Gaskins, Spurlock, and Colebank were preparing to leave for Parkersburg by the time Rachel’s plea hearing ended. Shelia’s wrists and ankles were shackled, but she still wore her street clothes. Not for long—the Lorrie Yeager Juvenile Center would provide her with an orange jumpsuit. Gaskins hoped she’d noticed the red and yellow “In Loving Memory of Skylar Neese” armband he’d hung on the rearview mirror just for her.
Having a female prisoner like Shelia in custody meant they needed to take extra precautions, so the two male officers asked Colebank to join them on the ride to Parkersburg. They also knew how hard she had worked the case, before the WVSP and FBI took it over.
“My hair is a mess,” Shelia said.
Gaskins and Spurlock looked at each other, Gaskins shaking his head. This girl was incredible. She was on her way to detention for her involvement in a murder and she’s worried about her hair?
“Seriously,” Shelia said. “I have to look right when we get there.”
“Do you have a scrunchie?” Shelia had asked the men. But once Colebank climbed into the back seat beside her, Shelia clammed up. She didn’t seem to want to talk with Colebank nearby.
“Do you think photographers will be waiting for you?” Colebank asked in amazement, wondering how Shelia always seemed to think everything was about her.
“No one’s going to be waiting, Shelia,” Gaskins said. “No one cares.”
He looked in the rearview mirror. Shelia was wearing an exaggerated pout, her lower lip protruding.
Colebank sat rigidly and stared straight ahead, as if Shelia’s sheer presence was a personal affront to her. Gaskins knew the arrogant, self-absorbed teen had angered Colebank from the first time they’d met.
The female officer was ecstatic when she found herself riding in the back seat with Shelia, and said she was overjoyed to know Shelia was finally going to be locked up. She thought back to her first few days working the case, when her gut feeling told her Shelia and Rachel were behind Skylar’s disappearance. She remembered the law enforcement seminar she and Spurlock later attended, when the presenter outlined the traits of a psychopath—and she and Spurlock, seated at opposite ends of a table—leaned forward and mouthed: “That’s Shelia.”
While she believed from the outset that the two killers would rate high on a scale showing sociopathic or possibly even psychopathic traits, no one else working the investigation wanted to—until the FBI did, after investigators consulted with the Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico, Virginia.
Her suspicions—and her gut feelings—were confirmed during an early autumn 2012 conference call with the BAU team. Using Rachel’s diary, among other items from the two girls, the federal analysts called it: Rachel had sociopathic tendencies, while Shelia had psychopathic ones.
As Colebank thought back to the BAU’s conclusion, she kept her hand on her Taser the entire way to Parkersburg. She knew it was entirely possible a troublesome teen like Shelia might give her a reason to use it.
When they arrived in Parkersburg, Shelia wanted to call her mother. “How much do I get to use the phone?” she asked.
Colebank had had enough and at that moment she couldn’t keep quiet. “You get nothing here. You committed a crime. You killed someone,” she said. “Don’t expect royal treatment here. There are rules here. If they say you can use the phone, you can use the phone. You don’t just walk up to a phone and call your mom.”
Shelia was already crying as they walked through the detention doors, but at Colebank’s words she cried harder.
The three officers escorted her to the processing area where she would receive her orange jumpsuit. They paused at a thick metal door with a small glass window, as a correctional officer told Shelia to follow him. It took a few seconds for Shelia to realize she was alone. Gaskins, Spurlock, and Colebank stood behind her, waiting for the heavy door to slam shut.
“Home sweet home,” Colebank said. “Enjoy your stay.”
Shelia’s eyes grew large. “What?”
At that moment, Colebank felt “pure elation,” and as the three officers left the building she went to have a celebratory cigarette before they got back on the road.
A few correctional officers were there, too, and had seen Shelia’s arrival.
“Really, three of you?” one of them said. “What, is she here on drug charges?”
“No, she killed someone,” Colebank said.
The other officers looked on in disbelief. “Her?”
Colebank was amazed they could be taken in by Shelia’s tiny, delicate body and innocent-looking face. “Don’t let her fool you. She will use her sexuality and her looks to get her way,” she warned. “Do not fall (for) her ruse. It is an act. This is how she’s going to be down here.”
A couple of correctional officers laughed. “Oh yeah, okay.”
Colebank could tell they didn’t believe her.
“No way,” another one said.
“Yep, way,” Colebank said, feeling herself flush. Why do people keep doing that? It’s making me mad. “We wouldn’t have brought her down here today if she hadn’t.”
After Rachel’s plea and Shelia’s detention, Twitter exploded. People were trying to make sense of what had happened. They truly wanted to understand the two teens’ actions—even though not everyone had figured out that Shelia was the unnamed teen in Rachel’s confession.
For example, @jsimp_93 tweeted, How can you go on about your normal life after what you did? #dontunderstand. People repeatedly said that Skylar’s murder had shaken their faith in fellow human beings. Such was @lyssa_ruth’s tweet, Idk how anyone could hurt or especially kill their best friend. (“Idk” is textspeak for “I don’t know.”) It just shows us we can’t trust anyone. #justiceforskylar.
But the people who had believed all along that Shelia and Rachel had committed a terrible crime, and who had been harassed because of it, now fought back. @Hannahsgotalota tweeted, To everyone who believed them, stood by their side, and told everyone how irrelevant their “rumors” were: go fuck yourself.
Other people tried a lighter approach. Cheyenne Cowell tweeted, Sometimes when I’m having a shitty day, I think “hmm. I wonder what Rachel Shoaf is doing” then suddenly I’m in a great mood.
Interestingly, as if their jobs were done, Mia Barr and Josie Snyder had stopped tweeting in February—even though the public didn’t find out the remains were Skylar’s until March. Mia and Josie had either lost interest or they simply didn’t think they were needed anymore. However, several other anonymous accounts stepped up to fill the void. Someone called @CountFistula tweeted a blast, that is, he retweeted Shelia’s tweets—with added punchlines:
RT “@_sheliiaa rest easy skylar, you’ll ALWAYS be my bestfriend. i miss you more than you could ever know.” I just threw up. Twice.
RT “@_sheliiaa hahahah good god you’re such a compulsive liar. i mean seriously it’d probably kill you to tell the truth” Pot, meet kettle.
RT “@_sheliiaa i hate when people blame their own actions and choices on others.” Looked up ‘irony’ in the dictionary & found this tweet.
An anonymous account called @KillerGirlProblems also suddenly became active with tweets such as, Just when you think you’ve gotten away with murdering your BFF, your accomplice rats you out. “UGH Y” #killergirlproblems. Like many people on Twitter, @KillerGirlProblems also showed sympathy for Skylar’s family: Just wishing all the prayers & love in the world to the Neese family . . . how they have made it to this point is beyond me. #staystrong.
Daniel’s tweets showed that for him, life became much more difficult after Rachel and Shelia were arrested, rather than easier. His May 1 tweet called out Rachel and Shelia directly: I have no sympathy for you girls. I just KNEW that you knew something, and I get called the jackass for believing that? #justiceforskylar and At one point, I considered you two some of my best friends. Now I just hope you rot in hell for this.
A couple of days later he tweeted that he was going to see Mary and Dave. After the visit, Daniel was furious: Hey Rachel, how’s that scar on your knee doing? Mary told me everything. My girl didn’t die without a fight, bitch.
Understandably, Daniel spiraled into a depression, and on May 6, school authorities suspended him after finding illegal substances among his possessions. That evening he tweeted I get so sad at night. <\3.
Even though Daniel had been such a driving force in causing Rachel’s story to crumble, at that moment he was completely unable to help himself.
Once people learned Shelia and Rachel had been arrested in connection with Skylar’s murder, they began discussing whether Shelia was a psychopath.32 But that’s not the way either psychologists or law enforcement think about it. According to criminal profiler Ken Lanning, people aren’t simply psychopaths or not psychopaths. It’s a matter of how many traits of psychopathic behavior people have and how strongly they have them. An individual can be more or less narcissistic, more or less prone to lying, and so on. There are differing degrees of psychopathy, and someone with psychopathic tendencies can still have good behavior, or have positive feelings for other people. In more extreme psychopathic types, of course, this isn’t the case.
According to Lanning, after he heard about the case and reviewed letters Shelia had written from detention, she seemed to have psychopathic tendencies—to be a psychopathic type of person. However, he warned, a label of psychopath should never be applied to a person so young—especially not without extensive first-hand experience.
“You have to be careful about how much of this is really a diagnostic mental disorder,” Lanning said, “and how much of this is just characteristics, immaturity, that adolescents go through.” Many people show psychopathic tendencies in adolescence and then simply get over them as they mature.
UHS teens were no different, and as many of them looked back, they began to question Shelia’s behavior. Daniel found himself doing this a lot. “Shelia just loved to run over animals for no reason,” Daniel said in hindsight. “I would never do that. I think it’s horrible.” According to Daniel, she did it a number of times. It’s hard to tell whether Shelia actually did like running over animals or whether Dan just thought that, looking back after he knew she murdered his best friend.
Two other teens offered similar stories, but neither of them was in the car when the incidents happened. Their stories could have been simply the kind of rumors that go around when people discover murderers have been living among them.
Some friends said Shelia did seem to hit a lot of animals, but blamed it on country living. In the rural areas, everyone hit an animal, one time or another. The lucky people were the ones who didn’t hit large animals, like deer.
However, what is interesting is how Shelia seemed to be able to manipulate other people in her world. For instance, she always put her books in her friends’ lockers—because she said the lockers were too difficult for her to open. “She wasn’t strong enough to open her locker,” Shania said.
In light of this, it wasn’t just running over bunnies that gave Daniel pause. There was also that time she talked him into stealing the answers to an exam.
“C’mon, Daniel, you know you need this grade,” Shelia insisted outside in the hallway. Lunch period had just begun but she had asked Daniel to hang back for a minute. “We have to do this. We’re gonna flunk, and our parents are gonna kill us.”
She was referring to the class they had together sophomore year, AP English.
“Shelia, you know I can’t do that. I’d rather just get grounded or something.”
“They’ll take your phone. You know they will.”
Daniel thought about that. Taking his phone was the worst. Usually, when his folks were pissed off about something, they would freak out. He’d heard the lecture many times before: “You’re not going to graduate. You’re going to be a failure in life. Blah, blah, blah.”
Seeing Daniel waver, Shelia pressed her advantage: “It’ll be easy. He’s never in his room at lunch. We can just go in real quick.”
Shelia’s idea was to simply walk into Mr. Kyer’s classroom and steal the test answers or jot them down. They could memorize them that night, then ace the test tomorrow.
“This is freaky!” Daniel said. “We could get in so much trouble.”
She put her lips to his ear and whispered, “Nobody will ever know.”
“I don’t know . . .”
She gently pushed his shoulder. “Let’s do it now. In and out. We can be in the lunchroom in two minutes.”
Daniel let Shelia persuade him to head down the hall to Mr. Lamb’s classroom. All the other students and teachers were either at lunch or in class, waiting to take lunch next period.
“They’re in the bottom drawer,” she told him. “On the right.” She clearly wasn’t going in.
“Oh, sure,” Daniel said, “make me go in and get my hands dirty.”
“Don’t be dumb. Someone’s gotta stand guard.”
Just like Shelia said, it only took a few seconds, and they were at lunch in a matter of minutes. Daniel felt guilty afterward. The worst part was, Daniel wasn’t sure why he did it because he’d never done it before.
Daniel tried not to waste time dwelling on Shelia or the trouble, but it was really hard; he just wanted his Sky back.