STAFFORD, Va. — It took Derrick Butler eight years to get justice for his murdered sister.
Now, he's pressuring prosecutors, hoping to get justice for the woman his sister's killer may have murdered 22 years earlier.
"If Virginia hadn't dropped the ball, I know Pam (Butler) would be alive today," said Butler, just before marching into the Stafford Country Commonwealth's Attorney's Office with TV news cameras in tow.
Butler is demanding an explanation for why Jose Angel Rodriguez-Cruz has never been charged in the murder of Marta Rodriguez, whose body was found in Stafford in 1991, but not identified until 2018.
Rodriguez-Cruz pleaded guilty in a D.C. courtroom in 2017 to strangling Pamela Butler, a 47-year-old computer analyst at the EPA. Investigators believe he also killed his wife, Marta Rodriguez, in 1989, but the Stafford County prosecutors has never filed charges against him.
The Arlington County mom disappeared just days before she was due to testify in court that her Rodriguez-Cruz had attacked and tried to kidnap her.
Butler said the Stafford County Commonwealth's attorney has been stalling, refusing for months to meet with him or take his calls. After running off the news cameras, Stafford County Commonwealth's Attorney Eric Olson spent about 15 minutes talking with Butler, who said he promised him that he was still investigating.
Will there be justice for Marta Rodriguez?
"We can do what we can do to evaluate the (Virginia State Police) investigation and do the best we can," said George Elsasser, Olson's deputy commonwealth's attorney.
"I think it's a slam dunk case," Butler said. "This is a person of color that went missing. And too often we don't do anything about it. We need to do something about this particular case."
After he pleaded guilty to murdering Pamela Butler, a D.C. judge sentenced Rodriguez-Cruz to 12 years in prison, on condition that he lead police to her body.
He took them to a spot in the median of Interstate 95 in Stafford County, about three miles from where Marta Rodriguez' body had been found. But police said Pamela Butler's grave had been paved over, and the remains were not recoverable.
Marta Rodriguez and Jose Rodriguez-Cruz had a son, who was two when she vanished. He's 34 now, and doesn't want us to publicize his name, but said he always lived in fear of his father's towering rage. He said his father told him his mother had left him because she didn't want anything to do with him.
The son said years ago, he found a note from his father admitting he had murdered his mother, and said for years he worried that he could be next.