Pretty Little Killers

by Berry, Daleen, Fuller, Geoffrey C.

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

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

  To observers, it seemed like Mikinzy22 was doubting his girlfriend for the first time.

  seventeen

  Business in Blacksville

  The same day Colebank was interviewing Rachel, Gaskins and Berry were paying their first visit to the Conaway place. It was one of many homes in Blacksville they were visiting in their search to find out more about the bank robberies. When they pulled up to the house, they saw a man digging in the backyard. As they walked toward the front door, the man came around the corner carrying a shovel. The officers recognized him from his police mug shot.

  Darek Conaway held the shovel out from his body by the tip of the handle, the muddy blade waist high. Bare-chested, Darek was clean-shaven, his hair sweat-caked to his skull. The man was ripped, all corded muscle. He glared at the two troopers. Neither trooper was easily spooked, but they tensed when they saw Darek.

  “Hello, Darek,” Gaskins said. “I’m Corporal Gaskins and this is Trooper Berry. We’re here to chat with you a few minutes.”

  Darek’s shovel blade lowered a little and he shrugged. “Okay.”

  Neither trooper wanted to square off against an angry man with a shovel, so Gaskins and Berry tried to defuse the tension.

  “What are you digging back there, Darek?” Gaskins asked lightly.

  “Oh, I ain’t digging anything,” Darek said.

  “You ain’t digging? You trying to hide a dead body or something?” Gaskins meant it as a joke, but that’s not how Darek took it. He drew himself up, his eyes large, and Berry and Gaskins could see his heart hammering inside his chest.

  The two troopers exchanged a look.

  “I’m just joking with you, Darek,” Gaskins said.

  Just then an elderly woman poked her head around the open front door. She stepped slowly out of the shadows and onto the porch.

  “Hey Grandma, it’s okay,” Darek said.

  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, turning toward the house.

  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 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 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 to the Conaways 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.

  eighteen

  The Wall Is Built

  Jessica Colebank knew Rachel was lying long before the Shoafs’ front door closed behind her. She and Spurlock had talked with the teen for an hour and a half but they knew little more than when they arrived. The interview told her Rachel was stonewalling as much as Shelia.

  Colebank 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 mad Skylar was still missing, angry she wasn’t getting answers, and pissed Rachel’s and Shelia’s parents seemed more concerned about their precious daughters than about finding Skylar. They were clueless.

  She was also sure they knew more than they were saying. After Colebank had combed through the Twitter feeds of all three girls, she was more convinced than ever Skylar was angry with both girls on June 9, when she tweeted: just know I know. The only problem was, she had no proof.

  Then there was Skylar’s next-to-last tweet, you doing shit like that is why I will NEVER completely trust you. From everything Skylar’s friends—Daniel, Hayden, Shania, among others—said, it looked like Skylar was upset because Shelia and Rachel had been leaving her behind lately. So maybe the night she snuck out, Skylar realized her two best friends were going to a party without her. She could have called another friend and asked for a ride so she could join in the fun, too. If so, they needed to find that car.

  Colebank realized the teens’ cell phone records would help clear up the mystery. She would need warrants, and she was going to start by searching Shelia’s and Rachel’s cell phone records. If she needed to, she could branch out from there, getting warrants for other teens’ phones. Maybe if she could piece together the tweets with the texts, as well as see who called whom that night, she would be able to come up with answers.

  The process was time intensive. There was no telling how long it would take the phone companies to respond—but it needed to be done. Colebank could not escape the feeling those girls were hiding something.

  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. In fact, Colebank thought the teen brash for even asking, and she didn’t like it that Shelia seemed amused.

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

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

  Mary and Dave waved her concern away, defending the teens as good friends who were simply worried about Skylar. The Neeses had known Shelia for many years and were confident if the teen knew anything useful, she would say so. They didn’t know Rachel well, but they automatically felt protective toward her, as they did with all of Skylar’s friends. They were afraid cutting off communication with Shelia 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 was certain Shelia’s “concern” was nothing of the kind, and suspected Shelia was doing something she’d seen other people do—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, the young investigator was determined to find out.

  At the same time, Colebank 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 an
d stoned to remember anything.

  Looking back, Colebank realized how different the two teens’ demeanors were. Shelia was crafty, but Rachel 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.”

  nineteen

  A Spy in the House?

  Officer Colebank wasn’t the only person who was angry. Mary Neese was growing more annoyed by the day and Dave wasn’t far behind. 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 almost 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 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, or to go to sleep in the evening. Their days had become nothing more than a string of minutes and hours, allocated to whatever needed to be done next. Maybe Dave needed to give another interview or Mary felt compelled to chase down another Facebook lead. Sometimes 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—this time in Sabraton. The Morgantown City Police, a much larger force, had been monitoring the tips, but Dave felt the need to do something. Anything.

  So he staked out a supposed “drug house” in Sabraton for several days. It was in a rundown part of the neighborhood 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 watched the house. Whenever 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 she was with looked at Dave with eyes full of fear when he approached them.

  “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 offered, but Dave refused to return to that life. Despite knowing 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. The toll it took was even greater. 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.

  It’s ironic: as much as people say they hate crime, they love to talk about it. This 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 JonBenet Ramsey murder to obscure unsolved crimes. Anyone can start a thread on any topic.

  Someone named “kmartin96” introduced 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.

  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 complaint: they were angry over law enforcement’s perceived failure to do anything. They were annoyed by 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 one year after Skylar disappeared.

  Across town on Wednesday, July 25, Shelia was hating the day. Since she seemed so disturbed by Skylar’s disappearance, Tara packed her daughter off to visit family in Florida. 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 underway. 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 every day since Shania returned from the beach. Mary noticed Shania was often texting while she talked about the police investigation. It was as if the teen was more interested in her phone than what was going on around her. Mary suddenly realized: once Shelia left for the beach, Shania had begun asking questions about the investigation. Her sudden interest 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 instantly suspicious of Shelia’s motives. Moreover, she was 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, begging 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 she wasn’t lying and 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.

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

  “Why should I?” Mary was beyond disgust. “Would you believe you?”

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

  twenty

  Facebook Friction

  Across town, someone else was growing suspicious, too. The boy with the blond curls was one of Skylar’s closest confidants—and vice versa. Although it’s true Skylar didn’t share much with anyone, if she did have something important to reveal, Daniel was one of the few people she would confide in.

  Soft-spoken, with a pleasant and easy manner, Daniel really sees the people around him. He is wary with strangers but reveals an impish side once he feels comfortable.

  Daniel knew he could trust Skylar with his deepest secrets so he came out as gay to her before he told anyone else. All his fears about revealing such a personal detail in a small town vanished when Skylar responded with love and unconditional acceptance.

  In February of their sophomore year, Skylar had gotten Daniel a job at Wendy’s. He tended to goof off at work, snapping photos and clowning around, while Skylar was all business. She was more committed in her academic life as well, but Daniel didn’t mind. At that point he wasn’t serious about much of anything.

  That all changed after Skylar disappeared. Daniel became obsessed with one tremendously important matter—figuring out what had happened to his dear friend. Daniel began to reason that since Shelia and Rachel were the last two people to see Skylar, they had to know something. Skylar had said something, done something, texted someone, while she was joyriding with them. Daniel wasn’t sure what they knew, but he planned to find out.

  When he looked back on all their time together, Daniel began to remember small details he had noticed in the months leading up to Skylar’s disappearance—tidbits about the three girls’ behavior strange enough to get stuck inside his mind. These details haunted him and his close proximity to Rachel provided his suspicions with an easy target.