VA Tech students worked on plot to kill 13-year-old

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.

(Tammy Weeks via AP).

(AP Photo/Skip Foreman). A worker directs traffic in the parking lot of a Blacksburg, Virginia, funeral home on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016.

Pettitt didn’t give a possible motive or describe how the killing was carried out; instead she detailed only the pair’s plans.

Police have said Eisenhauer took advantage of a prior connection with Lovell to abduct and kill her. They suggested she’s under duress and being held in isolation. Her lawyers argued that her mental health will unravel behind bars.

Pettitt revealed just enough information to persuade a judge to deny Keepers’ bail, leaving key aspects of the crime a mystery.

Keepers also told detectives where the child’s body had been dumped, Pettitt said.

Judge Robert Viar Jr. denied bail.

Eisenhauer told authorities he greeted the girl with a side hug, and then brought her to Keepers, Pettitt said.

Eisenhauer was arrested on Saturday and faces charges of first-degree murder and abduction.

Virginia Tech sophomore Natalie M. Keepers, 19, was initially charged with being an accessory after the fact of Nicole’s murder and with improper disposal of a dead body.

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 named David whose picture she displayed on her phone.

He said that his daughter is being kept in solitary confinement at the jail because she is “not street smart” and could be targeted by other inmates.

Lovell had survived several life-threatening health issues in her young life, including undergoing a liver transplant and enduring respiratory ailments.

Keepers maintained she was not present for the killing but told police she helped Eisenhauer load Lovell’s body into the trunk of his Lexus, the prosecutor said, according to the newspaper. WDBJ reports that her father Tim Keepers said Natalie comes from a Christian family and has never been in trouble before.

A Howard Community College student in Columbia who knew Keepers in middle school described her similarly to the Associated Press as energetic, also noting she was not violent and had been “really interested in guys”.

According to police, Eisenhauer, an 18-year-old freshman engineering student and a distance runner on the track team at Virginia Tech, kidnapped and fatally stabbed a 13-year-old girl.

Keepers displays a packed resume on her LinkedIn profile, including a summer internship with NASA, where she made how-to videos for engineers. Her father choked up in court Thursday when he said she had planned to follow his footsteps into aerospace engineering.