Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, breaking news, sweepstakes, and more!
College Student Murdered While Out for Jog in Iowa, Dumped in Cornfield — This Clue Led To Her Killer
University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts mysteriously vanished while out for an evening jog in the small town of Brooklyn, Iowa.
On the evening of July 18, 2018, college student Mollie Tibbetts vanished without a trace while out on her regular run through the rural roads of Brooklyn, Iowa, launching a massive nationwide search for the 20-year-old.
Weeks into the desperate search, video surveillance cameras finally gave investigators the clue they needed to figure out what happened to Tibbetts and bring the suspect to justice.
“That’s probably the first time in the case we all started looking at each other like, 'Holy cow, is this it? Is this the break we needed?'” Trent Vileta, lead investigator for the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, said on "The Last Mile" episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
Who was Mollie Tibbetts?
Tibbetts, a college student at the University of Iowa, was living in Brooklyn, Iowa and working as a counselor at a children’s day camp over the summer break after her freshman year.
“You get to be a big kid yourself and Mollie definitely fit that,” Jill Scheck, who was the supervisor at the day camp Tibbetts worked at, told Dateline of the job.
Friends and family said the former cross-country runner and honors student loved to run, babysit and listen to music — especially Taylor Swift.
“You were always laughing if you were around her,” Tibbetts' best friend Alexis Lynd recalled. “It was like a ball of sunshine every time she walks in a room.”
What happened the day Mollie Tibbetts vanished?
Tibbetts was her usual “happy-go-lucky self” at work on the day she disappeared, July 18, 2018, Scheck told Dateline. It was Tibbetts' night to close up the day camp and she left at around 5 p.m.
She headed to her boyfriend Dalton Jack’s home, where she was dog-sitting while he was away for work.
There, she sent a Snapchat message to Jack, texted her mom that she might stop by later for dinner and then headed out for a run, just as she’d done so many nights before.
The next day, Tibbetts’ cousin Morgan Collum was unnerved when she didn’t receive a response to Snapchat messages she'd sent, which would break a streak the close pair had going for more than 600 consecutive days.
“We took great pride in our Snapchat streak,” Collum said.
But the family wasn’t overly concerned until they learned that Tibbetts also hadn’t shown up to work as their calls and texts to the 20-year-old went unanswered.
“I just knew in that moment, this isn’t good,” Collum recalled.
With no sign of Tibbetts at Jack’s home, the family reported her missing to the Poweshiek County Sheriff’s Office just before 6 p.m.
Large-scale search efforts launched
Investigators quickly launched a massive search to try to find Tibbetts, using data from her Fitbit to identify her usual running routes, but the search was hampered by the flourishing fields lining what’s known in town as the blacktop road, where Tibbetts often ran.
“Corn is 8- to 10-feet high on both sides of the road,” Vileta said. “You could hide 100 bodies along that road and they’d be hard to find.”
The last person to see Tibbetts alive was her hairdresser Kristina Steward.
Steward said she had been out running an errand when she saw Tibbetts jogging at around 7:45 p.m. the night she disappeared, wearing black running shorts and a pink sports bra.
“It was our first real definitive time stamp,” Vileta said.
In the weeks that would follow, investigators chased down hundreds of leads.
Jack was ruled out as having anything to do with Tibbetts' disappearance after authorities discovered concrete evidence that placed him several hours away at the time she vanished. Authorities also searched the properties of known sex offenders in the area, and tracked down tips from members of the public who'd reported suspected sightings of Tibbetts across the country.
The FBI was called in to help and determined, using cell phone data, that Mollie’s phone had been traveling at about a 10-minute mile pace until she suddenly stopped at 8:28 p.m. for around four minutes, before the phone began to move on a different road going south at a pace of about 60 miles per hour.
“We knew she can’t run that fast, so now we knew it had to be in a vehicle,” Vileta said.
The phone’s signal died at 8:53 p.m., about 15 miles south of Brooklyn, giving authorities no other clues to her current whereabouts.
It wasn’t until authorities began to scour surveillance footage captured in Brooklyn that night that they finally got the break they needed.
Key clue in Mollie Tibbetts' case
Four cameras mounted on a garage on the east side of Brooklyn, Iowa, captured Tibbetts running by at 7:48 p.m. Just one minute later, a distinctive black Chevy Malibu with unique “aftermarket stuff” on the car, including custom mirrors and chrome, was spotted driving by.
“If you wanted us to go find a black Malibu, we could find hundreds that all look the same. This one was different,” Vileta said.
Over the next 20 minutes, the car drove by two more times, almost as though the driver had been circling prey.
Investigators knew the car they were searching for, but tracking it down was no simple task. Then, on August 16, 2018, nearly one month after Tibbetts disappeared, Poweshiek County Deputy Sheriff Steve Kivi spotted the car on his way home from work.
When the driver stopped the vehicle, Kivi approached the driver, a man later identified as Cristhian Bahena Rivera, an undocumented dairy farm employee who had been working under an assumed identity for the last seven years.
“He wasn’t nervous at all,” Kivi recalled. “He seemed cooperative and kind of nonchalant about the whole thing.”
Rivera, the father of a three-year-old daughter, insisted that although he had heard about Tibbetts' disappearance, he knew nothing about what happened to her.
“Everybody thought he was a good worker, decent guy, kind of quiet, worked a lot of hours,” Vileta said of those who knew Rivera.
Rivera continued to insist he had nothing to do with Tibbetts' disappearance four days later when he was officially brought in for questioning, but he did admit to driving in the area and seeing her when she was out on her run.
“She was good looking, but I didn’t look at her in the face,” he told the investigators in Spanish.
Who killed Mollie Tibbetts?
As the interrogation continued, Rivera finally cracked, admitting to pulling his car up behind Tibbetts as she ran. Rivera told authorities that Tibbetts had been listening to music with earphones and never heard him approach.
“I do remember that I was fighting with her,” he said, before adding that “she had blood.”
Rivera then confessed to putting Tibbetts in his car and dumping her body in a cornfield. He later led investigators to the location of Tibbetts' body. She had been stabbed to death.
“I fell to the floor and I was just sobbing because, you know, I knew in that moment I was never going to get to hug her again and I wasn’t going to welcome her back,” Collum told Dateline of the devastating discovery.
What happened to Cristhian Bahena Rivera?
Rivera went on trial for first-degree murder in 2021. By then, he had recanted his confession and pleaded not guilty.
Although a portion of his confession was ultimately thrown out because he hadn’t been read his Miranda rights in full, Rivera’s second confession to investigators was admissible at trial, along with the surveillance video and DNA evidence that showed Tibbetts had been in the trunk of his car.
Rivera was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Tibbetts' friends and family continue to keep her memory alive.
“There’s not a day, I think, where I don’t either think of her or just feel her nearby,” Lynd said.
