Pretty Little Killers (27 page)

But what if that truth—whatever
it
was—made Skylar look bad?

Ken Lanning says truth is complex. “Society wants simple answers to problems. They don't want complicated” ones that involve looking at multiple layers that lead to a murder like this one.

The long-time criminal profiler is now retired but he taught in the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) at Quantico for more than two decades. Lanning has investigated many high-profile murder cases and says when it comes to crimes like this one, people often want a simplistic answer. They want it to be black and white, or good versus evil. Unfortunately, it's rarely that easy.

For instance, Skylar could be “the representation of all the things that [a killer] sees is wrong with her life,” Lanning said. Or it could
be Skylar unknowingly acted in a way that made Shelia and Rachel feel the need to kill her.

As word of Skylar's disappearance spread, the world outside the high school walls began to feel the effects of her loss. Area parents couldn't comprehend the torment the Neeses must have been enduring. It was all too easy to imagine the horror of losing one's own child someday. But how terrible it would be if a daughter or son actually disappeared.

Communities grieve in their own ways. The grief must find a place to go, a way to find expression. A number of charity events were held around the greater Morgantown area the first few months after Skylar vanished. The Walmart in University Town Centre, where Dave worked, staged a candlelight vigil in August. T-shirts with Skylar's name and picture were sold at the event and $3,100 was raised for a “reward fund” established in Skylar's name. People donated because they wanted to help and needed to do something—anything.

A few weeks later the nearby town of Mannington hosted “Sky Ride,” a community gathering held in Skylar's honor. Mary had grown up in Mannington, an old coal-mining town, along with her fourteen siblings. Practically the entire town turned out in a show of support. People jumped onto their ATVs and rode for hours around the local hills. Everyone brought a covered dish and after a long day in the sun, they broke bread together. Even more money was raised for the reward fund through an auction and a drawing. “Bring Skylar home!” was the day's theme, and against all logic some attendees hoped the missing teen might somehow show up. The weight of a missing child was a heavy burden for the small community.

According to WBOY TV, one woman in attendance, a friend of the Neeses, wistfully recalled, “I remember Skylar from when she was a little girl, four or five years old, and she was always running around with curls bouncing. She was the cutest little thing. When I heard that it was her who was missing, it just broke my heart.”

Fortunately, the hometown show of support gave Mary and Dave a respite of sorts. They smiled and laughed with friends and family and actually felt lighter for a few hours. Even so, Skylar was never far from their minds. As dusk drew near and people began heading home, Mary and Dave returned to reality with heavy, aching hearts.

The truth is, just as Daniel suspected, that friction had begun to develop among Skylar, Shelia, and Rachel during their sophomore year. For a brief period, Skylar and Rachel were close, then they seemed to drift apart. It was her fading friendship with Shelia that Skylar bemoaned the most. Skylar even wrote about this in an essay for English class. There, she talked about how much Shelia changed after getting involved with a boy. Skylar wrote that the widening gulf between herself and her friend made her very sad.

On February 2, 2012, Skylar reflected on how this happened:

“I used to be extremely close with a girl who I loved dearly. She had such a fun personality and didn't have a care in the world about what people thought of her. That all changed dramaticilly
[sic]
when she got a new boyfriend. She transformed from an independent, free spirit into a needy doormat. Her boyfriend became all she cared about and began losing self-respect. I hated watching my dear friend change before my eyes. Sadly we're no longer close, but even if we were she's not be
[sic]
person I became friends with.”

In truth, Skylar and Rachel were never as close as Shelia was with either girl. Skylar and Shelia's bond went back almost a decade, but in some ways Skylar was losing her rank. She was becoming the third member—the odd girl out—of the trio. This may have been because Skylar was maturing more slowly than Shelia and Rachel—not mentally or emotionally, but physically. In some ways, Skylar was still a girl, but Shelia and Rachel—both sexually active—were young women. Skylar was turning into the “little sister” of the trio.

“Skylar and Shelia were real close,” Amorette said. “And then Rachel came along. That happened with me and my best friend. We
started letting another girl hang out with us, and then before I knew it, she kinda took my place.”

Like so many of Skylar's close friends, Amorette didn't believe the rumors going around that first week of school.

“If she ran away, she would
definitely
tell me,” Amorette asserted. “I even told her [on Facebook and in texts] if you went to a party and messed up, it's going to be okay. We'll help you figure it out. I never heard back, and I knew something must be wrong.”

twenty-four

Behind the Scenes

If Morgantown residents thought
they had heard every conceivable tale surrounding Skylar's disappearance, they were wrong. A brand new cycle started when school resumed in August 2012.

The story of what happened to Skylar wasn't just hallway fodder at the two most competitive high schools in town, UHS and Morgantown High School. It was also a topic of water fountain discussion at Clay-Battelle High School, where the Cee Bees were buzzing like crazy about Skylar. Those teens wondered whether she could be hiding out in their end of the county.

All through the first full week of class, rumors flew at warp speed through the county's three high schools through talk, texts, and tweets. The students had even begun to talk about other scenarios. Someone started a rumor Skylar had been invited by a boy to a big drug party in Blacksville, where something bad had happened. A boy had called her the night she snuck out to tell her about the party, and Shelia and Rachel had driven her there. Some variations of the story had the two teens abandoning Skylar after she got drunk. Other versions placed them at the party when Skylar overdosed and either left with a boy or was raped and murdered. Some teens said Skylar had hooked up with one boy in particular: Dylan Conaway.

Another theory started to make the rounds but only a few teens discussed it. Dylan's older brother Darek was the young man Gaskins and Berry had questioned after the Blacksville bank robbery. Theirs was the house that had been raided by a SWAT team. Police were rumored to be looking at him for the bank robberies in the region. Darek had also been indicted on five counts of third-degree sexual assault in September. That made law enforcement more suspicious of him.
²³

Not only had Darek been at parties with Dylan and his friends, but at times Darek had even given Shelia, Shania, and Skylar a ride there. Some students wondered if her close association meant Skylar had discovered a solid connection between Darek and the bank robberies. Maybe Darek and Dylan had killed the teen to keep her quiet. The Conaway boys were under an umbrella of suspicion—and they knew it.

While armchair psychologists chatted online about their theories, Colebank and Spurlock were working day and night to discover what really happened to Skylar. In fact, on August 24, the same day the Neeses were preparing to come to the Star City Police Department, Colebank was applying for search warrants for Shelia's and Rachel's phone records. Filling out the initial paperwork didn't take long and neither did running down to the magistrate's court to get the warrants, but she might wait a week or two for a response from the phone company. However, it needed to be done. Those girls were hiding something.

As far as the Neeses knew, however, the police were doing nothing—and they certainly weren't looking for their missing daughter. Consequently, eight days after Mary missed work in case Skylar came home, she exploded.

Dave had never seen Mary as angry as she was on August 24—with good reason, he thought. Skylar's parents were convinced from the beginning that Chief Vic Propst considered Skylar a runaway. That was her classification in the AMBER Alert system, after all.

In actuality, Propst says he never viewed Skylar as a runaway and he had personally called WVSP headquarters to ask for an AMBER alert to be issued.

On July 8, the veteran law enforcement officer had given Officer Colebank his blessing to pursue all leads and follow any hunches she had with regard to Skylar Neese's disappearance. After over six weeks of hearing nothing, Mary and Dave were so frustrated they went to see him. All the grieving parents had to go on were terrifying rumors. Colebank had assured them all leads were being explored, but she could offer them little in the way of substance. The case was incredibly challenging; to date, no solid information had been uncovered. The Star City Police Department—primarily Colebank, but other officers as well—had logged several hundred hours on the case in the previous six weeks. Still, for all their efforts, the cops had learned little.