She was stabbed 59 moments 40 decades back. Now, a DNA match has led Sunnyvale law enforcement to Maui to provide back again her suspected killer

So much time had handed that Karen Stitt’s father died in no way figuring out. Her more mature sister died hardly ever understanding.

But very last 7 days, her aunt been given a call from Sunnyvale law enforcement Det. Matt Hutchison. He had traveled to the Hawaiian island of Maui and just arrested a guy he believes kidnapped Karen from a bus stop on the El Camino Serious when she was just 15, then brutally killed her.

The aunt experienced waited 40 many years for the news.

“Thank you,” Robin Stitt Morris stated in excess of and about, breaking down on the cellular phone from her property in Tampa. “Thank you for not giving up.”

Santa Clara County chilly-situation investigators say they have solved a person of their most vexing murders utilizing DNA engineering connected to loved ones tree genealogy, the exact kind of contemporary law enforcement perform that led to the arrest and responsible plea of the Golden Point out Killer in 2018. Hutchison pursued a multi-point out hunt until eventually last but not least very last 7 days he came confront-to-deal with with a 75-year-previous guy with a undesirable hip who appeared so shocked he could say small more than, “Oh my gosh.”

Past week, the 38-yr-aged detective, who had adopted the situation given that he was a child expanding up in Sunnyvale, tracked Gary Gene Ramirez to a guest home on Maui and secured the handcuffs himself. In all his decades, Ramirez racked up no criminal document, police say, not so significantly as a shoplifting. His 79-12 months-aged brother, Rudy Ramirez, who also life in Maui, can’t picture that his young brother — a sometime-waiter and retired bug exterminator — would be capable of this sort of a horrific criminal offense.

“I’ve hardly ever seen him violent or get angry at any time,” Ramirez’s brother claimed. “He would not damage a fly.”

But law enforcement say Gary Ramirez’s DNA matched the blood from Karen’s leather-based jacket and the 4-foot cinder block wall up coming to the previous Woolworth Backyard Centre in the vicinity of Wolfe Street exactly where the killer experienced still left her for useless. The suspect had raped her and stabbed her 59 instances in the early morning several hours of Sept. 3, 1982. Ramirez stays incarcerated in a Maui jail awaiting an extradition hearing Wednesday to convey him to California.

At this stage, the case depends practically only on the DNA evidence, which Rob Baker, the chilly circumstance prosecutor for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s workplace, states is “overwhelming.”

Baker and Hutchison, who labored alongside one another on the circumstance, say that Ramirez invested time in the Bay Spot in the 1980s when Karen was killed. Still, they are in search of extra information and facts — and are hoping for strategies — to even more corroborate the scenario. In particular, they would like to know if everyone has details about a white paneled truck with a stripe that a witness had spotted around the crime scene.

The scenario was the first to be featured on the county website in 2014 when District Lawyer Jeff Rosen resurrected the chilly scenario device. It described that Karen experienced a short while ago moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to California to are living with her father and brother and attend Palo Alto High. She routinely traveled by bus, and on the evening of Sept. 2, 1982, met her boyfriend at 7-Eleven prior to heading to nearby Golfland, then a stroll to nearby Ponderosa Elementary college. Around midnight, law enforcement say, the boyfriend walked her toward the bus quit ahead of they divided.

The upcoming morning, a delivery truck driver uncovered her human body 100 yards absent from the bus prevent. She had been dumped at the base of the wall, police say, bare in the bushes. Her wrists were being certain with her possess striped shirt. Her jacket was tied all over her still left ankle.

The boyfriend, David Woods, now in his late 50s, experienced been a suspect for two many years until finally DNA technological know-how ruled him out in the early 2000s. He has lived with the anguish of leaving her on your own, dashing household to make curfew.

“For 40 several years I have suffered heartache from the horrific decline of a stunning girl whom I was slipping in like with,” Woods claimed in an e mail, introducing that he has been hyper-centered on stability and safety for his loved ones and good friends ever considering that. “I hope this delivers some closure for her family, myself and her other loved kinds.”

In Maui, Rudy Ramirez explained in an job interview with the Bay Place Information Team that police showed up at his doorway shortly immediately after his brother was arrested past Tuesday.

He and Gary were two of 4 brothers who grew up in what he known as a middle class “dysfunctional family” in Fresno, exactly where their father labored as a hefty devices operator for the county. Gary was the most loved son, he explained.

“He wasn’t like some violent child or dysfunctional juvenile delinquent,” said Rudy, who moved to Maui when he was 18.

Gary, four several years young, joined the Air Drive. Rudy suggests he misplaced keep track of of his brother in the 1980s, when Gary was in his 30s and Karen Stitt was murdered. Gary was keeping with his mother in Fresno in the late 1980s when his older brother confident him to be part of him in Maui.

Gary married 2 times, fathered two daughters and has been living there at any time because. With hip issues that is practically crippling, Rudy claimed, Gary lived on disability for a time and painted landscapes. As a youthful person, Gary experienced stood about 5-foot-11 with an normal create, his brother explained, but has shrunk about five inches in his older age.