The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese: The Truth Behind the Headlines (3 page)

Skylar had snuck out before. The first time Mary and Dave heard about her midnight adventures had been in the spring a year before, when the Neeses still lived in Stonepath, a development in the Cheat Lake area. Mary worked at Ruby then, but Dave only worked part-time, making advertising signs for company cars. Times were lean for the Neeses.

On a warm spring night Skylar engineered a plan to go joyriding with Shelia Eddy, her friend since second grade. Joyriding is what today’s teens call riding around aimlessly in a car, talking and texting and tweeting and sometimes getting high. Skylar and Shelia had gone joyriding many times, but Mary and Dave didn’t know that.

Because neither girl had a license, Skylar had talked Floyd Pancoast, a friend of Skylar’s, into taking them. Pancoast, age 19, was a brooding young man, but Skylar liked him and they talked often. Skylar was his rock and his confessor, as she was for so many teens at University High School.

Floyd’s eighteen-year-old friend Brian Moats ended up driving. They also picked up Rachel and Shelia, who lived just a few minutes away from Skylar. The car with its five teenage occupants was cruising a little too fast down a long hill in Star City when Officer Mike Teets noticed their speed and took off in pursuit. Star City had a strict 10:00 p.m. curfew for anyone under eighteen, and the officer thought some of the car’s occupants looked pretty young. When he strolled up to the driver’s window after pulling them over, his suspicions were confirmed: the girls were underage. Officer Teets released Pancoast and Moats. He took the three girls to the Star City police station, where he called Rachel’s and Shelia’s fathers to come get them. The two teens had intentionally not given him their mothers’ cell phone numbers. Rachel said her mom would get violent; Shelia knew her dad would go easier on her.

Neither mother immediately knew what had happened because both dads snuck their daughters back into their respective homes. But Skylar didn’t know that. Dave wasn’t working full-time and money was tight, so the Neeses didn’t have a home phone then. Nor did either of them have a cell—although they made sure that Skylar did in case of an emergency. Since Officer Teets had no way to reach her parents, he loaded Skylar into the back of his patrol car and drove her home himself.

According to Mary, Skylar had been nearly hysterical that night. She was sobbing and inconsolable, saying that Rachel was going to be in terrible trouble. Rachel’s mother, Patricia, was thought to be a strict disciplinarian.

“It’s all my fault!” Skylar gulped through her tears. She had been the instigator of the plan, and Mary thought the chastised teen’s guilt was appropriate.

“Yes, it is. You can’t be doing that, Skylar!” Mary said. “Do you even know these boys that well? What if they hurt you? What if they raped you, killed you?”

“Rachel’s going to be in such trouble!”

“As she should be. Now off to bed.”

Later that night, Mary and Dave both agreed that Skylar had punished herself enough. The next morning they told her they wouldn’t ground her or administer any other discipline. They believed she had learned her lesson.

But on that Friday, the afternoon of July 6, when Dave came home to find Skylar gone, the Neeses discovered that Skylar hadn’t learned anything. Just the opposite. In fact, as the Neeses would find out from one friend, then another, in that first month after she disappeared, Skylar snuck out a lot that summer.

Only later did Mary realize she’d missed some clues. For instance, there were the bruises—they had appeared on Skylar’s thighs earlier that summer. When Mary had asked about them, Skylar blamed them on the heavy, ice-filled buckets she hauled at Wendy’s. The buckets had bumped against her thighs.

“I even said, ‘Skylar, let the boys do that,’” Mary said later. “‘You shouldn’t do that. That’s what they have the boys for.’ But we fell for it. She really got them from sliding down the windowsill.”

When she recalled this, a shadow passed over Mary’s face, no doubt brought on by thoughts of what she and Dave should have done differently. Should have seen. All the red flags they’d missed.

Looking back, Mary couldn’t help but criticize herself for not keeping a closer eye on Skylar. She was confronting the difficult realization that almost all parents eventually face: that children who have been open and truthful in the past can, as teenagers, become deceptive and intensely wrapped up in their own worlds. They have extremely private lives and keep secrets from their parents. Skylar’s disappearance brought many of her secrets into the open.

After Mary and Dave learned that their missing daughter had been sneaking out frequently, Floyd Pancoast, the boy Star City police had caught joyriding with Skylar, came forward. He was someone who knew some of Skylar’s secrets. “He was one of the suspects in the beginning,” Mary said. “We pretty much harassed him. Dave and I went to him in person, and he told us, ‘I loved Skylar. I miss her so bad.’”

Mary had heard that Pancoast was big into marijuana, which is why she asked him directly, “How could you guys drive around every night, getting high, and Skylar’s getting up and going to school every day and has a 4.0 average?”

“Mary, we didn’t get high every night,” Pancoast said. “We’d just drive around. She listened to me.”

Through the police investigation, the Neeses learned that Skylar and Floyd were just good friends. He didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. “So I had to apologize to him,” Mary said. “He still feels terrible about losing Skylar.”

Mary is a compassionate woman, and her expressive eyes often reflect not only her own sadness, but also the sorrow she sees in others. She and Dave must have realized they were wrong when they saw the raw emotion in Floyd Pancoast. So then, they offered him comfort, as they did repeatedly with the various teens who had been touched by Skylar’s disappearance.

Almost immediately after people learned that Skylar was missing, the rumor mill began churning out stories. One of the most persistent involved a boy. No one seems to know who this boy was, but every variation seemed to suggest that he was instrumental in her disappearance. Pancoast was one of many such “boys” the police questioned.
Were you romantically connected to Skylar? Did you do drugs with her? Did you see her the night of July 5 or the early morning hours of July 6?

Mary insisted Skylar and Pancoast were not romantically involved, that they were just “buddies.” In truth Pancoast, who sported a buzz cut and tattoos, wasn’t Skylar’s type. Mary couldn’t say exactly what her daughter’s type was, though, because Skylar had never had a boyfriend.

Everyone’s impression of Skylar was that she was focused on getting a good education so she could go to college. For the time being, she was not interested in romance. Occasionally, she giggled with her girlfriends over one cute guy or another. But she wasn’t serious about dating or sex the way many teens are. She didn’t have those stirrings yet. Indeed, it seems that at the time of her death, Skylar hadn’t even had her first real kiss.

Money had always been an issue in the Neese household; her parents had lived from paycheck to paycheck all of Skylar’s life. That was why they didn’t take their first family vacation until the summer of 2000, when Skylar was four years old. They chose Ocean City, Maryland, six hours away, so Skylar could experience the sea and the beach for the first time.

While Skylar later became a big fan of the ocean, she didn’t much like the beach on that first visit. The waves kept knocking her over, and she hardly considered that “fun.” But she loved the hotel’s swimming pool. One afternoon as Mary laid her towel on a chaise lounge and Dave stripped off his shirt, Skylar stared at the pool, an inflatable seahorse around her waist and floaters on each arm. She waddled awkwardly toward the edge of the pool, peering intently at the water.

“Daddy’s not ready for you yet, honey,” Dave said. “Daddy’ll help you. You don’t know how to swim.”

“I can so swim!” Skylar shouted. To prove it, she jumped in the water. Dave panicked and leaped in after her with Mary laughing at both of them.

“It’s okay, Daddy!” Skylar sputtered, slapping the water with her floaters, her legs kicking. “I can swim!”

“You can’t swim, honey!” Dave grabbed at her, but the small child kept squirming.

“I can so!”

And Dave had to admit that with the floaters, Skylar seemed to be swimming just fine. That was the moment when he began to think of his daughter as fearless. In new situations, she was watchful and held back—until she just plunged in. Skylar was willful:
she
would decide what she would or wouldn’t do, no matter what her parents or anyone else said.

In many ways, Skylar was a mini Mary. People even used the same words to describe them, right down to their unfailing sense of humor, iron stubbornness, and occasional flares of temper. Where Dave and Skylar were best buds, Mary and Skylar were intertwined in the way that only mothers and daughters can be. Their family photos bear this out: Skylar possessed the same mischievous eyes as her mother and occasionally flashed a similar cynical smile.

When Mary discovered she was pregnant, she was not happy. The thought of raising a child terrified her, and she believed she would be a horrible mother. But she couldn’t and wouldn’t end the pregnancy. Skylar was born, and Mary fell in love.

But she still wasn’t sure she wanted a husband. Dave kept asking her; she kept putting him off. She hesitated when he said they should move in together. Six months after Skylar’s birth, Mary had a change of heart, and she and Skylar moved in with Dave.

Mary became the glue that held the family together. Her humor, playfulness, and sense of justice created the bond; her will and determination made it stick.

After Dave found the vanity bench and realized Skylar had snuck out, he immediately called Shelia. If anyone knew where his daughter was, Shelia would. That girl always seemed to have a cell phone in her hand, as if it was glued there. That morning, when Dave asked Shelia if she’d seen Skylar, the teen said no. But she did admit she had talked to Skylar around midnight the night before.

A few miles away, Mary was growing more concerned about Dave being worried, so she gathered up her purse and prepared to leave work early. The walk from Ruby Memorial Hospital to Mary’s car took longer than the short drive home. When she arrived, Dave was still on his cell. Just as she’d expected, he’d worked himself into a state.

Dave was missing two key phone numbers for Skylar’s friends Hayden McClead and Shania Ammons, so he called Shelia back to ask for them. He wasn’t sure Shelia would have Hayden’s number, since Hayden thought Shelia was mean and usually steered clear of Skylar when Shelia was around.

But he knew Shania was an old friend of Shelia’s from Blacksville. They had gone to middle school together. That’s how Shania became friends with Skylar. For social activities like making a McDonald’s run and going to concerts and movies, Skylar, Shelia, and Shania were together as often as Skylar, Shelia, and Rachel were. When it came to teen secrets, Shelia often confided in Shania—which is why Shania knew more about the Skylar-Shelia-Rachel trio than almost anyone.

As Dave expected, Shelia said she didn’t have Hayden’s phone number. She also reminded him that Shania was away at the beach.

Dave snapped shut the cell phone and turned to Mary. “Now what?”

Mary shrugged. “We could give it a little time, see if someone gets back to us.”

“Mary, she’s
missing
.” His tone was exasperated and pleading at the same time.

“Okay, then call 911.” As Mary walked toward her recliner, the house landline rang. Mary answered and learned from the Wendy’s manager that Skylar hadn’t shown up for work.

She hung up and faced Dave. “Call 911
now
.”

The house phone rang again. It was Shelia.

“I need to tell you the whole truth,” she told Mary, “about what happened last night.”

“What happened?” Mary’s thoughts raced to images of Skylar at a party, Skylar drunk, Skylar drugged after a boy slipped her a roofie. She even envisioned Skylar deserted in a dark corner after passing out at a party.

“I did see Skylar. She snuck out about eleven. Rachel and I picked her up and we went joyriding for about forty-five minutes. She made me drop her off at the end of the road so we wouldn’t wake you.”

Mary was momentarily relieved. She was more concerned about the girls sneaking around than the thought of some random stranger snatching Skylar off the street. That kind of scenario seemed far-fetched in their tiny town.

“Why do you girls continue to sneak out when we’ve told you just come to us when you want to do something?” Mary scolded. “You don’t need to do this sneaking stuff.” Mary didn’t know how upset she was until she realized she’d lit her cigarette inside the kitchen, a strict violation of their lease. She opened the sliding door and stepped out on the balcony. “We can’t find Skylar anywhere.”

“I heard. Do you know what happened yet?”

“We don’t know.”

At that moment Tara, Shelia’s mother, got on the line.

“Mary, what’s going on?” Tara asked.
²

“I don’t know. We can’t find her. Wendy’s called and she hasn’t showed up at work.” At that moment, worry seized Mary Neese’s heart. Somehow, just by saying the words “we can’t find her,” Mary truly realized that Skylar was missing.

“Do you want us to come over?”

“Yes, I do.”

***

When Shelia and Tara arrived, they accompanied Mary as she went door to door down one side of Crawford Avenue, asking if anyone had seen her daughter. Dave waited for Officer Bob McCauley, of the Star City police, to respond to the 911 call. McCauley arrived at 4:41, and the two of them covered the other side of Crawford. No one had seen a missing sixteen-year-old girl.

Contrary to the rumors that Shelia was crying that day, she did not cry during this search. Dave described her face as impassive and expressionless, her walk slightly wooden. At the time, Mary thought it was because Shelia was so upset, because she was scared. Shelia’s mother, Tara, had cried when she first got to the apartment, but Shelia hadn’t.

After the door-to-door search proved fruitless, the five of them walked back to the apartment. That’s when Mary had an idea:
the surveillance video.
She was surprised the police hadn’t already checked it. Security cameras had been installed around the small apartment building, primarily to capture shots of people trying to break in. Cameras were also trained on the inside hallways of both floors. Jim Gaston, the landlord, could access the security tapes. Dave called him, and Gaston said he’d be right over.

An unmarked door close to the Neeses’ apartment led to Gaston’s small video room, the size of a walk-in closet. The landlord sat at the computer controls, and the six of them—Dave, Mary, Tara, Shelia, and Officer McCauley—crowded around to watch the large monitor. Jim chose the view from the side of the apartment where Skylar’s room was located. The camera faced the complex’s parking lot, a small side street, and another apartment building across the way. Jim rewound the tape and let it play forward at double speed.

“Wait, wait,” Dave said when he thought he’d seen something. “Back it up.”

Jim rewound the tape and the six of them saw part of Skylar’s head blur past. Then nothing for a few seconds, although Dave noticed the shadowy image of a car in the background of the video. The time signature on the video read 12:31.

He tapped the screen. “You picked her up at eleven, Shelia?”

Shelia studied the image. “Yes.”

Suddenly, Skylar’s head emerged, and she was seen walking briskly toward a gray car. She opened the back door and climbed into the backseat. There was no sign of a struggle. No indication the people inside were strangers. No clue of any foul play whatsoever. Then the car drove off and the scene was empty again.

It was as if they watched Skylar vanish, right before their very eyes. It was all Mary and Dave could do to keep from reaching out and trying to pull their precious daughter back—back into the picture, back into their lives.

For several long seconds, silence filled the small room. Finally, Jim spoke up. “I think that looks like an SUV,” he said. On the video, the car had been blurry and indistinct. Officer McCauley agreed it could be an SUV. Shelia said nothing.

Dave asked her if she knew anyone with a similar vehicle, but Shelia said she didn’t.

“Do you know if any of Skylar’s friends have cars like this?”

“No,” Shelia said, shaking her head back and forth.

McCauley took Shelia’s statement that evening, so her word became the official story. His handwritten notes were the first recorded in the case. Shelia told McCauley she and Rachel picked Skylar up at 11:00 p.m. and dropped her off at the end of the street about 11:45. That meant, according to Shelia, that she and Rachel were home and in bed by midnight. That was possible, given that the three teens lived so close together. Everyone watching the video that night believed the vehicle on the video had to be someone else’s. It couldn’t be Shelia’s, because she drove a sporty silver Toyota Corolla—the one her stepfather had purchased for Tara before they got married.

That left only one logical explanation—but it was the last one that Mary and Dave wanted to hear. After her friends dropped her off, Skylar had left in a second car. But who could she possibly have left with?

People believed this theory for months; it became the basis for a general timeline of Skylar’s disappearance:

For almost two years, people who have seen the video replayed online at various news sites have asked the same question: Why did no one recognize Shelia’s car as the one in the video? More important, why did no one realize that Skylar was never seen leaving the first time, with Shelia and Rachel? Why did it take trained law enforcement as long as it did to come to these same conclusions?

These questions seem obvious now, but at the time no one wanted to believe that Skylar’s best friend would lie about the timing, especially not Mary and Dave. That soon after Skylar’s disappearance, Shelia was still simply a trusted teenager.

No one suspected the manipulative liar she would turn out to be.

***

That first weekend was a blur for Mary and Dave. Watching Skylar vanish on videotape had been harder than they realized. Worry, hope, fear, and despair filled the atmosphere of the apartment. They both felt the urge to do something,
anything
, to find their only daughter. At the same time, they felt too trapped and helpless to come up with an effective course of action. All they could do was cling to what the Star City police told every parent of a missing child. Trying to reassure Mary and Dave, the police told them not to worry because Skylar had probably gone on some kind of crazy summer getaway.

Even though they knew Skylar would never be that irresponsible, Mary and Dave tried to talk themselves into believing she had. The only alternatives were too grim. “They said teenagers do this,” Mary said later, referring to what the Star City Police had told her initially. “They said we should give it the weekend.”

They almost convinced themselves that Skylar would be home Sunday night. Almost. At the end of the weekend, she would magically appear. Her reckless, impromptu beach visit would be over, and their beloved daughter would be all apologies.

The weekend was torture for Mary and Dave. They sat. They waited. They wondered when they would hear Skylar’s ornery laugh. See her mischievous smile. They barely noticed the endless parade of friends and relatives that weekend. Through it all, every time someone knocked, every time the door opened, Dave would think,
God! It’s her. It’s her. It’s her
.

But it never was.