Pamela Butler

Case background and investigation

Pamela Butler, 47, worked as a supervising analyst at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and lived in the Brightwood area of northwest Washington, D.C. According to Oxygen, security cameras recorded her arriving home from work on February 12, 2009, and she was not seen again. Her disappearance, around Valentine's Day, drew wide attention, and she was declared legally dead in 2016, WTOP reported.

Her family long suspected her boyfriend, Jose Rodriguez-Cruz of Arlington, Virginia. D.C. cold case detectives reopened the case in 2017, and in April of that year he was charged with first-degree murder, according to WTOP and WJLA.

On October 6, 2017, Rodriguez-Cruz, then 52, pleaded guilty in D.C. Superior Court to second-degree murder. According to the prosecution's account in court, reported by WTOP, the two argued in her basement on February 13, 2009, over his job and finances; he punched and then strangled her, disabled a motion sensor and removed her body through a window. Under the plea agreement he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, on condition that he make a good-faith effort to help investigators find her remains; prosecutors could withdraw the deal if he misled them.

Investigators searched near a highway in northern Virginia with his help, but according to Oxygen and NBC Washington, the burial site near Interstate 95 had since been built over during roadwork and her remains were judged unrecoverable. They have never been found.

The case also led investigators back to Rodriguez-Cruz's first wife, Marta Haydee Rodriguez, who disappeared from Arlington in 1989. Partial remains found beside I-95 in Stafford County in 1991 were identified as hers through DNA in 2018. He was charged in October 2019, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in November 2020 and was sentenced on April 8, 2021, to 40 years in prison, to be served after his D.C. sentence, according to FOX 5 DC and WJLA.