Pretty Little Killers

by Berry, Daleen, Fuller, Geoffrey C.

  After greeting her parents, Skylar headed to the kitchen for some of Mary’s homemade sweet tea. She loved the stuff and drank it by the gallon.

  “Honey, are you hungry?” Mary asked from her recliner. The Neese apartment is open and airy so from her vantage point Mary could see Skylar standing in the small kitchen-dining area. Even before Skylar answered, Mary knew what her daughter’s dinner had consisted of: one of those little berry ice cream desserts Wendy’s sold. She just loved those.

  “No, Mom, I ate at work.”

  Skylar crossed the wood-laminate floor and came into the carpeted living room. There, she perched on the arm of the recliner and hugged Mary. “Love you, Mommy,” Skylar said, kissing her mother on the cheek.

  Then she jumped up, leaned over the couch, and kissed Dave in the same fashion. “Love you, Daddy,” she said. “I’m really tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “Do you work tomorrow?” Mary asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want me to wash your uniform?”

  “Yes, it smells like French fries,” Skylar said, wrinkling her nose. Because she hated the smell of grease on her uniform, she always made a beeline for the shower. Not a minute later, Skylar tossed her dirty clothes out the door for Mary to throw into the washing machine. It was the same mother-daughter routine every night after Skylar finished work.

  Mary waited for the wash cycle to end, then loaded Skylar’s uniform into the dryer. After switching it on, she said goodnight to Dave and went to bed. She didn’t know it, but Skylar’s slender arm peeking around the bathroom door as she tossed out her uniform was the last glimpse Mary Neese would ever have of her daughter.

  Dave was more fortunate; while he was dozing on the couch, he received one last “Love you, Daddy,” when Skylar reappeared from the bathroom, wrapped in a large bath towel. She got a drink from the kitchen, went into her bedroom, and locked her door like every other American teenager who has a secret.

  Dave Neese received no response when he knocked on his daughter’s bedroom door the next afternoon. “Hey, honey, get up. I want you to take me back to work so you can have my car.”

  Nothing.

  He knocked again. “Sky?”

  Again, no answer. Usually, she was up—bam—as soon as she heard the car was available. Dave knew he shouldn’t be letting Skylar drive by herself; with just a learner’s permit, the teen was supposed to have a licensed adult in the car. However, he also knew she’d drive just enough to take him to work and then go to her own job. She’d come straight home after her shift. That was their agreement. The Neeses saved on gas and Dave always checked the odometer to make sure she was sticking to the arrangement.

  After getting no reply, Dave went to the hall closet and grabbed a coat hanger—the door locks in the apartment easily popped open. But when he peered inside Skylar’s bedroom, she wasn’t there. Her unmade bed looked like it had been slept in, so Dave first assumed she must have gone shopping with a friend. Then he remembered her door had been locked from the inside. He called his wife at work.

  “Mary, did Skylar tell you where she was going?” Dave’s voice rose as he spoke. He paced the small kitchen, feeling his worry build.

  “Just calm down.” Mary knew how close to the surface Dave’s emotions ran. “Don’t flip out. She probably went shopping with one of her friends or something. She never misses work.”

  “That’s what I thought, but her door was locked.”

  “She probably just accidentally hit the button closing the door in a hurry. You know how she does.”

  “Okay, maybe. But I’m going to look for her.”

  Dave rushed back to Walmart, a few minutes away, and told a supervisor he had to take the rest of the day off. “Listen,” he said, “I can’t find Skylar. I don’t know where she’s at, but I gotta find my kid.”

  He decided to check at home once more to see if she’d returned while he was gone. Skylar was largely a responsible teenager, and although she might forget to let her parents know where she was going, she would usually remember at some point to check in. But she was also fearless and willful, and that concerned Dave.

  Skylar still wasn’t at the apartment when he returned. Dave walked through the kitchen and out onto the small balcony for a smoke. He wanted to think, to plan his next steps. That was when he noticed a small black bench sitting at the base of the back wall of the apartment complex, just around the corner from Skylar’s first-floor room.

  Dave flipped his cigarette into the round ceramic bowl he and Mary kept for cigarette butts and went back through the apartment, out and around to Skylar’s window. The screen was leaning against the wall, her window open a finger’s breadth. That was the moment he knew: Oh, my God. She snuck out.

  nine

  On the Verge

  On that Friday afternoon when Dave came home to find Skylar gone, the Neeses discovered Skylar hadn’t learned her lesson about sneaking out, like they had thought after her joyride with Floyd and friends.

  Thinking about the bruises she used to sometimes see on Skylar’s thighs, Mary realized she had missed some clues. At the time, she and Dave believed Skylar when she said she got them at work. Looking back, Mary said, “We fell for it. She really got them from sliding down the windowsill.”

  That terrible July 6 day was when her parents realized Skylar hadn’t learned a thing. Just the opposite. In fact, as the Neeses would discover from one friend of hers, then another, in that first month after she disappeared, Skylar snuck out a lot.

  When she recalled Skylar’s lies, a shadow passed over Mary’s heart, 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 almost all parents eventually face: 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 over the next month that their missing daughter had been sneaking out frequently, Floyd Pancoast, the boy Star City police had caught joyriding with Skylar, came forward. He 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 heard 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?”

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

  Through the police investigation, the Neeses learned Skylar and Floyd were no more than 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.”

  A compassionate woman, Mary’s expressive eyes often reflect her own sadness as well as the sorrow she sees in others. She and Dave must have realized they were wrong when they saw the raw emotion on Floyd Pancoast’s face. Afterward, they offered him comfort, as they did repeatedly with various teens who had been touched by Skylar’s disappearance.

  Almost immediately after people learned 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 suggested 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, and just “buddies.” In truth Pancoast, who sported a buzz cut an
d tattoos, wasn’t Skylar’s type. Mary couldn’t say exactly what her daughter’s type was, though, because Skylar never had a boyfriend.

  Everyone believed Skylar 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 or took part in drunk-girl kissing games, but she wasn’t serious about dating or sex the way many teens are. Perhaps Skylar was on the verge of such stirrings.

  The afternoon after she and Rachel killed Skylar, Shelia was headed back toward Blacksville. She probably wondered if Rachel was going to ruin everything. She had to be more careful. How could she have lost her phone? Rachel claimed she had looked everywhere and couldn’t find it.

  “It must have fallen out when . . . you know,” she’d informed Shelia a couple of hours earlier. Shelia told her to shut up—not over the phone—but at least Rachel hadn’t texted it. Their plan had been very clear: all communication about anything suspicious must be in person or on FaceTime. The police could get everything else—phone calls, tweets, texts—everything. FaceTime, an app that let the two girls place a video call, was the only safe way. On FaceTime, once a conversation was over it was gone forever.

  As she drove toward the spot where they’d gone the night before, Shelia might have thought about what happened, glorying in the crime they had gotten away with.

  Or maybe not. Shelia was proud of her ability to block out unwanted thoughts and emotions, and she was very, very good at it. She tweeted as much, quite often.

  When she arrived, Shelia pulled over and got out. She tried sending a text to Rachel’s phone and then listened carefully. She didn’t hear anything. Again, she texted Rachel’s cell. Shelia probably would have kept her eyes turned away from the newly gathered pile of leaves and branches. The search took several long minutes, as she sent text after text—until finally she heard Rachel’s ringtone. There it was, a little ways off in the grass. Shelia slipped it in her pocket and headed back to her car.

  No doubt Shelia saw the large dark stains in the road, but she was so elated over finding Rachel’s phone she likely didn’t give them a single thought.

  ten

  The Timeline

  After Dave found Skylar’s bench and realized she had snuck out, he immediately called Shelia. If anyone knew where his daughter was, Shelia would. That afternoon 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 the 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 distraught state.

  Dave was missing two key phone numbers: for Skylar’s friends Hayden McClead and Shania Ammons. He called Shelia again to ask for them. He wasn’t sure Shelia would have Hayden’s number, because she usually steered clear of Skylar when Shelia was around.

  He knew Shania was an old friend of Shelia’s from Blacksville. They had gone to middle school together. For social activities like making a McDonald’s run or 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 didn’t have Hayden’s phone number. She also reminded him Shania was 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 one of those date-rape drugs. 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 farfetched in their tiny suburb of Morgantown.

  “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.”

  Tara, Shelia’s mother, then got on the line.

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

  “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, by saying the words “we can’t find her,” Mary finally realized Skylar definitely 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 the Star City police to respond to the 911 call. Officer Bob McCauley arrived at 4:41 P.M. and the two men covered the other side of Crawford. No one had seen a missing sixteen-year-old girl.

  Contrary to the rumors saying otherwise, Shelia 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 upset and scared. Shelia’s mother, Tara, had cried when she first got to the apartment, but Shelia hadn’t.

  After the search of the immediate neighborhood 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 others—Dave, Mary, Tara, Shelia, and Officer McCauley—gathered 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 small group 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 back seat. 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 said he wasn’t sure it was. Shelia said nothing.

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

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

  After McCauley took Shelia’s statement, 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. By that account she and Rachel were home and in bed by midnight. It was possible, given the three teens lived so close together. Everyone there believed the vehicle they saw had to be someone else’s. It couldn’t be Shelia’s, because she drove a sporty silver Toyota Camry—the one her stepfather purchased for Tara before they got married.

  That left only one logical explanation in Mary and Dave’s minds—but it was the last one they wanted to consider. After her friends dropped her off, Skylar left again—in a second car. In a car whose driver parked in the lower parking lot near the Dumpster, which was captured in the surveillance video.