Pretty Little Killers (19 page)

At first, Shelia was arguably the most persistent searcher of all. She stopped by daily, usually with Tara. Her questions were always the same: “Did the police tell you anything new? What have they found out? What are they telling you?” To Mary and Dave, she seemed like a concerned ally, by turns energetic and distraught. Naturally, they shared everything they learned.

In retrospect, Mary and Dave remembered Rachel never offered to help. Mary wondered about her absence and asked Shelia about it. Shelia said Rachel had been away at camp since the previous
Saturday morning, the day after Skylar vanished. A couple of weeks later, Mary realized she still hadn't seen Rachel, but with hundreds of thoughts preoccupying her, she was too distracted to dwell on it. Still, it felt strange they had heard nothing from Skylar's other best friend.

On July 9, the first Monday after Skylar disappeared, when Shelia and Tara helped the Neeses search, mother and daughter both knew the police investigation was well underway. They were also aware the FBI was involved. Officer Colebank had already been to Shelia's house earlier that day with Special Agent Morgan Spurlock. During the visit Colebank noticed something strange.

“I will never forget this,” Colebank said, recalling her first encounter with the animated, watchful teenager. Everyone—Shelia, Tara, Shelia's stepdad Jim Clendenen, Shania, and Crissy Swanson, a distant cousin—was gathered at Shelia's house, “in the garage just hanging out, sitting on chairs, just chillin'. I'm, like, okay. . . . ‘Your supposed best friend is missing. Why are you sitting here having a good old time?'”

In actuality, the family had gathered at the Clendenen home to watch the first televised newscast about Skylar's disappearance. The atmosphere still seemed less somber than Colebank thought it should be. Shelia told Colebank she just hoped Skylar would come home.

Colebank decided to tackle the social media first. “I have some questions about Skylar's Twitter. Do you know what Skylar meant when she tweeted ‘you doing shit like that is why I will NEVER completely trust you'?”

“No,” Shelia said.

“Do you know who she was tweeting?”

“No, not really.”

“What about her last tweet, ‘All I do is hope'?”

Shelia just stared at Colebank. “Probably some boy.”

“Any boy in particular?”

“Not that I can think of. She and Eric Finch were close, and she had this other friend, Floyd Pancoast. Then there was Dylan Conaway. You might ask him.”

Colebank scribbled in her notebook. “Have you tried calling Skylar?”

“It just makes me so sad to hear her voicemail, to hear her voice,” Shelia said, looking like she might cry any second. “I can't call her number.”

Colebank checked out Shelia's bedroom. It was pretty typical, except most teenager's bedrooms didn't have a cardboard toilet paper roll sitting on the desk, with some dryer sheets right beside it. Colebank recognized the homemade tool for what it was: a bounce blower. Some young people thought exhaling pot smoke through the dryer sheet kept the scent down. It didn't, really. She had suspected Shelia's parents were pretty permissive with Shelia, but this was proof.

Next Colebank asked to see Shelia's car. In fact, she wanted to see Shania and Crissy's vehicles, too. Neither one of theirs resembled the one in the grainy video, but as Colebank walked around the silver Toyota Camry she couldn't help thinking:
This could be it. It really looks like that type of car
.

Colebank glanced at Shelia periodically as she circled the little car, but the teen “didn't even bat an eyelash,” the officer later said.

She also heard Shelia's firsthand account about her and Rachel dropping Skylar off. Colebank didn't buy it. Why drop Skylar off almost four blocks away for fear of waking Mary and Dave when they had picked her up nearby the apartment complex earlier that night? When she asked Shelia, the teen said Skylar had been mad and insisted on being let out there.

Something sounded wrong to Colebank's trained ear, so she had Shelia go over the entire evening again. This is what Shelia told her: She and Rachel parked on Crawford Avenue; Skylar came out her
window, ran up the slight incline to where they were parked, and got in; and they turned onto Fairfield Street, where they pretty much stayed, cruising and smoking weed on the side streets of Star City. She and Rachel were both dressed in shorts and sweatshirts, and the three girls talked about Rachel's boyfriend, Skylar's money problems, and how her shift at Wendy's that day had been boring. Skylar wasn't on her phone much, but she seemed upset and began acting weird, which is when she insisted they drop her off away from her home. When Shelia asked why, Skylar refused to say. According to Shelia's second written statement, they were with her “for at the most thirty minutes.”

Colebank thought that sounded plausible, so she decided to let it rest. Instead, she tried another line of questioning. “Why haven't you done more online to try to locate her?”

“I've been too upset.”

“That's bullshit, and I don't believe it for a second. If that was my friend, I'd be blowing up their Facebook page. I'd be blowing their Twitter account up if I didn't know where they were. You know where she's at. So tell me.”

“I told you, we dropped her off,” Shelia said.

The story didn't make any sense to Colebank, and she immediately suspected Shelia was lying. She just wasn't sure why.

The key takeaway from the visit was Shelia's attitude. “I did not like Shelia from the get-go,” Colebank said. “Her demeanor was wrong. Arrogant. Narcissistic. But I had nothing, no actual evidence for me to go on. It was just a gut feeling.” The young officer also sensed Shelia was a very capable manipulator.

Colebank was sure of it when Shelia started crying and mumbled something about missing her best friend—and Tara shut the interview down.

When Colebank returned to the station she watched the video again, playing it back and forth. She realized there were a few dead spots in the surveillance coverage—which is why she couldn't see Skylar
leave her bedroom window. Nor did the video show any traffic from Crawford Avenue.

Colebank did, however, see headlights from nearby cars. That fit with Shelia's statements to police, so Colebank reasoned the teen's story was plausible. Which meant the car captured by the video couldn't be Shelia's. It had to be someone else's.

The dead spots would also explain why the video didn't show Skylar going back inside—but perhaps she had crouched down beside her apartment building, hiding and waiting, and then gotten into the second car after it arrived.

Still, Colebank's gut told her it wasn't. She didn't know what it
was
, though.

A few hours later Colebank was still pondering the question of the unknown car when two retweets went out from Shelia's phone. A UHS girl had tweeted a pic of Skylar's MISSING poster, and Shelia sent it out for all her network to see. Another student had tweeted the same MISSING flyer and the message,
Hey guys this girl goes to UHS please retweet
. Shelia did.

fourteen

A Wild Child Runaway

On July 9, WBOY
,
one of three area TV stations, told viewers a local girl was missing. That same day, WAJR, a radio station with a popular call-in show, tweeted
Police looking for a missing Star City teen
.

One day later,
The Dominion Post
ran its own story. “Police, Family Seek Missing 16-year-old,” read the headline in the July 10 edition. The story described the teenager and the clothing she was last seen wearing. It also quoted Dave, who said Skylar's cell phone was “shut off or out of power.”

The article ended on a poignant note, relaying the distraught father's message for his missing daughter:
Just come home, baby
.

As the media geared up to cover the story, the Star City Police Department received good news: Skylar had been spotted in Carolina Beach, North Carolina. She was reportedly seen hanging around a boardwalk with an unidentified red-haired girl. A local woman with West Virginia connections had learned about Skylar on Facebook and called in the tip.

Colebank was skeptical. She had read Skylar's Twitter feed, and those of Shelia and Rachel. She saw the constant online arguing between them. But it was the June 9 tweets that really captured the young officer's attention. Skylar had been angry at someone but she
wasn't willing to name them publicly, so she subtweeted,
youre just as bad as the bitches you complain about
,
and a liar
, and
well now im too fucking annoyed to sleep
.

As she read them again, looking for any clue, Colebank realized Skylar's tweets were growing angrier by the second:
fuucckk yoouu
.., then
and no I do not type like that
, which made it sound like perhaps Skylar was texting someone—or receiving texts at the same time she was tweeting. If so, it was a really good way to hide a private conversation, while blaring your anger about that person through tweets. Then there was Skylar's final tweet from the argument—and it sounded like she got the last word:
just know I know
.

Colebank leaned forward in her chair, eagerly staring at Skylar's Twitter feed. “Know what, Skylar? What did you know?” she mused, talking to the computer.