Nineteen-year-old David Eisenhauer was indicted by a grand jury on charges of first-degree murder, abduction and hiding the body of 13-year-old Nicole Lovell, Montgomery County Commonwealth's Attorney Mary Pettit said in a statement yesterday.
Natalie Keepers, also 19, was charged with being an accessory to kidnapping and murder and with helping hide the body, the commonwealth's attorney said.
Trial dates in March were set Tuesday in both cases, Pettitt said. Eisenhauer and Keepers both face up to life in prison, she said.
Prosecutors would have had to show he abducted her with the intent to sexually defile her in order to pursue a capital murder charge against him, she said.
Also Read
Attorneys for Keepers and Eisenhauer did not immediately respond to messages left at their offices and emails seeking comment yesterday.
Authorities have not provided clues about a motive. But a friend of Eisenhauer told The Roanoke Times in May that Eisenhauer texted him about meeting a teenage girl at a party and later learning that she was underage.
A neighbor told The Associated Press in February that Nicole told 8-year-old friends before she vanished from her mother's home that she planned to sneak out to meet her 18-year-old "boyfriend," who she said was named David.
Lovell's disappearance in January set off a massive, days-long search. The girl, who suffered from bullying at school and online over her weight and a tracheotomy scar, needed daily medication after surviving a liver transplant, lymphoma and a drug-resistant bacterial infection as a child.