fifteen
Gone
On July 13, the day after Rikki’s Facebook post, Mary and Dave loaded their bags into Carol’s car and prepared to drive down to North Carolina. Skylar had bonded with her mother’s sister at birth. Carol and Skylar had spent so much time together since then that Carol looked at Skylar like the daughter she never had. Skylar was also like a little sister to Carol’s son, Kyle, who was two years older. Carol would do whatever it took to bring Skylar home.
Mary and Dave’s car wasn’t in the best shape. They had already put a ton of money into the beater to keep it on the road just so they could get to work each day. Taking it on a road trip was another matter. Dave was afraid it would break down and leave them stranded. God knows they already had enough stress; the last thing they needed was more.
They had to check on this latest Skylar sighting, though, to see for themselves if the girl spotted on the boardwalk was their daughter. For all they knew, it was her. In just a few hours, they believed, they might see their baby again. Carol’s offer of her own car had been an answer to their prayers.
The same day Mary and Dave were getting ready to drive to North Carolina, someone who called herself “Pisces_Sun” posted on Websleuths, one of the largest online crime discussion sites, saying she had barely seen or read anything about the story. Pisces_Sun’s post highlighted a disturbing reality: Me and my husband drove through Star City on our way to the store just now . . . I’m shocked that there aren’t missing posters for this girl up anywhere on the main drag! . . . Haven’t heard anyone mention it around town, either.
Even though Skylar had been missing for one week, few people outside of Mary and Dave’s immediate circles seemed to know about it. Skylar’s story illustrated a sad truth: traditional media can’t raise awareness as quickly as necessary in the case of a missing juvenile. Thus the need for AMBER Alerts. The program was a testament to Amber Hagerman, the 9-year-old who was riding her bicycle when she was kidnapped and brutally murdered in 1996. It was the brainchild of Dallas-Fort Worth broadcasters and local police who wanted a fast, efficient way to warn communities when children are abducted.
However, the AMBER system didn’t consider Skylar to be in danger. As far as Mary and Dave were concerned, the AMBER Alert system was broken and needed to be fixed.
Once national news programs did pick up the story, the networks requested sound bites from the parents. Ultimately, all of them came from Dave because Mary couldn’t look into a camera without crying uncontrollably. With his close-cropped, gray-flecked hair, knitted eyebrows, and a tight skepticism pulling at the left corner of his mouth, Dave reminded people of the actor John Goodman. In spite of his obvious concern and frustration, every news clip portrayed a man who was bearing all the disappointments with an admirable, soft-spoken dignity.
As the online momentum intensified, more people learned about Skylar’s disappearance. The mainstream media struggled to catch up to all the social media sites that had been covering the story since it began. By the time the Neeses were ready to leave for what they hoped would be a joyful reunion with Skylar, Colebank got word from the Carolina Beach police. The girl who had been seen was indeed a runaway. She just wasn’t Skylar.
Mary and Dave could barely find the energy to unpack Carol’s car.
On Sunday, July 15, a week and a half after Skylar came up missing, Mary Neese awoke to the certainty she’d never see Skylar again. Her maternal instincts told her as much. Across town, her sister Carol had the same feeling. Carol dressed quickly and drove to Mary’s.
On the way, Skylar memories kept playing inside her mind as if on a loop. Carol had been there the day Skylar was born. She had driven Mary and Skylar home when Mary called her, insistent she leave the hospital a day early. Mary, angry at Dave over some spat or another, refused to ask him for a ride. Carol never forgot how the car containing her, Mary, and their two only children spun around on black ice in the middle of a busy road. Carol held it together long enough for her husband Steve to come and rescue them. The minute she got home, though, she burst into tears.
Like Mary, Carol cries easily. She does so even as she relates stories about Skylar: the time Skylar borrowed her earrings to wear to a middle-school dance, all the times Skylar insisted she had to come clean Carol’s house when Carol was sick, and every time her favorite niece gave her another teapot.
Carol entered the Neeses’ apartment without knocking. In north-central West Virginia, people leave their doors unlocked when they are home—and often when they’re not. It’s common for relatives and close friends to simply enter, especially if they are expected. Mary was on the couch, her eyes rimmed with red.
“Carol, she’s not coming back,” Mary said. “If she was coming back, she’d be back. I’m telling you now.”
“I know. I can feel it, too. Skylar wouldn’t do this.” Carol sank onto the couch beside her sister.
“You know what else?” Mary said. “Her period was going to start, and you know how she gets.”
Carol nodded. “Cramps so bad she has to go to bed for the entire first day. And she always has to have Goody with her.” Carol suddenly realized something. “Mary! Where’s Goody?”
Mary shook her head. “In Skylar’s nightstand, same as always.”
“If Skylar had run away, she’d have taken Goody with her,” Carol insisted. The women were referring to a fuchsia piece of cloth cut from Mary’s nightgown that Skylar had kept since she was a toddler. Any time she was sick or in pain, Skylar wanted Goody nearby.
With that shared realization, Mary and Carol cried together, long and hard on the small balcony outside the dining room. They talked and wept for much of the afternoon.
When Dave got home after his shift, Mary and Carol were on the deck.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his brows knitted together with worry.
Mary spoke quietly. “Skylar’s gone.”
“What?” He felt suddenly panicked. “How do you know that?”
“We just know.”
Dave didn’t want to hear that. The family was just pulling out of a rocky patch. Skylar had sensed the change and was once more becoming the amiable and happy kid she had always been. He couldn’t bear to think Skylar was never coming home.
sixteen
Digging a Hole
One week after Officer Colebank first spoke with Shelia, the Blacksville branch of the Huntington National Bank was robbed. It was just after 10:00 A.M. on Monday, July 16, when a sturdy man in black wearing a full-face mask entered the branch carrying a backpack. He didn’t say a word—the large gun in his right hand said it all. The lone teller triggered the silent alarm. The thief either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He walked to the counter and handed the backpack to the female teller. Fingers trembling, she filled it with the contents of the cash drawer. The robber fled through the back door. From start to finish, the crime took less than thirty seconds.
Corporal Ronnie Gaskins and Senior Trooper Chris Berry from the WVSP arrived first on the scene. Trooper Berry knew the bank well. He had been transferred to Morgantown to help solve a rash of recent bank robberies. Berry’s family was from the Blacksville area, so he was happy to spend time working in his hometown. His grandfather, a Monongalia County deputy sheriff, had been shot in the neck at the same bank Berry was assigned to investigate. Luckily, the shot had grazed him and only required a few stitches.
Senior Trooper Chris Berry. (Photo courtesy Dana Berry.)
Berry immediately liked Gaskins, his new partner, who was also second-generation law enforcement. At one time Gaskins and his father were the only father-son state trooper team working the same West Virginia detachment. While their personalities were like day and night—Berry, talkative and excitable; Gaskins, reserved and thoughtful—both men were driven. Their shared family tradition made for a good working relationship.
This was Gaskins and Berry’s second visit to the bank, because it had been robbed over five weeks earlier, one month to the d
ay before Skylar disappeared. Neither trooper yet knew the bank robberies would draw them into the most complex case of their careers.
Colebank sensed they were being watched.
She’d gotten that sensation as soon as she pulled her Star City Police cruiser into the Shoafs’ driveway a few moments earlier. Sure enough, within seconds, a blonde woman appeared at the entrance of the house next door. Once she made eye contact with Colebank, the woman bustled down her walkway.
Still behind the wheel, Colebank grabbed her notebook and motioned to her male passenger. “Let’s do this,” she said, opening the car door. FBI Special Agent Morgan Spurlock followed her lead. In a suit and tie, Spurlock looked like a classic FBI agent—until he hoisted his ever-present backpack over his shoulder. Instead of briefcases, today’s federal agents carry backpacks.
Once outside the car, Colebank turned toward the blonde woman she thought might be Rachel’s mother.
“We’re here to see Rachel,” Colebank said.
“Oh, I’m not Patricia,” the woman said. “I’m a neighbor, Kim Keener. Her mom’s not here. Can I help you?”
It was July 19, almost two weeks since Colebank had spoken with Rachel at church camp. Colebank was eager to talk to her again, but the teen had never showed up at the station as she’d promised. The officer wondered if her first face-to-face with Rachel would make her as uneasy as when she’d met Shelia.
“Yes, Star City Police.” Kim had already pulled out her cell phone and was talking to someone. “It’s about Skylar, I guess. They wanna ask Rachel some questions about her disappearance. You need to talk to them or come home. Okay?” Kim nodded, eyeing the officer and the agent.
She held the phone out to Spurlock. “Patricia wants to talk to you.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” the FBI agent said, taking the phone.
Colebank listened as he introduced himself and gave Rachel’s mom the names of their respective agencies. She heard Patricia’s reply, too: “Ask her whatever you want. We’re trying to help here.”
Patricia was two hours away when her cell phone rang. She couldn’t understand why the police wanted to talk to Rachel. She had been at church camp when Skylar went missing. The police must have their facts wrong. They should be talking to Shelia; those two girls were always together.
Patricia had long ago heard what other teens said about the Eddy girl. She didn’t want her daughter with Shelia or Skylar, if the two were together. So she rarely let Rachel spend any time with them.
Liz said Patricia didn’t realize how serious the situation was or she would have turned around and come straight home. By the time she reached her destination, Patricia learned the full story: the FBI needed to question her daughter because Rachel was one of the last two people to see Skylar the night she disappeared. Patricia was mortified when she learned hours later Shelia was the other one.
Patricia was stunned by the realization Rachel had snuck out that night, and had been with Skylar before she went missing.
In the back of Colebank’s mind was a single nagging doubt: the car has to be Shelia’s. She and Spurlock had requested more security video from a couple of Star City businesses. The recordings they had already requested from corporate headquarters wouldn’t arrive for at least a few days, but in the meantime they planned to scout the area for any vehicles resembling the one captured on the landlord’s surveillance video.
Colebank remembered what it was like to be a teenager; high school girls are usually confused about something, and if they were high, it would be easy for their times to be off. Maybe they picked Skylar up later than they said, but they didn’t realize it.
That’s why Colebank wanted to talk to Rachel. She also knew the girl was religious and thought she might be easier to get information from than Shelia.
The officer hadn’t conducted many interviews so she was eager to pick up a few techniques from Spurlock. He was whip-smart and Colebank hoped to learn a great deal from working with him. Even though Spurlock appeared to be in his early twenties, she knew he had extensive training in criminology and accounting, so he had to be older. She didn’t realize Spurlock had only been out in the field a couple of months.
By the time Spurlock returned Kim’s cell phone, she had already grabbed Patricia’s hidden house key. Kim unlocked the front door of the Shoaf home and yelled up the stairs. “Hey, Rach! Star City Police are here to see you!”
In the dim light, Colebank could just make out the figures of two other people who hung back, watching as Rachel walked over to the officer and the agent. Colebank didn’t know Kelly Kerns, but learned Patricia had left Kelly in charge of Rachel for the weekend. Colebank immediately recognized the guy’s name. He was Mikinzy Boggs, Rachel’s boyfriend.
Rachel and Mikinzy had recently started dating—again. The two had first gotten together at the end of the previous October, drawn together by a mutual love of the stage. Rachel sang, played guitar, and was a rising star in UHS drama circles. Mikinzy wrote songs, played guitar, and sang lead in a band christened “Call Us Next Tuesday,” a name presumably chosen for its shocking acronym.
His band mostly played house parties. Slender, with a prominent nose and teeth, some people say Mikinzy looks like Napoleon Dynamite. Even so, he was the front man in a band, and as anyone who’s attended high school in America knows: That. Trumps. Everything.
Their school friends knew Rachel and Mikinzy’s relationship was rocky. They were always on again, off again. Some students said it was because Rachel used weed; Mikinzy was said to be an outspoken critic of drugs. Others said it was because he tried to control Rachel. Either way, by the time they were firmly committed to the relationship, Mikinzy’s stance on drugs had softened considerably. Perhaps it was because Rachel frequently enjoyed getting high with Shelia and Skylar.
The day the FBI dropped in to see Rachel, she and Mikinzy were newly reunited and their bond seemed stronger, almost unbreakable. Almost.
Several minutes into the interview, Colebank felt she was getting nowhere. “So when you dropped her off—I’m sorry, Rachel, I just want to make sure we have this right. Tell me again, where did you drop her off?”
The three of them, Rachel, Colebank, and Spurlock, were talking in the upstairs living room of the Shoafs’ split-level house. Rachel and Colebank faced each other on the couch. Spurlock sat alone in a chair. Kim, Kelly, and Mikinzy were downstairs in the family room.
“I told you, at the end there,” Rachel whined, as if she was annoyed at having to answer the same questions again. She would glance away or doodle with her pencil on a nearby notepad. “University Avenue. Skylar got angry and told us she didn’t want us to take her all the way to her apartment.”
“You dropped her off,” Spurlock asked, “after riding around smoking marijuana?”
Colebank broke in. “Look, Rachel, we don’t care about the weed. We care about where Skylar’s at. Where did you guys drive around?”
Rachel looked thoughtful, and then shrugged nonchalantly. “I’m not really sure where we drove around exactly. I was pretty messed up. I think we drove down Patteson Drive.”
Patteson was the main artery leading up to the WVU Coliseum, where it formed a T intersection with Beechurst Avenue at the top of the hill. A right takes one past the State Police Detachment to Star City and a left leads along the river, into downtown Morgantown.
“Thanks.” Colebank looked over at Spurlock, nodding her head. “There should be cameras.”
Many businesses along Patteson had video cameras, but most focused inside the establishments, on the doors, and on parts of the parking lots. None really showed a clear view of traffic but Colebank suspected Rachel wouldn’t know that.
“Yes, check the cameras,” Rachel said, “but I don’t know if you’ll see much. We stayed on side streets as much as we could.”
“Do you know the names of any of the side streets?” Colebank asked, masking a grin. She knew it was impossible to drive along Patteson and the side streets at the
same time. She also knew people who are lying often stall by repeating the question.
“The names of the streets? How am I supposed to know that?” Rachel sighed. “They were just streets. With houses. Like a regular neighborhood. I wasn’t driving. Ask Shelia.”
“We have.” Colebank let the silence draw out as she intently focused on Rachel. At the same time, Rachel’s neighbor Kim was pacing—visiting the kitchen, perching on the steps, going up and down the stairs—as if unsure of what to do with herself. Colebank fought an urge to tell Kim to take a seat and stay there.
Eventually, Kim went downstairs with Mikinzy and Kelly. “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 decided to focus on the contradictions in Rachel’s story. With her missteps 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 and opened it up. “Maybe this will help. After you dropped your friend Skylar off—at eleven-thirty, right?—after that . . .”
Downstairs, Kim was 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,” Kim’s voice was so loud snatches of her conversation 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.”
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