Pretty Little Killers (9 page)

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.”

four

Big Girls Do Cry

According to one investigator
who read Skylar's diary, she said very little about Shelia and Rachel having sex and seemed more upset about the fight she and Shelia had afterward. Skylar claimed she was mad at Shelia because whenever another person was around, Shelia favored that person.

As their sophomore year approached, a stronger note of the discord simmering beneath the unstable three-way relationship crept into Skylar's furious tweets:
yet ANOTHER reason to fucking hate you. youre realllly starting to push it. #idareyou to give me one more
.

The identity of the person (or people) Skylar kept subtweeting
¹³
is uncertain, but Shelia and Rachel are the most likely candidates. By then, they were the two friends Skylar was most concerned with.

However, she wasn't ready to let go of the relationship and seemed torn by her feelings for both girls. This was apparent by the end of August, when Skylar was waxing nostalgic, writing about the good times they had together sneaking out:
missinn the old daysss with @_sheliiaa @rachel_shoaf96 #fuckgettingcaught :(((
.

Even so, Skylar was becoming angrier and her outbursts more vocal. She seemed to blame the girls for problems that might have impacted her:
people who start shit for no reason at all #pathetic
and
hmmm even bigger whore than i thought? #notsurprising
.

Of course by then Skylar knew Shelia's affection for Rachel was more than platonic. She must have sensed she was being replaced by this newcomer, this upstart, this
intruder
in a relationship going back to the second grade.

She took to Twitter on August 21, lamenting,
its almost ridiculous how i somehow find out everything
.

By September Skylar tweeted what sounded like it could have been a threat, but was probably more her blowing off steam—however, it is possible the other two girls began to worry she
did
intend to expose their relationship.

Whatever was going on behind the scenes, Skylar was extremely upset, as shown by this August 23 tweet:
i forreal need to quit wishing death on people. #thatsterrible #karmasabitch
.

Either Shelia or Rachel—or both—were wearing on Skylar's nerves when she tweeted on September 5:
she found out shes got no soul but it reallly doesnt bother her <3
.

Then came the tweet many people say indicated Skylar was threating to “out” her two friends. On September 6 she wrote:
id tell the whole school all the shit i have on everyone, which is a lottttt #IfICouldGetAwayWithIt
.

It hardly seems a coincidence that one month later, Rachel and Shelia began to joke about killing Skylar.

People on the outside looking in might wonder why the three girls didn't just go their separate ways. It's not an easy question to answer,
but part of the explanation could be the fact that Shelia Eddy had something Rachel and Skylar did not: a car.

Shelia's car played a crucial role in the dynamics of the girls' relationship the entire time they were a trio. Shortly after they became sophomores, Shelia turned sixteen and received the gift from her mother and stepfather. Some teens have speculated she used the vehicle to control Rachel and Skylar.

Having transportation meant freedom from parental oversight. Rachel didn't have a car because she didn't get her learner's permit until late, and Patricia's friend Liz said Rachel's dad eventually planned to buy her a used car. However, once Rachel began acting out, her parents refused to let her have a vehicle.