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. This undated photo provided by the Blacksburg Police Department shows Virginia Tech student David Eisenhauer, who was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Nicole Madison Lovell.
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Keepers and Eisenhauer were both engineering students at Virginia Tech, and friends said they appeared to have bright futures.
The prosecutor, Mary Pettit, told the court that the two plotted over dinner how they would abduct and kill Lovell.
“I was excited to be part of something secretive and special”, Keepers told FBI investigators, according to commonwealth prosecutor Mary Pettitt.
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. The 13-year-old was planning to expose their relationship, the official said, and investigators believe he stabbed her to prevent that.
Lovell was disappeared from her Blacksburg home on January 27, and authorities were especially concerned because the liver transplant recipient left behind her daily medication.
Keepers also told detectives where the child’s body had been dumped, Pettitt said.
Eisenhauer told Keepers how he would lure Nicole out of her home one night, take her to a remote location and use a knife to cut her throat, the prosecutor said.
On the night Lovell disappeared, Pettit said Eisenhauer watched her climb out her bedroom window and she said he was the last person to talk to Lovell on social media.
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.
After the murder, Keepers and Eisenhauer allegedly went to a Walmart in Wytheville to buy cleaning supplies with the girl’s body in the trunk of the vehicle, Pettitt said. Eisenhauer said he greeted her with a side hug and then brought her to Keepers, Pettitt said.
Pettitt did not suggest a possible motive in court, or describe the killing itself.
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.
Nicole’s parents, David Lovell and Tammy Weeks, attended the hearing but made no comments before leaving for her private funeral. She was first charged with improper disposal of a body and being an accessory after the fact.
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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”.
