A former Virginia Tech student has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for helping her friend plan the murder of 13-year-old girl.
Natalie Keepers, 21, was sentenced on Tuesday for her role in the 2016 fatal stabbing of Nicole Lovell.
Keepers was found guilty in September of being an accessory to first-degree murder and had earlier pleaded guilty to helping conceal Lovell’s body.
She helped her friend David Eisenhauer in planning Lovell’s death by buying a shovel, assisting in picking out a spot to commit the murder and texting him about their plans.
Natalie Keepers, 21, was sentenced on Tuesday for her role in the 2016 fatal stabbing of Nicole Lovell. She is pictured above during her trial in September
Keepers, of Laurel, Maryland, and Eisenhauer, of Columbia, Maryland, were both freshmen engineering students at the time of the killing.
Lovell was a Blacksburg middle school student.
Eisenhauer is currently serving a 50-year sentence after pleading no contest earlier this year to first-degree murder.
Prosecutors said Eisenhauer met Lovell online and talked to her for months before meeting her in person.
They said he killed her because he feared she would expose their relationship.
Lovell, who was a Blacksburg middle school student at the time, was stabbed and dumped in in North Carolina in 2016
Keepers helped her friend David Eisenhauer in planning Lovell’s death. Eisenhauer is currently serving a 50-year sentence after pleading no contest to first-degree murder
Keepers told police she and Eisenhauer talked about various ways to kill the girl.
‘He was bouncing so many ideas off my head, I couldn’t keep track of them all,’ she said in police video clips.
‘He was the one who officially developed the plan.’
Keepers admitted that she later helped dump Lovell’s body in North Carolina after Eisenhauer stabbed her.
She insisted that she wasn’t present for the actual killing.
A medical examiner testified that Lovell had 14 stab wounds, including a lethal wound to her neck.
Her remains were left beside a highway in North Carolina near the Virginia border.
Keepers helped Eisenhauer by buying a shovel, assisting in picking out a spot to commit the murder and texting him about their plans. They are pictured buying the shovel in January 2016