Skylar Neese
Skylar Neese was just an ordinary 16 year old. She lived in a city called Star City located in West Virginia. She was an only child to Dave and Mary Neese. Skylar was described as being someone to light up any room. she was smart and enthusiastic; she was just fun to be around.
Around the age of 8, she met her best friend Sheila Eddy. Both girls were only children. They were also from different cities and went to different schools. Sheila was located in Blacksville, West Virginia. By the time high school was about to start in 2010, Sheila's family moved closer to Skylar so the girls could go to school together. This is where they met their third best friend Rachel Shoaf. The girls had such a strong bond and were inseparable.
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| (Left to right) Sheila Eddy, Rachel Shoaf, Skylar Neese |
On July 5th 2012, Skylar had gotten home from her shift at Wendy’s; she went to her room, shut the door, and went to sleep. The next morning, Skylar's parents woke up and went to work like normal. Around 3 or 4 pm, when Skylar's dad got home, he noticed that Skylar's door was still shut and noticed it as odd behavior. Skylar's dad knocked on the door and there was no response. He realized that Skylar was supposed to go to her shift at Wendy’s at 4pm. Skylar's dad decided to go into her room and found that Skylar was not in there. Skylar's dad looked around her room and saw that her bed looked like it was slept in. He also noticed that the window in Skylar's room was open a little bit and a bench was below the window. At this time, the manager from Wendy's started calling the Neese household and was asking where Skylar was. After the call with Wendy's ended and Skylar's mother came home from work, Skylar's parents called 911 and reported her as missing.
Once word got out that she was missing, Sheila called the Neese household to tell them what happened. They were planning on sneaking out around 11pm to drive around and smoke. Then at 12 am, they dropped her back off two blocks down the road. After they dropped her off they didn’t hear from her again. Skylar's parents went to look at the security footage in the apartment complex they lived in. The security footage showed a car pulling into the apartment complex around 12:30am and Skylar running across the parking lot and getting into the car. The footage was so bad that they could not point out the license plate number or a vehicle description.
After viewing the footage, authorities decided to treat it like a runaway and did not send out an amber alert. Skylar's parents then took to social media, the news, and even texting Skylar asking for her to come home. However, Skylar's social media and phone records showed that there was no recent activity. A few days after Skylar went missing, Sheila asked Skylar’s parents if she could sit on Skylar’s bed and have a moment. Sheila had a complete breakdown; she was sobbing and weeping after Skylar. Sheila tried to be helpful by posting on social media and putting out missing persons flyers and would often talk to Skylar's parents about her being missing.
Rachel, on the other hand, kept quiet about the situation. The day after Skylar’s disappearance, Rachel spent the day at the lake with her family. She was calm but was on her phone frantically texting. Rachel was also planning on staying at a church camp after the day at the lake.
After a few days of her disappearance, Skylar's family thought she would eventually come back. However, if Skylar was planning on running away, she would've packed some things with her. She never took her phone charger, contact solution, or any money with her. A lot of theories started to surface at this time. Some people were thinking she was abducted or lead into sex trafficking. Other people were thinking she was out partying and got too drunk so people left her in a ditch.
Authorities were considering Sheila and Rachel to be suspects and were thinking that the car from the footage belonged to Sheila. They began questioning the girls and they noticed that Sheila showed no emotion during the questioning and seemed more interested in the investigation by asking authorities what they were planning on doing. Rachel, on the other hand, acted nervous and like she had no idea about Skylar disappearing. Both stories that Sheila and Rachel shared seemed rehearsed.
The girls had said that they were planning on staying within Star City, drive around and smoke weed. Authorities wanted to make sure of this and went through hundreds of surveillance footage from companies. However they found that the girls drove 45 minutes out of their way to Blacksville. Sheila claimed that they had dropped Skylar off at home at midnight and Sheila and Rachel went to Blacksville after. But Rachel said that they went to Blacksville and told them that Skylar was with them. After Sheila found out that Rachel changed her story, she did too claiming that Skylar was with them. But she also added that they went to a town called Brave which was over the border of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. And while they were in Brave, the girls said that Skylar jumped out of the car and ran into the woods.
Authorities were becoming more suspicious over the two girls. They’re behavior seemed very odd to them. Skylar’s parents told authorities that Sheila was like a second daughter to them but knew that Sheila would push Skylar into certain behaviors; however they brushed it off thinking it was just teenagers being teenagers.
A few months before Skylar's disappearance, Skylar went to a friend and she was clearly upset about something. Skylar told this friend that she and Sheila had been friends for a while and had only just met Rachel. Skylar felt as if she was being pushed out of the friend group. Skylar told the friend that Sheila and Rachel would wear matching outfits and call it a ‘coincidence’. And when they would all take pictures together Skylar would be pushed or cropped out of the picture. Skylar wanted to save the relationship between her, Sheila, and Rachel.
Skylar was clearly upset about Sheila and Rachel's relationship and posted throughout social media about what was going on just a few weeks before she disappeared.
Video surfaced about a ‘would you rather’ game between the girls. They were asking eerie questions about drowning and suffocating.
Phone records between Sheila and Rachel showed that after Skylar disappeared, they didn’t care. There was nothing mentioned about Skylar or how they were going to try and find her. Skylar’s parents tried to defend Sheila and Rachel during their interrogation. Sheila was so confident in her "story" and wanted to prove that she wasn’t lying so she took a polygraph test but she ended up failing it. Rachel also said that she would take a polygraph test as well but on her way to the test, she jumped out of her fathers moving vehicle and ran away.
Authorities then tried to push and see if they could get anything out of the girls by using social media; saying things about karma and ‘these girls need to confess’. An anonymous tweet surfaced and was sent to the girls and it said ‘Pretty little liars keep on lying’. Everyone around Sheila and Rachel had suspicions and tried to get the girls to crack and tell the truth.
About 6 months after Skylar went missing, Rachel had a nervous breakdown. Rachel’s mother called 911 stating that Rachel was running around and was completely out of control. In the 911 call, you could hear Rachel hit her mom in the face, hard enough to give her a black eye. This was followed with screaming. It was also said that Rachel was suicidal and was taken to the hospital. After she was released from the hospital, she was taken to the police station and upon entering, Rachel said the words ‘We stabbed her’.
On January 16th, 2013, Rachel finally told the full story of what happened to Skylar. Sheila and Rachel planned on killing Skylar for months, almost a year. The two girls didn’t know how to use a gun so they had to settle on a knife.
Rachel said that on the night they killed Skylar, the girls packed in the trunk of Sheila’s car. They packed their supplies which included a shovel, paper towels, bleach, wipes, a change of clothes. The girls wore sweatshirts and put kitchen knives in the pockets of the sweatshirts. They planned to take Skylar on a drive, saying they were going to smoke, and kill her there. They thought the only way they could convince Skylar to leave the house was with weed. They went to Brave, Pennsylvania because Sheila’s family owned some land. So they drove out to this area on a gravel road.
When they stopped, they got out and decided to smoke there. Both Sheila and Rachel claimed that they didn’t have a lighter so Skylar offered to go back to the car and grab one. The girls had pre-arranged when they would kill her. They counted down from 3 and ran at Skylar and began stabbing and attack Skylar. Skylar tried to run away but Rachel tackled her to the ground and continued to stab her. They even slit her throat to kill her faster. They wanted to bury her so she wouldn’t be found but because they were on a gravel road, they dragged her off the road and covered her body in sticks, grass, and leaves. The girls then went back to the car and cleaned themselves up along with cleaning off the knives and acted like nothing had happened.
After hearing this story, authorities had no physical evidence to work with. But Rachel told them where the body was. They went and they did in fact find her decaying body. After finding Skylar's body, authorities could visit Skylar's family and confirm it with them. The authorities weren’t 100 percent sure that Sheila was involved so they wired Rachel and had her go hang out with Sheila. But Sheila would not budge and acted like she had no idea what Rachel was talking about. They still acted normal with each other like take selfies together.
The day that the news got out about Skylar’s body being found, Sheila went to Twitter and acted like she just found out that she was murdered. She even started to taunt the authorities with tweets. She would leave clues stating that it was her and she thought she was invincible.
While still being suspicious of Sheila, forensic teams were called to do tests on Sheila's car. The teams did find blood and tested it to see if it was Skylar's. When the tests came back, they could confirm that it was Skylar’s blood. Authorities had enough evidence between Sheila and Rachel and they were to go ahead and arrest the two girls. Rachel came in willingly and was arrested on the spot. Sheila was found in a Cracker Barrel parking lot and arrested shortly after Rachel was arrested.
The two girls were asked why they killed Skylar and they answered that they ‘just didn’t like her’. Authorities needed to find a motive so they looked in Skylar’s diary. They found out that in the summer of 2011, the girls were having a sleepover and they were all drinking. During the sleepover, Skylar had found out that Sheila and Rachel had a sexual relationship. Later in the sleepover, Sheila and Rachel decided to get intimate while Skylar was still awake. Sheila basically forced Skylar to watch. They thought that if Skylar left the room, the parents would know that they were drunk and they would get in trouble.
Then at some point in the sleepover, Sheila and Skylar started fighting. Skylar threatened to tell everybody about Sheila and Rachel's relationship. But Sheila and Rachel wanted to keep it a secret. The three girls were all still friends after this but Sheila and Rachel decided that they had enough of Skylar.
In October 2011, Sheila and Rachel discussed, in the middle of science class, how to hide a body. Apparently, a handful of students and a teacher from their school heard them talk about killing Skylar but never reported anything because they thought they were joking.
In June 2012, Sheila decided it was the final straw with Skylar. Skylar and Sheila went to Myrtle Beach for a week and this week was not good at all. There had been about a year of tension building up between Skylar and Sheila and the two girls were fighting the whole week. After they got back from Myrtle Beach, Sheila went up to Rachel and said to her that ‘Skylar has to die’.
On May 1st 2013, Rachel pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree by 'unlawfully, maliciously and intentionally causing the death of Skylar Neese by stabbing her and causing fatal injuries'. Rachel received a sentence of 30 years in prison, and will be eligible for parole after 10 years. Rachel also apologized publicly to Skylar's family. Since Rachel was a minor a the time, she was held in a juvenile detention center and then was transferred to an adult prison.
Sheila was later indicted by a grand jury on September 6, 2013 with one count of kidnapping, one count of first-degree murder, and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. Shelia, however, pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Later in January 2014, Sheila changed her plea and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for a lessened sentence of fifteen years to life, with the possibility of parole after fifteen years. Sheila did not apologize to Skylar’s family, she did not look like she had any remorse, and acted like the whole thing was a joke.
Skylar’s parents did not want Sheila’s apology even if she had given it. They think that Sheila 100 percent wanted to do it and would do it again if given the chance. Skylar’s father, Dave, said that he would be at every single parole hearings to make sure that Sheila never walks free again.
A West Virginia state legislator from the Neese family home district introduced a bill called Skylar's Law to modify West Virginia's Amber Alert plan to issue immediate public announcements when any child is reported missing and in danger, regardless of whether the child is believed to have been kidnapped or not. In May 2013, the West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin signed the legislation into law.
https://activefugitives.com/the-heartbreaking-murder-of-skylar-neese/
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