The Murder of Mollie Tibbetts — Talk Murder With Me

I realize it’s cliche to describe someone as a person who lights up a room each time they enter, but with Mollie, it was true. She was kind, thoughtful and always saw the best in everybody. Her radiant smile and warm brown eyes had a way of putting everyone she encountered at ease.

While Mollie struggled with anxiety and self-esteem issues, she refused to let them take over her life. She wrote poetry to express her innermost thoughts and feelings, which in turn helped her gain deeper insights into herself.

Mollie was a gifted communicator, particularly with children. She spent her summers working at a children's day camp at Grinnell Regional Medical Center in Grinnell, Iowa. It was no surprise to anyone that Mollie hoped to pursue a career as a psychologist for children and young people when she graduated college.

Mollie Tibbetts

Mollie Cecilia Tibbetts was born May 8, 1998, in San Francisco, California to Rob and Laura (née Calderwood) Tibbetts. She had two brothers, Scott and Jake. When Mollie was seven, her parents divorced. Mollie and her brothers moved with their mother from California to Brooklyn, Iowa (Laura’s hometown), a small farming town of about 1,500. Despite the distance, the Tibbetts children stayed in close contact with their father.

The move introduced Mollie to a very different America, the vast Iowa cornfields a stark contrast to the sandy beaches and vibrant downtown of San Francisco. Mollie settled in well, however, making friends easily and immersing herself in theatre and cross country once she started high school.

Display of flags in downtown Brooklyn. The city bills itself as “The Community of Flags” (source: Wikipedia)

In the fall of 2017, Mollie enrolled at the University of Iowa, located in Iowa City, about 50 miles east of Brooklyn. After a successful freshman year, in which she chose to major in psychology, Mollie returned home for the summer.

July 18, 2018

Back in Brooklyn, Mollie divided her time between her family home and the home of her boyfriend, Dalton Jack. On July 17, Dalton left for Dubuque, Iowa, located about 135 miles northeast of Brooklyn, for work on a construction project. Mollie stayed alone at Dalton’s house that night looking after his dogs.

Throughout the day on the 18th, Mollie and Dalton communicated via social media and text messages. Around 7pm, Mollie went out for her evening run, taking her cell phone with her and wearing her FitBit tracker. It was around 7:30pm that Mollie was seen for the last time, wearing dark-colored shorts, a pink top and running shoes.

Nobody heard from Mollie for the rest of the evening. While Dalton found this a little strange, he assumed she was likely just tired and had gone straight to bed after her run.

Mollie Is Missing

A missing poster of Mollie (source: The Daily Iowan)

When Mollie failed to get in touch with Dalton or her family the next morning, they began to worry. Mollie continued to work at the children’s day camp in Grinnell that summer, but she did not show up as scheduled on the 19th. It was completely unheard of for Mollie to skip work. If she had a reason not to go, she would have notified her co-workers. Convinced that something was seriously wrong, Laura reported her daughter missing.

The police were extremely proactive in the search for Mollie. Right away, they began collecting surveillance video from businesses located along the route Mollie would usually run. There was also reporting that they examined online GPS data from Mollie’s FitBit (although there isn’t much indication that this was particularly useful).

Hundreds of volunteers participated in searches of Brooklyn and the surrounding Poweshiek County. Neighborhoods were canvassed and dozens of interviews were conducted; over the course of the investigation, police interviewed over 500 individuals. A reward for Mollie’s safe return would eventually grow to over $400,000.

On July 26, investigators searched a pig farm in Guernsey, Iowa, located about 13 miles southeast of Brooklyn. The farm belonged to Wayne Cheney, who had previously been arrested for stalking and harassing women. The next day, however, investigators confirmed that Mollie was not on the pig farm.

On August 3, FBI agents returned to the pig farm and interviewed Cheney a second time. They also searched his home and went through his cell phone records. Cheney told them he had never seen Mollie Tibbetts before. He later spoke to reporters from a local news station about his encounter with investigators: “I don't know who those two were but they took me down to the fire station Tuesday and questioned me for two hours. I don’t remember what they asked me. I just thought it was a waste of time, but, oh well.”

Despite the searches of his property and interviews, Cheney was never officially named a suspect or person of interest in Mollie’s disappearance.

By August 15th, with still no sign of Mollie, the authorities had narrowed their search to five key locations in and around Brooklyn, including Dalton’s home, a carwash, a truck stop, and two farms.

Investigators Get A Break

Cristhian Bahena Rivera (source: Des Moines Register)

It was footage from a Brooklyn resident’s home security system that set investigators on the right track towards finding out what happened to Mollie. After hours of reviewing the video, they finally spotted Mollie running in an area east of Brooklyn. The footage also showed a black Chevy Malibu, which drove back and forth several times, eventually following Mollie as she ran. The car was linked to 24-year-old Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a Mexican national who worked on a Brooklyn dairy farm. Rivera was not known to police, nor had his name come up in the canvassing the authorities had carried out in the previous weeks.

On Aug. 20, investigators detained Rivera. He made no effort to resist and practically confessed on the spot. Rivera told investigators that he had seen Mollie jogging that evening and pursued her in his car, which he parked, and then began chasing her on foot. Mollie told him to leave her alone, and if he didn’t, she would call the police. She turned away and began running again.

Rivera explained that he couldn’t remember what happened after that, other than he had gone into a rage of sorts and blacked out. He began driving again, ending up at a cornfield in rural Poweshiek County. When he looked down at his lap, he noticed a bud from a pair of earphones which were not his.

I’m not sure how much I believe his story that he blacked out (I’m just going with what’s reported) but it was when he noticed the earbud that he realized he had put Mollie in the trunk of his car. He got out of the car and opened the trunk, where he found the young woman, bleeding from the side of her head.

Mollie Is Found

On Aug. 21, Rivera led investigators to Mollie’s body. He told investigators that after he realized she was in his trunk, he picked her up and carried her about 20 meters into the cornfield. He lay her amongst the corn face up and covered her with corn leaves.

Mollie’s autopsy revealed that she died of “multiple sharp force injuries”. I could not find solid information as to whether or not she had been sexually assaulted.

Rick Rahn, special agent in charge at the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, said at a press conference that there was no connection between Mollie and her killer, other than he mentioned seeing her running before. As far as motive goes, there did not appear to be one specifically. The attack was random; it appeared to be a case of Rivera acting on the most depraved and reckless of human impulses.

Rivera Is Charged

On Aug. 22, Rivera was charged with first-degree murder and held on cash-only bond of five million dollars. On Sept. 19, he pleaded not guilty.

Rivera in court on Aug. 22 (source: Rolling Stone)

Rivera’s arrest for Mollie’s murder lit a fire in the debate surrounding immigration in the United States. As it turns out, Rivera was originally from El Guayabillo, Guerrero, Mexico, and had settled in United States when he was 17, despite being undocumented. He had lived in Iowa since he arrived in the country, where he worked on several different farms.

Craig Lang, owner of Yarrabee Farms (where Rivera had worked since 2014), explained that Rivera used false identification, going by the name John Budd, to pass the Social Security Administration’s employment verification system.

Mollie’s case put a spotlight on the methods business owners in the United States use to screen potential employees. Yarrabee Farms was not a subscriber to the E-Verify online tool at the time, which is used to check on the immigration status of employees. After Mollie’s murder, they vowed that they would begin using E-Verify to vet all future employees.

Originally, Rivera’s trial was set to go ahead in Poweshiek County, but his attorneys argued that he would never get a fair trial there, and it was moved to Sioux City. The trial was continually delayed and moved to different counties; it was supposed to begin in Sept. 2019, but was delayed by a whole year to Sept. 2020. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, it has been moved to Scott County, and is supposed to start in Jan. 2021.

Unwelcome Political Interference

When Mollie Tibbetts was murdered in July of 2018, Donald Trump saw an opportunity. Mollie, a beautiful, bubbly, all-American college student with her whole life ahead of her had been killed by exactly the sort of person Trump demonized throughout his 2016 presidential campaign and into his presidency - a young Mexican man who was undocumented. It gave Trump further ammunition to use in his war on immigration; more precisely, to push for more funding for his much-talked-about (but still largely non-existent) border wall.

Trump never called Mollie’s parents to express his condolences. He did, however, tweet a video of himself on August 22, 2018, the day after Mollie’s body was discovered, in which he said:

“Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family. A person came in from Mexico illegally and killed her. We need the wall, we need our immigration laws changed, we need our border laws changed.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump also used the opportunity to push his false claim that there is “tremendous crime trying to come through the borders”.

Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said in response to Mollie’s murder:

"Every crime committed by an illegal alien is a crime that should never have occurred and would never have occurred if the illegal alien were not in our country.”

Kobach was also a strong proponent of Donald Trump’s racist birther movement, in which Trump and many of his allies harassed Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate in order to prove he was born in the United States and therefore eligible to serve as president.

The reality when it comes to crime committed by natural-born United States citizens compared with immigrants (documented and undocumented) is quite different from the one Trump and other Republicans push.

There are numerous studies that demonstrate that there is not a positive correlation between immigration rates and violent crime in the United States. A study published in Dec. 2016 showed that between 1980 and 2016, while there was a 118% increase in immigrant population (which includes documented and undocumented immigrants), the rate of violent crime fell by 36% to ~386 incidents per 100,000 residents.

Another study, published by Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, focused on the number of convictions of native-born, documented and undocumented immigrants in Texas (the state with the second largest foreign-born population in the country). The study showed that native-born residents are far more likely to commit and be convicted of crimes than the other two groups - the conviction rate for undocumented immigrants was about 50% lower than that of native-born Americans, and for documented immigrants, it was about 86% lower than for native-born Americans.

Remembering Mollie

A memorial service for Mollie took place at Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom High School, where Mollie had graduated from the previous year. Over 1,200 people crowded into the school gymnasium to say goodbye to the young woman who had had a positive impact on so many of their lives. Mollie’s father, Rob Tibbetts, delivered emotional, but hopeful, remarks to the crowd, using his daughter’s memory to channel strength and bring hope to the community devastated by the loss.

"Today, we need to turn the page. We’re at the end of a long ordeal," he said. "But we need to turn toward life — Mollie’s life — because Mollie’s nobody’s victim. Mollie’s my hero."

He went on:

"The person best equipped to help us through this is Mollie. So let’s try to do what Mollie would do. Let’s say what Mollie would say."

After Mollie's death, she continued to have a powerful influence over those she left behind. This article illustrates how Mollie's mother, Laura, did not let hatred and bitterness break her down after her daughter died. In life, Mollie strived to treat everyone she met with respect and dignity; she would go the extra mile just to make someone's life that little bit easier.

With Mollie gone, Laura made sure to carry on as she believed her daughter would, helping those in need, regardless of their background. The voices of powerful people spouting racist and xenophobic rhetoric, pressuring her to feel contempt and resentment faded away when she asked herself, "What would Mollie do?"

Jake, Mollie, Scott and mom, Laura (source: The Daily Iowan)

Mollie and her boyfriend, Dalton Jack (source: Des Moines Register)

Rob Tibbetts asked that politicians stop using his daughter as a weapon to further their political agendas. In an op-ed for the Des Moines Register, he wrote:

“Do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist. The act grievously extends the crime that stole Mollie from our family and is, to quote Donald Trump Jr., 'heartless' and 'despicable.”

Tibbetts’ op-ed was a response to one written by Trump Jr, titled: “Democrats' reaction to Mollie Tibbetts' death is heartless, despicable”.

Rob Tibbetts continued in his condemnation of those who used Mollie’s murder to demonize minorities:

"The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community as white supremacists are of all white people. To suggest otherwise is a lie. Justice in my America is blind. This person will receive a fair trial, as it should be. If convicted, he will face the consequences society has set. Beyond that, he deserves no more attention."

"To the Hispanic community, my family stands with you and offers its heartfelt apology. That you’ve been beset by the circumstances of Mollie’s death is wrong. We treasure the contribution you bring to the American tapestry in all its color and melody.”

Mollie and her father, Rob Tibbetts (source: CNN)

#MilesForMollie

After Mollie’s murder, runners from across the country set out on their own runs in her honor. They took photos using the hashtag #MilesForMollie, which has now been used on Instagram over 18,000 times. The #MilesForMollie movement set out to bring awareness of the dangers female runners face when heading out on their own.

On Sept. 30, 2018, over 500 people from across Iowa and even out-of-state, came to Brooklyn to participate in a 5 mile run along the route Mollie had taken the evening she was killed. The event served to remember Mollie, but also to bring together the small, close-knit community which had been traumatized by the loss of one of their own. Mollie’s cousin, Morgan Collum, along with local Brooklyn resident and keen runner Brandie Flathers, organized the event together. Morgan ran the five miles carrying an American flag, on which she wrote the distance and locations of people who had joined in the #MilesForMollie movement.

At the end of the run, Morgan shared some of her reflections:

“I remembered why I was doing this today. I was doing what Mollie wasn’t able to finish. Mollie wouldn’t want me or anyone to give up on running - or something else they enjoy - because they are scared.”