Bethany Decker

**Bethany Anne Decker (née Littlejohn)** was a young pregnant woman who vanished from Virginia in 2011. Her boyfriend has been charged with her abduction and murder and is set to go to trial in 2023.

## Background

Bethany was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia on May 13, 1989. She studied global and economic change at George Mason University in Fairfax while also working at Carraba’s Italian Grill to support herself. While at university she met an Army National Guardsman named Emil Decker who she married and had a son. Emil was often deployed to Afghanistan for months at a time so Bethany would let her son stay with his paternal grandparents while his father was away.

While working at the restaurant, Bethany met and began dating Ronald Roldan, a 30-year-old Bolivian immigrant. When she moved into an apartment on Orchard Grass Terrace in Ashburn, Virginia in late 2010 because of issues within her marriage he moved in with her. According to her family, Ronald quickly became abusive, controlling and possessive of Bethany. He would demand she sends him photographic evidence of who she was with several times a day and on one occasion he had threatened to “cut her open”. This concerned her family so much they made a plan to help her leave the relationship.

## Case

Bethany was last seen in Loudoun County, Virginia on January 29, 2011. The previous day she had returned from a week-long trip to Hawaii with her husband, Emil, and spent the night with her in-laws. The next morning Emil saw Bethany before she left for her apartment and Ronald claims to have seen her at the apartment. She also made a call to her employer to confirm her work schedule, indicating that she was not planning to go missing. Bethany’s bank account, email account and cell phone have been inactive since January 29. There have been no records of her ever leaving the United States or of her giving birth.

Unfortunately, Bethany had a busy life and was not always good at keeping in contact with her friends and family so they were not initially alarmed when she did not contact them. She did not see Emil off at the airport when he left when he departed for Afghanistan on February 7, although he was not overly concerned because he knew that they were having difficulties in their relationship. However, when multiple people came forward to state that they had received strange messages from Bethany’s Facebook account and believed someone was using it to impersonate her family noticed that something was amiss and decided to check on her on February 19. They found her car dusty and parked at an odd angle with a flat tire in front of her apartment. When they found she wasn’t inside they reported her missing to law enforcement.

Investigators spoke to both Emil and Ronald because they thought either of them could have had a motivation to harm her. According to Ronald, he had moved out of the apartment when the lease had expired.

A photograph of Ronald Roldan
On November 9, 2020, the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office obtained a warrant for Roldan's arrest for Bethany’s abduction. A second warrant was served against Ronald for Bethany’s presumed murder in December 2020. He is currently being held at the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center. Ronald’s trial is set to begin on January 30, 2023, and it is estimated to last approximately a month.

## Characteristics

* Shoulder length brown hair.
* Brown eyes.
* Pierced ears.
* She had a small tattoo of a Hawaiian rainbow man on or slightly above her left ankle.
* She was approximately four to five months at the time of her disappearance with a due date of August 7, 2011.

## Sources

* Bethany Decker on Wikipedia
* Bethany Decker at the *Charley Project*
* Bethany Decker at *NamUs*
* *WTOPnews*