In the Dateline episode “The Golden Child”, Dennis Murphy investigates the disappearance of 47-year-old EPA computer analyst Pamela Butler. She was last seen at her home in Washington, D.C. on Valentine’s Day 2009. Security cameras at her home captured her boyfriend Jose Rodriguez-Cruz entering her home with flowers — but the cameras never captured Butler leaving the house.
More than eight years later, in October 2017, that former boyfriend, Rodriguez-Cruz, confessed to killing Butler. He said they got into an argument: he punched her in the face and then strangled her to death. He dropped her body from a window out of the security camera’s view and put the body in his car. For his plea agreement (second degree murder), which included telling authorities where he hid her body, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. In December 2017, Butler’s partial remains were found along I-95 in Virginia but “unrecoverable”.
After Rodriguez-Cruz confessed to the murder of Pam Butler, authorities conducted new DNA testing on remains that were found in 1991. The results revealed that the skeletal remains belonged to Rodriguez-Cruz’s ex-wife Marta Haydee Rodriguez, a 28-year-old nurse’s assistant who went missing in Arlington, Virginia in 1989. Her remains were found about a mile away from where Butler’s remains were found. Dateline airs Fridays at 10 pm on ABC.
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