D.C. police have arrested Jose Angel Rodriguez-Cruz, the former boyfriend of a woman who was murdered eight years ago.
Police believe that with Rodriguez-Cruz’s arrest, they have now solved the eight-year murder mystery of Pamela Butler, WUSA 9 reports.
Rodriguez-Cruz was officially charged in the murder of Butler on Friday, the same day as his arrest in Alexandria by authorities.
Butler a computer specialist who worked for the Environmental Protection Agency, disappeared from her home in Northwest Washington, D.C., in February 2009. Her body was never found, but a judge declared her dead in July 2016.
As expected, police questioned Rodriguez-Cruz after the disappearance, but it appears that investigators at the time weren’t able to find any strong links between Butler’s boyfriend and her disappearance.
In 2009, Rodriguez-Cruz told The Washington Post that he had nothing to do with Butler’s death.
“This was a woman I really cared for, okay,” he said in 2009. “I mean, I treated her like a queen. . . . I’m telling you, there’s no way I would ever hurt her.”
However, authorities re-opened the case in February. It’s not clear exactly what new information prompted them to re-open the case and make an arrest, but police say that when detective Michael Fulton was given the case two months ago, he managed to piece together information that previously had not been connected. That information was enough to make an arrest.
“When he looked at the case with fresh eyes, he was able to determine additional information,” D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said, according to The Washington Post. “Piecing all that together with information that we had already collected, the detective was able to get a warrant.”
Rodriguez-Cruz will appear Monday at the D.C. Superior Court.
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