Skylar and Shelia met Rachel when the three had a class together and the next thing Skylar knew, wherever she and Shelia were, so was Rachel. This was fine by Skylar, who made friends with everyone. While they were freshmen, Shelia, Rachel, and Skylar became a well-known trio who turned the heads of other students they passed in the UHS hallways.
Skylar was ecstatic when Shelia Eddy—her Shelia—transferred there from an outlying rural area. Skylar and the tiny brunette had been friends since second grade, and she could imagine how fantastic it was going to be. Although Shelia was boy crazy and always on her cell phone, she had connections and could get weed.
Slender and sharp-tongued, Shelia had been popular at her old school, Clay-Battelle. But at UHS, she was an unknown. Except for Skylar, all her childhood friends lived in Blacksville. When Shelia didn’t become popular at UHS, she used her budding sexuality to make friends and influence people. UHS teens say Shelia was the least liked of the three.
Unlike Shelia, Rachel was surrounded by her childhood friends, many of whom also came from Saint Francis, a parochial school. Unlike Skylar, Rachel had money, and her parents were considered more white-collar workers than blue-collar. A popular redhead, Rachel was known for her staunch Catholic faith and her volunteer work during Special Olympics. A songbird and aspiring actress, Rachel was the most talented of the three.
Finally, there was the five-foot-two blossoming environmentalist and champion of the underdog. The girl whose every step became a bounce, who smiled all the time, aced every exam, did her friends’ homework, and insisted she was going to law school. That, of course, was Skylar. A likable honors student, she was the smartest of the three.
By the time they became fast friends, they were inseparable: the brunette, the redhead, and Skylar, the beautiful girl with Bette Davis eyes.
Despite the three girls’ desire for excitement—or perhaps because of it—their relationship would soon be marked by tension, distrust, and one fight after another.
During those two years, Skylar must have assumed the social payoff was worth the occasional drama. She either wasn’t bothered by the shifting alliances and two-on-one disputes that can occur between three close friends, or she tolerated the problems for the sake of having fun and partying. It was the worst mistake she ever made.
Fellow students wouldn’t forget Skylar after they saw a firsthand glimpse of her stubborn streak during band practice early in the fall semester 2010.
Skylar and the rest of the UHS marching band had gathered in a parking lot downtown, preparing for a parade. It was the beginning of the school year and quite hot outside when the band got into position. Ariah Wyatt, Hayden McClead, and Skylar were all in the flute section.
As Ariah later described it: “We’d always practiced like that, every single time, the same order.” As performance time neared, however, the upperclassmen decided to switch up the order. The freshmen didn’t like it.
“We’d already told our parents,” Ariah recalled, “so they’re . . . ready to watch us march by. We were all not wanting to move.”
The upperclassmen insisted on the order change but Skylar would have none of it. As the older students physically moved people, Skylar got angry. “No, this is where I told my family I was gonna be, this is where I’m gonna to be,” Ariah remembers Skylar saying.
“Skylar stood there with her flute in her hands,” Ariah said, “clutching it to her chest, going, ‘I swear, if one of them touches me, I am going to flip out!’ She was so mad, all the upperclassmen backed off as soon as she said that.”
At that instant they knew: Nobody messed with Skylar Neese when she was angry.
Rachel’s voice defined her freshman year at UHS. The first time students heard Rachel sing, their jaws dropped. “Oh, my gosh,” one student said. “She’s a freshman. She’s gonna be so good!”
Richard Kyer, the UHS drama teacher, wanted to gauge the incoming freshmen so he held an informal audition in drama class at the beginning of each school year. The event told him who could sing—and who couldn’t.
“Who wants to come up and sing?” Mr. Kyer asked.
Rachel volunteered and practically ran up on the stage. Students knew instantly they were watching someone who likely would land lead roles.
Other than her childhood friends, the only students who spoke well of Shelia were a few boys who considered themselves modern-day hippies.
One of them was a UHS student named Frankie.9 He had known Shelia since third grade. “She was just like the sweetest girl,” he said.
Frankie said he and Shelia smoked weed, did coke, and took Roxicet—a form of oxycodone—many times. They also slept together. Frankie believed Shelia’s unpopular status had more to do with her arrest than people were willing to say. “She was cool,” he said. “She was funny, and nice. I’m probably the only one who would admit it.”
Many students liked Shelia before Skylar disappeared, Frankie said. But later he believed they were afraid to say they’d ever liked her, because she’d been labeled a murderer.
As did Shelia, Daniel remained fast friends with Skylar throughout elementary, middle, and high school. Although Daniel often found Shelia annoying, her presence never seemed to interfere with Skylar and Daniel’s friendship. Because he was a boy, it was possible Shelia didn’t see Daniel as competition, which she might have with Skylar’s female friends—many of whom said Shelia tried to push them away.
Later on, Daniel often joined Skylar, Shelia, and Rachel on their weekend joyrides. He also hung out with the trio on a regular basis before classes or during lunchtime, and he and Rachel performed in high school plays together.
“We never argued,” Daniel said about his calm and steady bond with Skylar. “I cannot think of one argument we were in. We would get irritated with each other, but we never had an actual argument where we didn’t talk to each other.”
By the time they turned into teenagers and entered high school, Skylar’s relationship with Shelia—and later Rachel, once she joined the Skylar and Shelia club—came to dominate her world. Rachel’s friends said it seemed Shelia was trying to control Rachel, and said they could see the bad effect Shelia was having on her.
Skylar’s friends echoed those sentiments and were equally troubled about Skylar, but both girls brushed off their friends’ concerns. In the process, Rachel and Skylar drew even closer to Shelia—until the three-way friendship turned tumultuous, leaving Skylar the odd girl out.
Skylar had snuck out when the Neeses still lived in the Cheat Lake area. Mary worked at Ruby Memorial Hospital then, but Dave only worked part time, making advertising signs for company cars. Times were lean for the Neeses.
On a warm spring night Skylar engineered a plan to go joyriding with Shelia. Joyriding is what today’s teens call riding around aimlessly in a car, talking and texting and tweeting and sometimes getting high. Skylar and Shelia had gone joyriding many times, but Mary and Dave didn’t know that.
Because neither girl had a license, Skylar had talked Floyd Pancoast, a friend of hers, into taking them. Pancoast, age nineteen, was a brooding young man, but Skylar liked him anyway. Skylar was his sounding board, as she was for so many teens at University High School.
Floyd’s eighteen-year-old friend Brian Moats ended up driving. They also picked up Rachel and Shelia, who lived just a few minutes away from Skylar. The car with its five teenage occupants was cruising a little too fast down a long hill in Star City when Officer Mike Teets noticed their speed and took off in pursuit. Star City had a strict 10:00 P.M. curfew for anyone under eighteen, and the officer thought some of the car’s occupants appeared quite young. When he strolled up to the driver’s window after pulling them over, his suspicions were confirmed: the girls were underage. Officer Teets released Pancoast and Moats. He drove the three girls to the Star City police station, then called Rachel’s and Shelia’s fathers to come get them. The two teens had intentionally not given him their mothers’ cell phone numbers. Rachel said her mom would get violent; Shelia knew her dad would go easier on her.
Neither mother immediately knew what happened because both dads snuck their daughters back into their respective homes. But Skylar didn’t realize that. The Neeses didn’t have a home phone then, nor did either of them have a cell—although they made sure Skylar did in case of an emergency. Since Officer Teets had no way to reach her parents, he loaded Skylar into the back of his patrol car and drove her home himself.
According to Mary, Skylar was nearly hysterical. She was inconsolable, saying Rachel’s mom would beat her daughter up because she snuck out. Rachel had repeatedly told Skylar and Shelia about beatings she said she received from her mother.
“It’s all my fault!” Skylar gulped through her tears. She had been the instigator of the plan, and Mary thought the chastised teen’s guilt was appropriate.
“Yes, it is. You can’t be doing that, Skylar!” Mary said. “Do you even know these boys that well? What if they hurt you? What if they raped you, killed you?”
“Rachel’s going to be in such trouble!”
“As she should be. Now off to bed.”
Mary and Dave both agreed Skylar had punished herself enough, so they didn’t ground her or administer any other discipline. They believed she had learned her lesson.
Looking at events leading up to the murder, two facts are certain: Skylar’s personality had begun changing, and she was growing angrier. Anyone who knew her well knew that. It is possible Skylar’s temper was due to her personality change. Dave bragged she once punched him in the face so hard he was surprised she didn’t knock him out. She and Shelia were always feuding, many times because Skylar was angry at Shelia when she didn’t get her way. Then there were all those angry tweets Skylar sent out for the world to see, which she tweeted steadily in the late summer and fall of 2011.
Skylar was angry at Shelia, as evidenced by their frequent online fights. The bickering seems to have begun in late summer of 2011. In fact, June, July, and early August may have been the high point of the relationship among the three teens—both figuratively and literally.
Skylar’s tweets from this time are positively giddy. Just after three in the morning on August 4, she tweeted to Shelia, ima pass the time by blowing up yo shitt and two minutes later, Rachel: i have a story for you tomorrow. text me when you wake up! you can help my boredom on the ride to the beach :)). And not long after: OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG.
Clearly Skylar was pleased and excited—until the big blowout at Rachel’s home. Based on written documentation, the fight happened on August 16, just before the girls returned to school. It was loud enough to wake Rachel’s mother, who separated them.
Rachel invited Shelia and Skylar for a sleepover. It was the first and last time they stayed with her. Sometime after Patricia fell asleep, the girls began drinking from the bottle of vodka they had somehow gotten their hands on. Before long all three girls were drunk, which is apparently when they started snapping photos of each other and kissing.
Skylar may have taken part in the drunken kissing, but based on what is known about her public displays with the same sex, that’s probably all she did. For a while now, rumors have floated around she took pictures of—and some students say she even videoed—what happened next.
That is, Rachel and Shelia undressed and began having oral sex, and then scissored.10 Skylar, who was in an unfamiliar home with a parent Rachel claimed could be violent, was unlikely to have felt comfortable enough to leave the bedroom. So she was trapped, forced to watch.
Afterward all three girls slept in Rachel’s bed. Or they tried to. Shelia ordered Skylar to “move over, so I can cuddle with Rachel.”
Shelia’s request angered Skylar, who began complaining. A loud and rowdy fight ensued between the two girls. The next thing they knew, Patricia burst through the door. “What’s going on down here?”
“I don’t know, Skylar and Shelia—” Rachel began, then stopped. “They just started fighting.”
Patricia told them to keep it down and took Rachel upstairs to sleep in her bedroom. But Shelia and Skylar continued fighting, so Patricia was forced to return at least once more to quiet the two girls.
This secondhand account comes from another friend, Shania Ammons, to whom Skylar related the events.11 But Mary Neese verified the incident, when she later said Skylar wrote in her diary about Shelia and Rachel having sex.12
“Skylar . . . didn’t seem happy about it,” Shania said.
Shania didn’t discuss Skylar’s version of events with Shelia. “I pretend it never happened. I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I don’t have anything against it. . . . It was just like, Shelia and Rachel. It was weird.”