The agonizing month-long search for 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts ended Tuesday with everyone’s worst fears: that she had been abducted while jogging, killed and hidden in an Iowa cornfield not far from home.
The discovery of her body, covered with corn stalks, sent shock waves from the American heartland to Oakland, where she attended elementary school, and it took on a political dimension when authorities announced that the 24-year-old charged with first-degree murder in her death is an undocumented immigrant.
During a news conference Tuesday afternoon in Iowa, state officials said footage from someone’s security camera in the small farmtown of Brooklyn had captured images of Tibbetts jogging that evening and of a black Malibu that appeared to be trailing her. They tracked down the Malibu and on Monday, approached Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who had come to the United States from Mexico several years ago and lived outside of town for four to seven years.
Investigators wouldn’t reveal anything more about Rivera, but Iowa’s political leaders and President Donald Trump condemned the immigration system that allowed him to live under the radar for so long.
“Too many Iowans have been lost at the hands of criminals who broke our immigration laws,” the state’s two Republican senators, Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley said in a joint statement. “We cannot allow these tragedies to continue.”
In a lengthy interview, Rivera told police he had seen Tibbetts in the past, but on this evening had driven past her a couple of times, circled back and pulled up alongside of her.
The Associated Press reported that an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint said Rivera admitted to investigators he got out of his car and started running alongside Tibbetts.
“At one point he said Mollie grabbed her phone (and said) you need to leave me alone or I’m going to call the police,” Special Agent Rick Rahm of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation recounted Tuesday. “He chased her down and he says he blacked out and comes to at an intersection where we believe he placed Mollie.”
Rivera said he panicked before he blacked out and remembers seeing her earphones on his lap, and taking her bloody body out of the trunk of his car, the affidavit said.
“The defendant further described during the interview that he dragged Tibbetts on foot from his vehicle to a secluded location in a cornfield,” the affidavit said.
Rahm said he couldn’t speculate about a motive.
“I can just tell you that it seemed that he followed her, seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day,” Rahm said, and “for whatever reason he chose to abduct her.”
He didn’t say how she died or the nature of the assault; an autopsy will be conducted Wednesday. The Associated Press searched Iowa court records and found Rivera had no prior criminal history, and it’s unclear whether he had ever been subject to prior deportation proceedings.
Tibbetts, a University of Iowa student and high school track athlete, was last heard from at 7:30 p.m. July 18, when she texted her mother that she was going for a run. She had been staying at the home of her boyfriend while he was out of town. Police had been trying to track both her phone and the Fitbit she wore on her wrist. The videotape provided the break in the case.
Her disappearance spurred a massive search, with federal and state authorities as well as hundreds of volunteers scouring cornfields and drainage ditches.
“It’s a rural county, a lot of fields, a lot of woods, a lot of ditches,” Rahm said. Without the recent discovery of the video — and with her body covered in corn stalks — “we weren’t able to locate her.”
The tragedy reverberated back to Oakland, where Mollie had celebrated her First Holy Communion as a second-grader at Corpus Christi Catholic School. Principal Katie Murphy, who has worked at the school for three decades, told children on the first day of school Tuesday the news that “Mollie will not be coming home.”
“Mollie was kind and sweet and nice to everybody,” Murphy told them, leaving out the details to the young students. “Let’s try to be like Mollie. As we celebrate our first day, let’s celebrate her life and be like her today.”
Her father, Rob Tibbetts, who remained in the East Bay after his marriage ended a decade ago, spent weeks in Iowa helping with the search and conducting media interviews in hopes of keeping her face in the news. He last saw his daughter in June, when he remarried in a ceremony at Bass Lake near Yosemite. Mollie spoke at the reception that she considered her father her best friend.
Her mother, Laura Calderwood, and Mollie’s two brothers also helped in the search. None of the family were prepared to speak on Tuesday. A week ago, however, Calderwood had posted a photo on Facebook of a group of Mollie’s friends and her hopes that her daughter would be found alive.
“Mollie, your friends and I were missing you tonight. We shared some pizza and salad. Yes, we tossed the salad with cilantro avocado dressing,” she wrote. “We want you to know that our love is deep as the road is long. It moves our feet to carry on and beats our hearts while you are gone. We live each day and do what we can. Hurry home.”
In Oakland, parents and teachers at the small Catholic school knew Mollie long before her tragic disappearance made international headlines, before her mother had moved with her three children to her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa, 11 years ago.
“Of course we knew her,” said Kathleen Heafey Boyle, whose son was a classmate of Mollie’s at Corpus Christi School, “but if you didn’t know her, it’s like everyone had a Mollie, whether it’s a son, a daughter or a friend.”
She hopes the fact that Rivera is an undocumented immigrant doesn’t make Mollie’s memory a political flashpoint, like the death of 32-year-old Kate Steinle of San Francisco.
“My reaction is that it’s not about an illegal immigrant,” said Heafey Boyle, choking up. “It’s about the loss of a young woman. I don’t want it to be about that guy. It’s not right.”
Steinle was killed in July 2015 — a month after Trump announced his presidential candidacy — when an undocumented immigrant fired a stolen gun and the bullet ricocheted, striking Steinle as she walked with her father on Pier 14.
The shooter — a felon who had been repeatedly deported yet released under San Francisco’s controversial sanctuary city policy — was acquitted of murder by a jury who found the killing was accidental. But the case generated a firestorm over immigration policies in Trump’s campaign for president.
On Tuesday, at a rally in West Virginia, Trump said Tibbetts’ murder “should never have happened.”
“The laws are so bad,” he said. “The immigration laws are such a disgrace.”
Although the Tibbetts family had been gone from Oakland for more than a decade, they had been active volunteers there and kept in touch with their old friends and teachers. Since Mollie’s disappearance, those friends donated to fundraising efforts, prayed at daily Masses and held a candlelight vigil last week. About 150 people attended and lit candles around the baptismal font.
All day Tuesday, friends of the Tibbetts came and went from Corpus Christi church and school, meeting with the principal and lighting candles in the church.
“It’s just reminding us once again that we’re family,” Murphy said, and while members of their church and school community “can’t go to Iowa, they can come her and the doors are open to them.”