On May 8th, 1998, a family in San Francisco, California, welcomed their third child into the world and became complete. This was the Tibbetts family and Rob and Laura Tibbetts now had two sons and a little baby girl, a girl who’d grow up to become a warm and bubbly light in all of their lives.
Mollie Cecilia Tibbetts was fast friends with everyone she met. She was kind, loved her family and her friends, but maybe most of all, she was very funny. Mollie often made the people around her laugh with her sense of humor, and that drew people to her all the time.
But her second grade in school was a time of great change for Mollie. First her parents got a divorce and then Mollie, her two older brothers and her mother moved from the bustling and lively San Francisco to Brooklyn, Iowa. Tram cars and vivid culture were replaced by corn fields and a tight-knit community, but it was the community that Laura Tibbetts had grown up in, and it seemed to suit her daughter too.
The distance separated Rob from his children, but he made every effort to stay in touch and see them as often as he could, while his children settled into the quiet and sleepy life Brooklyn had to offer. There are only around 1400 people living in Brooklyn, making it one of those places where everyone knows everyone, but it was when Mollie was a junior in high school that she came across a new face.
His name was Dalton Jack, a senior in the same high school that Mollie was in, and he was sitting with one of his friends in his truck when Mollie and one of her friends approached. The four teenagers met, Mollie’s sense of humor broke the ice between her and Dalton, and the next thing anyone knew was that Mollie and Dalton were inseparable.
Anyone looking at them would know that they shared that love and connection that only seems to happen in the movies, but their relationship would be tested when Mollie graduated high school and began on her journey to college. She enrolled at the University of Iowa to study psychology, but by then, Dalton was a few years ahead of her.
After graduating high school, he’d chosen to join the workforce and had found a job in construction at a local company. This meant that Dalton was staying in Brooklyn, but it also meant a little bit more than that. Sometimes Dalton would be in town, sometimes he’d be across the state on another job site. Basically, Dalton had to go where the work was, and very few opportunities put him in the same place as his girlfriend Mollie.
Where other high school sweethearts would have called it quits, Mollie and Dalton held strong. The young couple made every effort to see each other, oftentimes on the weekends and sometimes during the weekdays… whenever they could make it work.
That was why when Mollie returned home from the semester in the summer of 2018, she was coming home not only to her family but to Dalton as well. For those precious, warm summer months, it looked like the only time they’d missed spending together would be when Dalton had work, and this young couple made the most of it.
When Mollie wasn’t with Dalton, she’d be with her family or out on the town. The very small town. To keep herself busy during the day and to earn a little extra money, Mollie found work at a local children’s day care and managed to squeeze in a few hours of studying into her evenings to make sure she’d be ahead when she went back to school in the fall. But something else Mollie almost always managed to find time for, was an evening run. The days were usually too hot and the sun too strong to have one during the day, but once the sun went down in the evening, Mollie would put on her shoes and would often be seen around town enjoying her run.
That was why on the evening of July 18th, no one was really surprised to see the twenty-year-old out and about in her running gear. Dalton was out of town for work that evening and Mollie had been staying at his house to dog-sit and study. She left his home around 7:00 and headed east into town on her usual evening run.
Neighbors remembered seeing her and security cameras picked up a portion of her run, but they missed a very crucial part: there was no footage of Mollie returning home.
The next day, Mollie’s supervisor from the daycare called Dalton to ask where Mollie was and to see if he knew why she was late.
But Dalton had been working out of town and didn’t have any answers.
Calls to Mollie’s phone went unanswered, her social media accounts remained eerily quiet and Mollie was nowhere to be found.
By that very evening, her family, Dalton and the local police had begun a town-wide search for Mollie, leaving missing persons posters behind them wherever they went. Investigators managed to piece together that Mollie had headed east during her run, but not much else. They set up a tipline, spread her poster and raised awareness of her disappearance through several states in the midwest, and they tried to pin her location through the Fitbit Mollie often wore.
All leads came to a dead end.
In a desperate attempt to help, the community came together and raised over $366,000 as a reward through their local Crime Stoppers branch, a reward that would, sadly, go unclaimed.
Instead, a neighbor’s security camera caught some disturbing footage. It shows a small and blurry figure running down a street at approximately the right time and direction for that person to have been Mollie Tibbetts, but it also shows something else. A black car can also be seen, first heading away from Mollie’s direction, then somewhere off camera that car turns around and heads off towards the running figure.
With Brooklyn being the small community that it is, it didn’t take long to track down the owner of that car: a man by the name of John Budd. John first claimed to know nothing about Mollie or her disappearance, but the investigators dug deeper and uncovered a series of startling truths.
The first lie to be overturned was John Budd’s identity. He was in fact Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a twenty-four-year-old immigrant from Mexico, in the country illegally, who was currently working on a farm owned by a Republican politician.
After hours of interrogation, Cristhian began to tell on himself. After first saying that he knew nothing about Mollies’ disappearance, he then confessed to having seen her running down the road. He’d approached Mollie in his car, asked to talk to her a few times and then began driving beside her. In an attempt to get rid of him, Mollie had taken out her phone and threatened to call the police.
Cristhian then claimed that in a fit of panic brought on by the thought of being caught by the police, he’d attacked Mollie, killed her and hidden her body in a cornfield. A cornfield that he then took the police to and brought the search for Mollie to a bitter end.
Partially hidden under leaves were the decomposing remains of a young woman. She’d been stabbed multiple times in the chest, neck and face and she was missing her shorts and underwear.
DNA analysis confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions and Mollie’s missing persons case was changed to a homicide.
It looked like an open and shut case. Rarely does anyone confess to murder, take authorities to their victim’s remains and get away with it, but this case’s journey to court would take longer than anyone expected.
Changes in his legal council, moving the case out of the county and a backed-up court system brought on by the pandemic bought Cristhian a few more years, but finally, in 2021, he faced the judge.
To everyone’s complete surprise, he pleaded not guilty.
At court, Cristhian challenged his own confession and claimed that he’d been tricked into giving it. His defense came in with a sturdier rebuttal and proved that Cristhian hadn’t been read his Miranda right correctly, making his confession inadmissible in court.
This was a hit to the prosecution, but by then they had already collected forensic evidence that put Mollie’s blood in the trunk of Cristhian’s car.
But it was Cristhian himself who sealed his own fate yet again. Taking to the stand, Cristhian claimed that he’d been attacked by a group of men that day. He said that they’d had knives and forced themselves into his car. They’d been the ones to make him stop alongside Mollie as she’d been running that day and they’d been the ones to attack and kill her. They’d then forced Cristhian to drive them out to that cornfield and hide Mollie’s body, and they’d then threatened Cristhian’s daughter to make sure that he kept silent about the whole thing.
It was safe to say that there were very few people who believed his new version of events and Cristhian was sentenced to life in prison without parole, but instead of bringing Mollie’s family and the community of Brooklyn peace, media and political coverage of this case continued to divide the country.
One side of the fence, including names like Donald Trump, used Mollie’s tragic story to double down on the need for stricter immigration policies. In a speech, the former president said: “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.”
The other side argued that Mollie’s murder was being used to spread racism and target immigrants. This was a sentiment that Mollie’s own father Rob shared publicly. In a response to Trump’s speech, Rob replied: “The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans. As far as I’m concerned, they’re Iowans with better food.” Mollie, he said, would have agreed with him and so he stood up against people who’d “appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist.”
But somewhere beneath the politicization of Mollie’s case lies a family still reeling from their loss and a young woman whose life was unjustly and unceremoniously cut short. Maybe that’s where the focus of her story should have always stayed.
