Here is the cut & paste text from the article:
2 women contacted Lincoln police about Aubrey Trail's activity months before he killed Sydney Loofe
LINCOLN — Months before Sydney Loofe was killed, two young women living in Lincoln reported to authorities suspicions of a couple running a sex trafficking ring out of Wilber, Nebraska.
The couple, the women later learned, were Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell, who were charged in Loofe’s slaying and dismemberment.
And when their roommate testified two weeks ago in Trail’s murder trial, the two women learned that their roommate had been participating in more than just sexual encounters.
“We knew that (Trail and Boswell) were dangerous, but she hadn’t told us that they were hunting for women to torture and kill them,” said one of the women.
The two 21-year-old women, who now live in Chadron, Nebraska, spoke on the condition that their names be withheld out of concern for their safety. The judge in the Trail trial ordered reporters not to reveal the name of the roommate as well as two other young women who testified about their travels and conversations with Trail and Boswell to protect their privacy.
The story that the two women relayed to The World-Herald had chilling similarities to the case of Loofe, who disappeared on Nov. 16, 2017, after going on a date arranged via the Internet dating app Tinder.
Trail, a 52-year-old ex-convict,
was found guilty Wednesday of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Court proceedings later this year will determine
whether he’s sentenced to death or life in prison. Boswell, 25, faces trial in October on charges of first-degree murder and improper disposal of human remains.
The two women said they went to authorities on July 31, 2017 — more than three months before Loofe disappeared — out of concern for their roommate. She’d told them a couple of weeks earlier that she’d met a “sugar daddy” after going on a Tinder date with a woman who called herself “Jessie,” who was actually Boswell.
The roommate, they said, came back from Wilber after her first meeting with the couple with $200 in her pocket and her fingernails professionally manicured. Later, there were other gifts, like lingerie and high-heeled shoes. The roommate eventually said she “loved” the couple, but she also told of “rules” she had to follow, such as wearing no clothes in the apartment shared by the couple, no sex with anyone else, and not sharing photographs of the couple.
Eventually, the stories the roommate told about staying with “Jessie” and “daddy” became darker, the two women said, including talk of witchcraft and boasts that the couple had killed people in the past and were willing to kill someone if their roommate wanted them dead.
“I told her this is dangerous and you need to get out of it,” one women said she told the roommate. “(The roommate) said if she’d heard the same stories that she’d be scared, too. But she wasn’t.”
Their roommate, the women felt, was no longer just boasting about her “great” life with the couple, but was possibly being groomed for sex trafficking.
“I told her this sounds like a poster for sex trafficking that you see in middle school,” one of the women said.
The two women assembled their roommate’s stories on 30 index cards and went to University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus police. A Lincoln police investigator was called in, who interviewed the women, they said, for more than an hour at the campus police station.
The women relayed the stories told by the roommate, gave the detective a description of the black car used to pick up their roommate, and told him to check in Wilber, because that’s the location of a Snapchat photo their roommate had shown them of new shoes that had been purchased for her. The roommate obscured the faces of the couple in the photo.
“We asked him not to talk to (the roommate) because we thought it would put her in danger, and we knew she wasn’t going to talk ... she told us she loved them,” one of the women said. “We were also trying to protect ourselves, too. We were still living with (the roommate).”
“We thought it was sex trafficking,” the other woman said.
But the investigator said he couldn’t do anything unless they had information that the couple, or their roommate, had violated the law. He seemed more interested, they said, that the roommate had smoked some powerful marijuana with “Jessie.”
A Lincoln police spokeswoman confirmed that a detective had met with the two women but said their “limited” information about unknown people involved in suspicious activities at an unknown location in Wilber didn’t meet “the burden of proof” for further action to be taken by law enforcement.
“A detective was assigned to the case and thoroughly followed up on the information that was provided,” said the spokeswoman, Angela Sands.
That, Sands said, included a follow-up call to the women by a detective on Oct. 11, 2017.
The investigator, she said, was “advised (that) the victim was safe and no longer hanging around the suspicious people.” The women, Sands said, had “no new information on the location or names of those involved.”
The women said they don’t recall that follow-up but distinctly remember providing police with the roommate’s phone number, with the request that it not be used except in case of emergency.
The two women, in recent telephone interviews, said they felt they’d provided enough information for police to at least drive to Wilber and ask around.
“The investigator asked at least twice if (our roommate) was messing with us,” one of the women said. “No. We’re scared that she might die.”
They said that they moved out of their roommate’s apartment after their initial report to police. The roommate, they said, eventually left Trail and Boswell and moved back to Chadron by October 2017.
They said that they’d heard from the roommate about the FBI and Lincoln police coming to Chadron to interview her after Loofe disappeared in November 2017, but the roommate had never relayed the darkest details of her time with Trail and Boswell. They said that they learned those details later, when the roommate testified at the trial.
The roommate testified that Trail, who referred to himself as the “vampire,” eventually told her that to become one of his “witches,” she needed to kill someone “and take their last breath.” Trail added that she would gain even more “powers” if the victim was tortured for two to three hours beforehand.
In August 2017, the woman told jurors, Trail led her and Boswell to a Walmart in Beatrice, Nebraska, where they met a short, blond-haired woman whom Trail and Boswell had met via Tinder. She testified that Trail asked her if she wanted the woman to be her first “kill.”
Days later, Trail said the purported victim had to leave town and the group would have to “save her for another time.” After that, Trail told her that he wanted to kill another “witch” in their group.
The woman said that while she was in the group, she never saw Trail and Boswell carry out a ritualistic slaying, which she had been told was supposed to happen in a secluded, wooded area when the moon stage was right.
The two women interviewed by the newspaper said they no longer have contact with their former roommate. Both said they have a newfound wariness about lining up dates on social media.
Aubrey Trail’s full testimony is available at this link.
