Mollie Tibbetts was, by all accounts, an exceptional young woman. Just 20-years-old, Tibbetts was a psychology student at the University of Iowa, a summer camp counselor, and at the time of her abduction and murder, was dog-sitting for a friend of her boyfriend.
While she was out enjoying a jog in the small Iowa town of Brooklyn, Cristian Bahena Rivera, 24, spotted her, reportedly found the beautiful college student attractive, and abducted her. He later led police to her body in a remote corn field where he had left her after stabbing her in her chest and skull.
Rivera, an illegal alien from Mexico, was arrested about a month after Tibbetts was reported missing. At the time, he claimed that he became angry when Tibbetts rejected his advances (apparently made from his car as she was jogging along the road), and stated that he “blacked out” and initially “forgot “ that her dead body was in the trunk of his car. He has been found guilty of first-degree murder.
An illegal Mexican immigrant working as an Iowa farmhand was convicted Friday of killing college student Mollie Tibbetts, who was knifed to death while jogging in 2018.Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 26, was found guilty of Tibbetts’ murder two days after he denied fatally stabbing the 20-year-old woman during his trial in Davenport, Iowa.Bahena Rivera will be sentenced July 15, the judge said Friday. He faces up to life in prison without parole.
In a bizarre turn of events, Rivera claimed that two men abducted him from his home and forced him to abduct Tibbetts. The two mystery men—Rivera reportedly never mentioned them to police—then killed Tibbetts and placed her in Rivera’s trunk before ordering him to dump her body in the cornfield, where Rivera later led police to her body.
The New York Post continues:
The convicted murderer had claimed on the stand Wednesday that two armed mystery men commandeered his car and ordered him to repeatedly drive by the University of Iowa student until they got out of the car and killed her.He said he discovered the woman’s body in his trunk only after the two men ran off from his car. Bahena Rivera admitted to dumping her body in a cornfield.“I picked her up, and then I put her in the cornfield,” he testified, adding that he covered Tibbetts’ body with corn stalks because he “didn’t want her to be too exposed to the sun.”He insisted that he didn’t go to the police because he was “scared” since it wouldn’t have been “seen as good [or] right.”
The jury didn’t buy a word of this story, apparently. Rivera will be sentenced on July 15th and faces the possibility of life in prison without parole.
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