A Nebraska man accused of fatally strangling a 24-year-old woman after wooing her through an online dating app with his girlfriend stunned the courtroom when he cut his own throat “several times” during his murder trial on Monday.
“Bailey is innocent, and I curse you all,” Aubrey Trail yelled in Saline County court on Monday, before reportedly slashing the right side of his neck. It was not immediately clear what Trail used to cut himself.
Trail, 51, is on trial for the first-degree murder of Sydney Loofe, who went missing for 19 days after a Tinder date. Her body was finally found in December 2017 in garbage bags scattered among ditches and farm fields in rural Nebraska. Prosecutors allege Trail conspired for weeks to lure Loofe to her death with the help of his 24-year-old girlfriend, Bailey Boswell.
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Both Trail and Boswell pleaded not guilty last July to first-degree murder and improper disposal of human skeletal remains. If convicted, they face the death penalty.
After cutting himself in court on Monday, Trail fell out of the wheelchair he has been using during the trial and onto the floor. According to reports from the courtroom, Trail appeared pale and was unresponsive as deputies rushed to him to administer first aid.
A stretcher was brought into the courtroom, and Trail was put into an ambulance to be taken to the hospital.
The outburst came in the second-week of the murder trial, during which prosecutors have argued Trail and his girlfriend messaged Loof on Tinder with the intent of “killing, torture and sex.” While Loofe was on a date with Boswell, Trail strangled the 24-year-old with an extension cord and then used a “fine-toothed saw” to dismember her body, prosecutors alleged. According to court documents, Trail confessed to the murder and told authorities Boswell helped clean up the crime scene.
Trail, who admitted he hid the 24-year-old’s body out of fear, pleaded guilty to disposing her body in June.
“This is more than a first-degree murder. This was a planned abduction to kill Sydney Loofe,” Nebraska Assistant Attorney General Sandra Allen said in her opening statements.
Nineteen days later, after an extensive search, authorities found Loofe’s body in several garbage bags, about an hour-and-a-half drive from her apartment complex just outside of Lincoln.
Trail’s court-appointed attorney, Joe Murray of Hebron, argued in his opening statements that Loofe was a willing participant in a sexual encounter with Trail and two other women and was accidentally choked to death.
“Aubrey Trail is not a particularly nice man,” Murray said, adding that Trail’s confession proves he told “the truth” that Loofe’s death was “completely accidental.”
Murray also argued that the trio previously knew each other, and Loofe agreed to take part in Trail’s sexual fantasy for money.
“There was nothing illegal. It was all consensual,” he said.
In a Facebook video after her arrest, Boswell explained she met Loofe on Tinder and they “drove around Lincoln, smoked weed [and] had a great time.” She took Loofe on another date the following evening, she said.
“I gave her my number. We were planning to go to the casino that weekend,” Boswell said in the video. “I haven’t heard from her since.”
Boswell’s trial is scheduled to begin in October.
