The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese: The Truth Behind the Headlines (10 page)

The search for Skylar gained intensity when Gaskins and Berry joined the investigation. As Colebank had predicted, the two troopers only had to speak with Shelia and Rachel one time before they, too, suspected something was amiss. But what were the two girls hiding?

It was time for a new tactic. Investigators asked a local judge to find probable cause to search the Clendenen-Eddy and Shoaf homes. On Monday, September 3, the first warrants in the case were served. The girls weren’t suspects, but law enforcement wanted to find out what they were hiding.

The warrants included the power to seize any and all devices that could be used to transmit vocal or electronic signals. The search began at UHS and was conducted by Gaskins, Berry, Spurlock, and Colebank. When Vice Principal Cheesebrough learned the officers had warrants to search Shelia and Rachel’s lockers, he was skeptical of the need for police involvement. “Those girls are good. Their skirts are too short sometimes, but they don’t do anything wrong,” he told Colebank.

Colebank wasn’t impressed. Neither, it turned out, were the other three officers. Gaskins said it was odd, the cold welcome they received at the high school. The sense of being unwelcome extended beyond the administration, even to the teachers. “It felt like we were a nuisance to the teachers,” he said.

Nothing was discovered during the locker search, but then the officers asked that the girls be called to the office separately. Both girls’ cell phones were confiscated. They also discovered a marijuana pipe and a bag of weed inside Shelia’s purse. Recreational drug use was hardly a priority at that moment, so Colebank turned it over to the administrator.

“Here’s your little angel’s weed,” she said, tossing Cheesebrough the bowl and bag. “You deal with it.”

Once outside, Berry was the first to speak. “Lockers didn’t have anything, but I’d bet a pizza their cell phones are golden.”

The four would continue the search for the secrets the girls were hiding at their homes.

“Chris and I will take Rachel’s place,” an unsmiling Gaskins said. Of the four, Gaskins was the most reserved. “We know how much you want to search Shelia’s home, Jessie.”

When Colebank saw the small grin on Gaskins’s face, her own split into a wide grin. Colebank had grown to especially dislike Shelia. She and Spurlock got into her cruiser.

“It’s go time!” Berry said as Gaskins pulled away from the curb. He couldn’t wait to see what they would find at the Shoaf house.

***

Patricia Shoaf’s modest residence sits in a tidy, upscale housing development in the Pierpont area. The property is almost bereft of trees, and an open expanse of lawn stretches behind the home Rachel shares with her mother. It’s a house many teens would love to live in.

Rachel wasn’t one of them. Ever since her parents’ divorce, Rachel wanted just one thing: to live with her father. Her relationship with her mother was filled with conflict, and everyone knew it. A self-proclaimed “daddy’s girl,” Rachel was not beyond acting out to spite her mother, which only made the situation worse. Word from observers was that Patricia could be equally difficult.

Many teens observed the mother-daughter trouble firsthand, before and after Skylar disappeared. Like the time Rachel was coming home from one of her Young Life meetings. The popular religious group known for its teen ministry has a branch in Morgantown, and Rachel was a devoted attendee.

One night in late spring 2012, Rachel was in a car with three other members when her cell phone rang. “Hi, Mom, I’ll be home—” Her words were cut off by the sound on the other end of the line. Everyone in the car could hear Patricia screaming. “Mom, calm down! I told you, we’re almost there,” Rachel said, ending the call as quickly as she could.

“Psycho bitch!” she seethed, cramming her cell phone deep into her purse. “I so want to move in with my dad.”

“We actually felt sorry for Rachel,” one girl said later.

So it made perfect sense that around 4:40 that afternoon, right after Gaskins and Berry hauled away her electronic gadgets, Rachel tweeted that she was jealous of Shelia’s relationship with her mother, Tara. She sent the tweet from her mother’s computer, which the police left behind because Patricia needed it to work from home.

Of the three teens’ parents, Patricia was the most restrictive. Rachel was allowed to do very little in the evenings. In fact, fellow students said Patricia even refused to allow Rachel to try out for the swim team at UHS, which the girl had set her sights on since early in middle school. Rachel was a real water baby, and had been swimming all her life. But Patricia denied Rachel the opportunity because it would have meant picking her daughter up after swim practice, which often ran as late as nine or ten at night.

***

“Why are you doing this? Why are you picking on my daughter?” Tara asked Colebank and Spurlock when they showed up with the warrant. “She didn’t do anything. She doesn’t know anything.”

According to Colebank, no sooner had the girls’ cell phones been seized than Tara bought her daughter another one. “Shelia had a new cell phone five minutes after we took hers,” Colebank said, “because she couldn’t live without one.”

Rachel thought that was terrific. She tweeted,
sooo jealous of the relationship @_sheliiaa and her mom have
. At the same time, it let Rachel get in a little dig at her own mother. Just four minutes later, Shelia retweeted, adding
we’re buds :)
.

In fact, all three girls—Skylar, Rachel, and Shelia—liked going to Shelia’s house best. Tara was laid-back and permissive; she simply let the girls do whatever they wanted to do.

Before Tara married Jim, she never could have afforded such an indulgence as a new cell phone. With finances tight, Tara had to choose luxuries carefully. Life in Blacksville had been hard for mother and daughter until Jim came into the picture, bringing marriage and a move to Morgantown. It was a big change, from financial insecurity in a rural area to relative luxury in an urban setting.

Soon after the searches, both girls began a pattern of skipping school and getting into various kinds of trouble. Their behavior forced school counselors to call the girls’ parents repeatedly. No doubt, Cheesebrough then wondered what had happened to cause their change in behavior. It’s difficult to know if he attributed it to Skylar’s disappearance, or just “normal” teenage angst, because UHS administration has had a gag order in place almost since school resumed in 2012.

***

On a regular basis, all four officers—Colebank, Spurlock, Gaskins, and Berry—would gather around and watch the surveillance video again and again. Finally, they blocked out half a shift and huddled around a large-screen computer monitor. Over and over, they watched the surveillance video that showed Skylar sneaking out her bedroom window. They played it from the beginning, in slow motion. They played it backwards, just as slowly. They looked at every single frame, trying to figure out what they had missed. Because surely there was something there—something so obvious they were missing it.

Over the course of the next several weeks, the officers continued watching the video, looking for that tiny clue that would tell them whose car Skylar got into that night. One morning, Spurlock, Gaskins, and Berry turned on the video at 8:00 a.m. when their shift began and then studied different car makes and models for hours online.

“We were so burned out, we actually went to the sergeant’s office where he has a bigger screen, to blow up a screen shot,” Berry said. “The coffee didn’t taste good anymore.”

The three men were so specific in their search for details, they looked at the gas caps, the back glass in the cars—everything they could think of to try to find a match to the car in the video. By ten that night, the men began to argue over their theories of the type of car it was and the minor differences in vehicle models they found online.

“Let’s stop right here,” Spurlock said. “Let’s go home, take a night, sleep on it and start out fresh tomorrow.”

“Okay, sounds good to me,” Berry said. Gaskins agreed, and the three men headed home.

***

Chris and Alexis Berry had been married for four years when the officer was reassigned to the Morgantown Detachment. Alexis had given up her dream of going to medical school to become Chris’s wife, because she was crazy about him. But his work on Skylar’s case began to take a huge toll on their marriage.

Berry spent more hours at the office than he ever had before. That wouldn’t have been as hard on Alexis if Berry hadn’t also brought his work home with him. Many times, he wouldn’t get home until midnight—and yet she’d still wake up to find him texting. Again! Night after night. At first, she didn’t believe him when he told her who he was texting.

“Who are you texting at 2:00 a.m.?” Alexis asked.

“Gaskins,” Berry said.

“Sure you are.”

But then he’d show her his phone, and Alexis saw he was telling the truth. She still worried, though. He looked horrible. She knew Spurlock and Gaskins were equally run-down, because she’d become acquainted with the women in their lives, too.

That’s how Alexis knew she wasn’t the only worried wife. The men were exhausted—and it showed: They had big dark circles under their eyes. They were eating on the fly, when they bothered to eat at all, so they all lost weight.

“When we work, we work,” Berry would often tell her.

***

That night—the night they all worked so long the coffee didn’t even taste good anymore—was awful. Berry couldn’t stop thinking about the case, mulling it over in his mind as he drove home. He knew Alexis was probably not going to be in a good mood when he arrived. He was right.

“It was an awful night,” Alexis agreed.

Then inspiration hit him like an early fall frost.

“It just clicked,” Berry said. He’d been watching the video all day long, and looking at every possible make and model of car and—nothing. But the minute he sat down with his wife, it hit him: Shelia told police she picked Skylar up and later dropped her off at the end of the street, but they had never seen Shelia pick Skylar up the first time.

He didn’t waste a second. He called Gaskins and then added Spurlock so they were all on a three-way phone call.

***

Gaskins was a few miles away, pacing in his kitchen. Even from upstairs, his fiancée, Kelly, could hear Gaskins talking to himself. They usually only had a few hours each evening to spend together. At one time, that had been because of Kelly’s schedule. She was a manager for a fast-food chain, and she was going to college at night. But ever since Gaskins got this case, they’d hardly seen each other.

So their relationship suffered, too. At first, Kelly would expect Gaskins would be home for dinner a little late. Then she realized if she waited for him, dinner would be burnt to a crisp.

“Well, I’ll see you when I see you,” she finally learned to say. She ate alone many nights, watching episodes of
Law & Order
.

At other times Kelly tried to call Gaskins, but got no reply. “He might not answer me for a couple of hours and I’d be worried he’d be out there dead,” she said.

Like Alexis, she was frustrated by her man’s constant texting—especially when they did get to sit down to a meal together. “Get off there,” Kelly would tell Gaskins. “Dinner’s gonna get cold.”

Gaskins continued to pace, trying to figure out what details he’d missed. Kelly knew he was obsessed by the case. He believed someone out there knew something, but they were just too scared to talk. Walking the floor, ruminating on all he knew about the case was how he worked out the kinks. Which is what he was doing when Berry’s call came through.

“That’s Shelia’s car! That’s Shelia’s car!” Berry yelled.

***

The next day at work, everyone involved celebrated their first major breakthrough in the case. They did so after gathering around the video again—this time backing it up to 11:00 p.m., the time Shelia said she and Rachel picked up Skylar.

Sure enough, no one saw anything like that on the video—because no car showed up to get Skylar then. The vehicle they had been searching for, so long and hard, had been under their noses the entire time. It was a silver Toyota Corolla—and it didn’t pick up Skylar until 12:31 a.m.

***

Monongalia County’s geography began to play a central role the day Colebank and Spurlock became convinced they weren’t working on a rescue anymore. The vital center of Monongalia County, Morgantown is urban but much of the rest of the county is rural, mountainous, and covered with trees. The county is V-shaped, with a panhandle jutting horizontally from the top, where Blacksville is located. It was this western area, which comprises one-third of the county’s land, that Colebank and the other officers decided to search extensively.

After Skylar’s murder, Sheriff Kenneth “Al” Kisner assigned Deputy Timothy Hunn to the western end of the county. It was a logical move, because Hunn had grown up out there and was familiar with the area. Prior to that, the area didn’t have a full-time officer available, and deputies would rotate driving in that direction to keep an eye on the panhandle.

Because Colebank’s fiancé was a sergeant with the Sheriff’s Department, she knew most everyone who worked there. She and Deputy Hunn were good friends, so she knew about his Blacksville connections.

One Saturday in September Colebank stopped by the Sheriff’s Department to say hello to her fiancé. Hunn was there, having just gotten off work himself.

“What’re you up to, Tim?” Colebank said.

Hunn, known for his solid, stocky physique, had just finished his workout in the department’s gym and said he was heading home. “How about you, Jess?”

“Still trying to find Skylar. Only problem is, she hasn’t come back on the radar,” Colebank said. “I keep hoping someone will see her, but so far, we’ve got squat.”

Hunn suggested she focus more on his end of the county. That was all the encouragement Colebank needed.

“You’re right,” she said. “Screw it. Let’s get some four-wheelers.”

On their next day off, Hunn and Colebank teamed up with Trooper Berry. Having grown up in the Blacksville area, he had gone to school with Hunn. The trio turned onto Route 7 and headed west. When they got to Blacksville, the three off-duty officers got on their four-wheelers and took off. Together, they covered every path and every trail they could find. They rode all over the one-lane back roads and even on the golf course behind Clay-Battelle High School, until it was too dark to see. They continued searching throughout the month of September, riding for hours on end. Still they had no luck. They knew it was hopeless.