16-year-old Skylar Neese peered outside excitedly from her bedroom window at her family’s apartment in Star City, West Virginia. It was midnight on a Friday in July 2012, and she could not hear any sound from anywhere else in the house.
Skylar slowly pushed her window open and began to scramble through it. She was not anxious, as she had previously snuck out for night car rides with her friends before.
Rachel Shoaf and Sheila Eddy, who were both also 16, were waiting in a car some distance ahead.
The apartment building’s surveillance apparatus would later show Skylar creeping her way to a nearby vehicle.
She had no way of knowing the adventure her two friends had invited her to would end with her murder in Pennsylvania.
Skylar Neese’s Background
Skylar Annette Neese was born on 10th February, 1996, and would remain the only child of Dave and Mary Neese. Her parents were based in West Virginia’s Monongalia County.
She grew up to be a gentle, fun-loving child who, according to Dave and Mary, once cried after accidentally killing some ladybugs.
When she was eight, Skylar met Sheila, who was a few months older than her, at a children’s program. At the time, Rachel was completing her primary education at a private school.
Skylar and Sheila began attending Monongalia County’s University High School a year before Rachel joined the institution for her secondary education. Once they were all enrolled in the same school, the three girls grew very close.
Mary later testified that Skylar often treated Sheila and Rachel like her siblings. The three habitually arranged sleepovers and went on vacations together. Rachel, who was quieter in character than Skylar and Sheila, was raised in a practising Catholic family.
The Breakdown of Teenage Friendship
Soon after Rachel enrolled at the University High School, Skyler began to sense that she was no longer as close to Sheila or Rachel as before. She also noticed that their friendship was thriving.
Skylar did not stop trying to reach out but also made pointed comments on ‘Twitter’ about their increasingly distant attitude.
One night, the three adolescents arranged for a sleepover. That night, Skylar watched in shock as Rachel and Sheila engaged in a sex act. Skylar wanted to post a cryptic message about the incident on her social media wall the next day.
She changed her mind and deleted the tweet some minutes after posting it. She did not know Rachel and Sheila had both read her tweet before she removed it.
Sheila would later admit that she had read Skylar’s odd tweet about the incident before it was hastily removed. It was then that she started to perceive Skylar as being problematic.
Sheila noted in her diary that she and Rachel began to repeatedly disagree with Skylar after the sleepover. Sheila even relayed this development to her other friends at school, asserting Rachel was also getting ‘bored’ of being around Skylar.
These classmates would later inform police officers that this could have happened around the time Sheila and Rachel started planning to kill Skylar.
Right before her disappearance, on 6th July in 2012, Skylar mockingly tweeted, “It really does not take much to piss me off. Thanks, ‘friends’, love hanging out with you all too.”
Shortly after this, Skylar received an unexpected phone call from Sheila and Rachel. The two apologised for the distress their behaviour had caused. They invited Skylar to join them for an outing just as they often did before the sleepover.
Skylar was initially sceptical, but she missed their companionship and accepted the offer.
Skylar Neese‘s Disappearance
Skylar did not report for her shift at Wendy’s after classes on July 6. Neither did she return home that night.
When he received a call from Wendy’s inquiring about Skylar’s absence from work, Dave immediately presumed that she had decided to take the day off and sleep in. He went to his daughter’s room.
Her window was open, as she had left it. According to Dave, it was almost as though Skylar had momentarily left the room to retrieve something that had fallen outside.
She probably expected to return to the room after a few minutes. Her contact lenses, toothbrush, phone charger, and other personal effects were still in the room, though.
This proved Skylar had not intended to be gone for long. It is then that Dave phoned the police.
Dave and Mary were also acquainted with Sheila’s mother, Tara Clendenen, and Rachel’s parents, Rusty and Patricia. Dave and Mary phoned both of their daughter’s friends’ parents and spoke with Sheila and Rachel.
Both girls asserted that they had not seen or interacted with Skylar on July 5. Rachel then changed her story and told Mary that the three of them had actually gone out for the night on Thursday.
Based on Rachel’s account, she and Sheila drove to an area near the apartment building where they picked up Skylar. The three went exploring local neighbourhoods before returning to a place that was two blocks away from Dave and Mary’s residence.
Rachel explained that they did this to prevent the building’s security cameras from spotting their vehicle. They also did not want Skylar’s parents to be woken up by the sound of their car.
When Dave shared this with the police, they wondered if Skylar might have gone to stay with other friends or relatives and was deliberately running away. They did not issue an Amber alert for up to 48 hours after Skylar’s disappearance.
After speaking with Mary on the phone, Rachel attended a Catholic summer camp the next day.
The Star City police department appointed Officer Jessica Colebank to oversee the case. She visited Dave and Mary in their apartment and reviewed the building’s CCTV footage.
It showed Skylar climbing out of her window and getting into a nearby car. It did not show her climbing back into her room again.
Neither did it show a car stopping some distance from Dave and Mary’s apartment to drop off Skylar.
Days after Skylar was reported missing, her classmates and friends at school printed flyers and posters with her image.
Sheila apparently vowed to help find Skylar. She spent July 7 with search parties. Officer Colebank noted that Rachel seemed unnecessarily terrified of something while Sheila appeared reserved when closely questioned.
Inconsistencies in Rachel and Sheila’s Testimonies and Behaviour
Rachel’s relatives would reveal to the authorities that she grew emotionally aggressive and started to act out after Skylar’s disappearance. During such episodes, Sheila was the only one who could calm Rachel down.
The Star City police department requested assistance from the FBI, and Special Agent Morgan Spurlock began assisting with the case. This brought increased press coverage and reports of possible sightings of Skylar.
None of the tips turned anything up. After two weeks away from the Catholic summer camp, Rachel was summoned by the police.
She confirmed Sheila’s testimony that both of them had picked Skylar, and then the three of them drove through local neighbourhoods smoking marijuana before returning Skylar to a spot that was some distance from her parents’ apartment.
The Star City detectives compelled each of the girls to show them, separately, which routes they had taken while driving through local neighbourhoods on that fateful night.
There were obvious inconsistencies in their accounts: one asserted they spun right upon reaching a specific intersection, while the other insisted they went left.
Sheila and Rachel’s written testimonies also seemed rehearsed. While Rachel became more withdrawn, Sheila kept tweeting in support of search parties and Skylar’s parents.
She often tweeted messages like, “…all I want is for my best friend to come home… I miss and love you…”
Touched by Sheila’s seeming kindness and constantly supportive posts, Dave tweeted back, “Keep strong!” The investigators’ interest was drawn to Sheila and Rachel’s activeness on social media.
The detectives watched Sheila continue tweeting to comfort Dave and Mary for months until November.
Unaware that Star City detectives and FBI agents were monitoring her account, Sheila tweeted, “…no one on this earth can handle Rachel and me…if you think you can, you are wrong.”
That immediately drew the investigators’ interest. They accessed Skylar, Rachel, and Sheila’s Twitter accounts and reviewed all existing tweets. They came across aggressive tweets Skylar had posted just weeks before she disappeared.
In one tweet, Skylar stated, “…you doing sh-t like this makes me never want to trust you…” Detectives asked Sheila who and what Skylar might have been referring to in this case.
Sheila insisted that she did not know. When detectives visited University High School and posed the same question to Skylar’s classmates and friends, they learned that there had been a lot of tension between the three girls before Skylar disappeared.
Their classmates asserted that Rachel and Sheila suddenly grew extremely close during the sophomore year and began leaving Skylar out of activities they had previously done together.
Throughout the investigations, detectives noted that Skylar’s cell phone had not been used since she was reported missing. Her credit card had also remained unused after the night of July 5, 2012.
Sheila and Rachel had initially told detectives that they went straight to their homes after dropping Skylar some distance from her parents’ home before 2 am on the early morning of July 6.
When the authorities obtained Rachel and Sheila’s phone records, the data showed that both girls’ phones were in West Virginia’s Blacksville region at 4am that same morning.
The detectives then visited businesses in that region, such as the Sheetz gas station, to review their camera footage.
These showed that around midnight, a vehicle resembling Sheila’s personal car passed by, heading towards Blacksville. This proved that the same vehicle had been to Skylar’s home some minutes before.
Both Star City detectives and involved FBI agents deduced that Sheila and Rachel were holding back vital information linked to Skylar’s disappearance. They confiscated Rachel’s diary and electronic devices for further examination.
In November 2012, Detectives then opted to administer polygraph tests to Rachel and Sheila to check their statements’ integrity. The procedure, which was overseen by Rob Ambrosini, an FBI agent.
It showed that both Sheila and Rachel were still hiding something. After the polygraph test, the girls changed their testimony for the first time.
They now said that after getting Skylar at midnight, they disagreed about meeting some men, and Skylar decided to get out of the vehicle and walk back home.
Sheila and Rachel said that they tried to persuade Skylar to get back inside. Police immediately classified them as suspects and focused more on Rachel because she was the likely one to crack.
Rachel Confesses to Murder
In early 2013, Rachel consented to speak plainly with the detectives. Just days before, she had experienced a nervous breakdown, and her mother called for an ambulance.
Rachel was confined in a psychiatric establishment for five days. On January 13, Rachel told detectives that she was there when Skylar died.
Rachel said that she and Sheila had first purchased plastic bags and knives, and concealed them alongside towels, a shovel, clean clothes, bleach, cleaning rags and wet wipes in Sheila’s car’s trunk.
They then taped the knives they had purchased to their torsos. Once Skylar was in the car, the three adolescents proceeded to an area in Brave, Pennsylvania, where they had been to before.
Skylar did not sense any danger, presuming that they would all just smoke some Marijuana and then return home. Upon reaching Brave, Pennsylvania, they all exited the vehicle and started to chat casually.
When they wanted to start smoking, Rachel and Sheila pretended to be frustrated because they had left their lighter inside the vehicle. Skylar immediately offered to retrieve it and turned towards the car.
This was the chance that Rachel and Sheila had been waiting for. They had agreed to count to three and then remove the knives hidden in their torsos and start stabbing Skylar.
They stabbed her more than 50 times in the back and neck. At some point in the midst of the attack, Skylar grabbed Rachel’s knife and pierced her ankle.
Rachel told the stunned detectives that after Skylar snatched her knife and pierced her ankle with it, she stopped attacking Skylar.
Skylar took this chance to try and escape, but Rachel said Sheila chased her down, tackled her, and started swinging the knife with renewed fury.
Rachel said that Sheila only ceased her attack when Skylar stopped making sounds. The two girls then sought to bury Skylar but found the ground too stony to dig.
They yanked the corpse 15 feet away from the path where they had murdered her and obscured it with discarded rubbish, dead leaves, rocks and tree branches.
The two then removed their bloodied clothes and donned the clean ones they had carried in the car trunk. Rachel and Sheila also used the wet wipes they had brought to swab their hands before leaving the scene.
After recounting this horrifying tale, Rachel told detectives she would show them where Skylar was. She led them to Wayne Township in Pennsylvania’s Greene County and onto a rural path where the corpse was already decomposed.
Trial and Sentencing
The autopsy findings confirmed Rachel’s statement that Skylar was subjected to multiple stabbings. Sheila was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Rachel was also charged with second-degree murder, to which she pled guilty.
In May 2013, Sheila was handed a life sentence. She will be eligible for parole after serving 15 years in prison. Rachel received a sentence of 30 years for the charge of second-degree murder.
Under West Virginia law, due to her cooperation, she was eligible for parole after serving 10 years in prison.
Dave and Mary Neese reacted to the unfolding events with intense grief and disgust. They felt a profound sense of betrayal, considering Sheila and Rachel had spent so much time pretending and crying on their shoulders.
Dave told the court, “My life and my wife’s life have been drastically altered. We’re no longer a family… You can look into the eyes of those who were responsible, but you can never know what they heard as they were taking her life.”
During her first appeal in 2023, Rachel finally admitted that she was in a romantic same-sex relationship with Sheila back in 2012.
She was terrified that Skylar would disclose this after watching the sex act between them during the sleepover.
Rachel’s appeals for parole in 2023, 2024, and 2026 were rejected. Both Sheila and Rachel are imprisoned at Mason County’s Lakin Correctional Centre in West Virginia.
A lawmaker based in West Virginia pioneered the bill known as ‘Skylar’s Law,’ which was signed into law in May, 2013. It compels the local authorities to make an immediate announcement when any minor is announced to be missing, even if the authorities believe the child is a runaway and does not need the Amber Alert.