Bethany Decker (born Bethany Anne Littlejohn; born May 13,
1989 – disappeared January 29, 2011) is an American missing person. On January
29, 2011, Decker left her grandparents' home and returned to her apartment in
Ashburn, Virginia. Her boyfriend, Ronald Roldan, says he saw her there later
that day. She has not been seen since.
While Decker did not show up at her job or classes she took
at nearby George Mason University, her absence was not noted for another three
weeks since messages to her friends purportedly from her continued to be posted
on her Facebook account. After her
family noted her absence otherwise, they found her car parked near her
apartment. Apart from the Facebook posts, there had been no other evidence she
had done anything since the day she was last seen. They reported her missing to
Loudoun County police. Decker was five months pregnant at the time of her
disappearance. Extensive searches have found no trace of her or the child she
might have given birth to.
Roldan, who had a criminal record prior to the
disappearance, is considered a person of interest in the case. In 2015, he was
arrested in North Carolina and charged with the attempted murder of another
girlfriend after he shot her during an incident in 2014; he has not said
anything about the Decker case. After she recovered, the victim claimed on the
Dr. Phil show that he had made statements to her that might implicate him in
Decker's disappearance. Roldan pled
guilty to two lesser charges in 2016; after he serves his sentence, he will be
deported to his native Bolivia. The incident has been the subject of a segment
of the Investigation Discovery channel series Disappeared.
Background
A native of Fredericksburg, Virginia, Bethany Decker
attended George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax after graduating high school.
She majored in global and economic change while working full-time. During her
time at GMU, she became pregnant by Emile Decker, an Army National Guardsman. The
two married in 2009; their son was born six months later. Emile was often
deployed to Afghanistan with his unit for months at a time. During those times,
Decker often left the boy with her in-laws in Columbia, Maryland, while she
worked and attended classes.
While working at a Centreville Italian restaurant, Decker
met Ronald Roldan, a Bolivian immigrant then around 30, and began an extramarital
affair with him. By late 2010, there
were strains in the Deckers' marriage; Bethany moved to a separate apartment in
Ashburn, Virginia. The relationship with Roldan soon followed, and he moved in
with her. According to her family,
Decker quickly found that Roldan was abusive, possessive, and controlling.
Several times a day, he demanded that she send him a picture of herself from
her cellphone to show who she was with. Her parents began developing a plan to
get her out of the relationship. By the
end of the year, she was pregnant.
Disappearance
In January 2011, Emile came back from his deployment for a
month-long leave. Near the end of that period, he and Bethany went on a
vacation to Hawaii for a week. They returned on January 28 and spent the night
at his parents' home in Maryland. Emile's parents were unaware of the couple's
marital difficulties.
The next morning, Emile saw Decker before she went back to
the Ashburn apartment. Roldan said he saw her there later that afternoon. Since
then, no one else is known to have seen her. During that day, Decker called her
employer to confirm her work schedule for the coming week, the last known
contact she has had with anyone other than Emile or Roldan.
On February 2, Emile's leave ended and he returned to
Afghanistan. Friends who came to see him off at the airport noted that unlike
previous such occasions, Decker was not there. They attributed her absence to the
couple's marital problems.
Investigation
Friends and family say Decker did her best to keep in
contact with them. But due to her busy life, balancing her classes in what was
to be her final semester at GMU with a full-time job, they had gotten used to
not hearing from her for several days at a time, so they were not worried as
February 2011 began without any news from her. However, later in the month, several of
Decker's friends called her mother, Kim Nelson, saying that they had received
messages from her via her Facebook account that did not seem to them to have
come from Decker.
By February 19, not having heard from her daughter herself,
Nelson asked her parents, who lived near Ashburn, to drive by and see if she
was there. Decker's Hyundai was still out front, but it was parked at an
unusual angle, with one tire flat, and noticeably dusty. This was not the
condition it had been in one week earlier when the grandparents had last
driven by. No one answered when they knocked on the door. Decker's grandparents called Loudoun County
police and reported her missing.
Investigators found that Decker had not used her bank
accounts or cell phone since the last day she was seen, nor had she reported to
work or attended her classes. They
initially focused on Emile and Roldan, since both of them might have had a
motive to harm Decker due to the love triangle they were involved in. With the
help of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID), they were able to
reach Emile at his remote post in Afghanistan and talk to him on the phone. Later they were able to have him return to the
U.S., where he spoke with police at length and took a polygraph test.
Roldan had moved out of the apartment shortly after Decker's
disappearance since the lease had expired, and gone to live with his mother in
Centreville. He told police that he had just assumed that she had gone back to
live with her family when she failed to return. But investigators became more interested in
him when they learned that he had a prior criminal record, including one arrest
for identity theft and later convictions for public intoxication and
destruction of property after a 2006 incident where he smashed a woman's car
window. He also reportedly gave them inconsistent answers to questions about
when he had seen the Hyundai parked outside the apartment.
In March, police searched a field near the apartment
complex. They obtained a search warrant
for Roldan's current residence, specifying murder as the possible criminal
offense on the affidavits. Among the items seized for forensic examination were
several cell phones, a laptop computer, and some documents.
However, police were not able to develop any evidence from
this material that might have helped them locate Decker. Roldan later stopped
cooperating with the investigation; he has subsequently been described by law
enforcement as a person of interest. Emile later obtained a divorce from his
missing wife. It has since been reported that he will no longer talk with
investigators unless his lawyer, who says his client has nothing to hide, is
also present. No record was ever found
suggesting that Decker had given birth by her expected due date later that
summer, although Loudoun County police distributed to the public pictures of
what she might look like near the end of a pregnancy.
"We feel we have
probably interviewed folks in this investigation already that probably have
information that we would like to have and have been reluctant to hand that
information over yet," Sheriff Steve Simpson told a local newspaper
later in 2011. "So, we're hopeful
that as the days go by that they'll realize that if they have information, no
matter how insignificant they think it is, they will give it to us."
A year later, Roldan made his only public statements on the
case, through his attorney. "My client
remains hopeful and prays daily that Bethany will come home," said
Andi Geloo on his behalf. She said he had cooperated with investigators. "He has complete confidence they're
working hard on the case."
In late 2012, the Investigation Discovery channel series
Disappeared visited the area to produce a segment on the case. Producers
interviewed Decker's friends and family, newspaper reporters who had covered
the story, and law enforcement. One of
the journalists interviewed speculated that the show was interested in the case
because Decker was pregnant at the time of her disappearance, and involved in a
love triangle, "so there are a couple of ways this could go." The
episode aired at the end of November.
On the third anniversary of Bethany's disappearance, Nelson
challenged Roldan to take a polygraph test. "I
would like to hear what happened," she told Washington-area news radio
station WTOP-FM. "I'd like him to
join the polygraph list like the rest of us did. If you have nothing to hide,
you have nothing to worry about." In response, Geloo repeated that
Roldan had answered all questions he was asked during the original
investigation and was innocent of any crime that may have been committed.
2014 Roldan arrest
and trial
Roldan remained in northern Virginia for several years after
Decker's disappearance. In 2014 he began another relationship with Vickey
Willoughby, a woman he met in a Manassas restaurant. She said that Roldan later
grew controlling, and that she attempted to flee the relationship by moving to
Pinehurst, North Carolina a few months later, but Roldan found out and followed
her there.
Their relationship turned violent. During an argument at the
house in November, Willoughby pulled out a handgun she had hidden in the living
room to protect herself. She was able to shoot Roldan twice, although he
continued to struggle, and eventually gained control of the gun himself,
shooting Willoughby three times, once in the head.
Both survived, although Willoughby lost one of her eyes to
the head wound. She was not charged since investigators believed she had been
acting in self-defense; he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon,
assault on a female and discharging a firearm in an occupied dwelling. After
being released from the hospital, he was taken to Moore County jail and held on
$1 million bail.
Detectives from Loudoun County visited Roldan in jail to ask
if he was now interested in speaking with them about Bethany's disappearance
again; he referred them to his attorney. In April 2015, he was additionally
charged with attempted murder over the incident with Willoughby. His attorney said he intended to plead not
guilty to the charges. Shortly afterward, Willoughby appeared on an episode of
Dr. Phil devoted to the Decker case, and she said that Roldan had told her,
during their fight the previous November, he could "make people
disappear."
In May 2016, after some of the evidence in the case had been
suppressed, Roldan accepted a plea bargain from prosecutors. He pled guilty to
two felony assault charges and was sentenced to six-to-eight years in prison.
After his sentence is completed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement will begin
deportation proceedings against him.
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