Victoria Ann Malet, a 54-year-old White female, was found dead on November 6, 2022, in a wooded area off Cook Springs Road near Pell City in St. Clair County, a discovery that quickly turned from a grim mystery into a homicide investigation. Authorities said she had suffered multiple gunshot wounds, and early reports described the scene as one that stunned both investigators and the local community.
Although the user-supplied location says Pell City, contemporary reporting identified Malet as being from Lincoln, Alabama, while saying her body was discovered near Pell City.
In the first hours after her body was found, the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Office said deputies were following leads and trying to piece together how she ended up in that secluded area. Within days, Sheriff Billy Murray announced that investigators had identified Michael Jerome Butler of Greenville as the suspect and obtained a murder warrant charging him in Malet’s death. Reporting at the time said Butler was already in custody in Prattville on other violent felony allegations when the murder charge was filed, which meant the case against him did not begin with a dramatic manhunt for Malet’s killing alone, but with investigators connecting her death to a broader trail of violence already drawing law enforcement attention across multiple jurisdictions.
As the story widened, public reports described Butler as a man accused of a violent crime spree that unfolded over several days in early November 2022. In connection with Malet’s death, authorities publicly tied him not only to her shooting but, in at least some reports, to the rape of Malet as well. News accounts said he was booked into the St. Clair County Jail after the murder charge, and one report listed his bond there at $1.5 million. The official picture presented by investigators was that Malet’s death was not an isolated act with unknown offenders still at large, but a case they believed they had solved quickly once Butler was identified.
The later public record, however, appears far thinner on Malet’s case than on the other crimes linked to Butler. Public reporting clearly shows that Butler later pleaded guilty in Autauga County to multiple charges tied to the Prattville abduction and sexual assault of two teenage girls and, in June 2024, received eight consecutive life sentences for those offenses. But publicly available reporting reviewed for this synopsis did not identify any additional suspects in Malet’s killing, and no later public report was found showing a trial, plea, or conviction specifically on the St. Clair County murder charge stemming from her death. So the arc of the case, as it appears in open sources, is one of a woman found slain in the woods, a suspect rapidly named and charged, and then a public trail that grows quieter on her homicide even as the same man is heavily punished in court for other violent crimes committed during that same terrifying period.
