Virginia Man Kills Girlfriend Decades After He Murdered His Wife, Burying Them Both Along Same Interstate
After Pamela Butler seemingly disappeared from her Washington, D.C. home, the case perplexed investigators before ultimately helping solve another woman's decades-old murder.
Surveillance cameras surrounding Pamela Butler’s Washington, D.C. home never showed the 47-year-old leaving the house despite her mysteriously vanishing from it in February of 2009.
Her brother, Derrick Butler, was determined to get to the bottom of her confounding disappearance — even as he endured being a suspect himself — working to find justice for his sister and another missing woman with a chilling connection to Pam’s case.
“I have no doubt in my mind that had this happened to me, that Pam would have done the same for me,” Derrick said in the "A Haunting Stretch of Road" episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
Who was Pamela Butler?
By her mid-40s, Pam had found success in most aspects of life. She worked as a supervising analyst at the United States Environmental Protection Agency, owned two luxury cars, and was the proud owner of a single-family home in a nice downtown neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
Pam's close friend Rita Moss described her as “a person who will make you laugh, a person who will have your back if she’s your friend” and “just a joyful, easy, vibrant person.”
But Pam felt there was something missing, and had hoped to find love and a person to share her success with.
Who is Jose Rodriguez-Cruz?
Pam met Jose Rodriguez-Cruz, a handsome former military police officer who was now working at a medical clinic in Virginia, through an online dating website in September of 2008 and the pair quickly hit it off.
With the romance going strong, Pam introduced him to her family that year during Thanksgiving.
“He seemed like an extremely nice guy,” Derrick recalled. “I mean, very attentive to Pam, attentive to us, so he was a pleasure to meet, he really was.”
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Pamela Butler disappears
Pam had planned to take Rodriguez-Cruz and her mom, Thelma Butler, out for a special Valentine’s Day dinner on February 14, 2009, but Pam never arrived at her mother’s house to pick her up that night.
When Thelma still couldn’t get ahold of her daughter days later, she grew increasingly concerned.
“I say, ‘Pam’s still not answering her phone, something ain’t right. She wouldn’t disappoint me like that,’” Thelma told Dateline.
Thelma and Pam’s nephew Brandon went to her home and found mail piled up outside the front door and papers strewn throughout her normally neat home, but no sign of Pam herself. Thelma also noted that the blinds on one of the windows had been pulled up from the bottom, even though the security-conscious Pam always brought the blinds down from the top so that those walking by couldn’t see inside her home.
When the family learned that Pam had also been absent from work, they called police.
Security camera footage puzzles investigators
Detectives noted some unusual clues about Pam’s disappearance right away. Although motion-activated security cameras around her home captured Pam coming home from work on Thursday, February 12, 2009, she was never seen leaving the house after that. Both of her cars were in the driveway and her purse was found inside her house.
There were no signs of forced entry or any evidence to suggest a struggle.
"What happened inside that house?” former TV news reporter Jennifer Donelan remarked on Dateline. “It is such an extreme mystery. We just have no idea what happened to Pam.”
Rodriguez-Cruz was spotted arriving at the home carrying gifts on Friday, February 13, and was then captured coming in and out of the house several times in the days that followed, carrying a bag and other items out of the house, but nothing that seemed large enough to conceal a body.
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Pamela Butler's brother questions Rodriguez-Cruz about her disappearance
After discovering that Pam was missing, Derrick brazenly confronted Rodriguez-Cruz at his Virginia apartment, even asking him to take off his clothes so that he could check his body for scratches. Rodriguez-Cruz surprisingly complied and insisted he was just as worried about Pam as her family.
He told Derrick that he and Pam broke up Friday night after she discovered he was keeping in touch with the child of an ex-girlfriend. He said he’d gone to her home after that to collect his things, even leaving behind a note inquiring about where she was.
While at Rodriguez-Cruz's apartment, Derrick opened his drawers and searched his home.
“I was trying to get a reaction out of him and couldn’t get it,” Derrick told Dateline, adding that when he left the apartment, he believed that Rodriguez-Cruz was in the clear. “I thought he was a pretty nice guy.”
Investigators are stumped, and look at Pamela Butler’s brother Derrick
Police couldn't find any obvious answers about what happened to Pam.
“It was a hard case,” Peter Newsham, a former Chief of Police for the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, told Dateline. “This was a young woman, by all accounts, she was beloved by her family. She kind of kept to herself in her neighborhood, her employer described her as being, you know, one of these folks that always came to work, very reliable."
Derrick led search after search to try to find his missing sister, but months into the investigation, he was surprised to find himself being eyed by investigators. Police had received several anonymous tips suggesting that Derrick, a former high school auto mechanics teacher, knew more than he was letting on about the case.
Investigators learned that Pam and Derrick had a property business together and owned a building together. One family member said Pam had been preparing to end some of their business ties because she didn’t feel Derrick was a good manager. Derrick was also listed as the beneficiary in her will, giving him a potential financial motive.
But Derrick insisted he had nothing to do with his sister’s disappearance.
“They would say things to me like, you know, 'It’s not looking really good for you,' um, 'You’re the only one that we see that had anything to gain from her going missing,'" Derrick told Dateline.
Police repeatedly brought Derrick in for questioning, and pored through his credit transactions and phone records, but were never able to find anything to link him to Pam's disappearance.
Pamela Butler declared dead, even though body not found
The years went by without any sign of Pam and she was officially declared dead in 2016.
Mike Fulton, a cold case detective with the Metropolitan Police Department, eventually took over the case and began re-examining all the evidence and possible suspects in what was now being considered an unsolved homicide case.
When analyzing the surveillance footage captured around the time of Pam's disappearance frame by frame, Fulton noticed some unusual things. First, the home’s motion sensor lights failed to come on after Rodriguez-Cruz had arrived at the house, suggesting someone may have toyed with the lights. He also noticed that Rodriguez-Cruz seemed to be carrying Pam’s keychain, not his own key, to get into the house.
But perhaps most chilling, was something that was discovered about Rodriguez-Cruz's past.
Who was Marta Haydee Rodriguez?
Fulton learned that Rodriguez-Cruz’s first wife, Marta Haydee Rodriguez, had mysteriously vanished decades before Pamela Butler did.
Rodriguez — who was estranged from her husband after discovering he had a second secret family — disappeared on May 25, 1989 after her shift at a local psychiatric hospital.
Rodriguez’s family said that a jealousy-fueled Rodriguez-Cruz had been furious that she was moving on with another man and had been stalking her for weeks, following her to work and watching her at the bus stop.
Rodriguez told authorities that in one harrowing incident, her estranged husband abducted her from her home and held her at a hotel for two days, where he raped and physically abused her. She finally was able to escape only after a police officer saw Rodriguez-Cruz tackle her outside the hotel and intervened.
Rodriguez-Cruz was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault and battery and felony abduction, but the case was thrown out just one week before she disappeared after a terrified Rodriguez failed to show up in court to testify against him.
Rodriguez-Cruz’s second wife, Guadalupe, who was now in hiding, also recounted horrific acts of abuse, some of which had been witnessed by his son Hansel, whom he shared with Rodriguez.
Jose Rodriguez-Cruz charged with Pamela Butler's murder
By 2017, although their case was largely circumstantial, prosecutors felt they had enough evidence to charge Rodriguez-Cruz with Pam’s murder.
Derrick described learning of the arrest as “the best feeling that I’d ever gotten in my life.”
As part of a deal that allowed Rodriguez-Cruz to plead guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a 12-year sentence, he agreed to lead authorities to Pam’s body.
What happened to Pamela Butler?
Rodriguez-Cruz confessed to strangling Pam in her home after an argument broke out, stuffing her body into a trash bag and then raising the blinds on one of the windows not covered by the security cameras so that he could slip her body out the window.
He buried her remains in a shallow grave in the densely wooded median between the north and southbound lanes on Virginia's I-95. But by the time Rodriguez-Cruz confessed, the area had been paved over as part of an interstate expansion, making it impossible to recover her remains.
However, the confession would help authorities finally solve another case.
Remains matched to Marta Haydee Rodriguez
Someone remembered that partial remains of another body had been recovered from the same median just six miles away in 1991. Through DNA testing, authorities were finally able to match those remains to the missing Rodriguez.
Derrick was determined to get justice for Rodriguez too, even showing up at the district attorney’s office with news crews in 2019 when he felt it was taking prosecutors too long to charge Rodriguez-Cruz.
“Derrick Butler was not satisfied and so he made it his mission to see that Jose Rodriguez-Cruz was brought to justice,” Stafford County Commonwealth's Attorney Eric Olsen told Dateline.
Derrick’s persistence paid off and that same year, Rodriguez-Cruz was charged with first-degree murder in his first wife’s death.
He later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Rodriguez’s case and in 2021, received the maximum possible sentence of 40 years behind bars.
“I clapped in the courtroom,” Derrick said.
