CHRISTIANSBURG, Va. — A former Virginia Tech freshman charged in connection with the kidnapping and killing of a 13-year-old girl described her involvement in the girl’s death as being part of “the best club in the world,” a police detective testified at a hearing in the case Friday. 
 
 Police detectives said that the freshman, Natalie Keepers, helped her classmate, David Eisenhauer, plot the killing and hide the body of Nicole Madison Lovell, 13, because Ms. Keepers enjoyed the excitement of the secret bond she and Mr. Eisenhauer shared. 
 
 “She told us,” Detective Ryan Hite of the Blacksburg Police said in testimony, “that she was part of a secret club, and it was the best club in the world because Eisenhauer understood her.” 
 
 Ms. Keepers referred to Mr. Eisenhauer as a “sociopath,” Detective Hite testified. Ms. Keepers, the detective said, described herself as “a sociopath in training.” 
 
 Nicole disappeared from her Blacksburg home on Jan. 27 and was found dead three days later in North Carolina. Mr. Eisenhauer, 18, was arrested at his dorm on Jan. 30. Ms. Keepers was arrested the next day. The case gained widespread attention because of the shocking nature of the allegations and the role that social media played in bringing Mr. Eisenhauer and Nicole together. 
 
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 A Montgomery County judge certified accessory-before-the-fact and body concealment charges against Ms. Keepers, 19, and a murder charge for Mr. Eisenhauer during a hearing on Friday. 
 
 The police said that Ms. Keepers and Mr. Eisenhauer turned off their cellphones and stowed them in the console of Mr. Eisenhauer’s Lexus sedan during crucial hours, apparently in an effort to avoid an electronic record of their whereabouts. But they still left an electronic trail that included GPS data, store surveillance footage and grisly exchanges of instant messages. 
 
 “I smell like cleaning supplies,” Ms. Keepers texted Mr. Eisenhauer after she helped move and wash the child’s body, according to the police testimony. “I don’t want to smell like that. I want to take a shower.” 
 
 Wearing glasses and a purple hoodie, Ms. Keepers entered the courtroom with her chin planted against her chest. As the evidence against her mounted, however, she looked at the witnesses. Mr. Eisenhauer, dressed in a black suit, displayed no obvious emotion during the three-hour hearing. 
 
 Neither team of lawyers for the two called witnesses of their own. The teams spent comparatively little time questioning the electronic road map portrayed by the prosecution. 
 
 “As long as they don’t find the body for a week, it will never be found,” the police read from a transcript of messages they said were downloaded from Mr. Eisenhauer’s phone. “We definitely did overkill. Always do overkill when your life is on the line.” 
 
 As a capacity crowd in the fourth-floor courtroom watched, a video screen depicted the movements captured by a Garmin GPS device removed from Mr. Eisenhauer’s car. A detective pointed out dates and times that appeared to match the prosecution’s narrative: a visit to a Walmart to buy a shovel, a trip to the local Cook Out restaurant to plot the killing and a pre-disappearance drive past the site thought to be where the killing took place — a remote, mountainous area about a dozen miles north of the Virginia Tech campus. The GPS device showed the car stopping in the vicinity of Nicole’s house around midnight on the evening she disappeared. 
 
 Friday’s hearing also included accusations by police investigators that they found blood on the road that investigators have pinpointed as the killing site, on the inside and outside of Mr. Eisenhauer’s car, as well as a bloody palm print on the shovel. 
 
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 The administrator of the state medical examiner’s office in Roanoke described the death as a homicide caused by a stab wound to the neck. 
 
 In her taped confessions, conducted over two days, Ms. Keepers moved from denying any knowledge of the crime to providing motives and key locations in the plot, a detective testified. 
 
 The prosecution, led by Mary Pettitt, the commonwealth’s attorney for Montgomery County, said that there was no reason to believe that Ms. Keepers was present but that she did help plan the killing, choose a murder site and then move the body of a girl she had never met. 
 
 With Friday’s ruling, the case advances to a grand jury, which meets on July 26. ||||| Virginia Tech Suspect in Death of 13-Year-Old Girl Allegedly Told Police She Was a 'Sociopath in Training' 
 
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 Blacksburg Police Department via AP 
 
 Disturbing Text Messages 
 
 Former Virginia Tech University students David Eisenhauer and Natalie Keepers are accused of doing the unthinkable : meeting 13-year-old Nicole Lovell online, and luring her from her home to kill her.But what prompted the grisly alleged crime? Although authorities have yet to release a potential motive, a portrait of the pair emerged at a probable cause hearing last Friday.During the hearing, a police detective testified that Keepers , 19, called 18-year-old Eisenhauer a "sociopath" and referred to herself as a "sociopath in training."Detective Ryan Hite of the Blacksburg Police testified in Friday's hearing, portraying the defendants as bonded together through their alleged remorselessness. "[Keepers] told us that she was part of a secret club," Hite testified. "And it was the best club in the world because Eisenhauer understood her," Hite testified. Nicole Lovell was found dead on January 30. Eisenhauer, then 18, was arrested at his Virginia Tech dorm the same day. Keepers was arrested the following day. They have remained in jail ever since.On Friday, Judge Robert Viar Jr. found probable cause to move the case forward. A grand jury will meet later this year to determine whether the two teens should be indicted. Eisenhauer faces charges of kidnapping and first-degree murder. Keepers has been charged with being an accessory to kidnapping and murder.In the probable cause hearing, Hite alleged that Keepers described how she and Eisenhauer had purchased cleaning supplies and a shovel. She also allegedly scoped out a rural site just over the North Carolina state line where Lovell would be killed and her body dumped.Hite also introduced text messages between Eisenhauer and Keepers in which they allegedly discussed tactics for getting away with the crime. "It will never be traced," Eisenhauer allegedly wrote to Keepers. In another text message, he wrote, "Always go overkill, especially when your life is on the line."The grand jury will convene on July 26.PEOPLE's calls to the lawyers of Eisenhauer and Keepers were not immediately returned.
– The alleged killers of a 13-year-old Virginia girl sat in court Friday as police painted a grim portrait of them, People reports. Former Virginia Tech students Natalie Keepers, 19, and David Eisenhauer, 18, heard how Nicole Lovell was allegedly lured from her home on Jan. 27, murdered by Eisenhauer, and dumped beside a rural North Carolina road. Keepers "told us that she was part of a secret club, and it was the best club in the world because Eisenhauer understood her," testified Detective Ryan Hite. Keepers called Eisenhauer a "sociopath," per Hite, and referred to herself as "a sociopath in training." Investigators say Keepers broke into tears and gave them a detailed confession but denied involvement in the actual killing, the Roanoke Times reports. Without giving a motive, investigators say Keepers and Eisenhauer planned Nicole's murder the day before she vanished. Eisenhauer denies killing Nicole, but he allegedly threw a bloody knife in the woods, got help from Keepers relocating the body, and joined her in washing their bloody clothes at a laundromat. The pair also left a trail of electronic evidence including store surveillance footage and instant messages, the New York Times reports. "It will never be traced," Eisenhauer is said to have texted Keepers. She texted him about smelling "like cleaning supplies" after they allegedly washed Nicole's body. "I don't want to smell like that," she added. "I want to take a shower." A judge at the probable cause hearing ruled there was enough evidence against them to proceed to a grand jury, which will convene July 26. (Nicole's mom says the girl met Eisenhauer on "some off-the-wall" website.)