As a result of the unconditional love she received, Skylar had a deep and unbreakable bond with her doting parents. Although it seems she was a “daddy’s girl,” Skylar’s world revolved around her mother.
“My mom, of course is the most important person in my life,” Skylar wrote in her English journal.3 “She not only cares for me, but she also listens to me and I know I can talk to her. I think it’s important for parents to not only take care of their children, but to also make sure their kids can talk to them.”
It mattered little to Skylar that she didn’t have as many toys and clothes as other kids, or take as many trips as other children did with their families. In fact, having fewer possessions seemed to ground Skylar, making her care more than many of her peers about social problems like bigotry, global warming, and racial discrimination.
Skylar also hated injustice and was blessed with an abundance of empathy. At an early age she became a champion of the underdogs she met in her short life. When Dave used to make fun of gays, Skylar would reprimand him and tell him to knock it off. Sometimes she would even punch him in the shoulder and say, “Stop it, Dad. They’re people too, you know.”
Her capacity for empathy and compassion could also be seen in her schoolwork. In her Honors English class, the big-hearted teen wrote a poem for Ryan Diviney, the former West Virginia University student who was beaten so badly in November 2009 he remains in a vegetative state today.
Skylar at age 11.
Skylar’s earliest friend, Morgan Lawrence, also knew about unconditional love, a feature in her home from the day she was born. Long before Skylar met Shelia or Rachel, she and Morgan, also an only child, were best friends. The two blonde toddlers first met at preschool and then reunited as kindergarteners at Cheat Lake Elementary. The first day of school the two towheads passed each other in the hall, made eye contact, and sensed they knew each other from somewhere.
“We just never stopped being friends after that,” Morgan said.
Unlike Skylar, Morgan’s father was a white-collar professional: a physician, the chief of the Monongalia General Hospital Emergency Department. Having money meant that, unlike Skylar’s parents, Morgan’s mother was usually available to pick up the kids after school.
Cheryl Lawrence became like Skylar’s second mother. All through kindergarten, she brought Skylar home with Morgan and kept her until Mary picked her up. Inside the Lawrence home, the two little girls played together—until one of them wanted a toy the other child had. Then a fight ensued. Cheryl would separate them, sending Morgan to her room. Skylar was left behind with all the toys and the TV, and Morgan soon learned Skylar really enjoyed having everything to herself. Such is a trait of many only children, Morgan later said, “including me.”
For all their advantages, David and Cheryl Lawrence were about as grounded as it gets. That’s one reason they felt so comfortable with Skylar and her parents. They recognized the Neeses shared the same family values. They also viewed Skylar as a good influence for their daughter.
In fifth grade Morgan believed she and Skylar would be best friends forever. A poll they later read in Honors Science class said by age eighteen, only 5 percent of people would still have contact with their first friend.
“We were like, ‘Boo! Boo! That’s not going to be us. We’re lab partners, and we have classes together,’” Morgan said. “I remember looking back and being, like, ‘Suck it, world, ’cause that’s not us! We’re still in contact.’”
What Morgan was most looking forward to with Skylar, and Skylar with her, was when they would be bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. It was a promise they made to each other as little girls—and they intended to see it through.
The year after kindergarten, Skylar and Daniel Hovatter were in first grade together at Cheat Lake Elementary School. Daniel later became Skylar’s closest friend and confidant—when she confided in anyone at all. Even as a child, Skylar showed signs of being a private person. She didn’t share much with anyone, not even her parents.
Skylar and Daniel’s friendship grew stronger because Dave did handyman work for Daniel’s mom while his dad worked overseas as a military contractor. When Dave came by he’d bring Skylar along, and the two children would entertain themselves playing Life or Battleship for hours on end. When they suspected Dave was about finished, they’d take their game inside a closet, furtively hiding so they could keep playing.
Shelia Eddy entered Skylar’s life when they were second graders. During summer, the two girls spent weekdays at the pool together at The Shack Neighborhood House, a community center outside Morgantown. Their play dates continued almost every weekend during the colder seasons. Usually Shelia’s mother, Tara, would take Skylar home with her after work on Friday, to save Mary and Dave from making the twenty-mile trip to Blacksville. During the school year, Skylar spent her afterschool hours at Morgan’s home, but during summertime she was often a visitor in Shelia’s home.
It wasn’t a surprise the two little girls ended up becoming fast friends at such an early age, because their mothers, Mary Neese and Tara Eddy-Clendenen, were close to the same age and had known each other when they were teens.
Like Skylar, Shelia was an only child. Also like Skylar, her parents came from small West Virginia towns and didn’t have much money. When Shelia was about two years old, her father was in a severe car accident. Greg Eddy sustained brain damage and was left partially crippled. A family friend said Greg “has made mistakes as we all have but he has a good heart.” As a single parent, Shelia’s mom struggled. She worked in Morgantown, but wanted a better life for her daughter, so she took college classes to become an accountant.
When Shelia rode in her parents’ car as a little girl, she often passed Kent’s Chapel, a church across the state line in Brave, Pennsylvania. A few miles north of Blacksville, West Virginia, where the Eddys lived, Brave is tiny—with its 201 residents—and is part of Wayne Township in Greene County. Before Skylar’s murder, it was an idyllic town where people left their doors unlocked and lived without fear of what would become of their children. One resident said, “The community of Brave was a picture-perfect place.”
Kent’s Chapel is a little white church on the same road where Skylar was murdered. Although the Eddys didn’t often attend, Greg sometimes helped out with the youth in the church; congregants recall many mornings when he fixed breakfast for the young people there. His Sunday breakfasts became a thing of the past after Skylar’s body was discovered.
Back in 2002, Shelia and Tara took part in a religious service at Kent’s Chapel. Tara read from Scripture while Shelia held up a chrismon4 before the eyes of everyone gathered in the small chapel. As Shelia hung her chrismon on the church’s Christmas tree, Tara explained it meant “new birth.” Shelia was just seven and her chrismon was a butterfly.5
That’s about the time Shelia showed signs of having a personality trait the public would later witness during her court appearances: she craved attention. Crissy’s mother babysat Shelia when she was an infant. Tara and Greg were separated and Tara didn’t have much money, so Crissy’s mother “bought her diapers . . . formula . . . everything,” Crissy said.
When Shelia was seven or eight they began to notice her eccentric behavior. As Crissy described, “One time we were out [at a restaurant] eating . . . and everything was fine and Shelia just stood up and she was eating, and my mom’s like ‘Shelia, what are you doing? Sit down.’
“‘I like to stand up when I eat,’” Crissy said Shelia replied.
No matter how many times her mother asked Shelia to sit down, she refused. Crissy believes Shelia’s actions were designed to get attention from everyone around her. Those odd mannerisms continued to define Shelia as she grew older, but her loved ones explained them away, saying she was an only child and the center of her mother’s life.
Unlike Skylar’s parents, Shelia’s parents divorced before she ever entered school. By the time Skylar was murdered in 2012, it appears the double tragedy—losing her father twice—might have taken its toll on Shelia. By then, she and Skylar had been friends more than half their lives.
Not too far from the Neeses’ home in a nearby section of Morgantown known as Evansdale, another little girl was growing up. Rachel Shoaf was the only daughter of a merchant father—Rusty Shoaf owned and operated Reiner and Core, an exclusive clothing boutique in town—and a stay-at-home mother, Patricia. Rusty’s first wife had succumbed to cancer, leaving him a widower with a young son and the proceeds from her life insurance policy. When he met and married Patricia, an outsider from Hampton, Virginia, his family thought he was rushing into a new relationship too soon.
The Shoafs soon had a baby girl. One family friend said she became “the sun, the moon, the stars” to her parents. Before long, Rusty’s store went out of business, he and his son, Kevin, moved out, and the marriage ended in divorce. Rachel, whose favorite pastime then was playing Blue’s Clues on the family computer, was four years old.
People who have known the Shoafs for many years said they have big hearts—sometimes too big, allowing people into their lives who later take advantage of them. Patricia Shoaf’s closest friend, Liz,6 recalled how she struggled as a single mother and how Patricia came to her aid. Liz’s daughter Karen was two years younger than Rachel, but because Patricia gave her all the outfits Rachel outgrew, Karen was the best-dressed child in school.
The Shoafs did not move in the same social circle as the Neeses or the Eddys, so Rachel didn’t know either girl. Instead, by the time she began school, Rachel was friends with children from the more affluent families in town. Liz said Rachel was a nervous child when at home. Away from home, though, she often lovingly tended to other children and later, as she grew older, regularly volunteered with the Special Olympics. “Rachel was the first person to defend those kids and wouldn’t let anyone be mean to them,” Liz said.
Skylar had always seemed sensible to Dave—sometimes irritatingly so. Many years after the Neeses’ vacation to Ocean City, when Skylar was a teenager and the family lived in the Cheat Lake area, she called her father to task for his excessive behavior during televised sports events. Dave was an unabashed fan of West Virginia University football. The team has never won a national championship, but the promise has often dangled. For a rabid fan like Dave, their performance has been exhilarating and frustrating. Dave watched every game, often yelling at the screen.
One day, Dave recalls, when they still lived in Cheat Lake, Skylar came downstairs to the living room where Dave was watching the game. She stood for a few seconds, observing how wrapped up in it he was.
“Daddy, what do you care? So they lose. Why get all worked up about it?”
“Did you see what Slaton did? It’s like he just gave up and fell down!”
“How does that affect you? How is your life going to change if they lose? Or if they win, for that matter?”
Something about hearing those questions from his fifteen-year-old daughter brought Dave up short. She was right, and “Ohh—go upstairs with your mother,” was all the frustrated father could say.
Dave went back to watching the game, but Skylar had planted a tiny seed that would germinate inside him and change his outlook on WVU football. He still watched the games but was more objective. Skylar planted many seeds in her dad, changing his views on subjects important and trivial. She was that kind of kid, and he was that kind of father.
As early adolescence approached and cell phone coverage improved, Skylar and Shelia called or texted each other whenever they weren’t together. The summer before Shelia moved to Morgantown, Skylar often stayed with Shelia.
Shelia’s neighbors said they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary during those visits. Skylar seemed friendly and sociable, and the two girls would often walk to the nearby Bell’s Grocery store, or they would hang outside on the front porch with local boys who dropped by—usually when Tara was at work.
Neighbor Ted Bice said Shelia was quiet and shy, and would often walk in her bikini through the backyard, where she would sunbathe. He would spray Shelia with a water hose if she was outside when he was washing his truck.
He remembers hearing Tara and Shelia yelling at each other “several times.” That could have been around the time Tara began dating Jim Clendenen, since several people have said Shelia didn’t like her mother’s new beau.
Even though he mined coal for a living, Jim wasn’t your average coal miner: Crissy said he wore jewelry and got pedicures, so she and Shelia often teased Tara. Men in rural West Virginia rarely engaged in such pampering.7
Shelia did find one reason to like Jim: he was generous.
“Jim was so gracious with his money, so gracious,” Crissy said. “He just gave and gave and gave and gave, and if Shelia wanted the best, she got the best.”
Once, possibly during a heated argument over her mother’s boyfriend, Bice heard Shelia threaten to kill Tara. “I don’t know how many more times she flipped out on her mom,” he said. “She was, like, really getting wild.”
Other neighbors said Shelia seemed odd. An older girl across the street from Tara’s old apartment said Shelia was also mean, calling her a “whore” after the teen neighbor got pregnant.
“[Shelia’s] always been a little weird, stayed in the house a lot,” a neighbor named Lee Barker said.8 “She acted like she didn’t want to be seen in public, ’cause she’d have her dad stop down and go to the store for her and bring stuff down while her mother was at work.”
Crissy said Shelia didn’t have a good relationship with her father, but Greg clearly loved his daughter and was more than happy to run errands for her. Greg was often a regular at Dunkard Valley Golf Course, where he and his father would play golf.
“He would come in about three times a week,” Kristen Miller said, “and say he had to get his ‘little girl a sodie pop.’”
Miller, who worked at the golf course restaurant, said none of the staff even believed he had a daughter—because they never saw her. When staffers later heard the news and learned Greg’s daughter had been charged with killing Skylar, Miller said they were shocked to learn she was a teenager. “He always talked about her like she was a little girl.”
It took, of all things, a wedding to set in motion a chain of events that would bring the three girls into almost constant contact—and alter the course of their lives forever.
Tara’s decision to marry Jim ushered a number of changes into Shelia’s life: a new stepfather, a well-appointed townhouse located outside Morgantown, and city living. In addition, gaining a new husband who worked as a foreman for a union coal company meant Tara could say farewell to difficult financial times. So could Shelia.
Jim’s generous income added luxuries to the lives of mother and daughter: he sent flowers to his new wife every month and Shelia could finally wear the expensive labels she’d always coveted. She could also get her hair styled and go to the mall for manicures. Even so, Shelia didn’t have the same status as the daughters of the local business moguls or the sons of prominent lawyers.
The move did allow Shelia to attend UHS, five minutes away, and her new home was only ten minutes from the Neeses’ Star City apartment. Shelia and Skylar were excited about the prospect of being together all the time. That prospect became a reality in October 2010 when Shelia transferred to UHS as a ninth grader and immediately requested a class schedule identical to Skylar’s.
Aside from her family, Skylar’s life had three constants: Morgan, Daniel, and Shelia. Rachel didn’t enter her life until both girls were fourteen and freshmen at UHS.
By then Skylar’s friendship with Shelia seemed to grate on the nerves of all her other friends. Those girls said Shelia was “mean” and “controlling.” Sadly, they saw the same thing as Mary and Dave—a change in Skylar’s behavior—which they attributed to her close association with Shelia. It impacted her other friendships so much that by the end of middle school, even Morgan and Skylar weren’t hanging together very often.
“Hey, just tell Skylar we’re not going to go,” Morgan’s friend said.
Earlier that day in the cafeteria, several UHS freshmen had made plans to see a movie. Skylar was there at the time so Morgan assumed she was included. Most of the teens were good friends with Morgan but none of them were close to Skylar.
It happens in high schools and everywhere else in society: people associate with other people who are like them. Often that means economic and cultural similarities. Morgan’s father was a doctor and many of her friends’ parents were white-collar professionals as well—lawyers, consultants, accountants, and professors.
“No, no,” Morgan said. “That’s not how that works. Either we’re both going, or I’m not going at all. Skylar and I’ll do something, ’cause I’m not doing that. That’s stupid.”
“I think it would be awkward if she went,” her friend replied. “This could be weird. We’re not that good of friends with her.”
“Well, I am. I’m friends with all of you.”
Morgan didn’t think it was a conscious choice on her friends’ part. They weren’t trying to exclude Skylar because her family didn’t have money; they just weren’t on the same wavelength.
Class differences weren’t always fueled by snobbery, but the effects could be equally divisive. Especially when it appeared snobbery was alive and well at UHS. Whether or not this attitude of entitlement affected Morgan’s friends, Skylar must have been aware of it. How could she not be? It was all around her. Students say some of the wealthier teens, the more mean-spirited ones, actually referred to the rural kids or those from working-class backgrounds as “the dirty kids” or simply, “the dirties.”