Bethany Decker

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.

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.

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 afterwards, 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."

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.

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 January 29, 2011, Bethany Anne Decker (née Littlejohn; born May 13, 1989) left her husband's parents' home in Maryland 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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.