The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese: The Truth Behind the Headlines (6 page)

She walked down the steps to the front yard, clearly suspicious.

“What do you want?”

Gaskins spoke up. “We’re just out talking to people about those robberies. If people saw anything, heard anything. We’d like to come in to talk with you all for a few minutes.”

“I guess that would be okay,” she said and turned toward the house, but Berry didn’t move.

“Before we go inside, ma’am, just to make me feel safe, I need to ask you a question. There any guns here at the house?”

Grandma looked at him and chuckled. “Heh, this is Blacksville. There’s guns in all the houses around here.”

“Yeah, I know,” Berry said. “I grew up over on Jake’s Run. I just like to ask. I’m not saying you’re going to blow me away or anything, but where’s the closest one you got?”

“In my daughter’s bedroom.”

Berry grinned. “Oh, really. What kind you got?”

“Revolver,” she said, heading back up the steps.

“I love revolvers!” Berry glanced at Gaskins like a kid with a new toy. The gun that had been used in the bank robbery was a revolver, a type of gun that was increasingly rare. “Can I see it?”

“Sure, come on in.”

Berry went inside with Grandma while Gaskins waited in the yard with Darek. A few moments later, Berry came back holding a black revolver. The weapon looked just like the one from the bank security video.

***

Within a few hours, Gaskins and Berry returned with a search warrant. They wanted to confiscate the gun before Darek had a chance to ditch it. They brought along a State Police Special Response Team, a tactical team, in case Darek got squirrelly. He didn’t.

Hours later, the thirty-member team had confiscated not only the revolver but several other firearms and items of clothing they believed matched those worn by the bank robber. Even if the search turned up nothing more, Gaskins and Berry were convinced they had unfinished business with Darek Conaway.

***

Even as the two troopers believed they were close to solving the bank robberies, Rachel’s interview with Colebank and Spurlock was still in progress.

“I want to help find her, I really do,” Rachel said, “but I was really loaded.”

Colebank felt herself getting frustrated, but she managed to keep her voice calm. “You can’t drive on Patteson Drive
and
stay on side streets, Rachel.”

Colebank and Spurlock had decided to focus on the contradictions in Rachel’s story. With them as leverage, Rachel might be convinced to explain what had really happened. From the start, Colebank had been certain something bad had gone down—an accident, an overdose, something. She was equally sure Shelia and Rachel knew what it was.

“Just tell us exactly what happened, and we’ll take it from there,” Spurlock said. He pulled a map of Star City from his backpack. “Maybe this will help. After you dropped your friend Skylar off—at eleven thirty, right?—after that …”

Kim shook her head in disgust. She turned and went down the stairs. While Colebank tried to catch every word that passed between Rachel and Spurlock, Kim was downstairs talking to Mikinzy.

He was lying on the carpet, hands over his eyes. “The story was always she was home by 11:45,” he kept repeating.

“Let me tell you something, Mikinzy Boggs,” some of Kim’s words carried up the stairwell. “You don’t sneak out and get back home at 11:45. Okay? I snuck out plenty. You don’t sneak home at 11:45. You sneak
out
at 11:45.”

“She told me she didn’t,” Mikinzy kept repeating. He seemed confused.

So did Kim. She and Sabrina exchanged a long glance. “You know what, I’m—that doesn’t even make sense on any level.” She stomped back up the steps.

To observers, it seemed like Mikinzy
³
was doubting his girlfriend for the first time.

***

The minute the Shoafs’ front door closed behind her, Colebank knew the two girls were lying. She and Spurlock had talked with Rachel for about an hour and a half and they knew little more than when they arrived. The interview—and Mikinzy’s reaction—told her Rachel was stonewalling as much as Shelia.

Colebank just couldn’t figure out why, or what they had to lie about. Nonetheless, their behavior and attitudes turned her initial frustration into anger. She was angry that Skylar was still missing. Angry that she wasn’t getting answers. And angry that Rachel’s and Shelia’s parents seemed more concerned about their daughters’ rights than about finding out what happened to Skylar.

It also bothered her that Shelia seemed to be asking more questions than anyone in her situation should be. “Anytime I talked to Shelia,” Colebank later recalled, “she’d say, ‘What have you figured out? What do you know?’”

Shelia didn’t call Colebank or seek her out, but whenever the officer called to set up an interview, Shelia immediately wanted to know how the investigation was going. She didn’t seem intimidated by the constant questioning. Colebank thought she seemed amused.

Colebank’s concern over Shelia’s motives turned to alarm when she learned that Shelia was asking Mary and Dave the same questions. She told them to stop telling Shelia or Rachel anything.
At all.

“They’re wanting to know where we’re at in the case,” Colebank warned them.

Both Mary and Dave waved her concern away, defending the teens as good friends who were simply worried about Skylar. Mary and Dave had known Shelia for many years and were confident that if the teen knew anything useful, she would say so. They didn’t know Rachel well, but they automatically felt protective toward her. They were afraid cutting off communication was the worst approach. After the tragedy of Skylar’s disappearance, the Neeses also felt like they needed the teens as much as the teens needed them.

Colebank disagreed. She suspected Shelia’s “concern” was not at all what Mary and Dave thought it was. She suspected Shelia was doing something she’d seen other people do before—trying to insert herself into the investigation. Shelia could be doing it for the thrill of being on the “inside,” but Colebank was afraid that wasn’t it at all. Whatever Shelia’s real reason was, the young investigator was determined to find out.

So Colebank grew more and more suspicious of Shelia’s continuous desire to know what was going on. At the same time, she also wondered what Rachel was hiding. Whereas Shelia probed for information, Rachel was wide-eyed and solicitous. Plus, the teen actress kept claiming she had been too drunk and stoned to remember anything.

Looking back, Colebank realized how different the two teens’ demeanor was. Shelia was crafty. Rachel, though, came across as wanting to say the right thing. “It was a little more sincere, I guess you could say. You could sense shame or … a lot of it was fear. We got fear.”

Officer Colebank wasn’t the only person who was frustrated and angry. Mary Neese was growing more frustrated by the day. Dave wasn’t far behind his wife. By the time Wednesday, July 25, rolled around, Skylar’s parents were addled and exhausted from worry, fear, and the slowly dimming hope their daughter was still alive. It had been three weeks since that horrible first weekend and they found themselves reacting like robots to one strange event after another. A rumor here. A sighting there. Along the way, they continued to help hang even more posters, walk the rail-trail yet one more time, and search continuously for any sign of their missing daughter.

They still tried to go to work, even though they couldn’t always manage it. The constant, overwhelming sorrow made it difficult to get out of bed in the morning and to go to sleep in the evening. Their days had become nothing more than a string of minutes or hours, allocated to whatever needed to be done next. Maybe Dave had to give another interview, or Mary had to chase down another Facebook lead. Or they had to meet with police. Before long, they weren’t even sure what day of the week it was.

One day Star City cops again told Mary and Dave they had received word of several Skylar sightings in the Sabraton area. The Morgantown police, a much larger force, had been monitoring the tips, but Dave felt the need to do something. Anything.

So he decided to stake out a supposed “drug house” in Sabraton for several days. It was in a run-down part of the neighborhood commonly known as an easy place to get drugs. Many of the rumors Dave had heard connected Skylar’s disappearance to drugs. Because Dave had once been addicted to prescription painkillers following a work-related injury, he knew what to look for. He knew which people to watch on the street, what their reddened eyes would reveal, how the desperation on their faces could betray them.

For days on end, Dave faithfully staked out the house. And when he saw someone who had all the signs of an addict, Dave got out of his car to investigate. Sometimes they mistook him for a dealer, and asked what he was selling. Other times he was mistaken for a buyer, and they offered to sell him something. They occasionally believed he was an undercover cop—and then they usually turned and ran.

Except for the time he saw a woman so ravaged by her addiction she couldn’t stop shaking. She and the man with her looked at Dave with eyes full of fear when he approached them on the street.

“Listen, I’m not a cop. I’m just a father looking for my daughter,” Dave said as he held up Skylar’s photo. “Have you seen her? Please, I have to know.”

During the times people believed he was a junkie, it was almost tempting to take what they were offering. But Dave refused to return to that life. Despite knowing that drugs would envelop his conscious thoughts in a wad of cotton so thick he would no longer feel the pain, Dave still couldn’t do it.

He’d made a promise to Skylar and he intended to keep it. He was going to be clean for the day when she finally came home.

It was hard work. And the toll it took was even harder. No matter how many times Dave handed out Skylar’s picture or begged the junkies to tell him if they had seen her, they never could. They didn’t even know her. And they certainly hadn’t seen her. Not in Sabraton.

Still Dave kept waiting and watching—but finding nothing.

***

While Mary and Dave were feeling angry and frustrated in the real world, so were their online counterparts. It’s ironic that as much as people say they hate crime, they love to talk about it. Which explains why crime discussion sites see some of the heaviest traffic on the Internet.

Websleuths is one of the largest, with hundreds of threads. The discussions range from high-profile cases like the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder to obscure unsolved crimes, and anyone can start a thread on any topic.

Someone named “kmartin96” started a Websleuths thread about Skylar one week after the teen disappeared.
WV - Skylar Neese, 16, Star City, 6 July 2012.
He included a brief description of Skylar and a link to one of the MISSING posters. The earliest participants on the thread tried to expand on what little information was available.

Then, on July 25, “Sheromom” voiced her aggravation:
I don’t understand why some cases are followed so closely that I can’t keep up and yet here is this beautiful young lady that no one seems to care about?

Wherever Skylar’s name was mentioned on social media, you could find people like Sheromom. Their written posts revealed a common pet peeve: they were angry over law enforcement’s perceived failure to do anything. They were annoyed about the lack of information about the case. The boiling point was finally reached on Facebook. Scalding criticism poured out of Becky Bailey, an old high school friend of Dave’s. Her online rant would eventually grow into landmark legislation, becoming law less than a year after Skylar disappeared.

***

Across town on Wednesday, July 25, Shelia was hating the day. Tara was packing her daughter off to visit family in Florida because Shelia was so disturbed by Skylar’s disappearance. That morning she tweeted,
seriously not looking forward to this 17 hour car ride
.

By Saturday, Shelia’s visit with her Florida family was well under way. Her attitude remained sour, though, as seen by a tweet to Shania:
getting up this early and going to the beach isn’t even enjoyable.

That same afternoon, Shania and her grandmother, Linda, visited the Neeses, as they had done every day since Shania returned from the beach. Mary noticed that Shania was often texting while Mary talked about the police investigation. Like the teen was more interested in her phone than in what was going on around her. That’s when Mary realized: once Shelia left for the beach,
Shania
had begun asking questions about the investigation. Her sudden interest definitely caught Mary’s attention.

“You’re always playing with your phone,” Mary said. “Who are you texting all the damn time?”

“Shelia. She wants to know how it’s going.”

“I’ll bet she does.” Mary remembered Colebank’s warning about talking to Shelia, and she was suddenly suspicious of Shelia’s motives. In fact, she was getting angry. Furious.

“She’s just scared for Skylar,” Shania said.

“Right.” Mary’s sarcasm was palpable.

With all the commotion, Shania didn’t hear her cell phone ringing. When it suddenly began vibrating like crazy, Shania looked down at her phone. She had a missed call from Shelia. When she didn’t get the call, Shelia had blown up Shania’s phone with several text messages. They begged Shania to call her back.

Shania called Shelia while Mary continued to vent to Linda, loudly, about her suspicions that both girls were up to no good.

“Mary found out I was texting you,” Shania said. After a brief pause, she added, “She thinks I’m passing info to you.”

“This was supposed to be about Skylar,” Mary said, still angry, “but you two are acting like it’s all about you.”

“Is she mad at me?” Shelia asked Shania.

“Oh, yeah. She’s pissed. I don’t think she believes you.”

“About what?”

“She thinks you’re not telling her something. But you are, right?”

“Mary doesn’t believe me?”

“I don’t think so,” Shania said. “Look, Shelia, you can’t lie. Just tell Mary anything you know. Now.”

Shelia completely lost it, sobbing into the phone that she wasn’t lying, that Mary had to believe her. She
had to
.

Shania held the phone away from her ear, and everyone heard Shelia: “I’ve got to talk to her. She has to know I’m not lying.”

“She wants to talk to you.” Shania reached toward Mary, who snatched the phone.

“I know when you’re lying. I helped cover for you too much, remember?” Mary said, referring to all the times she had tried to save Shelia from punishment.

Shelia continued to sob.

“Remember? I know when you’re lying,” Mary repeated.

“Please, Mary! Please!” Shelia pleaded through sobs. “You have got to believe me!”

“Why should I?” Mary was beyond disgust. She suspected Shelia was lying. “Would
you
believe you?”

There was a pause. Then Shelia sniffed and murmured a word that Mary thought sounded like, “No.”