Mollie Tibbetts was destined to 'change lives': 'You couldn’t help but just love her'

Luke Nozicka | Des Moines Register

BROOKLYN, Ia. — Mollie Tibbetts' face has been seen across the country, her bright smile flashing on national news.

She has been painted as the quintessential Iowa girl; an archetype, as her father puts it. Those following the story of her disappearance have seen her posing in her senior pictures and nestled with her high school sweetheart, beaming at a University of Iowa football game.

Tuesday, police found a body, believed to be the missing student.

After Tibbetts went missing July 18, her small hometown of Brooklyn in central Iowa received widespread attention. But loved ones know Tibbetts as much more than the two-dimensional posters seen on TV.

In interviews with the Des Moines Register, Tibbetts' family, friends, teachers, coaches and co-workers recount stories of the cheery, sometimes silly and occasionally stubborn personality behind the missing-person notices.

At just 20, Mollie has demonstrated a desire to help others, a natural ability to work with children and a gift for making anyone feel like the most important person in a room — because she genuinely believes they are. Friends describe her nurturing character and nod in approval at her decision to study psychology at the University of Iowa, a career path they call an obvious match.

Mollie Tibbetts knows how to connect with people, father says Never one to seek attention, father Rob Tibbetts says his daughter Mollie Tibbetts has an ability to connect with everyone she meets.

"Any problem that they had, you knew Mollie would help you fix it," says close friend Kayleigh Holland, 18.

After weeks of relentless attention on Tibbetts' unexplained disappearance, her boyfriend, Dalton Jack, wishes more people would talk about her as a person.

“She’s not just a flyer,” he says.

Growing up in California

Mollie Tibbetts' parents liked the name Grace. At the hospital in San Francisco, they didn't know if their middle child would be a boy or girl. Waiting to find out was an old-school approach — romantic and spontaneous.

But when they looked at her for the first time, they decided she wasn't a Grace, after all.

“Well, she’s more of a Mollie,” Rob Tibbetts remembers saying.

Months later, her parents found chewed-up balls of paper on a carpet near Mollie's crib. They thought they had mice.

After they took the sheets off to do laundry, they realized Mollie had been gnawing on a cardboard book. Later in life, the voracious reader would joke she "just ate books from a very early age."

It was a bedtime ritual. Each night, Rob Tibbetts read aloud to Mollie and her two brothers, acting out every character in the Harry Potter books. Posters from the series and quotes from one character, Albus Dumbledore, still adorn her room today.

When Mollie needed an excuse for something throughout her childhood, she would remind her father of another story: the time she was on his shoulders, standing in front of a redwood tree in Oakland, California, while her mother, Laura Calderwood, recorded a video. When her older brother, Jake, slipped next to them, Rob reached for him, causing Mollie to flip and land on top of her head.

"We used to explain any kind of odd behavior from her was, 'Well, she was dropped on her head as a baby,'" Rob Tibbetts says.

Katie Murphy, the longtime principal of Corpus Christi, a Catholic school in the East Bay region, checked three times a day for updates on her former student. She says Tibbetts was "sweeter than a button" when she attended her school from kindergarten to second grade.

In Murphy's school office in Piedmont, California, Christmas cards from Laura Calderwood and photographs of the three Tibbetts siblings hang on a wall. In her first-grade school picture, Mollie wears a pink bow.

"There wasn’t a mean bone in her body," Murphy says of Tibbetts in her younger years. "You couldn’t help but just love her."

The parish with which her family was heavily involved prays for Tibbetts’ safe return at each Mass.

Dorothy Lee, who taught Tibbetts in the first grade more than a decade ago, says Tibbetts was polite and productive, a role model for other children.

Lee has her own photographs from those years. One shows Tibbetts singing with classmates at a senior citizen’s birthday party, another shows her displaying a pumpkin she decorated. In a third, she beams from ear to ear as she stands between her parents at a conference with a teacher.

Tibbetts moved to Iowa with her mother and brothers after her parents separated when she was in the second grade. She made new friends who say her genius was to make anyone she talked with feel welcomed and wanted.

‘Mollie’s going to change lives’

A choir teacher at Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom school, a short walk from the family's home in Iowa, remembers Tibbetts standing out as a student with determination.

Carrie Hoskey taught Tibbetts starting in the sixth grade. Tibbetts was thrilled to be singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" from "The Lion King," one of her favorite movies at the time.

"She just about lost it," Hoskey says, remembering how Mollie jumped up and down in excitement.

By her senior year of high school, she had grown into a leader in the choir, mentoring young singers and showing them “how it's done.”

While she enjoyed choir, Tibbetts found her strength in speech, theater and writing.

She advanced from a small part in "Willy Wonka" during her early years to a main character in "Shrek The Musical." Older brother Jake Tibbetts describes her theatrical ascent through school: "From Oompa Loompa to a lead role."

Her high school speech coach, Jarrod Diehm, digs through his emails to find examples of Tibbetts' best work. He remembers she presented a consistent, mature theme in her work that impressed judges: the need for others to understand their self-worth.

"She just wanted to lift people up," he says of Tibbetts, who made it to state-level competitions all three years she was on the team.

As a student, Tibbetts wasn't afraid to offer constructive criticism to classmates, Diehm says. Days before she vanished, she'd reached out to a former classmate who dealt with personal issues, just to check on them.

"Mollie’s going to change lives," Diehm says.

She focused her speeches on topics that showed compassion for others. One year, she wrote about bullying; another, she wrote about mental health.

In June, Tibbetts tweeted about the deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, noting that mental illness can affect anyone. "We need to make people feel more comfortable talking about mental health," she wrote. "Be kind and understanding with everyone, including yourself."

Rob Tibbetts helped his daughter to develop her speech and presentation skills, something he does professionally to assist architects and engineers at the architecture firm where he works.

The pair shares a love of literature. He taught her about symbolism, metaphors and foreshadowing as they read dozens of books together, from afar.

One of their favorite authors was Patrick Ness. Mollie has since moved on to classic literature, such as "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and "To Kill a Mockingbird." In her room now, her father found "The Catcher in the Rye" on her bed.

In high school, written work and academics were Mollie's primary sport, her father says. After she vanished, he found some of her writing in her room, most of which was poetry, and he plans to retype it all.

He is struck by the number of drafts she crafted, even as a young teenager. For each piece, she edited the rhythm of her essays, which dealt with sophisticated issues such as pain and recovery.

"It’s well beyond her years," her father says. "It’s not just puppies and daffodils."

She balanced a number of activities with grace. As Diehm drove her back from one speech competition, he asked Tibbetts if she wanted to grab some food. Her response: "Nah, I got a track meet I have to get to."

Tibbetts mostly ran distance events in high school. She didn't take home first-place medals, but her coach, Shane Wilson, was impressed with her ability to make the sport fun. When her father asked how her races went, she would tell him about the new friends she'd made from different schools, not about how she'd placed.

Tibbetts was confirmed into the Catholic Church in 2015, and she was public about the influence of her faith.

In a now widely circulated video taken in fall 2016, Tibbetts tells a youth group about the time she got down on one knee to pray for strength before a conference cross-country meet. She had not run in a meet for more than a week and was nervous.

She ended up getting her best time of the season.

"It’s not a huge, big story," she told the crowd. "But it really meant a lot to me to see God working in my life."

Mollie Tibbetts talks about prayer in 2016 In a video provided by Lori Schafbuch, Mollie Tibbetts speaks at a high school event in 2016, when she was a senior at BGM, about prayer.

‘A true love sort of thing’

Dalton Jack and Mollie Tibbetts met about three years ago, after a football game.

Jack and one of his friends were sitting in his truck. Another girl came up and talked to the friend in the passenger's seat. Tibbetts wanted to be part of the conversation, so she walked to the driver's side and tapped on Jack's window.

At that point, he says, "we just got in our own little world."

Jack did not waste time asking Tibbetts out; they were dating two weeks later.

Rob Tibbetts always knew Mollie loved her boyfriend — he saw it when they were together. Since Mollie vanished, Rob has grown close to Jack. Now, he can better see why Mollie adores him.

The two complement each other: She brings out new sides of Jack, a quiet young man by nature, while he gives her stability and serenity, family and friends say.

"I really think it’s a true love sort of thing," Rob Tibbetts says.

When Rob called Mollie to leave her a voicemail on Valentine’s Day, he was surprised she answered at 10 p.m. He asked if she'd done anything special for the day, and she said she'd gone to dinner with her boyfriend.

"'You’re kidding? Dalton drove all that way and took you to dinner?'" he asked Mollie of the nearly hour-long drive from Brooklyn to Iowa City — a trip Jack made frequently. "I said, 'I love him,'" Rob says. "'You should totally stay with him.'"

Working with kids at a summer job

Organized and determined, Tibbetts had her next few years planned: head to graduate school out of state to become a psychologist. She was to start her sophomore year at UI this week.

As part of her curriculum, Mollie has been trained to assist battered women and men, her father says. Her true characteristics as a strong woman shine when "she’s not being a pain-in-the-ass teenage girl," he jokes.

After finishing her freshman year in May, Tibbetts lived at home with her mother and spent her summer taking three classes. It was her second summer working at a day camp with Grinnell Regional Medical Center, not far from Brooklyn, helping school-age children with literacy, crafts and other activities.

Chad Nath, director of the day camp, calls Tibbetts a warm and caring worker who showed patience with the 75 children she and 10 other staffers supervised. The kids love to be around her, he says.

Nath likes to tell jokes.

"'Why don’t skeletons play in church?'" he would ask. "'Cause they don’t have organs.'"

Tibbetts laughed and called those her dad's jokes, Nath says. But when she spoke with her father, who would make similar wisecracks, she would tell him, "Those are Chad’s jokes."

Mollie Tibbetts video: Day before she was last seen by friends and family Mollie Tibbetts hangs out with her friends in an art gallery at Grinnell College on July 17.

‘Our little sunshine’ a constant presence for friends

People in Brooklyn, a town of about 1,500 residents 70 miles east of Des Moines, say Tibbetts' disappearance has brought out the best in their city. Days after she vanished, at least 200 people gathered for a vigil at the high school, including people with no connection to Tibbetts.

Friends video-called Alexis Lynd, 19, who was vacationing in Florida, from the vigil. Lynd came home early from the trip; she could not enjoy it without knowing where Tibbetts was.

She, Holland and two other friends met with a Register reporter at the high school, where they called Tibbetts the "mother" of their group. They recalled car rides when she would belt out songs to the radio, even when she didn't know the words.

“Oh God, I’m going to start crying about this,” says Baylee Van Ersvelde, 19. “Just because she was such a bad singer.”

Her father later says Tibbetts has a lovely voice, but in the car, she can be, well, noisy.

“We have to use comedy at this point because that’s what she would do,” Holland says as Lynd comforts Van Ersvelde.

A real, ‘super average’ girl

As missing-person flyers are shipped across the country, Rob Tibbetts guesses Mollie's disappearance has struck an international chord because she reminds people of their own daughters, sisters or girlfriends. They may even see their own childhood in her.

"And there’s something tragic about having [her] disappear like this without any explanation," says Tibbetts, who has been contacted by people as far away as Indonesia.

Mollie is perfect in her father's eyes, but he knows she can be moody, and she sleeps in late in her utter mess of a room. Oh, and she's a terrible driver, he says.

"We’re trying really hard to not make her Saint Mollie," he says, adding that it's important to the search that the public identifies with her as a real person. "Mollie is super average."

In the window of a brick building in Brooklyn, a green number on a poster keeps rising, now $385,000-plus: the amount of money raised as a reward to solicit information leading to Tibbetts’ return. That's a record for the 36-year-old Crime Stoppers of Central Iowa.

When Mollie Tibbetts’ mother, Laura Calderwood, announced the fund, facing a row of at least 10 cameras, she told reporters she felt her daughter's presence every day.

"Sometimes, I just feel her sitting on my shoulder," Calderwood said. "I don't know that I have the strength in me, but Mollie's lending me her strength every day, every night."

‘It’s a matter of when, not if’

Rob Tibbetts had asked Mollie if he could marry his now-wife, Kacey Auston-Tibbetts; Mollie was wildly excited.

When Rob's sons couldn't make the June wedding, the next logical choice for best man was Mollie. But, really, she had insisted on it. She gave a well-prepared toast, in which she called her father her best friend, leaving people laughing and crying.

Days after the wedding, his family celebrated on a boat ride in Bass Lake, California, where he and one of his brothers-in-law decided to dive off a rock about 25 feet above the water. Though she screamed at the top of her lungs, his best man, Mollie, surprised him by jumping in right behind them.

“‘I’m your best man; I’m going with you,’” Rob recalls his daughter saying. “She was my best man, and she was every bit the best man.”