The case of a missing New Hampshire couple has now, sadly, become a murder investigation.
James and Michelle Butler had been missing since October 16. The Rumney, New Hampshire couple had been traveling the country in their RV since June 2018, taking on part time jobs to keep going. The family believed they were making their way to Fort Lauderdale, Florida where they were going to sell Christmas trees. Unfortunately, they never made it.
The last anyone had heard they had set up camp on Padre Island in Corpus Christi, Texas on October 15; then their regular contact with relatives just stopped cold. Their family filed a missing persons report after about a week, and the search began on October 23.
Just four days later, the body of a woman was discovered by a local sheriff’s deputy, buried on the Padre Island beach; a man’s body was later discovered underneath it in the same shallow grave.
The remains were badly decomposed, making identification difficult; it took four days, four unimaginable days being for a family being held in limbo, to get a positive ID.
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The Butlers’ relatives’ hope was extinguished on Friday when those bodies were finally identified as James and Michelle.
The Nueces County Medical Examiner’s Office has officially ruled the deaths homicides, though no cause of death has been released to the public.
According to a press release from the Kleberg County Sheriff’s Office:
“At present law enforcement officers are working on the investigation and are working on identification of persons of interest and attempting to find the whereabouts of the victims’ truck and RV trailer.”
James retired from the Navy in 2010 and returned home to New Hampshire to be with his dying mother. There he met Michelle, and the two were married in 2015. In 2018 they decided to pull up stakes and live life on the road.
The couple — he was 48 years old, she was 46 — stayed in frequent contact with family and friends and shared their adventures on Facebook. A vigil was held for the couple on Sunday night in their hometown of Rumney; there James’ sister, Deborah van Loon, told CBS News:
“We all loved what they were doing and they loved sharing it with us.”
We want to note it’s unfair to connect the couple’s unusual lifestyle to their deaths.
According to a November 2018 Washington Post article, a surprising one million Americans live in RVs, traveling the country the way the Butlers did.
So awful their adventure ended this way.
[Image via Facebook.]
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