Pretty Little Killers

by Berry, Daleen, Fuller, Geoffrey C.

  “I know those girls aren’t telling us what they know,” Berry said. “I just have to find the right buttons to push. I wanted to arrest them both for obstruction, but Ronnie didn’t think we had enough.”

  “Those girls have been lying since day one,” Dave said.

  “What Dave said,” Mary said, turning away from the TV for the first time. “I cut Shelia off a long time ago.”

  “It may be worse than either of you think.” He looked at the recliner. “I know they read the TEAMSKYLAR 2012 page. I want you to use that. Mind if I sit down? I need to tell you some things. It won’t take long.”

  Mary sat at the computer, trying to compose her thoughts. She was optimistic, but she would try anything if it would bring Skylar back.

  In the months after Skylar disappeared, bits and pieces of Mary’s memories began to surface. For instance, she remembered that Skylar had rejected the idea of applying for a job at Chick-fil-A, where Shelia then worked. Instead, she got a job at Wendy’s, joining her childhood friend, Hayden McClead. Soon after, Skylar got Daniel a job there, too.

  Skylar and Daniel had always been tight, but with all three of them working at Wendy’s, Skylar and Hayden grew close again. Hayden—like many of Skylar’s friends—didn’t like Shelia. She wouldn’t hang out with Skylar if Shelia was around.

  To Hayden and other teens, it seemed like Shelia was always testing the limits in uncomfortable ways. She liked being more outrageous than her peers. Hayden recalled a specific party held in Blacksville where Shelia really pushed the limits.

  Everyone was getting high, and Shelia and another girl, Janet,28 were kissing. Some boy began snapping photos, so Shelia and Janet started a striptease for all the partygoers. Hayden and Skylar were disgusted and sat back in a corner, trying to pretend it was no big deal.

  Thinking about the stories Skylar had told her and the ones she later heard from Hayden, Daniel, and others, Mary realized that while she and Dave had tried to accept Shelia and think of her as a daughter, they never completely succeeded. In the years since Skylar and Shelia first met at The Shack, Mary and Dave had seen Shelia mostly in the summer and a few times during the school year. In eighth grade, Skylar and Shelia’s visits became more frequent, with Shelia staying overnight at the Neeses’ or Skylar sleeping over at Tara’s place in Blacksville.

  In ninth grade, everything changed. Mary said that as time went on, she and Dave finally began to notice little things about Shelia they had always overlooked. Shelia was their daughter’s friend, and they wanted to see only the best in her, but her effect on Skylar hadn’t always been positive.

  For instance, there was how Skylar treated her own cousin, Kyle Michaud. Two years older, Kyle had been there the day Skylar came home from the hospital. Carol had only Kyle, and Mary had only Skylar—so Skylar and Kyle grew up as close as siblings. But once Shelia came to UHS, Skylar wouldn’t even talk to Kyle when she saw him.

  As Kyle later put it, they passed in the hallway “for more days than there were words exchanged between the two of us.”

  He’d told Mary how acutely he felt the effects of Skylar’s withdrawal from family and friends. One day was particularly vivid in his memory. He’d driven his father’s car to work and was waiting in the parking lot to give Skylar a ride home, as he did two or three days a week. Only that day in December 2011, she didn’t show.

  A couple of years apart in age, Skylar was a sophomore that year, Kyle a senior. They had already drifted far apart. On the days Skylar rode home with him, she’d wear her earbuds, blast the music, and only answer direct questions. Otherwise, they didn’t talk.

  Skylar enjoying her birthday with her family. (From left: Aunt Carol, Cousin Kyle, Skylar, and her mother, Mary.)

  Skylar and her protective older cousin, Kyle.

  He waited for ten or fifteen minutes, then went back into UHS, looked around the cafeteria and checked her locker. No Skylar. She could be anywhere. School had been out for twenty-five minutes. On his way back to the car, he called his father.

  “I don’t know where Skylar is, Dad,” Kyle said. “I’m telling you now, I’m not gonna get yelled at because she disappeared.”

  “All right, then. Come on.”

  When he arrived home, his aunt Mary was just leaving. He told her Skylar had never shown up after school.

  “Oh, she’s okay. She went with Shelia.” Mary stopped, her coat half on. “She didn’t tell you?”

  “Nope,” Kyle said sullenly. But he wasn’t surprised.

  That’s when Mary remembered what Kyle had said: “Shelia’s a bad seed.” That memory helped Mary realize that since Shelia moved into town, Skylar had been growing away from the older cousin who had once been like a big brother.

  It was also unnerving how often Shelia lied about one thing or another—Mary remembered how she even covered for Shelia with Tara. But it was a sexually explicit Facebook message that really made Mary reflect on Shelia’s character. She and Dave had been appalled and angry when they stumbled onto it.

  Mary remembered that it happened not long before Skylar disappeared. In a rush to meet up with Shelia, Skylar had forgotten to log out of her Facebook account on the family computer. When Dave went online, the page was there in plain sight. The message from Shelia to Skylar described in graphic detail one of Shelia’s sexual experiences. It was so worrisome that Mary and Dave printed it out and drove to Tara and Jim’s townhouse to show them. But Shelia denied she had sent it. She blamed it on Shania, saying the other girl was pranking her. Tara believed Shelia, and brushed the entire matter aside.

  Mary started typing. Maybe if she wrote everything down, she could make sense of it all. The words came slowly at first, but she discovered the more she wrote, the better she felt. She realized she wanted to share her thoughts with the world—and she did that in the form of a letter on Facebook.

  It appeared on Mary’s personal Facebook page in mid-December. Before long, everyone in the two Facebook groups had shared it. Some people later claimed Mary Neese’s honesty, clarity, and directness led to Rachel Shoaf’s confession soon after.

  Mary’s written words showed how six months of lies and stone-walling had radically changed her and Dave’s view of Shelia and Rachel. The time has come to tell the full Skylar story from beginning to end as we know it to this point, Mary began. She recapped the circumstances of Skylar’s disappearance and described the discovery of the apartment surveillance video.

  The grieving mother discussed how the unreliable tips and sightings were all they had to give them hope. They’d continued hanging MISSING posters around town for two months, until I could no longer take it. Then Mary stated something that only a mother would know: Skylar could not stay away from me that long, let alone her friends.

  Law enforcement confirmed Mary’s maternal instinct: Skylar’s two best friends . . . were not telling the whole truth. They have continued to withhold information . . . and have been caught in multiple lies to [the] authorities.

  Her moving public plea concluded on a dramatic note: This is truly the ultimate betrayal. . . . These girls are more guilty than originally suspected. . . . It looks like foul play has occurred and murder has not been ruled out.

  A former UHS guidance counselor, Monongalia County Commissioner Tom Bloom had known Dave since he was a high school student himself. Bloom was deeply moved when he read the news about Skylar. He had known her during her freshman and sophomore years at UHS. Bloom called Dave Neese as soon as he read the original Dominion Post article about Skylar back on July 10.

  “Dave, I’m not sure what I can do, but man,” Bloom said, “I just want you to know I’m here for you.”

  “Thanks, Tom,” Dave said.

  When Becky Bailey posted her online petition in early December, Bloom was one of two people who immediately reached out to her. Chuck Yocum, a former student of Tom’s, offered to add some legal language to the petition.

  Bloom called House of Delegates member Charlene Marshall, who introduc
ed Skylar’s Law to the state legislature in January. Marshall had long thought the AMBER Alert system needed to be revised. In her view the current law wasn’t doing enough to help bring home missing children.

  “We’re getting complaints about you,” Gaskins told Berry one day as the younger trooper hung up his hat. “But at least we’re getting results.”

  “Big surprise,” Berry said, grinning. “From out Blacksville?”

  He was used to it. Berry’s first posting had been at the Martinsburg Detachment in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle. The city had become a suburb of metropolitan DC, and criminal activity there was confined more to the city than the outlying rural areas. There, Berry had learned more aggressive policing techniques than were common in some other parts of West Virginia—because the criminals were more violent.

  Even though he solved crimes at a high rate, once Berry transferred to Fairmont, twenty miles southwest of Morgantown, he found the interview techniques he had used in the suburbs of DC didn’t translate well. Still, his superiors knew he was a good investigator, so when a rash of bank robberies occurred in Monongalia County, Berry had been sent to the Morgantown Detachment specifically to work the robberies. Then that case intersected with Skylar’s disappearance.

  As the months wore on with no leads on Skylar, however, Berry knew they had to break something loose to get results. So he had begun to aggressively question people, just like he used to in Martinsburg. The result was “pissing people off,” as he later put it. He knew of a few people in the Blacksville area who disliked him, for sure.

  So when he came into the office that day and Gaskins told him the sergeant wanted Berry to exclusively investigate some Westover bank robberies across town, Berry assumed that was the reason. He’d been talked to many times before about upsetting the locals.

  It wasn’t. It was something else entirely.

  “Seen TEAMSKYLAR 2012 recently?” Gaskins said, a small grin playing on his lips.

  Berry nodded. They both knew he had. Gaskins knew his way around a computer, but Berry was the go-to guy for all things social media.

  That’s when it hit Berry: he was being taken off Skylar’s case.

  Dave’s version of why Berry was removed was more colorful. He said Gaskins called him the morning after Mary had posted her long letter and yelled into the phone: “Get that shit off the internet now!”

  Dave said he called and tried to get Berry put back on the case, to no avail. With that, Berry became the second law enforcement casualty.

  Teenage girls are notorious for primping, and Shelia and Rachel were no different. Makeup, hair, clothes, everything had to be just right before they snapped the selfies that showed up all over social media before and after Skylar’s murder. By the time they hit high school, the girls were experts at managing their images.

  Skylar’s murder didn’t change that. If anything, as the police grew closer to the truth, the two teens tried even harder to maintain the appearance of normalcy. Rachel was finding it an impossible task.

  Evidently Rachel’s descent began not long after she murdered Skylar, signaled by the daily crying spells many students saw at school, cutting herself while at home, smoking more and more weed, and being reprimanded by school officials. There are allegations Rachel was using harder drugs, too, and some people say she and Patricia were fighting more frequently. Along the way, her school attendance also grew spotty.

  If possible, Rachel’s behavior grew even more erratic. As Christmas approached, her parents reached the end of their rope. They may have planned to hire a good therapist for their daughter. If so, they never got the chance.

  Rachel wasn’t the only one who was acting out. So was Shelia. She and Rachel cut classes so they could be together, and spent their days hanging out at friends’ houses, smoking weed.

  Shelia had always pushed the boundaries, but usually backed down once Tara made it clear Shelia wasn’t getting her way. But something had changed, and Crissy said Shelia was vocal and disrespectful whenever she challenged Tara’s authority. Equally odd, Tara didn’t say a word in reply.

  That was the part Crissy found weird. “It was like Tara was afraid of Shelia,” Crissy said. She then related how Tara had confided she was giving Shelia weed and alcohol to calm her, after Shelia grew outraged one day and grabbed her mother’s arm so hard Tara thought it was broken.

  Shania knew how much her friend Shelia missed Skylar, so she slaved over the homemade Christmas gift. She wanted it to be the perfect present; she planned to give it to her when Shelia came to pick Shania up for a sleepover a few days before Christmas.

  Shania was a little nervous because she wasn’t sure how Shelia would react. Would she be happy or burst into tears? She had copied dozens of photos she knew Shelia would love, of Shelia’s friends and family. There were shots of Shelia with Shania or Skylar, or all three girls together, an assortment of posed shots and selfies. Shania labored over the fabric-covered collage for hours, carefully assembling it. She had far more photos than would fit, so she wrapped up the loose photos together, so Shelia would have them, too.

  When she was done the collage looked fantastic, and Shania felt it helped memorialize their missing friend. Shania believed her present would provide Shelia with something tangible, something to hold onto—until Skylar returned.

  Shelia’s reaction to Shania’s handmade gift was exactly what Shania had hoped for. Shelia loved her present, and she and Tara took turns looking at all of the pictures Shania didn’t have room to place in the collage.

  “Thank you,” Shelia said, giving Shania a big hug.

  Shania didn’t give the moment much thought until a week later, when she was back at Shelia’s house. Shania saw the collage, but not a single photo of Skylar remained. Shelia had removed them all, and tossed them into the gift bag with the rest of the photos.

  thirty-four

  Nervous Breakdown

  “Don’t take my suitcase out of the car because I’m going back to Dad’s,” Rachel said.

  Her mother was trying to remove the luggage when Rachel chimed in, right after they returned home from celebrating Christmas with Patricia’s family. When Rachel saw her father’s Jeep in the driveway, she didn’t even plan to go inside with her mother. She wanted to leave as quick as she could, to go see Shelia.

  “Your dad is sick again,” Patricia said, “so he’s moving back in and I’m going to take care of him.”

  Rachel didn’t know it but Patricia and Rusty had concocted the story for their daughter’s benefit before she and her mom began the drive back from Virginia. Patricia texted Rusty on the way back, telling him they were almost home. The last thing she wanted, Liz says, was to have another fight with Rachel. You better hurry, because she’s getting upset, Patricia texted him.

  She noticed the closer they got to home, the edgier Rachel became, as if she might explode from nervous energy. Patricia suspected part of it was because Rachel had been separated from Shelia for so long. That was the reason she wanted to take Rachel away. The police had warned her from the start and Colebank told her Shelia was a pathological liar who was no good for Rachel. The rest of Rachel’s anxiety probably stemmed from the fact the FBI wanted to question her the following day. Again. Patricia might be a screamer but most any mother would be, after all she’d been dealing with for the last five months. She wanted to scream again when she thought back to that day when Liz told her what Rachel said: “I had to make sure Tara didn’t mind if I came to lunch with you,” Rachel had told Liz.

  Trying to keep Rachel away from that girl—and her mother—had proved an impossible task. She remembered the day Rachel had jumped from the Jeep and run to Tara—and Rusty hadn’t even told her. The whole time she thought Rachel was at the State Police office, taking her polygraph test. If it hadn’t been for Liz, whom Rachel later confided in, she never would have known. Patricia felt her blood pressure rise just remembering that terrible day. Rachel could have been killed. Patricia couldn’t understand
why Rachel would feel she had to run away from the police when all they were trying to do was find Rachel’s friend. To find Skylar, the girl Rachel had asked Patricia to let come live with them a year ago, when it looked like Skylar’s family might be evicted. It hadn’t come to pass, but Patricia had been touched by her daughter’s compassion.

  Who was this girl who defied her own mother, all while doing whatever Shelia and Tara asked her to, as if she was their puppet? Patricia couldn’t understand why Rachel didn’t try to do everything she could to help the police. Who was this girl? Where was her Rachel?

  Patricia was no fighter. She knew that. She had never overcome her tendency to cower when someone threatened her. It was a holdover from her own childhood, and she couldn’t do anything about it. Not so Rachel, who was much stronger and whose behavior had become more aggressive lately. Patricia dreaded the showdown that would occur if she and Rachel were alone when she figured out the ruse, when her daughter learned what was really going on.

  Rusty had already arrived when Rachel realized her parents were actually trying to prevent her from staying with her father, but in Rachel’s overwrought state, his presence provided no restraint.

  Patricia cringed as Rachel began shrieking. “You’re ruining my life!” she screamed at her parents in their driveway on December 28, 2012. “You’re ruining my life!”

  No matter how much Patricia and Rusty urged her to calm down, Patricia knew Rachel had gotten so worked up that she wouldn’t. Even if she had wanted to, which she didn’t, she couldn’t have stopped the tornado whirling within her. Her teenage world as she knew it was imploding. Rachel couldn’t contain five months of pent-up feelings a minute longer.