(ominous music)
(eerie music)
- [Narrator] Every suspect accused of a crime
has the right to remain silent.
Many agree to be interrogated anyway,
but they can stop the interview at any moment,
making it a race against time.
Justice hangs in the balance.
(tense music)
- The grandmother of Bethany Decker,
Ms. Evelyn Bayles, contacts the sheriff's office
and she said that Bethany
was a young student at George Mason University.
It had been three weeks since Bethany
had had contact with anyone.
- We learned she was last seen by her family
on the late evening hours of January 28th
when she was at her grandmother's house in Maryland.
Her family told us she was married to Emile Decker.
- [Mark] They had a child together,
but Emile had also had a commitment
to the United States military.
- I just wanna give a lovely shout out to my wife
and to my son, Kai.
I love you and I miss you very much.
Have a merry Christmas.
- Her family told us Emile was with Bethany
at her grandmother's house the night before she disappeared.
However, he was redeployed overseas days later.
- Our family was really close to Bethany
throughout her entire life.
Bethany had a child.
Her mother was watching Kai at that time,
helping Bethany out with school.
And we were concerned when Bethany did not visit.
I called Bethany every single day for an entire week
and she didn't answer the phone.
We really were fearing for Bethany.
(tense music)
- Our deputy made contact with the apartment manager,
asked if she would open the door, and entered the apartment.
It seemed like Bethany had moved outta that apartment.
But he notices a pile of women's clothes,
and a purse, and a set of keys
that the family's able to identify as being Bethany's.
- A woman and her pocketbook is almost unseparable.
So that, to me, throws a little red flag up.
- Outside, our deputy discovered
that Bethany's car is in the parking lot.
There's a flat tire.
There's dust all over the vehicle.
Not every missing person's case is gonna immediately
be assigned to a detective,
but there was enough red flags for us to think
that it immediately needed to be looked into.
(somber music)
- Bethany is my oldest daughter.
She was one who could get anybody to smile,
no matter what mood you were in.
She just loved to have fun
and had a laugh that was just infectious.
- We used to have this old car and the radio was broken.
And to fill that silence, she would basically sing,
scream at the top of her lungs.
So she'd sing a song and then she'd turn the knob
and switch the station right in the middle,
and she would just keep doing it.
And I thought that was the most funny thing in the world.
I loved hearing her,
even when she was singing just to be funny.
- She had a love for life.
And so when she found out she was having a little boy,
she was excited.
She had all of these amazing dreams for him.
- She would let us put our hand on her belly
and feel him kick,
and always shared, like, her progress reports
going to the doctors.
She loved Kai from the moment she laid eyes on him.
(tense music)
- From a law enforcement standpoint,
what stood out was the nature
and the complexity of the relationships that she had.
- Her family told us Bethany was involved
in a relationship with a man who was not her husband,
Ronald Roldan.
- She met him at work while Emile was deployed.
He was a friend at work who also had two young children,
seemed like he was struggling.
- And he had no place to live.
So Bethany felt bad for him and said he could come
and stay until he found a place.
But Ronald never left.
- And by January, Bethany was pregnant with Ronald's baby.
But Emile, along the way,
was still trying to work on their relationship,
trying to win her back.
We thought, is it possible that Emile
or Ronald became enraged and had hurt her?
Or is it possible that she
just got overwhelmed and decided to flee?
So getting both Emile Decker
and Ronald Roldan to come in, to cooperate,
was the next big step in the case.
(tense music)
(dog barking)
(clock ticking)
(siren wailing distantly)
- He recounts that Bethany comes home
from her grandmother's house.
Later that day,
he thought Bethany was leaving to hang out with friends
that she hadn't seen in a while.
- Ronald Roldan said he did not have contact
with Bethany Decker's family
because the family tried on a few occasions
to break up the relationship.
- Following that initial interview,
it gives us a little bit of hope
that if we just try a little harder,
do a few more interviews,
maybe we can still locate her safe and sound.
Over the next couple of days,
we got search warrants for her cell phone records
and for her financial records.
The most disheartening part was
is that not only did Bethany's cell phone records stop
on the 29th of January,
but we had no more financial transactions for her either.
At that point, we have to start looking at this
as something possibly more nefarious than just a young lady
who got overwhelmed and decided to flee.
(tense music)
We knew that Emile is being cheated on by his wife
and she was pregnant with Ronald's baby.
He has every motive to harm her.
We had to get as many questions answered as we can
before he decides to get up and leave that room.
- Emile was with Bethany the night before she disappeared
at her grandmother's house in Maryland.
- He said they knew she was in an abusive relationship
with Roldan and that she was in fear of leaving him.
- So they were trying to convince Bethany
that she just needs to leave Ronald.
And Emile said he would raise this child
that Bethany and Ronald were having as his own,
all in the name of trying to reconcile
and save their marriage.
But she keeps telling him she's gotta get back to Ronald
because if she doesn't, things will be bad.
- [Shaniqua] Ultimately, Bethany decided to leave
and go back to her apartment.
(tense music)
- So now we have Ronald Roldan,
who, through his own statements,
is the last person to see her alive.
And we believe that
he was emotionally and physically abusive.
It's just starting to lend credence to the idea
that Ronald Roldan is involved, in some way, shape, or form,
in the disappearance of Bethany Decker.
(tense music)
- The goal is to gain more information,
see what we can get out of him,
catch him in some lies, question him.
But, again, still fairly softly
because you don't wanna lose him.
- If he says, "I wanna speak with my lawyer,"
we may never get another shot at him.
And then this goes into the cold case unit
and we may never find out what happened to Bethany.
(Ronald laughs)
(tense music)
- [Reporter] This morning, police in Virginia
are tracking down leads
in the case of a missing pregnant mother.
21-year-old Bethany Anne Decker was last seen January 29th,
but wasn't reported missing until February 19th.
Decker's 17-month-old son, Kai, is living
with her grandparents
while she finishes her college degree in Virginia.
Her husband is serving in Afghanistan.
People who know Bethany say
she would never leave Kai behind.
(melancholy music)
- There was always the fear
and that devastation that she was gone.
But I was in limbo.
You know, this spot right between heaven and hell.
There was nothing but questions.
You know, what happened?
Where is she?
Why?
All we could do is hope.
(clock ticking) (crickets chirring)
(tense music)
- Ronald Roldan appears like he's a classic charmer.
He gravitates towards Detective Poland.
So you see an on-the-fly interview change
where Detective Halley is allowing Detective Poland
to ask more questions
because she seems to have that connection with Ronald.
- Now he's shielding his face.
He's got that slouched body position,
signs that an investigator picks up
that maybe this guy's not telling the truth.
- So, now he's rejected a polygraph.
When his response is almost adversarial,
you have to decide, how are you gonna react to that?
How are you gonna make them your friend again?
- Now, he's worried.
He gets much more focused on himself
and the jam that he thinks he might be in.
So she's really working hard to try to keep him engaged.
(tense music)
- Roldan has had very weak answers.
He can't even look at her when he's answering her.
I mean, Detective Poland's throwing punches.
So she wants to punch him where maybe his guard will go down,
or you may get him to slip up.
(tense music)
- We were definitely getting into that territory
where Ronald could shut down and walk out.
At that point, you've gotta pull the band-aid off
and you've gotta ask the hard questions.
We need to find Bethany Decker.
- In our eyes, at that point, he did nothing
to completely eliminate himself.
His girlfriend that he supposedly loves is missing
and instead, he's worried about himself.
- On top of that, he's the last person to see her alive.
When you start adding all those pieces to the puzzle together,
we believe that he's responsible for her disappearance.
We just can't prove it.
(melancholy music)
(traffic whooshing)
- We waited, and we waited,
and never knew if that day would come
where we would know what actually happened.
You know, in my heart,
I was still hoping that she was somewhere,
but I knew if she could reach out to us,
that she would've.
(tense music)
- At that point, we're pretty much in cold-case mode,
when all of a sudden, we start getting telephone calls
from friends and family of Bethany Decker.
They're reporting to us
that Bethany was contacting them on Facebook,
but they start to wonder
if she's the one sending the messages.
- I was scared.
I was getting messages that didn't quite seem like her,
you know, calling me sis
and just talking really negatively about her family
which isn't something that Bethany would do.
- A review of the messages suggested
that someone's impersonating her.
(pensive music)
But we were having a very difficult time tracing
the IP addresses off of these particular messages.
None of our efforts seemed to move the case forward.
(ominous music)
We get a telephone call
from the Pinehurst Police Department in North Carolina.
They notified us that Ronald Roldan
had shot his new girlfriend, Vickie Willoughby.
- We learned they had gotten into a domestic dispute.
He began choking her and shot him two times in the chest.
He then took the firearm from her
and ended up shooting her in the head
with a bullet going through her eye.
- They said Vickie had survived
and that Roldan had been cleared from the hospital,
and he was gonna be standing trial
for a charge of assault with a deadly weapon
in North Carolina.
And the moment that she knew she was safe,
she said to them, "You need to call the police in Virginia.
He's involved in Bethany Decker's disappearance."
(plane roaring)
- When I met Vickie Willoughby,
she was post-surgery, laying in the hospital bed.
She stated to me that she wanted justice for Bethany.
That she had been scared to tell anybody up until this point
because she feared the physical assault from Ronald.
(ominous music)
- Unfortunately, she didn't know any of the details
that we would need in order
to facilitate a prosecution for Bethany Decker.
- But what we can definitely glean is
that he's a violent, murderous person with women.
And it gives us more circumstantial evidence,
if we could get it in trial, that this is his history.
- Based upon Vickie's statement,
we're almost certain that he strangled Bethany to death.
So we decided to make this as an opportunity
to re-interview Roldan.
(tense music)
(clock ticking)
- I was very excited to go down and talk to Ronald.
I'll try what I call the Dutch Uncle.
Let me offer you some help
and maybe strike a nerve or a heart string
and see if he'll gimme a statement or a confession.
Basically, he shut me down.
You don't take it personal.
But after it was over,
it looked like he wiped a tear away from his eye.
It just gave me some insight
that maybe something struck a chord
in his heart or his mind that said,
you know, "I feel bad."
(wind whooshing)
(tense music)
- It's extremely frustrating
that you put in all these years of effort
and to know that it's unsolved.
(tense music)
- This inmate says we were drinking homemade moonshine
in their adjoining cells.
Roldan was drunk and made an admission.
Ronald Roldan said, "I killed my old lady
and I think she was pregnant with my kid."
(pensive music)
- Now, we have Roldan confessing to someone,
while he's in jail, that he killed Bethany Decker.
And this was when she was pregnant with Ronald's baby.
This inmate didn't think that was right.
They have a code and this was beyond his code.
So he's willing to testify.
(intense music)
- It's extremely difficult when you have a case
that does not have a body,
does not have DNA, or an eyewitness.
We needed to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt
to sustain a conviction.
(tense music)
(clock ticking)
- By the time spring of 2019 rolls around,
I'm starting to dabble in a few of our cold cases.
We knew Roldan was gonna be released
on the charges from North Carolina.
My boss assigned it to me to work as a full-time case
to try to bring it to some type of resolution first.
We had to rely on what was already obtained
by the original detectives.
And one of the things they were able to recover
was Ronald Roldan's MacBook computer.
So at that point, I remembered someone was
on Facebook impersonating Bethany
after she's disappeared.
- That computer was ultimately examined
and they were able to discover
what was called DATR cookie hits.
And they were able to establish that Ronald's computer
was accessing Bethany's Facebook account
after she disappeared.
The only reasonable conclusion is
that he was impersonating her.
- So now, I could go before a court
and strongly testify to the fact
that Ronald is keeping her from her friends and family,
or not disclosing where her remains are.
So I got the authorization
to go get a warrant charging Ronald Roldan
with abduction of Bethany Decker.
He was extradited back up to Virginia.
(tense music)
- Our office made the determination
that the evidence necessary to prove an abduction
would also establish a homicide.
At that point, the charges were elevated
to second-degree murder.
- It was an exhilarating moment,
but we were not across the finish line yet.
The defense reached out.
They wanted to participate in a plea agreement.
I was hoping beyond all hope
that he would tell us the location of Bethany's remains
and give some modicum of peace to the family.
(tense music)
(birds chirping)
(siren wailing distantly) (ominous music)
- Everything was thoroughly discussed by Bethany's family.
Their wishes were the most important thing to me,
in addition to having a conviction.
- The plea deal seemed like the right thing to do.
It would've been very difficult
to put the family through a long, drawn-out trial.
- We really think that no amount of time
could really replace the life of Bethany and her baby.
But for us, it was important to our family
to have some answers and knowing what had happened.
(tense music)
(clock ticking)
- During the debrief, myself and Ms. Clark Nelson
were able to ask him questions
and his defense attorneys were present with him.
(clock ticking)
- It was the most nerve-wracking thing
that I have done.
I did not want to appear overly combative to begin
because that may have created a space where he was not
as open with what he did with her body.
- He wants us to believe that it was an accident,
but his statements don't seem to be adding up.
- The human response should be to seek help.
But there was no efforts to revive,
there was no efforts to resuscitate,
there was no efforts to call for help.
- We believe that he's being truthful about what happened
to her remains because he's so detailed.
There's almost a slight smirk to his face
when he starts telling that information.
But he is completely fabricating everything
up until the point that he puts her in the trash bag.
At that point, the cop in me just wanted to let him know
that he had fooled nobody.
(pensive music)
He didn't wanna be cooperating.
He just thought this was what he had to do
to get the deal that he had agreed to.
And I wanted him to understand that,
after all these years, we knew exactly what occurred.
(tense music)
- I believe that we got the absolute most information
for the family that we possibly could.
I understand what you're saying.
As detectives, we all agree that she was killed
in that apartment, that she was strangled
because they got into an argument,
and that he placed her in that bag,
put her in the trash compactor,
and sent her off like common trash.
And this one, just hit the button here?
- Yep.
- At the end of the day,
we gave Bethany's family an opportunity
to fully digest the fact that Bethany is no longer missing,
but she's actually murdered by Ronald Roldan.
(pensive music)
(birds chirping)
- We figured out that the dumpster where he disposed
of her remains would've been taken
to a local transfer station, driven down I-95,
and it would've ended up in a waste management landfill
in King George County.
We're talking well over 150 acres worth of land.
And then to add on that 12 years of time,
and decomposition, compression,
the likelihood of recovering any remains is slim to none.
- There were efforts to try and recover her.
Unfortunately, we were not able to recover her body.
- It was really difficult.
But we are grateful that they did everything they could.
After all of these years,
there was justice for Bethany.
They made that happen.
(pensive music)
I can't tell you how hard it was knowing
that when we had our last Christmas,
that that would be the last one.
And so I just wanna encourage each and every one of you
not to take for granted tomorrow.
- This was the profound case.
It's a case that a lot of people worked on.
And we would not be here today but for the efforts of everyone.
- She was smart.
She was bold.
She was beautiful.
And that loss of someone that I admire and love so much,
it leaves kind of a hole in your heart.
- I miss everything about her.
I miss that she was one of the few people
in my life that loved me for me.
- She brought happiness
and she brought joy to me and to our family.
And I smile when I think back about those memories.
That helps keep her memory alive.
(somber music)