Prosecutor: Va. Tech students plotted girl's murder
BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Two engineering majors at Virginia Tech university carefully planned the kidnapping and killing of a 13-year-old girl, buying cleaning supplies and a shovel at separate Wal-Mart stores, and then hiding her body in the trunk of a Lexus, a prosecutor alleged on Thursday.
Montgomery County Commonwealth's Attorney Mary Pettitt described how authorities believe college freshmen David Eisenhauer and Natalie Keepers plotted the stabbing death of 13-year-old Nicole Lovell.
Pettitt did not suggest a possible motive, or describe the killing itself, but she said they planned for Eisenhauer to cut the girl's throat at a remote location.
Keepers is adamant that she was not present at the killing, but she "is in the same position as the person who carried out the murder," the prosecutor told Judge Robert Viar Jr.
Messages on the missing girl's phone led police to Eisenhauer, who initially denied his involvement, Pettitt said.
Eisenhauer later said he drove to the girl's home and watching her climb out of her window the day she vanished. He said he greeted her with a side hug and then brought her to Keepers, Pettitt said.
Eisenhauer, an 18-year-old freshman and distance runner at Virginia Tech, is jailed without bond on charges of kidnapping and first-degree murder.
Keepers, 19, was denied bail Thursday on charges that she aided Eisenhauer before and after the crime, and helped hide the body.
Nicole, whose body was recovered in North Carolina, two hours south of campus, was being remembered Thursday at a private funeral.
Those who knew the students beforehand reacted to the allegations with a uniform sense of shock.
Some of the most pointed comments came from a Facebook post attributed to Gaige Kern, a friend of Eisenhauer and a fellow distance runner at Virginia Tech.
"The David I knew had his faults, but this is beyond the scope of imagination," said the note, which was addressed to Eisenhauer. "Did something happen to you that would cause a complete change, or was this newly surfaced personality always there, lurking in the shadows, hiding amidst lies? And if it was, how did you hide it so well?"
The post also mentioned that Eisenhauer had a goal of working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops technology for the military. Kern told The Associated Press he wasn't ready to discuss the post or his friendship with Eisenhauer.
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. It's not clear when they met.
Eisenhauer, however, spent much of his childhood in Washington state, where he attended a small Christian school. His father was transferred to Maryland after his sophomore year, and his parents bought their $620,000 home in Columbia in 2013, property records show.
He started running competitively in middle school at Riverside Christian School in Yakima, Washington, which has just 320 students in preschool through 12th grade. Excelling in the classroom and on the track, he had an apparently seamless transition to Wilde Lake High School, which has 1,200 students.
His coach at Wilde Lake, Whitty Bass, raved about him in a feature for WMAR-TV, which aired last March.
"These are the ones you take a deep breath when you realize what you've got and say, 'Don't mess this up,'" Bass said.
Eisenhauer was redshirted for his freshman year in track at Virginia Tech, according to a sophomore teammate, Andrew Eason. In the WMAR feature, Eisenhauer said he hoped to redshirt so he could run in college for five years.
Keepers played junior varsity soccer at Hammond High School but wasn't a standout athlete like Eisenhauer. She joined the math team and Model United Nations, became a member of the National Honor Society and the National Science Honor Society, helped direct the musical "Seussical" and taught science at a summer Bible camp.
In 2014, she interned at a NASA facility in Maryland, and planned to double-major in aerospace and ocean engineering and naval engineering.
"My field of study is due to my fascination in the foundations of aircrafts, boats, and submarines. After college, I plan to hopefully get a job with the government or an aerospace or ocean company," she wrote in her LinkedIn profile.
At Virginia Tech, she joined a program for freshmen called the Hypatia Women in Engineering Learning Community. According to the school's website, participants live in the same dorm and are required to enroll in a semester-long seminar class where they talk about professional and personal development, academic success strategies and issues related to being women in male-dominated fields.
Those who knew her said she seemed like a normal teenager in every way.
"She was talkative, she had a lot of energy," said Mindy Niland, a 21-year-old student at Howard Community College. She said they were close in middle school, and that Keepers had slept over at her house. "We went shopping. She was really interested in guys. I don't remember her having any violent behavior."