CHRISTIANSBURG — Natalie Marie Keepers pleaded guilty Tuesday to concealing the body of 13-year-old Nicole Madison Lovell, a legal maneuver that her attorneys hoped would limit the evidence of the more serious charge of helping plan Lovell’s murder.
Keepers, 21, of Laurel, Maryland, is scheduled to begin a two-week jury trial on Sept. 17 on a charge of being an accessory before the fact to first-degree murder. If convicted, she faces a sentence of up to life in prison.
The concealment charge carries a maximum sentence of five years. At Tuesday’s hearing in Montgomery County Circuit Court, Judge Robert Turk found Keepers guilty of concealing a body and said he would decide a sentence after the September trial.
Lovell was a student at Blacksburg Middle School when she was killed in the early hours of Jan. 27, 2016. In February, David Edmond Eisenhauer, 21, of Columbia, Maryland, stopped his jury trial on charges of first-degree murder and concealing a body by changing his pleas from not guilty to no contest.
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Turk, who also oversaw Eisenhauer’s case, convicted Eisenhauer on both charges and in June sentenced him to serve 50 years in prison. The judge suspended another 25 years of incarceration.
Keepers and Eisenhauer were freshmen in Virginia Tech’s engineering program at the time of Lovell’s death. According to evidence presented at Eisenhauer’s trial and in earlier hearings in Keepers’ case, Eisenhauer said he’d met Lovell at a party and continued a relationship with her via Kik messages. Late on the night of Jan. 26, prosecutors said, Lovell climbed out the window of her home in the Lantern Ridge apartment complex in Blacksburg and met Eisenhauer, who took her to a wooded area in Montgomery County and stabbed her to death.
In recorded interviews with investigators played in earlier hearings, Keepers said that she and Eisenhauer talked about killing Lovell and she chose a location for the girl’s death, but Eisenhauer went to a nearby spot instead.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Commonwealth’s Attorney Mary Pettitt summarized the concealment accusation against Keepers, saying she told investigators that she helped load Lovell’s body into Eisenhauer’s Lexus, bought cleaning supplies with him at a Walmart in Wytheville, and eventually left Lovell on a hillside in Surry County, North Carolina. Bleach wipes and other cleaning supplies were used to attempt to remove evidence from Lovell’s body, Pettitt said.
Lovell’s attorneys argued that Tuesday’s conviction on the concealment charge should bar much of the evidence the prosecution might present at the trial — because that evidence pertained to concealment but not to the accessory before the fact allegation. It would be unfairly prejudicial for jurors to hear anything about the concealment of Lovell’s body when considering whether Keepers helped plan the killing, defense attorneys Kris Olin and John Robertson of Blacksburg said.
“Ms. Keepers’ involvement in the two crimes is separate and distinct. While the crimes share allegations of a common principal and victim, there are no common elements,” a motion filed by Olin and Robertson said.
In his argument Tuesday, Olin told Turk that a wide-ranging list of evidence — including Keepers’ own statements to police about why Lovell’s bloody Minions blanket was in Keepers’ dorm room — should be kept out of the September trial.
Olin and Robertson asked Turk to bar autopsy photos, pictures of where Lovell’s body was found, Walmart videos and receipts from Keepers and Eisenhauer’s purchase of cleaning supplies, hair and other physical evidence taken from Lovell and Keepers, evidence taken from a pond on Tech’s campus and from Keepers’ dorm room, and evidence found at the site where Lovell’s body was discovered and from dumpsters where cleaning supplies and other items were left.
The attorneys also asked Turk to bar testimony about the physical evidence or Keepers’ own recorded statements about the evidence.
Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Patrick Jensen said jurors should be able to consider much of the evidence the defense wanted to block because planning Lovell’s murder and concealing her body were “parts of a common crime.”
“It may be prejudicial because it shows she’s guilty,” Jensen said.
Olin based much of the defense argument on what he said was a day-long gap between Keepers and Eisenhauer’s last contact before Lovell’s murder and the steps taken to hide her body. The time gap made the two alleged criminal acts separate, he said.
Jensen said the time between contacts was much less.
Turk sounded skeptical about the defense argument, asking if it wasn’t really “all one continuous action.” When Olin insisted that it wasn’t, Turk said that he would take the defense motion to bar the evidence under advisement.
The judge said he would wait until the trial itself, then decide separately about each piece of proposed evidence.
He told attorneys that on the first day of trial, he expected them to be ready at 8:30 a.m. to start selecting jurors.