Pretty Little Killers (38 page)

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 introduced 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.