A festive errand to have her baby’s first photos taken with Santa turned into an unimaginable tragedy for Tiffaney Shereese Wilson, a 17-year-old female and young mother from Jackson, South Carolina. Her abduction and murder in the winter of 1999 marked another chapter in a string of violent crimes that terrorized communities along the Georgia-South Carolina border.
Tiffaney, who was married to her husband, Joshua, was just beginning her life as a mother to their infant daughter, Kaitlyn.
On Saturday, December 4, 1999, Tiffaney drove with two-month-old Kaitlyn to the Marketplace Shopping Center in North Augusta, South Carolina. It was a trip filled with the innocent joy of the holiday season, meant to capture a cherished memory. Instead, it ended in abduction. Witnesses later reported seeing Tiffaney entering a mid-1980s white four-door Ford in the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie grocery store. Her own car was found abandoned in the same lot. A frantic search began, but the first sign of what had happened was both a relief and a terror. Three days later, baby Kaitlyn was discovered, physically unharmed but left alone inside her mother’s car at a welcome center just across the state line in Georgia.
The discovery of the abandoned baby confirmed that Tiffaney had been abducted, and a desperate search for the young mother intensified. For weeks, her family and law enforcement held out hope. That hope was extinguished on December 28, 1999, when two hunters walking through a heavily wooded area off a road in Graniteville, South Carolina, discovered her body. The scene was brutal; Tiffaney’s hands had been bound behind her back, and an autopsy would later confirm she had been raped, strangled, and stabbed in the back.
Initially, investigators focused on those closest to Tiffaney, and her husband, Joshua, was even considered a person of interest after failing a polygraph test. However, the evidence found at the crime scene eventually cleared him. The case remained a terrifying mystery for nearly a year, one of several unsolved disappearances and murders of young women in the area. The community was on edge, fearing a predator was moving among them, but police had not yet publicly connected the dots between the violent crimes.
The break in the case came in October 2000, not from Tiffaney’s investigation, but from the courageous survival of another young woman. Chrisilee Barton, an 18-year-old, was brutally raped and stabbed in her Augusta home by a man who had approached her with a story about being a modeling agent. Barton survived the horrific attack and was able to provide investigators with a detailed description of her assailant, leading to a forensic sketch that was broadcast by local media. Tips poured in, and on October 12, 2000, police located 37-year-old Reinaldo Javier Rivera in a South Carolina motel room, suffering from self-inflicted slash wounds to his wrists in an apparent suicide attempt.
At the hospital, Rivera, a former U.S. Navy sailor who had once worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, began to confess. He admitted to an FBI agent that he was the man who had been terrorizing the region, calling himself the "Model Scout Serial Killer." He confessed to the murders of 17-year-old Melissa Dingess in July 1999, 17-year-old Tabitha Bosdell in June 2000, and 21-year-old Army Sgt. Marni Glista in September 2000. He also admitted to killing Tiffaney Wilson. He told the agent he had lured Tiffaney into his van with the same phony modeling opportunity, then sexually assaulted and strangled her while her infant daughter was in the vehicle.
In January 2004, Reinaldo Rivera was tried in Augusta, Georgia, for the murder of Marni Glista and the attack on Chrisilee Barton. During the trial, he chillingly told the jury he would kill again if released and asked for the death penalty. A jury convicted him of malice murder, three counts of rape, four counts of aggravated sodomy, four counts of aggravated assault, burglary, and possession of a knife during the commission of a crime. He was sentenced to death. Though he was also charged with the murders of Tiffaney Wilson and Melissa Dingess in Aiken County, South Carolina, those cases were never brought to trial, as he was already condemned to die in Georgia. Reinaldo Rivera remains on death row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison.
