A Haunting Stretch of Road

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Speaker 5 I stood outside of that house. I remember thinking, what happened?

Speaker 6 Where did she go?

Speaker 5 It is such an extreme mystery. We just have no idea what happened to Pam.

Speaker 7 They scoured the house for physical evidence.

Speaker 5 There was just nothing to indicate that there was a crime there.

Speaker 9 What I had was a great deal of video footage.

Speaker 10 She always had those cameras on.

Speaker 8 When you watch the video frame by frame, you start to see little things that don't make sense.

Speaker 9 A couple text messages came in that we need to look at the brother Dirk.

Speaker 8 It's awkward to have to ask somebody, did you kill your sister?

Speaker 12 But you did?

Speaker 13 I did, yes.

Speaker 10 She told me that she met Jose. I knew that this was pretty serious.

Speaker 1 On a first take, how does Jose come across?

Speaker 8 Works hard, served his country.

Speaker 5 If he's telling the truth, then that's a man who doesn't know what happened to his girlfriend.

Speaker 8 His first wife, Marta, disappeared off the face of the earth. I'm like, dude, what if he killed his first wife?

Speaker 3 We don't know all the things that he's done.

Speaker 6 It's a big puzzle. You have to put all the pieces together.

Speaker 5 Pam's cell phone pinged, so is Pam alive

Speaker 5 or is this the day we find her body?

Speaker 1 These grainy nighttime images are some of the last known moments in the life of a successful woman. A person who simply vanished without a trace from her home.

Speaker 5 What happened inside that house?

Speaker 1 The investigation into what happened to her opened up an entirely new saga about another missing woman.

Speaker 6 It's a big puzzle.

Speaker 1 It took decades to unsnarl the stories of the two women who didn't know one another, but who both ended up years apart in the same place.

Speaker 15 It's idiosyncratic. That's a signature.

Speaker 1 Without a few individuals stricken with a bad case of justice fever, we might never know their stories at all.

Speaker 3 They found out that I wasn't going to give up.

Speaker 1 Not the twists. Two women, two children, neither knows about the other.
Yes.

Speaker 13 The setbacks.

Speaker 16 The cause of death was undetermined.

Speaker 1 The stark fear of it all.

Speaker 8 He says, oh my God, he's going to kill her and he's going to kill me.

Speaker 1 The fates of Pam and Marta, united in horror on one of the busiest stretches of interstate in the country.

Speaker 11 When all that stuff started coming out, I was like, oh my God, this guy's a monster.

Speaker 1 In early February 2009, Pamela Butler, a manager for the federal government, was on a cheer-up mission to douse the winter blues. That was typical Pam, says her brother Derek.

Speaker 3 She was always the one that would say, you know, let's do something. We're going to do this.

Speaker 1 Personality, who would you be talking about when you think of Pam?

Speaker 3 Just a lovely person. I mean, somebody that would go out of her way to help you.

Speaker 1 Pam told best friend Rita Moss she'd planned a busy week out on the town with her boyfriend of five months, Jose.

Speaker 10 Pam and I were texting each other as we normally do. The last text she sent is that she and Jose were going to three or four different restaurants over the next few days.

Speaker 1 Pam would wrap up her busy social week with an early Saturday evening dinner at Ben's Chili Bowl, a fixture of downtown DC. Her guests, Jose and her mom, Thelma.

Speaker 1 But two days before they were due to go out, Thelma realized something a little awkward.

Speaker 18 Mr. Pam, we made a date to go out to dinner for Saturday.
Do you all know Saturday's Valentine's Day?

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 18 She said, Mommy, that's okay. She said, we can still go out.

Speaker 1 The plan was to meet that Valentine's Day at 3 p.m. at Thelma's home and drive to the restaurant.
But when 3 p.m. came that Saturday, Pam was a no-show.
Calls to her phone went unanswered.

Speaker 1 So Thelma called her son Derek, who didn't see any need to worry.

Speaker 3 New boyfriend, they're just out having a good time.

Speaker 1 The next day, Sunday now, Thelma tried again, and yet again on Monday, which happened to be the President's Day holiday.

Speaker 18 I say, Pam's still not answering her phone. Something ain't right.
She wouldn't disappoint me like that.

Speaker 1 So after the long holiday weekend and still no sign of Pam, her mom Thelma and her nephew Brandon, who'd recently moved out of Pam's home, went to Pam's house to see if she was okay.

Speaker 18 Go to our place. Mail all piled on the porch.

Speaker 20 Very unlike her, huh?

Speaker 18 Her mail would not be piled up like that.

Speaker 1 Inside the home, there were more not like Pam signs. Troubling.

Speaker 18 Papers and things throwed all over the

Speaker 18 table.

Speaker 1 Everything's in disarray, huh?

Speaker 18 Disarray. Uh-uh, this is not right.
This is not right.

Speaker 1 Thelma called Pam's workplace only to learn her daughter hadn't shown up there either.

Speaker 20 Are you getting nervous at that point?

Speaker 14 Yes. Thelma called Derek.

Speaker 3 And my mother says, Derek, you need to see this house. Something isn't right here.

Speaker 1 He drove to Pam's home, which was equipped with security cameras and an alarm system. It was an out-of-position window blind that caught his mom's attention.

Speaker 1 It was the kind that could be raised from the bottom or lowered from the top.

Speaker 3 And then she said, this

Speaker 3 blind is lifted up from the bottom. She said, Pam never lifts it up from the bottom.

Speaker 1 Pam usually lowered the blind from the top. so people on the street couldn't look into her home.
Because your sister is very security conscious, wasn't it? Correct.

Speaker 3 It didn't look right.

Speaker 1 They checked Pam's phone answering machine. It turned out Jose had been calling Pam too.
Hey, Pam, where are you at? His message went. And on the desk in Pam's office, he'd left a note for her.

Speaker 18 Pam, where are you? I've been here looking for you.

Speaker 1 But Pam was gone.

Speaker 18 We called the police.

Speaker 1 And Derek says he called Jose.

Speaker 3 I said, Jose, this is Derek. Have you heard from Pam? And he says, I haven't heard from Pam.
He said, me and Pam broke up.

Speaker 14 Broke up? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Derek says he wanted to know more, so he began his own personal investigation.

Speaker 3 I said, give me your address. I'm coming to your house.
I need to talk to you.

Speaker 1 And he said, he said, okay. He says they met in the lobby of Jose's apartment building in nearby Virginia.

Speaker 3 I said, Pam's missing. Can we go up to your apartment? He said, yeah.
I mean, very cordial, nice conversation.

Speaker 1 Jose, he says, expressed concern and compassion.

Speaker 3 He was telling me how much he cared about Pam, how much he loved her. He said, we broke up on Friday and I haven't seen or heard from her since.

Speaker 3 You know, I wish I could help you, but I just don't know.

Speaker 1 The reason for the breakup, according to Jose, was jealousy.

Speaker 3 He said, you know how Pam is, and he said, I was staying in touch with one of my ex-girlfriends' daughter. She was young and she just kind of looked at me like a father.

Speaker 3 And he said, I was staying in touch with her and Pam didn't like it.

Speaker 1 Because he was close to this girl from a... previous girlfriend.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 3 So he said, you know, so we decided to break up. And he said, you know, he said, I thought we would still be friends.
And we sat there and we talked for well over two hours.

Speaker 3 So I said to him, I said, you know, I just don't understand, you know, what happened, how she could just get up and just walk away. He said, I don't understand it either.

Speaker 1 Then Derek says he made an aggressive demand.

Speaker 3 And I said,

Speaker 3 Jose, I said, I need you to take your clothes off. I said, I just need to make sure that

Speaker 3 I don't see any scratches or anything on you.

Speaker 1 That's kind of a police question, huh?

Speaker 14 Well, he says, okay. He's good with that.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So he did. He took his shirt off.
He took his pants off. And I looked at him and I didn't see anything.

Speaker 1 There were no fresh scratches on Jose's skin. But Derek says he wasn't done playing cop.

Speaker 3 I stood up and I just started walking around his apartment looking. My sister's missing.
Is she in here, you know, in the closet somewhere? And I opened up his drawers and I'm looking in there.

Speaker 1 He didn't object to that like little woman.

Speaker 3 No, I was trying to get a reaction out of him and couldn't get it.

Speaker 1 When you left Jose's place that day, what did you think of him and where things stood?

Speaker 3 I thought he was a pretty nice guy.

Speaker 1 Derek reassured his family.

Speaker 3 I said, Jose's fine. He didn't do anything to her.
He's fine.

Speaker 1 When Derek got back to Pam's home, police were already on the scene, looking for leads into what had become of Pam Butler in what would be a grueling investigation.

Speaker 1 So Pam is now an official missing person, huh? Correct.

Speaker 3 They're telling us, you know, still doesn't look like to us that, you know, that she's in any danger.

Speaker 11 But curious clues were adding up a latex glove files on the floor everything was just totally out of character for pam the papers on the floor led me to believe that something made her stop doing what she was doing with those papers

Speaker 1 Pam Butler's Valentine's Day no-show in 2009 was completely out of character.

Speaker 1 And in the days after her family reported her missing, Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police looked for clues inside Pam's home.

Speaker 7 They scoured the house for physical evidence.

Speaker 1 Peter Newsham, D.C.'s former chief of police, was running investigations when detectives began probing Pam Butler's disappearance.

Speaker 1 His investigators found no sign of forced entry, no sign that Pam had been in a struggle, and no sign at all of what might have happened to her.

Speaker 7 If we had information to suggest that Pam was in a particular location, we could go and search that area and maybe find something.

Speaker 7 That didn't happen in this case.

Speaker 1 So a missing persons file was opened, even as police tried to reassure Pam's brother Derek, a former high school auto mechanics teacher. So Pam is now an official missing person, huh?

Speaker 21 Correct.

Speaker 3 They're telling us, you know,

Speaker 3 we want to find out what happened. Still doesn't look like to us that, you know, that she's in any danger.

Speaker 1 And D.C.'s police wanted to find out from family and friends more biographical detail about who Pam was.

Speaker 10 A person who will make you laugh, a person who will have your back if she's your friend, just a joyful, easy, vibrant person.

Speaker 1 Rita Moss had met Pam in Washington, D.C. at a conference for rising stars in government leadership.

Speaker 10 That was the person that said, I'll be at the bar afterwards and Pam showed up at the bar and we immediately clicked.

Speaker 1 Why did you guys hit it off so quickly?

Speaker 10 We had a lot in common just even on appearance and we probably talked on the phone every other day or so. So yes, she was my closest friend.

Speaker 1 People think of Washington, maybe they know the mall and the Washington Monument and the nice houses in Georgetown. That's where Pam ended up, but not where we came from.

Speaker 1 Derek remembers growing up with his sister in a small house in a rough and tumble neighborhood. Not an easy life.

Speaker 3 She was the one that really held our family together.

Speaker 1 How did you two get along, you and your sister Pam?

Speaker 3 You know, we were brothers and sisters. You know, we had our spats like any other brother or sister.

Speaker 1 She was very orderly, right?

Speaker 3 She would drive you crazy with that.

Speaker 3 Her house was extremely neat all the time.

Speaker 1 From an early age, Pam was driven. A summer job at the Commerce Department led to Pam hopscotching through government agencies.

Speaker 3 Pam was just always a go-getter. Before I started working for the school system, she tried to get me to work for the FBI.

Speaker 1 So that's a very Pam thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she always wanted to see us just do better, you know.

Speaker 1 Pam's mom, Thelma, says her daughter, was happy to share her hard-earned success.

Speaker 18 She would pay my way to go to the casino.

Speaker 1 And you'd have mom and daughter day at the casino, huh?

Speaker 18 She didn't like gambling, but she never denied me.

Speaker 1 You're talking about an ideal daughter.

Speaker 18 Yes, very much.

Speaker 1 In her mid-40s, Pam was supervising computer analysts at the Environmental Protection Agency. How well she'd done was reflected in her lifestyle.

Speaker 1 The owner of a single-family house in a good downtown neighborhood, the one she'd equipped equipped with security cameras, and a Mercedes and a Jaguar in the driveway.

Speaker 1 She had a lot of nice things, beautiful place to live.

Speaker 1 But work wasn't Pam's entire life. For a few years, she took in her nephew Brandon, raising him as her own son with his bundle of typical late teenage issues.
Still, that nice house felt empty.

Speaker 1 A good man, she told her friend, would go a long way to filling the void.

Speaker 10 She really was not looking to casually date. She was looking for someone to spend her life with.

Speaker 1 That's when, in September 2008, petite and fit from jogging, 47-year-old Pam started dating Jose Rodriguez Cruz, a good-looking former military police officer in Virginia who worked at a medical clinic.

Speaker 1 They met on a dating website.

Speaker 10 She told me that she met Jose on the Metro. He Harmony.
Yes, that's what I'm told. She told me she met him on Metro, which I immediately knew was not the truth.

Speaker 10 And I told her I knew it wasn't the truth because Pam would drive everywhere.

Speaker 1 Within a few days, Jose was showing Pam around town a full-on courtship.

Speaker 10 He bought her flowers regularly and he bought her a ring for her birthday.

Speaker 1 As happy as Rita was for her best friend, Pam's new relationship was a gal pal buzzkill.

Speaker 10 Pam immediately started canceling plans with me, so I knew that this was pretty serious.

Speaker 1 So happy hour was off now?

Speaker 10 Happy hour was off.

Speaker 1 At Thanksgiving, Pam decided the next step had arrived, and it was time for Jose to meet the family.

Speaker 3 Seemed like an extremely nice guy.

Speaker 11 I mean,

Speaker 3 very attentive to Pam, attentive to us. No, he was a pleasure to meet me.
He really was.

Speaker 18 He was such a jeff of mine.

Speaker 14 She seemed happy?

Speaker 18 She did. She did.
She seemed very happy.

Speaker 1 What did you think Jose meant to her?

Speaker 10 The fact that she was seeing him regularly, I knew that she was intending for this to be a long-term relationship.

Speaker 1 And that made Pam's disappearance all the more sad.

Speaker 11 When I got the case, and once I looked at all the things that were done, I wanted to start over.

Speaker 1 Former homicide detective Mitch Cradle, who worked on DC's sexual assault unit, ended up being assigned to the missing persons case after other detectives had worked at it.

Speaker 1 What did you think you could bring to the play that they didn't know yet?

Speaker 11 A different set of eyes.

Speaker 23 I mean, experienced, and I'm very familiar with this community. I have two informants that live in this particular area, so I think I'm going to be able to.

Speaker 1 So you thought you might be able to scratch and get something, huh?

Speaker 23 Yes, I was hoping I could get something, but as you see, even right now, this how the neighborhood is all the time. It's quiet.

Speaker 1 Detective Cradle analyzed the evidence in the growing case file. The uncharacteristic messiness in Pam Butler's home.
That's not the way she runs her household, right?

Speaker 24 Exactly.

Speaker 11 Everything was just totally out of character for Pam.

Speaker 11 The papers on the floor led me to believe that something made her stop doing what she was doing with those papers because she's just not going to leave them lying on the floor.

Speaker 1 And next to all those files strewn about was something else that had caught investigators' eyes. Latex glove on the floor, I guess, huh? Yeah, it was a latex glove there.

Speaker 1 Had the latex glove been dropped by someone not in Pam's circle, her abductor, possibly her killer. This is the unknown intruder.

Speaker 24 Exactly.

Speaker 1 But who?

Speaker 1 The surveillance cameras around Pam Butler's home would give important clues. They were activated by motion sensors and had recorded comings and goings in the days before and after Pam went missing.

Speaker 1 Images that told some, but not all, of the story.

Speaker 5 It's presumed when we see this hand come out of the door to pick up mail that that is Pam.

Speaker 1 All those security cameras. Why didn't they capture Pam leaving her house?

Speaker 10 She always had those cameras on. That was the funny thing.

Speaker 1 And a possible break.

Speaker 5 Pam's cell phone pinged. So is Pam alive or is this the day we find her body?

Speaker 1 Pam Butler had vanished without a trace, and her family and friends were confounded, suspended between hope and grief.

Speaker 10 There was a very big void

Speaker 10 when Pam went missing.

Speaker 1 Were you waiting for the phone to ring and there'd be her on the line or what?

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 18 Hoping that it'd be the call to say, I'm okay.

Speaker 1 Phone never rang.

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 18 It kept me in tears.

Speaker 1 By now, reporters were getting tips from police about the mystery of Pam Butler's disappearance.

Speaker 5 I had a number of sources throughout the department, and a source said, this is a case you need to take a look at. 47-year-old Pamela Butler of Northwest.

Speaker 1 Jennifer Donlin, then a local TV crime reporter, broke the story.

Speaker 5 There were questions, really strange things about her disappearance. Yes, she was an adult.
Maybe she chose to leave.

Speaker 1 But she didn't seem to be the kind of person who would take up and go to Las Vegas and start a new life.

Speaker 5 Or to miss dinner with her mother on Valentine's Day.

Speaker 1 Pam's family had given detectives a heads up to what they believed was important evidence. The cameras Pam had installed, covering nearly the entire exterior of her home.

Speaker 9 What I had was a great deal of video footage.

Speaker 1 When Detective Mitch Cradle was eventually assigned to the case, he analyzed images from the cameras that other detectives had screened. You're talking about the missing woman's surveillance system.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Pretty sophisticated.

Speaker 23 It was not only that, it was an alarm system.

Speaker 11 So we're talking someone is only only coming into the house who she's familiar with.

Speaker 1 So, she's very fussy about who gets in there.

Speaker 10 And she always had those cameras on. That was the funny thing.
Even when I came over, I texted her two minutes before I arrived. You know, I'll be here in two minutes.

Speaker 10 And even when I knocked on the door, she would look at the camera to make sure it was me. I'm like, I'm just texting you.
Why are you checking the cameras?

Speaker 10 Open the door.

Speaker 1 In the days before and after the Valentine's Day weekend, Pam went missing. Her cameras captured what was going on around her house.

Speaker 1 On Thursday, she's seen arriving home, walking across her patio, then showing up in her front doorway.

Speaker 5 She's at the door and she's collecting her mail, just like a normal day.

Speaker 1 The next day, Friday, much the same.

Speaker 5 It's presumed when we see this hand come out of the door to pick up mail that that is Pam.

Speaker 1 Later the same day, the day before Valentine's Day, Jose showed up carrying gifts.

Speaker 9 He's the boyfriend arriving. Exactly.
So Riley.

Speaker 14 Flowers present.

Speaker 24 That was on Friday.

Speaker 1 And Jose is seen leaving the following day. But the cameras never showed Pam leaving her house.
And that became the central mystery of the case.

Speaker 1 In the worst possible theory, if Pam had been killed inside her house, how was her body taken out undetected?

Speaker 5 What happened inside that house? It is such an extreme mystery. We just have no idea what happened to Pam.

Speaker 1 The video showed Jose going in and out of Pam's home after Friday night. So it was an easy call for detectives to pull him in for some what's-up questions, but not much more.

Speaker 11 So with missing persons, there are incidents, not offenses.

Speaker 1 And no real persuasive evidence it was even a crime. Right.
What's more, Jose had an explanation for what had happened. The same explanation he'd given Pam's brother Derek.

Speaker 1 He said he and Pam had broken up before she went missing.

Speaker 5 And he was upset and that he had made efforts to get in touch with her after she had gone missing.

Speaker 5 If he's telling the truth, then that's a man who doesn't doesn't know what happened to his girlfriend.

Speaker 1 The reporter wanted to hear the boyfriend's account for herself, so Jose invited Jennifer into his home for an exclusive interview.

Speaker 5 We're in his living room and he didn't want us to tell his name on television and he didn't want us to show his face.

Speaker 1 But he did want to clearly state his innocence.

Speaker 26 I did not have anything to do with her disappearance. You know, I loved her.
Our relationship ended in a way that I didn't expect.

Speaker 1 Jose told the reporter Pam's security camera video told the story. Proof that he'd had nothing to do with Pam going missing.

Speaker 26 You know, like I told the police, you've seen the video. She did not leave with me.

Speaker 5 He was right. We never see Pam leave with him on video.
That is for sure.

Speaker 26 I don't know where Pam is at. I don't know what happened to her.

Speaker 1 And Jose gave the reporter a very simple explanation for why he was in and out of Pam's home after she went missing. He'd used his key and was simply removing bags of his own things from her home.

Speaker 5 I was just taking my stuff out of the house. I was just going back and getting my stuff.
Just breakup. Yeah, this is all breakup stuff.

Speaker 11 I know the last thing I've seen was him coming out the door with a big bag, which is not big enough to carry a body.

Speaker 1 In the days after Pam disappeared, crime scene texts turning Pam's house inside out for evidence were baffled.

Speaker 27 No blood.

Speaker 5 They were pulling up floorboards. There was just nothing in the house that indicated that there was a crime there.

Speaker 1 Beyond Jose, the boyfriend, the investigators wondered if there was anyone in Pam's life who would want to make her disappear.

Speaker 1 They looked at those closest to her, including her nephew, Brandon, the teen she'd taken in.

Speaker 5 There were some reports from the family that Pam might have been experiencing some financial difficulties at the time.

Speaker 5 Brandon was living there, and that perhaps Pam didn't feel like Brandon was stepping up like he should in terms of helping out financially, and that at some point she had reportedly asked him to leave.

Speaker 1 The situation apparently got heated.

Speaker 5 There had been an argument. He did have access to the house, so was it him?

Speaker 1 As As the investigation deepened, the detectives took a close look at technology, Pam's cell phone.

Speaker 11 In a lot of investigations, a lot of people don't realize that phone towers be pinging and telling you where people are.

Speaker 1 If they've been watching Dateline for the last 20 years, they do now.

Speaker 1 Investigators searched in Virginia and in a park in Maryland.

Speaker 5 Why? Because Pam's cell phone pinged there. Pam's cell phone pinged.
So is Pam alive or is this the day we find her body?

Speaker 11 Then all of a sudden it stops. And that's the thing about it.
Once it stops, you have no clue, no idea where to go. It stops and that's what happened in this situation.

Speaker 5 And they searched and searched and searched and they never found Pam.

Speaker 1 In the following weeks and months, hopes rose and fell.

Speaker 5 There were a number of sightings after all of the published media reports saying that I saw Pam Butler. Turned out not to be her.

Speaker 1 But five months into the investigation, a fresh lead suddenly opened. And with that lead came a new reason to take a closer look at Pam Pam Butler's family

Speaker 3 they actually raised Derek as a possible suspect to me like how this is her brother did a clash between siblings lead to murder they would say things to me like you're the only one that we see to had anything to gain from her going missing

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Speaker 1 In the months after Pamela Butler's disappearance, new leads dried up and the police investigation seemed stuck at a hopeless dead end.

Speaker 9 It was still considered a missing person.

Speaker 13 It wasn't even ruled a homicide.

Speaker 1 A frustrated detective Cradle says he couldn't devote the time he wanted to Pam Butler and her family. Fresh cases were piling up demanding his attention.

Speaker 11 I'm investigating 20, sometimes 25 cases a month, so it's hard for me to give this family the attention the case needs. And that's unfazed at them.

Speaker 1 And he felt something else, something ugly. It seemed to him the department just didn't care enough about the victim.

Speaker 9 I felt as though that this case wasn't getting the intention that it was if she would have been a white victim from an affluent neighborhood.

Speaker 11 It would have been, in my opinion, totally different.

Speaker 1 It would have been resources thrown at it, put some heat on it.

Speaker 9 Threw the whole house at the case.

Speaker 20 But that didn't happen with Pam Butler. No, it did not.

Speaker 11 And it used to to bother me sometimes at night because I knew for a fact if Pam Butler was white, man, they would have,

Speaker 1 they would have did it. Pam's family felt the same way.
There would have been a hue and cry, you think, if she'd been a white woman missing?

Speaker 13 Oh, for sure.

Speaker 3 When we go missing, you hear nothing about it.

Speaker 1 D.C. police told us its officers try to use every resource available to investigate all cases, regardless of a victim's race.

Speaker 1 In 2009, as Pam's brother Derek led search efforts, he stayed in the cops' faces.

Speaker 3 Sometimes we would just have, I mean, real fights.

Speaker 1 Were you making a nuisance of yourself down at the police station?

Speaker 14 I was trying to.

Speaker 3 I was trying to, yes.

Speaker 1 Did you need to do that, though?

Speaker 3 I felt like I did. I just told my sister.

Speaker 1 And Derek made appearances on TV. A strategy intended to keep Pam's story in the public eye.

Speaker 3 The goal was to keep it going. And I felt like if I kept it going, the police would say, you know, we got to get this off the news.
We have to solve this case.

Speaker 1 But five months after Pam Butler went missing, there was a head-snapping development. TV reporter Jennifer Donald was getting the inside scoop.

Speaker 5 My sources told me that they had to take a look at Derek. They actually raised Derek as a possible suspect to me.
Like, how? This is, this is her brother.

Speaker 5 He's spearheading these massive search efforts for her.

Speaker 1 Derek? How could that be? It turned out investigators had received anonymous text message tips about him.

Speaker 11 Early on in the investigation, a couple of text messages came in that we need to look at the brother Dirk.

Speaker 1 The first message read, please look into the fact that Pam and the brother were not as close as he tried to make it appear. Another message also put Derek in the frame.
Pam Butler's still missing.

Speaker 1 The brother has all of y'all fooled.

Speaker 5 These strange text messages came out saying, you should take a look at Pam Butler's brother.

Speaker 30 He did it.

Speaker 17 Jennifer, the reporter, learned Derek had a property business with his sister.

Speaker 5 They owned a building together, so they had financial interests. They shared financial

Speaker 5 There were the Wills. He was named as a beneficiary in her will.

Speaker 1 Then a family member told police that Pam had been planning to end some of her business dealings with Derek because she didn't think he was a good manager.

Speaker 5 Is there a reason there is or possible motive there?

Speaker 1 It was hard for the reporter to believe the brother, who seemed so caring and determined to crack the case, was actually under suspicion for his sister's disappearance.

Speaker 14 But.

Speaker 5 Thou doth protest too much.

Speaker 5 Is that what's happening here? Is the brother pushing so much that it's because he actually is the one who did something?

Speaker 1 Police questioned Derek numerous times during their investigation. Sessions that turned sour.

Speaker 3 They would say things to me like, you know, it's not looking really good for you.

Speaker 3 You're the only one that we see that had anything to gain from her going missing.

Speaker 1 You're going to inherit her money. Correct.
And this, Derek, is what? Just months after your sister's reported missing? Correct.

Speaker 3 The brother did it.

Speaker 1 And they're going through your credit card transactions and your phone calls?

Speaker 13 Everything. Everything.

Speaker 1 Given the full-blown investigation into you.

Speaker 3 Correct.

Speaker 19 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 But nothing came of all the questioning, and Derek insisted he had done nothing to Pam. And that's pretty much where the whole mysterious story of Pamela Butler stayed.
In limbo.

Speaker 27 Your daughter will be remembered every day.

Speaker 1 On the first anniversary of Pam's disappearance, Derek held a vigil, attended by family and Pam's closest friends. And as the years passed, there were more vigils.

Speaker 10 I will tell you they were very, very painful because you're standing in front of a house, you're reliving the whole scenario.

Speaker 1 Detective Cradle attended the vigils too. And he kept searching for clues, sometimes spending hours late at night outside Pam's home.

Speaker 11 A long time ago when I first joined homicide, my sergeant said, if you spend enough time on a crime scene, they start talking to you.

Speaker 1 What was this one telling you? Here you are in the dark, years later.

Speaker 13 At night, watching the house.

Speaker 11 There's no late dog walkers. There's no one jogging.

Speaker 1 So it was very difficult.

Speaker 21 And you were striking out with that?

Speaker 14 Oh, my God.

Speaker 11 I was, whew, Lord Hammers.

Speaker 9 It's like I went, man, it's like I went a whole baseball season without a hit.

Speaker 1 Did you lose faith in the investigation?

Speaker 10 I did lose faith in the investigation. I really, in my mind, thought that they would never charge anyone.

Speaker 1 Why did this case stick with you, Mitch? You're a veteran. You've had unsolved along the way.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I had plenty of unsolved cases.

Speaker 31 This case stuck with me because of Dirk and his mother.

Speaker 3 When I met his mother, I was just, oh, wow, I couldn't even hold myself together because here it is.

Speaker 31 I'm sitting here talking to her, and I can't even give her any information. There's nothing I can tell her, nothing I can do.
It's nothing.

Speaker 1 Seven whole years went by, and still there was no trace of Pamela Butler.

Speaker 1 No calls to her beloved family and friends, no birthdays or holidays celebrated, no financial activity on her accounts, nothing. Finally, in 2016, a judge declared Pam officially dead.

Speaker 1 Now her missing persons case could be officially classified as an unsolved homicide. And Mitch Cradle, soon to retire, made a last-ditch plea to his boss.

Speaker 11 I said, Commander, look,

Speaker 11 this family needs more than what we're giving them. This case needs to be handled by someone in the co-case unit.
Give one of them dudes this case. And he looked at me, said, okay, Mitch, I will.

Speaker 9 And when he said that, I was like, thank God.

Speaker 1 A new detective was promptly assigned, and he plunged deep into the Pam Butler case file.

Speaker 1 It wasn't long before he turned up new evidence, and the investigation took a dramatic twist.

Speaker 1 Another look at that surveillance video.

Speaker 8 When you watch the video frame by frame by frame, you start to see little things that don't make sense.

Speaker 1 And a closer look at Pam's brother, Derek.

Speaker 8 It's awkward to have to ask somebody, did you kill your sister?

Speaker 12 But you did?

Speaker 14 I did, yes.

Speaker 1 In late 2016, seven years after Pam Butler went missing, a 28-year veteran D.C. cold case detective named Mike Fulton was assigned the case.
Story goes that you really wanted that one.

Speaker 8 I did.

Speaker 21 You want the tough ones, and this was a big case.

Speaker 1 Unlike detectives before him, Fulton had the luxury of working Pam's case full-time. He believed he was likely dealing with her murder, even though Pam's body had not been found.

Speaker 8 She was declared legally dead.

Speaker 1 And why was that important for you as an investigator?

Speaker 8 Ultimately, if we figure out who did it, a defense attorney can't say, look, Pam Butler's alive. She's going to walk through this door and have everybody sort of turn and look.

Speaker 1 No body, no crime, right? That's the buttersticker, right?

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 8 The judge isn't saying she was a victim of a homicide. The judge is saying she's dead.
So once we get the facts to show that she's a victim of a homicide, it just makes it that much easier.

Speaker 1 Easier to make an arrest and secure a conviction. What's your approach, Detective? Do you put the clock back to day one, hour one on this thing?

Speaker 14 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 So, Detective, this is Pamela's place. Like the detectives before him, Detective Fulton immediately drove out to Pam's house.

Speaker 32 The house looks different now than it did back in 2009, but this is it.

Speaker 1 He began to excavate the foundations of Pam's case.

Speaker 32 You started dissecting her life. You know, who were her friends? Does she have any other boyfriends, ex-husbands, you know, her job, you know, financials? You start going through everything.

Speaker 1 Everything. But first off, Pam Butler's family.

Speaker 1 The detective reviewed the original persons of interest and became convinced, for one, that Pam's nephew Brandon, just a teenager at the time, had nothing to do with Pam's death.

Speaker 1 But he didn't dismiss the suspicions about Pam's brother, Derek.

Speaker 32 You have to investigate every.

Speaker 1 You're following following the money, right? Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. You follow the investigation where it goes.

Speaker 1 And just as previous investigators have learned, the money trail led to Derek.

Speaker 8 There were questions I had to ask him that were hard, that he needed to answer.

Speaker 1 Top metropolitan police officials called Derek in to meet with the new detective assigned to his sister's case. A new face.
Derek saw only more of the same. You went through some detectives, right?

Speaker 3 Oh, yes. At least five detectives, yes.

Speaker 1 So here's yet another detective you were introduced to as here's your guy now.

Speaker 3 Wasn't impressed at all. He just didn't seem to me like he had it in the way that he was talking.
He just didn't seem like he was the one.

Speaker 1 Then quite suddenly, ominously, the atmosphere in this introductory meeting changed. Fulton confronted Derek, cutting right to the chase.

Speaker 8 It's awkward to have to ask somebody, did you kill your sister?

Speaker 14 But you did? I did, yes.

Speaker 3 Then he asked me, he said, did you do something to your sister?

Speaker 1 This new cop is thinking, maybe I'm talking to the killer right here. The brother who benefited from her death?

Speaker 3 I said, no, I I didn't do it.

Speaker 1 But Derek had a growing sense of foreboding. This new detective wasn't letting go and drilled down again.

Speaker 2 You're still on his list.

Speaker 3 He said,

Speaker 3 I need you to come down and give some DNA.

Speaker 1 Oh, this again, you're hitting another gear here in this whole right.

Speaker 21 Derek did it there.

Speaker 1 But Fulton was heading down multiple paths in his investigation. He wasn't ready to discount Pam's boyfriend, Jose, even though he had no felonies to his name.

Speaker 1 He retrieved Pam Butler's security camera footage from the case file. Are these surveillance videos your main bit of evidence in this case?

Speaker 8 They're a very crucial part of the investigation. When you watch the video frame by frame by frame by frame, you start to see little things that don't make sense.

Speaker 8 For instance, the motion sensor lights, you know, why aren't they working?

Speaker 8 It's nighttime, so anytime anything came, you know, a cat, anything, these lights would pop on, pop on, illuminate around the house.

Speaker 8 So sometime in the late hours, you can see Jose come outside, but the lights don't come on.

Speaker 1 It was true. The video that first showed Jose in the glare of a motion-activated security light around the time Pam went missing later seemed as though it had been turned off.

Speaker 8 What's that tell you? Well, that tells me that, I mean, what's going on?

Speaker 1 And something else caught the detective's eye. Something seen in Jose's hand.
It appeared to be Pam Butler's keychain. How might Jose explain why he had it?

Speaker 1 You told us that Pam gave you one key, but now it looks like you have a key with stuff hanging from it and we know that pam had a key chain and we're like well wait a second where where is this coming from the detective's suspicions took him on a deep dive into jose's past going back some 30 years he discovered some troubling stories about jose and women

Speaker 1 A man with a secret. Two lives, two wives.

Speaker 6 How do you pull that off? You learn how to lie to one wife, to the other wife.

Speaker 1 The comings and goings of Pamela Butler's boyfriend, Jose, captured on Pam's home security cameras, were more than perplexing to Detective Mike Fulton of Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department.

Speaker 1 So in early 2017, even as Pam's brother Derek remained a person of interest in her disappearance, the detective took a hard look at Jose's background. On a first take, how does Jose come across?

Speaker 8 A normal guy, you know, served his country, works hard.

Speaker 1 The D.C. detective needed to know more about Jose's personal life.
So to get the scoop, he reached across the Potomac River to law enforcement colleagues in Arlington, Virginia, where Jose was living.

Speaker 6 I remember vividly, it was March of 2017. He says he needed my help.

Speaker 1 Arlington, P.D. Cole case detective Rosa Ortiz got the call.
As she began to investigate, she learned that long before the Pam Butler case, Jose had been married in Puerto Rico to a woman named Marta.

Speaker 6 They meet in Puerto Rico. They go to the same school.
Marta is a bit older than Jose.

Speaker 1 Did you want to know who Marta was?

Speaker 6 I wanted to, absolutely.

Speaker 1 Detective Ortiz, who speaks fluent Spanish, was able to fill in some blanks about Marta from her sister Nada in Puerto Rico.

Speaker 33 She was slim and tall. She had green eyes, very pretty.
She was very intelligent. She was always laughing.

Speaker 1 She has a recording of her sister singing cheerfully all those years ago.

Speaker 1 And she says Marta was even happier after she and Jose had a baby boy they named Hansel and settled in Arlington, Virginia.

Speaker 33 She was completely dedicated to her boy. Nothing but the best for him.

Speaker 1 The picture was that of a happy American family. But when the detective dug down a little, she discovered stories about Jose that shattered the heartwarming image.

Speaker 1 It turned out that while he was serving with the U.S. Army in Central America, he'd met another woman.

Speaker 6 He meets her and he marries her in Panama.

Speaker 20 A woman named Guadalupe.

Speaker 6 Guadalupe. And then eventually he brings her over to the U.S.
And that's

Speaker 6 the end of 88, beginning of 89.

Speaker 1 She's got two wives in the greater DC area. Is that the picture?

Speaker 6 That is.

Speaker 1 Somebody stashed over here in an apartment living a life and somebody else is somewhere else? And he's shuttling between the two lives?

Speaker 6 That's correct.

Speaker 1 And all in secret. Did she know at the time that he was married to this other woman named Marta?

Speaker 6 She did not. She had no idea who Marta was.

Speaker 1 She was totally in the dark on that.

Speaker 6 She was.

Speaker 1 What's more, Jose had a son with Guadalupe, too. What's that tell us about the guy, Jose?

Speaker 6 He lived two different lives. So how do you pull that off? You learn how to lie to

Speaker 6 one wife, lie to the other wife.

Speaker 1 Two women, two children, neither knows about the other, at least for a while.

Speaker 13 For a while, yes.

Speaker 1 Marta's sister says eventually Marta got wise to Jose and Guadalupe.

Speaker 6 She knew. She told her sister that she knew they were married.

Speaker 33 That's when the problem started, and she decided to separate from him.

Speaker 1 The deeper Ortiz dug into Marta's story, the more she felt an affinity with her.

Speaker 6 I couldn't help but sympathize with her.

Speaker 1 The detective herself had also moved from Puerto Rico to Virginia in the 1980s, just before Marta. It's a funny kind of symmetry.

Speaker 1 I mean, here you've come from Puerto Rico and your first major, major case is finding out what's happened to this woman, and she has some of the same pathways that you have.

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 6 There was a connection.

Speaker 1 I knew you knew people that she knew.

Speaker 6 Yeah, absolutely. So it was easier for me to reach out and find people.

Speaker 1 People who could tell her what happened to Marta.

Speaker 1 When Marta finally separated from Jose, their son Hansel was in Puerto Rico with family.

Speaker 20 Marta meanwhile got an apartment with roommates and she got a job too.

Speaker 1 Another echo of the detective's own past before her career in law enforcement, as she learned Marta started working in a psychiatric hospital. You'd work there too.

Speaker 6 I did. She was doing the same job I did when I was there.

Speaker 19 Wow.

Speaker 1 The detective learned when Marta walked out and started building her new life, she also got a boyfriend.

Speaker 6 She liked him. He treated her so different.

Speaker 6 She just didn't know that that kind of love existed. And she talked to her sister a lot about how nice he was with her.

Speaker 6 So it was a big deal to her.

Speaker 33 They're already establishing a relationship and were planning to come and introduce themselves to my parents.

Speaker 1 But apparently, Jose had other ideas about Marta and new men. Even though he had a second family, he didn't want to give up Marta.

Speaker 33 He was following her when she left him. When she went to work, he followed her.
When she went to catch the bus, he was following her.

Speaker 1 She says Marta was terrified of what was happening to her.

Speaker 1 Had you witnessed a crime?

Speaker 14 Yes, there was a physical assault occurring.

Speaker 22 You basically said, you don't understand, this is my wife. If I can't have her, nobody's going to have her.

Speaker 1 A string of detectives had spent more than eight years investigating Pamela Butler's 2009 disappearance, all of them with the victim's brother Derek on their case.

Speaker 3 I'm calling them, telling them, you know, asking them, what's happening? What are you doing? Wouldn't tell me.

Speaker 1 Derek himself, meanwhile, was still in the frame. But as 2017 rolled on, the investigation was zeroing in on Pam's boyfriend, Jose.
His first wife, Marta, had left him.

Speaker 1 And Detective Rosa Ortiz, digging through old police reports, came up with an amazing story of what happened next.

Speaker 6 A

Speaker 6 now retired police officer sees a woman struggling.

Speaker 1 She tracked down the officer mentioned in the police reports, former detective Mike Seddon.

Speaker 1 In 1989, 20 years before Pam Butler went missing, he was on patrol in Arlington when he came upon an alarming scene.

Speaker 22 So I immediately sped up, pulled over, jumped out.

Speaker 1 Mike, you're on foot and it doesn't look good what you're seeing. What is it?

Speaker 22 I see a domestic violence situation where a man is dragging a woman up the sidewalk.

Speaker 1 Dragging the woman by her hair, he says. He showed me what happened next.

Speaker 22 He had his arm around here, and he was basically pulling her like this, but her feet were out from underneath of her, and he was dragging her in this direction.

Speaker 1 So this is all going down very quickly, my friend. Going down very quickly, and he's running.

Speaker 22 He let go of her, and I just focused on him. And right about here, I just basically tackled him to the ground and held him down.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, he was fighting with me told him you know stop the six foot seven detective overpowered the man and cuffed him yes sir had you witnessed a crime yes there was a physical assault occurring he would learn the assailant's name was jose and the woman he'd been dragging was his estranged wife marta and then i paid attention to marta who was there crying and she was like oh thank you thank you you know help me and then she started telling me what was going on and it it just blew my mind.

Speaker 1 He says Jose was apparently in a jealous rage because he found out Marta had a new boyfriend.

Speaker 22 He had abducted her from her home, and according to her, kept her in a hotel and was raping her and physically abusing her for two days.

Speaker 1 Down at the police station, Marta told the detective Jose had used duct tape and rope to assault her. She escaped, and that's when Jose grabbed her on the street.

Speaker 1 Her story checked out when the detective went back to the scene and spotted Jose's car.

Speaker 22 Found the car, looked in the back window, saw the duct tape, saw the rope.

Speaker 1 This is a case that solved itself before you even get to the arraignment.

Speaker 22 Exactly.

Speaker 1 In a police interview, Jose seemed to dig himself an even deeper hole with a chilling statement to the detective.

Speaker 22 And he basically said, look,

Speaker 22 you don't understand. This is my wife.
If I can't have her, nobody's going to have her.

Speaker 1 Jose was charged with misdemeanor, assault, and battery, and felony abduction.

Speaker 22 I didn't see see him actually take her, as she described. I saw him dragging her up the street, so I'm going to get him for the abduction.

Speaker 1 But for the abduction charge to stick, Marta had to testify in court. On the fear scale, Mike, here and here.
How scared was she?

Speaker 22 This woman was off the scale.

Speaker 22 She told me, this man is going to kill me. I'm afraid he's going to kill me.

Speaker 1 And she warned the detective.

Speaker 22 She says, You have to be very careful because my husband is going to kill you, he said. You? Yeah, me.

Speaker 1 On the day Marta was due to testify in court against Jose, she didn't show up.

Speaker 22 And because of the fact that she wasn't there, they had a null prostate case.

Speaker 1 Means it wasn't going to go forward.

Speaker 22 Right.

Speaker 22 They can't go forward because they don't have the complaining person there.

Speaker 1 A week after she didn't show up to the court hearing, Marta called her sister Nada in Puerto Rico. One of Nada's children picked up and later told her that Marta had been in tears.

Speaker 33 And I said, well, if she was crying, she wanted to tell me something. She'll probably call again and I'll pick up.

Speaker 1 But Marta didn't call again, and Nada didn't call her back that day either. Something she'd regret for the rest of her life.

Speaker 33 I feel so guilty not knowing what she wanted to say.

Speaker 1 That same day, May 25th, 1989, Detective Ortiz learned from Marta's roommates that she'd left her apartment for a shift at the hospital, but she'd planned to quit her job.

Speaker 1 Later that day, Marta vanished. A missing person's report was filed soon after.

Speaker 6 Her roommates see her going to work. She made it to work.
She had day shift.

Speaker 1 And those roommates become the source of the missing person's filing report.

Speaker 6 Correct, because she didn't come home. And the question is, why? Why were they worried about their roommate? And it's because they knew what she'd been through with Jose.

Speaker 1 Jose was questioned by police police back then, but denied any knowledge of Marta's disappearance and whereabouts.

Speaker 1 In a recorded police interview, he told the detectives he'd even called her roommates looking for her.

Speaker 1 Why don't you just tell us where she is? I don't know where she can recover her body.

Speaker 34 I don't know where she's at. I don't know where she's at.
Funny where she's at. I will tell you.
I don't know know where she's at.

Speaker 1 He might not have known, but the mystery of Marta's disappearance and reappearance was about to unfold.

Speaker 6 She says, yeah, this is my ID. This is who I am.
She's alive and well.

Speaker 1 There's Marta. Yeah.
Marta Rodriguez alive and well? Detectives were in for a stunner of a twist.

Speaker 14 That's a holy cow moment, huh?

Speaker 8 It is a holy cow moment.

Speaker 1 Marta Rodriguez's sudden disappearance from Arlington, Virginia, in 1989 was a stark revelation for detectives investigating the suspected homicide of Pam Butler in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 She'd gone missing in 2009. Detective Rosa Ortiz learned that, as in Pam's case, police searching for Marta hadn't been sure where to look.

Speaker 6 They knew she was missing from Arlington. They just didn't know where she had been.

Speaker 1 It wasn't as though the cops didn't try. Detective Ray Spivey worked the case at the time.
He circulated flyers about Marta, hoping to trigger sightings of her near St.

Speaker 1 Elizabeth's Hospital, where she worked. Did you call out dogs and any special equipment or teams?

Speaker 12 D.C. had a specialty dog, and we arranged through D.C.
to search an area of the grounds.

Speaker 1 Did they hit on anything?

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 1 Marta's sister Nada came to search too, but found no sign of Marta. So the case watches sort of

Speaker 1 died? It was more or less a closed case after a year.

Speaker 6 They ran out of ways to gather evidence. They just came up empty-handed.

Speaker 1 But in 2017, as detectives tried to find out what happened to Marta back then, they tracked down her son Hansel, now in his 30s.

Speaker 8 I introduced myself, hey, I'm Detective Fulton. And I just said, hey, you know, I'm following following up on some old missing person cases.

Speaker 8 By any chance, did you have a mother named Marta who went missing? And he's like, yes. Oh, my God, yes.

Speaker 1 Hansel told the detectives he didn't know exactly what had happened. But right after his mom, Marta, went missing, his father, Jose, told him why she was gone.

Speaker 8 Jose's story was she had always ran off, that she had met some dudes, some drug guys, and she had just ran off and was never to be seen before. That was his story.

Speaker 1 So Hansel grew up under a dark cloud.

Speaker 6 He grew up thinking his mom abandoned him.

Speaker 1 But there was one big problem with Hansel's story. The detectives searching for his mom, Marta, turned up evidence that would totally contradict it.

Speaker 1 Documents showed that in the year 2000, more than 10 years after Marta had disappeared from Arlington, a routine check of missing persons by Virginia police turned up, guess what?

Speaker 1 Marta Rodriguez was alive and living in Florida. Maybe she'd been so terrified of Jose that she'd gone into hiding far away from him.

Speaker 6 Not missing at all. Not missing at all.

Speaker 1 At the time, the Arlington Missing Persons Unit even dispatched an officer in Miami to check if it was really her. And a woman answered the door.

Speaker 6 She says, Yeah, this is my ID. This is who I am.
She's alive and well.

Speaker 14 There's Marta. Yeah.

Speaker 8 They called back to Virginia and said, Hey, she's here. She's living in Florida.
And the case, you know, just got filed away.

Speaker 1 Tragically, Marta's family says they remained in the dark.

Speaker 33 They simply closed the case and we weren't told anything. Nothing.

Speaker 33 So many years went by and no one knew anything.

Speaker 6 Marta's mother died thinking that Marta forgot all about her, that she didn't want to communicate with her.

Speaker 1 So they thought she'd walked away from family and childhood?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 1 But in 2017, the detectives learning more about Marta thought it was unlikely she would have walked away from her family. So they did some double-checking.

Speaker 1 They already had a photo of Marta, so they decided to compare that photo to a state ID photo they accessed of the woman in Florida named Marta. And would you believe it?

Speaker 6 It wasn't Marta.

Speaker 21 No question.

Speaker 6 No questions whatsoever.

Speaker 1 That's a holy cow moment, huh?

Speaker 8 It is a holy cow moment.

Speaker 13 It is a holy cow moment. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It meant that Marta Rodriguez was, after nearly 30 years, still missing. Did you ever say, I'm going to find out what happened to you?

Speaker 6 I did.

Speaker 6 I said, I'm going to give it all I got.

Speaker 6 And, you know, until somebody tells me to stop or I retire, I'm not going to give up.

Speaker 1 The first question the detective wanted answered was, who was the woman living in Florida posing as Marta?

Speaker 1 So is this a whole other investigation off to the side now? How did this woman get the documentation that allowed her to pose as Marta?

Speaker 6 I personally found her.

Speaker 1 The woman claiming to be Marta? Yes.

Speaker 6 She's living in Florida. She's living in Florida.
Very seldom you get a confession over the phone. It's not as easy as people think it is.
But she confessed.

Speaker 1 As the detective untangled the complex story of Marta Rodriguez, she was stunned when she learned the woman's true identity.

Speaker 1 A startling trail of deceit.

Speaker 8 Jose said, hey, take Marta's information. Here's her date of birth.
Here's a social security number.

Speaker 1 She's not going to need him anymore.

Speaker 32 She's not going to need him. Did he actually say that?

Speaker 8 Exactly. She's not going to need him.

Speaker 1 Hey, weirdos!

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Speaker 1 Early in 2017, detectives trying to crack the Pam Butler case got a break as they investigated Pam's boyfriend, Jose. They knew Jose's first wife, Marta, had disappeared from Arlington in 1989.

Speaker 1 And now they discovered a woman had been living as Marta in Florida for nearly two decades. Detective Ortiz was about to find out who she was after ferreting out a phone number and calling her.

Speaker 6 She cried on the phone call, but she confessed. She confessed that it was her who used somebody else's information to get an ID.

Speaker 1 But get this. The woman who said she didn't know about Marta's disappearance turned out to be Jose's sister-in-law.

Speaker 8 So, Jose said, hey, take Marta's information. Here's her date of birth, here's a social security number.
You know,

Speaker 1 she's not going to need him anymore.

Speaker 32 Did he actually say that?

Speaker 8 Exactly. She's not going to need him.

Speaker 1 After all that confusion and deception, it turned out Marta Rodriguez, like Pam Butler, was still apparently missing. The detective was sure Jose was in some way responsible.

Speaker 8 So I remember going down to my boss's office and plopping down.

Speaker 21 And as chairing, I'm like, dude, he was married before and his wife is missing.

Speaker 8 And it was like, what if he killed his first wife?

Speaker 1 Is this the big light bulb moment, the big insight in the case?

Speaker 8 I think so.

Speaker 1 A pattern was emerging, story after story, like that of Jose's second wife, Guadalupe.

Speaker 8 The detectives were never able to locate her. Well, the reason why they were

Speaker 8 never able to locate her was because she went into hiding.

Speaker 1 Guadalupe, a third woman in Jose's life who had gone missing.

Speaker 8 She did the whole underground sort of railroad system and over the years had relocated two or three different times because Jose was able to locate her so she would go someplace else.

Speaker 8 So she was totally off the grid. So that's the reason why detectives had a hard time finding her.

Speaker 1 But eventually by cross-referencing her name in databases, detectives were able to track down Guadalupe.

Speaker 8 We were able to interview her.

Speaker 21 And then the story she tells, we're like, oh, wait a second.

Speaker 1 So what'd her main story turn out to be?

Speaker 8 That he was abusive, that I was afraid he was going to kill me.

Speaker 1 Guadalupe's dramatic story was backed up by Hansel, who moved in with his father and Guadalupe after his mother disappeared.

Speaker 6 Hansel had first-hand knowledge of the abuse that Guadalupe went through. He saw it as a child.

Speaker 8 Hansel had described an incident where she was downstairs begging for a life and he could hear Jose yelling at her, screaming at her, I'm going to kill you.

Speaker 1 He saw his father put a gun to her head?

Speaker 6 Yes, he witnessed Jose put a gun to Guadalupe's head.

Speaker 8 He says that I come downstairs and I see my father is just in a rage and I'm thinking, oh my God, he's going to kill her and he's going to kill me. And he's like 10 or 10 or 11 at the time.

Speaker 1 Detective, is this like article number one and let me tell you what kind of a guy Jose is? Exactly. But the detectives were more alarmed when they discovered yet another violent relationship.

Speaker 1 Jose had been running a flea market stall with a woman who had a young child. He apparently wanted more than a business relationship.

Speaker 6 He called her to meet him. He took that opportunity to abduct her at gunpoint.

Speaker 8 Jose became very aggressive and very abusive and ended up forcing her to have sex, ended up raping her, ends up tying her up, threatening to kill her, threatening to kill the kid.

Speaker 8 If you don't do what I say, I'm going to kill the kid.

Speaker 6 He had them both against a will in a basement of this house. When she finally sees the opportunity to leave, she arms herself with a knife.

Speaker 8 He's got a gun in his hand, grabs her, there's a struggle, she stabs him, there's a neighbor upstairs who comes running down, she's screaming, help me, help me. He's kidnapped me.

Speaker 8 You know, call the police.

Speaker 1 But when the police arrived, the tables turned. He's bloody and she's got a knife in her hand, right?

Speaker 20 Exactly.

Speaker 8 And he's saying, look, she's, this is a domestic. She got mad.
She stabbed me. And she's trying to explain, but her English isn't good.

Speaker 6 All the police could see was that she stabbed him. But they didn't know that she stabbed him in an effort to get away from him with her child.

Speaker 8 So she ultimately ends up getting locked up.

Speaker 1 However, the police did check out her story.

Speaker 8 And they go back to the house and they're able to find duct tape in the trash can. So, you know, the case ends up getting dismissed against her.

Speaker 1 Jose didn't get charged, but the detectives were sure they had his number.

Speaker 21 He's a violent man.

Speaker 8 He has a problem with women. He has a problem controlling his anger.

Speaker 1 Detective Fulton concluded Jose's anger and alleged violence had led to murder. So he decided to arrest him for killing Pam Butler.

Speaker 1 But until then, he couldn't tell Derek, who was still living under a cloud of suspicion.

Speaker 8 He walked around for eight years

Speaker 8 thinking that people were looking at him

Speaker 8 like he killed his sister. I mean, that's a hard thing to swallow.

Speaker 1 And you can't tell him the walls are closing in on Jose.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 21 I can't tell him everything I have.

Speaker 13 I can't tell him, dude, don't worry about it.

Speaker 14 I know you didn't do it.

Speaker 1 In April 2017, two experienced D.C. prosecutors took the Pam Butler case.
Former military prosecutor Glenn Kirshner and Deborah Sines.

Speaker 8 She is a character to say the least.

Speaker 1 But I don't think you want to face either one of them in court.

Speaker 8 No, they are what we call heavy hitters.

Speaker 1 The prosecutors were just learning about Jose's alleged history of violence.

Speaker 37 We have envisaging violence, bad violence, against both wives.

Speaker 27 We have wife number one missing and wife number two had a gun to her head begging for her life. We now have Pam Butler missing.

Speaker 27 But when we realized Jose is now hooked up with another young lady who has a young daughter herself, we decided we had to seek an arrest warrant for Jose.

Speaker 1 There's urgency to get him on ice, right?

Speaker 14 No, for sure. For sure.

Speaker 1 Pam's brother, Derek, is he still a suspect?

Speaker 3 I said, oh, Lord, I'm thinking that they're coming to lock me up at three o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 1 In April 2017, detectives were preparing to arrest Jose Rodriguez-Cruz for the murder of Pam Butler. Pam Butler's brother, Derek, knew nothing of what was going on.

Speaker 1 He himself was still living in fear of being arrested for his sister's murder, when early one morning, 3 a.m., he got a call from Detective Fulton.

Speaker 3 I said, oh, Lord,

Speaker 3 I'm thinking that they're coming to lock me up at three o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 1 Knock, knock, come on. Yeah.

Speaker 3 He said, this is Detective Fulton. I said, yeah, what's going on?

Speaker 3 And he said, I locked his ass up.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it was the best feeling that I'd ever gotten in my life.

Speaker 1 Jose had been arrested. And that meant Derek was in the clear.
Did you think he did it?

Speaker 14 Ever? Hell no.

Speaker 21 No, not. Derek was clean.

Speaker 8 Derek was clean.

Speaker 21 Clean as a whistle.

Speaker 1 A few hours later, Pam Butler's friend Rita heard the news of Jose's arrest.

Speaker 10 I just cried. I sat in my office and cried that this had finally happened.

Speaker 1 But Jose continued to say he was innocent.

Speaker 8 He's under arrest, very calm, very relaxed, and he's just, hey, I didn't kill Pam.

Speaker 1 But you knew he was your guy. We knew he was a guy.

Speaker 8 We have him being the last person seen with Pam.

Speaker 8 We have his first wife. Marta, who's disappeared off the face of the earth.
We have his second wife, who tells us that she was beaten, threatened. We have Jose

Speaker 8 giving his second wife's sister Marta's information and saying, ah, she's not going to need it.

Speaker 13 So you take all these things and you put it together and it's Jose killed Pam.

Speaker 21 No if and buts about it.

Speaker 13 He killed her.

Speaker 1 Even though Pamela Butler's body had not been found in the eight years after she'd vanished from her Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 home, Jose Rodriguez-Cruz was charged with her first-degree murder and potentially faced life in prison.

Speaker 27 That's when Jose realized he really didn't have much hope of beating this, but he did have one card to play, and that was where he disposed of Pam's remains.

Speaker 1 That leverage became the basis of a plea deal, a lesser second-degree murder charge for Jose, carrying a 12-year sentence if he gave up where Pam's body was and told how it got there.

Speaker 37 He is supposed to tell me how he killed Pam.

Speaker 1 The prosecutor stared down Jose as he stalled.

Speaker 37 I'm asking the questions and Jose won't look at me.

Speaker 20 And I'm getting annoyed.

Speaker 37 And I finally go, look at me.

Speaker 37 And he

Speaker 37 starts shaking, his eyes bulge out and he starts

Speaker 37 sweating profusely.

Speaker 1 Jose started spilling his guts about Pam. and what happened in her basement the day before Valentine's Day, 2009.

Speaker 37 He says that she got angry with him and says, why am I working? You're over here watching TV. I'm working.
Why haven't you gotten a better job? You're not a man. You'll never be a man.

Speaker 37 And he looked at me and he said, she called me.

Speaker 37 And he said, a bad name.

Speaker 1 You can say it.

Speaker 20 We'll believe it.

Speaker 13 A p.

Speaker 37 So I punched her. And I must have blacked out.
Because when I came to, she was gone.

Speaker 1 The prosecutor was having none of Jose's blackout story.

Speaker 37 He apologizes, and then he tells me he didn't blackout at all.

Speaker 37 And he says he strangled her to death.

Speaker 1 The prosecutors had at last gotten a confession. And then finally, Jose revealed the biggest mystery of the case, how he got Pam's body out of the house.

Speaker 1 Remember that window shade Pam's family had noticed was raised from the bottom, something Pam never did.

Speaker 1 Jose put Pam's limp body in a black plastic trash bag, raised the shade from the bottom, and under the cover of darkness, dropped her out of the dining room window, a window he knew wasn't covered by Pam's security cameras.

Speaker 1 He told you the story.

Speaker 3 Sure did.

Speaker 1 Jose then described driving Pam's body away in the back seat of his car.

Speaker 20 It's difficult to think of his hands on her. Yes.

Speaker 10 The thing that haunts me is that. terrifying minute or two minutes that it took for him to choke her.

Speaker 1 All Pam's family wanted was to restore some dignity.

Speaker 27 They said, you know, we don't really care how much time Jose Rodriguez Cruz gets in jail. What we want is for him to tell us where Pam's remains are because we want to give her a proper burial.

Speaker 1 Using a map, Jose marked the place where he said he buried Pam's body, in the densely wooded median of I-95 in Virginia. That's where this bright beloved woman had ended up.

Speaker 1 in a shallow grave between the north and southbound lanes of one of the busiest stretches of interstate in the country. So Detective, here we are in the median of I-95.

Speaker 1 These people are going to Washington. These people are going to Richmond, Virginia.
I have no idea what's happened here.

Speaker 6 Absolutely, and that's the reason why he got away with it for so long. Nobody would have thought to stop here.

Speaker 1 He buried Pamela Butler. But recovering her remains was another sad chapter altogether.
The median where Jose said he buried Pam had since been paved over to create HOV lanes.

Speaker 1 So Pam's body, under tons of concrete, never was recovered. What did this man do to your family?

Speaker 18 He took a lot away from us. Took everything out of me.

Speaker 1 As for Jose, he was sent to prison. But with good behavior, he would likely end up serving a good deal less than his 12-year sentence for murdering Pam.
And that gnawed at Derek Butler.

Speaker 1 He felt Jose had cheated him.

Speaker 14 I think he knew.

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 22 there was no chance of us ever finding the body.

Speaker 1 So what are you thinking? We've got to extend the sentence? Exactly. As it happened, Derek would get his chance.

Speaker 1 Because when Jose told investigators the location of Pam Butler's remains in the median of Interstate 95, that jogged a distant memory over in Virginia.

Speaker 6 When they were on the scene searching for Pamela's remains, someone at the scene remembered that six miles south from there, they had found some other remains.

Speaker 1 A state trooper recalled that in 1991, nearly 20 years before Pam Butler was murdered, Civil War relic hunters turned up another body six miles south in the median of I-95.

Speaker 1 So instead of a shell casing or a button from a jacket, they found

Speaker 6 the remains. So they immediately called the police.

Speaker 1 Back in 1991, there was no good way to identify the woman's sparse remains. So she was listed as a Jane Doe.
But the detectives had a hunch, could she be Marta?

Speaker 6 The first thing that came to mind, mind, have you guys submitted DNA for testing?

Speaker 1 The detectives obtained a DNA sample from Hansel, Jose, and Marta's son. They sent it off for comparison with a sample extracted from the remains of the Jane Doe.
And at that point, your phone rings?

Speaker 6 We have a match.

Speaker 1 And your DNA turns out to be Marta Rodriguez.

Speaker 6 I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 1 This is where they found Marta's body.

Speaker 6 This is where they found Marta's body.

Speaker 1 But that was just a starting point.

Speaker 6 We knew who killed her.

Speaker 1 But you got to prove it in court.

Speaker 6 But we had to prove it in court.

Speaker 1 A personal mission for Derek. Bring Jose to justice for Marta's murder.

Speaker 3 I thought it was going to be easy when I first started.

Speaker 6 I told him some puzzles take longer than others.

Speaker 1 At his home in Washington, D.C., Derek Butler was fuming, regretting he'd signed on to the plea deal that meant Jose Rodriguez-Cruz could likely serve less than 12 years in prison for murdering his sister Pam.

Speaker 3 I have no doubt in my mind that he would have done it again.

Speaker 1 Derek was sure Jose had also murdered his first wife, Marta, in Virginia decades before.

Speaker 1 And he was going to try to get Jose put away for life. Now you're fired up again and you're going to take this fight across the river.
Correct. You knew it was going to be as tough or tougher.

Speaker 3 Actually, I thought it was going to be easy when I first started.

Speaker 1 Derek figured the D.C. prosecutors had presented a gift-wrapped watertight case against Jose to the prosecutor in Virginia.
But as 2017 rolled into 2018, it seemed to Derek Marta's case was stuck.

Speaker 3 Year goes by, nothing happens. Year and a half go by, we're pretty close to two years, and they didn't do a daggone thing with it.

Speaker 6 I told him, you need to trust us. We're doing this.
We're doing it the right way. It's a big puzzle is how I describe these cases.
You have to put all the pieces together.

Speaker 6 Some puzzles take longer than others.

Speaker 20 And Derek wanted to go quickly.

Speaker 6 He did.

Speaker 1 And in 2019, Derek's frustration turned into action.

Speaker 3 I started making phone calls to them, and the district attorney would not even talk to me.

Speaker 1 When Derek did eventually get through, he says he got the brush off.

Speaker 3 Told me he didn't have to talk to me. He wasn't going to talk to me he didn't have to talk to you yeah wasn't my case i had nothing to do with it yeah

Speaker 1 so derek upped the ante he rounded up reporters and camera teams and headed to virginia to confront the commonwealth attorney in person he's going to be on the six o'clock news unless he gets with a program here exactly

Speaker 1 Derek marched his entourage into the Commonwealth Attorney's office. Do they get into the building with you or do they try and keep him out?

Speaker 3 His secretary came to the door and she said, Mr. Butler can come in, but nobody else can come and you have to cut the audio and video equipment off.

Speaker 38 No cases ever.

Speaker 1 Derek spoke with then DA Commonwealth Attorney Eric Olson.

Speaker 14 Cordial? It was cordial, yeah.

Speaker 3 Seemed like a nice guy and I have no doubt that he is a nice guy.

Speaker 39 Derek Butler was not satisfied and so he made it his mission to see that Jose Rodriguez Cruz was brought to justice.

Speaker 1 Commonwealth Attorney Olson was caught off guard by Derek's approach. He came with you guys saying, basically, grow a spine.
Come on, you guys got to take this thing on.

Speaker 39 Well, he certainly did come to our office, and he talked to me personally

Speaker 39 about, you know, trying to encourage us.

Speaker 1 So what do you do with this angry family victim?

Speaker 39 You know, when I spoke to Mr. Butler, I explained there's a difference between knowing what happened and proving what happened.
This was a 30-year-old case.

Speaker 1 But he told Derek he'd see what he could do.

Speaker 39 My message to Derek Butler was this. We will do everything we can to try to put a case together.
You just have to be patient. If there's any way we can do it, we're going to try.

Speaker 1 And if you hadn't brought the media pack with you, do you think you would have gotten any breakthrough in it?

Speaker 3 I wouldn't have gotten past the front door.

Speaker 3 I'm not crazy. I know that a 30-year-old case is hard to prove.

Speaker 1 But Olson pushed the case forward.

Speaker 38 This is the ultimate act of domestic violence. That's the allegation in this case.

Speaker 1 He's singing a completely different tune to you now, huh?

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 1 Now your brother's in arms and you're going to go get this guy.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 3 I'm here to get justice for her. She deserves it.

Speaker 38 It was fairly obvious to the authorities that there was need to pursue it as a homicide investigation.

Speaker 1 Once in October 2019,

Speaker 1 Commonwealth Attorney Olson charged Jose Rodriguez Cruz with the first-degree murder of his first wife, Marta, and assigned Sandra Park and Ryan Fitzgerald to prosecute the case.

Speaker 1 Who does Jose Rodriguez-Cruz turn out to be? Who did you learn this person was?

Speaker 16 He was a psychopath. To me, he was just an evil person that inflicted a lot of violence on women who certainly did not deserve any of it.

Speaker 15 Of course, the challenge for us as prosecutors is what we could use as evidence and how. How legally were we going to get those items into evidence to paint the picture?

Speaker 1 Their evidence was circumstantial, even thin. They had no murder scene, no blood evidence, no eyewitnesses.
And they were relying on a few bones found by Civil War relic hunters some 30 years before.

Speaker 15 Remember, the bones were recovered in 1991.

Speaker 1 And imagine the remains were sparse.

Speaker 23 Yes.

Speaker 1 But while the prosecutors could prove they were Marta's remains, could they convince a jury she'd been murdered?

Speaker 16 The initial pathology report determined that the cause of death was undetermined.

Speaker 1 So you don't know how she died. Right.

Speaker 1 And of course, Jose denied any knowledge. He was in prison for murdering Pam Butler when Detective Ortiz and a colleague showed up to question him about killing Marta.

Speaker 6 I'm just here to ask you for that. Just the honest truth, get that off your chest.

Speaker 6 That's different.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, obviously you believe I killed her.

Speaker 1 Why didn't you kill her?

Speaker 1 You keep asking me questions I can't answer.

Speaker 1 Why I killed her, I didn't kill her.

Speaker 16 And he says, I don't know what to tell you. I think she ran off with some drug dealers.
And that's the same story that he'd been telling all the other innocent people in our story.

Speaker 1 With so little evidence to work with, the two prosecutors weren't sure they could win the case. And what's more, Jose had a Lulu of a story still to tell.

Speaker 1 Is there anything where you just felt the hair in your neck stand up? Yes,

Speaker 13 all of it.

Speaker 1 A wild tale about Marta's death. Could it have been an accident?

Speaker 15 He wanted the court to believe that she died of a drug overdose.

Speaker 1 In late 2020, the stakes were high for Stafford County, Virginia prosecutors.

Speaker 1 Jose Rodriguez Cruz seemed set to walk out of prison after serving a good deal less than his 12-year sentence, even though he'd pleaded guilty to killing his girlfriend Pam Butler.

Speaker 1 But now, as the prosecutors sought to put him away for maybe the rest of his life for killing his first wife, Marta, could they even prove the core truth about Marta's death?

Speaker 1 Do you know whether she was a murder victim or not? The most basic information you need.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 15 People don't just end up on the median unexplained. People don't just end up on I-95 unexplained.
And there was no one else that would have put her there but Jose.

Speaker 15 And the manner in which he disposed of her became so important because he'd done it to someone else another time.

Speaker 1 Even though he'd already told prosecutors in the Pam Butler case what he'd done, here he was on tape speaking casually, chillingly about Pam to Detective Ortiz and a fellow detective.

Speaker 1 How did you cure her?

Speaker 1 Um, that's frankly.

Speaker 1 You just cured her?

Speaker 1 Did you feel bad about that?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he told the detectives he drove down Interstate 95.

Speaker 1 Did she pull off this side of the rubber and did she use immediately? Who did you be in?

Speaker 1 And he confirmed how he disposed of Pam's body.

Speaker 1 The way he tells it, some of the details, is there anything where you just felt the hair in your neck stand up?

Speaker 25 Yes,

Speaker 16 all of it. Just no compassion or empathy or human emotion whatsoever.

Speaker 1 You're not seeing any remorse.

Speaker 16 No remorse.

Speaker 1 Little did he know, by telling law enforcement how he murdered and disposed of Pam Butler, Jose was handing the prosecutors critical details they could use against him for killing Marta.

Speaker 15 It becomes signature evidence. It's idiosyncratic.
It's so unique that the evidence of Pam Butler's murder becomes relevant to the murder of Marta Rodriguez.

Speaker 15 The defendant has acknowledged this is the area in which he placed Pam Butler's body. That's a signature.

Speaker 6 Marta was dumped very close along this tree line here.

Speaker 1 Detective Ortiz told us how she believes Jose disposed of Marta's body.

Speaker 13 So how do you think it happened?

Speaker 1 How do you see it going down?

Speaker 6 I really see it

Speaker 6 at the middle of the night, dark. Jose just pulls over on the shoulder of the highway and

Speaker 6 it's a very quick, unplanned maneuver. He just dumps the body right there.

Speaker 1 As the Marta Rodriguez murder case headed for trial, the evidence against Jose that once seemed thin was piling up.

Speaker 15 I think that's when Anyone would begin to realize, okay, they've built the case and they have my story now.

Speaker 15 What do I do now?

Speaker 1 Jose did as he'd done in the Pam Butler case. He made a deal with the prosecutors and agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder.

Speaker 1 In April 2021, at a sentencing hearing, he would make his case for the minimum, five years in prison, while the prosecutors would argue for the max, 40 years.

Speaker 1 This is sort of an unusual event for a lot of people. There's no jury.
You're arguing your case to the judge.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 1 As the court convened, there was Marta and Jose's only son, Hansel.

Speaker 21 Hansel.

Speaker 15 Hansel Rodriguez. He's a driving force for us.
He suffered so much, and we needed to bring this to fruition for him.

Speaker 1 Derek Butler was there, too, staring daggers at Jose.

Speaker 1 Here you are in this courtroom, standing as an advocate for a murdered woman that you'd never met.

Speaker 14 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Hansel didn't deserve to go through what he had went through.

Speaker 1 When the hearing got underway, Ryan Fitzgerald made a blistering presentation of the evidence. Fair to say you took this personally?

Speaker 15 No, it's not that you take things personally, but it's impossible not to tap into what that feels like when you've got his son sitting behind you.

Speaker 1 Hansel took the stand against his father with a searing impact statement.

Speaker 15 You could feel his hurt. You felt it when he said, I started to notice other families that had a mom and I didn't have a mom.

Speaker 1 And then he told the court a childhood secret he'd revealed revealed to detectives during their investigation.

Speaker 1 That when he was 11, he suddenly discovered that story about his mom running off with drug dealers wasn't true. The incident happened when Jose was in a rage and Hansel ran to hide.

Speaker 8 He says, my dad has this library and he has this desk area and I'm running by and I just happen to look and there's this piece of paper laying there and the sheet of paper said, I, Jose Rodriguez, am responsible for Marta's disappearance.

Speaker 8 And he was like, oh my God, he's going to kill himself. And this is sort of of his confession of what he did to his mom.
And he said he went and hid.

Speaker 15 He said he just viewed his life through a lens of conflict and survival. And you felt it when he said that it defined him.

Speaker 1 Being a boy whose father killed his mother. Right.
The exclamation point came from Marta's sister Nada, appearing in court via a live video stream.

Speaker 33 So tragic. Marta suffered so much.

Speaker 1 The prosecutors closed believing they'd made their strongest case for a long sentence. The question is, Judge, what are you going to do now that we've told you these things? That's correct.

Speaker 1 And they hadn't counted on Jose's next move.

Speaker 15 At a sentencing proceeding, the defendant has the right to offer the court his version of the events.

Speaker 1 So Jose rose to tell his story of what happened to Marta.

Speaker 1 In May 1989, after he and Marta were separated, Jose said Marta got in touch with him.

Speaker 6 He says that she wanted to meet with him to talk about a handsome.

Speaker 1 Jose said they met at a hotel, but Marta felt unwell.

Speaker 16 He says that she was suffering a migraine. He told her that she could take some of his painkillers that happened to be laying out in a bag.

Speaker 6 And he directed her to the bag to take the pain pills.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, Jose said he took this car to go get some food for Marta. But as luck would have it, he said he ran out of gas.

Speaker 1 And so by the time he got back to the hotel, he claimed he was confronted by a scene of horror.

Speaker 6 So when he leaves to go get gas, he comes back late, and then Marta's dead.

Speaker 1 Marta had overdosed on pain pills, Jose explained in court, and he panicked. And then he says he calls a friend to help him, huh?

Speaker 6 Well, he said he calls not a friend. He calls his drug dealer

Speaker 6 to help him dispose of the body.

Speaker 1 Jose claimed his dealer friend told him to keep a lookout while he took care of Marta's body.

Speaker 6 And then it's the drug dealer. who dumps the body.

Speaker 1 And that was Jose's story about Marta.

Speaker 4 Think about that, right?

Speaker 15 In the year before she died, Jose abducted her, abused her, tied her up, attempting to rape her.

Speaker 15 And he wanted the court to believe that she died of a drug overdose during which he wasn't even in the room, and he happened to be out getting gas.

Speaker 1 The judge was not buying this defense at all.

Speaker 16 That was our take on it.

Speaker 1 After a short recess, the judge returned to hand down his sentence.

Speaker 14 Boom.

Speaker 15 He imposed the maximum punishment allowable under the the law, and I clapped in the...

Speaker 1 You're not supposed to do that, Derek.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I was hoping that he would get the maximum amount,

Speaker 3 but I wasn't expecting it.

Speaker 1 Jose, aged 55, got 40 years. On top of the 12 years, he was already serving for murdering Pam Butler.

Speaker 16 That is what that maximum penalty is reserved for. It's for people, monsters like Jose.

Speaker 14 I thought

Speaker 3 nobody was so broken that they couldn't be fixed. But I would tell him that you are a person that should have never been born.
He's an evil guy.

Speaker 9 We don't know all the things that he's done.

Speaker 38 Justice was finally served.

Speaker 1 Jose will likely die in prison while his many victims try to pick up the pieces of their lives.

Speaker 1 Marta's sister Nada is still filled with regret for not coming to the phone the day Marta called for help.

Speaker 33 I'm never going to have closure. That's why I feel so guilty.

Speaker 33 As if I had killed her with my own hands.

Speaker 1 Detective Ortiz took it upon herself to bring Marta's ashes to Puerto Rico, and Nada laid her sister to rest in a place where Marta had some of her happiest moments.

Speaker 6 And she would have still been around her family.

Speaker 1 She didn't get that.

Speaker 6 She didn't get that chance. She didn't get a chance to raise her child or have the

Speaker 6 ability ability to raise her grandkids.

Speaker 1 As for Derek, he continues to help other people of color searching for missing loved ones through the nonprofit Black and Missing Foundation. But his personal journey is over.

Speaker 1 You just kept on a coming and a coming and a coming for years.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Scared as hell sometimes that they were going to come and lock me up.

Speaker 1 How do you think about yourself, Derek?

Speaker 19 Are you a hero?

Speaker 3 No, just somebody that cares about his family. I have no doubt in my mind that had this happened to me, that Pam would have did the same for me.

Speaker 1 Hey, everybody, it's Rob Lowe here. If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe.

Speaker 1 And basically, it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J.

Speaker 1 Fox.

Speaker 22 There are new episodes out every Thursday.

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