A judge on Wednesday delayed the sentencing of the man convicted of killing Mollie Tibbetts, a student at the University of Iowa, in 2018 after two inmates claimed to have new information about the case, NBC News reports.
Judge Joel Yates ruled to delayed the sentencing of Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who was to receive a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, until after hearings can be held on the request from the defense for the prosecution to release information about other suspects in the killing, and for a new trial. The first hearing is set for Thursday, while a hearing on a new trial has yet to be scheduled.
A spokesperson for the state attorney general's office said on Tuesday that prosecutors remain confident of Bahena Rivera's guilt. A jury found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder in May. Prosecutors submitted a surveillance video that showed Bahena Rivera in the area where Tibbetts disappeared while she was out for a run in Brooklyn, Iowa, in July 2018, as well as DNA evidence showing her blood in the trunk of his car, and the fact that Bahena Rivera took police to the field where her body was eventually found about a month after her disappearance.
Bahena Rivera claims that two men wearing masks killed Tibbetts and forced him to help them dispose of her body. His attorneys say that two witnesses recently approached them to support the defendant's testimony. They claim that a 21-year-old man, who has not been publicly identified but has a history of violence, claimed to have committed the crime.
One witness said that this man had claimed, while they were in jail together, that Tibbetts was kidnapped and taken to a ''trap house'' nearby to be forced into sex trafficking before her death. The witness claims that this person told him that the person in charge of the trafficking ring, who also owned the house, had ordered her death due to the publicity surrounding her disappearance. The man said that he and another person had followed this man's orders to kill Tibbetts and frame a Hispanic man for her murder.
Mahaska County's sheriff said recently that the allegations of kidnapping and sex trafficking were never substantiated despite police searching the home after a woman claiming to be a victim of sex trafficking identified a 50-year-old man from New Sharon as having lured her to a house where she was held against her will, drugged and raped repeatedly from May 2018 until August 2018.
Bahena Rivera's attorneys argue that the prosecution should have provided details about this investigation, which they say could corroborate the witnesses' claims. They also note that several young people in recent years have disappeared from the area, and that the same 50-year-old man had been investigated regarding the disappearance of a boy earlier this year, although he has not been charged with any crime related to this.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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