Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: The Last Mile

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Andrea Canning talks with Josh Mankiewicz about his episode, “The Last Mile,” which covers the 2018 murder of Mollie Tibbetts in her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa. The 20-year-old college student disappeared while out for a run, sparking a massive search. Weeks later, Mollie’s body was found in a cornfield. Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a local farmworker, was charged with her murder. Andrea and Josh discuss the investigation that led to Rivera’s arrest and the questions raised during his trial. Josh also shares a podcast-exclusive clip from his interview with Mollie’s cousin, Morgan Collum, about their childhood.Have a question for Talking Dateline? DM us on social @DatelineNBC or leave a voicemail at [phone] — your question might be featured in a future episode.Listen to the full episode ‘The Last Mile’ on Apple: https://apple.co/4mBG7xIListen to the full episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0KKmktbudrxxptlROyPjII?si=oISZG1qMR-iBQKyc0QoBeQ

Hi, I'm Andrea Canning and this is Talking Dateline. I'm joined by Josh Mankiewicz and today's episode is called The Last Mile. It's about the story of Molly Tibbets, a 20-year-old college student who vanished after going out for a jog on a warm summer evening in Brooklyn, Iowa. What started as a small town search quickly became a massive investigation, with volunteers combing cornfields, analysts digging into phone and Fitbit data, and a single blurry video of a black car that cracked the case wide open, leading to an arrest.

If you haven't listened to the full episode yet, it's the one posted yesterday. There's also a link in the description to this episode. Or you can watch it on Peacock. So go there and do that. And when you come back, Josh has an extra clip from his interview with Molly's cousin, Morgan Colum, who shares one of her very first memories of Molly. Later, we'll answer some of your questions from social media. All right, let's talk Dateline.

Hi, Andrea. Hey, so Josh, the first thing that really jumped out at me from this story was just how safe this area seemed. I mean, this is the heartland. This is country. This is the blacktop and the cornfields. You know, I mean, this is small town America where everybody knows everybody else, maybe not everybody else, but you know a lot of your neighbors when people drive by you and

things like that. This is sort of the quintessential small town where neighbors look out for each other and people don't lock their doors. And she was the kind of young lady that grows up in a town like that, sweet and a nice person and trusting of other people. Hollywood couldn't write this any more effectively than real life did. This is not Brooklyn, New York. This is Brooklyn, Iowa. No, this is someplace even cooler, Brooklyn, Iowa.

But it's, you know, it's the kind of thing, it's just never in a million years would she have thought, would Molly have thought when she went out for her usual run that something like that could happen. And I think most people would feel the same if they lived in a place like that could happen. And I think most people would feel the same if they lived in a place like that. I mean, I don't know that I, having done this job and also having been a reporter for nearly half a century,

would ever go to sleep without locking my door. I don't know that there is a city on Earth or a town on Earth where I would not lock the door. So I can't say that that would be the case. But I will say that clearly everything about Brooklyn, Iowa, said you're safe here. And she clearly did not feel in any danger. It's interesting when an investigation comes to a town like that, because when you talk

about the surveillance video and canvassing neighbors and all that it's like we knew that was you know that was Suzy's car and that was Bill's truck and that was you know it's not hard to sort of figure out who owns what vehicles and who lives where and who knew her and who might have seen her. And for investigators I think that was a big help I mean here in Los Angeles you see a black Chevy Malibu. I mean, you go to DMV, there are going to be thousands of those, but not in that area. So, I mean, that kind of, that smallness definitely helped in the investigation.

S1C1 And the hairstylist who had seen Molly running, then when they get that, the small amounts of video they did get, they see the hairstylist's van driving on the video, which is exactly what she said. The one thing that was so interesting was the little, teeny, tiny snippet of Molly in that video where they said you can even see her ponytail bouncing and it's so short. It's like a second.

And it required endless, lengthy, repeated viewing of all the video that was available from people's houses, from Ring cameras and other security cameras around town, because they just got all the video, is what they did, and they just looked and looked. Now, the interesting thing about seeing the witnesses van is that, you know, one of the things that we learned and that the detectives across the country know is that witness statements, particularly involving people who are trying to be helpful to law enforcement, aren't always correct.

Sometimes something the investigator says will find its way accidentally into the witness statement. So it's great for investigators to be able to see the hairstylist's van, thus corroborating what she said. She did not embellish her statement trying to help police unconsciously, which people sometimes do. She actually, she saw what she said she saw and there's the proof. I mean, that is a little tiny window into how investigating homicides have changed. I mean, 50 years ago, pretty much none of that existed. There was some security video, but it wasn't being recorded. Maybe it was a live camera that somebody was watching from another place. I mean, closed circuit TV has been

around for a while. But not the kind of stuff that you have here and not people's doorbell cameras and not all the other things that they have. Not the ability to track a cell phone or to look up a car's license or registration, you know, like that. Those things didn't exist. And that made this case possible to break. Finding that little tiny snippet of her ponytail bobbing as she ran, that told you we don't have to worry about everything before that on her run. No, not at all. Every other place she was that we don't, I don't need to go back there because

it didn't happen there. It happened later. And that, that's a huge help. And so this goes so far beyond someone's, you know, ring camera. I mean the way that the, first of all, okay, let's just talk about one thing. I say this, I sound like a broken record. I learn something new on Dateline every single time I watch. And I say that every time I'm talking Dateline because it's true. In this episode, I didn't realize that, so they don't have Molly's phone, but they have her password, they have her phone number. So they go to, what was it? Was it Walmart? And they buy a new phone?

Yes, they go out and they buy a new phone and they connect it to her account. Yes. Thus being able to essentially clone it, I guess. I didn't know that that was a thing because, you know, usually you hear about, okay, no phone. Well, there's password issues, you know, or whatever, like they can find some things. But I mean, that, that or whatever, like they can find some things, but I mean, that was like amazing that they were able to do that. It depends on what kind of phone you have.

It depends on what kind of, first of all, whether they build a people know the password. That's a huge thing. Yeah, thankfully someone knew it. Right. And in this case, you know, it wasn't as probative as it otherwise might have been because, you know, you're looking on the phone and what you want to see is a text from the killer saying, hey, why don't you meet me at such and such a place at 6 p.m., right?

And there wasn't anything like that. But the absence of someone saying, please meet me, gave them a sort of alternative theory of the crime, which was that this was essentially random. This wasn't somebody she knew. This wasn't somebody she knew. This wasn't somebody she was headed to meet. What that says to investigators is this was unplanned. Something else I had never heard of through the FBI was this CAST team, the Cellular Analysis Survey Team,

that deals with cell data and information. And I was riveted as you start seeing Molly, you have her running at 10 miles per hour, and then she's suddenly, she's going 60 miles per hour, and she's going in a whole new direction, and she's going 15 miles south of Brooklyn, Iowa. And it's bone-chilling when you think about this poor girl that she's just out for her casual run and then you can

see on the data that everything suddenly changes. Right. You know, when she's going 60 miles an hour, obviously she's in a car there. Is she alive at that point? Is she with her phone at that point? Because we only know the phone is going 60 miles an hour. So that doesn't necessarily mean she's with it, but in this case, I think it did. So I mean, those are all things that investigators have to think about while they're looking at that data. You know, I mean, she was,

she had a Snapchat streak going with her cousin for 600 days. That kind of helps investigators, because that kind of person is not going to fall off the earth. You know? Like that person's not going to stop. They're not going to stop contacting people. No. I mean, they knew right away with her that something was wrong. And when we come back, we'll hear more from Molly's cousin, Morgan Colum, the person she considered a

sister. So I want to give a big shout out to Deputy Sheriff Steve Kivvy. I mean, talk about eagle eyes, the fact that he's driving and he just happens to see, you know, this like a Malibu and thinks to himself, maybe, you know, I mean, and he wasn't even on the case at that moment. He was what I think he was driving home or something. No, he was definitely off. I think he was on a day off and he just sees the Malibu. He's like, Oh, wow, look at that. You know, now I will say this, after we finish recording Talking Dateline, I'm going to the retirement of a homicide detective here in Los Angeles. And she is one of those people like Steve Kivvy, who would have noticed the car, put it together, and despite being on day off, you know, would

have started making some phone calls. You know, there are a lot of cops. I'm not talking about homicide detectives, I'm talking about guys in uniform in radio cars who just obsessively punch in plate numbers that they see all day long on every street corner because they're thinking like that car doesn't look like it belongs in this neighborhood. And sometimes that's how you get hits, you know, cause you're always working and always thinking.

And Steve Kivvy is one of those guys. Um, okay. I had another question. So Kivvy talks to him, to the suspect, and then they wait four days. Why did they wait four days? I mean, if I were that guy, the suspect, I'd be getting the heck out of Dodge. One of the things that certainly is pervasive among the criminals we cover is that they have this idea that they're not going to get caught, right? There was no one there when the crime happened except themselves and the victim.

And so therefore, there weren't any eyewitnesses. And now a few days have gone by and police have not come to my house and they haven't arrested me and I'm living my life as normal. I'm back to my job and everything seems okay. And that I think gives a lot of people a false sense of security. Now, whether, you know, in this case, Mr. Rivera felt, I don't know what he felt, but clearly he was working, you know, he had a job to go to there. And as to why investigators waited, you know, I think they felt like they had a fix on him. And I think that area is too sparse and underpopulated for a full-time surveillance.

I mean, that's really hard in a small town because, you know, I mean, you know, you park a van on my street here in Los Angeles, I mean, you know, you park a van on my street here in Los Angeles, I don't pay any attention to it. But if there are no cars on the street, but there's a surveillance van, you are going to pay attention to it. Yeah, they're lucky that he didn't take off. They bring in this, this woman officer, you know, and they, you actually say in the story, they wanted a woman. Not only does she say in the story they wanted a woman. Not

only does she speak Spanish, but they wanted a woman. Did they say why they wanted it to be a woman? They wanted Pamela Romero because she spoke Spanish. And also because of sort of, I mean, the thing about her is that she'd never done a homicide investigation before, and that kind of worked to their advantage because this wasn't the sort of Hollywood idea of, you know, the cop sitting across from you and banging on the table and saying, have you talked to me? I'll help you out with the DA. I mean, there was none of that.

She's soft-spoken and she's empathetic, and that apparently did work with him to the point where there was another officer in the room with them at the beginning, a man. And he was, the suspect was directing everything to Romero. Just wanted her. And so finally the other guy was just like, you know what, I'm going to leave. And you know, he was, the Miranda thing later became a huge issue. But they kept saying to him, I think a bunch of times,

they said to him, you're not in custody, you can go. And they point the doors right there. And that I think also gave him sort of a sense that, okay, this doesn't really count if I'm not being arrested. If I just keep denying it, I'll be okay. But look, one of the things, again, that we learn in Dateline is that telling a lie is much harder than people think it is.

And sticking with it is much harder than people think it is, particularly when the person you're talking with has some evidence that you don't know they have, and they are also kind of rolling it out bit by bit by bit. So you can't just be saying, you don't know they have and they are also kind of rolling it out bit by bit by bit. So you can't just be saying, I don't know, I didn't do it, I wasn't there. I don't know, I don't know what happened, I wasn't there. Like then they're like, well, wait a minute, why is your phone and her phone in the same place? That kind of thing. First he said, I wasn't there, I don't know what you're talking about. Then

he's like, okay, well, I did see her. Okay, well, you know, I did stop. You know, I mean, you know, she was cute. I mean, all this stuff that he didn't want to say at the beginning. And it eventually, as officer Romero keeps talking to him, it just sort of starts coming out. Yeah. The female officer seemed pretty casual during your questions about her missing part of the Miranda rights. But I mean, at the time when she found out that she missed part of it, she must have been sweating bullets. Oh my goodness.

It's just, I mean, it's just the most gigantic error. And I know she super regretted that. Fortunately, I mean, and the result was, I think like six hours of his interrogation went out the window. The judge ruled they couldn't use that. Fortunately, he got remarandized at the scene. Which was so brilliant.

That was so brilliant. Right. And he led them to her body. That safety net. He led them to her body and then he made another confession there. So I mean, that ended up not being as big a deal as it otherwise might have been. So smart. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, because it's interesting with the Miranda rights. I did another story where a bunch of the interview was thrown out with some key moments in it with the police interview because they didn't, it was supposed to be sort of more of this casual conversation, which, you know, you don't always have to read Miranda rights, like in the movies. It's not a, it's not a sure thing that like every single time, especially if it's a very cordial conversation. And then the case I'm talking about, things started to get testy. The person that was being interviewed and the officer

does not read the Miranda rights. Then it's up to a judge to decide, okay, you know what? I feel like this is crossing the line now. Like this is crossing into interrogation versus, you know, casual interview. When it is custodial or when the person believes it is custodial, in other words, I can't leave, I'm being questioned, I don't have the option to leave. That's where you need to advise somebody of their rights. Yeah. Something that brought back a lot of memories for me was looking at all the, first of all,

so many people turned out. You know, Molly's cousin thought maybe 20 would come and hundreds came. They were all the people, I could see them lined up along the cornfield body to body. And I remember when I was a reporter in Canada in Bury, Ontario back in 1998, a boy by the name of Jake just went missing. And I remember that it was in a forest, and everyone went body to body in the forest to try to find this teenager.

They never, unfortunately, found him. But it just brought back those memories when I saw all those people getting ready. Because Cornfields, that's a really tough place to search. Yeah, yeah. And it's great that everybody did show up. I mean, that really tells you a lot about what kind of place Brooklyn, Iowa is.

I know you interviewed the cousin. We are going to take a listen to some extra sound from Morgan Colum, Molly's cousin, sharing one of her earliest memories of Molly. So growing up, Molly lived in Oakland, California with her mom and dad and younger brother, younger brother Scott, older brother Jake, and we would receive VHS tapes from them kind of showing the escapades of their life in California And I remember the first time I actually met Molly I remember we were eating spaghetti at my grandma's house and

Molly was sitting in the high chair and she was the messiest baby I had ever seen by the time she got done eating the spaghetti I think she had meat and noodles in her nostrils and in her hair and all over her shirt. And I remember they took her out of her high chair and threw her in the tub. I mean, she was an infant at this point, but it was really funny. And I just thought, oh, what a goofball. That's hard to hear. That's hard to hear. And Molly's just one of those girls that, young women who was doing everything right. She'd just done everything right her whole life

and she had so much to look forward to. Yeah, I mean, it's an awful story. And it all, I mean, it's one of those things that, if she goes out for a run five minutes later, they don't run into each other and she's alive today. Okay, when we come back, we'll answer some of your questions from social media. Josh, we're going to take some social media questions from your episode and most of them

are actually comments. People had a lot of comments. Let's start with at southern beach girl. Yes. Her comment was not sure how he thought he'd get off with her blood in his trunk and the video of him stalking her with his car. Yeah I mean that's look you know prosecutors don't like to go into court on any case, but certainly a murder case without some significant evidence. So you know, maybe the killer was hoping that that stuff might get thrown out too. That's the only thing I can think of.

Okay, this, I guess I have to read this, this handle, don't bite me. Yeah. He thought. I think that's Keith. Oh, poor Keith. All right. This again, don't bite me says he thought he was going to get off because Ramirez made a mistake on the Miranda rights. Not so fast. Yeah. Well, I mean, that fortunately, you know, they continued talking and and and he incriminated himself all over again. Yep. And then another viewer said poor Molly How terrifying I mean if you go there and you think about Molly's last moments and

Did just the terror that she would have experienced, you know him probably coming up from behind her because she has her The thing I keep coming back to is that she was wearing headphones And she didn't know that he was approaching her. And that is, I mean, you know, how many times has a victim wearing headphones unable to detect the person coming up behind them been an issue? And I know that's part of the advice that people get, which is if you're going to go jogging, don't wear your headphones because first of all, you might not hear a car that could hit you and you also will be vulnerable to people like this guy.

Yeah, and we did that on Dateline True Crime Weekly, we did the tips for runners, and that's definitely one of the things that comes up is the music. But people like the music or the books because it helps the time go by. Right, I mean sometimes people are listening to Dayline podcasts and sometimes they're listening to music. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean that's a big part of running, that's the problem. And now here's an opportunity for me to get on my soapbox again, which is like the world

is full of tips for women about how not to be assaulted and don't wear headphones while running is one of them. Be situationally aware, which means you have to be able to hear as well. And learning self-defense and don't have too much to drink at a party if there isn't somebody that you trust to take you home. Those are all good pieces of advice. But what no one ever talks about is if we taught our sons not to rape, we wouldn't need any of these things. And now it is time for me to go. Yeah. All right. That's it for our Talking Dateline this week.

Thank you so much to all of you for listening. And thanks for talking with us, Josh. We know you got to get back to work on the latest season of Dateline Missing in America, which drops next week. That is season four of our Webby award-winning podcast with six new cases of people who've disappeared and someone out there might know something that could help. Missing in America launches June 10th, wherever you get your podcasts. And remember if you have any questions about our stories or a case you think we should be covering,

reach out to us on social media at Dateline NBC. And if you've got a question for Talking Dateline, leave us a voicemail at 212-413-5252 or record yourself and send it via DM. We'll see you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.