Found Deceased IA - Mollie Tibbetts, 20, Poweshiek County, 19 Jul 2018 #23

[gitana1]

Please stop. I did not write what you read, I did not suggest what you state. That upsets me more than it should, maybe because I chose my words very deliberately and re-stated my point at the bottom to avoid such a misinterpretation .

Please do not reply, as again I don’t want this thread distracted from its other important discussions.

No. You did not say that.

It's part of a larger discussion that multiple posters have been having.

 

[Madeleine74]

I see there is still an assumption that Mollie was abducted from the BF's house or near the house, but that has not been confirmed or verified by L.E. right?

 

[gitana1]

I removed the question about the red shirt based on the interview with Mollie's mom.
Things we want to know:

1.What was the condition of the house? Door unlocked? Did she normally lock doors? Dogs? Shower used?
2. What time was the Snapchat photo taken?
3. What route did Mollie jog that evening?
4. Who was also in that area?
5. Did the surveillance video provide any clues (parked vehicles, etc.)
6. Did LE find anything during their searches?
7. Who else did she communicate with that day/evening? Especially on Snapchat.
8. Who knew her housemates would be away that night?
9. When and where did her phone lose power?
10. What was her eyesight?
11. Did she run with contacts in?
12. How was she getting to work in the morning?
13. Who was the first person to enter the house after Mollie went missing?
14. How long were the dogs believed to have been left alone in the house? Mollie's BF mentioned that when he went into the house, the dogs had plenty of food and water.
15. Were the doors unlocked at the house when the first person entered?
16. Did anyone try to contact her the night of the 18th?
17. What time did Mollie normally leave for work in the morning?
18. Why do police think she was on her computer that night? (I leave mine on for days at a time)
19. Did she ever wear her armband to listen to music while doing homework? (They’re not usually very comfortable, and it seems unlikely she’d wear it for anything other than being outside)
20. Would she have taken the trash out to the curb that night? (Or have some other house chore/reason to be outside after her jog and before she let the dogs out)?
21. Which pair of Mollie's shoes were missing? Running sneakers or work sneakers?
22. Was there food in the West Des Moines house that Mollie could have chosen to eat for dinner rather than going to her mom's house?

I wish someone would send this to a reporter to try to ask at the presser!

I know they likely would not answer much but it would be interesting to see their reaction and f they quickly shut down questions.

 

[jman07]

I think in 24 hours we may at least know if LE knows anything...

Only if an arrest is made, or if Mollie is found prior to the PC. No arrest = no information IMO

 

[gitana1]

I see there is still an assumption that Mollie was abducted from the BF's house or near the house, but that has not been confirmed or verified by L.E. right?

Right. I'm still thinking she may have been taken while jogging. Either scenario there are contradictions. So confusing!

 

[Auntie Cipation]

Re which route MT might have been running -- late on a hot day, I might choose my exercise route based on which streets/sidewalks would be in the shade at that time.

 

[Cardinal47]

I think in 24 hours we may at least know if LE knows anything...

From your lips to God's ears!

 

[Mica]

Following

 

[OldCop]

Thoughts on witness, DR, report on timeline: His original report was put on Poweshiek county Sheriffs FB page. It wasn’t long after Mollie went missing. He stated that it was between 8 :30 and 9:30. The media interviews came much later and time was reported as maybe 8:00.

1. I would think his memory was best closest to the event rather than a couple of weeks later.
2. Did he switch his sighting time to fall in more with the other witnesses? (Inserting himself into the case?).
3. Because of the location of his home, it isn’t likely that Mollie passed his house(if she did), during a second, later, walk/jog to her Mom’s just to pick up the car and maybe grab a bite to eat.

 

[PommyMommy]

SBBM - I might be nitpicking here but in the RT article and video interview I think it's pretty clear that he saw her walking east along W Des Moines St, then he assumed she had to have either turned north or south down Jackson St because she did not appear to backtrack to the west again. It was not a sighting along Jackson. MOO

Neighbor offers new testimony about the night Mollie Tibbetts disappeared

Also, in regard to the weird pinned tweet where Mollie described being mistaken for a 10 yr old missing girl by LE, if you click on the comments you will see that a female friend of hers confesses to calling it in. Then they both joke about how young she looks. So, unless the friend was lying, we know the source of the 'tip'. It wasn't just a random LEO or person impersonating a LEO who approached her, if that makes sense. I'm also assuming that it was campus police. Because she was likely in the school library on UoI grounds.

In terms of looking for Mollie, a local suggested elsewhere to look at hunting cabins/lodges used by other locals. It might be easy to check out the public hunting spaces, but you'd need permission to go on private land to search privately owned ones. Still, it wouldn't hurt to ask hunters to check their own buildings just in case they were being clandestinely used by trespassers.

Not nit-picking at all, and thank you! I edited my post to show W. Des Moines.

 

[Madeleine74]

Reports of one among hundreds of thousands of crackpots who post insane things online and have concerned friends or relatives are different from an intenstive missing person's investigation where we know a person is gone, and hundreds of investigators from multiple agencies are involved.

If this was being handled by a smaller, less experienced agency AND we had info that things were not being handled well, ivould understand the criticism.

I believe the proliferation of the true crime shows like CSI and NCIS and social media are such that some watchers who are or became interested in this genre start to believe they are "working a case" from their couch, by throwing out all kinds of inane things to guess or speculate online. Some poor souls think they are providing direction to LE agencies. There's an abundance of entitlement that has appeared over the years--an online case follower believes they are entitled to know what's going on in an investigation because they've gotten emotionally invested. We see so many examples of this in all kinds of cases. It's everywhere.

The reality is a group of trained professionals are empowered to work the cases and the public is not 'entitled' to know the details outside of any information that would personally affect them/their family. In the case of a missing person who has likely been abducted the prevailing wisdom would remain: lock your doors & windows, don't go running alone and away from populated areas if you're female, let people know where you are, etc, etc. Common sense things everyone's mom would tell them to do.

 

[:+:MrTT:+:]

It was pretty quick in this case. I think involvement at all of FBI when the person missing is an adult and over 19, is interesting.

What does everyone else think?

when i heard of their quick involvement i wondered if a ransom note was left at the computer. And this was investigated in the first 24 48 hours as a kidnap for ransom. But not a real kidnapping for ransom, just a ploy to through them off for a while. then after awhile, it became an abduction. They may had been involved even early on, but with no phone calls were made about an ransom they went public with the disappearance. Hence the FBIs early involvment. But I dropped this train of thought quickly early on.

 

[SharonNeedles]

Thoughts on witness, DR, report on timeline: His original report was put on Poweshiek county Sheriffs FB page. It wasn’t long after Mollie went missing. He stated that it was between 8 :30 and 9:30. The media interviews came much later and time was reported as maybe 8:00.

1. I would think his memory was best closest to the event rather than a couple of weeks later.
2. Did he switch his sighting time to fall in more with the other witnesses? (Inserting himself into the case?).
3. Because of the location of his home, it isn’t likely that Mollie passed his house(if she did), during a second, later, walk/jog to her Mom’s just to pick up the car and maybe grab a bite to eat.

DR’s original statement of 8:30 - 9:30 was based on the time he usually sits on his porch. When I first read that I could totally relate, and it’s ambiguous enough to move that sighting up and inline with her known run time.

 

[Dudda]

I don't envy the job of these investigators, nor do I feel there is any basis to criticize them at this point. They are likely working their butts off to solve the mystery and bring Mollie home. I hope they are successful and aren't distracted by discouraging comments about their competency.

I agree just because LE isn’t saying anything doesn’t mean they don’t know anything. I bet you they know a lot. It may all be circumstantial. Most of the time not showing your full deck of cards is the best play.

 

[gitana1]

I totally respect LE.. but I don’t understand how sharing a few details or confirming if a few things are true or not ....would compromise the case and this point... it’s not like they are allowing MT to suffer while they figure out how to make an arrest legally.

I was involved in a missing persons case, absolutely zero media attention... after a year or so and all the investigation details came out....we learned, the person involved with disposing of her corpse, immediately fled the area 800 miles south, he was never caught nor did we think LE cared ... the POI was finally identified, when he died, 10 months later, and his fingerprints were entered into the master police database which was flagged and matched the fingerprints found at her death scene. So if he wouldn’t have died, we still wouldn’t know or have closure because LE ruled her death .. death without a crime committed. Really? Anyways.. thought I would share my experience to let everyone know sometimes you can do everything and get nothing, or do nothing and then get everything you need because in the end, we are not in control .

What's sad is how many cases aren't given the attention that this one is. I think those are the ones we have to worry about more when it comes to ability of LE to solve them.

But this is very high profile and it's got huge numbers of professionals from different jurisdictions working on it.

Sharing a few things can very simply make it impossible to know if someone who has incriminated themselves, confessed or given witness info, is accurate, being truthful and/or is the person they're looking for, instead of a situation where they've been unintentionally influenced by media reports or are crazy and prompted by info released.

For example, we've heard of eye witnesses giving info as to sightings of Mollie the evening in question. If LE releases their timeline or information about whether she came home safely or not, or what clothing is missing, it could affect their ability to verify such sightings.

If they have reason to believe that indeed, she was wearing "khaki/black yoga pants" when she was jogging that night, but that info hasn't been given out, then they know the sighting needs to be taken more seriously. If that info had been given out there's no real way to know whether that sighting is likely accurate.

Or let's say someone tells someone else while drinking, maybe, that they went into Mollie's home when the door was open, found her doing homework on the computer and grabbed her, and grabbed her phone, around 10:30 pm, but we had never heard info that she made it home safely or was doing homework late in the evening, and everyone still assumed she was taken while jogging. If LE knows differently, well they may now have enough to really look at the person who confessed because they have info (homework/computer/late evening) that no one else really knows.

 

[SharonNeedles]

I agree just because LE isn’t saying anything doesn’t mean they don’t know anything. I bet you they know a lot. It may all be circumstantial. Most of the time not showing your full deck of cards is the best play.

I'm really getting the feeling that we'll have a lot better feel for what LE knows after tomorrow's presser.

 

[DancingMuse]

Thanks so much SharonNeedles. Really great work done, so we could all get a sense of this beautiful town.

Quoting WoundWarrior, I'd have to agree to this:
"I continue to think of the day camp. All the males associated with the registered children should be investigated."

Grinnell is farther from MT's community. A sinister person, sadly, seems most likely (IMO) to be from the 30 mile-radius, rather than a 3-mile radius...

Piggy-backing on what BessDrew and many others wrote about a less sinister situation, combined with all the excellent Sleuthers who have stated that MT's health concerns may have been part of a "confluence of factors", resulting in a tragedy. I'd have to say....

All your theories work for me. You are all amazing. Every single poster on Websleuths has put forth really plausible ideas. The following post is COMPLETE CONJECTURE following up on what other sleuthers have written.

About 20 threads ago, some of us had a VIBE that this was an encounter that was covered up because MT perished while with another person, or persons. This is a NON-sinister version in the sense that no one had bad intentions at the beginning but events conspired so that something terrible happened to MT, and the young person/people panicked, and are now covering for each other. It became sinister when they did not own up to the accident that happened.

They must own up now, for the sake of this beautiful, loving family and community!

If we go along with that reasoning, the timeline would look like this:

1. At Grinnell, OR running by the high school, OR at Casey’s while on her run, OR wherever, MT bumps into someone from her 3rd Circle of Acquaintances. They VERBALLY agree to meet later, thereby leaving nothing on SM of their planned movements.

2. 3CA said: “Lets go to FILL-in-the-Blank tonight. We’ll drive there. Meet me at the corner of Such-and-Such Street & the Park, so we can get straight back on the highway since I’m coming off of my job-late/coaching-late/shift-late nearby, etc.” (Take your pick.)

3. MT leaves the BF's house at 9:00-ish. The house is cooler; Her run is finished. She’s had a nap, eaten a little, taken care of the dogs and done some homework. She’s got some of her belongings in her book bag, but not her wallet. Besides, she’s going to a low-cost or free event; so MT takes a little cash. She could still be in her running outfit, or part of it, after a quick wash-up, and change of shirt. No need for fancier clothing, as she knows she will be outdoors.

4. MT walks or runs to Such-and-Such street and enters 3CA’s car willingly.

5. Later in the evening, MT expires during the FILL-in-the-Blank activity. 3CA and possibly other acquaintances, or family members, cover it up.


So what is FILL-in-the-Blank ? Could be something such as…….

a. Swimming at a pool at someone’s private home. The older relatives are away. No adult supervision and no lifeguard. Hot, humid day; MT could have had an asthma attack, or gets dizzy/falls/hits her head, drowns or otherwise perishes.

b. Swmming at a more public pool, after closing hours; Sadly, same possible outcome.

c. Swimming at a lake, or river bank, at night: Sadly, same outcome.

d. Swimming at an abandoned mine: Water is very cold, and induces muscles to not work; Panicking, or asthma attack, MT goes under. Sadly same outcome.

e. Attending a bonfire; Provokes a serious asthma attack through inhalation of ashes, leaf dust/fungus, fumes from the fire, etc. 3CA tries to help her, in this, and each other case listed above, but tragically, similar outcome.

f. Boating, Kayaking, other kind of outdoor accident, etc, etc………???


Questions:

Has her Swimsuit been accounted for?

Was she dieting at this point in her life, (because of the upcoming wedding), and therefore a little weaker, and possibly more susceptible to changes in her environment?

Some people are self-conscious about wearing a bathing suit (myself included!!!), …..so did MT just swim in a shorts and top?

What are other FUN ACTIVITIES done in the summer which young people in IOWA do in the later evening, but which could adversely impact someone with an underlying health condition?

Praying for Mollie and her family!

 

[Ilovemy3boys]

I'm really getting the feeling that we'll have a lot better feel for what LE knows after tomorrow's presser.

If they’re willing to say anything.

 

[gitana1]

I'm really getting the feeling that we'll have a lot better feel for what LE knows after tomorrow's presser.

I hope you're right. My bet is more of the same. Until we hear she's been found or an arrest has been made I don't think we are going to get anything important.

 

[Justice101]

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