Reinaldo Rivera was born in Madrid in 1963 and moved with his family to Puerto Rico when he was seven. His father was a doctor. At nineteen he joined the United States Navy, training in Orlando and then spending three years at sea out of San Diego. From December 1986 to March 1991 he worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. He then took a degree in office administration at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, married on Valentine's Day 1993, and had two children. He stayed in the Navy through postings to Pensacola and Corpus Christi until his discharge in September 1995, and in January 1998 settled in Aiken County, South Carolina, where he was taken on as a tyre inspector at a Bridgestone plant.
Between July 1999 and September 2000 he raped and killed four young women across the Georgia and South Carolina state line. Melissa Dingess, seventeen, of Graniteville, South Carolina, disappeared in July 1999. Tiffaney S. Wilson, seventeen, of Jackson, South Carolina, was killed in December 1999. Tabitha Bosdell, seventeen, was killed on June 29, 2000. Sergeant Marni Glista, twenty-one, a soldier stationed at Fort Gordon in Augusta, was raped and strangled on September 9, 2000.
The approach was a story. He told women he was a professional photographer, or that he was opening a modelling agency, and tried to get them into his car; he asked them about their sex lives. After his arrest investigators took about thirty calls from women who had been approached that way between 1999 and 2000.
What ended it was the woman who lived. In October 2000 Chrisilee Barton went with him to her house, where he raped her and stabbed her three times in the neck with a steak knife. She survived, and she helped police find him. They found him in a motel room, where he had cut his wrists trying to kill himself.
He talked in the police interview, and two of the four bodies were recovered on the strength of what he said, in woodland near the state line. The other two had already been found.
He was arraigned on November 3, 2000 before Judge Albert M. Pickett in Richmond County Superior Court and pleaded not guilty to a capital murder charge and thirteen others, including rape, aggravated assault and aggravated sodomy.
At the trial in January 2004 he described himself in statements and in evidence as a sex addict living a double life, with a bad side that drove him to deceive women with the photographer story, and he admitted killing Sergeant Glista, killing the three other women and trying to kill Chrisilee Barton. The district attorney, Danny Craig, told the jury not to believe everything said by a man his own doctors had described as a sadistic psychopath, and put the case differently: not a seducer but a rapist who stalked and abducted each of the four.
On January 23, 2004 the jury took under three hours to reject the defence's plea of guilty but mentally ill and convicted him on every count, writing on each one not simply guilty but guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
He then tried to stop his own trial. He called the proceedings a joke and a circus, and the judge had to remind him that although he was entitled to address the jury, to act as his own co-counsel and to tell the jury he wanted a death sentence, he could not prevent his lawyers from arguing for his life. One of them, Jacque Hawk, told the judge he was genuinely unsure what his duty was, caught between his client's instructions and his client's interests. Rivera said he would make his statement and then go back to his cell for the rest of the trial.
His complaint was about being tried twice. He objected that the district attorney had obtained an indictment in Columbia County for the murder of Tabitha Bosdell when he had repeatedly said he killed her in Richmond County, and said that if the state could not kill him in one county it would try in the other. The answer was procedural: a murder charge is brought in the county where the body is found.
He was sentenced to death on February 20, 2004 for the murder of Marni Glista. The judge imposed sentences for the remaining verdicts: three counts of rape, four of aggravated sodomy, four of aggravated assault, and one each of burglary and possession of a knife during the commission of a crime. Prosecutors in Columbia County said they would try him regardless of the sentence, and the solicitor for the second circuit in South Carolina said she would try him in Aiken County for Melissa Dingess and Tiffaney Wilson.
One thing suspected of him was never established. A homicide task force at Fayetteville, North Carolina, examined whether he could be connected to fifteen unsolved cases there, six of them murders of women working as prostitutes in the Fayetteville and Cumberland County area between 1987 and 1999, almost all beaten and strangled. Nothing came of it in anything available here, and none of it is in the count.
An early report described the fourth victim as an unidentified eighteen-year-old who had disappeared during the summer. That is Tabitha Bosdell, who was seventeen.