Pretty Little Killers (45 page)

Dave addressed the committee, and though his voice caught with emotion several times, his words were convincing and moving. Skylar's Law, he said, needed to be passed for other potentially endangered children. He explained it was a small but crucial amendment to existing AMBER legislation. It would mandate that police contact the AMBER Alert system, which would be required to treat all missing children and teenagers—regardless of how they came to be missing—as actual kidnapping cases unless an investigation proved otherwise.

Dave's trip to the capitol was successful, as Skylar's Law was overwhelmingly popular with the legislators. As it wove its way through the legislative process, Skylar's Law came up for a vote in each chamber. Each time it passed unanimously.

When he heard the news, Dave called Mary immediately. “It passed! It passed the House 98–0 and the Senate 34–0,” Dave told his grieving wife.

thirty-eight

Finding Skylar

When the news of
Skylar's remains finally broke on Wednesday, March 13, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Wheeling made the announcement. It confirmed the FBI was directly involved in Skylar's identification, which explained in part why the process had taken so long. But the four-sentence press release explained little else.

       
March 13, 2013

       
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

       
Body Recovered in Pennsylvania Identified

       
WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA—United States Attorney William J. Ihlenfeld, II, announced today that the body recovered in Wayne Township, Pennsylvania, on January 16, 2013, has been scientifically identified as that of Skylar Neese. Neese is the Star City, West Virginia, teenager who was reported missing by her parents in July of 2012. The testing of the body was conducted by the laboratory of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

             
The investigation into the disappearance of Neese and her subsequent death is ongoing.

With Skylar's remains positively identified, authorities were one evidentiary step away from arresting Shelia and Rachel.

Daniel Hovatter was among the growing number of people who were rapidly learning that Skylar was gone. Mary had broken the news about Skylar's remains in a Facebook message back in February, and Skylar's close friend had been absolutely heartbroken. Like the Neeses, he had not learned of Rachel's confession, either, but when he was told it looked like her remains had been located, he knew immediately who was responsible.

By the time the news of Skylar's murder was made public on March 13, Daniel's world was falling apart, so he did the only thing he could do to cope with the intense pain he felt: he went home, locked himself in his bedroom, and lit up a joint. Then he cried and cried—for days on end.

Skylar's other childhood friend, Hayden McClead, heard the same time Daniel did in February. Her mother, Katrina, and Mary were close, so when Katrina learned the news from Mary, she told Hayden. For the next month, Hayden's world was suspended in silent grief. Never having faced something this awful before, she simply didn't know how to feel. While she had been told Skylar was probably dead, she didn't want to believe it. She continued to go to class, mired in a cloud of numbness and denial—until March 13.

Hayden was listening to her chemistry teacher's lecture during fourth period that day when she felt her phone vibrate. Someone had sent her a message on Facebook.
R u ok?
The words confused her. She wondered what they meant and why anyone would be worried about her. Just then, her mom's picture appeared on Hayden's cell phone screen. Hayden left the classroom to take the call, worried that something bad must have happened.

Katrina broke the news to her daughter as gently as she could: Skylar's body had been positively identified. Hayden could no longer ignore the truth. Still, she was so shocked when the reality set in, she could barely speak. One singular thought kept repeating inside her head:
Shelia and Rachel did it
.

Across the county, Shania Ammons' volleyball coach pulled her from class to deliver the news in person. Shania went from sobbing to wailing. She was so upset that school officials were afraid to let her drive herself home, so she called her grandma and talked for a while until she calmed down. Then she walked out of Clay-Battelle High School and went straight home, stopping long enough to text Shelia with the news. She was sure Shelia would want to know.

Shelia didn't cry that day. Shania didn't think it odd because she and Shelia had cried together, back when Skylar first disappeared.

Back at the home she shared with her grandparents, Shania told her grandmother she was headed over to Shelia's.

“If you're going, then I'm going,” Linda said. The slender but forceful grandmother wouldn't let Shania go by herself, because Linda had her own suspicions about Shelia.

“My family didn't believe her story,” Shania said, “and they tried really, really hard to keep me away from Shelia. It was a constant fight, an every-single-day fight. But I still hung out with Shelia. They didn't keep me away from her.”

Ironically, on that March 13, Shania and Linda already had plans to join Shelia and Tara for dinner. So they all went to Martin's Bar-bque Joint in Morgantown together. Shania remembers the meal being sad and awkward.

Shania said Shelia asked her who she thought had committed the murder. Shania answered honestly.

“I don't know.”

The high school cafeteria could be called a precursor to today's social media sites: a hotbed for the same kind of gossip and innuendo that pops up on Facebook, Twitter, and Websleuths. Many students first heard rumors about Skylar's murder in the lunchroom—some true, some false. One particularly disturbing rumor began floating around after Skylar's body was found, but long before Rachel and Shelia were arrested.

This dark story especially affected Jordan Carter. She had never given up hope that her one-time summer playmate would come home. Perhaps because the color purple was used at Skylar-themed events after she disappeared, Jordan would think of Skylar every day when she drove home from school past a local bar called the Purple Cow Lounge. Jordan was always looking at the faces of people she passed—hoping one of them might just be her missing friend.

After the news broke about a body being found, Jordan was sitting at a table in the UHS cafeteria when a snippet of conversation caught her attention.

“You know Rachel and Shelia killed her, right?” one teen asked another. “You know they cut off her head and dumped her in the woods.”

Jordan was speechless with horror.

The snow was coming down hard on March 18, almost a white-out, as FBI Victim Specialist Tessa Cooper navigated the black SUV toward Brave. Dave rode in the passenger seat, with Mary in the back. It was a quiet ride.

No one had expected so much snow in mid-March. A week earlier the sky had been clear, the temperatures in the high 60s. That day, thick flakes fell in a torrent. Looking out the window, Dave thought the snow wouldn't be around long, not with the ground so warm. He knew these roads; he and Mary had driven them a dozen times at least, back when . . . when Skylar was still missing. Now Tessa was going to show them where Skylar had been found.

As they rode north, Tessa talked to them about what they were going to see. She had become Mary and Dave's primary liaison with law enforcement and the prosecutor's office. She explained what they should expect, helped alleviate worries, and provided an outlet for the pent-up emotions.

“Nothing about the site jumped out. Nothing obvious,” Dave later said. “She was trying to prepare us [for] the fact that they dumped her like a sack of garbage.”

Based in Charleston, Cooper served the entire state, counseling victims of terrorism and crimes like murder, kidnapping, and child abuse. It was heart wrenching but important work, and she had been doing it for over a decade.

Tessa pulled over at a wide place in the road and turned the car off. Mary and Dave got out, and Tessa said, “Over here.” She led them to a scattered pile of branches and leaves and debris at the base of a tree about ten feet off the road.