For four decades, the man who stabbed 15-year-old Karen Stitt 59 times and left her for dead behind a cinderblock wall near the old Woolworth’s in Sunnyvale got away with murder.
On Monday morning, after years of working odd jobs including as a bug exterminator and settling into a guest house on the island of Maui and reaching the age of 77, Gary Gene Ramirez, pleaded no contest to first degree murder in a San Jose courtroom Monday. It is treated as a guilty plea in criminal court but may not be used as evidence in some civil cases.
Karen’s aunt, Robin Stitt Morris from Florida couldn’t attend Monday’s hearing, but wants to be here when Ramirez is sentenced, scheduled for 9 a.m. May 12. He faces 25 years to life in prison, which would make him eligible for parole at 102 years old.
“Justice is a difficult thing,” Morris said in a phone interview Monday. “He’s lived his entire life, and my niece didn’t get that privilege.”
The cold case had been solved two years ago through DNA evidence left on Karen’s clothes and the dogged work of Sunnyvale Police Det. Matthew Hutchison, who knew of the case growing up in Sunnyvale as the stepson of a Sunnyvale officer who often talked about the case. Hutchison kept a photo of the blond-haired Stitt in his office to keep inspired by the case, and flew to Hawaii in August 2022 to handcuff the shocked Ramirez himself.
So many years had passed that Karen’s father and older sister never lived to see the arrest or conviction of her killer. But in the courtroom Monday were her sister’s ex-husband and his wife and her best friend from Palo Alto High School, Tracy Lancaster, who is 57 years old.
“We were kids,” Lancaster said. “Nobody deserves anything like this and that’s why we’re here.”
The murder couldn’t have been solved without DNA evidence that didn’t come into wide use or factor into Karen’s case until 2000 — 18 years after her death. It’s the same kind of police work that solved the case of the Golden State Killer in 2018 that used family tree genealogy and tested DNA of relatives to zero in on Ramirez.
Ramirez’s plea brings to an end one of the most frustrating cold cases that had crossed the desk of nearly every Sunnyvale police detective since that Sept. 3, 1982 night. The case was the first to be featured on the county website in 2014 when District Attorney Jeff Rosen resurrected the cold case unit.
“We never forget,” Deputy District Attorney Rob Baker, the cold case prosecutor who also worked on the case said when Ramirez was arrested. “Whether it’s 10 years, 20 years or 50 years, our goal is to seek justice for victims and the families and friends of those victims.”
In all his years, Ramirez had no other criminal record — so running the DNA from the blood found on Karen’s leather jacket never produced a match.
But it did exonerate her boyfriend, David Woods, who had taken her on a date to nearby Golfland that night. Worried he’d get in trouble for busting curfew, he left her as she walked towards the bus stop at El Camino Real near Wolfe Road close to 12:30 a.m., police say.
Family members never really suspected him, but in an email to the Bay Area News Group after the arrest, he said he had “suffered heartache from the horrific loss of a beautiful girl whom I was falling in love with,” and that he was hoping for closure.
The next morning, a delivery truck driver discovered her body 100 yards away from the bus stop. She had been dumped at the base of the wall, police say, naked in the bushes. Her wrists were bound with her own striped shirt. Her jacket was tied around her left ankle.
Ramirez grew up in Fresno, one of four brothers, in a “dysfunctional” middle class family, one of his brothers told the Bay Area News Group in 2022. Ramirez joined the Air Force and at some point in the 1980s, when Karen was killed, he lived briefly in the Bay Area. He moved back with his mother in Fresno before his brother encouraged him to join him in Maui. He married twice and had two daughters.
Hutchison pursued a multi-state hunt for Stitt’s killer until he came face-to-face with Ramirez, then a 75-year-old man with a bad hip who appeared so shocked he could say little more than, “Oh my gosh.”
It was in many ways reminiscent of the notorious Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo, a former police officer who terrorized California from Sacramento and the Bay Area to Southern California with a string of horrific rapes and murders in the 1970s and 1980s. Genetic evidence in 2018 led police to a 72-year-old quietly living out his retirement in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights. In 2020, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to murder and kidnapping charges to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.