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Nice. Oh, hear that?
My neck cracked. So satisfying.
Speaking of satisfying, I just use a Clorox toilet wand.
Ooh, with the cleaner already in it.
Yes. All in one, the brush just clicks on.
Click. Then you swish swish swish, tch -tch -tch. Ah.
And pops right off into the trash.
Just click, swish, pop.
Chlorox. Clean feels good.
Clean feels good. Oh, we're back.
Yours is directed. Tonight on Dateline.
Molly was just a ball of sunshine to be around.
I love her so much. Who has her?
Who knows where she's at?
I knew there was an answer out there.
One of the biggest cases ever in Iowa.
We were desperate to find Molly.
She had been gone a little over 24 hours.
Those are crucial hours, aren't they?
Yes, they are. All we really had was that she went out for a jog and never came home.
We dispatched search parties, checking road ditches, fields.
A home security camera caught Molly running for an instant.
After she goes by, do you see this black Chevy Malibu?
We were thinking, what are the odds that we'll ever find this car?
I said, OK, so I think we got something.
You weren't a detective.
I was not a detective.
You'd never investigated a murder before.
Never. I felt the pressure.
I mean, that was a huge roll in the ice.
We had a mission and we knew what that mission was.
It's terrible. It eats you up.
I knew I had to do this for Molly.
An urgent and mind -boggling mystery.
What happened to Molly?
I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline.
Here's Josh Mankiewicz with The Last Mile.
It's a winding road on the outskirts of town.
Here they call it the Blacktop.
It really is such a beautiful route.
You get out there and you're just surrounded by nature.
Her running shoes pounding out a steady beat.
There's a certain spot when you're on that road where you can see our grandparents' farm.
The rhythm of her breathing in sync with her favorite music.
She would always put her phone on, Do Not Disturb, when she was running because that was her time.
Her time. As the sun quietly set over the vast cornfield surrounding her home.
Molly couldn't have known there would be no more sunset runs.
No more anything. Not for her.
It was July 18, 2018.
Molly Tibbetts was 20 years old.
She'd just completed freshman year at the University of Iowa, and this summer was going to be the best of her young life.
Did you see her on that day?
Had she seen? Her happy -go -lucky self.
She was excited to be at work.
Molly had a great job working at a summer day camp at a local elementary school.
Supervisor Jill Scheck said Molly was a natural with children.
She loved being able to play with the kids, loved being on the playground, loved being inside doing crafts, loved doing the reading with them.
That was, it was her cup of tea.
She didn't seem concerned about anything or worried?
No, definitely not.
Just before lunch, Molly was all smiles as she pranked a co -worker and used his phone for selfies.
You get to be a big kid yourself, and Molly definitely fit that.
That day, it was Molly's turn to close up the camp.
She left about five o 'clock.
She was the last person there.
Yep. Molly's brother had picked her up and then dropped her off at her boyfriend Dalton's house.
Dalton was out of town and not coming home that night, so Molly sent him a Snapchat message.
Then texted her mom saying she'd stopped by for dinner and then she got ready for her usual evening run.
She would lace up her shoes and out the door she went.
Morgan Collum was seven years older than Molly.
They'd grown up together, and were more like sisters than cousins.
You ever talk to her about whether or not it was safe to go out there and run at night?
It never crossed my mind to say, hey, that's probably not safe to do that.
Later that night, storm clouds rolled in and it poured but the next day dawned warm summer bright.
I remember distinctly messaging her saying, wow, it rained so much last night and the thunder was really loud.
Morgan and Molly were so close.
They had exchanged Snapchats every day without fail for almost two years.
This sounds so silly, but we took great pride in our Snapchat streak.
I think we were in the 600s, so it was pretty cool.
So you get the hourglass, meaning your streak is in danger?
Right, which means that she hasn't responded to what I sent to her.
Morgan wasn't the only one wondering where Molly was.
When the camp day began, Molly wasn't there.
Molly was reliable.
Oh yes, very much so.
Not like her to not show up.
Definitely not. That question, where is Molly?
Was being asked all over Brooklyn, Iowa.
I reached out to her cousin and I said, hey, is something going on?
Molly didn't show up for work today and they hadn't heard from her, no one has seen her.
That phone call sparked a chain reaction.
Molly's family started calling each other and they were increasingly frantic.
I checked my phone and I saw I had a missed call from my dad, I had a missed call from my brother, I had a missed call from my Aunt Laura.
And I just knew in that moment, this isn't good.
Some of Molly's friends and family hurried to Dalton's house, hoping maybe she was sick or asleep.
It was empty, and now panic was setting in.
Everybody's calling you because they want to find her.
I was overwhelmed with that, you know, in that moment, I just wish that I had better answers for people and I didn't.
And that's when it started to get scary.
At 556 p .m., Poweshiek County Sheriff's Office received a call.
Molly was missing. Special Agent Trent Valletta caught the case for Iowa's Division of Criminal Investigation.
She'd been gone a little over 24 hours, but reported missing maybe 12.
Those are crucial hours, aren't they?
Yes, yes they are. Deputy Steve Kivvy headed up the investigation for the Poweshek County Sheriff's Office.
We didn't know if she had a medical issue or if she'd been hit by a car, or if she'd been abducted.
We had no idea. So Valetta and Kivvy started where investigators always start, finding out everything they could about what Molly had been up to on the day she disappeared.
She was supposed to be at work, but she didn't show up for work, so that pushes us back until the prior evening.
And the best we could tell was around 7 p .m., she had a text to her mother saying she was going to go for a jog or something and then maybe come over for dinner.
So that's your starting point, 7 p .m.?
Pretty much, yes. Now, the race was on to build a timeline minute by minute from 7 p .m. on the night Molly went missing.
At the same time much of Brooklyn, Iowa, held its breath, desperately hoping she'd be found alive.
She went for a run after work.
That was normal. Now, no one in Mollie Tibbitt's circle of family and friends had heard from her in almost 24 hours.
And that wasn't. She's not going to just vanish without telling anybody.
Right. And you know, I had several people say to me, well, are you sure she didn't run away?
Did I maybe question it for a minute?
Yeah, sure. But then I thought, no, this is Molly.
This isn't what she does.
Molly's best friend, Alexis Lynd, was on vacation and rushed home when she got the news.
We were just so confused and shocked because not a single person had heard from her.
Right on me, that's funny.
Ever since Molly moved to Iowa in the third grade...
Not a lot, but high!
Seatbelts, safety! Safety first!
they had been inseparable.
What was it like to be around her?
You're always laughing if you're around her.
She was like a little ball of sunshine every time she walked in the room.
And what'd she like to do?
Loved running. She enjoyed babysitting kids around Brooklyn and around the area.
We'd drive around listening to music.
She was obsessed with Taylor Swift. In Brooklyn, Molly had blossomed into an honors student, a cross -country runner, and a three -time participant at Iowa's annual speech competition.
My sophomore year, I found out that my talent was speaking.
I talked all the time.
I decided to make people listen.
Mollie's impeccable reputation left investigators with no obvious personal problems to explore, so they went back to building a timeline of Mollie's last day.
The last place Mollie was known to have been was at the home where her boyfriend Dalton Jack lived.
Why was she staying in that house?
Dalton was out of town working, so Mollie had to stay there to let the dogs out.
She was essentially dog sitting.
Detective Valletta wanted to know if something had happened there and went to speak with the owners, Dalton's older brother, and his wife.
They basically give us a tour of the house.
Then they say look, Molly's wallet's here, all her clothes are still here, we look for kicked in doors, signs of a scuffle inside the house, the house was exactly the way it was supposed to look.
If Molly had gone for a run, the question was, where?
Investigators got their first clue from someone who had seen Molly that night.
Christina Stewart told police she was on her way to feed her family's horses and was driving east of town on a road known as the Blacktop when she saw Molly running.
The time was about 8 p .m. How'd she know it was Molly?
She's a hairdresser and she cut Molly's hair and she gave a pretty good description of what Molly was wearing, in black running shorts, a pink sports bra.
She said she could see her ponytail bouncing.
It was our first real definitive time stamp.
Their first solid lead confirming Molly did go jogging that evening.
Now they had to figure out what happened next.
Did she run into someone else?
Had she been attacked?
Or was she lying injured beside the road?
Ditches in July in Brooklyn are waste to chest -high in grass.
Corn is 8 to 10 feet high on both sides of the road.
So if you wanted to hide something you wouldn't have to try that hard. You could hide a hundred bodies along that road and they'd be hard to find.
Friday morning, two days after Molly was last heard from, the town of Brooklyn turned out an assembly of shaken but determined volunteers to look for her along the blacktop and beyond.
I will never forget that day.
I was parking my vehicle, thinking, you know we'll be lucky if we get 20 people that show up because it is a Friday.
It's during the work week.
Are people going to be able to take time off to come and help us with this?
We had people on four wheelers.
There were helicopters there, people by the hundreds.
I remember seeing trucks with boats, canoes, that kind of thing behind them.
They were going to search waterways, that sort of thing.
So far we've been searching by air and foot boat.
We had covered systematically, not only the canvassing from house to house in town, but also, you know, the surrounding countryside, the road ditches, the fields, ponds.
Even as they searched, investigators and volunteers alike were thinking, nothing good would be found there.
It was with that grim possibility in mind that police would begin to look at local farmer.
A man with a history of troubling behavior.
NBC Nightly News. From one era to the next.
I'm Tom Brokaw. I hope to see you back.
I'm Lester Holt. Trust is the anchor.
For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas.
A new chapter begins.
NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas.
Evenings on NBC. Dateline True Crime Weekly.
Andrea Canning and the Dateline team cover breaking crime News around the country and now a special series with daily updates from the trial of Sean Combs.
I'll be talking to NBC News correspondent Chloe Malas every day after court about what she's seeing inside, the witnesses, the evidence and what it all means.
Dateline True Crime Weekly.
Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, guys, Willie Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit -Down Podcast. On this week's episode I get together with Ina Garten in front of a live studio audience for the second ever Sunday Sit -Down Live event.
We talked about her rise from home cook to culinary icon with some hosting tips and a proper dessert tray mixed in, too.
You can get our conversation for free wherever you download your podcasts.
Molly Tibbets' family and friends had joined the Citizen Army of Brooklyn, Iowa, that was looking all over town for the missing college freshman.
A lot of us girls that grew up together, we were just trying to hope and pray that they were going to find her alive and well.
Even as they kept vigil, they asked a difficult question.
Was there some secret Molly had been hiding?
I was looking at Molly's Instagram, then I'm talking to her friends as well, like, hey, is anything going on that Molly didn't want to share with me?
Molly cell phone was an obvious place to look for clues, but it was missing.
So investigators came up with an ingenious way to replicate it.
What we were able to actually do is we had her password. We were able to clone her phone and get all the data off it just by buying a new iPhone at Walmart.
So you're reading all those texts on that last day.
Right. And she's not angry at anybody and nobody else is angry at her.
It was frustrating because generally you will find an aha moment that points you in the right direction, but we weren't picking up on any of that.
Now, there was one person who had to know something about Molly's state of mind, and maybe even what happened to her.
Her boyfriend, Dalton Jack.
What kind of vibe you get off him?
Pretty calm guy. He seemed concerned but not panicked.
Dalton and Molly had known each other since the sixth grade and had been dating for the past three years.
Molly's cousin Morgan thought they were a good match. What'd you think of him?
I'm kind of that protective, overbearing cousin who's like, well, nobody's ever going to be good enough for Molly, but I think Dalton treated her really well, and she felt very loved by him.
Dalton Jack. Seemed genuinely concerned, truthful, cooperative.
We were able to, right away, put Dalton Jack, about two hours away, in a hotel with co -workers.
And he actually went into Walmart and bought groceries right around the time Molly started jogging.
Another dead end that took one of the usual suspects off the table.
After several days of searching had turned up nothing, the FBI was brought in.
Supervisor Molly Ammon put her team to work on recovering the data from the Fitbit Molly was believed to have been wearing.
We were very interested in the Fitbit.
Because we know that you can set your Fitbit to store your past running routes once the run is completed.
We were able to discern Molly's past running routes, but not where she'd been that night.
So you start looking even closer along those routes that she regularly took?
We did and sex offenders along the routes, we were not only talking to the people, we were searching every bit of the property.
We'd go into the garden shed, the garages, the rafters of the garage, the basements of house and you didn't find anything?
No. Another dead end in Brooklyn.
Outside of town investigators were checking out a local pig farmer named Wayne Chaney for what seemed like a good reason.
He had a record. Yeah he was familiar to all of us at the sheriff's office and has a history of violating no contact orders with women numerous times, stalking, harassment.
You asked Wayne Chaney to a polygraph?" Yes we did.
It's interesting because he got mad and he ended the polygraph before he finished it.
So it didn't look good for him.
As investigators continued to look at Cheney, FBI analysts moved on from the Fitbit to Molly's cell phone data.
They were able to perform a more detailed workup than police.
One of the very first things I did was call for deployment of CAST. That's the Cellular Analysis Survey Team.
A CAST operator will record phone pings against a cell tower, where they come from and what time they come in, and from that you can extrapolate an average rate of speed.
And when they got that data, a breakthrough.
With critical new information to put into the timeline of the molly went missing so they went back to that precise moment so what cast told us was that between 815 and 828 p .m. Molly's phone was moving in an easterly direction at about a 10 minute mile pace commensurate was running and then there's a stoppage point how long does she stop running and she's just in one place we had as much as four minutes and then all of a sudden Molly is now moving on a different road, uh, south about 60 miles an hour.
Well, we know she can't run that fast, so we knew it had to be in a vehicle.
Investigators had their second solid lead, which revealed when and where Molly's run had ended, that she likely had been driven out of town, and that her phone signal had died at 853 p .m., 15 miles south of Brooklyn.
Moving fast like that, the fear was that she was out of our reach. I was hoping for anything but that.
Following Molly's trail, federal investigators expanded their search beyond the town's limit.
Soon, local police would spot a clue much closer to home.
So while we're looking at cars, one of the agents, Matt George, is staring at the screen and he sees Molly.
We reached the end of 385th and now this is where the cell phone data starts showing us where Molly is suddenly moving at 60 miles an hour down this road.
Federal, state, and local investigators were urgently pursuing a new lead in the Molly Tibbetts case.
Cell phone records showed her evening run had come to a sudden stop at 8 28 p .m. and then she or her phone or both had sped away in a car.
The thing you always got to keep in your back of your mind as just because it's the cell phone data we're tracking doesn't mean it's the body we're tracking.
Even though investigators did not have the cell phone itself it left an important clue.
Where does it end up?
Either the phone's shut off or it's destroyed, so we had an idea where the phone stopped pinging.
That could just mean that someone decided to kick it out the window or run it over.
Investigators quickly switched the focus of their search to the area where her phone died at 853 that night, 15 miles southeast of Brooklyn.
What are people saying?
Well, you know, Brooklyn is very close to Interstate 80, and the talk of someone taking her, possibly putting her into like the sex trafficking world, human trafficking world, that was definitely talked about.
And that was a really horrible place to be mentally, thinking, you know, who has her?
Who knows where she's at?
The case was getting national attention too.
This morning, there is new information coming to light, and the desperate search for a University of Iowa student missing now for more than two weeks.
Police were dealing with dozens, even hundreds, of leads.
She was supposedly seen down at a rest stop in Missouri, or eating tacos in Colorado, who was chasing your tail, you know, chasing red herrings.
One of those red herrings turned out to be Wayne Chaney.
Investigators could not connect him to Molly.
so they dropped him as a person of interest. Kind of looked at each other one day and thought, I wonder if this is what we're gonna be doing for like the next five or six years.
Molly's parents weren't giving up, and they were offering a reward for any information.
As of 10 o 'clock this morning we have raised $172 ,000 that will be paid to you as soon as Molly is safely home.
Almost four weeks after Mollie's disappearance, the lack of progress was starting to wear on agent Trent Valletta and his team.
You didn't find anything you thought was a murder weapon, you didn't find her Fitbit, you didn't find her phone.
We still have not found any of that.
What's the security cam situation in Brooklyn?
I'm guessing not a lot of them.
We collected all of video we could, but most of it was not very good.
With so few leads developing, investigators decided to look once again at video from four cameras mounted on a garage on Brooklyn's east side.
Two of significance to us were one facing to the southeast and one to the northeast. The cameras captured the approach to the road known as the Blacktop.
So behind this tree is 385th Avenue.
Chief Deputy Joel VanderLeest led eight investigation teams who spent an entire day logging every second of the video from the evening Molly disappeared.
While looking at that video, one of them saw something.
The time was 7 .48. So while we're looking at cars, one of the agents, Matt George, is staring at the screen and he sees Molly.
So, she'll jog through right here on Boundary Street between the bush and this house, only lasts about a second and a half.
And if you expand the video you can actually see the ponytail bouncing as she jogs.
And there she goes.
MUSIC That's my first time in the case we all started looking at each other like holy cow is this it, is this the break we needed.
It also meant the timeline of Molly's disappearance could now be compressed, potentially, to the few moments after she passed the security camera at 7 48 p .m. Now the timing of is coming and going starts to matter, because immediately the first thing after you see when she goes by is this black Chevy Malibu.
At 7 .49 seconds after Mollie, the black Malibu drives by for the first time.
A unique car. It's aftermarket stuff that's put on the car.
If you wanted us to go find a black Malibu, we could find hundreds that all look the same.
This one was different.
Even on the grainy video, they could tell this car had custom mirrors and chrome that set it apart.
You can't see who's driving it?
No it was just a fuzzy driver is all we could really see.
At 756 Christina Stewart's white minivan passes the same security camera.
This is just a few minutes before she saw Molly on her run.
As she would later tell police.
Once we saw her on the video then we knew that was a valid fitness sighting and now everything started to fall into place.
Then at 8 .02, the black Malibu drives by again.
Can't get a plate number?
No. Cause this isn't a TV show.
At 8 .10, the Malibu drives by one last time, almost as if it's circling its prey.
All we had is a car and we were thinking, what are the odds that we'll ever find this car?
Investigators now have their third and most substantial lead yet.
And their first potential suspect, the driver of the black Malibu, following Molly.
Now, the mission was clear and urgent.
Find the car, find the driver, and maybe finally find Molly Tibbetts.
era to the next. I'm Tom Brokaw.
We'll hope to see you back here.
I'm Lester Holt. Trust is the anchor.
For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamis.
A new chapter begins.
NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamis, evenings on NBC.
Investigators have their first major breakthrough in the four -week search for Mollie Tibbetts.
It was this tiny bouncing dot they spotted on security footage— a blurred image they believed was Molly, jogging by at 7 .48 p .m., just before she disappeared.
You see Molly, but you also see a car.
Yes, we do. We figure out that it's a 2008 -2012 Chevrolet Malibu.
Not only did the car drive right past Molly, it circled back ...
three times. ... and it'll pop out right here.
Before, a flashing left -turn signal marked a final trip out to the blacktop where Molly was running.
Finding that black Malibu suddenly became the major focus of the entire investigation.
They were able to eliminate a lot of cars in that area by knowing the owners.
But not this one. No. The next day, Deputy Sheriff Steve Kivvy was on the road, not looking for anything in particular.
Six o 'clock at night, I was running home to check in with my family.
As I'm driving north here on Highway 63, I notice at the off ramp here a black Malibu with the silver mirrors and the characteristics we were looking for.
Kivvy called in the plates and followed at a distance.
I decided I would just kind of see where they went and try to identify the driver without actually doing a traffic stop.
Tell me about this guy that gets out from behind the wheel.
I tried to talk to him, but he apparently didn't speak any English.
So, some older guy working in his yard came over and helped us communicate.
The driver identified himself as Christian Bahena Rivera and said he worked at a local dairy farm.
You asked him about Molly?
about her case? I did, and he said, I heard that there was a girl missing from Brooklyn, but that's all he knew.
Is he telling the truth?
Is he nervous? He wasn't nervous at all.
Seemed cooperative and kind of nonchalant about the whole thing.
He let me take his picture, and I took a picture of the car.
And I relayed that back to the command post. Investigators confirmed the black Chevy Malibu Deputy Kivvie had just followed was a perfect match to the car seen on video circling Molly.
You don't use the term divine intervention much. You're finally getting lucky.
Investigators learned Rivera was an undocumented worker, who was in Iowa to work in local agriculture.
They also discovered he'd been living here 7 years, using an assumed identity.
Does he have a criminal record?
So we don't know, he's essentially a ghost. Any of his coworkers tell you anything interesting?
Everybody thought he was a good worker.
A decent guy, kind of quiet, worked a lot of hours.
Four days later, investigators brought Rivera in for questioning.
They also asked him if it was okay to search his two cars.
He not only agreed to that, he agreed to letting us tow them into the sheriff's office.
Lawmen knew they needed a Spanish speaker, and they preferred to have a woman interview Rivera.
Luckily, they had recently met Pamela Romero from the nearby Iowa City Police Department.
But you weren't a detective.
I was not a detective.
You'd never investigated a murder before?
And you'd never done anything like this?
Never. Lot of pressure?
Yes. Talk about rolling the dice.
I mean, that was a huge roll of dice.
Nice to meet you. My name is Pamela Romero.
Romero started the interview by keeping things light.
I go to work at like five or five -thirty, and I get out at about five, about twelve hours.
That's a lot of hours.
It's a lot. That's what we're here for.
This doesn't sound like the kind of interrogation you see on TV and in movies.
You know, where they're sweating the guy.
This was just a conversation, kind of like the one we're having now.
Yeah. We were joking around.
I was asking him about his family.
He was telling me everything.
Rivera told Officer Romero he had an ex -wife and a three -year -old daughter, and he repeated what he told Deputy Kivvy, that he'd known about the missing jogger, but nothing more.
How did you hear about the girl that disappeared?
Because of the posters and all that.
I think later it started appearing on Facebook.
A lot of my friends were sharing that.
Then, Officer Romero began to dig in.
We got to the point of also his vehicles, who was the owner of the vehicle that he was driving.
Who else drives them aside from you?
Only me. Next, she confronted Rivera with images from the video of his Chevy Malibu passing Mollie minutes before she disappeared.
The same car? Which is your car.
OK. At some point, you start asking questions a little more pointedly about Mollie Tibbets, about whether he saw her and what he was doing that day.
And the video that shows him, sort of, driving past her more than once.
He said, well, I believe I was driving my car.
Oh, where were you going?
And then he started telling me that he was going over to visit some family member.
I feel you're still keeping another small part of this for me that you haven't told me.
well that's all i recall i looked at her that time nothing more and then for the first time rovera acknowledged not just that he had driven by molly but that he had seen her and that he was attracted to her you liked her she seemed attractive she caught your attention you turned around she was good looking but i didn't look at her face no all you noticed was the physical well yes So at that point, everything in my mind switched.
That is when I said, okay.
So he has something to do with her.
I mean, this is not some guy, this is the guy.
Even if he was, could Officer Romero get him to admit it?
It was day 33 of the investigation into the disappearance of Mollie Tibbetts.
Police believed Christian Rivera knew what had happened to Mollie, but he wasn't giving them anything.
I don't feel bad, because, well, I didn't do anything.
What else do you want me to tell you?
the truth. There were a lot of ebbs and flows to the interview.
The amount of stress was almost unbelievable.
I don't have anything nothing else to tell you.
Yes you have something and you know it but you're scared because you know it's going to change your life.
From the time when the interview begins can you tell whether your instincts were correct and it is a good idea to have a woman involved.
Yes. And to take it one step further, well, we decided to pull her partner out of there because he was only engaged with her.
What's going to happen to me?
I can't tell you what's going to happen to you, Cristian.
And then, Officer Romero finally did what every investigator hopes to do.
She got Cristian Rivera to crack and reveal the truth about Molly Tibbets' disappearance.
So he said he saw her.
Molly smiles at him, and then he decides to park his car like 100 feet behind her.
She was listening to music, so she was not aware that he was behind her.
He had the advantage of surprise.
I do remember that I was fighting with her.
OK. OK. I remember that I brought her into my car.
OK. She had blood. Mmhmm.
But I can't, I can't say if she was alive or dead.
OK. Then he suddenly said what investigators had been trying to figure out for weeks.
He knew where Molly was.
I remember that we were in the corn.
Mmhmm. Um, like, I remember that's where I put her.
And then he looks at me, he goes, I will tell you where she's at. Rivera took investigators to a cornfield that was just a mile away from where they had concentrated their search, just before sunrise.
Investigators finally found Molly Tibbetts.
It's depressing. Makes you angry as to what you believe probably what happened.
And what happened was as bad as it gets.
What did the autopsy show?
Just stabbed to death.
It's still tough for you to think about this, isn't it?
It is. Soon everyone in Brooklyn was learning the devastating news that sent shockwaves through Molly's family.
I fell to the floor, and I was just sobbing, because I knew in that moment I was never going to get to hug her again, and I wasn't going to get to welcome her back.
Christian Rivera was indicted for first -degree murder.
His trial came three years later.
Morgan was there every day to bear witness.
I'm a Christian woman.
I knew I had spirit of God with me.
I wasn't alone and I had to do this for Molly.
By then Rivera had recanted his confession and pleaded not guilty.
If convicted of first -degree murder, he faced life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Ladies and gentlemen, when you examine this evidence together, There can be no other conclusion than that the defendant killed Molly Tibbetts.
Poweschek County Prosecutor Bart Claver and Assistant Attorney General Scott Brown presented the pillars of the case against Rivera.
The video of Molly jogging and Rivera's car.
Blood found in his car's trunk that matched Molly's DNA and Rivera's confession to Officer Romero.
Those three components all proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Christian Rivera committed murder in the first degree.
A potentially insurmountable challenge loomed for the prosecution.
The rookie investigator who had delivered in the interrogation room had also made a rookie mistake when she recited the constitutionally required Miranda warning to Rivera.
I skip a part. What part did you leave out?
The No one where it states that anything could be used against you in a court of law, anything you say.
That's an important part.
Very important part.
And because of that, the judge excluded six hours of Rivera's subsequent interview with Officer Romero, including his confession.
It was a devastating moment for the case, for the prosecution.
Fortunately, agent Trent V elections had made sure Rivera was Mirandized a second time, after he led them to Molly's body.
And Rivera made another confession on the spot.
And that little moment ended up saving you.
Yes it did. It was maybe one of my bright shining moments in my career.
Mr. Behina, I'm gonna ask that you rise, along with your attorneys, please.
The jury wasn't out for long.
We the jury find the defendant, Christian Baquina Rivera, guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree.
Thank you, Keri. Rivera was convicted of first -degree murder and received a mandatory sentence of life in prison.
His voice saying, he's convicted, that will never leave my memory.
It doesn't even the scales, though, does it?
No, it doesn't. It doesn't.
but it's good to know that at least justice has been served in the way that it can.
How are you doing? I'm doing okay, therapy helps, sharing Molly's story helps, doing things that honor Molly in her life help.
Molly's legacy and commitment to good deeds lives on in Brooklyn, Iowa and beyond.
Every year, people put up new ribbons from the year before, around the time when Molly had gone missing.
Teal ribbons. Molly's favorite color.
You still sort of feel her presence, don't you, all the time?
There's not a day, I think, where I don't either think of her or just feel her nearby.
A memorial fund for child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Iowa has received more than half a million dollars in Molly's memory.
For Morgan, part of keeping the memory of Molly alive means running in her shoes, running just as Molly did that last day.
You know, we got to have her and we can carry on Molly's legacy in such beautiful ways and pay tribute to the life that she lived here on earth.
That's all for this edition of Dateline.
We'll see you again Friday at nine, eight central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.
I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.
Goodnight.
