By this time the teens knew about Skylar’s disappearance. The students knew about Shelia and Rachel’s involvement, too—or thought they did. They had seen the various rumors texted, tweeted, and posted all over each other’s cell phones and social media sites. They had heard the gossip as it spread through town—at coffee shops, fast-food restaurants, and all the other places where teens hang out. Of course, few students then blamed Shelia and Rachel for Skylar’s disappearance.
At least one person was sure of it, however: Daniel Hovatter. He knew Skylar wouldn’t be at school, but he wanted to believe she would be. He had even worn his brand-new gray and orange pullover with a pair of black-and-white plaid shorts and Nike sandals just to hear her tease him. The two shared a trust that let them rib each other, and both teens enjoyed it.
Daniel and another friend talked about how strange it was to have someone from their school missing as they continued along the familiar route the first day back to school for the fall semester 2012. Daniel recalled the last time he and Skylar had been together on the bus.
“I don’t want to sit with some creep!” Skylar had said when reminding him to save her a seat on the morning bus, not that Daniel needed reminding. He always saved her a seat even though he had to protect it from students who got on before she did.
Skylar was his rock. Throughout that spring she had repeatedly helped him. Daniel’s parents argued constantly and he often had to hide in his room or go out for long walks. With Skylar, he could vent.
“Life with my parents is shitty,” he told her.
Skylar was optimistic and assured him the situation would improve. “Try to talk to them about what they’re fighting about,” she said. “See if you can help make it better.”
That was Skylar’s way: roll up your sleeves and dive in.
For Daniel, riding bus 257 would never seem the same again. Not without Skylar sharing his seat.
After getting off the bus, Daniel entered UHS through the back door of the school cafeteria. He stood with the rest of the student body, corralled there until the main doors opened, texting on his cell phone while waiting for the buzzer to signal the start of the new school year.
Jordan Carter saw Daniel when she arrived. She had been worried about Skylar since Jordan’s mom first texted her about a missing UHS student. Jordan’s mom was a big fan of Facebook and had seen the news there.
Omg! Jordan texted back. That’s Skylar, my friend from Kaleidoscope! She recalled the summer program where she and Skylar had met years before. Skylar had been the only girl who would get ice cream at the swimming pool with her. Because Jordan was two years older than Skylar, their only other interaction was brief. They were in the band together for a year in middle school. Skylar had played flute, Jordan the cymbals.
Since Jordan dated one of Mikinzy Boggs’ bandmates, she knew Mikinzy and Rachel were an item, so she was eager to see her school friends. She hoped they had good news about Skylar. More than anything else Jordan wanted her childhood buddy to show up.
So did Daniel, which is why he kept watching the pillar where Rachel’s red head bent close to Shelia’s darker one. By the time the bell rang and students scurried off to class, Skylar still hadn’t turned up.
Daniel was afraid she never would.
University High School in winter. Photo courtesy Meredith Marsh.
When Skylar didn’t appear in her scheduled classes, it signaled a finality: Skylar wasn’t coming back. Many students knew about Skylar’s disappearance and had followed the unfolding events online. But there were many teachers who had not. In at least three classes—chemistry, algebra, and AP English—teachers called Skylar’s name during roll call. The silence afterward in one class was deafening.
“Skylar?” said Mr. Fisher. “Skylar Neese?”
The deep voice of a male student spoke up. “Uh, she’s not here.”
“Our first absence, then,” the teacher said, bending down to make a mark next to Skylar’s name.
“No, she’s missing,” a small female voice said.
That student said Mr. Fisher glanced up and saw everyone looking at him. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
She looked around, and realized she wasn’t the only one crying.
A few miles away in Star City, Mary Neese had taken the day off work—just in case. Because Skylar loved school, her parents thought she might return for the new school year. Mary had put in a request with her supervisor for time off, hoping for a miracle.
But it never happened. When the Dominion Post interviewed Dave, he said it was a crushing blow. What he didn’t say was he and Mary both felt like they had a hole in their hearts.
twenty-three
Two’s Company . . .
“Leave me alone, Daniel,” Rachel hissed across the aisle in drama class. Daniel laughed, even though the situation wasn’t funny at all. Ever since Skylar disappeared, he had learned laughing was easier than crying or screaming. School had been back in session for only one day, but Daniel was already tired of Rachel saying she didn’t know anything else. She refused to say much about Skylar or her disappearance, but he was positive she had crucial information. After all, Rachel and Shelia had been the last known people to see Skylar before she got into the strange car. Daniel knew what she and Shelia had told police—because Mary and Dave told him.
“Right, like you just drove around for, like, an hour, then dropped her off. The most boring joyride ever.” Daniel was disgusted. Rachel kept telling him the same story, like her voice was a looped recording. When he first heard Skylar had run away, Daniel didn’t believe it for a second. He and Skylar worked together at Wendy’s that day. She would have told him if something was wrong. No way Skylar would have run away without telling Daniel.
“Shut up, Daniel,” Rachel said a little too loudly. Rachel had a flair for the dramatic.
From the front of the classroom, Mr. Kyer stopped talking and glared at them.
Daniel saw the glower and chalked it up to Rachel being one of Richard Kyer’s favorite students. Whenever anyone said that, Mr. Kyer insisted he didn’t have favorites. He said he treated all students fairly, but pushed the talented students harder than the rest. Many students agreed with him, since numerous teens thought the drama teacher was the closest thing to a saint they could imagine.
Daniel was leaving class when Mr. Kyer stopped him. “Daniel, you can’t be accusing Rachel of doing something wrong without proof. This is America and people are innocent until proven guilty. If you have other evidence, then you need to tell the police.”
That was the problem: Daniel didn’t have any evidence. He just had a gut feeling based on how the girls were acting.
Daniel decided to back off, but only for the moment. He had been missing his buddy Skylar for almost six weeks, but now that he had access to Rachel, he was going to get answers. He had no plans to question Shelia. He never cared much for her. In fact, Daniel only hung out with Shelia because of Skylar. But Rachel, she would tell him the truth. Or else.
But what if that truth—whatever it was—made Skylar look bad?
Ken Lanning says truth is complex. “Society wants simple answers to problems. They don’t want complicated” ones that involve looking at multiple layers that lead to a murder like this one.
The long-time criminal profiler is now retired but he taught in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) at Quantico for more than two decades. Lanning has investigated many high-profile murder cases and says when it comes to crimes like this one, people often want a simplistic answer. They want it to be black and white, or good versus evil. Unfortunately, it’s rarely that easy.
For instance, Skylar could be “the representation of all the things that [a killer] sees is wrong with her life,” Lanning said. Or it could be Skylar unknowingly acted in a way that made Shelia and Rachel feel the need to kill her.
As word of Skylar’s disappearance spread, the world outside the high school walls began to feel the effects of her loss. Area
parents couldn’t comprehend the torment the Neeses must have been enduring. It was all too easy to imagine the horror of losing one’s own child someday. But how terrible it would be if a daughter or son actually disappeared.
Communities grieve in their own ways. The grief must find a place to go, a way to find expression. A number of charity events were held around the greater Morgantown area the first few months after Skylar vanished. The Walmart in University Town Centre, where Dave worked, staged a candlelight vigil in August. T-shirts with Skylar’s name and picture were sold at the event and $3,100 was raised for a “reward fund” established in Skylar’s name. People donated because they wanted to help and needed to do something—anything.
A few weeks later the nearby town of Mannington hosted “Sky Ride,” a community gathering held in Skylar’s honor. Mary had grown up in Mannington, an old coal-mining town, along with her fourteen siblings. Practically the entire town turned out in a show of support. People jumped onto their ATVs and rode for hours around the local hills. Everyone brought a covered dish and after a long day in the sun, they broke bread together. Even more money was raised for the reward fund through an auction and a drawing. “Bring Skylar home!” was the day’s theme, and against all logic some attendees hoped the missing teen might somehow show up. The weight of a missing child was a heavy burden for the small community.
According to WBOY TV, one woman in attendance, a friend of the Neeses, wistfully recalled, “I remember Skylar from when she was a little girl, four or five years old, and she was always running around with curls bouncing. She was the cutest little thing. When I heard that it was her who was missing, it just broke my heart.”
Fortunately, the hometown show of support gave Mary and Dave a respite of sorts. They smiled and laughed with friends and family and actually felt lighter for a few hours. Even so, Skylar was never far from their minds. As dusk drew near and people began heading home, Mary and Dave returned to reality with heavy, aching hearts.
The truth is, just as Daniel suspected, that friction had begun to develop among Skylar, Shelia, and Rachel during their sophomore year. For a brief period, Skylar and Rachel were close, then they seemed to drift apart. It was her fading friendship with Shelia that Skylar bemoaned the most. Skylar even wrote about this in an essay for English class. There, she talked about how much Shelia changed after getting involved with a boy. Skylar wrote that the widening gulf between herself and her friend made her very sad.
On February 2, 2012, Skylar reflected on how this happened:
“I used to be extremely close with a girl who I loved dearly. She had such a fun personality and didn’t have a care in the world about what people thought of her. That all changed dramaticilly [sic] when she got a new boyfriend. She transformed from an independent, free spirit into a needy doormat. Her boyfriend became all she cared about and began losing self-respect. I hated watching my dear friend change before my eyes. Sadly we’re no longer close, but even if we were she’s not be [sic] person I became friends with.”
In truth, Skylar and Rachel were never as close as Shelia was with either girl. Skylar and Shelia’s bond went back almost a decade, but in some ways Skylar was losing her rank. She was becoming the third member—the odd girl out—of the trio. This may have been because Skylar was maturing more slowly than Shelia and Rachel—not mentally or emotionally, but physically. In some ways, Skylar was still a girl, but Shelia and Rachel—both sexually active—were young women. Skylar was turning into the “little sister” of the trio.
“Skylar and Shelia were real close,” Amorette said. “And then Rachel came along. That happened with me and my best friend. We started letting another girl hang out with us, and then before I knew it, she kinda took my place.”
Like so many of Skylar’s close friends, Amorette didn’t believe the rumors going around that first week of school.
“If she ran away, she would definitely tell me,” Amorette asserted. “I even told her [on Facebook and in texts] if you went to a party and messed up, it’s going to be okay. We’ll help you figure it out. I never heard back, and I knew something must be wrong.”
twenty-four
Behind the Scenes
If Morgantown residents thought they had heard every conceivable tale surrounding Skylar’s disappearance, they were wrong. A brand new cycle started when school resumed in August 2012.
The story of what happened to Skylar wasn’t just hallway fodder at the two most competitive high schools in town, UHS and Morgantown High School. It was also a topic of water fountain discussion at Clay-Battelle High School, where the Cee Bees were buzzing like crazy about Skylar. Those teens wondered whether she could be hiding out in their end of the county.
All through the first full week of class, rumors flew at warp speed through the county’s three high schools through talk, texts, and tweets. The students had even begun to talk about other scenarios. Someone started a rumor Skylar had been invited by a boy to a big drug party in Blacksville, where something bad had happened. A boy had called her the night she snuck out to tell her about the party, and Shelia and Rachel had driven her there. Some variations of the story had the two teens abandoning Skylar after she got drunk. Other versions placed them at the party when Skylar overdosed and either left with a boy or was raped and murdered. Some teens said Skylar had hooked up with one boy in particular: Dylan Conaway.
Another theory started to make the rounds but only a few teens discussed it. Dylan’s older brother Darek was the young man Gaskins and Berry had questioned after the Blacksville bank robbery. Theirs was the house that had been raided by a SWAT team. Police were rumored to be looking at him for the bank robberies in the region. Darek had also been indicted on five counts of third-degree sexual assault in September. That made law enforcement more suspicious of him.23
Not only had Darek been at parties with Dylan and his friends, but at times Darek had even given Shelia, Shania, and Skylar a ride there. Some students wondered if her close association meant Skylar had discovered a solid connection between Darek and the bank robberies. Maybe Darek and Dylan had killed the teen to keep her quiet. The Conaway boys were under an umbrella of suspicion—and they knew it.
While armchair psychologists chatted online about their theories, Colebank and Spurlock were working day and night to discover what really happened to Skylar. In fact, on August 24, the same day the Neeses were preparing to come to the Star City Police Department, Colebank was applying for search warrants for Shelia’s and Rachel’s phone records. Filling out the initial paperwork didn’t take long and neither did running down to the magistrate’s court to get the warrants, but she might wait a week or two for a response from the phone company. However, it needed to be done. Those girls were hiding something.
As far as the Neeses knew, however, the police were doing nothing—and they certainly weren’t looking for their missing daughter. Consequently, eight days after Mary missed work in case Skylar came home, she exploded.
Dave had never seen Mary as angry as she was on August 24—with good reason, he thought. Skylar’s parents were convinced from the beginning that Chief Vic Propst considered Skylar a runaway. That was her classification in the AMBER Alert system, after all.
In actuality, Propst says he never viewed Skylar as a runaway and he had personally called WVSP headquarters to ask for an AMBER alert to be issued.
On July 8, the veteran law enforcement officer had given Officer Colebank his blessing to pursue all leads and follow any hunches she had with regard to Skylar Neese’s disappearance. After over six weeks of hearing nothing, Mary and Dave were so frustrated they went to see him. All the grieving parents had to go on were terrifying rumors. Colebank had assured them all leads were being explored, but she could offer them little in the way of substance. The case was incredibly challenging; to date, no solid information had been uncovered. The Star City Police Department—primarily Colebank, but other officers as well—had logged several hundred hours on the case in the previous six
weeks. Still, for all their efforts, the cops had learned little.
Colebank couldn’t discuss case details with Mary and Dave because it was an ongoing investigation. She had her own suspicions but didn’t feel she could share what she knew with the public. That included Skylar’s parents.
Colebank didn’t want anyone doing anything rash, either. She and Dave had had a few long Saturday morning talks and she was concerned about him. The dedicated officer still had no idea what had happened to Skylar, but she was certain Shelia and Rachel were key to the puzzle. The last thing Colebank wanted was for Dave to go off on a vigilante hunt—especially when there was no evidence to support her hunches.
Being kept in the dark wasn’t even Mary and Dave’s primary gripe. The bigger problem was Jennifer Woodall Hunt—and the things she had been saying on Facebook. She seemed to know details about the investigation she should not have known.
As they prepared to visit the chief, Dave could tell by the fire in his wife’s eyes that Mary was furious. For a minute, he thought of Skylar and how wound up she could get when discussing a topic she was passionate about. She inherited that from Mary. More than anything else, Dave wanted one more chance to debate with his daughter. It could be about WVU football or greenhouse gases or even (God forbid) gay rights. The topic didn’t matter. He just wanted to see Skylar’s eyes flash like her mother’s again. One more time.
That thought got Dave back on track, got him thinking about the thumb drive he had been given by someone at work, which he had later passed on to Skylar for school. When he found the drive in Skylar’s room, he turned it over to Colebank. At the time he thought it might have information to help the police locate his daughter. Dave had forgotten the drive contained survivalist literature, with advice about how to disappear if one wanted to.
Pretty Little Killers Page 14