The illegal immigrant accused of murdering University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts used another person's name and identification to get a job on a family farm, the owners of the business said Wednesday.
The revelation came after 24 year old Cristhian Bahena Rivera made his first court appearance and was ordered held on $5 million cash bond.
"What we learned in the last 24 hours was that our employee was not who he said he was," Dane Lang told reporters gathered at Yarrabee Farms in Brooklyn, Iowa.
Lang co-owns the farm with his father. He says he knows Rivera by a different name, which he declined to divulge.
"It was not Cristhian," Lang said. Lang says that when Rivera applied for a job four years ago at the farm, he produced an Iowa state ID and a Social Security card that they checked out by calling the Social Security administration, not the government-run E-Verify system as they had said in an earlier statement.
After it was revealed that they had employed an undocumented worker, Lang said they received more than 100 hostile messages, including death threats and "threats to kill my dog." Rivera kept coming to work after YTibbetts disappeared on July 18 and "nobody saw a difference in his demeanor," Lang says.