Karen Stitt Wiki

                                    Karen Stitt Biography

Who was Karen Stitt ?

A Hawaiian man has been arrested after DNA technology helped investigators identify him as a suspect in the 1992 murder of a 15-year-old girl who was kidnapped from a Northern California bus stop, raped and murdered. authorities said.

Karen Stitt was waiting for a bus in Sunnyvale when she disappeared in the early hours of Sept. 3, 1982. A delivery truck driver discovered her naked body in some bushes 100 yards from the bus stop, the Mercury News reported Tuesday.


Gary Ramirez Arrested and Charged

Last week, Sunnyvale police arrested Gary Ramirez, 75, in Maui after they said his DNA matched blood on Karen’s leather jacket and the 4-foot cinder block wall where the killer he left her after stabbing her 59 times, the newspaper reported.

Ramirez remains jailed in a Maui jail awaiting an extradition hearing Wednesday to take him to California. It was not immediately clear if he has retained an attorney who can speak on his behalf.


Once Ramírez is extradited, he will face charges of murder, kidnapping and rape, according to the Santa Clara district attorney’s office. If he is convicted, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“Behind every old murder file in every major police department, there is a person, a heartbreak and a mystery,” said Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. “The mystery of Karen Stitt’s death has been solved thanks to advances in forensic science and a detective who would never, ever give up.”

Investigation


Santa Clara County cold case investigators say they used DNA technology linked to genealogy from the family tree, the same investigative process that led to the arrest and guilty plea of ​​the Golden State Killer in 2018.


Sunnyvale Police Detective Matt Hutchison said he arrested Ramirez, a man with hip problems who seemed so shocked he couldn’t say more than “Oh my God.”

Ramirez, a retired bug exterminator, had no criminal record, police say. His older brother, Rudy Ramirez, who also lives in Maui, said he can’t imagine his younger brother would be capable of committing such a horrific crime.

“I have never seen him violent or angry ever,” Ramírez’s brother told the newspaper. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Three years ago, Hutchison teamed up with a genealogist who narrowed down the DNA to four siblings. Hutchison then tracked down one of Gary Ramirez’s sons and collected a DNA sample, which showed a high probability that the suspect was his father, he said. After that, authorities used a search warrant to take a DNA sample from Gary Ramirez’s mouth, which a forensic lab confirmed matched DNA found at the crime scene.

When he opened the email with the DNA match, “I wanted to scream, but I can’t because I didn’t want to wake up the hotel,” Hutchinson said. “So I took a moment to reflect.”

He opened his laptop and clicked on Karen’s photo.

“I took a quick look at her picture,” he said, “and I just said, ‘We did it.’”

Source: https://wikisoon.com/