A 25-year-old farm worker was found guilty of murder on Friday in the kidnap and fatal stabbing of college student Mollie Tibbetts in June 2018.
The judgement comes nearly three years after the corpse of the 20-year-old woman was found in an Iowa cornfield.
Wearing headphones, Christhian Bahena Rivera stood in the court as interpreters translated the verdict in Spanish and nodded slightly as the decision was announced. Sentencing was set for July 15. He could face his whole life in prison, BBC news reported.
The jury of seven men and five women deliberated about three hours on Friday and about five hours on Friday, according to CNN affiliate KCCI.
The farmer is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. In a 2018 interview with police officials, he admitted that he followed Tibbetts while she was out for a morning walk, got angry at her, and “blacked out,” according to a testimony at trial and an arrest affidavit.
Christhian then led police to the cornfield, where they found her corpse with fatal stab wounds, prosecutors said.
After the decision, prosecutor Scott Brown said the Tibbetts family was “pleased” and “relieved” with the decision.
“The people that were close to her, and the family, live with it forever,” Scott said of the tragedy. “We hope in the end; we can bring a sense of justice to them, although we would never have the ability to bring Mollie back.”
In testimony Thursday, Rivera– talking through an interpreter — told a very different story. He said three masked men kidnapped him, forced him to take part in their plot to kill Tibbetts, threatened his family and told him to be quiet.
In closing arguments, Scott rejected that testimony and said it did not fit with the evidence.
“There weren’t three other guys. That’s a creation of his imagination,” Scott told the judge. “All the evidence, in this case, points at him.”
