirez abducted Karen from a bus stop, raped her and then stabbed her 59 times before leaving her body behind a cinderblock wall about 100 yards away.
Ramirez was living in Maui, where he had spent the decades since, in August 2022 when Sunnyvale police Detective Matt Hutchison, armed with a DNA genealogy probe that implicated him as the lone and primary suspect in Karen’s death, handcuffed him and took him into custody.
A subsequent DNA analysis by the Santa Clara County Crime Lab, operated by the district attorney’s office, matched Ramirez to blood evidence recovered near the old Woolworth Garden Center near El Camino Real near Wolfe Road. That’s where a truck driver discovered the body of Karen, naked and bound with her own clothes.
“Over 40 years ago, Karen Stitt lost her life, but she was not forgotten,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement Monday. “Today, thanks to a dedicated detective, a persistent prosecutor, and our Crime Lab, the person responsible is behind bars.”
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The homicide case frustrated detectives in Sunnyvale for decades until 2019, when Hutchison, working with prosecutor and current cold-case supervisor Rob Baker, consulted with a DNA genealogist to find new leads. DNA genealogy — which utilizes family trees generated from the genetic data of millions of people who submitted their DNA to public and private databases to trace their lineage — had been gaining prominence, perhaps most notably in the effort that led to the identification and arrest of the Golden State Killer the year before.
To that point, examinations of DNA from the crime scene had not been fruitful in identifying a suspect, though it did clear Karen’s then-boyfriend, to whom she was traveling by bus from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale the evening before she died. Ramirez — a Fresno native who in the intervening years had moved to Hawaii where he married twice and had two children — was not on any law enforcement radar due to a clean criminal history.
The genealogy search narrowed the suspect pool to Ramirez and his three brothers. Hutchison tracked down one of Ramirez’s daughters and collected a DNA sample from her, which led to a search warrant that compelled Ramirez to provide a DNA swab. Soon after, the Crime Lab matched his DNA to blood found on Karen’s leather jacket.
By the time that link was made three years ago, Karen’s father and older sister had died. Her case had long been a priority for the DA’s office, as it was the first to be featured on the agency’s website when Rosen renewed his office’s cold case unit in 2014.
