19-year-old Natalie Keepers, also a Virginia Tech student, faces charges of being an accessory to murder before the fact, concealing a body and being an accessory to murder after the fact.
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A judge denied bail Thursday for a Virginia Tech student charged as an accessory in the murder of a 13-year-old girl in the college town of Blacksburg. Both Eisenhauer and Keepers had separate arraignments on Monday where they had preliminary hearings scheduled for late March. Virginia law requires cases to begin in juvenile court if the victim is a child, the state prosecutore on the case said. According to Pettitt, Keepers told investigators that she and Eisenhauer, 18, had planned it over a meal at a cookout restaurant in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Nicole lived and where they went to school.
This story will be updated. And once Nicole was dead, Keepers helped load her body into Eisenhauer’s Lexus, the prosecutor added.
The judge denied the request because he did not believe Keepers, whose family lives in Maryland, has sufficient ties to keep her from fleeing Virginia.
Keepers and Eisenhauer planned to take Lovell “to a remote location under the guise of a date”, Pettitt said in court, according to the station. She said she is on antidepressants and medication for anxiety. She said they were close in middle school, and that Keepers had slept over at her house.
Police arrested Eisenhauer on January 30, three days after Nicole disappeared.
An examination of emails and social media showed that Eisenhauer and Nicole last made contact at 12:39 that morning, shortly before she disappeared, the prosecutor said.
Judge Robert Viars Jr. decided Keepers should remain behind bars after Pettitt said she “is in the same position as the person who carried out the murder”.
Like others her age, Nicole was tech-savvy, posting on Facebook and chatting using the Kik messenger app. Unlike other young teens, she had to take daily medicine to keep her transplanted liver from failing, and endured bullying over a disfiguring tracheotomy scar in her neck, a reminder of the months she spent in a coma.
By all accounts, she was a lovely but awkward girl, clinging to childhood ways while also telling 8-year-old friends she planned to sneak out to meet her 18-year-old “boyfriend”, a man named David whose picture she displayed on her phone.
Defense lawyers argued that Keepers had a troubled past of her own, and would become mentally unstable if kept in isolation for her own protection from other inmates.
Now the subject of sensational murder charges that have shocked those who know him, his university campus and the nation, Eisenhauer remains an enigma, the mystery compounded by his statement to police after his arrest: “I believe the truth can set me free”.
“Keepers told investigators she was “excited” to be part of something “secretive” and ‘special, ‘” Pettitt said in an email.
Keepers told the judge that she has problems, too. The charge of accessory before the fact indicates Keepers was not present during the killing.
Fellow student 18-year-old David Eisenhauer also is charged in the death; he’s accused of kidnapping and fatally stabbing Nicole.
Sara Keepers, an X-ray technician, said the whole situation is “devastating”.
Eisenhauer was a freshman engineering student and a distance runner on the track team at Virginia Tech.
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Nuckols reported from Washington.
