Skylar Neese, 16, was reported missing on July 6, 2012. Her two best friends later pleaded guilty to murder
Credit: AP Photo/The Dominion Post, Ron Rittenhouse
NEED TO KNOW
- Skylar Neese, 16, was reported missing on July 6, 2012
- Her best friends, Rachel Shoaf and Shelia Eddy, were later convicted of murder
- Shoaf allegedly confessed that they lured Skylar to a remote area and stabbed her to death because they “didn’t like her,” according to West Virginia State Police Sgt. Ronnie Gaskins
She was the kind of teenager friends turned to with their problems.
A straight-A student at University High School in Morgantown, W.Va., 16-year-old Skylar Neese worked part-time at a fast-food chain and spent much of her free time chatting with her closest confidants on social media.
Around 10 p.m. on July 5, 2012, she hugged her parents, Mary and Dave Neese, goodnight before taking a shower and going to bed.
“She would tell us she was going to bed, but a lot of times that would mean she was going in to be on her phone or on the computer,” recalls Mary, 64. “She seemed to be, according to her friends, a child psychologist. She was always addressing their problems and giving them advice.”
Sadly, that would be the last time Skylar logged on to her laptop as sometime during that warm summer night, she disappeared from her family’s apartment, seemingly without a trace.
“Her bed hadn’t been slept in, and a screen was taken out of the window,” says Dave, 62, who checked in on his daughter on his lunch break from Walmart around noon the following day.
At 4 p.m., when Skylar failed to show up for her shift at Wendy’s — which she had never done in the past — her parents called the police to report her missing.
Credit: Disney+
Later that evening, their daughter’s best friend, Shelia Eddy, called their home and made a confession:
The night before, she and another close friend, Rachel Shoaf, had picked up Skylar for a late-night joyride and dropped her off down the street about 30 minutes later.
“I was pretty upset,” says Mary, who nevertheless accepted an offer from Eddy — who had been close to Skylar since meeting her in second grade — and Eddy’s mother to join her and Dave in searching the neighborhood for their daughter.
In the desperate days that followed, Eddy often messaged Skylar’s parents to offer love and support.
“I even texted back to her, ‘We love you too, honey,’” recalls Dave.
Little did Skylar’s family know that Eddy and Shoaf, their daughter’s closest companions, were also her tormentors.
The high school sophomore’s mysterious disappearance shocked her small-town community, but what police discovered during a 10-month investigation into the true nature of the three friends’ relationship and another startling confession by one of them was devastating.
On May 1, 2013, Eddy and Shoaf were taken into custody, and both later pleaded guilty to murdering Skylar.
The trio’s deadly dynamic and its tragic outcome are featured in the new Hulu docuseries Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese.
Credit: Courtesy Neese Family
“Your heart, you can still feel it fall,” says Mary. “We didn’t see any red flags. They just seemed like three normal teenagers having fun and hanging out.”
Best friends since attending the same summer day camp when they were 8, Skylar, bubbly yet studious, and Eddy, who was more outgoing, grew into a sister-like relationship in their teens.
“Skylar was the kind of person that would go up to a stranger who didn’t have any friends and just start talking to them,” says Ariah Johnson, 30, a fellow member of their high school’s marching band who appears in the Hulu series.
For more on the shocking murder of Skylar Neese, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands now, or subscribe here.
Credit: Lakin Correctional Facility (2)
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By contrast, Eddy, says Johnson, could be intimidating.
“I remember once she was wearing a pair of shorts that was outside of the dress code, and a teacher told her she needed to change. She started giving him attitude, yelling at him that she paid for her clothes, she can wear whatever she wants," Johnson says.
At the beginning of ninth grade, Shoaf, a new student and a member of the theater department, became friends with Skylar and Eddy. “Once Rachel came into the group, you always saw the three of them together,” Johnson adds. “It was always just the three of them.”
Credit: DISNEY + (2)
But over the course of two school years, tensions arose, as Eddy and Shoaf grew closer and even joked about becoming intimate with each other.
“There were at least a few times where Skylar told me about how the others had excluded her from a trip to the mall,” recalls Skylar’s friend Eric Finch, 29. “It ticked her off that she wasn’t included.”
Although the three girls at one point had appeared to have an unbreakable bond, they began to air their frustrations on social media.
“I knew there was a reason I hated you so much,” Eddy wrote on Twitter, seemingly in reference to one of her friends.
Skylar once wrote, “Life would be so much easier if jealousy didn’t exist.” And then, on the day before she disappeared, Skylar tweeted, “You doing s— like this, that is why I will NEVER completely trust you.”
It didn’t take long for police to begin questioning Shoaf’s and Eddy’s accounts of what happened that night. The teens initially told investigators they dropped Skylar off at 11:30 p.m. and returned to their homes and went to bed. But, records showed their phones pinging off of a cell tower near the Pennsylvania state line around 4 a.m. that morning.
Credit: Disney+
Surveillance video also showed Eddy’s car driving past a gas station around 12:39 a..m. near Skylar’s home.
Unable to get the teens to talk, investigators grew frustrated. “We gave them every avenue that we possibly could,” says West Virginia State Police Sgt. Ronnie Gaskins. “[We said,] ‘If you girls are under duress, or if you’re being threatened by somebody, just let us know’ — but we just weren’t getting any cooperation from them.”
As the search continued, investigators brought Eddy in for a polygraph test in November 2012. After failing the test, Eddy admitted she and Shoaf had actually picked Skylar up at 12:31 a.m., but claimed she soon got out of the car to go to a party.
Then, on the day Shoaf was scheduled to have a polygraph test, she jumped out of her father’s car while he was driving her to the police office and fled before eventually checking into a psychiatric facility, where she spent five days under observation.
Credit: Ron Rittenhouse/The Dominion Post/AP (2)
After her release, during a four-hour interview with police on Jan. 3, 2013, she finally confessed to plotting with Eddy to kill Skylar because “we didn’t like her,” according to Gaskins, who conducted the interview with a polygraph expert.
In Shoaf’s account of what happened that night, the three teens drove to a remote area in Pennsylvania, where they stopped to smoke marijuana. They got out of the vehicle, and when Skylar turned her back, Shoaf said, she and Eddy counted to three and plunged knives into Skylar’s back and neck.
“I asked Rachel, ‘What did Skylar say?’” recalls Gaskins. “She said Skylar just screamed, ‘Why? Why?’”
Shoaf then led police to the spot where she and Eddy left Skylar’s body under a pile of branches at the side of a country road.
On May 1, 2013, Shoaf pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Eddy pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on Jan. 24, 2014, and was sentenced to life in prison.
In 2023, Shoaf told a parole board that she and Eddy were secret lovers and killed Skylar because they feared being exposed. Both are now housed at the same West Virginia state prison.
Still devastated by the loss of their only child, Mary and Dave helped pass Skylar’s Law, which amended West Virginia’s missing and endangered child protocols to immediately issue Amber Alerts without waiting for proof of abduction.
Living without Skylar has been “pure hell,” says Dave.
The couple have since moved from the home they shared with their daughter and now live in Pennsylvania, where their house is filled with photos of the teen, who once dreamed of becoming a criminal attorney.
“She wanted to put the bad guys away,” says Mary. “It breaks my heart that she never got the chance.”
Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese is now streaming on Hulu.
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