Dateline NBC: "A Haunting Stretch of Road" (NBC-TV, aired March 18, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. yesterday I watched a Dateline NBC show about the disappearance of one Pam Butler, who lived in Washington, D.C. and worked for the federal government until she suddenly disappeared the day before Valentine’s Day, 2009. Her family was convinced she had met with foul play but it took literally years to bring her killer to book. She had been dating a slimeball named José Rodriguez-Cruz, a Puerto Rican immigrant who in the 1990’s had been simultaneously married to two women, Marta and Guadalupe. The police in Washington, D.C. originally got nowhere with the investigation and ultimately fixed on Pam’s brother, Derrick Butler, as the prime suspect because he and Pam had been partners in a small real-estate investment ahd the cops had footage from Pam’s security cameras that showed her and José entering her home but only him leaving. The police ultimately called Derrick at 3 a.m. – Ivan Pavlov’s recommended time to make arrests of political prisoners after the Soviet NKVD asked him to research just what would be the most disorienting time of day to arrest someone – and at first Derrick was sure they would arrest him. Then he heard from the cop assigned to the case (a white sheriff’s deputy who had taken it over after the original officer, a Black man, retired and later made comments to the effect that the D.C. police were sufficiently racist that a disappearance of a Black woman like Pam Butler was a far lower priority than the disappearance of a white woman under similar circumstances) that they had arrested another suspect and Derrick was cleared.

Alas, in order to get him to reveal what he had done with Pam Butler’s body – he had sneaked it out of her house through a window not covered by her cameras and buried it in a shallow grave in the median of Interstate 95 – the prosecutors had to give José Rodriguez-Cruz a plea deal so he got a lesser charge and only a 12-year sentence. Then the Butler family went out to have her body dug up so they could at least give her a decent burial – and they found out that the part of the interstate median where José had buried her had since been paved over to add a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) iane to the freeway and there was no way to exhume her under several tons of concrete. Both the Butler family and the police were understandably upset at the prospect of José getting out in 12 years (or less) and being young and well enough again to attract another woman and do this all over again. Then the police in neighboring Stafford County, Virginia learned about another dead body that had also been buried in the median of Interstate 5. It had been found in the early 1990’s by a group of scavengers looking for relics of the Civil War, and the police filed it as a “Jane Doe” until the reopening of the case against José Rodriguez-Cruz for killing Pam Butler forced them to take another look at the dead body in the morgue to see if it was that of Marta, the mysterious first wife of José who had similarly disappeared in 1991. José had told their son Hansel that mom had taken up with drug dealers and left him, but in fact he’d killed her, too, and given his sister-in-law by his bigamous marrage to Guadalupe (whom he’d married in Panama, probably because the Panamanian authorities were much less likely to be able to trace his previous marriage than U.S. authorities would have been) Marta’s identity documents. “She won’t be needing them anymore,” José said in a statement even the Dateline NBC reporters seemed to be appalled by the sheer coldness of it – and he asked Gujadalupe’s sister to move to Miami, establish herself as Marta, and live in Marta’s identity with her identity documents so anyone looking for her would find the rump “Marta” in Miami – only when the cops did find the false “Marta” it didn’t take them long to figure out that she wasn’t the real one.

The prosecutors in Stafford County put together a case against José for Marta’;s murder, and once again José pleaded out to a lesser charge of second-degree murder – which led to a bizarre proceeding in which the prosecutors and José’s attorney had to argue before a judge (in the absence of a jury) to ask that José get the maximum 40-year sentence or something considerably shorter. José’s and Marta’s son Hansel made a powerful victim’s statement laying bare what he had gone through as he grew up first with the suspicion and then the actual fact that his dad had killed his mom, and eventually José got the full 40 years to be served consecutively after the 12 years for killing Pam. In the document José comes across as, in the old saying, “a real piece of work,” treating the women in his life as his property and in some cases pulling them by the hair as well as locking them in rooms and repeatedly raping them. On one occasion he was actually stopped by a police officer while dragging a woman by her hair, but José was able to talk the cop into writing this off as just another domestic violence call and letting him go. To my mind, the most tragic figure in the program was Marta’s sister, who lived in Puerto Rico and spoke no English (she was interviewed in Spanish with a voice-over translation); she said that on the last night of her life Marta called her, but she missed the call and did not return it – and she’s haunted by the thought that if she’d spoken to Marta that night she would have been able to save Marta’s life. Like the old church catechism says, we’re as haunted by the things we leave undone than the things we actually do.