Episode 133: Marta Haydee Rodriguez

An investigation into a missing woman leads detectives nearly 30 years into the past to answer the question: What happened to Marta Rodriguez?

Episode Media

Jose Rodriguez-Cruz during his time in the Army c.1986 *(Facebook)*

Jose Rodriguez-Cruz in 2015 *(Facebook)*

Episode Sources

Episode Transcript

Welcome back to Bite-Sized Crime. This week I’m bringing you a case that went unsolved for decades and was only brought back into the spotlight because of another victim’s story. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, I encourage you to go back and listen to it first because it adds a lot of important context to the case we’re about to dive into. This episode discusses sensitive topics, so listener discretion is advised.

Marta Haydee grew up in Puerto Rico in the 1960s and 70s, a time of radical politics and a movement towards statehood. Not much is known about Marta’s childhood or teenage years, but in the early 80s, she met a handsome young man named Jose Rodriguez-Cruz. In 1984, Marta and Jose married, and a year later they welcomed a son.

Around that same time, Jose enlisted in the United States Army. During his tour, he was stationed in Panama, El Salvador, and Honduras while Marta stayed in Puerto Rico with their infant son. It must have been a challenging time for her to be so far from her new husband while raising a baby on her own.

In 1986, Jose was transferred to Fort Eustis in Newport News, Virginia. Marta followed him to Virginia, leaving their young son in Puerto Rico with relatives. But little did Marta know that Jose had also brought someone else to Virginia – a woman named Maria that he had met and married in Panama. Marta had no idea that while she was dreaming of a future with her husband, Jose was living a double life, hoping that his two wives would never find out about each other.

Jose also had another secret, one that many of his military colleagues shared – he was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. After his tour in Central America, Jose’s mental health began to deteriorate. His mood could swing between dysphoria and rage in a matter of minutes. His behavior was violent and unpredictable, and Marta was often the target of his wrath.

In February of 1988, Marta had finally had enough. She reported Jose’s behavior to his superiors, alleging that he had assaulted her on more than one occasion. Jose was placed in a Domestic Violence Containment Program and ordered to stay away from Marta, who by that time had packed her bags and moved out of the home she and Jose shared. But three days later, Jose violated the no-contact order, acting in a threatening way towards Marta.

Jose’s behavior continued to escalate. Army records indicate that Jose was not only violent with Marta, but he also had multiple outbursts while on duty, sometimes threatening to harm himself and others. In April of 1988, Jose was hospitalized and underwent a mental status evaluation. The psychiatrist who evaluated Jose diagnosed him with borderline personality disorder and recommended that he be released from active duty. Not long after, Jose received a general discharge from the Army.

Unfortunately, this seemed to further aggravate Jose’s instability. He began harassing Marta, trying to exert control over her life even though she had long since moved out. Whenever Marta went out on a date, Jose followed her, threatening whichever unlucky man happened to be with Marta that night. Marta tried to get help from the police, but it seemed that nothing could be done.

In early 1989, Marta learned the truth about Jose’s secret life when she discovered a marriage license with another woman’s name. Marta was angered by the betrayal, by the years of abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband, a man who had been living a double life behind her back. It was further proof that she had been right to leave Jose.

On February 23, 1989, Marta walked into the Arlington County Police Department and reported an assault. According to police records, Marta said that she and Jose had been driving down Route 7 when Jose had grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head into the passenger side window. Marta told the officer that it wasn’t the first time Jose had done this to her, and she asked the officer for help. But because the assault had taken place in Fairfax County, the officer told Marta she needed to go to their police department for assistance. It’s unclear if she did or not.

A month later, on March 29th, an Arlington County police officer witnessed a man forcing a woman into a car on Wilson Boulevard. As the officer ran towards them, he saw the man punch the woman in the stomach as she cried out for help. A passerby also witnessed the incident and jumped on top of the man, holding him down until the officer was able to get him in handcuffs and call for backup. The woman, clearly shaken, identified herself as Marta Rodriguez. She told the officer that the day before, she had been leaving her house to go to work when her husband Jose had come up behind her and threatened her with a knife. Jose had bound her with ropes and covered her mouth with duct tape, taking her to a motel in Fairfax where he attempted to rape her multiple times throughout the night. In the morning, Jose had driven her to Washington, D.C., and Marta had managed to escape and make it back home. But when she left the house a few hours later, Jose had ambushed her again, this time claiming he had a gun. It was during her second escape attempt on Wilson Boulevard that the officer had intervened.

Inside Jose’s car, the officer found black duct tape and twine that matched Marta’s story, and the knife Jose had used was found in his coat pocket. Jose was taken into custody where he admitted to kidnapping his wife. According to the arresting officer, Jose said, “If I can’t have her, no one will. She’s mine.” When the officer asked Jose what he meant by that, Jose replied, “I would see herself and me dead before she was with anyone else.”

A hearing for Jose’s case was scheduled for May 18th. Marta was expected to testify about the assault and abduction, but on the day of the hearing, Marta was nowhere to be seen. Unfortunately, this often happens with domestic abuse cases where the victim is too frightened to face their abuser, and the court assumed that Marta fell into that camp. The charges against Jose were dismissed, and he walked out of the courthouse a free man.

But court wasn’t the only place where Marta failed to show up. A week after the hearing, Marta’s roommate contacted the police and reported her missing. According to the roommate, Marta had left for work on the morning of May 25th and hadn’t returned home. When police followed up on the report, they learned that Marta had made it to her job at St. Elizabeth Hospital where she worked as a nurse’s aide. She was last seen leaving work, walking towards the bus stop. No one could recall seeing her again after that.

Knowing Marta’s history, Arlington police showed up at Jose’s door. Jose told them that Marta had fallen in with some drug dealers and had decided to skip town. Police searched Jose’s home, but all they found was a semi-automatic pistol. There was no evidence that Marta had been there or that Jose had caused her any harm.

For years, Marta was listed as a missing person. Every so often, a detective would dust off her case and follow some leads, but if Marta had truly walked away, it seemed as though she didn’t want to be found.

Then, in October of 2000, a detective in Miami, Florida, made contact with Marta. She provided her ID and told the detective that she had been previously living in Virginia before moving to Florida. Satisfied that Marta had been found and that she was safe, authorities in Arlington County closed Marta’s case.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. In 2017, a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department was investigating another missing persons case when he made a surprising discovery. Back in 2009, 47-year-old Pamela Butler had gone missing from her Washington, D.C. home, and the last person to see her was her boyfriend, Jose Rodriguez-Cruz. Prosecutors had never felt they had enough to bring a case against Jose in connection with Pam’s disappearance, and the case had gone cold.

When cold case detective Michael Fulton reopened the case 8 years later, he started chasing down old leads. Detective Fulton learned that Jose Rodriguez-Cruz had been married several times before meeting Pamela Butler. He decided to try and track down these women and see if they could provide any insight.

Detective Fulton spoke with Jose’s second wife Maria, who told him that during her marriage to Jose, he had been verbally and physically abusive. The abuse had eventually gotten so bad that she had fled to another state to escape him, but he had found her and beaten her. Although Maria had eventually gotten away from him, she still lived in fear that Jose would find her and kill her.

Maria also told Detective Fulton that she hadn’t known Jose was already married when she’d met him. Jose had always told her that his first wife left him for another man and had abandoned their child. Maria said that during her marriage to Jose, her sister had come to the United States and needed paperwork. Jose had provided her sister with his first wife’s information and told her to use it to get a government-issued ID card. Maria’s sister had been living under that name ever since.

Detective Fulton was floored. He knew that Jose’s first wife Marta had gone missing in the 80s, but she had been found in Florida back in 2000. Could it be that the woman Miami detectives had spoken to was not Marta Rodriguez?

Detective Fulton zeroed in on this woman. He contacted the Miami-Dade Police Department and obtained the Virginia address that the woman had provided. He quickly determined that the address didn’t belong to Marta, but to Jose’s second wife Maria. Her sister had used it to register for her ID.

Next, Detective Fulton reached out to some of Marta’s relatives in Puerto Rico, who confirmed that they hadn’t spoken to her in nearly 30 years. They recalled that back in May of 1989, Marta had been planning to return to Puerto Rico and bring her son back to Virginia. In the days before she disappeared, she had called them to say how excited she was about this new phase of her life. She had a new job and a new house, and she was finally out from under Jose’s control. When they didn’t hear from Marta after that, they wondered what had happened but didn’t have the resources to find out.

It was clear that Marta truly had been a missing person all these years and that no one had been looking for her. Detective Fulton passed on the information he had gathered to the Arlington County Police Department, and they decided to reopen Marta’s case.

Detective Rosa Ortiz took the lead on the investigation and was able to get in contact with Jose and Marta’s son, who was now an adult. He provided her with a picture of his mother, which Detective Ortiz compared with the ID card from the woman in Florida. It confirmed everything they had suspected: this was not Marta Rodriguez. But Detective Ortiz thought she knew where Marta was.

In February of 1991, nearly 2 years after Marta disappeared, a group of Civil War relic hunters were exploring a wooded area on Interstate 95 near Stafford, Virginia, when they came across skeletal remains. When investigators arrived on the scene, they found a human skull and scattered bones among the grass. Based on the amount of vegetation, it appeared that the remains had been there for at least a year. Investigators also found remnants of clothing, including a woman’s bra, nylon pantyhose, and three yellow buttons that may have been from a blouse. A yellow plastic watch and two gold rings lay nearby.

The remains were taken to the state police crime lab in Richmond, but other than determining that they belonged to a young woman, there wasn’t much else they could confirm. There was no obvious evidence of blunt force trauma or gunshot wounds, and DNA testing was still in its infancy. All they had were unidentified human remains and a few scattered belongings.

In 1992, the state police created a composite model of the woman, hoping that a lifelike clay structure would help in finding her true identity. They announced that they believed she was a young Black woman between the ages of 30 to 45, around 5 feet tall and weighing approximately 120 pounds. They believed she had died between 1985 and 1990, but they had no idea how she had ended up in the median of the interstate.

Unfortunately, the composite didn’t generate any new leads. In the early 2000s, the young woman’s profile was added to NamUs, a national database for missing and unidentified persons. She was compared to many missing persons cases over the years, but they were all ruled out. In 2016, the state police released an updated composite model of the young woman. This time, they were able to be more specific. They believed she was between the ages of 25 to 35 and was of mixed Black and Hispanic ancestry. She had near-perfect teeth, which they believed could be an indication of her general health and lifestyle. Virginia’s chief medical examiner told reporters, “The goal is to have people see these [models], and if anybody thinks they recognize one of these, notify the medical examiner’s office or law enforcement.”

But again, no leads came in for the unidentified woman. Her case was quiet once more, until late 2017, when the search for the remains of Pamela Butler led investigators to Stafford County and what used to be a wooded median on Interstate 95, a spot just six miles from where another woman’s remains had been found 26 years earlier.

Detective Ortiz reached out to Marta’s son once again, this time to ask for his DNA. He agreed, and finally, in June of 2018, the skeletal remains of the unidentified young woman were confirmed to be those of Marta Haydee Rodriguez.

While this was happening, Jose was sitting in jail, serving 12 years for the murder of Pamela Butler in 2009. Now, Pamela’s brother Derrick, who had championed his sister’s case for years, was taking up the charge for Marta. In 2019, he told Dateline that he had met with the Stafford County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and was determined to get charges against Jose for Marta’s death. “One of the things that I really wanted him to know is that… this is a person of color that went missing, and too often we don’t do anything about it.”

Derrick also told WJLA that he believed that if police had investigated Marta’s case properly back in 1989, his sister might still be alive. “I want to make sure he doesn’t get out of jail. If he gets out of jail, we are all in jeopardy.”

In October of 2019, Jose Rodriguez-Cruz was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Marta Rodriguez. At a press conference, Commonwealth’s Attorney Eric Olsen said, “I think it’s important, 30 years later, to know that justice can be delivered. Sometimes that’s really difficult to do and I will say the efforts of the media in keeping this case before the public, the efforts of Mr. Butler to keep reminding the authorities that Marta Rodriguez was not just a cold case, she was a potential homicide victim, it helped us all to realize that we need to do our best to bring justice in this case.”

Jose pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and in 2021, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison to be served after the completion of his 12-year sentence for Pamela’s murder. At the sentencing hearing, prosecutors read a report of Jose’s previous statements, where he insisted that he hadn’t killed Marta intentionally. Instead, he claimed that he had given her pills for a migraine and she had died unexpectedly, after which he buried her body along I-95. Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Ryan Fitzgerald called this explanation ridiculous. “If he had remorse, he could have told the truth. He had 30 years to do it. He buried it, like he did to Marta.”

Before being sentenced, Jose apologized to his son and asked for his forgiveness, saying that if he could bring Marta back, he would. His son later told reporters that he felt a sense of closure after the whole ordeal and was glad that Jose would be off the streets for good. “Now, nobody else will have to worry about meeting the same fate.”

In the aftermath of Jose’s guilty plea, Derrick Butler told Dateline that he felt his sister Pam would be proud that justice had been served for both her and Marta. “I definitely feel like I’ve done all I can do… I’m sure Marta would be happy to know someone is standing up and fighting for her.”

Marta’s case is sadly one of many. Each year in the United States, thousands of women die at the hands of abusive partners, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788 for free and confidential help.