A stunning break in a cold case murder mystery from almost four decades ago. Karen Stitt was 15 years old when she was kidnapped from a bus stop in Palo Alto, raped, and brutally murdered in September of 1982. >> On the morning of September 3rd, 1982, a delivery truck driver moving along a commercial strip in Sunnyvale, California, came across the body of a 15-year-old girl thrown over a 4-ft cinder block wall behind a restaurant.
She had been stabbed 59 times. Her own clothes had been used to bind her wrists and one of her ankles. Her makeup lay scattered on the ground around her. Blood ran down the cinder block behind her. More blood sat on top of the wall on the surface where her killer had climbed. The killer had cut himself on his own knife.
His DNA was on her leather jacket and on her body. None of it could be matched to him for 40 years. Not because the science wasn’t there. The man who killed her had never been arrested. Not for anything. Not anywhere. Not ever. This is how they finally found him. Her name was Karen Ann Stitt. She was 15 years old, a sophomore at Palo Alto High School, born in Pittsburgh, and raised there until earlier that year when she had moved to California with her brother and her older sister to live with their father.
The move had not been planned. In March of 1982, 6 months before Karen was killed, her mother Katherine Marie Lecheski Stitt died by suicide in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Karen was 14 at the time. Her sister Suzanne was 17, and their brother Robert was older still. The three of them lost the parent they had grown up with that week.
After their mother’s death, they joined their father, Robert Stitt III, in Palo Alto. The new house was on the residential side of the city, west of El Camino Real, in the part of Palo Alto where the streets dead end into school grounds and the front yards have oak trees. Karen finished her freshman year at Palo Alto High and stayed in California through the summer.
In a 1985 interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Suzanne tried to describe what that summer had been like. They were into forgetting it, she said. Getting the family back together. They were trying to get through the rest of the year together in a new city. Karen settled in quickly. She made friends at the school.
She started seeing a 17-year-old boy named David Woods who lived in Sunnyvale, the next city south down the peninsula, and learned to ride the bus along El Camino Real to visit him. By the end of summer, she was a regular passenger on the line, comfortable enough with the route that her family did not worry about her taking it alone.
Thursday, September 2nd, 1982 was the last week before school started again. Karen took the bus from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale that evening to see Woods. The two of them spent the night doing what teenagers in the valley did when they had a few dollars and nowhere to be. They played video games at a 7-Eleven on the strip, walked over to Golfland for a round of miniature golf, and hung around the lot afterward.
El Camino Real in 1982 ran the length of the peninsula from San Francisco to San Jose. The stretch through Sunnyvale was a corridor of car dealerships, fast food restaurants, motels, and retail stores lit by neon signs and the yellow glow of street lights. Buses ran late along the line. The stops were spaced close enough that a person could get off within walking distance of almost anything on the strip.
Karen and Woods had been on it all night. She was wearing a leather jacket, a striped shirt, pants, and Woods’ baseball hat. The hat had a Rush insignia on the front, the rock band. It was a piece of clothing a girlfriend wore home on a Thursday night because the boy she was seeing had handed it to her. Around 12:30 in the morning, Woods walked Karen partway toward the bus stop at the corner of El Camino Real and South Wolf Road.
She would catch the 22 back to Palo Alto, to her father’s house. Woods did not walk her the rest of the way. He turned around and ran home, worried about getting in trouble with his parents for being out past curfew. He later told police he had felt bad about leaving her alone, but had not believed she was in any immediate danger.
That was the last time anyone who knew Karen saw her alive. The next morning, the truck driver had pulled into the lot behind the Honey Bee restaurant, a commercial spot on the El Camino strip about 100 yards from the bus stop. Karen was on the ground at the base of the wall in the strip of bushes between the lot and the back of the building.
Woods’s baseball hat with the Rush band insignia lay on the dirt beside her. The leaves around her body were disturbed in a pattern that suggested she had been alive for at least part of the attack. The biological material the killer had left at the scene was distinct enough to be preserved and tested when the technology arrived to read it.
In 1982, that technology did not exist. Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety detectives began working the case that day. They canvassed the businesses along El Camino, the motels, the bars, the all-night convenience stores, the gas stations. Investigators interviewed cab drivers and bus drivers. They looked for witnesses on the road in the early morning hours.
They found very little. A machinist working late that night told them about a truck. He had seen a white old-fashioned panel truck with a stripe along the side and a rectangular sticker on the bumper parked near where Karen’s body was later found with its parking lights on. He had not thought much of it at the time.
It looked out of place on the commercial strip after midnight, but it was just a truck. The vehicle was gone by morning and was never identified. David Woods was the first and only viable suspect. He was the last person who had seen Karen alive and he had walked her toward the stop and then left. He cooperated with detectives, gave his account of the evening, and denied any involvement in what had happened to her afterward.
Investigators could not place Woods at the scene, but they could not rule him out, either. The case stalled. It went into the department’s cold case files. Every few years a new investigator would inherit it and read through what was there. Suzanne carried it after that. She had been 18 when Karen was killed, the older sister who had moved cross country 3 months before to start over with their father after their mother’s suicide.
The summer she had spent trying to put the family back together turned into the rest of her life spent trying to find out who killed her sister. She spread Karen’s ashes over Mount Tamalpais in Mill Valley, a peak north of the Golden Gate where the family had hiked together. She worked with police on the case through her 20s, her 30s, and into her 40s.
New detectives inherited the file. Suzanne met with them, explained what she knew about Karen’s life and routine and the people in it, and waited for the science to catch up. Suzanne moved to Eugene, Oregon as an adult. She married a man named John Musumeci, became a stepmother to his three children, and built a life in the Pacific Northwest.
The case did not leave her. She gave interviews when reporters came back to it and gave the family’s permission for whatever new technology investigators wanted to try. In 2018, years after Karen’s death, investigators pulled a DNA profile from the physical evidence at the scene and ran it through CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offenders.
The result came back negative. He had not been convicted of any qualifying offense anywhere in the country. The same comparison did something else. It cleared David Woods. The sperm collected from Karen’s body and the male blood found at the crime scene did not match a sample provided by him. After 18 years of being the primary person of interest in the murder of his teenage girlfriend, Woods was out.
The killer was a stranger. He had crossed Karen’s path on one night and left no trace in any system that could find him. That was where the case sat for the next decade and a half. The DNA profile was on file. It was clean, intact, distinct. It just did not belong to anyone the database knew. In March of 2013, Suzanne Catherin Stidham died of ovarian cancer at her home in Eugene, Oregon.
She was just 49. She had spent more than 30 years pushing for an answer to her sister’s murder and she died without one. Karen’s father, Robert Stidham did not get the answer either. He passed away in the years between his daughter’s death and the arrest that came later. Of Karen’s immediate family, only her brother Robert Stidham and her aunt Robin Stidham Morris would live to hear the name.
In 2017, a Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety Detective named Matt Hutchison took the file off the shelf. Hutchison had grown up in Sunnyvale in the same part of the city where Karen had been killed. His stepfather had worked for the department. The Stitt case had been in the city’s history since before he could remember.
He believed police had a responsibility to victims regardless of how old the case was. And the biological evidence in storage was something earlier detectives had never had a way to use. In early 2019, Hutchison received a tip. The specifics were not made public, but the effect was that the field of possible suspects narrowed to a family of four brothers from Fresno.
A city about 150 miles southeast of Sunnyvale in California’s Central Valley. None of the four had any kind of record that would have put their DNA in CODIS. None of them had been on the original suspect list in 1982 or in any year since. Hutchison began working the tip through forensic genetic genealogy, the same investigative technique that had identified the Golden State Killer the year before.
He partnered with a genealogist. They uploaded the killer’s DNA profile to public genealogy databases used by millions to find their ancestors. The system returned distant relatives, people who shared enough genetic markers with the unknown killer to be third or fourth cousins. From those matches, the genealogist began building a family tree outward, marker by marker, generation by generation.
The method had not existed when the original detectives were working the case, and Hutchison treated it as a tool he had to use because the case had to be solved. The work took 2 years. The genealogist traced birth and death records, marriages, immigration documents, the routine public records that exist in county courthouses and online registries.
By 2021, the tree had narrowed to the same family the tip had pointed to. The man who killed Karen Stitt was one of four brothers from Fresno. The genealogy could not say which one. That was where the science ended and the police work began. Hutchison spent months tracking the four brothers through every public source he could find.
He read newspaper obituaries, family announcements, marriage records, and military service records. Social media filled in more of the picture. Through Facebook, he located one of their grandchildren. And through that line, he found the children of the four men. He needed a confirmatory sample. Genealogy could narrow the killer to a family, but it could not pick out an individual member by genetic markers alone.
Brothers share too much of their DNA with each other for the science to separate them. Hutchison needed a direct comparison between one of the four brothers and the unknown profile from the scene. The fastest path ran through the next generation. A child of one of the brothers would carry roughly half of his father’s DNA.
Testing that child’s profile against the crime scene blood would either confirm the father as the source or rule him out. On April 8th, 2022, Hutchison obtained a DNA sample from one of the brothers’ children. The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s crime lab ran the comparison. The result indicated a very high probability that the child’s father was the killer Sunnyvale had been looking for since 1982.
That father had a name. Hutchison had found him. His name was Gary Gene Ramirez. Ramirez was 75 years old. He was living in Makawao, a town on the slopes of Haleakala on the island of Maui, about 2,500 miles from Sunnyvale. There was no criminal record attached to his name. Across his entire adult life, he had not been arrested for a single violent crime, a theft, or a serious traffic stop.
On paper, he was an ordinary 75-year-old retiree on a Hawaiian island. He had grown up in Fresno and attended high school there. After school, he served in the US Air Force in the early 1970s. Once out of the military, he had moved through the Bay Area Peninsula, San Francisco, San Diego, Colorado, and finally, Hawaii.
By the end of his working life, he was a retired bug exterminator on Maui. His older brother, Rudy Ramirez, who also lived on the island, told the Mercury News that he could not believe what his younger brother had been accused of. He had never seen his brother angry or violent, he said. His brother would not hurt a fly.
That was the face the system had been looking at for 40 years without seeing it. A man who had committed one of the most violent crimes in Sunnyvale’s history, and had stayed clean for the rest of his life on every record that mattered. The blood on the wall had matched no one in CODIS because the person it belonged to had never given the system a reason to ask.
On August 2nd, 2022, officers arrested Ramirez at his home in Makawao. The operation had taken months of planning. It involved Santa Clara County, Maui police, and federal law enforcement, and it was funded largely by a 2021 grant from the US Department of Justice for the investigation and prosecution of cold cases.
Hutchison later told reporters that when Ramirez was put in cuffs, the only thing he said was, “Oh my gosh.” Investigators obtained a direct DNA sample from Ramirez through a search warrant after the arrest. The crime lab confirmed what the child’s sample had indicated. The match was definitive. Ramirez waived extradition.
He was flown back across the Pacific to California and booked into the Santa Clara County jail on August 20th, 2022. He was charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping, and rape in the death of Karen Stitt. It was the first time in 40 years that the case had a name attached to it. Hutchison was able to call Karen’s brother, Robert Stitt IV, the only one of her three siblings still alive, and tell him the news.
Karen’s aunt, Robin Stitt Morris, who lived in Tampa, Florida, and had outlived both of Karen’s parents and Suzanne, learned of the arrest from a relative. She told reporters that the news had reopened a wound, but that somehow it had also brought her relief and peace at the same time. In the press conference that followed the arrest, Hutchison made a request to the public.
He told reporters he believed it was possible Ramirez had crossed paths with other victims who had never been connected to him, and he asked anyone with information about the man to come forward. On February 24th, 2025, Ramirez stood in a Santa Clara County courtroom and, in a barely audible voice, pled no contest to first-degree murder.
A no contest plea carries the same legal weight as a guilty plea, but does not require the defendant to admit to the facts of the crime. He was 78 years old. He sat through the proceeding with long gray hair and a cane. On May 12th, 2025, Judge Hanley Chew sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison with the possibility of parole. It was the maximum available under the plea. at 78.
Ramirez would be over 100 years old before he became eligible for parole consideration. For all practical purposes, it was a life sentence. District Attorney Jeff Rosen issued a statement after the sentencing. “Over 40 years ago, Karen Stitt had lost her life,” he said, “but she had not been forgotten. Thanks to a dedicated detective, a persistent prosecutor, and the county crime lab, the person responsible was now behind bars.
” Members of Karen’s family and friends attended the sentencing hearing. David Woods, the boyfriend who had walked her partway to the bus stop and run home, was in the courtroom. He told the judge that the heinous crimes that ended Karen’s life had caused deep heartache and continued suffering for the people who loved her.
Michael Calhoun, an ex-boyfriend of Karen’s who had lived around the corner from her family in Palo Alto, also spoke at the hearing. He had fallen hard for her in the summer before her death, and he had joined law enforcement because of her murder. Before the summer Karen was killed, she had given him a copper ring with her name on it.
He had kept it for the 43 years since. Calhoun told the courtroom that Karen had been his first true love. He said he would carry her in his heart until his last breath on this earth, and that some relief had come now that her killer had been named and caught. But there would still never be closure, he said.
Karen was gone. They would never get her back. Tracy Lancaster, Karen’s best friend who had stayed close with the family across the decades, talked about the questions she had carried for 43 years. The biggest one was the simplest. Why? Karen’s aunt, Robin Stitt Morris, sat with the family. The sister who had pursued the case for 30 years had been dead for 12.
Their father, who had taken in three children after losing his wife, had been dead for years. Of Karen’s three siblings, only Robert Stitt the Fourth, the brother who had crossed the country with her that spring, had lived to hear the sentence read. A 15-year-old girl was walking toward a bus stop on El Camino Real on a September night in 1982.
100 yards away, behind a cinder block wall, the evidence that would name her killer was already there in the blood on the concrete. It would sit there for 40 years. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.
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