The first of four possible death-penalty trials begins Monday for Reinaldo Rivera.
Investigators nabbed Mr. Rivera, 40, they said, because an 18-year-old Augusta woman survived being choked and having a knife plunged into her throat. She lived to tell detectives what happened and to describe her attacker's face and even the car he drove Oct. 10, 2000.
On Monday in Richmond County Superior Court, about 110 residents will be called for jury duty in the first trial. After a week of jury selection, attorneys expect two to three weeks of testimony.
In Augusta, Mr. Rivera has pleaded innocent to charges of murder, rape, aggravated sodomy, aggravated assault, burglary and possession of a weapon during the commission of a crime.
If he is convicted of murder in the Sept. 4, 2000, attack on Army Sgt. Marni M. Glista, 21, prosecutors will ask the jury to sentence him to death.
Mr. Rivera's defense team will try to persuade the jury to impose one of the other two punishment options - life in prison with or without the possibility of parole. If pretrial hearings are a good indication, the defense will lean heavily on psychology.
Since his first conversation with investigators Oct. 13, 2000, Mr. Rivera has said that he wanted to plead guilty and get the death penalty. However, the trial will proceed as usual.
"We contemplate we will have two phases of a trial," a guilt-innocence phase and a punishment phase, said lead defense attorney Peter Johnson, who with Jacque Hawk represents Mr. Rivera.
A death sentence is the penalty District Attorney Danny Craig and Assistant District Attorney Ashley Wright will try to persuade a jury to impose. Regardless of the outcome of the trial, Mr. Craig said he believes he will still pursue capital murder charges in Columbia County, where one of Mr. Rivera's alleged victims was found.
Although Mr. Rivera's arrest in four homicides resulted in massive media coverage, Mr. Craig said he believes an adequate pool of potential jurors can be found. The test, he said, isn't ignorance or a lack of any opinion about Mr. Rivera, but whether each will be able to base a verdict only on the evidence presented in court.
Mr. Johnson said he is interested to learn what potential jurors have to say. If a large number of them have fixed opinions about the case, the defense will seek a change of venue, Mr. Johnson said.
The passage of more than three years since Mr. Rivera's arrest is expected to have clouded potential jurors' memories, attorneys from both sides said.
Mr. Rivera made many claims during interviews with investigators. He said he raped and tried to kill the Augusta teenager Oct. 10; raped and killed Sgt. Glista; and killed three other young women. Investigators didn't even know two of them had died until Mr. Rivera's descriptions led to the discovery of their remains.
In addition to the victim who survived, a slew of witnesses will testify about encounters they said they had with Mr. Rivera.
Nearly 30 women have been subpoenaed to tell the jury how they believe Mr. Rivera approached them outside businesses in the Augusta area and struck up conversations that began innocuously, then often sidetracked into talk about sex.
Trying to get women to talk to him about sex was an obsession, Mr. Rivera said. He claimed it led to many consensual sexual encounters. But he said the four women he killed wouldn't consent, so they were raped and killed.
The first, he said, was Melissa Dingess, who was killed July 17, 1999, in Aiken County. The next victim was Tiffaney S. Wilson, five months later, also in Aiken County.
Seven months after that, Mr. Rivera's path crossed that of 17-year-old Tabitha L. Bosdell, whose body he said was dumped off Interstate 20 in Columbia County. The next victim, Sgt. Glista, was killed three months later, and one month later Mr. Rivera tried to kill the last victim, he told investigators.
Mr. Rivera repeatedly told detectives that these were his only homicides and that he had raped 150 to 200 "prostitutes" in the Washington, D.C., area years earlier.
However, in his last tape-recorded interview, Mr. Rivera deviated from those statements.
He said he had raped two women, neither of them prostitutes, in Fayetteville, N.C., in 1996 or 1997.
"One of them, I'm very sure that she probably did die," Mr. Rivera said.
He also told detectives that after moving in the winter of 1998, he raped three employees of escort services.
He used a knife in one of the Fayetteville assaults to control the woman, Mr. Rivera told investigators. He said he also used knives to force Ms. Wilson, Sgt. Glista and the last victim to submit.
He said he gagged Ms. Wilson and Sgt. Glista with tape so he would not have to listen to any pleading, but the last victim fought back.
Mr. Rivera also said he stabbed his last victim in the neck, as he had stabbed Ms. Wilson, because choking alone didn't kill them.
Trial dates in Columbia County and Aiken County have not been scheduled.
THE ALLEGED VICTIMS
MELISSA DINGESS, 17, walked out of the Graniteville One-Stop the morning of July 17, 1999, to call her father from the pay phone. The newlywed, who lived with her husband in a trailer park behind the cafe, left her shoes, purse and cigarettes there. She was never seen again.
In tape-recorded interviews with police, Reinaldo Rivera described his fatal encounter with Mrs. Dingess as chance. Neighbors of the petite strawberry blonde told Augusta Chronicle reporters in October 2000, however, that a Hispanic-looking man had seemingly been stalking Mrs. Dingess in the days before her disappearance.
Her remains were found where Mr. Rivera said he had left her body almost a year earlier, in woods off Interstate 20 in Aiken County.
TIFFANEY S. WILSON, 17, had taken her 2-month-old daughter to the Winn-Dixie on U.S. Highway 25 in North Augusta the afternoon of Dec. 4, 1999, to have her picture taken with Santa Claus. She never returned home. The baby was found unharmed at the Georgia Welcome Center, just across the Savannah River.
Bow hunters found Mrs. Wilson's remains Dec. 28, 1999, in a wooded area off Bettis Academy Road.
NO ONE KNEW that Tabitha L. Bosdell, 17, was dead. Her sister and foster family were told that Ms. Bosdell had been seen in Columbia dancing in a club. They last saw her June 22, 2000, when she was dropped off at a Washington Road restaurant to apply for a job.
Ms. Bosdell was still a minor and in the custody of the Richmond County Department of Family and Children Services the day she disappeared, but the agency took no action with the sheriff's department. Because she had run away before and because she had reportedly been seen alive, her foster mother asked the sheriff's department to file an incident report instead of a missing-person report.
Mr. Rivera told investigators that he ran into Ms. Bosdell the day her family last saw her. After sexually assaulting and strangling her, he said, he dumped her body off Interstate 20, near the Pumpkin Center in Columbia County. That's where officers, using Mr. Rivera's directions, found her remains three months later.
ARMY SGT. MARNI GLISTA, 21, was found barely alive in her Oakridge Drive home when she did not report for duty at Fort Gordon the day after Labor Day. She died at Doctors Hospital on Sept. 9, 2000.
Mr. Rivera told investigators that he raped and sodomized Sgt. Glista and strangled her.
ON THE AFTERNOON of Oct. 10, 2000, an Augusta teenager was sexually assaulted and left for dead at her south Augusta home.
She survived the strangulation attempt and three stab wounds in the neck and called for help. She said she had met her attacker in a Belvedere parking lot. The man, who appeared to be Hispanic, told her he would pay to photograph her, and he followed her to her south Augusta home, she told police.
The description she provided of her attacker's car, combined with a composite drawing of the man, brought several tips from the public that investigators said they used to identify Mr. Rivera.
Mr. Rivera, a husband and father who worked at Bridgestone/Firestone, recognized the drawing, too. He left his North Augusta home for a Clearwater motel, where he downed a bottle of Tylenol and made superficial cuts on his arms before investigators found him and took him to Medical College of Georgia Hospital.
Reach Sandy Hodson at (706) 823-3226 or sandy.hodson@augustachronicle.com.
