20/20 - The After Show: Badass Detective

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Learn how one officer made arrests in no less than 7 cold cases. From posing as a trash collector, to meeting with a psychic, Det. Hutchison is on a mission for justice.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi there, everybody, and welcome to 2020 The After Show. Always a pleasure to have you all with us. Now, if you've followed us over the years and so many of you have, you know that we often report on stories that really resulted from cold case files. And today, our episode is going to center on a man who some have called a crime-solving hero. His name is Detective Matthew Hutchison. He's with the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety in California. And when he came on board, he made it his mission to try to crack open decades-old mysteries. I mean, families who were left with no resolution to these murders. Well, we're going to look into some of the chilling cases that he's solved and reveal some new details from the victim's family members and uncover some of the unique methods that Detective Hutchison has used to put murderers, longtime murderers behind bars.

Our John Cignonas is here with us today. John, nice to see you. Hi there. Hey. Good to see you, Deb. Thank you for having me on again. Always great. Always great chatting with you, John, because you know, you and I go way back and we can just talk and talk and talk for days about a lot of our stories. But you've seen it all. We've seen it all. And you particularly always bring this interesting spin. I mean, obviously you're just a great storyteller. But this particular look at how we go about solving cold cases and what it means not only to the victim's families, but law enforcement. So you sat down with Detective Hutchison, and you talked about two of the cases involving teenage women. And just give me a sense of him and why you were so intrigued by his work. An amazing guy, Deb. He's very likable. You know, he's humble, and yet he's very ambitious. He joined the police force in Sunnyvale, California in 2008.

And he became a detective just 10 years ago. He's a young guy. He's in his 40s. incredibly dedicated to his work as an investigator, but also dedicated as a father. He's got a wife and these two kids. Pretty amazing guy. Yeah, that drives him too because he does have family and can think about it that way. Some people refer to him as the badass detective, but yet he's sort of this mild-mannered guy. He talked to you about sort of opening the closet, as it were, into some of these old files, deciding to dust them off. And he was sort of hooked in terms of trying to

solve these mysteries, right? He's very much a part of this little town of Sunnyville. He grew up there, went to his high school there, played little league baseball there, and he grew up very close to where he does his police work now. His father was a public safety officer, stepped out for more than 30 years, and he's the one who kind of inspired and guided Hutch toward the path of public safety. He is trained not only as a police officer, but also as a firefighter and as an EMT technician. He has a unique drive.

He's all in when it comes to safety and public safety and public service. He wants to help people. You know, it's always interesting to me when we go to these communities because oftentimes these crimes are being investigated by people who are in the community, who know the community, who, you know, have roots in the community. And he certainly did. He solved cases that together, span. decades and investigators have been looking for answers for years. Why would he think that suddenly

he could actually do what others weren't able to do all those years? I think he was just born with his drive to fight injustice. These case files, many of them, so many of them were unsolved. They got under his skin and they continue to get under his skin. He wants to solve them so badly that he just, you know, he just can't put them down. He's also motivated. by his two sons. He told me that when he was teaching them, for example, how to ride their bicycles and they would fall, he would say, hey, guys, just don't give up. Never quit. Keep going. Keep pedaling and pedaling again until you can ride that bike on your own. And that, I think, is the level of dedication that this man Hutch brings to his work. It's just organic to him as a family

member. Well, John, let's get into some of these cases and talk about how he actually began to solve them. Let's talk about Carol Smith. So she was a volunteer in the police department. She also was sort of obsessed with these cold cases, and she became critical in helping him uncover some of these details. Yeah. It was kind of an unlikely coupling. Carol is a woman who was bored, being at home, wanted to keep busy.

So she volunteered to do some filing, just some filing of paperwork at the local police station there in Sunnyvale. And after a while, That alone wasn't enough of a challenge for her. So she asked for more work. And a sergeant then says, look, come over here. Let's go into this closet where we have all these cold cases and they need to be filed. And she goes ahead and tells her, just organize these files and these boxes. She tells me that the closet was really dusty and full of mold, moldy,

but she couldn't help but be drawn to all these cases that have been unsolved. years and decades. Truly dusting off the files. Yeah, yeah, literally. She's talking about these cases. It bothers her. They get under her skin, too, in the office. And Hutch overhears her, this detective Hutch, and he decides, yeah, we should take a look, a closer look at those cases. Let's open them up. Yeah, well, they opened up one involving a teenager by the name of Karen Stitt. And, John, just stay put. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, we're going to talk about the exclusive interview with the last man who saw her alive and talk a little bit more about her case and how Detective Hutchison was able to bring her killer to justice.

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I'm talking to my friend and colleague John Cignonis, who always brings such light and such storytelling to 2020 and in this case, murder mysteries. And John and I are talking about the relentless work of Matthew Hutchison, a detective out in California, who was the subject of John's latest 2020 report. And John, one of those cases, this, this, detective made it his mission to solve a lot of unsolvable cases. And one of them he did solve was the

case of 15-year-old Karen Stitt. It was a really horrible story of a young teenager who was stabbed multiple times. And this case went cold. Her family had no answers. And then he took on the case. Why did he particularly want to, you know, begin with a case like this? Well, Deb, as it turns out, Hutch's stepfather, as I mentioned, had worked in the police department, right, for more than 30 years. and he remembered the murder of this young teen, Karen Stid. It kept bothering the stepdad. And he was the one who inspired then his son, Hutch, to reopen that case. That murder had haunted the stepfather and, in fact, a whole generation of cops.

And that's why it came to Hutch's desk. Yeah. And the community, too, I mean, when you think about it, a 15-year-old girl, I mean, I can imagine any community would just be haunted by this. So let's talk a little bit about what happened there. She was a teen girl who was out with her boyfriend, David. They had been doing the things that teens do. They had been playing at an arcade, and he was playing his guitar. They'd had this really, I guess, sweet date.

They went separate ways. He went home, and that was the last time he ever saw her, and then she turns up dead. Her body is found next to a cinder block wall near a bus stop. And David talked to you in this episode about how this impacted his life, because, of course, people are going to start looking at a boyfriend, whoever's close to her, and then they started looking at him. Yeah, it was horrific for the boyfriend, David. He remembers early on he fell head over heels in love with Karen.

She swept him off his feet. It was a story of first love. And when he heard that she had been murdered, his world, then just fell apart. As you can imagine, he felt terrible regret because he was supposed to walk her all the way that night for a date. But he had to get home right away and he had a curfew. So he decides to walk her just a block away from the bus stop and turns back. In that one block while she goes to the bus stop, she is assaulted and killed. He just full of regret saying I should have kept, I should have protected her. Yeah, of course. And then he's dealing with that pain and that trauma. And then he's being

looked at and police are investigating him. He was adamant that he didn't do it. He was adamant that he didn't do but police really did sort of zero in on him as a suspect, and it was sort of linger for years. Yeah, David knew that he was going to be the suspect. After all, he was the last person to see Karen alive. But he also knew that he didn't have anything to do with her murder. With no other suspects, though, for so long, David worried, in fact, that this horrific crime would never, never, ever be solved. Yeah, and it haunted him. And police, even though he, they, they had no direct evidence. This was sort of in the air, right? It took 18 years before he was finally cleared. And then two decades, essentially, before new technology came into play. And it led Hutch and his

team to Hawaii of all places. I mean, this case was sort of crazy that way. It's all over the map. Hutch, yes, and his investigative partner flew to Hawaii. And they posed, again, going undercover as a married couple. They had heard that the main suspect in the murder was living in an apartment where the landlord was a fortune teller. So they decide to get into the place. They have to go undercover and pose that they're a couple, a husband and wife, and they book an appointment with that psychic to get inside the house.

Yeah, that doesn't happen very often in these stories that we cover, right? And the links that they will go to. So in the story, I mean, obviously you unspool it in a way that is just so. so captivating, but ultimately they zero in on that suspect. And they'd find this man who at the time was 78 years old by the time they discovered him a man by the name of Gary Ramirez. What was it that drew them to him? And talk a little bit about this guy, because that was the biggest question in what was so surprising in the episode that this random man wound up being the one who committed the murder. Yeah, after so many years, in fact, when Hutch approaches him and arrests him,

He says, you know, how did you find me? Yeah, he was home free. And a really cool thing that Hutch did is he wanted something from 1982 when the crime happened. And the other fellow officers were looking at this case. It was the year Karen was murdered. So Hutch brought along his stepfather's handcuffs to be a physical part of the arrest, part of him seeking justice, if you will, for Karen. He wanted to honor the generation of country.

cops who originally had investigated this case so many years, decades before. So Ramirez is sentenced to life after he goes to court, and it was emotional. Hutch was very emotional in talking to you about all of this and those handcuffs and everything. So he finally put this case to rest, and he had a certain amount of satisfaction about that, too. Well, John, stay with us because there's more. There's more to talk about.

That's another case. Another case, another cold case, that investigative. Investigators called essentially sort of a true who-done-it. And it's the murder of another teenager, Estella Mena. Her killer had an almost 40-year head start on detectives, and it was just a stunning, stunning case. And her family finally got the answers they were praying for. We're going to dig into that case as soon as we come back.

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John Cignonis, about one of the stories that he recently covered a detective shining light on cases that had long been filed away and people thought that they could never be solved. Detective Hutchison went on to help solve cold cases in Sunnyvale, California, including that of Estella Mena. Tell us a little bit about Estella's case. Well, this is a case that was so old. It happened in 1979, three years before Karen Stitt's murder. And police had no one to focus on. They had no witnesses. There was no surveillance cameras way back. then, right, as we do have them now. Forensic DNA testing was not yet being used. So it was a tough case to crack. Yeah, and that was the thing, I think, with a lot of these stories that we've covered, too,

that the DNA evidence and the technology just wasn't there then. And now it has really illuminated a lot of these cases. This was an 18-year-old young woman who was working as a security guard. She was brutally stabbed, and her body was found and never anything made of it for years. Lots of twist and turns in this investigation, though. DNA technology made a big difference. There was a trash grab involved in this with Hutch and his team in trying to get that DNA evidence. They had found a drop of blood on a doorway where Estella had been attacked and murdered. And they used forensic genetic genealogy to locate this new suspect, thanks to that blood. But how do you get more DNA from him to confirm that this was him?

Well, they found out where he lives, and Hutch decides to pose now as a trash collector. This guy is really good at just assuming roles, isn't he? Oh, yeah. He's getting down to the bottom of all this. He poses a trash kid and goes to pick up the trash from this guy's house. He even rigged up a garbage truck to do this. It turns out that that suspect was not the killer, according to the DNA. But then new testing was down.

This time on Estella's shoe that was found near the body after she had been attacked. And the DNA on that shoe matched a man, another suspect named Sam Silva. Silva had been in prison. This is a guy who had served time already. John, obviously these two cases and other cases that he's solved, you know, he can show up in anybody's door at any time. This guy is so driven. What about now? Where do you think he goes now in terms of other cases?

He absolutely still has that passion. He continues to investigate cold cases. He feels all kinds of calls from anyone. His door always open to anyone who wants to brainstorm and tackle just any more of these cold cases. He's left quite an impression on me. Yeah, I definitely get that impression and the rest of us, too. What an amazing guy. Well, Q, keep doing it.

Keep doing it. You're always just bringing these great stories. Always great stories. Yeah, let me leave you with my impression of him. Yeah. You know, Hutch has a mantra where he says the thing that drives him, he always says these words, tell the truth, protect the weak, do what's right. I also keep thinking about the message he gives to his young sons, as I mentioned, he has two boys. He tells them, we all have a responsibility in this world to leave it in a better shape than we found it.

Go out there, help people around you. And Deborah, that's not a bad way to live your life. I would say a shining example of good. Absolutely. Always great. Always great talking to you, my friend. Next time in person. Next time.

Yes. Come sit next to me. All right, John. I appreciate your being here. You can catch our latest episode of 2020, of course, on Friday nights on ABC. And you can stream episodes on Disney Plus and Hulu. So make sure you check us out. FX is the beauty.

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