Pretty Little Killers (18 page)

Rachel usually relished the chance to be home alone without her mother, and Patricia couldn't be sure, but something in Rachel's nervous demeanor suggested she didn't want to be alone that day. Patricia shrugged it off, happy to have her daughter along for the day trip since Rachel was leaving for Camp Tygart the next day.
²⁰

While Patricia and Kelly chatted and sunbathed, Rachel was glued to her mother's cell phone. Both women noticed the three-inch cut along Rachel's lower right leg, close to her ankle. “What did you do to your leg, Rach?” Kelly asked.

Rachel shrugged. “I must have scraped it on the boat motor when I climbed into the boat.”

No doubt Patricia could tell the cut looked angry, like it would leave behind a nasty scar. “You need to be more careful, Rachel.”

Rachel continued texting, without even looking up at her mother. “I sure do.”

On Saturday, Shelia and her mother Tara helped the Neeses canvass door-to-door again. They walked the rail-trail down by the river, an old railroad track that had been converted into a hiking trail. Unlike the day before, Shelia was now as tearful as Tara, and they both hugged Mary repeatedly. Tara's heart went out to Mary and Dave; their only daughter was missing. She could not imagine how she'd feel if Shelia was gone. Mother and daughter promised they would be back the next day and every day thereafter for as long as it took.

The next time Shelia stopped by the Neeses', she was alone. She asked Mary if she could sit in Skylar's bedroom. Mary agreed, but several long minutes later, when she heard Shelia crying, she hurried down the hallway. Shelia was sitting on Skylar's bed, hugging a pillow to her chest and sobbing. Mary, feeling sorry for Shelia, sat down beside her and rubbed her arm, as if the girl was her own distraught daughter.

In the following days, Shelia appeared to grieve for her missing friend. She spent hours with the Neeses trying to help find Skylar. However, when Mary and Dave looked back on events, they saw her sadness as feigned. Shelia was the picture of sorrow in real time, but
her activity in cyberspace revealed not all was as it seemed. Saturday night at 11:45 she tweeted,
tired of losing sleep over this
. The meaning of
this
was unclear. One can only guess Shelia's loss of sleep had to do with the disappearance of her best friend.

An hour and a half later, at 1:24, she posted another mystifying tweet:
when you text me and my stomach drops to my ass <
. The < symbol indicated she did not like what she felt. Was Shelia talking to someone with whom she shared some important knowledge, perhaps a secret discussed only in texts? And why were they talking at nearly 1:30 in the morning? Most of Rachel's tweets disappeared from the web in the spring of 2013, but it's likely she was the one who shared Shelia's secret.

The most intriguing aspect of Shelia's Twitter traffic that weekend was not what she said, but what she didn't say. Why wasn't Shelia reaching out to Skylar via Twitter? Why wasn't she sending out tweets begging Sky to come home? Shelia's silence was a huge departure from her usual blowing up
²¹
of her Twitter feed, and what she didn't know was some people were starting to notice. She didn't tweet
to
Skylar. She didn't tweet
about
Skylar. Nothing.

thirteen

Nagging Doubts

Officer Colebank never thought
of Skylar as a runaway. In fact, Shelia's story “sounded hinky” the minute Colebank heard it. The only problem was, she couldn't tell the Neeses.

Jessica, as Mary and Dave referred to her, was the Star City Police Department's lead investigator into Skylar's disappearance. Initially, Bob McCauley had handled the case, but though he had spent many years as a deputy sheriff, he now worked only part time for Star City. Since this case involved a missing teenager, it required a full-time investigator like Colebank. As soon as Colebank came back to work after two days off, McCauley handed the case over to her. Included in the file were Skylar's phone records. Due to the fact Skylar could have been in immediate danger, McCauley had filed the appropriate paperwork with the phone company the same day he responded to the 911 call, citing exigent circumstances.

Colebank found the records very telling: most of the calls and texts going to and from Skylar's phone were among her, Shelia, and Rachel. In fact, Skylar had called Shelia six times just before midnight—and the last call Skylar received was from Rachel.

Around the station, Colebank was considered the department's unofficial “detective” because she liked to dig deep when working her cases. Six years as a 911 dispatcher had helped motivate her to
become a cop—every time a call came in, she longed to be on the other side of the radio.

Difficult cases were her lifeblood. Colebank was the type of cop every small-town police chief loves: intelligent, dedicated, and hardworking. She also has an investigator's keen instinct for sniffing out falsehood and an innate ability for reading suspects' behavior. Liars pissed her off, and she had no qualms about telling them.

When Colebank inherited Skylar's case, she'd only been in law enforcement four years. She had already become a thorough and aggressive investigator—partly because her father, on the force for thirty-five years, had helped train her when they worked together as Fairmont, West Virginia city cops. The Star City Police Department dealt with four or five missing-juvenile cases a month; Colebank handled the majority of them. Most had been runaways; up to this point, Skylar was the only missing juvenile on Colebank's watch who had never made it home.

Officer McCauley entered Skylar's name and other vital data into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database July 6, the same night law enforcement first learned of her disappearance. Important details about missing juveniles go into this central crime database, the country's largest, which the FBI makes available to facilitate the flow of information among police agencies. That's how local FBI agents learned Skylar was missing, and why they called the Star City Police Department to offer their help.

Chief Propst also called State Police headquarters in Charleston twice, asking the agency to issue an AMBER Alert. But the alerts are issued only for abductions—a status determined solely by state officials. Since the surveillance tape clearly showed Skylar getting into a car voluntarily, both requests were denied. Instead, Skylar was classified as a runaway—not an abducted teen.

Dave Neese had solid reasons to insist Skylar hadn't run away. She left her contact lens container and lens solution behind, just as she did the charger for her TracFone. She left her window open and carefully placed her vanity bench outside to help her climb back inside when she returned.

Most importantly, Skylar left Lilu—her dog and real best friend—behind. In elementary school, Skylar had begged her parents to let her have the tiny white ball of fluff after seeing one of her friends' Bichons. Against their better judgment, Mary and Dave agreed, and the Bichon had become Skylar's baby. Dave said again and again Skylar would never have left home for good without taking “that damned dog.”

Lilu, Skylar's dog and best friend.

The FBI didn't see Skylar as a runaway, either. In fact the federal agency gets involved in cases of missing juveniles when sexual assault, physical abuse, abduction, or internet crime is suspected. Since the FBI was working on an ongoing investigation an hour south of Morgantown, they wondered if the two cases could be connected. Aliayah Lunsford, three, vanished from her Lewis County home in 2011, a year before Skylar disappeared. The massive search for Aliayah lasted for weeks, but FBI agents continued working the case long after searchers went home. Sadly, the toddler has never been found. When they heard about Skylar, the FBI worried they might have a serial killer on their hands.

In the beginning, only a few people helped Dave and Mary look for Skylar. Shelia and Tara came immediately. A friend of Mary's from work brought copies of the MISSING flyers that were being posted on Facebook. More support began pouring in as the situation turned into a crisis. Shania Ammons and her grandmother, Linda Barr, offered their assistance. Dave's aunt, Joanne Nagy, organized volunteers to cook meals for Dave and Mary.

Ultimately, Aunt Joanne proved to be a one-woman army. She fortified the shattered parents with emotional support and canvassed the rail-trail behind Sabraton, a suburb on the eastern side of Morgantown where sightings of Skylar had been reported.

Joanne also organized numerous search teams that met in the Sabraton McDonald's parking lot. The first search on July 10 drew such a huge crowd Joanne was sure she'd picked the wrong place to meet—the parking lot was overflowing. When she went inside the restaurant, she discovered most of the people were there to look for Skylar.

One week after Skylar disappeared, more people volunteered from all over the region, and complete strangers became close friends after hopping into cars together, bound by a common purpose: finding Joanne's missing niece, Mary and Dave's missing daughter. They split into teams of four and plastered flyers everywhere they could. The searchers drove up and down the winding country roads, dirt lanes, and interstates that led away from Morgantown, looking for Skylar night after night.