What was in his lap
It was an earbud from a pair of headphones. The earbuds belonged to Mollie.
That, he told investigators, was when he remembered. Mollie was in the trunk of his car.
He said he drove to the driveway of a cornfield. He opened the trunk and saw blood on the side of her head. He took her out, carried her on his shoulder into the field, and covered her with corn leaves. Then he left.
He said he couldn’t remember how she had died.
When Romero pushed him for more, she testified, he told her: “I brought you here, didn’t I? So that means that I did it.”
The cornfield
In the early hours of August 21, 2018, Bahena Rivera rode with investigators out of Brooklyn into rural Poweshiek County and showed them the spot.
Mollie was there, hidden under cornstalks, exactly where he said she would be.
“After we got done interviewing Mr. Rivera, he led us to her location,” Rick Rahn, the DCI special agent in charge, told reporters that afternoon.
Bahena Rivera was charged with first-degree murder. The state medical examiner found that Mollie had died of multiple sharp force injuries. She had been stabbed.
Federal immigration officials said he was in the country illegally, and within hours the killing of a college student from a small Iowa town had become a national political story. To the people who had searched for her for 34 days, it was something simpler. Mollie was not coming home.
The trunk
Investigators took the black Malibu apart.
A DNA analyst found blood in the trunk and testified that it matched Mollie’s DNA profile. “The profile I had from Mollie Tibbetts and the profile from that blood matched,” the analyst told the jury.
An FBI agent who analyzed Mollie’s phone testified that on the evening she disappeared, it moved east out of Brooklyn at about the pace of a runner. At 8:35 p.m. it began moving south at speeds of up to 60 mph. At 8:53 p.m. it stopped in rural Poweshiek County. Then it stopped sending data altogether.
Investigators never found a murder weapon.
“Two armed men”
The trial was moved across the state to the Scott County Courthouse in Davenport and began in May 2021, nearly three years after Mollie vanished.
Prosecutors built their case on three things: the video, the blood in the trunk, and what Bahena Rivera had told investigators.
His lawyers, Chad and Jennifer Frese, attacked that last part hardest. They said there was no murder weapon, no crime scene, no eyewitness and no motive. They argued that their client had been questioned for hours after a full day of work, that he was exhausted and kept saying he was sleepy, and that what came out of that room was a false confession.
Then, on May 26, Bahena Rivera took the stand himself and told a completely different story.
He said that on the night of July 18, he got out of the shower at his home and found two armed men inside. They forced him to drive into Brooklyn, he said, and made him drive past the runner several times. One of them got out with a knife. Later, he said, he heard the trunk open and close.
The men made him drive to the cornfield, he testified, threatened his ex-girlfriend and his daughter, and told him to keep his mouth shut. He admitted that Mollie ended up in his trunk and that he had seen her body. He denied killing her.
Asked why he had never gone to the police, he said he was scared.
The prosecutor, Scott Brown, called the story “a figment of his imagination.”
Guilty
On May 28, 2021, after just over seven hours of deliberation, the jury found Cristhian Bahena Rivera guilty of first-degree murder.
Before he was sentenced, his lawyers asked for a new trial. They pointed to new claims that other people were responsible for Mollie’s death. The judge rejected them.
On August 30, 2021, District Judge Joel Yates sentenced Bahena Rivera to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the mandatory sentence for first-degree murder in Iowa, and ordered him to pay $150,000 to Mollie’s family.
“You and you alone forever changed the lives of those who loved Mollie Tibbetts,” the judge told him.
Mollie’s mother, Laura Calderwood, wrote a statement that was read aloud in court. In it, she said Mollie’s father, Rob, would never get to walk his only daughter down the aisle.
Bahena Rivera appealed. He argued that his statements to investigators should never have been used against him. In October 2023, the Iowa Court of Appeals rejected every claim and upheld his conviction.
He is serving his sentence in an Iowa state prison.
For 34 days, hundreds of people searched the fields around Brooklyn for Mollie Tibbetts. In the end, the clue that found her had been recorded on the very first night, by a neighbor’s camera: a few seconds of a black car with chrome mirrors, driving past again and again.
