The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese: The Truth Behind the Headlines (11 page)

Skylar was the type of friend who kept in touch with the people she loved, people like Daniel, Shelia, and Rachel. Even if she’d run away because she was angry at her parents—and there was no evidence to support that idea—Colebank knew that Skylar would have reached out to someone.

Except she hadn’t. No one had heard one word from the missing girl.

“Skylar would’ve called someone,” Colebank said later. “She wouldn’t let all these people who love her worry about her. That’s who she was.” Although none of the law enforcement officers had ever met her, the appealing teen had made an impact. She had done that by reaching out to them, through the pages of her diary. Across all departments—from the young FBI agent to the troopers to the detectives and veteran cops—every officer working the case felt that Skylar had touched his, or her, heart.

Even though they no longer believed Skylar was alive, they weren’t going to give up. They would keep searching until they found her, even if it was only her remains. They promised Mary and Dave—and each other—they wouldn’t stop looking until they brought her home.

As October approached and the leaves began turning vibrant autumn colors, everyone following Skylar’s story on Facebook wanted to weigh in on the role Mary and Dave had played in their daughter’s disappearance. While the real-world drama was moving from a slow simmer to a fast burn at UHS, the virtual world was being whipped into a firestorm. Tension, innuendo, and outright accusations only increased on Facebook and Twitter. As if Skylar’s parents hadn’t already endured enough, Mary and Dave felt like some people were determined to see them suffer even more.

What began as a small schism in a public Facebook group grew into a big and very ugly family battle. In numerous private emails and public postings during August and September, Jennifer Hunt insinuated her cousin Dave and his wife were hiding something. She said their story had changed several times and implied that as a result, the police were no longer sharing any information with the Neeses. In fact, Jennifer said, police had begun investigating Mary and Dave. On August 30 she wrote,
When her parents became suspicious early on, info wasn’t being shared with them anymore. They are part of the investigation now
.

Even though Dave tried to keep from looking in on TeamSkylar<3, sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. Other times, he didn’t need to, since many members were very loyal to the Neeses and would alert them to such nonsense. So Dave could do nothing but watch as some of the 3,000 people from TeamSkylar<3 took the rumors at face value and ran with them.

Other people weren’t as rash; they just accused Mary and Dave of being evasive. They claimed the couple was withholding information from TeamSkylar<3 members in preference to their own, closed group, TeamSkylar 2012. Some said Mary and Dave weren’t open with law enforcement. While their countless questions went mostly unanswered, the group seemed to believe it had a right to know anything and everything. After all, hadn’t members been posting, sharing, and praying for this missing girl for months? Hadn’t Skylar become their child, too? Didn’t that mean they owned a stake in the story, and that her parents owed them an explanation?

Mary and Dave somehow found the strength to respond to as many Facebook messages as they could, trying to control the damage. But inside the privacy of their own home, they both teetered near the edge of collapse. The Facebook drama piled on the trauma of Skylar’s disappearance was almost more than they could bear.

One night, Dave grew so angry when he saw another post from Hunt that he wanted to hurl the computer through the living-room window. Mary urged him to calm down, have a smoke, or take Lilu for a walk. She told him to do anything to get his mind off the cousin he’d never even met, as well as all the people on Facebook they’d once considered their friends.

In truth, Mary realized she didn’t even know most of the TeamSkylar<3 members. They were just as much strangers as Hunt and her son. Mary knew only one thing: those “friends” were making it harder and harder for her to get through another day at work.

***

Joanne Nagy knew what Dave and Mary were facing and felt compelled to intervene. On September 23, Dave’s Aunt Joanne told TeamSkylar<3 members she wanted
to clear up a few things
. She wrote:

She reminded the Facebook group that the Neeses’ lives had become a public spectacle. Neither Mary nor Dave had the energy to answer the hundreds of questions posed to them, especially the
really far-fetched
ones
.

Anyone reading her poignant note had to sense the pain Nagy felt for her family. When she begged every one of the 3,000 TeamSkylar<3 members to
please stop the bickering and fussing [and] to refocus [on] the reason we are here,
you could see Joanne, a very religious woman, down on both knees praying that her words would help convince people to back off.

Aunt Joanne’s words did seem to provide a respite of sorts. For a while, at least, the level of drama in the Facebook sphere dissipated. Until Hunt’s story changed: in the blink of an eye, she claimed in a private email that Skylar was safe and sound. Hunt promised to share the truth with the public very soon. But Hunt’s promise was no different from Rachel telling Colebank she would stop by the police station after camp: empty.

Mary and Dave were furious: Who was this woman? What right did she think she had?

***

About the same time the adults on Facebook began backing off, Twitter, a more popular venue for teens, exploded. Tweets from real people and from those who were hiding their identities tumbled headfirst into the drama.

The online tweets contributed to the tightening vise of public pressure, as Rachel and Shelia tried to get through a regular school day. They felt the tension increase in early October, in the form of rumors, innuendo, jokes, and tweets.

The pressure was two parts Twitter, one part Daniel. He kept haranguing Rachel, demanding information from her. He wasn’t alone. Students throughout UHS wanted Shelia and Rachel to come clean, too. Very quickly, a focused Twitter campaign began from two new anonymous Twitter accounts: @Snyder28Josie and @MiaBarr8. The newcomers seemed to have one goal—to harass Shelia and Rachel until they buckled under the pressure.

To onlookers, it seemed like a game, the only players being @Snyder28Josie and @MiaBarr8. For example, @Snyder28Josie tweeted
besties dont like having to answer questions of their guilt!!
to @MiaBarr8. But it was also a subtweet, addressed to one person but meant for someone else entirely. In this case, the subtweet was directed at Shelia and Rachel. The anonymous people behind the accounts had to realize that their tweets resounded in a very public way.

***

Then the jokes and accusations against Shelia and Rachel morphed into something uglier. Some could be classified as threats. Two factors seemed to trigger the shotgun spray of negative tweets: investigators concluded that Skylar was dead, and Mary and Dave began to hear bits of gossip that indicated Rachel and Shelia might be behind the tragedy. While the general public wasn’t supposed to know details about the case, people still found out. The result was tweet after harsh tweet, aimed directly at both girls.

Shania Ammons, Shelia’s close friend, was fed up with the accusations. Ammons was also disgusted that people she didn’t know were directing their rage at her just because she was Shelia’s friend. So on September 30, Ammons came to Shelia’s defense, tweeting,
no matter what I will always have @_sheliiaa back. that girl is my bestfriend #loveyou #staystrong
.

Indeed, Shania’s battle cry did fortify her friend: two days later, Shelia lashed out in typical fashion by tweeting @MiaBarr8:
and a fake twitter account…you don’t know shit so do us a favor and shut your fuckin mouth.

Shelia’s cousin Crissy had also seen enough. Not only was she being harassed at work, but everyone seemed to believe she had something to do with Skylar’s disappearance. That could be due to her family connection; Crissy had once been distantly related to Shelia through marriage. Crissy believed people’s accusations were ridiculous and amounted to nothing more than guilt by association. She was angry.

The petite blonde took to Facebook rather than Twitter. There, on the TeamSkylar<3 page, Crissy posted her heartfelt defense:
Pardon me for being so blunt & know that I feel SO much for Mary&Dave & their situation,
she typed.
I can’t imagine the things they’re going through at the moment
.

Then Crissy got to the point, with as much tact as Joanne Nagy had employed two weeks earlier. Crissy spoke eloquently, encouraging people to think before they typed words that could ruin more lives—namely Shelia’s and Rachel’s:

***

Gradually, battle lines were being drawn. Three alliances had formed, but everyone really only wanted to know one detail. At the heart of the skirmish was one big question: What were Rachel and Shelia hiding?

Beyond that, they also kept trying to figure out whose car the surveillance tape showed Skylar getting into. It was a question for which there seemed no answer.

The first group, which included the girls’ UHS classmates, believed that Shelia and Rachel were, at best, not sharing information they had known from the beginning. Some people, including law enforcement, felt certain that the car on the video was Shelia’s. Few of these people still believed Shelia and Rachel’s story about dropping Skylar off at the end of her street.

Another faction, filled with the friends of both girls, took their friends’ word as gospel. They stood up for, and often directly asked—or even told—anyone who disagreed to back off.

A third camp, represented by Hunt and her TeamSkylar<3 followers, believed that Shelia and Rachel had been telling the truth since the day Skylar disappeared. They believed Skylar had been dropped off before midnight, just like the two girls said. They thought the surveillance video showed Skylar getting into a
different
car.

But the importance of that belief to the search for Skylar was just like Hunt herself had become: irrelevant.

Rachel whined into the phone: “They’re, like, Nazis!”

She was complaining to Patricia about the harassment coming from Gaskins and Berry and Spurlock and
everyone
at school. Several students overheard conversations like this more than once.

Rachel huffily pushed away the plate full of lettuce she’d been picking at. She was sitting at the cafeteria table she and Shelia shared. Shelia sat across from her, looking down. She was texting.

“Mother!” Rachel held the phone away from her ear as Patricia’s voice burst from it. She looked at Shelia. “I don’t believe this shit,” she said, rolling her eyes. Shelia still didn’t look up from her phone. When the phone grew quiet, Rachel put it back to her ear.

“They won’t leave me alone.” Rachel waited a second for her mother to finish, then shouted, “I want you to fucking do something!” into the cell. Heads around the cafeteria turned as more people took notice. Rachel gripped the phone tightly, her eyes widening. Then her eyes got watery. She burst into sobs.

“I know that, I didn’t mean to say that, but I—” her voice caught. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this!” Rachel’s voice collapsed under the weight of her sobs. Shelia glanced up with a disgusted expression; Rachel kept sobbing and sobbing.

***

As Daniel kept pressuring Rachel, she continued to stonewall. Most often the teen claimed she had been so wasted that night, she just didn’t remember any details. She couldn’t recall what they had done or where they had gone. The only detail she could remember was that they dropped Skylar off at the end of the road because Skylar insisted on it.

“You know how she gets,” Rachel had said. Daniel did know how Skylar “got.” Skylar could be pigheaded when she’d made up her mind, and there was no talking her out of her position. Sometimes she’d get angry if people kept pushing.

But the story made no sense to Daniel. Skylar had snuck out with Shelia and Rachel dozens of times, and he’d never, ever heard of Skylar insisting on being dropped off like that.

By then he’d been hounding Rachel for almost six weeks. That fall UHS was staging
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the Shakespeare comedy. She and Daniel were at play rehearsal for several hours each night, since both teens had big roles in the production.

One day in October, Rachel finally cracked. She screamed at Daniel in the middle of drama class. He screamed back. Mr. Kyer called him into the hall.

“You need to give her a break, Daniel. She’s going through a lot since Skylar disappeared. People keep asking her what she—”

“That’s because she’s lying! She knows something and the police need to know what it is so they can find Skylar.”

“She’s not lying. I’ve talked to her. She doesn’t know anything more than she’s told the police.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“That’s enough, Daniel. Leave Rachel alone.”

Daniel knew better than to argue with him anymore. Kyer was being an idiot. He couldn’t see that Rachel was lying, but pissing his drama teacher off wouldn’t help. Daniel shrugged.

“I did upbraid her and fall out with her,” Daniel said.

Mr. Kyer smiled. He recognized one of Daniel’s lines from the play. “That’s it. Focus on the play. We only have two weeks.”

With all the tension in the air, all over school—not to mention in drama class and during rehearsals—Daniel wasn’t so sure they could pull it off. Opening night was just two weeks away, and he didn’t have a lot of confidence in Rachel. She’d been acting pretty weird.

***

Meanwhile, “Josie Snyder” and “Mia Barr” kept tweeting to Shelia and Rachel. By then it seems their tweets were also for the public’s benefit. Josie Snyder’s tweets were often taunting and judgmental. Her October 26 tweet tied Shelia and Rachel to one of their favorite TV shows:
bring pretty little liars down together… #promisetoneverleaveyoucold
.

Pretty Little Liars
was a mystery-thriller targeted to teenagers, as much soap opera as mystery. The premiere shows five teenage girls at a slumber party. They get drunk and the next morning, one of them is missing. By the end of the episode, the other girls discover she wasn’t missing—she was murdered. And one of her pretty, popular friends killed her—but which one?

Josie Snyder’s reference to Shelia and Rachel as “pretty little liars” was the first time the two teens were linked to the TV show publicly, but law enforcement had privately been referring to the pair with that moniker since Skylar disappeared.

The next day, Josie Snyder’s tweet incorporated lyrics from a Merle Haggard song entitled “Mama Tried”:
Turned 21 in prison doing life w/o parole #loveoldiesmusic
.

A few days later, she tweeted again. This time it was a lyric from the theme song of the TV show
Cops
:
Whatcha gonna doo whatcha gonna doo when they come for you.

Whoever Josie Snyder was, her unceasing pressure on Shelia and Rachel was taking its toll—especially on Rachel. Numerous people said Rachel was having a difficult time with the play. Daniel’s relentless push for answers hadn’t stopped after Mr. Kyer called him out; it had just turned more subtle. Daniel began texting Rachel more and speaking to her less. And Rachel’s on-set behavior in the run-up to the play was outrageous: as opening night approached, her tears, outbursts, and tantrums threatened to turn the comedy into a tragedy.