The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese: The Truth Behind the Headlines (4 page)

From the moment they knew Skylar was gone, the nearby sound of police sirens set Mary and Dave’s nerves on edge. Was an officer coming to tell them Skylar was home? Or were the sirens conveying something worse?

Actually, the shrill sounds had nothing to do with Skylar. One fire whistle that ripped through the night, waking them up, went off because a couch was in flames. Another West Virginia University student igniting another couch. As one popular T-shirt said, “WVU: Where greatness is learned and couches are burned.”

Skylar had planned to attend WVU, Morgantown’s great equalizer. Although many residents, like Mary and Dave, didn’t have college degrees, many others jumped at the chance for their child to receive an education and have a better life. West Virginia PROMISE scholarships provided free tuition for hard workers and overachievers like Skylar. The money helped them cross the line from blue-collar to white-collar status.

The population of greater Morgantown swells to almost 100,000 when class is in session, but shrinks by half when students leave in the summer months. The town is well-to-do, but with coal mining on the wane in the outlying communities—with names like Core, Osage, and Blacksville—life can be hard. The university boasts faculty and students from around the world, a diverse population that the families who have lived in these mountains for generations mostly succeed in ignoring. The two cultures mix to some degree, but they often clash at the two largest high schools, Morgantown High and University High, where the children of university folks go to school with the children of townspeople.

Early on, before most adults even knew there was a missing girl named Skylar, the UHS students were abuzz with speculation. While Mary and Dave and their immediate circle worried and searched around the clock, most of Morgantown remained in the dark.

Not so the town’s teenagers. In fact, those teens were coming to conclusions that the adult world wouldn’t reach for months.

***

Those first few days were filled with worry, which seemed to have little effect on two people: Shelia Eddy and Rachel Shoaf. This was odd, given that they had been Skylar’s very best friends. In fact, UHS students said the trio had been inseparable in their freshman and sophomore years. Where you saw one, you usually saw all three.

The cliquish trio always turned heads when they passed other students in the University High School hallways. Slender and sharp-tongued, Shelia had been popular at her old school, Clay-Battelle. But at UHS, Shelia was an unknown. Except for Skylar, all of her childhood friends lived in Blacksville. When Shelia didn’t become popular at UHS, she used her budding sexuality to make friends and influence people. Shelia was the least liked of the three.

Everyone who heard Rachel sing assumed she would end up on Broadway. Rachel was known for being a songbird, and for landing lead roles in the school’s drama productions. Rachel was the most talented of the three. Unlike Shelia, Rachel was surrounded by her childhood friends, many of whom also came from Saint Francis. Unlike Skylar, Rachel had money, her parents considered more white-collar than blue-collar workers. That distinction automatically made Rachel the most popular of the three.

Finally, there was the five-foot-two blossoming environmentalist and champion of the underdog. The girl who smiled all the time, aced every exam, did her friends’ homework, and insisted she was going to law school. That, of course, was Skylar. A likable honors student, she was the smartest of the three.

During those two years, Skylar must have assumed that the social payoff was worth the occasional drama. She either wasn’t bothered by the shifting alliances and two-on-one disputes that occur between three close friends or she tolerated the problems for the sake of having fun and partying. She assumed whatever problem arose could be smoothed over. That assumption was the worst mistake she ever made.

On Friday the 6th of July, while the Neeses were searching for their daughter, Rachel and her mother were sunning themselves on Cheat Lake, out in the suburbs. Patricia Shoaf, a full-time Comcast sales rep, wanted to spend some time together before Rachel left for two weeks at church camp. So mother, daughter, and a friend of Patricia’s who owned a boat spent the day sunbathing on the lake.

The light of Patricia’s life, Rachel was perhaps the best thing that had come of her marriage to Rachel’s father, James “Rusty” Shoaf. Patricia assumed Rachel’s stunning looks and talent would take her far in life.

As they sunbathed, Patricia may have wondered about the four-inch cut along Rachel’s lower right leg, close to her ankle. She may have questioned Rachel’s explanation that she’d gotten it earlier, while boarding the boat. Perhaps Patricia noticed that the cut looked fresh and angry, like it would leave behind a nasty scar.

***

On Saturday, Shelia and her mother, Tara, helped the Neeses canvass door to door again. They walked the rail-trail down by the river, an old railroad track that had been converted into a hiking trail. Unlike the day before, Shelia was now as tearful as Tara, and they both hugged Mary repeatedly. Tara’s heart went out to Mary and Dave; their only daughter was missing. She could only imagine how she’d feel if Shelia was the one who had disappeared. Mother and daughter promised they would be back the next day and every day thereafter for as long as it took.

The next time Shelia stopped by the Neeses’, she was alone. She asked Mary if she could sit in Skylar’s bedroom. Mary agreed, but a few minutes later, when she heard Shelia sobbing, she hurried down the hallway to see what had happened. Shelia was lying on Skylar’s bed, hugging a pillow to her chest. Huge sobs tore through her. Mary, feeling sorry for Shelia, lay down beside her and rubbed her arm, just as if it was her own daughter in distress.

***

In the days that followed, Shelia appeared to grieve for her missing friend. She spent hours with the Neeses trying to help find Skylar. But when Mary and Dave looked back on events, they saw her sadness as feigned. Shelia was the picture of sorrow in real time, but her activity in cyberspace revealed that not all was as it seemed. Saturday night at 11:45 she tweeted,
tired of losing sleep over this
. The meaning of
this
was unclear. One can only guess that Shelia’s loss of sleep had to do with the disappearance of her “bestie.”

An hour and a half later, at 1:24, she posted another mystifying tweet:
when you text me and my stomach drops to my ass <
. The < symbol indicated that she did not like what she felt. Was Shelia talking to someone with whom she shared some important knowledge, perhaps a secret discussed only in texts? Most of Rachel’s tweets were successfully scrubbed from the Web in the spring of 2013, but it’s likely she was the one who shared Shelia’s secret.

The most intriguing aspect of Shelia’s Twitter traffic that weekend was not what she said, but what she didn’t say. Why wasn’t Shelia reaching out to Skylar via Twitter? Why wasn’t she sending out tweets begging Sky to come home? Shelia’s silence was a huge departure from her usual blowing up of her Twitter feed, and what she didn’t know was that some people were starting to notice. She didn’t tweet
to
Skylar. She didn’t tweet
about
Skylar. Nothing.

Officer Colebank never thought of Skylar as a runaway.

Jessica, as Mary and Dave referred to her, was the Star City Police Department’s lead investigator into Skylar’s disappearance. Initially, Bob McCauley had handled the case, but, though he had many years as a deputy sheriff, he now worked only part-time for Star City. This case involved a missing teenager, so it required a full-time investigator like Colebank. As soon as Colebank came back to work after two days off, McCauley handed off the case to her.

Around the station, Colebank was the department’s unofficial “detective” because she liked to dig deep when working her cases. Six years as a 911 dispatcher had helped motivate her to become a cop. Every time a call came in, she had longed to be on the other side of the radio.

Difficult cases like this one were her lifeblood. Colebank was the type of cop every small-town police chief loves: intelligent, dedicated, and hardworking. She also has an investigator’s keen ability to sniff out falsehood and an innate ability to read suspects’ behavior. Liars pissed her off, and she wasn’t afraid to let them know it.

When Colebank inherited Skylar’s case, she’d only been in law enforcement for four years, but she had already become a thorough and aggressive investigator—partly because her father, on the force for thirty-five years, had helped train her when they worked together as Fairmont city cops. The Star City Police Department dealt with four or five missing-juvenile cases a month; Colebank handled the majority of them. Most had been runaways; up to this point, Skylar was the only missing juvenile on Colebank’s two-year watch who had never made it home.

Officer McCauley entered Skylar’s name and other vital data into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database July 6, the same night law enforcement first learned of her disappearance. Important details about missing juveniles go into this central crime database, the country’s largest, which the FBI makes available to facilitate the flow of information among police agencies.

The local police also called state police headquarters in Charleston twice, asking for an AMBER Alert to be issued. AMBER Alerts are only issued for abductions—a status determined solely by state officials. Since the surveillance tape clearly showed Skylar getting into a car voluntarily, both requests were denied. Instead, Skylar was classified as a runaway—not an abducted teen.

But Dave had solid reasons to insist Skylar hadn’t run away: She left her contact lens container and lens solution behind, just as she did the charger for her TracFone. She left her window open, and carefully placed her vanity bench outside to help her climb back inside when she returned.

Most important, Skylar left Lilu—her dog and real best friend—behind. In elementary school, Skylar had begged her parents to let her have the tiny white ball of fluff after seeing one of her friends’ Bichons. Against their better judgment, Mary and Dave agreed, and the Bichon had become Skylar’s baby. Dave said again and again that Skylar would never have left home for good without taking “that damned dog.”

The FBI didn’t see Skylar as a runaway either. While the federal agency does get involved in cases of missing juveniles, they only do so when sexual assault, physical abuse, abduction, or Internet crime is suspected. Skylar’s disappearance apparently had none of these elements.

However, the FBI had been involved in an investigation an hour south of Morgantown for a year before Skylar disappeared. Aliayah Lunsford, three, vanished from her Lewis County home in 2011. The massive search for Aliayah lasted for weeks. Sadly, the toddler was never found. If the FBI believed Skylar and the Lunsford case were connected, that could have been the reason they reacted so quickly in Skylar’s case.

Unless there was some other reason.

***

In the beginning, only a few people helped Dave and Mary look for Skylar. Shelia and Tara came immediately. A friend of Mary’s from work brought copies of the MISSING flyers that were being posted on Facebook. More support began pouring in as the situation turned into a crisis. Shania Ammons and her grandmother, Linda Barr, offered their support. Dave’s aunt, Joanne Nagy, organized volunteers to cook meals for Dave and Mary.

Ultimately, Aunt Joanne proved to be a one-woman army. She fortified the shattered parents with emotional support, including frequent hugs, and canvassed the rail-trail behind Sabraton, a suburb on the eastern side of Morgantown where sightings of Skylar had been reported. Sabraton was primarily a working-class neighborhood, with pockets of poverty here and there.

Joanne also organized numerous search teams that met in the Sabraton McDonald’s parking lot. The first search on July 10 drew such a huge crowd that Joanne was sure she’d picked the wrong place to meet. The parking lot was overflowing. When she went inside, she discovered most of the people were there to look for Skylar.

One week after Skylar disappeared, more people volunteered from all over the region, and complete strangers became close friends after hopping into cars together, bound by a common purpose: finding Joanne’s missing niece, Mary and Dave’s missing daughter. They split into teams of four and plastered flyers everywhere they could. The searchers drove up and down the winding country roads, dirt lanes, and the interstates that led away from Morgantown, looking for Skylar night after night.

At first, Shelia was arguably the most persistent searcher of all. She stopped by daily, usually with Tara. Her questions were always the same: “Did the police tell you anything new? What have they found out? What are they telling you?” To Mary and Dave, she seemed like a concerned ally, by turns energetic and distraught. Naturally, they shared everything they had learned.

In retrospect, Mary and Dave remembered that Rachel never offered to help. Mary wondered about her absence and asked Shelia about it. Shelia said Rachel had been away at camp since the previous Saturday morning, the day after Skylar vanished. A couple of weeks later, Mary realized she still hadn’t seen Rachel, but with hundreds of thoughts preoccupying her, she was too distracted to dwell on it. Still, it felt strange that they had heard nothing from Skylar’s other best friend.

***

The first Monday after Skylar disappeared, when Shelia and Tara helped the Neeses search, mother and daughter both knew the police investigation was well under way. They were aware the FBI was involved. Officer Colebank had already been to Shelia’s house earlier that day, and Special Agent Morgan Spurlock had joined her. On that visit Colebank noticed something that struck her as strange.

“I will never forget this,” Colebank said, recalling her first encounter with the animated, watchful teenager. Everyone—Shelia, Tara, Shelia’s stepdad, Jim, Shania, and Crissy Swanson, a distant cousin—was gathered at Shelia’s house, “in the garage just hanging out, sitting on chairs, just chillin’. I’m, like, okay … ‘Your supposed best friend is missing. Why are you sitting here having a good old time?’”

In actuality, the family had gathered to watch the first televised newscast about Skylar’s disappearance. But the atmosphere still seemed less somber than Colebank thought it should be. Shelia told Colebank she just hoped Skylar would come home.

When Colebank asked if she had tried calling Skylar, she said Shelia replied, “It just makes me so sad to hear her voice mail, to hear her voice. I can’t call her number.”

That day, Colebank heard firsthand the story about how Shelia and Rachel had dropped Skylar off. She didn’t buy it. Why drop Skylar off two blocks away for fear of waking Mary and Dave when they had picked her up earlier right beside the apartment complex? When she asked Shelia that question, the teen said Skylar had been mad and insisted on being let out there.

“Why haven’t you done more online to try to locate her?” Colebank asked.

“I’ve been too upset.”

“That’s bullshit, and I don’t believe it for a second. If that was my friend, I’d be blowing up their Facebook page. I’d be blowing their Twitter account up if I didn’t know where they were at. You know where she’s at. So tell me.”

“I told you, we dropped her off,” Shelia said.

The story didn’t make any sense to Colebank, and she immediately suspected that Rachel and Shelia were lying. She just wasn’t sure what they were lying about.

Almost as an afterthought, Colebank asked Shelia why she hadn’t yet tweeted anything
about
Skylar. It was odd, she said, that Shelia hadn’t spread the word about Skylar’s disappearance. At that point Shelia started crying and mumbled something about missing her best friend. That’s when Tara shut the interview down.

A few hours later, two retweets went out from Shelia’s phone. A UHS girl had tweeted a pic of Skylar’s MISSING poster, and Shelia had sent it out for all her network to see. Another one had tweeted the same MISSING flyer and the message,
Hey guys this girl goes to UHS please retweet.
Shelia did.