Va. Tech students plotted girl’s stabbing death

A judge on Thursday refused to grant bail to a Virginia Tech student charged in the killing of a 13-year-old, and prosecutors said the woman told police she was “excited” to be a part of something “secretive”.

Keepers, a sophomore engineering major, is charged with being an accessory before the fact in the murder, illegally disposing of a body and being an accessory after the fact.

Another student, David Eisenhauer, 18, also is charged in the death; he’s accused of kidnapping Nicole and then stabbing her to death.

The details emerged during a bail hearing for one of the students jailed in the death of Nicole Lovell of Blacksburg, Virginia, the town where the university is located.

– In their defense: “We understand the allegations are disturbing and serious”. The girl was planning to expose their relationship, the official said, and investigators think this was the motive for killing her.

The prosecutor said Eisenhauer initially denied his involvement when police found his messages on Nicole’s phone, but eventually, he said he drove to the girl’s home, watched her climb out of her window and greeted her with a “side hug” before they drove off to pick up Keepers.

Tammy Weeks, Nicole Lovell’s mother, entered the Montgomery County courthouse an hour before the hearing, surrounded by family members and a police escort.

Police arrested Eisenhauer on January 30, three days after Nicole disappeared. Keepers told investigators that she had been with him when he went to Walmart to get cleaning supplies while Nicole’s body was still in the trunk, Pettitt said. They took her to the pre-determined site and slit her throat, Pettitt said.

Keepers’ parents attended the hearing.

A neighbor said she told 8-year-old friends before she vanished that she planned to sneak out to meet her 18-year-old “boyfriend”, a man she said was named David, whose picture she displayed on her phone.

Keepers said in court that she has a history of depression and suicidal thoughts, and her attorneys argued she should be freed on bail so she can get proper treatment, WSLS reported.

Eisenhauer did not lead authorities to the body, according to Blacksburg police Chief Anthony Wilson, nor did he confess to murder. Weeks discovered that the door to her daughter’s bedroom had been barricaded, and that her phone and her “Minions” blanket also were gone.

Like others her age, Nicole was tech-savvy, posting on Facebook and chatting using the Kik messenger app. But she also had to take daily medicine to keep her transplanted liver from failing, and survived other harrowing health problems that left her with a tracheotomy scar in her neck. He said the young man had “dropped everything” previous year to rush their daughter to a hospital for an emergency appendectomy.

Eisenhauer and Keepers went to high schools five miles apart in Columbia, a planned community between Baltimore and Washington that’s known for highly rated public schools and competitive athletics. Both are engineering students at Virginia Tech.

Her father, an aerospace engineer, said he had already contacted an electronic monitoring company so she could be fitted with an ankle bracelet if she returned to their home in Maryland, but the judge still denied her release.

Pettitt said that after Keepers was read her rights, however, she became emotional and then admitted to helping plan the alleged murder.