From yesterday's opening statements:
Defense attorney John Lichtenstein told jurors that Keepers “planned this event” and “was at the scene of this murder,” bringing into question: “Who actually committed this murder?”
Montgomery County, Va., Commonwealth’s Attorney Mary Pettitt told the jurors in her opening statements that Eisenhauer’s DNA was found under Nicole’s fingernails and her blood was found in the trunk of his car.
She said Nicole, a seventh grader, was self conscious about her medical complications that left her with a scar on her neck and stomach, but that January night, she had “a secret date.” Nicole pushed her nightstand in front of her door and planned to sneak out the window and meet up with the older college guy she had been messaging online for months. Pettitt also said the two had seen each other at least once before.
That same night, Pettitt said, Eisenhauer has “a problem and his problem is Nicole Lovell.”
He had spent 30 minutes the day before, the prosecutor said, searching things like “Knock out drugs”; “How long does it take to burn a body”; and “How does tv serial killer Dexter get rid of bodies.”
Pettitt also said Eisenhauer and Keepers talked about switching out Nicole’s medication to cyanide pills, drove around looking for the area to carry out the murder, and went to Walmart to buy a garden shovel.
Shortly after 1 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 27, Pettitt said Eisenhauer arrived at Nicole’s apartment to pick her up, before he took her into the woods and “coldly and ruthlessly stabs Nicole, not once, not twice, but 14 times, he stabs her in the chest and then her throat.”
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Lichtenstein told the jurors that the Commonwealth’s evidence tries to pin the murder on Eisenhauer in a “circumstantial way.” Instead, he said, Keepers was “exhilarated” and “excited” about this murder. She admitted to police, he said, everything about her involvement in the murder with the “sole exception” of being at the scene.
Keepers had a fascination with a demonic fiction author, he said, and was “deeply motivated to commit this.” While Eisenhauer was only interested in wiping clean the data on his phone showing communications with Nicole, Keepers wanted a “more permanent solution,” Lichtenstein said. In Keepers’s dorm room, he said, police found Nicole’s Minions blanket, now bloody, along with other belongings from Nicole.
This behavior, along with a shovel with Keepers’s bloody fingerprints, is enough reasonable doubt for a not-guilty verdict, he told the jurors.
“Could this have happened another way?” he asked.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...91602206fb7_story.html?utm_term=.e684a661e8ca
