But Toby had evidence.
The murder of his girlfriend, Angela Acosta, offered plenty of leads: There was a crime scene, a body, video footage, and cell phone evidence. In the early morning hours after her death—before her body was found and when she was still feared missing—he had tracked her phone to try to glean information about her whereabouts. To his shock, the phone appeared on a residential street in Downey, 130 miles north of Tijuana.
Toby tried to raise the alarm. Less than 36 hours after Acosta’s body was found, he shared the information about her cell phone turning up in Southern California with an FBI task force officer, while Acosta’s mom told Mexican investigators. He pleaded with them to do something, anything. He pleaded again when Acosta’s Apple Pay was used in the days after her murder—at a Dunkin Donuts and a Vietnamese restaurant. “If the FBI had actively contacted the Mexican authorities and said ‘we have information related to a murder in your city,’ things would have gone very differently,” said Toby, who asked to withhold his last name because of the enormous media attention around the case. Instead, three weeks after his girlfriend’s body was discovered in a hotel bathroom, another sex worker was brutally murdered in Tijuana. Months later, Mexican authorities declared the murders to be the work of a serial killer. U.S. and Mexican authorities hailed the alleged murderer’s eventual arrest as an example of the countries’ close cooperation. But there is another story: About how a lackluster investigation, slow-moving justice system, and a time-consuming extradition process allowed a serial killer to continue preying on sex workers.He was convinced that his girlfriend’s murderer lived in one of the low-rise, green stucco apartments.
Three weeks after his girlfriend’s body was discovered in a hotel bathroom, another sex worker was brutally murdered in Tijuana. Months later, Mexican authorities declared the murders to be the work of a serial killer.
And in Acosta’s case, it would take overwhelming evidence, a single-minded boyfriend, and the brutal killings of at least two other women before authorities intervened.
THE CLUB
On Monday, January 24, 2022, Acosta reported to work in a metallic, blue bikini and knee-high boots topped by rainbow-colored socks. She wore her straight black hair down. She was dancing at the front of the club when an American took notice, said Acosta’s friend, Hadden, who was with her. The man wore a dark sweater, had a light brown complexion and his black hair was shorter on the sides and longer on the top. He was around 30. He invited Acosta for a drink, and Hadden joined.Acosta, Toby’s girlfriend, started working at the club in August 2020.
The man said he was from the U.S. and primarily spoke in English with Acosta, said Hadden, who requested to only use her first name because of the sensitive nature of the case. He didn’t drink alcohol, and was taciturn and serious, she said. The American asked whether the women were interested in astrology. Acosta said she was, and showed him an astrology chart on her phone. The man then said, “It can even tell the day you’re going to die,” Hadden recalled.
An hour passed. And then two. Acosta’s mom texted and called, but the messages stopped going through and her calls went straight to voicemail. Afraid something had happened, she went to the club to look for her daughter. But the managers refused to help, she said. She was told they couldn’t disturb room 404 because the customer had reserved the room until 1 p.m. the following day.
“They told us for three hours in a row they were going to check the room,” Toby said. “And then they would come back and say ‘we have to wait.’ By the third time they told us that, I lost my mind,” he said. He went to room 404 and banged on the door. The only thing he heard was the humming of a mini fridge.
An autopsy would later determine that Acosta had no trace of drugs or alcohol in her body. And the security cameras at Hotel Cascadas were, in fact, working. When the footage was eventually turned over to authorities, it offered damning evidence. At 10:13 p.m, Acosta and the American entered room 404. At 11:49, the American left the room. The cameras captured no one else entering or leaving the room, according to court records.
When hotel staff finally entered the room at noon the following day, on Jan. 25, they found Acosta dead on the bathroom floor, naked. Her mouth had been stuffed with paper to prevent her from breathing. There was no sign of the American.
Months later, Toby learned the American’s identity. He was a U.S. citizen, and, according to prosecutors, his name was Bryant Rivera.
Rivera has not been charged in the U.S. and his lawyer declined to comment.
SPIRAL OF GRIEF
The couple met in August 2020 at a party thrown by Hong Kong Gentlemen’s Club. He was 41, she was 19. The pandemic was raging. Toby had started going to the club to escape his isolation and meet women. He is good-looking and the dancers doted on him. “I loved being given for free what others had to pay for,” he said.
The first night Toby met Acosta, they stayed up all night talking about music, and Toby asked her on a date. She was funny and beautiful. Soon, Toby was visiting Acosta every weekend in Tijuana. Three months after they first met, he went to her grandfather’s birthday party in Monterrey and met her extended family. He took her on trips around the world—to Colombia, Paris, Berlin, Mexico City. They constantly took videos together—drinking coffee, visiting pyramids, discussing the day’s plans.
Acosta refused Toby’s pleas—she didn’t want to depend on him. She had rented a space in Tijuana to open a clothing store and needed the money to get it off the ground.As soon as he learned Acosta was missing, Toby feared the worst. Acosta had recently acquired a new phone, but it was still linked to her previous phone. Using the old phone, he could see her new phone was in Downey. Some 12 hours later—after Acosta’s body had been found—the phone appeared 50 miles to the east, in Riverside, California.
A spokesman for the Baja California Attorney General’s office, which oversees homicide investigations in Tijuana, didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether authorities did anything with the information provided by Flores, or if they considered Toby a suspect.
Tijuana was coming off years of record violence, fueled by a brutal cartel war over control of the drug trade. The number of homicides averaged around 2,000 per year, making the border city the bloodiest in all of Mexico. By contrast, New York City—whose population is four times as large—had 433 murders in 2022. There were so many corpses in the government morgue in Tijuana that authorities ran out of refrigerators to store Acosta’s body. By the time they turned it over to Flores, around a week after the murder, it had already started to decompose, she said.There were so many corpses in the government morgue in Tijuana that authorities ran out of refrigerators to store Acosta’s body.
Toby channeled his rage and grief into investigating Acosta’s murder. A friend put him in touch with a former Riverside County District Attorney, who in turn connected Toby to FBI task force agent Dane Wilkinson.
Toby told Wilkinson about Acosta’s stolen iPhone and how someone was still using her Apple Pay. Toby wanted to track down the phone—an idea that Wilkinson dissuaded him against because it could undermine evidence. Plus, it was dangerous.
Wilkinson was sympathetic, Toby said, but told him that without a homicide report there was nothing he could do. In the days and weeks after Acosta’s murder, Toby emailed Wilkinson with increasing desperation. January 26: “Just the idea that there's the tiniest little thing that I can do for her means the world to me.”
In fact, Mexican authorities had already zeroed in on Rivera as a prime suspect. It’s unclear if Wilkinson knew this and didn’t want to tell Toby, or if he simply didn’t know. Wilkinson didn’t respond to requests for comment sent to his email and phone.
WHEELS OF JUSTICE
The second victim was Acosta.
The third woman was murdered just three weeks after Acosta. The victim, 25-year-old Elizabeth Martínez Cigarroa, was also a sex worker who worked at Hong Kong. She told her family she was going on a Valentine’s Day date with an American man that she met at the club. Days later, on Feb. 17, 2022, her naked body was found in the trunk of her Jeep, which had been abandoned on a commercial street in Tijuana’s red light district. Security camera footage showed a man parking the car.
One month after Martínez Cigarroa’s murder, a judge in Baja California—where Tijuana is located—quietly signed a warrant for Rivera’s arrest, according to documents obtained by VICE News. But the arrest warrant applied only if Rivera were apprehended in Mexico.Rosario Mosso Castro, a veteran reporter with the Tijuana paper Zeta, was the first person to publicly raise the alarm about a possible serial killer hunting sex workers in the city.
Toby didn’t know about any of this. Neither did Acosta’s mom. They had no idea the investigation had advanced at all until November, when Mosso Castro published another blockbuster story that identified the suspected serial killer as 30-year-old “Brayan Andrade Rivera” and included his driver’s license photo.
“THAT SERIAL KILLER? I KNOW HIM”
He also reached out to Francisco Cigarroa, the brother of the woman murdered three weeks after Acosta. Cigarroa had been extremely vocal after his sister’s death and denounced authorities for failing to investigate. Now, Cigarroa confided with Toby that an anonymous person had reached out over Facebook and shared Rivera’s address in Downey. Toby began driving to the apartment complex every chance he could, hoping for a glimpse of Rivera. In May of this year, Toby said he called the FBI field office in Los Angeles and was connected to an agent. He again pleaded for law enforcement to arrest Rivera. “I was calling to say there is a serial killer living here, and I shared his address and name,” Toby said. “He probably thought I was crazy.”
Toby said he never heard back.
He wasn’t the only one reporting Rivera. Shannon Sales, a Los Angeles resident, said she also called the FBI after seeing Rivera’s picture in a story about a serial killer in Tijuana. She recognized him, because it was her ex-boyfriend’s best friend.
ONE BLOCK AWAY
A former co-worker at the Mexican restaurant El Taco said Rivera was quiet, almost to the point of mute. He said Rivera got the job at the restaurant because Rivera’s father—who had worked there decades earlier—arrived with Rivera and asked the manager to give his son a job. “If you tried to talk to him, he would look away and just give ‘yes or no’ answers. But he was never disrespectful,” said the co-worker, who asked to withhold his name because of the media attention around the case.
In a court filing, federal public defender J. Alejandro Barrientos requested that the judge release Rivera on bail and noted the lengthy time period it took to arrest him. “Whatever the cause of these delays, the mere fact that they were permitted to occur betray any claim that Mr. Rivera poses an immediate danger to anyone,” Barrientos wrote. Rivera’s older sister also pleaded for her brother to be released to her on bail. “The crimes of which my brother is being accused of do not resemble the character of the boy I grew up with and know," she wrote in a statement to the court, describing him as “shy and reserved.” She said when she moved out, “all the responsibility of taking my parents to their doctor appointments, grocery shopping, running errands, etc., fell onto my brother.” The judge denied bail. Rivera is expected to be extradited to Mexico in the coming months, marking a triumph for Mexican authorities. While extradition is common, it’s mostly a one-way street of Mexico sending its citizens to the U.S. to face trial and prison time. Rivera is an exception.Rivera is expected to be extradited to Mexico in the coming months, marking a triumph for Mexican authorities.
On July 30, two days before Acosta’s birthday, Toby visited her grave in Tijuana. He had always gone accompanied by someone, but this time he went alone. He stayed for hours. He played songs from their playlist—they had sent each other a song a day since the night they met.
He spread rose petals and tied blue balloons to the white cross at her gravesite. He told her everything—about his efforts to obtain justice for her, and how an American had been arrested for her murder. He cried and screamed and sang her happy birthday. Acosta would have been 22.