D.C. woman's disappearance leaves a trail with no end

2012-01-18T23:08:00.005-05:00

They made a love connection in cyberspace, two lonely strangers in their 40s, each long divorced and yearning for new romance.

By all accounts, Jose Rodriguez-Cruz and Pam Butler were a happy couple for most of their five months together. "This was a woman I really cared for, okay?" said Rodriguez-Cruz, who met Butler through the online dating service eHarmony.

"I mean, I treated her like a queen."

Then, on the eve of Valentine's Day, she disappeared.

"I'm telling you," he said, "there's no way I would ever hurt her."

And no one can prove he did.

Butler, 47, a computer specialist for the Environmental Protection Agency, vanished in February in what D.C. police think was a homicide. From the outset, detectives have focused on Rodriguez-Cruz as a suspect, searching his Alexandria apartment with a warrant, taking his car and other belongings, digging into his past and questioning him aggressively.

But with Rodriguez-Cruz denying any knowledge of Butler's whereabouts and detectives lacking enough evidence for an arrest, the stubborn case "has gone about as far as it can go at this point, unfortunately," a law enforcement official said. A dead end.

Rarely is homicide in the District so complicated; rarely are the facts so intricate. This year, 130 people have been killed -- the carnage numbing, its rhythm bleak: A gunshot sounds; detectives roll up to a corpse on the pavement; there are shell casings to examine, motives to explore, witnesses to cajole. Maybe a thug cuts a deal, snitches on the shooter and the file gets put away.

Not this time.

Of the dozens of active cases being handled by the D.C. police homicide unit, only one involves a suspected victim who can't be found. Butler's mother said a detective told her that investigators might never learn what happened to her daughter.

"They're never going to find nothing to indicate that I did something to her," said Rodriguez-Cruz, an office manager at a private substance-abuse treatment center in Annandale.

After months of avoiding publicity, the 44-year-old former military police officer discussed Butler's disappearance for hours in recent interviews with The Washington Post, acknowledging that he is a suspect and saying that detectives have "made my life hell."

"You're tried and convicted by the police," he said, describing himself as an innocent victim of misconstrued "so-called evidence," much of it circumstantial. He voiced sympathy for Butler's relatives, mired in anguish over the stalled investigation, but said he stopped cooperating with detectives because they want him to confess to a crime he didn't commit.

"You know what my worst fear is?" Rodriguez-Cruz said. "That they never find her. Somebody who's guilty, that's what they hope for, that they never find her. I'm the opposite. I want her to be found."

The mystery centers on a highly educated woman who normally was hyper-vigilant about her safety -- a career-minded professional with a six-figure salary who friends said was lonesome for a man in her life. Butler met Rodriguez-Cruz online last fall, and soon he was regularly staying overnight at her Northwest Washington home.

It was there, in her immaculate brick house in the Brightwood neighborhood, that Butler was last known to be alive, in the company of her boyfriend.

"Like I told the police from the first day, you can search that house," Rodriguez-Cruz said. "You're not going to find anything to suggest there was a struggle. You're not going to find no blood. . . .

"Not because I'm talking arrogant and I covered my tracks," he said. "It's because I didn't do nothing to that woman."

Everything 'just so'

"Everything Pam did was absolutely meticulous," said Brenda Mosely, a microbiologist who worked with Butler at the EPA's headquarters in Washington.

With a bachelor's degree in information technology and a master's in public administration, Butler was in charge of computer systems in the agency's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

"I mean, she kept her office like 'Good Housekeeping,' " Mosely said of her missing friend, who was in her 11th year at the EPA, making $120,000 annually. "Color-coordinated artificial flowers; all her awards and certificates displayed just so, in an orderly fashion. . . . She was just a careful, organized, efficient individual."

Butler, 5-foot-3 and 130 pounds, with shoulder-length brown hair, was a "clean freak" at home, said her widowed mother, Thelma Butler, who lives in Southwest Washington. Her brother, Derrick Butler, who teaches auto mechanics at Ballou High School in the District, said, "She was so neat, if you walked into her house, you'd be almost reluctant to sit down."

Her impeccable tidiness would offer detectives and her family clues about what might have happened.

Security alarms, cameras

With her EPA income, plus her shared ownership of two rental houses in Baltimore and a 12-unit apartment building in Southeast Washington, Butler lived comfortably, at least until the economy tanked. Her two-story six-room house at Fourth and Oglethorpe streets NW, for which she paid $175,000 in 2000, was worth about $600,000 at the peak of the city's real estate boom, and she borrowed substantially against it, records show.

In addition to other high-end possessions, she owned a Mercedes and a Jaguar at the time she vanished.

Guarding her safety and belongings carefully, Butler bought not only an alarm system and motion-activated floodlights for her house, she also bought surveillance cameras for the outside, one to cover the front door and one each for the three doors in back.

Most of the downstairs windows also appeared in the closed-circuit images, which were displayed simultaneously on three video monitors in the house, each with a four-way split screen. Butler wanted to size up any strangers before greeting them in person, friends and relatives said.

After Butler disappeared, the continuous video feeds, which were stored on a computer drive, greatly contributed to the suspicion that fell on Rodriguez-Cruz.

Friends and relatives of the missing woman said they knew of no trauma in her past that made her so cautious; they said it seemed part of Butler's nature that she felt acutely vulnerable, especially living by herself in the city.

"I think she was lonely," said her friend Rita Moss, a human resources manager in the Defense Department. Butler's brief marriage to a merchant mariner had ended in an amicable divorce in the mid-1990s.

"She had everything else," Moss said. "She was successful in her career; she had her nice house, her nice cars. I think what she really wanted was someone she could spend some quality time with."

As protective of her privacy as she was of her safety, Butler apparently told no one close to her that she had signed up with an online dating service. When people asked her last fall how she and her new boyfriend had met, she spun varying fibs about a chance encounter on a Metro train or in a Costco store.

Not until after she vanished did her family and acquaintances find out that Butler had joined eHarmony and that a computer had generated a list of potential soul mates for her, including Jose Angel Rodriguez-Cruz.

A match made online

"If I remember, I got an e-mail," Rodriguez-Cruz said. "Pam read my profile. That's how we started e-mailing. Then we talked on the phone." Then they met for dinner at a Cuban restaurant, he said, and "it went real quick from there."

As for why the computer matched them, he cited eHarmony's "29 dimensions of compatibility," saying that he and Butler agreed on the most important qualities in a relationship -- "trust, communication, physical affection" -- and had common likes and dislikes.

"For one thing, we were both very neat and orderly," he said. From the night they started dating in September last year, he said, he was "forthcoming about everything" in his past, including "my psychological problems," which he said are a result of his military service.

Stoutly built at 5-foot-9, with a shaved head and black mustache, Rodriguez-Cruz, who did not want to be photographed for this article, lives in the $800-a-month apartment he was renting when he met Butler, a modern efficiency done up like an Ikea showroom 16 floors above Seminary Road in Alexandria.

He said he grew up in Puerto Rico and New York and joined the Army in 1982, at age 17. Only snippets of his service record are public. They show that he was a military police officer, that he was stationed outside the United States for a time and that his final rank, private first class, took effect in April 1988, a month before he was discharged.

Rodriguez-Cruz said he had been a sergeant at one point and was honorably discharged. He said he was demoted near the end of his enlistment for having a romantic affair with a fellow serviceman's wife, a violation of military law.

Another reason he had trouble in the Army: He said he had post-traumatic stress disorder, which caused him to feel "paranoid" and agitated. He said the illness stemmed from dangers he faced while serving with Reagan-era military advisers in Latin America, helping governments combat armed leftists.

"In Peru, it was Shining Path; in Colombia, it was M-19; in El Salvador, it was the FMLN." He said he also served in Guatemala and Panama.

"When I came back, I had PTSD, which I still have," he said. Living in the Washington area after his discharge, he said, he was employed mostly as a security guard in the 1990s but was unable to work regularly some years because of "my nerves."

"I still get treated," he said one afternoon in his apartment, his brown eyes wide and intense. Describing waves of extreme anxiety and a crushing migraine that had come over him the night before, he said he takes the antidepressant Zoloft and 800-milligram tablets of ibuprofen, among other medications, to stay on an even keel.

After serving in the Army, his "mental issues" created turmoil in his domestic life, he said, referring to an ex-wife who "falsely accused" him of abuse, including kidnapping, and a former girlfriend who "stabbed me a bunch of times" in a fight.

Although he had some minor scrapes with police that were unrelated to women, he said, he has not served jail time. No serious criminal record for him could be found in Washington area courts.

Needing a "low-stress" job, Rodriguez-Cruz said, he started working in March 2008 as an office manager at Living Free Health Services in Annandale, making $40,000 a year. And with help from eHarmony, he said, he set out to reboot his love life.

"Have I had tumultuous relationships? Yes, unfortunately, I have. Does that mean I did something to Pam? No, it doesn't."

He said that their romance bloomed quickly last fall and that he was soon sleeping at her home most nights. "I basically lived there," he said.

'They got along fine'

For some of the five months they were together, one of Butler's nephews, Brandon Butler, a college student, also lived in the house. "She seemed happy," Brandon Butler recalled. "I mean, they had their arguments here and there. But for the most part, they got along fine."

Other relatives and some of Butler's friends said they got the same impression on the few occasions they socialized with the couple.

They said Rodriguez-Cruz was affable and pleasantly attentive to Butler, who seemed to enjoy being with him.

"Pam was a very, very sharp lady, one who did not suffer fools," said her friend Michael Yelverton, a Defense Department executive who went to graduate school with Butler at American University.

Yelverton recalled meeting Rodriguez-Cruz in an Irish pub last fall at a get-together with Butler and a few of their old classmates. "I could never see her letting her guard down," said Yelverton, adding that Rodriguez-Cruz "seemed like a nice fellow."

Apparent financial strain

Rodriguez-Cruz said their relationship soured in the winter, though, after Butler began "stressing out" over money.

The impact of the economy on her real estate is evident in assessment records. The value of her Brightwood house fell sharply and is set at $353,000 for next year, which is less than she had borrowed against it. "She was complaining about bills," Brandon Butler recalled. After he and his aunt had a spat about living costs, he said, "I moved out, to give her time to cool down or whatever."

That left just Butler and her boyfriend in the house. "She was stressing out about people taking advantage of her, people thinking she was made of money," Rodriguez-Cruz said. "And then she starts getting on me, like I'm a leech. . . . Especially that last month. She was coming out of left field. And I was, like, what the hell is going on, you know?"

Others who had contact with Butler in the week before she vanished said she gave no hint that she intended to break up with Rodriguez-Cruz.

Thelma Butler said her daughter called her Thursday, Feb. 12, to say that the couple wanted to take her out that Saturday for a Valentine's Day dinner. And her friend Rita Moss said Butler mentioned in a text message that Friday that she and Rodriguez-Cruz had plans for that evening.

"We are going to the new restaurant called 'Next Door' owned by Ben's Chili Bowl and others tonight," Butler's message read.

But that evening, when he arrived at her house after work, Rodriguez-Cruz said, Butler told him they were finished as a couple.

"It didn't make any sense to me," he said. In an emotional discussion, he said, Butler was never specific about her reasons for breaking up with him.

"She kept saying that I didn't have her back. And I'm like: 'Your back on what? What are you talking about?' That's why it was a mystery to me." Finally, he said, "she told me to get my [stuff] and get out."

He said he climbed into his '97 Dodge Neon and drove home to Alexandria.

It was Friday, Feb. 13.

"After that, I don't know what happened to her," he said. "All I know is, I left her alive and well in that house."

10 Ways To Help Win Child Custody

2010-02-04T21:46:00.000-05:00

Find an adequate / safe living environment.

Stay in the same school district.

Find a job / work schedule that fits the children’s routine.

Avoid cohabitation too soon in a new relationship

Find and keep stability in all aspects of your life.

Hire a lawyer who knows custody and who you can afford.

Put the children’s needs above the custody fight.

Don’t involve the children in the custody fight.

Facilitate the opposing party’s custody as much as possible.

Know your own limits and needs.

Lower your Child Support

2008-10-21T07:12:00.000-04:00

You don't need an attorney or spend an exorbitant amount to decrease your Child Support payments. Below are 4 steps to help you accomplish lowering your support. This is not intended to be an affront to custodial parents and certainly not the children. However, it is no secret that some non-custodial parents pay way too much child support.

Step 1: Keep accurate records of all your support payments. If you pay through the state, get a copy of your records.

Step 2: If your pay has decreased have your boss write a letter for you as documented proof. If the custodial parent has made recent lavish, unnecessary purchases, take pictures.

Step 3: File a petition to Modify Support. If your payments are lowered the new payment will go back to the date of your petition. Do a Discovery and subpoena the custodial parents' bank and credit card records. When Discovery is complete, get a court date set.

Step 4: Continue all court dates until Discovery is complete. Make sure you are on your best behavior in court. Do not ever argue with the judge or the custodial parent.

Know the facts, but do not try to act like you are an attorney. Let your records and documentation do most of the talking for you. Your job is to be composed and organized when presenting your petition to lower your Child Support.

Stay on the high road and remember this is not an attempt to "get back" at the custodial parent and mother or father of your child. This is a legitimate attempt to lower your payments because it is difficult for you to make ends meet. If you're not having a difficult time financially then you should not go down this road because the law of "cause and effect" will come back to haunt you.

Online Parenting Classes

2008-09-10T12:34:00.001-04:00

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2008-09-10T12:16:00.000-04:00

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How to Get Custody of Your Child

2008-09-10T12:02:00.001-04:00

Be there from day one.

Hire a good attorney.

Get a place of residence in your own name.

Do not move out of your home until it is absolutely necessary.

Take parenting classes and keep certificate for court.

Take the high road and do not belittle the Mother of your children before the judge.

Realize, it is not about who was at fault in the marriage, your focus should be 100% on getting custody of your children.

Have information about Day Care Centers, schools, and activities that your children will be involved in and present your documented facts before the judge.

Stay focused, don't get rattled, no matter what your opponent says in the courtroom.