Brooklyn, Iowa • For the past four years, Cristhian Rivera has spent his days caring for herds of meat and dairy cattle just outside Brooklyn, Iowa. On the evening of July 18, he told investigators, he spotted a young woman in workout clothes, jogging alone.
Rivera, a Mexican national who appears to have used a stolen ID to evade a federal system to screen undocumented workers, drove past the woman several times. As he drove, his Chevrolet Malibu went in and out of the frame of a surveillance camera aimed at the street.
"It seemed that he followed her and seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day," Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Agent Rick Rahn told reporters Tuesday. "And for whatever reason, he chose to abduct her."
At first, Rivera told authorities, he pursued the woman in his car. Then he got out and ran beside her. The woman was frightened, Rivera recalled. She pulled out her phone and told him, "I'm gonna call police."
What happened next, Rivera claims, is blocked from his memory, something he said happens when he gets upset or angry. The next thing he recalled, he told investigators, was being in his car and finding a headphone earpiece in his lap that did not belong to him. That prompted him to open his trunk, where he saw the woman in workout clothes, bleeding from the head and motionless.
The woman was Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old psychology student at the University of Iowa whose disappearance sparked a month-long search by federal, state and local authorities, and whose killing has now become a talking point for conservatives arguing for more restrictive immigration laws.
On Tuesday, investigators revealed what had happened to her, as told by the man they say killed her, then hid her body.
Rivera, 24, said he dragged, then carried Tibbetts' body 60 feet into an isolated cornfield. Then he dropped her on the ground, face up, covered her with corn stalks and walked away.
After the interview, he led investigators to Tibbetts' body.
On Tuesday, Rivera was charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts' killing. He is in jail, and on Wednesday, a judge set his bail at $5 million.
Rivera was in the country illegally and appears to have used a stolen identification to satisfy a federal immigration background check by his employer through the Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify system, a law enforcement official told The Washington Post.
In a motion asking for a gag order, Rivera's attorney, Allan M. Richards, claimed that Rivera was in the country legally, saying that his employer had verified Rivera's status. Richards provided no evidence to back up his assertion in the motion and could not immediately be reached for comment.
Yarrabee Farms President Eric Lang told the Associated Press that Rivera had been in good standing as an employee. Lang is the brother of Craig Lang, a prominent Iowa farmer who recently lost the 2018 Republican primary to become Iowa's agriculture secretary.
Within hours of the news conference announcing Rivera's arrest, President Trump weighed in on the killing, telling a West Virginia audience about an "illegal alien" who had just been arrested:
“You saw what happened to that incredible, beautiful woman [Mollie Tibbetts],” he said. “Should have never happened .... the immigration laws are such a disgrace. We’re getting them changed.”
And on Wednesday White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders talked about Tibbetts' death just a few moments into the administration's press briefing.
"Sadly the individual believed to be responsible for the murder is an illegal immigrant, making this an unfortunate reminder of why we need to strengthen our broken immigration laws," she said.
Numerous studies have failed to demonstrate that immigrants, legal or otherwise, pose a unique threat of committing crimes. In fact, some have shown that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. For documented immigrants, that number is even lower.
That hasn't stopped people from seizing on another powerful anti-immigration anecdote.
The broad contours of Tibbetts' death are reminiscent of the case of Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old white woman whose 2015 shooting death in a popular area of San Francisco has become a cri de cœur for Trump and other conservatives and proponents of harsher immigration laws.
An undocumented immigrant, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, was later convicted on a gun charge related to Steinle's killing.
Three years later, Tibbetts, who had been housesitting for her boyfriend, went out for a jog on a narrow farm road that led out of Brooklyn, a small town of about 1,500 -- then vanished.
Authorities and dozens of volunteers searched for her for more than a month, combing cornfields and barns and scouring her Fitbit data and social media accounts for clues.
Investigators interviewed some 1,400 people and received more than 4,000 tips, but the break in the case came within the past two weeks when they found someone with a security camera system while canvassing a neighborhood.
It showed Tibbetts jogging and Rivera’s car — and was a critical clue in identifying a suspect.
Investigators have not found anything indicating that Tibbetts and Rivera knew one another before the attack, according to Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of Iowa's Division of Criminal Investigation.
The results of an autopsy are pending, and Rahn did not specify a cause of death.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement representative said that the agency lodged an immigration detainer on Rivera with local authorities after his arrest Tuesday. That means that if Rivera is ever released, he would be sent back to Mexico.
As politicians publicly debated what Tibbetts' death said about the nation's immigration system, her family, who had been vocal during the search for the college student, mourned in private in Brooklyn, where missing signs with her face on them still dotted fields.
The family broke their silence on Wednesday, shortly before Rivera's first court appearance.
In a statement to the Des Moines Register, Tibbetts' family asked to be "allowed the time to process our devastating loss and share our grief in private."
"On behalf of Mollie's entire family, we thank all of those from around the world who have sent their thoughts and prayers for our girl," the statement said. "We know that many of you will join us as we continue to carry Mollie in our hearts forever."
- - -
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump, Christopher Ingraham, Nick Miroff and Eli Rosenberg contributed to this report.
