BLACKSBURG, Va.—A Virginia Tech student who was initially accused of helping dispose of 13-year-old Nicole Lovell’s body is now believed by authorities to have played a bigger role in the girl’s stabbing death.
Just exactly what Natalie Keepers is accused of doing still hasn’t been explained. She faces a bail hearing Wednesday, a day after prosecutors added a more serious charge of being an accessory “before the fact” to first-degree murder. Her classmate, David Eisenhauer, is jailed on charges of kidnapping and murder.
Both Eisenhauer and Keepers graduated from nearby high schools in Maryland.
A neighbor said the seventh-grader told friends she would sneak out to meet her “boyfriend” David, an 18-year-old she met online through the Kik messaging app.
Nicole’s mother discovered her missing last Wednesday morning, setting off an intense hunt for the girl, who suffered bullying at school and online over her weight and a tracheotomy scar, and needed daily medication after surviving a liver transplant, lymphoma and a drug-resistant bacterial infection as a 5-year-old.
Police quickly zeroed in on Eisenhauer, and then found Nicole’s body Saturday, hidden off a North Carolina road, two hours south of campus.
Eisenhauer told police he believed the “truth will set me free” after he was arrested Saturday, but a police document did not elaborate on what he meant by the statement.
Stacy Snider, a neighbor whose 8-year-old twins played with Nicole, told The Associated Press that before she vanished, Nicole showed her girls Eisenhauer’s picture along with a thread of texts they had shared and said she would be sneaking out to meet him.
“She was talking about this boyfriend she had that was 18 and went to college, and his name was David, and showed some text messages off of a Kik and pictures. And that’s what the girls told the police officers when they asked.”
Snider said she learned all this from her girls only after Nicole vanished. “I would have told her mother. But we didn’t know nothing about it until she came up missing, unfortunately,” she said.
