Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the morning of July 6, 2012, Dave Neese went to check on his 16-year-old daughter and found her bed had not been slept in.
He looked around her room in the family’s apartment in Star City, West Virginia. The window screen was in the closet. There was a bench hidden nearby that she could use to climb in and out.
“Then I knew: she snuck out last night,” he later told ABC’s 20/20. “And then, oh my god, she snuck out last night, and she’s not home.”
That day Skylar Neese missed a shift at Wendy’s. It was the first time she ever had. Her parents called the police.
“Just like one of our kids”
Skylar was an only child, an honor student at University High School in Morgantown. She had a 4.0 grade point average and wanted to become a criminal defense attorney. “Skylar was a very bubbly person,” her father said. “She was also very loyal to her friends, the people she thought was her friends.”
She had met Shelia Eddy when they were both eight, at a local children’s program. The Neeses thought of her as another daughter. “She was like a part of our family,” Dave said. “I mean, just like one of our kids.”
In high school a third girl joined them. Rachel Shoaf had come from a Catholic school. The three of them were soon inseparable, taking selfies and spending every spare hour together.
But that summer something had gone wrong between them. Skylar’s Twitter account showed it. On July 4 she tweeted: “Sick of being at f****** home. Thanks ‘friends,’ love hanging out with you all too.” The next day: “you doing s*** like that is why I can NEVER completely trust you.”
On July 5, she came home from her shift at Wendy’s and went to bed like any other night.
The camera
Later that day, Skylar’s mother got a call from Shelia.
She said that she, Skylar and Rachel had sneaked out the night before. They had driven around Star City getting high, she said, and then dropped Skylar off at the end of the road so she wouldn’t wake anybody up. Picked up around 11, back before midnight.
There was no reason to doubt it. The next day, Shelia and her mother went out with the Neeses to walk the neighborhood and look for Skylar. Rachel left for two weeks at a Catholic summer camp.
Police, meanwhile, thought she was a runaway. Under the rules at the time, no Amber Alert could go out. The Neeses put up flyers around Monongalia County on their own, and Shelia handed some out too.
Then investigators looked at the footage from the camera at the apartment complex.
It was grainy and it was dark. At 12:30 a.m. a car pulled up. Moments later, a small figure came out of Skylar’s window and got in, and the car drove off.
Twelve-thirty. Not 11. The story did not fit. Cell phone records and footage from a nearby store made it worse. When Shelia was pressed, she admitted it was her car. She had dropped Skylar off an hour later, she said.
Investigators now knew the girls had lied. They had no idea why.
Police worked other theories. The most likely, they thought, was that Skylar had gone to a party, overdosed, and that frightened kids had hidden her body. The FBI and West Virginia State Police joined the case on September 10 and began working through her friends.
Jessica Colebank, who worked on the case, never forgot her first talk with Shelia. “Just complete blank on emotions,” she said. “It was like iced over.” Rachel looked scared to death. And their stories were word for word the same. “No one’s story is exactly the same, unless it’s rehearsed,” she said.
All through the fall, Shelia went on tweeting about TV and homework. “no one on this earth can handle me and rachel,” she wrote, “if you think you can you’re wrong.”
The pressure came from everywhere. From Dave and Mary, from classmates, from strangers online. It came down hardest on the girl who had looked so frightened.
On December 28, 2012, Rachel Shoaf had a breakdown at home. Her mother called 911. On the recording you can hear her screaming in the background. She spent several days in a psychiatric hospital, with no contact with Shelia.
On January 3, 2013, she was released. She asked to go straight to her lawyer’s office.
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