A young woman says until recently she believed she helped dispose of Sydney Loofe’s body and had suppressed the memory. The testimony in Aubrey Trail’s murder trial Tuesday included graphic descriptions of Trail’s alleged interest in torture and killing.
Fifty-two year-old Trail is charged with murdering 24-year old Sydney Loofe in 2017. Trail says the death was an accident during a sexual fantasy.
During his trial Tuesday, three young women testified that they were with Trail and co-defendant Bailey Boswell in the months before Loofe disappeared.
The judge has ordered the media not to identify the three women.
One woman told the jury she was with Trail and Boswell two days after Loofe was last seen, and that she spent almost a week with them traveling to hotels in Grand Island, Kearney, and Iowa.
She says on November 18, 2017, a Saturday, she's missing memories for large chunks of the day and woke up with scratches on her legs she couldn't explain. When she later learned about Sydney Loofe’s disappearance and discovery of her dismembered body, she worried for over a year that she had repressed a memory of helping Boswell and Trail dispose of it.
That would fit with the defense’s narrative that another woman was in the car with Trail and Boswell when they dumped trash bags with Loofe’s body parts in a rural part of Clay County.
But the witness says after speaking with prosecutors last week, she no longer believes she was there. Prosecutors say the evidence suggests Loofe’s body was dumped a few days before that - cell phone records show Boswell's phone in the area where Loofe's body was found on November 16.
All three women described eerily similar events: meeting Boswell on Tinder and meeting Trail soon after. All three said Trail paid for things like rent, clothes, manicures and more, in addition to a weekly allowance of up to $200.
Two of the women say they helped steal and sell antiques. All say they were punished with whips and choking if they didn’t do what they were told. The violence was usually part of a consensual dominant/submissive relationship, the women say, but they also say Trail and Boswell implied or explicitly threatened to kill them or their families.
The women also told the jury that both Trail and Boswell talked often about torture and killing. One witness says Trail showed her Boswell's "killing bag" with tools. Another said Trail told her to talk about torture during sex to help satisfy Boswell, and said Boswell talked often about fantasizing about dismembering a person.
They talked about Trail's so-called coven of witches - one woman was told she could become a witch if she killed someone and took their last breath. The other two were more skeptical of Trail's claims to be a vampire who could fly.
All three said Trail and Boswell asked them to kill at one point. One woman said they even picked out a target, twice, but didn't follow through either time.
Trail faces the death penalty if convicted of murder. Boswell’s trial is scheduled for September.