The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese: The Truth Behind the Headlines (17 page)

After the plea hearing, Ashdown was quoted as saying Rachel confessed that she and Shelia started stabbing Skylar on “a prearranged signal.” For months, people claimed that signal was a count: “One … two … three!”

At one time, such a notion seemed to be based solely on unrelated Twitter traffic on March 31, 2013, between Shelia and her cousin Lexy Eddy, who went by @slexy on Twitter.

In successive tweets, Shelia said,

A little later, about 1:30 a.m., Shelia tweeted,
we really did go on three
. Lexy, tweeted back,
“@_sheliiaa @slexy_ on three” that was a good idea
.

People repeatedly cited those tweets and others like them, saying the murder began after one girl gave the other girl a signal of “One, two, three.” People claimed this March 31 exchange between Sheila and Lexy was proof Shelia’s cousin knew about the murder. Social media chatter showed how early this speculation began. Although it may have begun earlier, on May 9, nine days after both girls were arrested, @KillerGirlProbz9 tweeted,
What are u guys gonna do, take to into the woods stab me on the count of 3?

Similar speculation appeared repeatedly on Topix and Websleuths. PaulfromChas posted,
Looks like the “we went on the count of three” tweet was what it was rumored to be
, and Hillbilly_Chick responded,
Also, to me, that tweet says … others knew.

Throughout this case, people laid blame on first one and then another family member or friend, saying they knew about the murder. Sometimes, people pointed at those close to Shelia and Rachel and said they helped cover up the crime. Many, many teens were wrongly accused as murderers or accessories to Skylar’s murder. But the authorities made no other arrests. Nor were they likely to—not when the real killers had confessed. Not when the evidence was so strong that Shelia and Rachel had acted alone.

Based on the tweets themselves, it looked as if people took Shelia and Lexy’s words out of context. At one time, there was no valid reason to believe those tweets had anything to do with the murder. There was every reason to believe the cousins were discussing something the two of them did—not even remotely connected to Skylar’s death.

However, it was also now likely that Shelia was using something she knew she and Rachel had done as a way to mock her audience—whom she was trying to portray as having wrongly persecuted her. On February 4, she tweeted,
the littlest things can be blown out of proportion to something that is completely untrue. don’t talk if you don’t know what really happened.

In her press conference after the hearing, Ashdown revealed the two teens really did count to three before they began stabbing Skylar.

Whenever three people are as close as Shelia, Skylar, and Rachel were, the relationship’s dynamics can become extreme. Former FBI profiler Ken Lanning stated that alliances are always in flux, and at any given moment, two would be “in” and one would be “out.” Various friends of all three girls said this was
constantly
the case. A look at the trio’s Twitter traffic during freshman and sophomore years verified this.

Now retired, Lanning taught in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia, for more than two decades. He also wrote the training manuals for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Lanning said teen social alliances could be incredibly volatile and intense, and eventually “two girls together wind up doing something that possibly no one of them would have done by themselves.”

At some point, the theory went, the trio broke down. It turned into two against one. The shifting alliance solidified, leaving Skylar the odd girl out—permanently. People were waiting for the trial to reveal what caused that final break, what the
real
motive was in Skylar Neese’s murder.

Skylar’s tweet on December 13, 2011, six months before her murder, provided a glimpse of that breakdown:
#whyareyousofuckingstupid #twofacedbitches #nevergettingoverit
.

Her tweet the evening of July 4, one day before she climbed out her window for the last time, also showed signs that Skylar was angry at her two best friends and frustrated over being left out:
sick of being at fucking home. thanks “friends”, love hanging out with you all too.

The permanent two-against-one status that led to Skylar’s death took shape as much as a year before her murder. When Rachel’s confession became public knowledge on May 1, Chris Boggs, a UHS student, posted on Facebook,
I knew those dumb bitches killed her!

Mary, who saw Chris’s post, sent him a private message. He replied, saying he and other students had heard both girls ask during class how to get rid of a body. The biology teacher, Dan Demchak, who has since retired, wouldn’t discuss the details. But he admitted that what did happen “was the most bizarre thing” he had ever experienced in the classroom.

Mary alerted Gaskins, who reached out to Chris. That led police to other UHS students—who agreed with Boggs’s assessment. Students also claimed they overheard Shelia and Rachel making plans to kill Skylar. Some students said they tried to warn their classmate. But when Skylar inquired about the warnings, Shelia and Rachel blew them off. So did Skylar.

Skylar’s permanent outsider status only laid the basis for her murder. Investigators look for a “precipitating event” that triggers a violent crime, something that turned a simmering situation to a full boil. In Skylar’s case, three such events have come to light thus far. All three involved her and Shelia. First, the two girls argued and came to blows inside a movie theater in March 2012. Second, there was a known tiff that took place during their trip to the beach together in early June 2012. Third, the two girls often fought online.

For instance, a Twitter fight occurred on June 9, when Skylar tweeted,
youre just as bad as the bitches you complain about
. It ended 40 minutes later, when she tweeted,
just know I know.

Unfortunately, how Shelia felt or what she said in reply was unclear … because all of Shelia’s tweets between 5:50 a.m. and 6:27 a.m.—the time the fight was taking place—have disappeared from Shelia’s Twitter.

***

Skylar’s death was gruesome. Many people close to the case said the murder involved what police and prosecutors call “overkill.” The act itself was extreme, involving anywhere from thirty to fifty separate stab wounds. Skylar’s murder was
personal
: the victim’s killers knew Skylar well and had deep personal feelings toward her.

Overkill can also indicate a murder driven by hatred, rage, fear, jealousy, loathing, disgust, or some combination of intense emotions—such as those that might have been fueled by a close, three-way friendship gone horribly wrong. Those feelings could also have been fueled by alcohol or a powerful chemical like amphetamine (speed, crystal meth), cocaine, or—the latest entry to the list—so-called “bath salts,” although no evidence of that emerged.

But one investigator, Senior Trooper Berry, said so many stab wounds could indicate what he called a “freak-out thing. Somebody that young, they’re going to freak out. They keep doing it and doing it, not knowing the whole time that the victim is dead. That’s a typical reaction. I’ve seen it in other crimes.”

Even if the murder was carefully planned, the intense emotion indicated the crime was not carried out simply to further an agenda (e.g., “Skylar was brilliant so she had to die”) or to gain some advantage (“With Skylar dead, I can have her iPod”).

Extreme violence could also indicate the killers didn’t just want to do away with the victim—they wanted to obliterate Skylar. Possibly, Skylar reminded both killers of something about themselves they didn’t like. If Skylar served as a constant reminder of a past they wanted to forget—or a future they couldn’t contemplate— then Shelia and Rachel might have believed killing Skylar would alleviate those negative feelings. When Shania gave Shelia the photo collage as a Christmas gift and later discovered Shelia had removed all images of Skylar, it’s possible she witnessed Shelia’s attempt to block out any memory of Skylar, so she wouldn’t have negative feelings whenever she saw Skylar’s face staring back at her.

Other grisly details have since been revealed involving Skylar’s burial. According to Rachel’s confession, she and Shelia tried to bury Skylar on that exact spot near the creek beside Morris Run Road. They couldn’t, though. A combination of hard earth and large rocks embedded just inches below the ground made the soil extremely difficult to dig. Grave digging is hard work at best, which is why cemeteries these days use backhoes. Murder victims, when they are buried, are often found in shallow graves or underneath debris—like Skylar.

It was a lesbian love affair.

That’s what people have been saying for more than a year now. At UHS, other teens called the trio lesbians long before Skylar’s murder. The teens themselves had joked about it through much of their freshman and sophomore years. Close friendships between teenage girls often inspire such rumors. Most of the time, that’s all they are.

These days, girls stripping and kissing each other is quite common, especially at parties where alcohol and drugs are plentiful. When such behavior takes place in a semipublic context, it’s often more about showing off than an authentic expression of sexuality. Any number of other factors could be at play, from a desire to be thought of as cool to exhibitionism. One teen called this kind of behavior “drunk girl games.”

Over the months, many people spoke of pictures or a video the entire school is said to have known about. Most recently, a photo Shelia uploaded to the social media site MeetMe appeared to validate those rumors—with regard to Shelia and Rachel.
¹⁷
In that photo, Rachel could be seen lying on top of Shelia while Skylar shot a selfie of the trio. Skylar wore an expression of disdain as she stood in the foreground snapping the shot. Both girls were dressed in scanty clothes and could be seen wrapped in an embrace on a couch behind Skylar. Unlike many other pictures people pointed to as evidence of lesbian interaction, this one seems to have caught the two girls unaware.

But that’s not what the prosecutor’s office seemed to believe. Shelia and Rachel
were
having a romantic affair, and that might have provided a motive for murder. This may have been the secret they were worried Skylar might expose. One scenario would involve blackmail if Skylar had threatened to tell the girls’ parents, Rachel’s boyfriend, Mikinzy, or even her priest. Rachel cared deeply about appearances, so it’s likely this kind of public outing would have mortified her.

In addition to what Shelia’s plea hearing revealed, sources have confirmed that photos of this clandestine affair were discovered on the electronic devices confiscated from the trio’s homes. In the weeks to come, that evidence should shed even more light on this sexual relationship.

Shelia and Rachel may have worried that, if discovered, they would have to split up. They may have murdered Skylar to keep the relationship secret. On the other hand, it was also possible neither Rachel nor Shelia would have cared in the least.

***

On January 24, in a room filled with the sound of weeping, Ashdown alluded to the motive behind the murder: Rachel and Shelia, she said, were “worried that Skylar would divulge their secrets. The kind of secrets girls have and [Ashdown paused here] other things.”

The prosecutor didn’t elaborate, and that was her sole direct reference to Shelia and Rachel’s sexual relationship. At first, Ashdown said, the two teens began to distance themselves from Skylar. But when they came to believe Skylar planned to expose their relationship, they murdered her.

Sometime in June, Shelia and Rachel finalized their plan to kill Skylar. They set that plan in motion on July 6, by concealing kitchen knives beneath their clothing and taking along a shovel to help bury their intended victim.

They lured Skylar into Shelia’s vehicle, drove to the Blacksville area, and crossed the state line into Pennsylvania. They drove down a narrow country lane to an isolated area familiar to all three girls, where they planned to smoke weed. On the count of three, they then “both stabbed Skylar multiple times,” Ashdown said. “Skylar fought back and tried to run but she was overcome by her attackers.”

Ashdown’s next words were especially poignant. “They changed into clean, unbloody clothes and returned to their lives,” she said.

***

There may never be a fully satisfying answer to why Shelia and Rachel killed Skylar. Ken Lanning, the FBI profiler, said as much. According to Lanning, juveniles often commit crimes for reasons that adults cannot wrap their minds around. He has heard any number of “explanations” from teens attempting to explain why they committed some heinous crime, and he has often been surprised by what they consider a valid reason to commit murder.

If Shelia and Rachel’s secret was their lesbian relationship, that excuse seems almost as empty as “we didn’t want to be friends with her anymore.” Even considering the unstable and possibly explosive three-way relationship, it’s possible neither Rachel nor Shelia would have cared at all if Skylar had exposed them.

However, if that exposure meant an end to their relationship as they knew it—if it threatened to tear the two lovers apart—that might have seemed like a logical motive for murder. At least in the eyes of two teenagers.

So, the question that remains at the end of the day is the same question that fell from Skylar’s lips as she was being savagely stabbed to death:

“Why? Why? Why?”