Sydney Loofe: The Second Tinder Date That Became A Missing-Person Case
Dating, Deception And Claims Of Witchcraft
On 16 November 2017, Sydney Loofe failed to arrive for work at a hardware store in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her family and friends knew she had been on a date two evenings earlier and had arranged to see the same woman again. Now the normal points of contact in her life were falling silent.
The woman she had met through Tinder called herself Audrey. That name gave investigators somewhere to begin, but it did not yet tell them whom they were looking for. Sydney was 24. What her loved ones needed was an explanation for her absence, and someone who could say where she had gone after the second date.
The case behind Swipe Right on the Devil, the documentary directed by Brian Biegel and released on 22 October 2026, starts with that narrow gap between an ordinary plan and an unexplained disappearance. Its publicity emphasises witchcraft and manipulation. The investigation itself would depend on something more concrete: identifying people, testing accounts and establishing the sequence of their movements.
The First Date Had Ended With Her Coming Home
Sydney had been looking for a relationship. In recollections reported alongside the documentary, friends described her wish to meet someone who wanted a serious connection. That context matters because a dating profile was not simply a doorway into danger. For her, it was a way to pursue the companionship that other people routinely expect to find.
There was also a reason to agree to another meeting: the first date had ended with her returning home. The following day she went to work. Nothing about those facts, viewed from her position, supplied the knowledge investigators would later acquire. Reading the story backwards can make ordinary decisions appear laden with warnings that were not actually available.
On 14 November, Sydney sent Audrey her apartment address. The woman collected her shortly after 5.30pm, and they spent almost two hours driving around Lincoln before Sydney returned home at approximately 7.15pm. They made plans to meet again the following evening. These were details investigators could reconstruct through the evidence, rather than imagined scenes from a private encounter.
After Sydney was reported missing, a friend located the dating profile and supplied it to police. Recent reporting identifies that friend as Brooklyn McCrystal and describes her efforts to make contact through Tinder. The important breakthrough was practical: a person remembered as a first name and a profile could become someone investigators could identify.
The Name Behind The Profile
Police established that Audrey was Bailey Boswell. They also learned that Boswell lived with an older man, Aubrey Trail, in a basement apartment in Wilber, a town south-west of Lincoln. The enquiry now extended beyond the woman Sydney had expected to meet. Investigators had an address and another person whose connection to the evening required examination.
When police telephoned Boswell on 17 November, she acknowledged the second date. Her account was that she had subsequently dropped Sydney at a friend’s home in Lincoln. If correct, that would move the search beyond Boswell: someone else might have seen Sydney, spoken to her or known what happened next.
It was an explanation that could be checked. Investigators could compare the claimed journey with phone activity, seek independent confirmation of the destination and establish whether Sydney had communicated afterwards. The last person known to have seen someone is an important witness, but that position alone does not establish responsibility for a disappearance.
A welfare check at the Wilber apartment on 18 November produced a different kind of observation. Nobody was inside, but officers noticed a strong smell of bleach. Residents upstairs reported that an overwhelming bleach smell had begun on the night of 15 November, the night of Sydney’s second date.
Cleaning products belong in ordinary homes. Their presence was not an answer. Their timing, however, gave investigators a reason to examine the apartment alongside the other information they were gathering. The crucial question was whether the smell reflected an unrelated domestic task or something connected with the missing woman.
The Phone That Stopped Communicating
As records accumulated, investigators reconstructed Sydney’s journey that Wednesday. Boswell collected her shortly before 7pm. They travelled to the Wilber apartment, arriving at approximately 8.08pm. Sydney’s phone last communicated with a mobile tower at 8.32pm. After that, the network no longer supplied the same kind of trail.
That final communication was a boundary in the evidence, not a precise account of what happened inside the apartment. A phone ceasing to communicate does not, by itself, establish why it stopped or what happened to its owner. It does establish a point after which investigators must rely on other sources.
The enquiry also examined two phones associated with Boswell and another associated with Trail. Location data, combined with other evidence, allowed investigators to compare movements rather than treating each person’s account in isolation. Patterns could be assessed across several devices, and particular journeys could be checked against physical locations and surveillance.
One journey on 16 November attracted particular attention. During the afternoon, the phones associated with Boswell and Trail travelled along county roads west of Wilber. For approximately three and a half hours, they were stationary or moving slowly along the route. The significance of that movement was not immediately visible on a map.
Location records cannot turn a telephone into an eyewitness. They do not automatically identify its carrier at every moment or explain what a person did after stopping. Their value here was that they gave investigators a geographically bounded lead: a stretch of roads and surrounding land that could be searched.
What The Searchers Found Beside The Roads
The search eventually brought investigators into rural ditches and fields. In December, they found a partially torn rubbish bag containing human remains. A severed arm bore a distinctive tattoo matching one known to belong to Sydney. Further searches uncovered additional remains and objects scattered across separate locations.
The recovered remains were formally identified as Sydney’s. Investigators ultimately documented 17 disposal sites. Thirteen body segments were recovered; the pathologist concluded that her body had been divided into fourteen. Most of the internal organs from her chest and abdomen were missing. Those findings transformed the search for Sydney into the investigation of her death.
The details are difficult to read, but their evidential significance is specific. The condition of the remains required specialists to distinguish deliberate cutting from damage caused by animals after disposal. The recovery locations also had to be documented carefully so that an object found in one place was not casually attributed to another.
Among the recovered items were pieces of Sydney’s driving licence and credit card, fragments of her phone, clothing and her car keys. Investigators also collected gloves, a towel, plastic sheeting, bedding and other material. The countryside held more than a body: it held objects that could potentially connect the disposal sites to people and premises.
A search of the Wilber apartment produced a fitted sheet resembling a flat sheet recovered outside, along with bleach and other items. No blood evidence was discovered in the apartment. That absence belonged in the account alongside the suspicious observations; investigators could not legitimately replace a negative result with an imagined positive one.
What The Examination Could Establish
The pathology examination supplied evidence that the scene alone could not. The pathologist concluded that Sydney had died through homicidal violence by strangulation. The findings included blood congestion in tissues of the head, pinpoint haemorrhages in the forehead and eyes, and bleeding through the tissue layers of the lower neck.
The pinpoint haemorrhages are known as petechiae. Here, they formed part of the pathologist’s overall assessment rather than functioning as a solitary diagnostic shortcut. Abraded bruises around Sydney’s wrists also suggested restraint. These were injuries with a different significance from the cutting and separation of the body.
The examination did not license a writer to reconstruct every minute of Sydney’s suffering. It established a cause of death and documented injuries. The available account does not justify invented dialogue, a precise duration of consciousness or a confident sequence for every action inside the apartment.
DNA testing added further connections, with different levels of certainty. Sydney was included as a contributor to DNA from blood on a glove, a towel and torn denim. She could not be excluded as a possible contributor on other material. Those formulations should remain distinct rather than being flattened into a claim that everything produced an identical match.
Trail was a possible contributor to DNA on an extension cord. Both Trail and Boswell were possible contributors on a large green shirt. Investigators also found a photograph on Boswell’s phone showing her wearing pyjamas similar to star-patterned trousers recovered during the searches. Each item had to be understood in combination with the wider record.
The central difficulty was becoming clearer. Discovering what happened to Sydney’s body did not automatically establish how the fatal encounter began, whether it had been planned, or each person’s role. Evidence of concealment and evidence of intention overlap, but they answer different questions.
The Hours Before Sydney Arrived
Investigators therefore examined the hours before the second date. On the morning of 15 November, Boswell and Trail had travelled near Sydney’s apartment and then along the route she took to work. Security footage showed Trail watching Sydney at the hardware store. He subsequently telephoned Boswell, who was waiting in the car park.
That observation connected Trail to Sydney before her arrival in Wilber. It introduced a new question about the apparent boundaries of the date: how much had been happening around Sydney that she had no reason to see? Her encounter with one woman now sat within movements involving two people.
Purchases made during the same day sharpened that question. The record lists cutting tools, plastic sheeting, rope, cleaning chemicals, rubbish bags and other supplies bought at several stores. Their timing mattered as much as their eventual relevance. These purchases preceded the second date; they were not all transactions made after Sydney disappeared.
The following morning, Boswell bought further cleaning products and rubbish bags. Taken separately, many of the items were ordinary retail goods. Considered alongside the preceding surveillance, the subsequent journey and the recovered material, they became part of an argument about preparation. Establishing that argument still required more than describing the purchases as sinister.
The Other Women Who Knew The Apartment
The enquiry also reached women whose experiences with Boswell and Trail predated Sydney’s disappearance. Three later testified in court, identified in the appellate judgment by the initials A.H., A.G. and K.B. Their accounts described relationships entered through the same dating application, followed by increasingly intrusive rules and disturbing conversations.
A.H. was twenty when she began communicating with Boswell in July 2017. She described an arrangement in which Trail provided an allowance and gifts while expecting sexual access, participation in the household and assistance with the couple’s coin and antiques business. She was required to seek permission and check in regularly.
According to her testimony, breaches of the rules led to physical punishment. She also described claims that Trail possessed supernatural abilities, including the capacity to read her mind and erase her memory. Boswell was presented as a witch within a group under his control. These were accounts of what people said and believed, not evidence that such powers existed.
A.H. testified that she was told killing someone would enable her to acquire powers and join the coven. She described being taken to a shop to look at another young woman, followed by a discussion about whether that woman would become her first victim. She eventually left the arrangement and said she was threatened with harm to herself and her family if she spoke.
A.G. described a similar financial arrangement, household rules and physical violence. Her testimony included conversations about torture, killing and making a recording of a person being killed. She said she left in October 2017 and remained silent because she feared retaliation against herself or her family.
The accounts gave the occult language a more concrete significance. Claims of extraordinary power appeared alongside ordinary means of control: money, punishments, demands for obedience and threats. A claim to read someone’s mind could make even private resistance feel unsafe. A threat against relatives could make departure seem insufficient to secure safety.
That is an interpretation of the described behaviour, not a clinical diagnosis. It does not require accepting the supernatural story or assuming every participant believed every claim equally. The evidence concerns how those claims were used within relationships and what witnesses said they were encouraged or threatened to do.
Another Mother Was Looking For Her Daughter
K.B.’s account brought the enquiry back to the days immediately surrounding Sydney’s disappearance. She had met Boswell in late October or early November and understood that a relationship with Boswell involved Trail as well. She described payments, rules and punishment, alongside conversations about violence.
Boswell and Trail had arranged to collect her on 16 November. Boswell postponed until the following day, texting that she was busy and complaining of tiredness and a sore shoulder. K.B. testified that after collecting her, the pair discussed finding someone she and Boswell could torture and kill while Trail watched.
During their travels, K.B. received a police voicemail prompted by her mother’s concern for her welfare. She said Boswell and Trail told her to switch off her phone. Later, she learned that a young woman was missing and that the pair were suspects. Boswell denied hurting the missing woman.
These accounts were serious allegations with obvious emotional force. They also created a fairness problem that could not be ignored: would a jury use the evidence to assess a specific accusation, or simply decide that people associated with disturbing beliefs and sexual behaviour must be guilty?
The Difference Between Disturbing Evidence And Proof
Boswell’s lawyers challenged the admission of the sexual and occult evidence. They argued that it was irrelevant, improper character evidence and unfairly prejudicial. The objection mattered because unconventional sexual relationships and beliefs are not substitutes for proof of a criminal act. Nor does association with an abusive person automatically establish participation in that person’s conduct.
The trial judge instructed jurors to consider the challenged material for motive or intent, rather than as proof of bad character. That distinction placed a limit on the prosecution’s use of the testimony. Its purpose was to illuminate the alleged plan and the participants’ intentions, not to invite a general verdict on their lifestyle.
The same discipline applied to the photographs. Boswell objected to graphic recovery and autopsy images as irrelevant, excessively prejudicial or repetitive. Some were excluded as cumulative. Those admitted were used to document where remains were found and explain the pathologist’s observations.
For readers, the equivalent discipline is to ask what a disturbing detail establishes. A documented injury may explain a medical conclusion. A purchase made before a meeting may bear on planning. An occult claim may explain a threat. Their emotional impact does not make these different forms of evidence interchangeable.
The defence position also challenged how responsibility should be divided. Boswell portrayed herself as controlled and manipulated by Trail. Trail, meanwhile, offered an account in which Sydney’s death was accidental and sought to absolve Boswell. Those positions had to be tested against the evidence of actions, communications and preparation.
The eventual question was therefore not whether something appalling had happened. The recovery and examination had answered that. It was whether the death had followed an unforeseen incident, as Trail claimed, or a deliberate agreement, as prosecutors alleged—and whether the record established Boswell’s participation.
What The Evidence Finally Established
The prosecution’s case was that Sydney Loofe had been deliberately selected and killed as part of a conspiracy between Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell. Separate juries accepted the murder cases against them. Trail was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy in July 2019; Boswell was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy and improper disposal of human skeletal remains in October 2020.
The outcome rested on a sequence that reached backwards from concealment into preparation. The pre-date observation of Sydney, purchases made before she arrived, movements afterwards, physical recoveries and witness testimony supplied mutually reinforcing parts of the case. The occult claims were one component of the evidence about motive and intent; the verdicts did not depend on believing in witchcraft.
The medical conclusion was strangulation. The cutting of Sydney’s body and dispersal of her remains were separate acts that helped explain the subsequent search and forensic findings. The court record supports a planned killing and the responsibility established by the convictions. It does not require an embellished account of a ritual or an invented reconstruction of every moment.
Trail received a death sentence on 9 June 2021. Boswell’s sentencing panel reached a different outcome. Two judges found the alleged aggravating circumstance proved, but a third disagreed. The necessary unanimity for that stage of the death-penalty process was absent.
On 8 November 2021, Boswell received life imprisonment for murder, with consecutive sentences of fifty years for conspiracy and two years for improper disposal. Her different sentence did not amount to an acquittal or a finding that she had merely been an innocent bystander. The murder conviction remained the foundation of her imprisonment.
The Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed Trail’s convictions and sentence in 2022. It affirmed Boswell’s convictions and sentences on 10 May 2024, rejecting her evidentiary challenges. The court concluded that the challenged testimony could properly be admitted for motive and intent and that the photographic evidence had legitimate explanatory purposes.
Later litigation requires a separate update. In May 2025, Nebraska’s Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of Trail’s post-conviction motion as time-barred. On 20 April 2026, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear his petition concerning that ruling. That refusal was a decision not to take the case, rather than a fresh trial of the evidence.
As of 27 October 2026, Trail remains on death row and Boswell remains imprisoned under her life sentence. Boswell also has a pending appeal concerning the dismissal of a post-conviction application, scheduled for oral argument before Nebraska’s Supreme Court on 3 November 2026. Its listed issues concern procedural treatment, filing deadlines and counsel; the listing itself changes none of her convictions.
The pending proceedings show why a documentary ending and a legal ending need not coincide. A completed series can present verdicts and sentences while later applications continue through the courts. Reporting that distinction neither weakens the established outcome nor pre-empts an argument that judges have yet to decide.
The title Swipe Right on the Devil gives this story a recognisable point of entry. Yet placing all the emphasis on Sydney’s swipe risks mislocating the decisive choices. She sought a date. The evidence concerned what other people arranged around that ordinary wish, including conduct she could not have assessed from a profile.
Her disappearance became traceable because friends knew her plans, a profile could be identified, devices left records and investigators followed those records into the physical world. The claims of hidden powers ultimately had to meet evidence that could be examined, challenged and tested.
Sydney did not need to believe in anyone’s supernatural abilities for their actions to endanger her. She only needed to believe that the woman who had brought her home after a first date wanted to see her again.
