Couple steals $18,000 in gold jewelry from downtown Santa Cruz store

Two thieves struck a downtown Santa Cruz jewelry store on Saturday evening and walked away with $18,000 worth of gold jewelry. 

In security camera footage released to KSBW-TV, a man and a woman are seen entering Golden Bliss Jewelry on Pacific Avenue just before 6 p.m. on Jan. 10. They told a salesperson that they wanted to purchase $35,000 worth of jewelry for a wedding party, and had about $5,500 in cash on them. 

“The other sales clerk checked all the bills, and they were all legit,” sales associate Marcus Sporleder told KSBW. “There wasn’t really anything weird about that, so it seemed like a legitimate deal until it wasn’t.” 

While considering multiple pieces, the video shows the man holding several pouches with gold jewelry inside. When the woman came over to talk to the sales associate, he passed the pouches to her and they disappeared inside her purse. 

The couple left soon after, saying they needed to make a cash withdrawal from the bank to pay for the jewelry they wanted to buy. They left a $500 deposit, but took home thousands of dollars in gold necklaces. 

“It’s a very unfortunate situation,” said owner Jacki Truhitte, who also owns Super Silver, a silver-focused jewelry store with locations on Pacific Avenue and in Capitola, Sacramento and San Luis Obispo. 

Truhitte said she believes the thieves are professionals. “They knew what they were doing, how to trip up the employee, show her the money, and let her believe it’s real. The girlfriend distracted the other employee while the man spoke with the manager,” she said. She didn’t realize a theft had taken place until the following morning, when an employee returned the items that the man had put on hold and realized some of them were missing. 

The investigation is ongoing, but police don’t have any new information to share, a representative of the Santa Cruz Police Department told Lookout.

While small thefts of pieces under $1,000 happen occasionally, this is the most significant theft at Golden Bliss. “This is a huge hit,” Truhitte said. 

This is the second time one of Truhitte’s stores was robbed in the last month. On Dec. 13, thieves used power tools to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of jewelry from Super Silver in Old Town Sacramento. 

Jewelry heists are on the rise throughout California, driven in part by the soaring price of gold. This week, the value of an ounce of the precious metal surged to a record high of more than $4,600. Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken notice. On Tuesday, he announced that retail crime investigations are up 3,000% since he took office, from 24 in 2019 to 734 in 2025. 

Truhitte’s insurance covers the cost of stolen items at the purchase price, but because the price of material has risen significantly since she purchased the jewelry, that isn’t enough to replace the lost inventory. “I can’t replace it, because it’s way more expensive now. I’ll only be able to replace about half of it,” said Truhitte. 

She’s fearful of future thefts, and is considering adding more security to her stores, including carrying fewer items, locking cases and tying down every ring, even though it’s inconvenient for staff to untie and retie each ring every time a customer wants to try one. 

“We’ve been downtown for 30 years, and we’ve always been able to have our rings out,” said Truhitte. 

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