The Iowa Office of the State Medical Examiner said Aug. 23 that the body found in a cornfield earlier this week is the missing 20-year-old student. A preliminary autopsy was carried out on Aug. 22, and the medical examiner’s office stated that “additional findings” might be revealed after another examination, Fox reported.
Her body was found in rural Poweshiek County and was covered in cornstalks. She disappeared in mid-July after going jogging in Brooklyn, Iowa.
Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, was charged on Aug. 21 with first-degree murder in Tibbetts’s death, and he’s now being held on $5 million cash bond, according to the report.
On Tuesday, officials confirmed that they spotted the car Rivera had been driving on surveillance footage. Rivera later allegedly admitted to killing Tibbetts.
It is not clear when Tibbetts was killed or if she knew her alleged murderer.
A motive in the case has not been established.
A prominent Iowa farm family had employed him for the past four years, saying that he had worked under a different name and was a good employee who helped care for cows, according to CBS News.
“Our employee is not who he said he was,” Dane Lang, the manager of Yarrabee Farms, said at a news conference at the farm, according to CBS. “This was shocking to us.”
Lang said that Rivera handed them an out-of-state government-issued photo identification card and a Social Security card. His information was analyzed by the Social Security Administration’s employment-verification system, and he checked out, according to CBS.
“He showed up every day and he did his job. He was patted on his back. They turned a blind eye to the reality of documentation,” Rivera’s attorney, Allan Richards, told CBS.
No Prior Contact
Investigators said there doesn’t appear to have been prior contact between Rivera and Tibbetts.“There is nothing that we have come across as of yet that shows they had any type of relationship. And I don’t mean intimate dating—I mean friendship, acquaintance, what have you,” Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, told the Des Moines Register.
He said, “He had mentioned, I believe, that he had seen her before. In what context—I don’t know if it was just in passing or had seen her in town somewhere, but it sounded like he at least had recognized her.”
Rivera told investigators that he pulled over after circling the block a few times, exited the vehicle, and approached Tibbetts, according to the Register. After she threatened to call the police, he became angry and killed her.
