Reinaldo Javier Rivera was convicted in January 2004 of murdering Marni Glista, a 21-year-old Army sergeant stationed at Fort Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia. A Richmond County jury found him guilty of malice murder and 13 other counts and, three days later, voted for a death sentence. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the judgment in 2007, and his challenges in state and federal habeas courts have since been rejected. The Georgia Department of Corrections lists him among the people under a death sentence as of June 30, 2026.
Glista was not the only young woman whose death he admitted. After his arrest in October 2000 he told investigators that he had also killed Tabitha Bosdell, a teenager from the Augusta area, and two 17-year-old girls from Aiken County, South Carolina, Melissa Dingess and Tiffaney Wilson. He was charged in all three deaths, according to Associated Press reports from 2004, but no trial on any of those charges has been reported. In law he stands convicted of one murder. The other three remain deaths he confessed to and was charged with.
He was caught because the last woman he attacked survived. On October 10, 2000, he attacked an 18-year-old woman in Augusta and left her for dead. She called for help, and her description of the man and his vehicle reached the public. Within two days police had found him in a motel in Aiken County, South Carolina, where he had tried to kill himself.
The public record on Rivera's early life is thin. The Georgia Department of Corrections gives his birth as September 1963. At his trial in 2004 the Associated Press described him as 40 years old and from North Augusta, South Carolina. His sister testified for him at the sentencing hearing.
He had served in the U.S. Navy. The Washington Times, in a report published while he awaited trial, described him as a former Navy ensign who had been discharged in 1995. The same paper found an earlier arrest in Washington, D.C. According to D.C. Superior Court records it examined, Rivera was arrested on January 17, 1989, after a knife attack in the early morning hours in southwest Washington, and was released the same day when the U.S. Attorney's Office declined to prosecute. The paper reported that he then worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff for about two years and lived in Beltsville and College Park, Maryland.
His federal habeas lawyers later raised the question of whether he had been sexually abused as a child in Puerto Rico. Court papers record that a psychologist retained by his trial lawyers, Dr. David Lisak, evaluated him and suggested that abuse, possibly at a private religious school in Puerto Rico, might help explain his conduct. Rivera denied that any abuse had happened. The question returned in his habeas case, as described below.
Investigators and prosecutors described a consistent approach. According to the Supreme Court of Georgia's summary of the trial evidence, Rivera stopped women on a pretext, such as asking for directions, then said he was a professional photographer and pressed them to let him take their pictures. An Associated Press report on his appeal described him as posing as a photographer to strike up conversations with young women in eastern Georgia and western South Carolina.
At trial, Rivera testified that the women had gone with him willingly to secluded places because they believed his photography story. The district attorney, Danny Craig, told the jury that this was false. "All lies!" he said in his closing argument, according to the Associated Press.
Melissa Dingess and Tiffaney Wilson were both 17 and both from Aiken County, South Carolina. Both died in 1999. Associated Press reports in 2002 and 2004 said Rivera was charged in their deaths, and he confessed to killing them after his arrest, according to the Supreme Court of Georgia. Their cases were never tried in Georgia, but prosecutors there presented evidence about them at his 2004 trial as similar transactions. The appeals court described both girls as victims of killings in South Carolina and said Rivera had disclosed where two South Carolina victims could be found.
Tiffaney Wilson had a two-month-old daughter. The Augusta Press, summarizing the case in 2024, reported that she went missing after taking the baby to visit Santa at a local store, and that the infant was later left at a welcome center. WRDW-TV in Augusta reported in 2019 that the baby was found at the Georgia Welcome Center, still in her car seat. Her father took her to live with his family in Louisiana, and she grew up knowing little about her mother. In June 2019, about 20 years later, she returned to the Aiken area for the first time to meet her mother's family. Her grandmother told the station that it was a blessing to have her there and to know that she was alive. "I look just like my mom," the young woman said. Police gave her her mother's jewelry during the visit.
Less is recorded about Melissa Dingess. The court opinions and the news reports give little beyond her name, her age and her home county.
Tabitha Bosdell was a telemarketer. The Supreme Court of Georgia gave her age as 17; Associated Press reports at the time of trial gave it as 18. On June 29, 2000, she was walking to work when Rivera talked her into getting into his car, according to the court's summary of the evidence. He drove her to an isolated place, where he killed her.
No one knew what had happened to her until Rivera told police after his arrest. Following his description, investigators found her remains in Columbia County, Georgia, on October 14, 2000. Dental records confirmed who she was.
The Richmond County indictment included counts concerning Bosdell, and the jury convicted him on them. It did not charge him with her murder, because her remains were found in Columbia County. After the 2004 verdict, District Attorney Craig told reporters that he would likely pursue capital murder charges in Columbia County, whatever the sentence in the Glista case. No Columbia County murder trial has been reported.
Marni Glista was a 21-year-old sergeant in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia. She was married. Her mother lived in Seattle.
On September 4, 2000, over the Labor Day weekend, Glista went grocery shopping. A store receipt later showed a purchase at 11:12 that morning. Rivera followed her from the store to her home, according to the Supreme Court of Georgia, where he sexually assaulted and strangled her. When she did not report for duty the next day, she was found in her home. Her husband's vehicle was in the driveway with the groceries still inside.
She never recovered. Her doctor testified that she had suffered irreversible brain damage. She was declared brain dead on September 8, and she died on September 9, 2000, after she was removed from a ventilator. Her family had kept a vigil at her bedside. The medical examiner ruled that she died of the delayed effects of ligature strangulation.
At the sentencing hearing in 2004 her mother testified for the prosecution. "I gave birth to Marni, and I sat by her side when she drew her last breath," she told the jury, according to the Associated Press. Her husband identified her photograph for the jury during the trial.
The attack that led to Rivera's arrest happened about five weeks after Glista's death. On October 10, 2000, he stopped an 18-year-old woman in Augusta on the pretext of asking for directions, suggested they talk in a parking lot, told her he was a professional photographer and pressed her to let him photograph her. She suggested he follow her to a relative's home. There he attacked her and left her for dead.
She survived. She reached the telephone and called 911. Her account gave investigators the information that led to Rivera's arrest, according to the Associated Press. Because she survived a sexual assault, she is not named.
After a news broadcast described the attacker, two people who knew Rivera called the police separately to say they thought it was him: a co-worker and his sister-in-law. The Supreme Court of Georgia recorded both calls.
On October 12, 2000, police found Rivera in a motel room in Aiken County, South Carolina. He had cut his wrists and taken an overdose of Tylenol, The Augusta Press reported. He was taken to a hospital.
Rivera talked to investigators over the following weeks. He admitted the attack of October 10, then confessed to the murder of Marni Glista, the killing of Tabitha Bosdell and the deaths in South Carolina, according to the Supreme Court of Georgia. He told police where Bosdell's remains were, and he disclosed the locations of two South Carolina victims.
The first interview, on October 12, 2000, became a point of dispute. Mention of it was suppressed at trial because Rivera had been drugged at the time, The Augusta Press reported, and prosecutors said it had not been recorded. His lawyers argued on appeal that his hospitalization and medication made the statements involuntary and that police kept questioning him after he said he might need a lawyer. The Supreme Court of Georgia found that he had been lucid, had read and signed a waiver, and had not been threatened, and that after he mentioned a lawyer the officers stopped. Rivera then asked to speak with his wife and later asked to speak with the police again, and he signed a new waiver. The court held that he had started the later conversation himself.
Years later, a recording of the October 12 interview was found in the former apartment of Richard Roundtree, who had been one of the lead investigators as a sheriff's detective, The Augusta Press reported. Rivera argued in federal court that prosecutors had hidden the interview and had testified falsely when they said he was not incapacitated during it. The federal court rejected that claim.
In late 2000, Rivera's arrest drew inquiries from many other police agencies. The Washington Times reported that several dozen agencies had contacted Richmond County investigators about possible links to their own cases, and that the FBI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Maryland State Police cold case squad were involved. Augusta police said Rivera had told them about rapes in several places, but investigators had not confirmed those statements, and the paper reported that authorities did not then believe he had killed anyone outside the Augusta area.
The day after his arrest, Rivera was charged in three killings, and on October 14, 2000, in a fourth, The Washington Times reported. A Richmond County grand jury indicted him on October 24, 2000, and the state gave notice the next day that it would seek the death penalty. The indictment charged one count of malice murder, three counts of rape, four counts of aggravated sodomy, four counts of aggravated assault, one count of burglary and one count of possession of a knife during the commission of a crime. The counts covered the attacks on Glista, Bosdell and the surviving woman.
The case took more than three years to reach trial. In April 2002, against his lawyer's advice, Rivera told a judge that he wanted to plead guilty and get on with his punishment, according to a July 2002 report. Superior Court Judge Albert M. Pickett granted the prosecution's request to have him examined by mental health experts. That July, jailers at the Richmond County jail used pepper spray on Rivera when he refused to stop kicking his cell door, and he was charged with felony obstruction. A sheriff's captain said he had grown more aggressive in the previous two weeks, possibly because he had stopped taking an antidepressant. Before trial he was evaluated and found competent to stand trial.
The trial began in Richmond County Superior Court on January 5, 2004, before Judge Pickett. Rivera was represented by Peter Johnson and Jacque Hawk. Their strategy was to ask the jury for a verdict of guilty but mentally ill, the Associated Press reported.
Rivera testified. "We're trying to get everyone to accept the idea that I have a mental illness," he told the jury, according to the Associated Press. "We've got to figure out why I do the things that I do." Johnson argued that medical evidence showed brain damage had left Rivera unable to choose between right and wrong, and that doctors could study his condition in the hope of finding a cure and a way to prevent such crimes. The trial court did not allow expert testimony linking frontal lobe dysfunction to criminal behavior, finding that the theory could not be scientifically verified. A defense neurologist testified that Rivera was not mentally ill and was of above-average or superior intelligence.
Prosecutors also presented evidence about the deaths of Melissa Dingess and Tiffaney Wilson. Craig told the jury that Rivera was not mentally ill in the legal sense of being unable to tell right from wrong. He called him a psychopath who abducted women to rape and kill them.
On Friday, January 23, 2004, the jury rejected the defense of mental illness and found Rivera guilty on all 14 counts.
The sentencing phase began the next day. Rivera testified again, and this time he asked the jury to sentence him to death. He told jurors that he would probably kill again if he had the chance. "I still fantasize about hurting the same girls that I killed," he said, according to the Associated Press. He also said, "I took the lives of so many people."
He tried to control his own defense. According to the Supreme Court of Georgia, he would not let two family members testify as mitigation witnesses, and after the guilty verdicts he raised with the judge the ideas of presenting no mitigation, staying away from the sentencing hearing, acting as his own co-counsel and firing his lawyers. The defense called six witnesses to ask for a life sentence. One was his sister, who said she could not believe that the brother she knew could have done such things. "There's no way he's evil; he has to be sick," she said. The prosecution called three witnesses, among them Glista's mother.
In closing, the prosecutor asked the jurors, "Whose daughter will it be the next time?" He also argued that Rivera would be a danger to people in prison, pointing to his own testimony and to fights in jail.
On Monday, January 26, 2004, after more than eight hours of deliberation, the jury voted for death. Rivera showed no emotion, the Associated Press reported. When Judge Pickett asked whether he had anything to say, he said, "I'm sorry." The jury found three aggravating circumstances: that the murder was committed during a rape, that it was committed during an aggravated battery, and that it was outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman.
Judge Pickett set the execution for a window of March 3 to 9, 2004, but an appeal to the Supreme Court of Georgia was automatic. Besides the death sentence, Rivera received a life sentence for each of the three rape counts and each of the four aggravated sodomy counts, 20 years for each aggravated assault count and for the burglary, and five years for the knife count, all to run consecutively. After the sentence, Glista's mother said that she had waited three and a half years and was thankful that the jurors had brought justice.
Investigators said they would keep looking at whether Rivera had killed anyone else. A Richmond County sheriff's homicide investigator, Wayne Bunton, told the Associated Press that it did not make sense for a man suddenly to start killing in his 30s.
Rivera's lawyers moved for a new trial on February 19, 2004; the motion was denied on July 11, 2006. The Supreme Court of Georgia heard the appeal on February 28, 2007. The Associated Press reported that the hearing was held at the Putnam County Courthouse, as part of the court's practice of sitting in different parts of the state. Rivera's lawyer argued that more evidence about his mental illness should have reached the jury and that his conduct as his own co-counsel had sabotaged his defense. Lawyers for the state replied that the jury had heard enough about his mental condition and that nothing would have changed the outcome.
On June 25, 2007, the court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence in an opinion by Justice Thompson, with all the justices concurring. It rejected each claim of error:
The evidence was sufficient on every count.
The exclusion of the frontal lobe testimony was not preserved for appeal, and in any case the trial court had applied the correct test for scientific evidence.
The evidence about the South Carolina deaths had been properly admitted after a hearing, with detailed limiting instructions to the jury.
His statements to police were voluntary, and he had validly started new questioning after mentioning a lawyer.
The trial court had not forced him into a hybrid form of self-representation, and it had no reason to hold a new competency hearing.
The prosecutor's closing arguments did not require a new trial.
The jury's verdict on sentence was not coerced.
The court noted one flaw. The jury had stated the third aggravating circumstance in the alternative, which meant the jurors might not have agreed on a single basis for it. That did not require reversal, the court held, because the other two aggravating circumstances were valid. It found the sentence was not the product of passion or prejudice and was not disproportionate to sentences in similar cases. Reconsideration was denied on July 27, 2007. Rivera did not seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court, The Augusta Press reported.
On November 7, 2008, Rivera filed a petition for habeas corpus in the Superior Court of Butts County. Judge William A. Fears heard the case. The central claim was that his trial lawyers had been ineffective in failing to follow up on Dr. Lisak's suggestion of childhood sexual abuse. At a hearing in May 2010, two witnesses testified about abuse at a Catholic school in Puerto Rico by a priest who had taught there. The habeas court found their testimony irrelevant to Rivera himself. Dr. Lisak was unavailable for the hearing dates, the court refused to delay the hearing for him, and it later excluded a 17-page affidavit from him as untimely.
The habeas court denied the petition on March 31, 2011. It found that the trial lawyers had made a reasonable, strategic decision not to make further use of Dr. Lisak, and that there was very little concrete evidence of abuse. Rivera then sought to withdraw his appeal and represent himself. After a competency proceeding the habeas court found him competent, and his appeal went forward. The Supreme Court of Georgia unanimously refused to hear it.
Rivera filed a federal habeas petition in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, in Augusta, on September 9, 2013. Judge J. Randal Hall presided. The petition raised claims of ineffective assistance of trial and appellate counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, juror misconduct, trial court error, faulty jury instructions and arbitrary application of the death penalty. An amended petition in 2014 added a cumulative error claim and a challenge to lethal injection.
In June 2015 the court refused his request to subpoena a Catholic religious community's records about abuse allegations, to see whether his name appeared among the victims. It held that "good cause for discovery cannot arise from mere speculation or pure hypothesis," noting that Rivera had firmly denied any abuse. In December 2017 the court rejected new claims added in 2016, including a claim of actual innocence and a new claim of ineffective assistance, and refused to appoint additional lawyers, while allowing the cumulative error claim to go forward. The case was stayed while the U.S. Supreme Court decided another Georgia case, Wilson v. Sellers. That decision came in April 2018, and in October 2018 Judge Hall lifted the stay.
On September 13, 2024, the court denied the amended petition, denied a certificate of appealability on every claim, refused an evidentiary hearing and closed the case. The Augusta Press described the order as about 200 pages long. It reviewed competing expert explanations for Rivera's conduct, including a brain abnormality, sex addiction and early sexual abuse, and it rejected his claims about the October 12, 2000 recording. Rivera asked the court to reconsider.
On February 25, 2025, his lawyers filed a notice of appeal, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit docketed a death penalty habeas appeal the next day. The appeals court extended his deadline to file a motion for a certificate of appealability to May 19, 2025. No ruling by the Eleventh Circuit has been reported.
Rivera is held on death row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison, according to The Augusta Press (2024) and the federal habeas filings, which name its warden as respondent. The Georgia Department of Corrections lists him, with the inmate number 1155294, among the people under a death sentence as of June 30, 2026, with Richmond County as the county of conviction and February 2004 as the date of sentence. No execution date has been reported.
Marni Glista's mother traveled from Seattle for the trial and spoke for her daughter at the sentencing hearing. Tiffaney Wilson's daughter, who was an infant when her mother died, met her mother's family for the first time in 2019. Associated Press reports from 2004 recorded that Rivera's sister came to court to plead for his life.
The number of victims. Rivera told the jury at sentencing that he had taken "the lives of so many people." In law he is convicted of one murder. He confessed to three more killings and was charged in them, but no trial on those charges has been reported.
The South Carolina charges. Associated Press reports from 2002 and 2004 said he was charged in the deaths of Melissa Dingess and Tiffaney Wilson in Aiken County. No later outcome of those charges has been reported.
Other cases. After his arrest, dozens of agencies asked about possible links, and federal and Maryland investigators were involved. The 1989 knife attack in Washington ended with no prosecution. His statements about rapes elsewhere were not confirmed, according to The Washington Times. No other killing has been publicly attributed to him by police.
Mental illness. The defense argued that brain damage left him unable to choose right from wrong; a defense neurologist found no mental illness, and the jury rejected the guilty but mentally ill verdict. The suggestion of childhood sexual abuse has never been established; Rivera himself denied it, and the courts found little concrete evidence of it.
The October 12, 2000 interview. Prosecutors said it was not recorded; a recording was later found. The federal court rejected his claim that prosecutors had hidden it and testified falsely.
Ages. The Supreme Court of Georgia gives Tabitha Bosdell's age as 17; Associated Press reports from 2002 to 2004 give 18.
September 1963: Rivera is born, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.
January 17, 1989: Arrested in Washington, D.C., after a knife attack; released the same day when federal prosecutors decline to charge him.
1995: Discharged from the Navy, according to The Washington Times.
1999: Melissa Dingess and Tiffaney Wilson, both 17, of Aiken County, South Carolina, die. Rivera later confesses and is charged.
June 29, 2000: Tabitha Bosdell is killed while walking to work.
September 4, 2000: Sgt. Marni Glista is attacked in her home.
September 9, 2000: Glista dies after being removed from a ventilator.
October 10, 2000: An 18-year-old woman survives an attack in Augusta.
October 12, 2000: Rivera is found in an Aiken County motel after a suicide attempt and taken to a hospital.
October 13 and 14, 2000: Charged in three killings, then a fourth.
October 14, 2000: Bosdell's remains are found in Columbia County, Georgia.
October 24, 2000: Richmond County indictment on 14 counts.
October 25, 2000: State gives notice it will seek death.
April 2002: Rivera tells a judge he wants to plead guilty; mental health examinations are ordered.
July 2002: Charged with felony obstruction after a struggle with jailers.
January 5, 2004: Trial begins.
January 23, 2004: Guilty on all 14 counts.
January 26, 2004: Jury votes for death.
February 19, 2004: Motion for new trial filed (denied July 11, 2006).
February 28, 2007: Supreme Court of Georgia hears argument.
June 25, 2007: Convictions and death sentence affirmed.
November 7, 2008: State habeas petition filed in Butts County.
March 31, 2011: State habeas denied.
September 9, 2013: Federal habeas petition filed.
June 2015: Federal court denies discovery of abuse records.
December 2017: Federal court rejects added claims.
October 2018: Stay lifted after Wilson v. Sellers.
June 2019: Tiffaney Wilson's daughter meets her mother's family.
September 13, 2024: Federal habeas denied.
February 26, 2025: Appeal docketed in the Eleventh Circuit.
June 30, 2026: Listed under death sentence by the Georgia Department of Corrections.