A 24-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico has been charged with the murder of missing Mollie Tibbetts.
Cristhian Bahena Rivera was charged on Tuesday after leading police to the corn field where he dumped Mollie’s body after attacking her on July 18 in Brooklyn, Iowa.
Rivera, who has been in the US illegally for between four and seven years but is from Guayabillo in Guerrero, Mexico, followed her in his dark Chevy Malibu as she ran at around 7.30pm on July 18.
Rivera told investigators that he ‘blacked out’ and attacked her after she threatened to call the police unless he left her alone. Rivera was identified by surveillance footage obtained in the last couple of weeks from someone’s home.
It showed him following the student in his car and Mollie running ahead of him.  It is not yet clear how Mollie died.
Rivera told police that after seeing her, he pulled over and parked his car to get out and run with her.
Mollie grabbed her phone and threatened to call the police before running off ahead. The suspect said that made him ‘panic’ and he chased after her.
That’s when he ‘blacked out.’

He claims he remembers nothing from then until he was back in his car, driving.
He then noticed one of her earphones sitting on his lap and blood in the car then remembered he’d stuffed her in the truck.
Rivera drove her then to a corn field where he hauled her body out of the truck and hid her beneath corn stalks.
She grabbed her phone and said: “I’m gonna call the police.” Rivera then panicked and he got mad and he ‘blocked’ his memory which is what he does when he gets very upset and doesn’t remember anything after that until he came to at an intersection.
He was arrested on Friday after police honed in on his vehicle by viewing surveillance footage obtained from a private resident’s home surveillance cameras.
‘He followed her and seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day. For whatever reason he chose to abduct her,’ Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation special agent Rick Ryan said on Tuesday afternoon.
Rivera told police he had seen her in the area before. She is friends on Facebook with the mother of his daughter but it is not clear if he and Mollie knew each other.
Dailymail.com understands that Rivera was doing seasonal work for a local dairy farm in Brooklyn.

Law enforcement descended arrived at the property which Neighbors described as housing a ‘revolving door’ of hired migrant workers but that they had never caused any problems  before, around 3pm Monday afternoon.
As FBI agents were observed still searching the house and a number of nearby trailers on Tuesday afternoon, workers associated with the farm claimed that they barely knew Rivera but confirmed that he lived there with a girlfriend Iris Monarrez and their baby.  Iris apparently had gone to stay with her mother after Rivera was arrested in for murder.
Mollie was staying alone overnight in her boyfriend’s home the night she went missing and was last seen going for a jog in the neighborhood at around 8pm but what happened afterwards has remained a complete mystery for weeks.