Man Accused of Killing Girlfriend's Tinder Date Attempts to Slit His Throat During Murder Trial
The suspected killer of Sydney Loofe, the Nebraska woman who disappeared after an online date, went to extreme lengths to declare the innocence of his alleged accomplice in court on Monday.
Immediately after a witness left the stand during Monday’s hearing at Saline County Courthouse in Wilber, Aubrey Trail suddenly began yelling about his girlfriend Bailey Boswell’s innocence before trying to slit his throat with an unknown object.
In courtroom footage obtained by Ohama World-Herald, Trail can be heard shouting off-camera, “Bailey is innocent, and I curse you all!” just before he dragged the object, which appeared to be some kind of small blade, across the side of his neck and fell from his wheelchair.
The 52-year-old defendant has been in a wheelchair since being incarcerated after suffering two heart attacks and a stroke, according to the local outlet.
Chaos then ensued as multiple Saline County officers rushed towards Trail, who reportedly had blood dripping from his neck, and attempted to remove the object from his possession.
After the unexpected incident, Trail was rushed to the hospital while a cleaning crew was called in to clean up the blood on the courtroom floor. Before being loaded onto the ambulance’s stretcher, Trail appeared to be unconscious, the local outlet reports.
RELATED: Young Woman Allegedly Strangled and Dismembered by Duo After Online Date: Officials
One of Trail’s court-appointed defense attorneys, however, said on Monday after the incident that his client expected to be discharged from the hospital within the evening and would be present in court on Tuesday morning.
“We still think we can get a fair trial,” Hebron attorney Ben Murray told the Ohama World-Herald.
Murray and representatives at Saline County Courthouse did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Saline County District Judge Vicky Johnson later demanded that Trail be handcuffed for the rest of the trial “for obvious reasons,” and said the trial would resume as expected on Tuesday.
She also ordered jurors to “disregard [Trail’s] outburst … and not consider it in your deliberations.”
This isn’t the first time that trial has been disrupted in the past week. According to the Omaha World-Herald, testimony was suddenly halted last Wednesday without reason. It was later revealed that Trail was ill and unable to sit in the courtroom.
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Trail and Boswell, 24, were charged with first-degree murder and improper disposal of human skeletal remains last June after allegedly killing of Loofe in Nov. 2017.
The 24-year-old was reported missing by her family on Nov. 16 after failing to show up for her shift that day at a home improvement store in Lincoln. Her remains were eventually recovered in December, three weeks after she vanished.
Authorities believe she was killed either on Nov. 15 or 16, after she and Boswell met on the Tinder dating app and exchanged about 140 messages in the days before Loofe disappeared, according to criminal complaints and supporting probable cause affidavits in the case, the Omaha World-Herald reported.
The two women had gone on a date Nov. 14 and planned to go out again the next day when, on the morning of Nov. 15, surveillance video captured Boswell and Trail purchasing items at a Home Depot in Lincoln that authorities think were used in the victim’s “dismemberment and disposal,” the court documents stated.
The couple was named by authorities as “persons of interest” in the case but initially denied any involvement, going so far as to post an online video titled “our side of the story” before they were arrested.
“We’re not trying to defend anything, we’re not trying to make you believe anything,” Trail said in the nearly 10-minute clip while sitting with Boswell in what looks to be a parked car. “We just feel we should get to say our side since everyone else gets to say theirs.”
While the two were behind bars on unrelated charges the following February, Trail made the startling claim that he had accidentally strangled Loofe during a consensual sexual encounter that also involved two other women — but not Boswell, he said.
“It was suffocation,” he said in an interview with a World-Herald reporter, whom he called to share his account of the incident.
Loofe had allegedly agreed to be part of a sexual fantasy with Trail and the two other women while Boswell was passed out from drugs in another room, he said.
“It wasn’t supposed to go to the extreme it went, of course not,” he said. “It wasn’t meant that she was to die.”
Court documents show he also told police that he was the one who strangled Loofe and that Boswell allegedly helped him to clean the crime scene and dispose of the body afterward.
The murder charge against Trail and Boswell carries the possibility of either life in prison or the death sentence.
Trail’s hearing is expected to continue for two more weeks, while Boswell’s trial is scheduled to begin in October, according to the World-Herald.
