After the plea hearing, Ashdown said Rachel confessed that she and Shelia started stabbing Skylar on “a prearranged signal.” For months, people claimed that signal was a count: “One . . . two . . . three!”
At one time, such a notion seemed to be based solely on unrelated Twitter traffic on March 31, 2013, between Shelia and her cousin, Lexy.
In successive tweets, Shelia said,
still waiting “@slexy_Just waitin for you to make a move @_sheliiaa”
and
still. make a move “@slexy_“@_sheliiaastill waiting “@slexy_Just waitin for you to make a move @_sheliiaa”” o me 2”
and
@slexy_ on three
A little later, about 1:30 in the morning, Shelia tweeted, we really did go on three. Lexy, tweeted back, “@_sheliiaa @slexy_ on three” that was a good idea.
People repeatedly cited those tweets and others like them, saying the murder began after one girl gave the other a signal of “One, two, three.” People claimed this March 31 exchange was proof Shelia’s cousin knew about the murder. Social media chatter showed how early this speculation began. Although it may have begun earlier, on May 9, nine days after both girls were arrested, @KillerGirlProbz9 tweeted, What are u guys gonna do, take to into the woods stab me on the count of 3?
Similar speculation appeared repeatedly on Topix and Websleuths. PaulfromChas posted, Looks like the “we went on the count of three” tweet was what it was rumored to be, and Hillbilly_Chick responded, Also, to me, that tweet says . . . others knew.
Throughout this case, people laid blame first on one and then another family member or friend, saying they knew about the murder. Sometimes people pointed at those close to Shelia and Rachel and said they helped cover up the crime. Many, many teens were wrongly accused as murderers or accessories to Skylar’s murder. But the authorities made no other arrests. Nor were they likely to—not when the real killers had confessed. Not when the evidence that Shelia and Rachel had acted alone was so strong.
Based on the tweets themselves, it looked as if people took Shelia and Lexy’s words out of context. At one time, there was no valid reason to believe those tweets had anything to do with the murder. There was every reason to believe the cousins were discussing something the two of them did—not even remotely connected to Skylar’s death.
However, it was also now likely Shelia was using something she knew she and Rachel had done as a way to mock her audience—whom she was trying to portray as having wrongly persecuted her. On February 4, 2013, she tweeted, the littlest things can be blown out of proportion to something that is completely untrue. don’t talk if you don’t know what really happened.
In her press conference after the hearing, Ashdown revealed the two teens really did count to three before they began stabbing Skylar.
Whenever three people are as close as Shelia, Skylar, and Rachel were, the relationship’s dynamics can become extreme. Former FBI profiler Ken Lanning stated that alliances are always in flux, and at any given moment, two would be “in” and one would be “out.” Various friends of all three girls said this was constantly the case. A look at the trio’s Twitter traffic during freshman and sophomore years verified this.
Lanning was so familiar with teen dynamics that he actually wrote the training manuals for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Lanning said teen social alliances could be incredibly volatile and intense, and eventually “two girls together wind up doing something that possibly no one of them would have done by themselves.”
At some point, the theory went, the trio broke down. It turned into two against one. The shifting alliance solidified, leaving Skylar the odd girl out—permanently. People were waiting for the trial to reveal what caused that final break, what the real motive was in Skylar Neese’s murder.
Skylar’s tweet on December 13, 2011, six months before her murder, provided a glimpse of that breakdown: #whyareyousofuckingstupid #twofacedbitches #nevergettingoverit.
Her tweet the evening of July 4, 2012, a day and a half before she climbed out her window for the last time, also showed signs that Skylar was angry at her two best friends and frustrated over being left out: sick of being at fucking home. thanks “friends”, love hanging out with you all too.
The permanent two-against-one status leading to Skylar’s death took shape as much as a year before her murder. Police learned this when Chris Boggs came forward after Rachel’s confession. Boggs, a UHS student, posted on Facebook, I knew those dumb bitches killed her!
Mary, who saw Chris’ post, sent him a private message. He replied, saying he and other students had heard both her and Shelia ask during class how to get rid of a body. Chris told Mary it happened in Dan Demchak’s sophomore biology class.
Mary alerted Gaskins, who reached out to Chris. That led police to other UHS students—who agreed with Boggs’ assessment. Students also claimed they overheard Shelia and Rachel making plans to kill Skylar. Some said they tried to warn their classmate, but when Skylar inquired about the warnings, Shelia and Rachel blew them off.
Skylar’s outsider status only laid the basis for her murder. Investigators look for a “precipitating event” that triggers a violent crime, something that turns a simmering situation to a full boil. In Skylar’s case, three such events have come to light thus far. All three involved her and Shelia. First, the two girls argued and came to blows inside a movie theater in March 2012. Second, there was a known tiff that took place during their trip to the beach in June 2012.
The event that triggered the trio’s problems came long before, on a hot August night in 2011, when Skylar witnessed Shelia and Rachel having sex.
The disturbing video that captured the three girls playing a game about death six months before Skylar’s murder shows “[c]learly there is some awareness of pain and suffering and different ways of dying,” Lanning said.
Then, when Shelia and Rachel did kill Skylar, it was in “a pretty gruesome, horrible way, with a lot of personal attack against her and what they felt that she represented.”
The long-time criminal analyst said that to “brutalize this person, to almost torture them, and then just leave them there . . . shows a certain amount of rage targeted at her and what she represents.”
Skylar’s death was gruesome. Investigators said her murder involved what police and prosecutors call “overkill.” The act itself was extreme, involving anywhere from thirty to fifty separate stab wounds. Skylar’s murder was personal: the victim’s killers knew Skylar well and harbored deep personal feelings toward her.
Overkill can also indicate a murder driven by hatred, rage, fear, jealousy, loathing, disgust, or some combination of intense emotions—such as those that might have been fueled by a close, three-way friendship gone horribly wrong. Drugs or alcohol could have exacerbated those feelings, although no evidence of that emerged.
That many stab wounds could also indicate the two killers freaked out. “Somebody that young, they’re going to freak out,” Trooper Berry said. “They keep doing it and doing it, not knowing the whole time that the victim is dead. That’s a typical reaction. I’ve seen it in other crimes.”
Even if the murder was carefully planned, the intense emotion indicated the crime was not carried out simply to further an agenda (e.g., “Skylar was brilliant so she had to die”) or to gain some advantage (“With Skylar dead, I can have her iPod”).
Extreme violence, according to Lanning, could also indicate the killers didn’t just want to do away with the victim—they wanted to obliterate Skylar. Possibly, Skylar reminded both killers of something about themselves they didn’t like. It is entirely likely this was the case with both girls, albeit in different ways. For instance, it is no secret that Rachel felt intense anger toward her mother. Skylar, in many ways the responsible overachiever who called her friends on the carpet when they misbehaved, could have reminded Rachel of a mother figure.
Shelia, however, is another matter. Skylar could have reminded Shelia of what she lost, or willingly gave up, when she entered her boy-crazy stage. No doubt Shelia, whom Skylar believed had lost all self-respect, knew Skylar no longer respected or looked up to her, like she once did. Skylar’s own words seem to confirm this, when she wrote about Shelia in her February 2, 2012, English journal: “She transformed from an independent, free spirit into a needy doormat . . .”
It wasn’t “so much that they hated Skylar but that they hated what she represented,” Lanning said. If Skylar served as a constant reminder of a past they wanted to forget—or a future they couldn’t contemplate—then Shelia and Rachel might have believed killing Skylar would alleviate those negative feelings.
Lanning believes another factor to incite Shelia and Rachel’s anger would have been the relationship Skylar had with her parents. She wasn’t rich or spoiled, but “clearly her mother and father were two individuals who loved her and were devoted to her. Maybe that’s what they resented about her. She was really this good person who reminded them of what they were not, and that’s what made them angry.”
So when Shania gave Shelia the photo collage as a Christmas gift and later discovered Shelia had removed all images of Skylar, it’s possible Shania witnessed Shelia’s attempt to block out any memory of Skylar, so she wouldn’t have negative feelings whenever she saw Skylar’s face staring back at her.