On the morning of October 10, 2000, Chrisilee Barton, eighteen, was sitting in her car at a stop sign in Augusta, Georgia, when a man leaned in and asked for directions. That was how he held her there. He raped her and stabbed her three times in the neck with a steak knife, and she lived. When a description of her attacker went out on the news, two people who knew Reinaldo Rivera called the police separately, a co-worker and his own sister-in-law, to say they thought it was him.
Police found him in a motel room in South Carolina, where he had cut his wrists, and took him to the Medical College of Georgia, where he was kept on suicide watch. In interviews he admitted the attack on Barton and then confessed to raping and murdering two more women: Marni Glista in September 2000 and Tabitha Bosdell in June 2000. He told investigators where to find Bosdell's remains in Columbia County, and told them there were two more victims in South Carolina.
Sergeant Marni Glista was twenty-one and stationed with the Army at Fort Gordon. Her husband was serving in Kuwait, and on the morning of September 5, 2000 he called trying to reach her; when she did not report for duty, her commanding officer went looking. She had been raped and strangled. There were marks on her back from the bed rails she had been lying against. The loss of blood flow and oxygen to her brain caused it to swell until it cut off her breathing, and she was put on a ventilator. She was declared brain dead on September 8 and died the next day when the ventilator was removed.
Tabitha Bosdell was seventeen and was killed on June 29, 2000. The two South Carolina victims were Melissa Dingess, seventeen, of Graniteville, who disappeared in July 1999, and Tiffaney S. Wilson, seventeen, of Jackson, killed in December 1999. Two of the four bodies were recovered because of what he told the police, in woodland near the state line; the other two had already been found.
He had a story he used on women. He said he was a professional photographer, or that he was opening a modeling agency, and tried to get them into his car, and he asked them about their sex lives. After his arrest investigators took about thirty calls from women who had been approached that way in 1999 and 2000.
Rivera was born in Madrid in 1963 and moved with his family to Puerto Rico at seven; his father was a doctor. At nineteen he joined the Navy, trained in Orlando and spent 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 took a degree in office administration at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, married on Valentine's Day 1993 and had two children, and stayed in the Navy through postings to Pensacola and Corpus Christi until his discharge in September 1995. In January 1998 he settled in Aiken County, South Carolina, and went to work as a tire inspector at a Bridgestone plant.
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 other counts. At trial in January 2004 he described himself as a sex addict living a double life, with a bad side that drove him to deceive women with the photographer story. The district attorney, Danny Craig, told the jury not to believe everything said by a man his own doctors had called a sadistic psychopath: this was not a seducer but a rapist who stalked and abducted his victims. On January 23 the jury took under three hours to reject a plea of guilty but mentally ill and convicted him on every count, writing on each that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
He then tried to stop his own trial. He called the proceedings a joke and a circus. The judge told him that he could address the jury, act as his own co-counsel and ask for a death sentence, but could not prevent his lawyers from arguing for his life. One of them, Jacque Hawk, said he was genuinely unsure where his duty lay. Rivera complained that the district attorney had also obtained an indictment in Columbia County for Tabitha Bosdell's murder though he had said he killed her in Richmond County; a murder charge is brought where the body is found. He told the jurors he was mentally ill and that doctors should study him to find a cure, said he still fantasized about killing, warned that he would do it again if released, and asked to be put to death.
On February 20, 2004 he was sentenced to death for the murder of Marni Glista. The fourteen verdicts were one count of malice murder, three of rape, four of aggravated sodomy, four of aggravated assault, one of burglary and one of possessing a knife during a crime, all arising from the attacks on Glista, Barton and Bosdell. Prosecutors in Columbia County and in Aiken County, South Carolina, said they would try him for the other killings. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the convictions and sentence on June 25, 2007.
He filed a state habeas petition in Butts County in November 2008 and later took his case to the federal court in Augusta, where his lawyers argued that his trial counsel had failed to investigate his background, in particular whether he had been sexually abused as a child, and sought records from St. John's Abbey, a Catholic religious order. He was held on death row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in Jackson.
A homicide task force in Fayetteville, North Carolina, looked into whether he could be connected to fifteen unsolved cases there, six of them murders of women working as prostitutes between 1987 and 1999. No connection was ever established.