The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese: The Truth Behind the Headlines Read online

  Finally, this story is about the rampant rumors of a lesbian love triangle at the heart of the case. Or whether Rachel’s stated motive for the murder—“we didn’t want to be friends with her anymore”—carries any validity at all.

  Chapter 3

  Vanished

  When Skylar Neese clocked out of Wendy’s at the Glenmark Centre on July 5, 2012, she had every intention of returning to work the next day. Her shift ended at 10:00 p.m., and the drive across Morgantown to Star City took only ten minutes. When Skylar walked through the front door, she could see Mary and Dave sitting in front of the television, watching Las Vegas endure a citywide blackout on CSI.

  After greeting her parents, Skylar headed to the kitchen for some of Mary’s homemade sweet tea. She loved the stuff, and drank it by the gallon.

  “Honey, are you hungry?” Mary asked from her recliner. The Neese apartment is open and airy, so from her vantage point, Mary could see Skylar standing in the small kitchen-dining area. Even before Skylar answered, Mary knew what her daughter’s dinner had consisted of: one of those little berry ice cream desserts that Wendy’s sold. She just loved those.

  “No, Mom, I ate at work.”

  Skylar crossed the wood-laminate floor and came into the carpeted living room. There, she perched on the arm of the recliner and put her arm around Mary. “Love you, Mommy,” Skylar said, kissing her mother on the cheek.

  Then she jumped up, leaned over the couch, and kissed Dave in the same fashion.

  “Love you, Daddy,” she said. “I’m really tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “Do you work tomorrow?” Mary asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want me to wash your uniform?”

  “Yes, it smells like French fries,” Skylar said, wrinkling her nose. She hated the smell of grease on her uniform, and she always made a beeline for the shower. Not a minute later, Skylar tossed her dirty clothes out the door for Mary to throw into the washing machine. It was the same mother-daughter routine every night after Skylar finished work.

  Mary waited for the wash cycle to end, then loaded Skylar’s uniform into the dryer. After switching it on, she said goodnight to Dave and went to bed. She didn’t know it, but Skylar’s slender arm peeking around the bathroom door as she tossed out her uniform was the last glimpse Mary Neese would ever have of her daughter.

  Dave was more fortunate: while he was dozing on the couch, he got one last “Love you, Daddy,” when Skylar reappeared from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. She got a drink from the kitchen, went into her bedroom, and locked her door like every other American teenager who has a secret.

  ***

  Dave Neese received no response when he knocked on his daughter’s bedroom door the next day. “Hey, honey, get up. I want you to take me back to work so you can have my car.”

  Nothing.

  He knocked again. “Sky?”

  Again, no answer. Usually, she was up—bam—as soon as she heard the car was available. Dave knew he shouldn’t be letting Skylar drive by herself; with just a learner’s permit, the teen was supposed to have a licensed adult in the car. However, he also knew she’d drive just enough to take him to work and then go to her own job. She’d come straight home after her shift. That was their agreement. The Neeses saved on gas that way, and Dave always checked the odometer to make sure she was sticking to the arrangement.

  After getting no reply, Dave went to the hall closet and grabbed a coat hanger—the door locks in the apartment easily popped open. But when he peered inside Skylar’s bedroom, she wasn’t there. Her unmade bed looked like it had been slept in, so Dave first assumed she must have gone shopping with a friend. Then he remembered her door had been locked from the inside. He called his wife at work.

  “Mary, did Skylar tell you where she was going?” Dave’s voice rose as he spoke. He paced the small kitchen, feeling his worry build.

  “Just calm down.” Mary knew how close to the surface Dave’s emotions ran. “Don’t flip out. She probably went shopping with one of her friends or something. She never misses work.”

  “That’s what I thought, but her door was locked.”

  “She probably just accidentally hit the button closing the door in a hurry. You know how she does.”

  “Okay, maybe. But I’m going to look for her.”

  Dave rushed back to Walmart, a few minutes away, and told a supervisor he had to take the rest of the day off. “Listen,” he said, “I can’t find Skylar. I don’t know where she’s at, but I gotta find my kid.”

  He decided to check at home once more to see if she’d returned while he was gone. Skylar was largely a responsible teenager, and although she might forget to let her parents know where she was going, she would usually remember at some point to check in. But she was also fearless and willful, and that concerned Dave.

  Skylar still wasn’t at the apartment when he returned. Dave walked through the kitchen and out onto the small balcony for a smoke. He wanted to think, to plan his next steps. That was when he noticed a small black bench sitting at the base of the back wall of the apartment complex, just around the corner from Skylar’s first-floor room.

  Dave flipped his cigarette into the round ceramic bowl he and Mary kept for cigarette butts and went back through the apartment, out and around to Skylar’s window. The screen was leaning against the wall, her window open a finger’s breadth. That was when he knew: Oh, my God. She snuck out.

  Chapter 4

  Joyride!

  Skylar had snuck out before. The first time Mary and Dave heard about her midnight adventures had been in the spring a year before, when the Neeses still lived in Stonepath, a development in the Cheat Lake area. Mary worked at Ruby 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 Eddy, her friend since second grade. 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 Skylar’s, into taking them. Pancoast, age 19, was a brooding young man, but Skylar liked him and they talked often. Skylar was his rock and his confessor, 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 looked pretty 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 took the three girls to the Star City police station, where he 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 had happened because both dads snuck their daughters back into their respective homes. But Skylar didn’t know that. Dave wasn’t working full-time and money was tight, so the Neeses didn’t have a home phone then. Nor did either of them have a cell—although they made sure that 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 had been nearly hysterical that night. She was sobbing and inconsolable, saying that Rachel was going to be in terrible trouble. Rachel’s mother, Patricia, was thought to be a strict disciplinarian.

  “It’s all my fault!” Skylar gulped through her tears. She had been the instig
ator 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.”

  Later that night, Mary and Dave both agreed that Skylar had punished herself enough. The next morning they told her they wouldn’t ground her or administer any other discipline. They believed she had learned her lesson.

  But on that Friday, the afternoon of July 6, when Dave came home to find Skylar gone, the Neeses discovered that Skylar hadn’t learned anything. Just the opposite. In fact, as the Neeses would find out from one friend, then another, in that first month after she disappeared, Skylar snuck out a lot that summer.

  Chapter 5

  First Kiss

  Only later did Mary realize she’d missed some clues. For instance, there were the bruises—they had appeared on Skylar’s thighs earlier that summer. When Mary had asked about them, Skylar blamed them on the heavy, ice-filled buckets she hauled at Wendy’s. The buckets had bumped against her thighs.

  “I even said, ‘Skylar, let the boys do that,’” Mary said later. “‘You shouldn’t do that. That’s what they have the boys for.’ But we fell for it. She really got them from sliding down the windowsill.”

  When she recalled this, a shadow passed over Mary’s face, no doubt brought on by thoughts of what she and Dave should have done differently. Should have seen. All the red flags they’d missed.

  Looking back, Mary couldn’t help but criticize herself for not keeping a closer eye on Skylar. She was confronting the difficult realization that almost all parents eventually face: that children who have been open and truthful in the past can, as teenagers, become deceptive and intensely wrapped up in their own worlds. They have extremely private lives and keep secrets from their parents. Skylar’s disappearance brought many of her secrets into the open.

  After Mary and Dave learned that their missing daughter had been sneaking out frequently, Floyd Pancoast, the boy Star City police had caught joyriding with Skylar, came forward. He was someone who knew some of Skylar’s secrets. “He was one of the suspects in the beginning,” Mary said. “We pretty much harassed him. Dave and I went to him in person, and he told us, ‘I loved Skylar. I miss her so bad.’”

  Mary had heard that Pancoast was big into marijuana, which is why she asked him directly, “How could you guys drive around every night, getting high, and Skylar’s getting up and going to school every day and has a 4.0 average?”

  “Mary, we didn’t get high every night,” Pancoast said. “We’d just drive around. She listened to me.”

  Through the police investigation, the Neeses learned that Skylar and Floyd were just good friends. He didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. “So I had to apologize to him,” Mary said. “He still feels terrible about losing Skylar.”

  Mary is a compassionate woman, and her expressive eyes often reflect not only her own sadness, but also the sorrow she sees in others. She and Dave must have realized they were wrong when they saw the raw emotion in Floyd Pancoast. So then, they offered him comfort, as they did repeatedly with the various teens who had been touched by Skylar’s disappearance.

  Almost immediately after people learned that Skylar was missing, the rumor mill began churning out stories. One of the most persistent involved a boy. No one seems to know who this boy was, but every variation seemed to suggest that he was instrumental in her disappearance. Pancoast was one of many such “boys” the police questioned. Were you romantically connected to Skylar? Did you do drugs with her? Did you see her the night of July 5 or the early morning hours of July 6?

  Mary insisted Skylar and Pancoast were not romantically involved, that they were just “buddies.” In truth Pancoast, who sported a buzz cut and tattoos, wasn’t Skylar’s type. Mary couldn’t say exactly what her daughter’s type was, though, because Skylar had never had a boyfriend.

  Everyone’s impression of Skylar was that she was focused on getting a good education so she could go to college. For the time being, she was not interested in romance. Occasionally, she giggled with her girlfriends over one cute guy or another. But she wasn’t serious about dating or sex the way many teens are. She didn’t have those stirrings yet. Indeed, it seems that at the time of her death, Skylar hadn’t even had her first real kiss.

  Chapter 6

  Fearless and Willful

  Money had always been an issue in the Neese household; her parents had lived from paycheck to paycheck all of Skylar’s life. That was why they didn’t take their first family vacation until the summer of 2000, when Skylar was four years old. They chose Ocean City, Maryland, six hours away, so Skylar could experience the sea and the beach for the first time.

  While Skylar later became a big fan of the ocean, she didn’t much like the beach on that first visit. The waves kept knocking her over, and she hardly considered that “fun.” But she loved the hotel’s swimming pool. One afternoon as Mary laid her towel on a chaise lounge and Dave stripped off his shirt, Skylar stared at the pool, an inflatable seahorse around her waist and floaters on each arm. She waddled awkwardly toward the edge of the pool, peering intently at the water.

  “Daddy’s not ready for you yet, honey,” Dave said. “Daddy’ll help you. You don’t know how to swim.”

  “I can so swim!” Skylar shouted. To prove it, she jumped in the water. Dave panicked and leaped in after her with Mary laughing at both of them.

  “It’s okay, Daddy!” Skylar sputtered, slapping the water with her floaters, her legs kicking. “I can swim!”

  “You can’t swim, honey!” Dave grabbed at her, but the small child kept squirming.

  “I can so!”

  And Dave had to admit that with the floaters, Skylar seemed to be swimming just fine. That was the moment when he began to think of his daughter as fearless. In new situations, she was watchful and held back—until she just plunged in. Skylar was willful: she would decide what she would or wouldn’t do, no matter what her parents or anyone else said.

  In many ways, Skylar was a mini Mary. People even used the same words to describe them, right down to their unfailing sense of humor, iron stubbornness, and occasional flares of temper. Where Dave and Skylar were best buds, Mary and Skylar were intertwined in the way that only mothers and daughters can be. Their family photos bear this out: Skylar possessed the same mischievous eyes as her mother and occasionally flashed a similar cynical smile.

  When Mary discovered she was pregnant, she was not happy. The thought of raising a child terrified her, and she believed she would be a horrible mother. But she couldn’t and wouldn’t end the pregnancy. Skylar was born, and Mary fell in love.

  But she still wasn’t sure she wanted a husband. Dave kept asking her; she kept putting him off. She hesitated when he said they should move in together. Six months after Skylar’s birth, Mary had a change of heart, and she and Skylar moved in with Dave.

  Mary became the glue that held the family together. Her humor, playfulness, and sense of justice created the bond; her will and determination made it stick.

  Chapter 7

  The Timeline

  After Dave found the vanity bench and realized Skylar had snuck out, he immediately called Shelia. If anyone knew where his daughter was, Shelia would. That girl always seemed to have a cell phone in her hand, as if it was glued there. That morning, when Dave asked Shelia if she’d seen Skylar, the teen said no. But she did admit she had talked to Skylar around midnight the night before.

  A few miles away, Mary was growing more concerned about Dave being worried, so she gathered up her purse and prepared to leave work early. The walk from Ruby Memorial Hospital to Mary’s car took longer than the short drive home. When she arrived, Dave was still on his cell. Just as she’d expected, he’d worked himself into a state.

  Dave was m
issing two key phone numbers for Skylar’s friends Hayden McClead and Shania Ammons, so he called Shelia back to ask for them. He wasn’t sure Shelia would have Hayden’s number, since Hayden thought Shelia was mean and usually steered clear of Skylar when Shelia was around.

  But he knew Shania was an old friend of Shelia’s from Blacksville. They had gone to middle school together. That’s how Shania became friends with Skylar. For social activities like making a McDonald’s run and going to concerts and movies, Skylar, Shelia, and Shania were together as often as Skylar, Shelia, and Rachel were. When it came to teen secrets, Shelia often confided in Shania—which is why Shania knew more about the Skylar-Shelia-Rachel trio than almost anyone.

  As Dave expected, Shelia said she didn’t have Hayden’s phone number. She also reminded him that Shania was away at the beach.

  Dave snapped shut the cell phone and turned to Mary. “Now what?”

  Mary shrugged. “We could give it a little time, see if someone gets back to us.”

  “Mary, she’s missing.” His tone was exasperated and pleading at the same time.

  “Okay, then call 911.” As Mary walked toward her recliner, the house landline rang. Mary answered and learned from the Wendy’s manager that Skylar hadn’t shown up for work.

  She hung up and faced Dave. “Call 911 now.”

  The house phone rang again. It was Shelia.

  “I need to tell you the whole truth,” she told Mary, “about what happened last night.”

  “What happened?” Mary’s thoughts raced to images of Skylar at a party, Skylar drunk, Skylar drugged after a boy slipped her a roofie. She even envisioned Skylar deserted in a dark corner after passing out at a party.

  “I did see Skylar. She snuck out about eleven. Rachel and I picked her up and we went joyriding for about forty-five minutes. She made me drop her off at the end of the road so we wouldn’t wake you.”