His story was to engineer a twisted plan from which he would emerge as the knight in shining armour.
Despite having a girlfriend, the young father had become obsessed with a local teenager, 15-year-old Nichole Cable. The popular teen knew Kyle but wasn’t interested in him.
So Kyle hatched a plan...
He would kidnap Nichole and later discover and ‘rescue’ her.
In his mind, it meant he would be seen in his town as a hero, and maybe Nichole would even fall for him.
In May 2013, Kyle set up a fake Facebook account so he could chat to Nichole without her knowing who he was.
He used the name and identity of Bryan Butterfield, who was someone his current girlfriend, Sarah Mersinger, had once dated. Nichole also knew Bryan.
It worked, and Nichole was soon chatting to Kyle online, thinking that he was Bryan.
Then, on May 12, the fake Bryan spoke to Nichole via Facebook and the pair arranged to meet at the end of her long driveway, on a remote dirt road.
Of course, it was actually Kyle who was there to greet Nichole.
After that, Nichole’s family never saw her again.
When they realised she was missing, her mother, Kristine Wiley, stepdad, Jason Wiley, and three younger sisters, launched a huge search.
Photos of Nichole were plastered throughout the surrounding neighbourhood, saying she’d last been seen wearing jeans and a pink top.
Kyle went over to Nichole’s family home, even offering to babysit the younger girls while Kristine was out appealing for news.
He, like many others in the local area, was interviewed by police.
As his girlfriend, Sarah, spoke to officers, she got the impression that they thought Kyle was somehow involved.
Confronting Kyle, she asked him what he’d done.
‘He told me that he had killed Nichole,’ Sarah said.
His planned abduction had gone wrong.
Sarah did not immediately go to police and on May 20 – eight days after Nichole’s disappearance – her naked body was found buried under leaves and sticks in woodland about 30km from her home.
She had died from asphyxiation.
Kyle’s DNA was found under Nichole’s fingernails, and Kyle also had scratches on his face.
And when the real Bryan Butterfield heard about the fake Facebook profile, he alerted investigators to it.
He told them that he suspected Kyle had created it, and that he knew he wanted to have sex with Nichole but that she had refused his advances.
The evidence was mounting and the final nail in the coffin was when Sarah came forward with the confession Kyle had made to her.
Later, Kyle’s brother, Dustin, also came forward, telling police the full story.
Kyle had arranged for Nichole to meet him down the road from her house.
Then, he’d waited in the woods, wearing a ski mask and equipped with duct tape to wrap her up.
On seeing her, he jumped out of the bushes and took Nichole, duct taped her and put her in his father’s truck.
When he removed Nichole from the truck, he found she was dead.
He said the duct tape which was covering her mouth had stopped her breathing.
Kyle quickly dumped Nichole’s body in the woods, removed her clothes and threw them out of the vehicle’s window on his way home.
Kyle was arrested and charged in connection with Nichole’s death.
In court, Kyle Dube, 21, pleaded not guilty, and his trial began in February 2015.
The prosecution didn’t believe that Nichole’s death was an accident and discarded the kidnapping-gone-wrong theory.
Instead, they argued that Dube had tried to have sex with Nichole and when she resisted, he strangled her.
It took the jury just 45 minutes to find him guilty of murder and kidnap.
‘[Kyle Dube] took someone wonderful and threw her away and that’s not okay,’ Nichole’s mother Kristine, later told media. ‘He should feel bad about it.’
It appears that he did not, however, and when he was given the opportunity to confess and apologise at the sentencing hearing, he refused.
Superior Court Justice Ann Murray ordered Dube, then 22, to serve 60 years in prison for murder and 30 years for kidnapping, to run concurrently.
‘This was an unprovoked, senseless killing,’ she said. ‘Nichole Cable was a teenager, she was full of love, full of life, full of fun, and she had her whole life ahead of her.’
And while the punishment means Kyle will be in jail for life, Kristine still has many questions unanswered.
‘I need him to tell me and own up to what he did,’ she said outside court.
‘Stop putting the blame on someone else. Take the responsibility, man up. I need to know what her last words were.
‘Was she screaming for me? Was she screaming for her dad?
‘I need to know what happened.’
