Murder of Skylar Neese

In the summer of 2012 Morgantown, West Virginia, was the home to three teenage girls, each one of them on their own separate journeys through life.

First in the group was the sixteen-year-old Skylar Neese, a girl who only a few years before that summer had broken down into tears when she’d accidentally caused the death of a few ladybugs. That kindness and love for life is what everyone knew Skylar for, especially those who were closest to her.

Her father, Dave Neese, remembered a time when Skylar had called him out for commenting on someone’s physical appearance. “Well, how many beauty contests have you won lately, daddy?” she’d asked, and Dave had humbly taken his lesson. Her mother, Mary, would often hear Skylar on the phone, talking and treating her best friends like they were her sisters.

And Skylar didn’t just treat her friends like this because she was that kind, she was also an only child, so for Skylar, her best friend Sheila Eddy really was a sister.

Skylar and Sheila had known each other since they were eight years old. Sheila was loud, larger and life and not afraid to show it. Sheila always made herself right at home wherever she went too. Dave and Mary Neese remember that Sheila wouldn’t even knock whenever she came over. She’d just walk right into the house and everyone was just happy to see her. Fun was everything to Sheila and people couldn’t help having fun around her too. And it was this zest for life and passion for fun that drew someone to Sheila like a moth to a flame.

Rachel Shoaf shared that same love for life as Sheila did, just maybe a little more quietly than the other girl in her class. And it was the first year of University High School when Sheila and Rachel crossed paths and sealed the trio’s fate. 

Rachel was well-liked in school and got along well with others. She was an active part of the school’s theater club and helped put on a lot of plays, but by 2012 she was also a teenager.

Teenage life hit Rachel a little differently than it did to Sheila and Skylar. She’d grown up in a strict, practicing Catholic household and her parents were on the tailend of a divorce. Throw in the angst, peer pressure and all the other joys of growing older and Rachel had gone a bit quiet and shy.

Rachel and Sheila first bonded over their shared experiences of having divorced parents and the next thing anyone knew, Rachel had introduced Sheila to Skylar and the trio was complete.

Rachel was the shy, creative one, Sheila the one with the big personality and Skylar the kind one who was always there for emotional support. 

But soon after, relatives noticed an even bigger shift in Rachel’s demeanor. She still kept good grades at school, but she’d started sneaking off. She’d skip classes and disappear to smoke a little green. Some say nothing more than normal teenage behavior, but things took a turn when a rift formed between the girls, leaving Skylar unofficially kicked out.

Skylar’s posts online from the spring of that year showed just how deeply she’d been hurt. “Too bad my friends are having lives without me,” she wrote and another post that ended with the line: “youre a twofaced b*tch and obviously f*cking stupid if you thought I wouldn’t find out.”

Classmates noticed the constant bickering and fights that continued even when school was out for the summer. Hurt, but focused on what she wanted to make out of the life ahead of her, Skylar got a summer job working at a local Wendy’s while she looked into what it would take for her to become a criminal defense lawyer.

But then she got an unexpected phone call.

Rachel and Sheila were sorry for how things had gone down between them all and they wanted to make up. Skylar was hesitant. There’d simply been too many arguments and things said for everything to be this easy, but Rachel and Sheila pushed and Skylar had missed her friends.

Around midnight on July sixth, 2012, Skylar propped open the window in her bedroom and snuck out to meet her former best friends. Security footage from her apartment building showed her getting into a car and leaving, presumably for a night of fun. Skylar had done this before and she’d done it with Rachel and Sheila. The tree of them would sneak out and drive around at night, sometimes ending up in a neighboring town where they would spend a few hours smoking, but what Skylar had never done before was stay out the whole night.

Unaware that Skylar had even left, Dave and Mary went into her room the following morning to check in on her. They’d gotten a call from the Wendy’s where Skylar worked, telling them that she was late and for all Dave and Mary knew, Skylar had simply slept in.

But they found Skylar’s room empty, her window still propped open like she was about to come back in at any moment. Right away, her parents knew that something was wrong, but they were also certain that Skylar hadn’t just run away. Her phone charger, toothbrush and other toiletries were still in her room, meaning that wherever Skylar had gone, she hadn’t planned on being out for long.

Dave and Mary called the police to report their daughter as missing and Skylar’s family and friends began canvassing the area, putting up posters and raising awareness that the sixteen-year-old Skylar was missing.

And it worked. That very same day, Sheila Eddy caught wind that her best friend Skylar hadn’t returned home the night before and she called Dave and Mary to tell them everything she knew.

It was true. Skylar had snuck out with Sheila and Rachel the night before, but they’d dropped Skylar off back home around midnight. But there was one twist to the story. Skylar had asked Sheila not to take her all the way back to where they’d picked her up, and where the car had been spotted by the security camera. Instead, Skylar had asked to be dropped off further down the road so the sound of the car wouldn’t wake her parents up.

Sheila had listened and as far as the other two girls had known, Skylar had made it home safe and sound.

It wasn’t much to go off of, but at least it was a start and an explanation for why Skylar had snuck out the night before and at least it added one more person to the search party. The following day, Rachel went on her way to Catholic summer camp, but Sheila was still around and she desperately wanted to be there for Skylar’s family and to join in the search for her best friend.

She spent all of July seventh helping Mary work her way through the neighborhood. The search party came back empty-handed, but it did lead to something. Investigator Jessica Colebank, who would go on to become Star City’s first female chief of police, grew suspicious. “Sheila is acting wrong. Rachel is scared to death,” she noted and perhaps she was onto something.

Rachel became even more shy and withdrawn. She started violently acting out towards her family and it got to the point where Sheila was the only one who could get through to her. Sheila herself seemed intent on being the emotional support for Skylar’s parents. She kept in their lives, made constant posts about missing her best friend and looking for reassurance until November 2012, when Sheila wrote something that set investigators on edge: “no one on this earth can handle me and Rachel if you think you can you’re wrong.”

The beginnings of a confession, perhaps? Or a reaction to something else. 

Classmates had previously overheard Rachel and Sheila openly discussing plans to murder Skylar in the classroom. At the time, no one had actually believed that they’d actually do it, especially when it came across as the two of them just blowing off steam after another fight had happened between the three of them. But when Skylar actually went missing and the last two people to see her alive turned out to be the very two girls who’d openly discussed killing her, well, that was a little too on the nose for people to ignore.

In December 2012, Rachel’s mother made a desperate 911 call. “I have an issue with a sixteen-year-old daughter of mine,” she told officers. “I can’t control her anymore. She’s hitting us, she’s screaming, she’s running through the neighborhood. My husband’s trying to contain her. Please hurry.”

In the background of the call, Rachel can be heard crying and shouting: “Give me the phone. No! This is over! This is over!” That night, Rachel suffered a mental breakdown and had attacked her mother with a lit candelabra before barricading herself inside her room, screaming that she wanted to kill herself.

Once in police custody, Rachel crumbled even further. She admitted that there’d been a plot to kill Skylar for at least a month before Rachel and Sheila had even acted on it and the only reason they’d met up with Skylar that night was so that they could finally get rid of her.

They attacked Skylar in a secluded forest, with Rachel giving up the chase after Skylar had managed to break free and injure Rachel. Sheila had then continued on her own, stabbing and slashing at Skylar until Skylar's had finally gone quiet. In one of her dying breaths, Skylar had managed to ask why her two friends were doing this to her, but it’s unlikely that she got an answer that made any sense.

Rachel and Sheila’s motive is still a mystery, but some people who knew them claim to know what had made them snap. Skylar herself had made diary entries that seem to back up the theory and it all stems from a secret relationship. Rachel and Sheila were allegedly together in every sense of the term. One time after drinking in Rachel’s bedroom, the two of them had even begun sleeping together while Skylar was still in the room with them. There were even rumors of a recording that Skylar had made and allegedly could have been used to blackmail them into spending more time with her.

In her parole hearing in 2023, Rachel finally gave a motive for killing her best friend. “After things became known with the relationship, there was tension between us. It was hostile and violent, in our teenage minds we didn’t know how to handle the conflict and we just wanted it to stop.”

Growing up in a strict and religious Catholic household could possibly have added to the fear Rachel claims to have felt about news of her relationship breaking, but could it really be motive enough to brutally stab someone to death? 

Sheila herself has never confirmed the relationship or given an explanation for why she acted the way that she did during the months that followed the murder. She showed no remorse for ingratiating herself with her victim’s family, even after Dave Neese went to the police station and defended Sheila to the investigators. A move he would later deeply regret once Sheila and Rachel both confessed to murdering his daughter.