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.
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.”
Police investigators said they broke the case about a month after Tibbetts’ disappearance when they tracked down surveillance video that showed a person, apparently the young woman, running in the distance and a Chevy Malibu driving by her soon after.
A deputy in town saw Bahena Rivera driving in the same car the next day. Police then questioned the farmhand, who admitted driving by Tibbetts, then turning around and passing her again because he found her attractive.
Police later found Tibbetts’ DNA in the trunk of Malibu.
Her killing was seized on by President Trump in the lead up to the 2020 election as supposed evidence that America needed harsher immigration policies and a wall on the Mexican border to keep illegal migrants from crossing into the US.
It took the Iowa jury just seven hours to convict the killer.
“This was the verdict that the evidence demanded,” said one of the Poweshiek County prosecutors in the case, Bart Klaver.
Bahena Rivera’s lawyers said they would appeal their client’s conviction based on their long-standing argument that his statements to cops were coerced.
-With AP
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