Officer Colebank never thought of Skylar as a runaway. In fact, Shelia’s story “sounded hinky” the minute Colebank heard it. The only problem was, she couldn’t tell the Neeses.
Jessica, as Mary and Dave referred to her, was the Star City Police Department’s lead investigator into Skylar’s disappearance. Initially, Bob McCauley had handled the case, but though he had spent many years as a deputy sheriff, he now worked only part time for Star City. Since this case involved a missing teenager, it required a full-time investigator like Colebank. As soon as Colebank came back to work after two days off, McCauley handed the case over to her. Included in the file were Skylar’s phone records. Due to the fact Skylar could have been in immediate danger, McCauley had filed the appropriate paperwork with the phone company the same day he responded to the 911 call, citing exigent circumstances.
Colebank found the records very telling: most of the calls and texts going to and from Skylar’s phone were among her, Shelia, and Rachel. In fact, Skylar had called Shelia six times just before midnight—and the last call Skylar received was from Rachel.
Around the station, Colebank was considered the department’s unofficial “detective” because she liked to dig deep when working her cases. Six years as a 911 dispatcher had helped motivate her to become a cop—every time a call came in, she longed to be on the other side of the radio.
Difficult cases were her lifeblood. Colebank was the type of cop every small-town police chief loves: intelligent, dedicated, and hardworking. She also has an investigator’s keen instinct for sniffing out falsehood and an innate ability for reading suspects’ behavior. Liars pissed her off, and she had no qualms about telling them.
When Colebank inherited Skylar’s case, she’d only been in law enforcement four years. She had already become a thorough and aggressive investigator—partly because her father, on the force for thirty-five years, had helped train her when they worked together as Fairmont, West Virginia city cops. The Star City Police Department dealt with four or five missing-juvenile cases a month; Colebank handled the majority of them. Most had been runaways; up to this point, Skylar was the only missing juvenile on Colebank’s watch who had never made it home.
Officer McCauley entered Skylar’s name and other vital data into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database July 6, the same night law enforcement first learned of her disappearance. Important details about missing juveniles go into this central crime database, the country’s largest, which the FBI makes available to facilitate the flow of information among police agencies. That’s how local FBI agents learned Skylar was missing, and why they called the Star City Police Department to offer their help.
Chief Propst also called State Police headquarters in Charleston twice, asking the agency to issue an AMBER Alert. But the alerts are issued only for abductions—a status determined solely by state officials. Since the surveillance tape clearly showed Skylar getting into a car voluntarily, both requests were denied. Instead, Skylar was classified as a runaway—not an abducted teen.
Dave Neese had solid reasons to insist Skylar hadn’t run away. She left her contact lens container and lens solution behind, just as she did the charger for her TracFone. She left her window open and carefully placed her vanity bench outside to help her climb back inside when she returned.
Most importantly, Skylar left Lilu—her dog and real best friend—behind. In elementary school, Skylar had begged her parents to let her have the tiny white ball of fluff after seeing one of her friends’ Bichons. Against their better judgment, Mary and Dave agreed, and the Bichon had become Skylar’s baby. Dave said again and again Skylar would never have left home for good without taking “that damned dog.”
Lilu, Skylar’s dog and best friend.
The FBI didn’t see Skylar as a runaway, either. In fact the federal agency gets involved in cases of missing juveniles when sexual assault, physical abuse, abduction, or internet crime is suspected. Since the FBI was working on an ongoing investigation an hour south of Morgantown, they wondered if the two cases could be connected. Aliayah Lunsford, three, vanished from her Lewis County home in 2011, a year before Skylar disappeared. The massive search for Aliayah lasted for weeks, but FBI agents continued working the case long after searchers went home. Sadly, the toddler has never been found. When they heard about Skylar, the FBI worried they might have a serial killer on their hands.
In the beginning, only a few people helped Dave and Mary look for Skylar. Shelia and Tara came immediately. A friend of Mary’s from work brought copies of the MISSING flyers that were being posted on Facebook. More support began pouring in as the situation turned into a crisis. Shania Ammons and her grandmother, Linda Barr, offered their assistance. Dave’s aunt, Joanne Nagy, organized volunteers to cook meals for Dave and Mary.
Ultimately, Aunt Joanne proved to be a one-woman army. She fortified the shattered parents with emotional support and canvassed the rail-trail behind Sabraton, a suburb on the eastern side of Morgantown where sightings of Skylar had been reported.
Joanne also organized numerous search teams that met in the Sabraton McDonald’s parking lot. The first search on July 10 drew such a huge crowd Joanne was sure she’d picked the wrong place to meet—the parking lot was overflowing. When she went inside the restaurant, she discovered most of the people were there to look for Skylar.
One week after Skylar disappeared, more people volunteered from all over the region, and complete strangers became close friends after hopping into cars together, bound by a common purpose: finding Joanne’s missing niece, Mary and Dave’s missing daughter. They split into teams of four and plastered flyers everywhere they could. The searchers drove up and down the winding country roads, dirt lanes, and interstates that led away from Morgantown, looking for Skylar night after night.
At first, Shelia was arguably the most persistent searcher of all. She stopped by daily, usually with Tara. Her questions were always the same: “Did the police tell you anything new? What have they found out? What are they telling you?” To Mary and Dave, she seemed like a concerned ally, by turns energetic and distraught. Naturally, they shared everything they learned.
In retrospect, Mary and Dave remembered Rachel never offered to help. Mary wondered about her absence and asked Shelia about it. Shelia said Rachel had been away at camp since the previous Saturday morning, the day after Skylar vanished. A couple of weeks later, Mary realized she still hadn’t seen Rachel, but with hundreds of thoughts preoccupying her, she was too distracted to dwell on it. Still, it felt strange they had heard nothing from Skylar’s other best friend.
On July 9, the first Monday after Skylar disappeared, when Shelia and Tara helped the Neeses search, mother and daughter both knew the police investigation was well underway. They were also aware the FBI was involved. Officer Colebank had already been to Shelia’s house earlier that day with Special Agent Morgan Spurlock. During the visit Colebank noticed something strange.
“I will never forget this,” Colebank said, recalling her first encounter with the animated, watchful teenager. Everyone—Shelia, Tara, Shelia’s stepdad Jim Clendenen, Shania, and Crissy Swanson, a distant cousin—was gathered at Shelia’s house, “in the garage just hanging out, sitting on chairs, just chillin’. I’m, like, okay. . . . ‘Your supposed best friend is missing. Why are you sitting here having a good old time?’”
In actuality, the family had gathered at the Clendenen home to watch the first televised newscast about Skylar’s disappearance. The atmosphere still seemed less somber than Colebank thought it should be. Shelia told Colebank she just hoped Skylar would come home.
Colebank decided to tackle the social media first. “I have some questions about Skylar’s Twitter. Do you know what Skylar meant when she tweeted ‘you doing shit like that is why I will NEVER completely trust you’?”
“No,” Shelia said.
“Do you know who she was tweeting?”
“No, not really.”
“What about her last tweet, ‘All I do is hope’?”
Shelia just stared at Colebank. “Probably some boy.”
“Any boy in particular?”
“Not that I can think of. She and Eric Finch were close, and she had this other friend, Floyd Pancoast. Then there was Dylan Conaway. You might ask him.”
Colebank scribbled in her notebook. “Have you tried calling Skylar?”
“It just makes me so sad to hear her voicemail, to hear her voice,” Shelia said, looking like she might cry any second. “I can’t call her number.”
Colebank checked out Shelia’s bedroom. It was pretty typical, except most teenager’s bedrooms didn’t have a cardboard toilet paper roll sitting on the desk, with some dryer sheets right beside it. Colebank recognized the homemade tool for what it was: a bounce blower. Some young people thought exhaling pot smoke through the dryer sheet kept the scent down. It didn’t, really. She had suspected Shelia’s parents were pretty permissive with Shelia, but this was proof.
Next Colebank asked to see Shelia’s car. In fact, she wanted to see Shania and Crissy’s vehicles, too. Neither one of theirs resembled the one in the grainy video, but as Colebank walked around the silver Toyota Camry she couldn’t help thinking: This could be it. It really looks like that type of car.
Colebank glanced at Shelia periodically as she circled the little car, but the teen “didn’t even bat an eyelash,” the officer later said.
She also heard Shelia’s firsthand account about her and Rachel dropping Skylar off. Colebank didn’t buy it. Why drop Skylar off almost four blocks away for fear of waking Mary and Dave when they had picked her up nearby the apartment complex earlier that night? When she asked Shelia, the teen said Skylar had been mad and insisted on being let out there.
Something sounded wrong to Colebank’s trained ear, so she had Shelia go over the entire evening again. This is what Shelia told her: She and Rachel parked on Crawford Avenue; Skylar came out her window, ran up the slight incline to where they were parked, and got in; and they turned onto Fairfield Street, where they pretty much stayed, cruising and smoking weed on the side streets of Star City. She and Rachel were both dressed in shorts and sweatshirts, and the three girls talked about Rachel’s boyfriend, Skylar’s money problems, and how her shift at Wendy’s that day had been boring. Skylar wasn’t on her phone much, but she seemed upset and began acting weird, which is when she insisted they drop her off away from her home. When Shelia asked why, Skylar refused to say. According to Shelia’s second written statement, they were with her “for at the most thirty minutes.”
Colebank thought that sounded plausible, so she decided to let it rest. Instead, she tried another line of questioning. “Why haven’t you done more online to try to locate her?”
“I’ve been too upset.”
“That’s bullshit, and I don’t believe it for a second. If that was my friend, I’d be blowing up their Facebook page. I’d be blowing their Twitter account up if I didn’t know where they were. You know where she’s at. So tell me.”
“I told you, we dropped her off,” Shelia said.
The story didn’t make any sense to Colebank, and she immediately suspected Shelia was lying. She just wasn’t sure why.
The key takeaway from the visit was Shelia’s attitude. “I did not like Shelia from the get-go,” Colebank said. “Her demeanor was wrong. Arrogant. Narcissistic. But I had nothing, no actual evidence for me to go on. It was just a gut feeling.” The young officer also sensed Shelia was a very capable manipulator.
Colebank was sure of it when Shelia started crying and mumbled something about missing her best friend—and Tara shut the interview down.
When Colebank returned to the station she watched the video again, playing it back and forth. She realized there were a few dead spots in the surveillance coverage—which is why she couldn’t see Skylar leave her bedroom window. Nor did the video show any traffic from Crawford Avenue.
Colebank did, however, see headlights from nearby cars. That fit with Shelia’s statements to police, so Colebank reasoned the teen’s story was plausible. Which meant the car captured by the video couldn’t be Shelia’s. It had to be someone else’s.
The dead spots would also explain why the video didn’t show Skylar going back inside—but perhaps she had crouched down beside her apartment building, hiding and waiting, and then gotten into the second car after it arrived.
Still, Colebank’s gut told her it wasn’t. She didn’t know what it was, though.
A few hours later Colebank was still pondering the question of the unknown car when two retweets went out from Shelia’s phone. A UHS girl had tweeted a pic of Skylar’s MISSING poster, and Shelia sent it out for all her network to see. Another student had tweeted the same MISSING flyer and the message, Hey guys this girl goes to UHS please retweet. Shelia did.