In 2017, prosecutors say Aubrey Trail killed Sydney Loofe with an electrical line and cut her body into 14 pieces.
Local news stories say that a true-crime author helped a Nebraska death row inmate who killed and cut up a woman he met on Tinder get a jail nurse to pay him $25,000.
KLKN reported on Wednesday that Samantha Al-Rekabi was charged with criminal theft by blackmail in connection with the 2017 murder of 24-year-old Sydney Loofe. At the time, Al-Rekabi was working on a book about the murder.
Aubrey Trail, who was 56 years old, was found guilty of killing Loofe and given a death sentence. Prosecutors said he killed Loofe with an electrical cord and cut her body into 14 pieces, which he then dumped in ditches along country roads in Nebraska.
Trail’s lover, who is now 29 years old, matched with Loofe on Tinder and asked for group sex with both the victim and Trail.
In her search for information about Loofe’s murder for her true-crime book, Al-Rekabi seems to have become friends with Trail and helped him steal the jail nurse in 2021, before he was sentenced that same year, according to a statement that KLKN was able to get.
Trail finally started talking to the nurse, who told him that she and her husband were having problems. Trail is accused of using the nurse to get her to pay him $25,000 to stop a hitman from killing her husband.
He may have also talked the nurse into sneaking him things like a phone, chewing tobacco, and a gun into jail, according to the Lincoln Journal-Star.
In her search for information for her book, the suspect also made friends with the nurse. KETV got court papers that say they thought of themselves as “true crime fans.”
According to the Journal-Star, Trail told the nurse, “Bring me a gun so I can just kill everyone.” He said this in phone calls that were given to the police.
Al-Rekabi was with the nurse when she took the money from her bank account, so he must have been there.
KETV reported that Al-Rekabi told the Nebraska State Patrol that Trail tricked her into swindling the nurse out of money by telling her that he would kill her or her son, who was also an inmate, if she didn’t go along with the alleged extortion plan. In 2021, the nurse quit her job.
“Trail also said he wanted to sneak a gun into the prison,” a detective wrote in the statement, which was published in the Lincoln Journal-Star. He and Al-Rekabi also talked about the “compromised staff member” and how she wanted her husband killed so that he couldn’t get her salary through a divorce.
Investigators’ phone calls, on the other hand, seem to show Al-Rekabi “joking” with Trail about how they were going to steal $25,000. Documents obtained by KETV show this.
The true-crime author went to court in Lancaster County on Wednesday, where a judge told the police to hold him on a $5,000 bond.