May 22, 2025 • 42 mins
15-year-old Karen Stitt was stabbed to death 100 yards from the bus stop where she was headed to catch a bus to take her back home. She suffered nearly 60 stab wounds, 18 to the heart, and there is blood evidence all over the crime scene. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the case that has so much evidence it is shocking how it went cold, and only got colder as the years went by. The murder happened in 1982 and it took until the last few months to get a conviction. Is justice delayed, justice denied?
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.65 Introduction
02:08.90 Grisly murder, blood saturated crime scene
04:59.07 Close to 380 episodes of Body Bags
09:42.63 Event occurred 100 yards away from bus stop
14:56.13 Killing took place behind a wall
20:03.83 Making castings of shoe imprints
25:28.74 Volume of blood can change color of clothing, more than 59 stab wounds
30:04.66 18 wounds to the heart
34:57.38 Boyfriend was suspect, but never charged, he didn't do it
39:29.99 DNA - Genetic Genealogy leads to suspect
41:01.64 Gary Ramirez pleads "no contest" sentenced to life with possible parole after 25 years
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body times with Joseph's Gotten More. I love language. I
love studying language. I guess you know. People have come
to me and they have asked me before, if you
weren't doing what you do or what you did, you know, emmy,
what would you what would you do otherwise? And it's like,
(00:22):
you know, I got to tell you. I you think.
When I was a little boy, I thought I wanted
to be an archaeologist, and then got older and I
thought I wanted to be a historian. And I suddenly
came to my senses and realized that you could make
a living at it. But in the last few years,
(00:43):
I've gotten where I really and I'm such a nerd.
I really enjoy watching linguistic videos on YouTube. The reason
I enjoy it it combines history with language. And I
can't speak a foreign language. I know bits and pieces
of Spanish, a little bit of French, not much, but
(01:03):
I love to study origins. And today I wanted to
throw a word out to you that has been used
for years. As a matter of fact, the first time
that it actually entered in to our language sphere was
in the twelfth century. Actually in Middle English. The word
(01:29):
actually derives from an old English word, and since then
it has been used to describe things that are horrific,
things that most people would not expect to see. Certainly,
it generally involves blood. In particularly it involves death. That
(01:52):
word is grisly. I have trouble pronouncing that word many
times because I get it confused with grizzly. But for
a grizzly murder to take place, it has to be
blood saturated. And regarding the case we're going to talk
(02:12):
about today, that term continues to pop up in every
single article that I've come across. But here's the upside.
Today We're going to talk about a homicide, a very
brutal homicide that was committed all the way back in
(02:34):
nineteen eighty two. And guess what I can sit here
today and say that they have finally made an arrest
in the case of Karen Stitt. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is bodybags. Sometimes, Dave find I love language,
(03:02):
but sometimes as I move on down the line in life,
words fail me many times, And I don't know if
it's my memory or if I've got so much stuff
jammed into my attic. You know inside of my skull
that you know useless trivia. I think somebody told me, well, actually,
(03:25):
I think it was giming me. She said, you've gotten
more useless trivia jammed into your brain than anyone I
have ever met. I don't do well when we go
to trivia things, but lord, I love to have healthy
discussions about language, and about words and their origins and
and on body bags. I try to introduce people to
(03:47):
new terms that they might not be familiar with. I
think I've probably introduced you to a few along the way,
to your chagrin. Many times it's like, man, I wish
you hadn't introduced me or expose me to this. But
you know, it's some words failure, you know, when you're
trying to to describe something. And of course the case
(04:07):
that we're talking about today is absolutely brutal.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
In this particular case, you know, we have a young
girl fifteen years old that is stabbed over fifty times
near a bus stop. It wasn't at the bus stop,
but it was close enough nearby where they knew that's
where she was headed. You would think with that type
of murder there would be plenty of evidence to solve this,
(04:33):
but not. It didn't. I mean, here we are in
twenty twenty five and we're talking about this because they
finally have got an arrest.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
The level of brutality here, I got to tell you, you know,
she and this would be this is my knee jerk reaction.
You know where I'm going to go with this. She
was going to visit her boyfriend. And what are we
seeing over and over and over again in all of
these cases that you and did you realize that we're
right on the cusp of hitting three hundred and eighty
(05:03):
episodes of Bodybags? It makes your head swim. That's like
an eye watering number in it. But we've been grinding, man,
So out of all of this time that you and
I have spent in front of the microphone talking to
one another, there are certain things that we've imparted to
one another because of all these cases that we cover.
(05:25):
The one thread that runs through something like a case
like this, and we'll get into the level of violence here,
is that idea about intimates those people that are within
the circle. And you think about young Caring here fifteen
years old, man, fifteen years old, and she is literally
(05:49):
ripped a shred and it's not like this, this was
in a place like a hidden place. Really, you know
what I'm saying. It's not like it was someplace that
where she's been taken off in the woods. We're talking
about an event that occurred one hundred yards away from
(06:10):
the bus stop. David, you know what this sounds like
to me? And that's why I would go as an investigator.
You know, got to tell you the boyfriend, his butt's
going in a seat and we're going to have a
long conversation. I know, the detectives would This sounds like
a reactionary kind of thing. You know, like something passed
(06:32):
between two people that were intimately involved with another and
I don't mean necessarily in a sexual sense, but that
had a relationship with one another. Something was said. Because
it takes it takes that kind of passion that you
find in amorous relationships in order to fuel this kind
(06:54):
of brutality. It's almost this is almost when I talk
about these injury he said, I'm going to talk about
in just a bit, it's it's animalistic, Okay. Because she
has been assaulted so severely and in such a degrading way,
you have to think did this person know her? Because
(07:16):
would who in the world could be Dave this angry.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I just dumbfounded that a fifteen year old girl could
be raped and murdered and stab I mean, that's overkilled,
stabbing fifty times. Do we know we're I mean I
know when I tend to think about its stabbing, I
think about every one of them being a fatal strike,
and that's not the case. When you actually start breaking
(07:41):
that down, do you look at that which, Yeah, I
know you had to figure out which were the fatal wounds,
But can you determine when you've got that many the
order or the ones that could have caused her death
or is it a combination of all of them or
was there one strike? Can you tell with all the blood,
can you tell which one was last and which one
was first and whether it was live at the end.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah, it's very difficult, particularly when you have this I'm
talking about in terms of forensic pathology. When you have
this astronomical number, this is not something you would normally see. Now.
I've I've had cases where I've had individuals that were stabbed.
I think the most I ever had was like two
(08:21):
hundred times, and the person was like ground beef afterwards,
and it was a lover's quarrel two dudes went at
each other. One of the other times in my career
where I actually slipped at the scene and fell into
blood because there was blood. It was like a river
(08:42):
of blood that we were having to work this case
in had it happen there, and that I had a
mass shooting where I fell in the blood actually pulled
a groin muscle. It's those little things that you remember
about cases like that. But that case where the individuals,
where the individuals stabbed like two times, that's an anomaly.
(09:02):
But you know, when you begin to think about fifty,
at some point in tom you're going to hit a
point where before and as well, probably well before you
get to fifty, where the individual will have ceased to
have been breathing. Kind of goes without saying, however, it's
(09:23):
important to understand when you talk about order, because that's
one of the big questions people always ask, right, they
want to know what order, What was the first the
first insult that was sustained. It's almost impossible to do,
particularly with these kinds of numbers. The best you can
(09:44):
do is say this is anti mortem and this is
post mortem, and the only delineation there is one will
have hemorrhage, and one want I'll give you a great example.
You go back to Jody Arius and Travis Alexander. Well,
she brutalized him and stabbed him so many times when
he was in the shower, continued to attack him and
(10:07):
he's trying to move away from her down that hallway.
Then I think she straddled his back, pulled his head
back by the forehead, and cut his throat. And then
it's like an afterthought, because that was one of the
big questions in this case. You know which came first,
and you think the back would travels Alexander because he's
in the shower those infamous photos. How can you forget
(10:31):
where he's looking over his shoulder and she begins to
hammer on him with his knife. The delineation in that
case was that he had a he had a gunshot
wound that she had inflicted upon him. I think it
was the left a Ford parietal area or the left
(10:51):
temple and it went diagonally across his head and lodged low.
There was no there was no hem in that one track.
So after all she had done to him, she said, well, yeah,
I think I'll just pop a round off into his
head while I'm at it, and there was no man.
So the best we can do most of the time, Dave,
(11:12):
unless you have an eyewitness, the best you can do
is to say this is either in the anti mortem
state or the post mortem state. But I do know this,
while this crime was being perpetrated within one hundred yards
of a bus stop, this killer was leaving behind information
(11:38):
with each swing and each thrust of that blade that
would eventually, all these decades later end in him being convicted. Okay,
(12:04):
let's set the scene here. This is in September, Palo Alto, California.
We're probably I've never been to Palo Alto, but I
get the impression that Palo Alto would not exist if
Stanford University was not there. Probably it would be kind
of a you know, an afterthought. It would be a tiny,
little little town. But because Stanford is there, it you know,
(12:26):
it's the hub that draws everything in. And of course,
now you look at Palo Alto and Silicon Valley and
all of that, isn't that amazing You look at the
history of that location that all the stuff is built
up around it as a result of it. But you've
got this young girl that is found, according to what
we are understanding, is found adjacent to or leaning up
(12:49):
against a cinder block wall. Now they don't go in
great detail about the nature of how she was found
positionality of the body, but it is kind of implied
in some of my readings that she was essentially seated
against it or lying against it. Immediately adjacent there would
(13:12):
have been David got to tell you, there would have
been a tremendous amount of blood at the scene. And
it's one thing to see blood in a house, but
there's something about seeing it in the daylight when you're
outside and you've got natural light to expose everything and
(13:32):
something this horrific. Those kind of cases for me, like
even cases I had where people took their own lives
with like shotguns and that sort of thing. Outside it
was always more striking to me for some reason than
being inside. I think a lot of it has to
do with the way I view things and how I
see it, and particularly it's natural light. It's hard to
(13:53):
escape natural light, and so when it's on full view.
Those cops that would have shown up at that scene
back in eighty two, they would have drawn on a
brows day.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
So he's looking at that because her home was in
Palo Alto and this was in Sunny Vale, nine miles
to the south. And I'm thinking about the scene that
you were talking about it being daytime when they actually,
you know, find the next morning. And I was thinking, Okay, well,
let's assume, and I think we can because she was
going to catch the bus around midnight and sometime between
(14:25):
the time she was going to catch that bus and
the time her body was found. This murder takes place
in the dark behind a cinderblock wall. It might have
seemed like a private place to carry out this horrific
but during the daylight, where you can see everything, that
(14:48):
would be the shocking to me. It'd be like, how
did you get away with it? It was dark, nobody
could see, and behind that wall, you've got traffic, you
got a lot going on hand over the mouth, and
you know, you've got control of the city situation. So
in the daytime, you would see it for everything that's
out there, every place somebody should have looked, could have seen.
My time, you can't see that, or you don't look
(15:10):
that far off the road. I mean, if you're talking
fifty to one hundred yards away from a bus stop,
area behind a wall. That tells me a lot. It
tells me. It does kind of surprise me that it
happened the way it did because of the fact that
it was at a bus stop or near a bus stop,
you would think somebody else would have been there, you know.
(15:31):
I guess that's what I keep wondering. Where was the
help with investigators, because you said that when they got there,
they would have taken a step back, they would have
been shot with it.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yeah, they would have. They would have drawn a breath.
And here's a couple of things that you know, I
haven't quite revealed yet that I want to, you know,
kind of tell you about. First off, it's a bit
more than fifty it's right at about fifty nine. Okay,
sharp force ND injuries that you sustained, and there's some
that are that are very very critical here and we
(16:03):
can get into that. But let's let's revisit the scene.
You know, it was when she's visiting her boyfriend who's seventeen.
He had a curfew, all right, and he had actually
stated at that time when they interviewed him that because
of the late hour, he was worried about being grounded
(16:26):
from missing his midnight curfew, so he headed home after
he essentially walked her towards the bus stop. So somebody
was there lurking in the shadows, and this brick wall,
this center block wall, which by the way, would wind
up effectively being stained with her blood. And they're saying that,
(16:54):
you know that relative to the center block wall, that
it was a tremendous man of blood that was there.
Somebody would have been off the beaten path, maybe in
a darkened area, watching her. And you know, I don't
know that she was specifically targeted. He may this perpetrator
(17:18):
may very well have been trying all day long or
all evening long, just to find a female that would
satisfy his desires at that point, Tom and here comes
this fifteen year old, and let's let's just think about
you know what it's like to be a fifteen year
old and you're you know, you're out there in the world,
(17:40):
particularly back during this day and a I mean that
particular time in history. You know, when you saw an
adult and they give you some kind of directive or
they're speaking to you, they're not generally going to be
dismissed if he calls her over and all it takes
is she's fifteen, she's there by herself, it's at midnight,
(18:01):
and he calls her over, you know, and might say,
you need to look out. There's there's people lurking about here.
You need to be safe. And she's distracted because she's
looking around. He grabs her and then he begins to
assault her. But he moved her away from the bus
stop over one hundred yards. The question or close to
one hundred yards. The question is did he lure her,
(18:23):
did he force her at the end of a knife
to walk over there? Did he just pick her up
and towed her off if you will? You know, who
knows exactly how she was tempted to go over there.
But the next morning, when the police arrived, they saw
(18:44):
something quite interesting in the dirt. And this is something
we really haven't talked talked much about on bodybacks during
you know, in any of our coverages. When they got there,
one of the things that they determined was that there
the dirt and the leaves had been kicked around that
(19:07):
area had been moved, so you have like scuff marks
in the dirt, any kind of debris that's on the
ground has been moved. About what that tells you is
is that when that got over to the wall, Because
my impression is this is immediately adjacent the wall. She's
alive when she gets there, and that fits into our time,
(19:28):
you know, when you're trying to understand the dynamics of
how she gets from the bus stop to that wall.
Was she still walking toward the bus stop and he
grabs her and pulls her in behind the wall, or
did he lure her from the bus stop? And those
are certainly things to be taken into consideration. I got
to tell you if you're you know, one of the
(19:49):
things that you would do. First off, if they noticed
that there were scuff marks and prints in that dirt,
you have to assume that the purpose trader would have
left some as well, so you would cast those. You
would actually do do castings of those shoe impressions, take photographs.
(20:14):
If they're deep enough, you can do casting, which is
where we mix up what's called dental stone. It's actually
the same stuff that dentures are made out of, and
we pour that into the depressed areas, use it a
lot with tire tracks, and it forms it form an
impression or a casting as it is of these elements
(20:37):
that can be tied back. If you ever find that
particular tire, you can look at the cast that you
took the scenes see if it marys up. Same thing
with shoes. Shoes have very distinctive patterns. If they found
her shoe prints out there and they're adjacent, and I'm
assuming that she's probably rather diminutive, all of our images
look like she is, you would see a stark difference
(21:01):
between what her footprints look like and what his look
like depend upon the types of shoes they were wearing.
Let's say, if he's got a smooth, smooth soled leather
shoe on, he's wearing a pair of I'm thinking back
in nineteen eighty two, a pair of zip up floor
shine boots or something, you know. And he's out there
and he's contesting with her, and she's got on a
(21:23):
pair of kads sneakers, Well, those have a very distinctive pattern.
I always prefer kids or converse when I was a kid,
and they have this kind of unique waffle pattern to them. Well,
that's distinctive to that shoe. If you look at her shoes,
you can actually say, yet, this is in fact, this
does look similar to the shoes that she has on
(21:45):
her feet when she died, But we don't know about
these others and some of the other considerations you take
into account relative to shoe and tire impressions as you
begin to think about the weight of an individual. You know,
So let's just take a truck for instance. If you've
got a four to f one fifty pickup truck and
(22:07):
it has nothing in the bed of the truck, and
you drive over over a dirt road, well that impression
will be there, but it's going to be not as deep.
Makes sense. It's kind of logical if you've got sacks
of concrete in the back of the truck that you're
taking out somewhere to build something to pour concrete. You know,
(22:29):
we've all seen these trucks. The shocks are under stressed
in the back. The front end would be up in
the air, so those tire tracks are going to be
much deeper with something like that. Well, the same thing
with the human being. If you're talking about a grown
mail which he was, he's going to have first off,
(22:52):
a different shoe size. It'll be larger. You'll be able
to tell that right away, and also his weight because
they're standing on the same surface, Dave the same type
of surface, so his would be deeper as opposed to
her as being more shallow. And then you can look
at the prince to see how they're kind of if
the types of movements that we're going on all right,
(23:15):
are there scuff marks where the edges of the shoes
are being almost like a plow where they're moving the
dirt away, that implies that she's being drug Right, you
can have kind of elliptical if she's knocked out, he's
got his hands under her armpits and he's dragging her.
Her heels are touching the ground. That drag mark is
(23:36):
going to look completely different than, say, for instance, if
he's dragging her from the side. So people that do
impression evidence like that have got a real keen eye
for the sort of thing much better than say, for instance,
I do. But it's indicative of movement and activity at
the scene. So based upon that alone, we know that Karen,
(24:00):
when she arrived at that location and when the scuffle
took place, she was still in the land of living.
But after the scuffle ended, her death was at hand.
And oh my, the injury she's just snained. Let me
(24:30):
paint the picture for you when you're at a death
scene and you have someone that has been so severely traumatized.
There actually been cases where I have gone out to
a scene where someone has been stabbed through their shirt.
There was so much blood that had saturated through the anterior,
(24:54):
which means the front of the body, and also posterior.
It obviously didn't go through the body, but they had
multiple stab woinds on the back as well. David, you know,
I couldn't even tell the color of the shirt. Sometimes
the volume of blood can diminish everything else, and you
have no idea as to what you're looking at because
(25:15):
you know that someone has been traumatized. You might see
a few gaping wounds, but you'll never understand the full
depth and breadth until you get them back to the
morgue and you get them cleaned up, and then suddenly
again it's like sunlight hitting when those surgical lights hit
that body and you begin to see all of those
(25:37):
I would like to refer to them with single edge blades,
the winking eye as I call it, single edge blade.
They all look like winking eyes. That's the stab ons.
And you're thinking, oh my lord, this is absolutely indescribable.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
When there are this many stabloons where you're talking fifty nine, yeah,
you know, or more really tend to think of a
frenzied stabbing going on, lots of just fighting screen. You
know that a lot of them are going to be slices,
just frenzied movement, not just all you know, Alfred Hitchcock's
psycho in the shower stabbing, you know. Yeah, And I
(26:15):
don't know what that actually means though with fifty nine stabbing,
is it overkill or was she fighting in such way
as that only one or two of these was a
massive shit where all the rest we're a bunch of
these cuts. Oh my god, there's fifty nine. I guess
I'm just trying to figure out why why were there
(26:36):
so many that? There's no way, I mean, the overkill
almost indicates a personal relationship with somebody. You don't find
that in stranger things like this.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Do you you do when you're doing with somebody the psychotic? Okay, yeah,
that's really my only my only answer to that. I
don't know what you're looking at.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
The boyfriend though, weren't.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
They yeah, oh oh my gosh, yeah, I know that
they were. And look sometimes and I don't know how
long it took them to get off of him as
a suspect. And sometimes you know, because cops are going
to press, they have to press at that moment time
because you get one one swing at the ball, all right.
But I think that many times when when you get
(27:18):
onto an intimate and you begin to look at them
and it turns out they're not involved. If if you
get tunnel vision, that's a very dangerous place to be
in investigatively because for every second that you're not looking
at somebody else, you're going down this kind of this
(27:40):
linear timeline where you're moving further and further away from
the actual event, and that individual physically is getting away,
and they're getting away. You know. I don't want to
overstate this, but let's just say that biologically, any kind
of evidence is getting away because you have to assume
(28:02):
that when the perpetrator left Karen Dave, he's super saturated. Man,
So anything he would have had on he's had a
time to shower. Now he's had a time to discard
whatever kind of clothing he was wearing at that moment.
Time maybe burned it, you never know, and it's gone.
(28:23):
He could have had it sent to the city dump
at that you know, by that time he could have
thrown it in a dumpster on his way back to
his domicile. You just you never know, and so time
is critical here. When but when they did Karen's examination
back at the Morgue, Dave, you mentioned something and I
(28:47):
think that this was the point that you were trying
to get at. Did she fight back? Were these defensive wounds? Dave?
According to the forensic pathologist in this particular case, you know,
to give you an idea about how old this case is,
the forensic pathologists that did the autopsy, I think he
(29:08):
died like back in two thousand and six or two
thousand and seven. All right, so he's been and he
was an old member, yeah, and he's gone. You know,
at this point in time, he actually documented the fifty
nine strikes that she had had, Dave, Karen was stabbed.
(29:30):
Are you ready for this? Eighteen times in the heart?
Eighteen times in the heart. That if you were firing
a weapon, Okay, if you were firing a weapon at
a target, you know the silhouette targets that you use
and you try to hit center mass, and you know
they have the head on them. They have a circle
(29:51):
in the middle of the head. You try to aim
for that. If they tell you to take a headshot
when you're qualifying and you have center mass, that's an
incredible shot. Group. If you're firing a firearm, okay, that
means that you're putting those rounds right in that same spot.
Somebody's not going to be moving in the midst of this.
That's why I think that a lot of these you're
(30:13):
talking about eighteen wounds to the heart, now, that's what
the pathologists documented. So in a tight little if you
just think about a tight little circle adjacent to your sternum. Okay,
that's just to the left side of your sternum. In
that space, there would have had to been eighteen individual well,
(30:34):
like I said earlier, winking eyes. Just think about that,
and these are all penetrating her heart, every single one
of them. And he didn't stop there. The thing about
it is is that Karen had injuries to her neck,
her chest, her abdomen, and her back. I often think that,
(30:55):
you know, sometimes when we're attacked, there's like this thing
that I've seen happened with individuals that get attack attacked
and they kind of go into I call it like
a turtle posture, where they will we kind of curl
up many times, you know how they tell you to
react if there's a charging bear coming. You know, you
kind of get into a ball. But that's kind of
(31:16):
a natural reaction. Many times when you're overwhelmed by trauma,
you kind of go into a fetal position. I'm thinking
that the injuries that she had on her back was
not a reactive thing. And he's, you know, he stabbing
her on her back and then he flips her over.
He starts stabbing her anteriorly. But I got to tell you, Dave,
(31:36):
not only did she sustain eighteen stablings to the heart,
she also stabbed was stabbed ten times in her lungs
as well. Again you know they're lateral of the heart,
left and the right, and so he's all over her
chest at this point in tom he stabbed her in
(31:56):
the throat, in the neck, and he actually punctured her layering.
He got her trachea, and the larynx is essentially superior
to the trachia. Trachea is actually what people referred to
as the wind pipe. And this is not surprising, but
he went through the trachea and actually, well, I don't know,
(32:17):
let me get my anatomis right here, went into the
trachia and went into the esophagus as well. So he
is just absolutely riddled Karen with all of these injuries.
And again it brings us back to this idea of
how much anger had to be involved. But I think
people would love to know and try to understand how
(32:41):
did this guy get away with this because we're talking
decades later now, until he was hooked up and it
was actually his own biology that sealed his fate.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Dave, Yeah, it was his daughter, wasn't it. I got
her DNA. Well back to this at the moment when
I mentioned his boyfriend, her boyfriend, Yeah, because it was
so overkill and so personal. It was his DNA the
freedom obviously that got them off of him. But between
nineteen eighty two and the time that they actually finally
(33:19):
did eliminate him, it had to have been a number
of years they had to have had that in the
back of their head, because they did they didn't have
I mean, we didn't develop the DNA we have now
that we take for granted, is not even what we
had during the O J. Simpsons, crioal No as a
matter of fact, the first time.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
I know I've said this before, but if any if
anyone is really interested in that interesting cat to look up,
check out Sir Alan Jefferies. And he is the first,
and he's British and he is the keep. He's he's
like on my uh, if I had, if I had
a stack of baseball cards, a forensic scientists, he's one
of the people I want to have signed my card.
(33:56):
He's actually the first cat that had utility for DNA
in crime science and he didn't come about. And that's
the infamous pitchfork case that took place. That's a guy's name,
actually took place in Great Britain back in eighty four,
(34:17):
and he saw the utility for it. And starting back
in eighty four, that's two years after and that's in
Great Britain, you know, before we really understood the utility
of it. This is in eighty two, and it was.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Eighty seven or eighty eight before it was ever even
used in a trial in the US.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Right, Yeah, I think that that's accurate.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
And again the think is that I'm just thinking about
this poor kid. I'm thinking about the seventeen year old
kid in nineteen eighty two. Yeah, who seems like a
likely suspect for killing his girlfriend. And he can't say
I didn't do it. He was with her up until
I mean, he was right there walking her to the
bus stole. I mean, I just all I can think
of what his life, you know, I mean, God love
(35:03):
her for fifteen year old self dead in her family.
I just I get my heart breaks for all of them.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
But yeah, but the thing about it is for him though,
that would be lingering. It kind of chases you through
your life, I can only imagine. And he might get
a respite and not think about it, but your thoughts
are always going to drift back to it. And you
know you're sitting there, you know good and well that
you didn't do this thing right, but you keep And
(35:29):
I'm sure that part of him was probably hoping that
somebody would eventually and not just to free him of it.
But you know, he cared for this young girl at
that particular time in his life. He wanted to see
it solved, I'm sure, as her family did. But yeah,
for the suspect involved in this case, Dave, and this
(35:50):
does not surprise me in the least bit. First Off,
the one thing that I failed to mention is that
there was some interesting activity that went on with her body.
And I think that it's important that you know that
we kind of take note of this. This this reeks
of not just savagery, but there's a touch of sadism
(36:13):
here too. She was actually found new Dave, and her
wrist had been bound behind her back with her shirt
and her jacket was tied around her ankles, so she's
essentially immobilized in that state. I would I think that
(36:38):
for me, I would have loved to have known what
the types of knots that were used, how how robust
the knots were, how much tension was placed on the wrist,
did they leave a mark? You know, these bindings. You
don't normally see something that's that has that much surface
area that's going to you know, like if you use
(37:01):
a piece of rope, for instance, and you can see
binding marks on the wrist or the ankles because it
cuts a deep furrow. Same thing, the same principle that
we apply with hangings. But I would like to know
how tightly she was tied. This child was terrified, Dave,
because I have to assume that happened in life. He
wanted to have complete and total access to her, but
(37:23):
she was in fact raped as well, so you've got
biological deposition from him there. And here's the other thing, Dave,
this guy was in a frenzy. He apparently cut hisself
because his blood was there as well, and back in
eighty two, and I wonder how long it kind of
took them to kind of sust this out, because in
(37:45):
eighty two, all we had was blood typing. You know,
we talked about this recently. You know, we had zerology
where you know, you're you're looking at the scene and
you want to type the blood. The boyfriend, unless he
had the same tie of blood as him, could have
been eliminated based upon that bit of blood that was
(38:06):
left behind, because it wasn't Karen's blood, so there was
blood that was left behind. And again here's another great
case of law enforcement officials that have preserved evidence, Dave,
this keeps popping out. I love this. I love the
fact that these folks are preserving this evidence for so
long that it can still be tested.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
It's amazing that here we are in twenty twenty five
and they're able to test materials now back from the
set as well. The sixties too, But in this particular case,
this one actually came down to the it's the type
of work that authoram does. It's the type of work
that was used to catch the Golden State killer using
(38:53):
the genetic genealogy to which is how they were able
to Finally, because his daughter did did she like submit
her did she donate her blood to something else, her
DNA to like a twenty three and meters or did
they come Well.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
It would be an open it would be a sample
had to have been submitted to to an open source
to an open source directory. It can't like I was
one like me is not is not open source, so
it would have to be another one. It's the same
databases that author relies on as well. And at some
(39:33):
point in time, somebody deposited a DNA sample and you know,
you look at I don't know, you began to think
about you know, they've they've got they've got a cold
case unit there. I think it's uh Santa Clara, Santa
Clara County, I think is the name of it. Uh.
(39:54):
They've got a they've got a cold case unit there
within the DA office and they've been looking at cases.
You know what, what can we get off of the
off of the books. And it was in twenty nineteen
that the cold case supervisor, a fellow named Rob Baker,
you know, got involved with this and decided, you know, hey,
(40:17):
you know, I'll spend the wheel here and see if
we can't maybe get a DNA genealogist to find some
leads in this case, because thing's gone cold. But you know,
a PA cop understands that you've got this much physical evidence.
And it was you know, I think twenty nineteen that
(40:43):
they actually get an indication that the suspect was one
and did this was one of four brothers that lived
in Fresno. Wow, you know, you think you think about that,
And of course the one that was the one that
was settled upon had been living in Hawaii or they
(41:04):
had lived in Fresno for a period of time. The
perpetrator is wound up wound up in Hawaiian had been
there for decades and he's the one that they eventually
wound up hooking up on this thing.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Seventy eight year old Gary Ramirez is the person arrested
in charge with Joe. Why after forty three years we're
investigators able to move forward with Ramirez as the suspect.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
The evidence in this case, looking back on it now,
is so overwhelming that the perpetrator in this case has
in fact been convicted at this point in time. Just
has this is hot off the press and Dave, he
played no contest.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
With that, no contest Palid Joe Gary Ramirez, who is
seventy eight years old, is sentenced to life with possible
parole after twenty five years, meaning when he's one hundred
and three years old he can see Pearl.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks
Body times with Joseph's Gotten More. I love language. I
love studying language. I guess you know. People have come
to me and they have asked me before, if you
weren't doing what you do or what you did, you know, emmy,
what would you what would you do otherwise? And it's like,
(00:22):
you know, I got to tell you. I you think.
When I was a little boy, I thought I wanted
to be an archaeologist, and then got older and I
thought I wanted to be a historian. And I suddenly
came to my senses and realized that you could make
a living at it. But in the last few years,
(00:43):
I've gotten where I really and I'm such a nerd.
I really enjoy watching linguistic videos on YouTube. The reason
I enjoy it it combines history with language. And I
can't speak a foreign language. I know bits and pieces
of Spanish, a little bit of French, not much, but
(01:03):
I love to study origins. And today I wanted to
throw a word out to you that has been used
for years. As a matter of fact, the first time
that it actually entered in to our language sphere was
in the twelfth century. Actually in Middle English. The word
(01:29):
actually derives from an old English word, and since then
it has been used to describe things that are horrific,
things that most people would not expect to see. Certainly,
it generally involves blood. In particularly it involves death. That
(01:52):
word is grisly. I have trouble pronouncing that word many
times because I get it confused with grizzly. But for
a grizzly murder to take place, it has to be
blood saturated. And regarding the case we're going to talk
(02:12):
about today, that term continues to pop up in every
single article that I've come across. But here's the upside.
Today We're going to talk about a homicide, a very
brutal homicide that was committed all the way back in
(02:34):
nineteen eighty two. And guess what I can sit here
today and say that they have finally made an arrest
in the case of Karen Stitt. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is bodybags. Sometimes, Dave find I love language,
(03:02):
but sometimes as I move on down the line in life,
words fail me many times, And I don't know if
it's my memory or if I've got so much stuff
jammed into my attic. You know inside of my skull
that you know useless trivia. I think somebody told me, well, actually,
(03:25):
I think it was giming me. She said, you've gotten
more useless trivia jammed into your brain than anyone I
have ever met. I don't do well when we go
to trivia things, but lord, I love to have healthy
discussions about language, and about words and their origins and
and on body bags. I try to introduce people to
(03:47):
new terms that they might not be familiar with. I
think I've probably introduced you to a few along the way,
to your chagrin. Many times it's like, man, I wish
you hadn't introduced me or expose me to this. But
you know, it's some words failure, you know, when you're
trying to to describe something. And of course the case
(04:07):
that we're talking about today is absolutely brutal.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
In this particular case, you know, we have a young
girl fifteen years old that is stabbed over fifty times
near a bus stop. It wasn't at the bus stop,
but it was close enough nearby where they knew that's
where she was headed. You would think with that type
of murder there would be plenty of evidence to solve this,
(04:33):
but not. It didn't. I mean, here we are in
twenty twenty five and we're talking about this because they
finally have got an arrest.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
The level of brutality here, I got to tell you, you know,
she and this would be this is my knee jerk reaction.
You know where I'm going to go with this. She
was going to visit her boyfriend. And what are we
seeing over and over and over again in all of
these cases that you and did you realize that we're
right on the cusp of hitting three hundred and eighty
(05:03):
episodes of Bodybags? It makes your head swim. That's like
an eye watering number in it. But we've been grinding, man,
So out of all of this time that you and
I have spent in front of the microphone talking to
one another, there are certain things that we've imparted to
one another because of all these cases that we cover.
(05:25):
The one thread that runs through something like a case
like this, and we'll get into the level of violence here,
is that idea about intimates those people that are within
the circle. And you think about young Caring here fifteen
years old, man, fifteen years old, and she is literally
(05:49):
ripped a shred and it's not like this, this was
in a place like a hidden place. Really, you know
what I'm saying. It's not like it was someplace that
where she's been taken off in the woods. We're talking
about an event that occurred one hundred yards away from
(06:10):
the bus stop. David, you know what this sounds like
to me? And that's why I would go as an investigator.
You know, got to tell you the boyfriend, his butt's
going in a seat and we're going to have a
long conversation. I know, the detectives would This sounds like
a reactionary kind of thing. You know, like something passed
(06:32):
between two people that were intimately involved with another and
I don't mean necessarily in a sexual sense, but that
had a relationship with one another. Something was said. Because
it takes it takes that kind of passion that you
find in amorous relationships in order to fuel this kind
(06:54):
of brutality. It's almost this is almost when I talk
about these injury he said, I'm going to talk about
in just a bit, it's it's animalistic, Okay. Because she
has been assaulted so severely and in such a degrading way,
you have to think did this person know her? Because
(07:16):
would who in the world could be Dave this angry.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I just dumbfounded that a fifteen year old girl could
be raped and murdered and stab I mean, that's overkilled,
stabbing fifty times. Do we know we're I mean I
know when I tend to think about its stabbing, I
think about every one of them being a fatal strike,
and that's not the case. When you actually start breaking
(07:41):
that down, do you look at that which, Yeah, I
know you had to figure out which were the fatal wounds,
But can you determine when you've got that many the
order or the ones that could have caused her death
or is it a combination of all of them or
was there one strike? Can you tell with all the blood,
can you tell which one was last and which one
was first and whether it was live at the end.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah, it's very difficult, particularly when you have this I'm
talking about in terms of forensic pathology. When you have
this astronomical number, this is not something you would normally see. Now.
I've I've had cases where I've had individuals that were stabbed.
I think the most I ever had was like two
(08:21):
hundred times, and the person was like ground beef afterwards,
and it was a lover's quarrel two dudes went at
each other. One of the other times in my career
where I actually slipped at the scene and fell into
blood because there was blood. It was like a river
(08:42):
of blood that we were having to work this case
in had it happen there, and that I had a
mass shooting where I fell in the blood actually pulled
a groin muscle. It's those little things that you remember
about cases like that. But that case where the individuals,
where the individuals stabbed like two times, that's an anomaly.
(09:02):
But you know, when you begin to think about fifty,
at some point in tom you're going to hit a
point where before and as well, probably well before you
get to fifty, where the individual will have ceased to
have been breathing. Kind of goes without saying, however, it's
(09:23):
important to understand when you talk about order, because that's
one of the big questions people always ask, right, they
want to know what order, What was the first the
first insult that was sustained. It's almost impossible to do,
particularly with these kinds of numbers. The best you can
(09:44):
do is say this is anti mortem and this is
post mortem, and the only delineation there is one will
have hemorrhage, and one want I'll give you a great example.
You go back to Jody Arius and Travis Alexander. Well,
she brutalized him and stabbed him so many times when
he was in the shower, continued to attack him and
(10:07):
he's trying to move away from her down that hallway.
Then I think she straddled his back, pulled his head
back by the forehead, and cut his throat. And then
it's like an afterthought, because that was one of the
big questions in this case. You know which came first,
and you think the back would travels Alexander because he's
in the shower those infamous photos. How can you forget
(10:31):
where he's looking over his shoulder and she begins to
hammer on him with his knife. The delineation in that
case was that he had a he had a gunshot
wound that she had inflicted upon him. I think it
was the left a Ford parietal area or the left
(10:51):
temple and it went diagonally across his head and lodged low.
There was no there was no hem in that one track.
So after all she had done to him, she said, well, yeah,
I think I'll just pop a round off into his
head while I'm at it, and there was no man.
So the best we can do most of the time, Dave,
(11:12):
unless you have an eyewitness, the best you can do
is to say this is either in the anti mortem
state or the post mortem state. But I do know this,
while this crime was being perpetrated within one hundred yards
of a bus stop, this killer was leaving behind information
(11:38):
with each swing and each thrust of that blade that
would eventually, all these decades later end in him being convicted. Okay,
(12:04):
let's set the scene here. This is in September, Palo Alto, California.
We're probably I've never been to Palo Alto, but I
get the impression that Palo Alto would not exist if
Stanford University was not there. Probably it would be kind
of a you know, an afterthought. It would be a tiny,
little little town. But because Stanford is there, it you know,
(12:26):
it's the hub that draws everything in. And of course,
now you look at Palo Alto and Silicon Valley and
all of that, isn't that amazing You look at the
history of that location that all the stuff is built
up around it as a result of it. But you've
got this young girl that is found, according to what
we are understanding, is found adjacent to or leaning up
(12:49):
against a cinder block wall. Now they don't go in
great detail about the nature of how she was found
positionality of the body, but it is kind of implied
in some of my readings that she was essentially seated
against it or lying against it. Immediately adjacent there would
(13:12):
have been David got to tell you, there would have
been a tremendous amount of blood at the scene. And
it's one thing to see blood in a house, but
there's something about seeing it in the daylight when you're
outside and you've got natural light to expose everything and
(13:32):
something this horrific. Those kind of cases for me, like
even cases I had where people took their own lives
with like shotguns and that sort of thing. Outside it
was always more striking to me for some reason than
being inside. I think a lot of it has to
do with the way I view things and how I
see it, and particularly it's natural light. It's hard to
(13:53):
escape natural light, and so when it's on full view.
Those cops that would have shown up at that scene
back in eighty two, they would have drawn on a
brows day.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
So he's looking at that because her home was in
Palo Alto and this was in Sunny Vale, nine miles
to the south. And I'm thinking about the scene that
you were talking about it being daytime when they actually,
you know, find the next morning. And I was thinking, Okay, well,
let's assume, and I think we can because she was
going to catch the bus around midnight and sometime between
(14:25):
the time she was going to catch that bus and
the time her body was found. This murder takes place
in the dark behind a cinderblock wall. It might have
seemed like a private place to carry out this horrific
but during the daylight, where you can see everything, that
(14:48):
would be the shocking to me. It'd be like, how
did you get away with it? It was dark, nobody
could see, and behind that wall, you've got traffic, you
got a lot going on hand over the mouth, and
you know, you've got control of the city situation. So
in the daytime, you would see it for everything that's
out there, every place somebody should have looked, could have seen.
My time, you can't see that, or you don't look
(15:10):
that far off the road. I mean, if you're talking
fifty to one hundred yards away from a bus stop,
area behind a wall. That tells me a lot. It
tells me. It does kind of surprise me that it
happened the way it did because of the fact that
it was at a bus stop or near a bus stop,
you would think somebody else would have been there, you know.
(15:31):
I guess that's what I keep wondering. Where was the
help with investigators, because you said that when they got there,
they would have taken a step back, they would have
been shot with it.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yeah, they would have. They would have drawn a breath.
And here's a couple of things that you know, I
haven't quite revealed yet that I want to, you know,
kind of tell you about. First off, it's a bit
more than fifty it's right at about fifty nine. Okay,
sharp force ND injuries that you sustained, and there's some
that are that are very very critical here and we
(16:03):
can get into that. But let's let's revisit the scene.
You know, it was when she's visiting her boyfriend who's seventeen.
He had a curfew, all right, and he had actually
stated at that time when they interviewed him that because
of the late hour, he was worried about being grounded
(16:26):
from missing his midnight curfew, so he headed home after
he essentially walked her towards the bus stop. So somebody
was there lurking in the shadows, and this brick wall,
this center block wall, which by the way, would wind
up effectively being stained with her blood. And they're saying that,
(16:54):
you know that relative to the center block wall, that
it was a tremendous man of blood that was there.
Somebody would have been off the beaten path, maybe in
a darkened area, watching her. And you know, I don't
know that she was specifically targeted. He may this perpetrator
(17:18):
may very well have been trying all day long or
all evening long, just to find a female that would
satisfy his desires at that point, Tom and here comes
this fifteen year old, and let's let's just think about
you know what it's like to be a fifteen year
old and you're you know, you're out there in the world,
(17:40):
particularly back during this day and a I mean that
particular time in history. You know, when you saw an
adult and they give you some kind of directive or
they're speaking to you, they're not generally going to be
dismissed if he calls her over and all it takes
is she's fifteen, she's there by herself, it's at midnight,
(18:01):
and he calls her over, you know, and might say,
you need to look out. There's there's people lurking about here.
You need to be safe. And she's distracted because she's
looking around. He grabs her and then he begins to
assault her. But he moved her away from the bus
stop over one hundred yards. The question or close to
one hundred yards. The question is did he lure her,
(18:23):
did he force her at the end of a knife
to walk over there? Did he just pick her up
and towed her off if you will? You know, who
knows exactly how she was tempted to go over there.
But the next morning, when the police arrived, they saw
(18:44):
something quite interesting in the dirt. And this is something
we really haven't talked talked much about on bodybacks during
you know, in any of our coverages. When they got there,
one of the things that they determined was that there
the dirt and the leaves had been kicked around that
(19:07):
area had been moved, so you have like scuff marks
in the dirt, any kind of debris that's on the
ground has been moved. About what that tells you is
is that when that got over to the wall, Because
my impression is this is immediately adjacent the wall. She's
alive when she gets there, and that fits into our time,
(19:28):
you know, when you're trying to understand the dynamics of
how she gets from the bus stop to that wall.
Was she still walking toward the bus stop and he
grabs her and pulls her in behind the wall, or
did he lure her from the bus stop? And those
are certainly things to be taken into consideration. I got
to tell you if you're you know, one of the
(19:49):
things that you would do. First off, if they noticed
that there were scuff marks and prints in that dirt,
you have to assume that the purpose trader would have
left some as well, so you would cast those. You
would actually do do castings of those shoe impressions, take photographs.
(20:14):
If they're deep enough, you can do casting, which is
where we mix up what's called dental stone. It's actually
the same stuff that dentures are made out of, and
we pour that into the depressed areas, use it a
lot with tire tracks, and it forms it form an
impression or a casting as it is of these elements
(20:37):
that can be tied back. If you ever find that
particular tire, you can look at the cast that you
took the scenes see if it marys up. Same thing
with shoes. Shoes have very distinctive patterns. If they found
her shoe prints out there and they're adjacent, and I'm
assuming that she's probably rather diminutive, all of our images
look like she is, you would see a stark difference
(21:01):
between what her footprints look like and what his look
like depend upon the types of shoes they were wearing.
Let's say, if he's got a smooth, smooth soled leather
shoe on, he's wearing a pair of I'm thinking back
in nineteen eighty two, a pair of zip up floor
shine boots or something, you know. And he's out there
and he's contesting with her, and she's got on a
(21:23):
pair of kads sneakers, Well, those have a very distinctive pattern.
I always prefer kids or converse when I was a kid,
and they have this kind of unique waffle pattern to them. Well,
that's distinctive to that shoe. If you look at her shoes,
you can actually say, yet, this is in fact, this
does look similar to the shoes that she has on
(21:45):
her feet when she died, But we don't know about
these others and some of the other considerations you take
into account relative to shoe and tire impressions as you
begin to think about the weight of an individual. You know,
So let's just take a truck for instance. If you've
got a four to f one fifty pickup truck and
(22:07):
it has nothing in the bed of the truck, and
you drive over over a dirt road, well that impression
will be there, but it's going to be not as deep.
Makes sense. It's kind of logical if you've got sacks
of concrete in the back of the truck that you're
taking out somewhere to build something to pour concrete. You know,
(22:29):
we've all seen these trucks. The shocks are under stressed
in the back. The front end would be up in
the air, so those tire tracks are going to be
much deeper with something like that. Well, the same thing
with the human being. If you're talking about a grown
mail which he was, he's going to have first off,
(22:52):
a different shoe size. It'll be larger. You'll be able
to tell that right away, and also his weight because
they're standing on the same surface, Dave the same type
of surface, so his would be deeper as opposed to
her as being more shallow. And then you can look
at the prince to see how they're kind of if
the types of movements that we're going on all right,
(23:15):
are there scuff marks where the edges of the shoes
are being almost like a plow where they're moving the
dirt away, that implies that she's being drug Right, you
can have kind of elliptical if she's knocked out, he's
got his hands under her armpits and he's dragging her.
Her heels are touching the ground. That drag mark is
(23:36):
going to look completely different than, say, for instance, if
he's dragging her from the side. So people that do
impression evidence like that have got a real keen eye
for the sort of thing much better than say, for instance,
I do. But it's indicative of movement and activity at
the scene. So based upon that alone, we know that Karen,
(24:00):
when she arrived at that location and when the scuffle
took place, she was still in the land of living.
But after the scuffle ended, her death was at hand.
And oh my, the injury she's just snained. Let me
(24:30):
paint the picture for you when you're at a death
scene and you have someone that has been so severely traumatized.
There actually been cases where I have gone out to
a scene where someone has been stabbed through their shirt.
There was so much blood that had saturated through the anterior,
(24:54):
which means the front of the body, and also posterior.
It obviously didn't go through the body, but they had
multiple stab woinds on the back as well. David, you know,
I couldn't even tell the color of the shirt. Sometimes
the volume of blood can diminish everything else, and you
have no idea as to what you're looking at because
(25:15):
you know that someone has been traumatized. You might see
a few gaping wounds, but you'll never understand the full
depth and breadth until you get them back to the
morgue and you get them cleaned up, and then suddenly
again it's like sunlight hitting when those surgical lights hit
that body and you begin to see all of those
(25:37):
I would like to refer to them with single edge blades,
the winking eye as I call it, single edge blade.
They all look like winking eyes. That's the stab ons.
And you're thinking, oh my lord, this is absolutely indescribable.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
When there are this many stabloons where you're talking fifty nine, yeah,
you know, or more really tend to think of a
frenzied stabbing going on, lots of just fighting screen. You
know that a lot of them are going to be slices,
just frenzied movement, not just all you know, Alfred Hitchcock's
psycho in the shower stabbing, you know. Yeah, And I
(26:15):
don't know what that actually means though with fifty nine stabbing,
is it overkill or was she fighting in such way
as that only one or two of these was a
massive shit where all the rest we're a bunch of
these cuts. Oh my god, there's fifty nine. I guess
I'm just trying to figure out why why were there
(26:36):
so many that? There's no way, I mean, the overkill
almost indicates a personal relationship with somebody. You don't find
that in stranger things like this.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Do you you do when you're doing with somebody the psychotic? Okay, yeah,
that's really my only my only answer to that. I
don't know what you're looking at.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
The boyfriend though, weren't.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
They yeah, oh oh my gosh, yeah, I know that
they were. And look sometimes and I don't know how
long it took them to get off of him as
a suspect. And sometimes you know, because cops are going
to press, they have to press at that moment time
because you get one one swing at the ball, all right.
But I think that many times when when you get
(27:18):
onto an intimate and you begin to look at them
and it turns out they're not involved. If if you
get tunnel vision, that's a very dangerous place to be
in investigatively because for every second that you're not looking
at somebody else, you're going down this kind of this
(27:40):
linear timeline where you're moving further and further away from
the actual event, and that individual physically is getting away,
and they're getting away. You know. I don't want to
overstate this, but let's just say that biologically, any kind
of evidence is getting away because you have to assume
(28:02):
that when the perpetrator left Karen Dave, he's super saturated. Man,
So anything he would have had on he's had a
time to shower. Now he's had a time to discard
whatever kind of clothing he was wearing at that moment.
Time maybe burned it, you never know, and it's gone.
(28:23):
He could have had it sent to the city dump
at that you know, by that time he could have
thrown it in a dumpster on his way back to
his domicile. You just you never know, and so time
is critical here. When but when they did Karen's examination
back at the Morgue, Dave, you mentioned something and I
(28:47):
think that this was the point that you were trying
to get at. Did she fight back? Were these defensive wounds? Dave?
According to the forensic pathologist in this particular case, you know,
to give you an idea about how old this case is,
the forensic pathologists that did the autopsy, I think he
(29:08):
died like back in two thousand and six or two
thousand and seven. All right, so he's been and he
was an old member, yeah, and he's gone. You know,
at this point in time, he actually documented the fifty
nine strikes that she had had, Dave, Karen was stabbed.
(29:30):
Are you ready for this? Eighteen times in the heart?
Eighteen times in the heart. That if you were firing
a weapon, Okay, if you were firing a weapon at
a target, you know the silhouette targets that you use
and you try to hit center mass, and you know
they have the head on them. They have a circle
(29:51):
in the middle of the head. You try to aim
for that. If they tell you to take a headshot
when you're qualifying and you have center mass, that's an
incredible shot. Group. If you're firing a firearm, okay, that
means that you're putting those rounds right in that same spot.
Somebody's not going to be moving in the midst of this.
That's why I think that a lot of these you're
(30:13):
talking about eighteen wounds to the heart, now, that's what
the pathologists documented. So in a tight little if you
just think about a tight little circle adjacent to your sternum. Okay,
that's just to the left side of your sternum. In
that space, there would have had to been eighteen individual well,
(30:34):
like I said earlier, winking eyes. Just think about that,
and these are all penetrating her heart, every single one
of them. And he didn't stop there. The thing about
it is is that Karen had injuries to her neck,
her chest, her abdomen, and her back. I often think that,
(30:55):
you know, sometimes when we're attacked, there's like this thing
that I've seen happened with individuals that get attack attacked
and they kind of go into I call it like
a turtle posture, where they will we kind of curl
up many times, you know how they tell you to
react if there's a charging bear coming. You know, you
kind of get into a ball. But that's kind of
(31:16):
a natural reaction. Many times when you're overwhelmed by trauma,
you kind of go into a fetal position. I'm thinking
that the injuries that she had on her back was
not a reactive thing. And he's, you know, he stabbing
her on her back and then he flips her over.
He starts stabbing her anteriorly. But I got to tell you, Dave,
(31:36):
not only did she sustain eighteen stablings to the heart,
she also stabbed was stabbed ten times in her lungs
as well. Again you know they're lateral of the heart,
left and the right, and so he's all over her
chest at this point in tom he stabbed her in
(31:56):
the throat, in the neck, and he actually punctured her layering.
He got her trachea, and the larynx is essentially superior
to the trachia. Trachea is actually what people referred to
as the wind pipe. And this is not surprising, but
he went through the trachea and actually, well, I don't know,
(32:17):
let me get my anatomis right here, went into the
trachia and went into the esophagus as well. So he
is just absolutely riddled Karen with all of these injuries.
And again it brings us back to this idea of
how much anger had to be involved. But I think
people would love to know and try to understand how
(32:41):
did this guy get away with this because we're talking
decades later now, until he was hooked up and it
was actually his own biology that sealed his fate.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Dave, Yeah, it was his daughter, wasn't it. I got
her DNA. Well back to this at the moment when
I mentioned his boyfriend, her boyfriend, Yeah, because it was
so overkill and so personal. It was his DNA the
freedom obviously that got them off of him. But between
nineteen eighty two and the time that they actually finally
(33:19):
did eliminate him, it had to have been a number
of years they had to have had that in the
back of their head, because they did they didn't have
I mean, we didn't develop the DNA we have now
that we take for granted, is not even what we
had during the O J. Simpsons, crioal No as a
matter of fact, the first time.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
I know I've said this before, but if any if
anyone is really interested in that interesting cat to look up,
check out Sir Alan Jefferies. And he is the first,
and he's British and he is the keep. He's he's
like on my uh, if I had, if I had
a stack of baseball cards, a forensic scientists, he's one
of the people I want to have signed my card.
(33:56):
He's actually the first cat that had utility for DNA
in crime science and he didn't come about. And that's
the infamous pitchfork case that took place. That's a guy's name,
actually took place in Great Britain back in eighty four,
(34:17):
and he saw the utility for it. And starting back
in eighty four, that's two years after and that's in
Great Britain, you know, before we really understood the utility
of it. This is in eighty two, and it was.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Eighty seven or eighty eight before it was ever even
used in a trial in the US.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Right, Yeah, I think that that's accurate.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
And again the think is that I'm just thinking about
this poor kid. I'm thinking about the seventeen year old
kid in nineteen eighty two. Yeah, who seems like a
likely suspect for killing his girlfriend. And he can't say
I didn't do it. He was with her up until
I mean, he was right there walking her to the
bus stole. I mean, I just all I can think
of what his life, you know, I mean, God love
(35:03):
her for fifteen year old self dead in her family.
I just I get my heart breaks for all of them.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
But yeah, but the thing about it is for him though,
that would be lingering. It kind of chases you through
your life, I can only imagine. And he might get
a respite and not think about it, but your thoughts
are always going to drift back to it. And you
know you're sitting there, you know good and well that
you didn't do this thing right, but you keep And
(35:29):
I'm sure that part of him was probably hoping that
somebody would eventually and not just to free him of it.
But you know, he cared for this young girl at
that particular time in his life. He wanted to see
it solved, I'm sure, as her family did. But yeah,
for the suspect involved in this case, Dave, and this
(35:50):
does not surprise me in the least bit. First Off,
the one thing that I failed to mention is that
there was some interesting activity that went on with her body.
And I think that it's important that you know that
we kind of take note of this. This this reeks
of not just savagery, but there's a touch of sadism
(36:13):
here too. She was actually found new Dave, and her
wrist had been bound behind her back with her shirt
and her jacket was tied around her ankles, so she's
essentially immobilized in that state. I would I think that
(36:38):
for me, I would have loved to have known what
the types of knots that were used, how how robust
the knots were, how much tension was placed on the wrist,
did they leave a mark? You know, these bindings. You
don't normally see something that's that has that much surface
area that's going to you know, like if you use
(37:01):
a piece of rope, for instance, and you can see
binding marks on the wrist or the ankles because it
cuts a deep furrow. Same thing, the same principle that
we apply with hangings. But I would like to know
how tightly she was tied. This child was terrified, Dave,
because I have to assume that happened in life. He
wanted to have complete and total access to her, but
(37:23):
she was in fact raped as well, so you've got
biological deposition from him there. And here's the other thing, Dave,
this guy was in a frenzy. He apparently cut hisself
because his blood was there as well, and back in
eighty two, and I wonder how long it kind of
took them to kind of sust this out, because in
(37:45):
eighty two, all we had was blood typing. You know,
we talked about this recently. You know, we had zerology
where you know, you're you're looking at the scene and
you want to type the blood. The boyfriend, unless he
had the same tie of blood as him, could have
been eliminated based upon that bit of blood that was
(38:06):
left behind, because it wasn't Karen's blood, so there was
blood that was left behind. And again here's another great
case of law enforcement officials that have preserved evidence, Dave,
this keeps popping out. I love this. I love the
fact that these folks are preserving this evidence for so
long that it can still be tested.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
It's amazing that here we are in twenty twenty five
and they're able to test materials now back from the
set as well. The sixties too, But in this particular case,
this one actually came down to the it's the type
of work that authoram does. It's the type of work
that was used to catch the Golden State killer using
(38:53):
the genetic genealogy to which is how they were able
to Finally, because his daughter did did she like submit
her did she donate her blood to something else, her
DNA to like a twenty three and meters or did
they come Well.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
It would be an open it would be a sample
had to have been submitted to to an open source
to an open source directory. It can't like I was
one like me is not is not open source, so
it would have to be another one. It's the same
databases that author relies on as well. And at some
(39:33):
point in time, somebody deposited a DNA sample and you know,
you look at I don't know, you began to think
about you know, they've they've got they've got a cold
case unit there. I think it's uh Santa Clara, Santa
Clara County, I think is the name of it. Uh.
(39:54):
They've got a they've got a cold case unit there
within the DA office and they've been looking at cases.
You know what, what can we get off of the
off of the books. And it was in twenty nineteen
that the cold case supervisor, a fellow named Rob Baker,
you know, got involved with this and decided, you know, hey,
(40:17):
you know, I'll spend the wheel here and see if
we can't maybe get a DNA genealogist to find some
leads in this case, because thing's gone cold. But you know,
a PA cop understands that you've got this much physical evidence.
And it was you know, I think twenty nineteen that
(40:43):
they actually get an indication that the suspect was one
and did this was one of four brothers that lived
in Fresno. Wow, you know, you think you think about that,
And of course the one that was the one that
was settled upon had been living in Hawaii or they
(41:04):
had lived in Fresno for a period of time. The
perpetrator is wound up wound up in Hawaiian had been
there for decades and he's the one that they eventually
wound up hooking up on this thing.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Seventy eight year old Gary Ramirez is the person arrested
in charge with Joe. Why after forty three years we're
investigators able to move forward with Ramirez as the suspect.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
The evidence in this case, looking back on it now,
is so overwhelming that the perpetrator in this case has
in fact been convicted at this point in time. Just
has this is hot off the press and Dave, he
played no contest.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
With that, no contest Palid Joe Gary Ramirez, who is
seventy eight years old, is sentenced to life with possible
parole after twenty five years, meaning when he's one hundred
and three years old he can see Pearl.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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