Crime Junkie - NEW SHOW: Three
Episode Date: March 13, 2024After midnight on July 6th, 2012, three teenage girls walked into the thick Appalachian woods somewhere along the Mason-Dixon county line. Hours later, under the glow of a nearly full moon, only two w...alked out.The very last time Dave and Mary Neese saw their only child Skylar was in a grainy black-and-white video. In it, she's sneaking out of her ground-floor bedroom in the middle of the night, her purse over her shoulder, her brown hair swinging as she hurries across the small parking lot to a waiting car. What happened to Skylar Neese has become gothic American lore: the odd girl out in a vicious teenage triangle. But in the ten years since that fateful night beneath the West Virginia stars, a fuller portrait of what happened has emerged. From award-winning journalists Justine Harman and Holly Millea comes a gripping 10-part series featuring Skylar's family, closest friends, and law enforcement who lived the case—and are still living it. Make sure you follow Wavland’s new series, Three, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts so you’re the first to know when the rest of the series drops. And don’t forget, there are already 4 more episodes waiting for you right now!
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Hi, Crime Junkies.
Ashley Flowers here, and I've got a little something special for you guys today.
Our Crime Junkie OG fan club members will probably remember all the way back in 2018,
we covered the case of Skylar Neiss, who was 16 years old when she was murdered by girls
that she thought were her best friends.
Well, our friend Justine Harmon, who you've actually heard host a couple of audio check
shows like OC Swingers and Killed,
anyway, she is hosting an entire series about Skyler featuring exclusive interviews with Skyler's loved ones throughout the years.
And that series is called Three.
I'm going to play you the first episode here right now, but you have got to head over to the Three feed to hear the rest.
There are four more episodes waiting for you right now.
You can find three THREEs spelled out on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify, wherever you listen,
and make sure you hit the follow button
so you're the first to know
when the rest of the series drops.
And until then, enjoy episode one right now.
This podcast is intended for mature audiences.
Listener discretion is advised. After midnight on July 6, 2012, three teenage girls walked into the thick Appalachian woods
somewhere along the Mason-Dixon County line.
Hours later, under the glow of a nearly full moon,
only two walked out.
Driving down the narrow back road,
the headlights of the car bore holes through the dark.
What's done was done.
The surrounding forest had muffled the sounds of the sudden, unthinkable violence. Where there was
laughing, then screaming, there is now silence. Where there was struggle and
carnage, there is now stillness. But listen closely. Six feet from where Skyler's body has been abandoned.
The faint babbling of a creek.
A cell phone, lost in the chaos, fell between the creek and Skyler,
whose multicolored blouse and yellow shorts are thick with blood and mud.
For months, her body lay decomposing, hidden beneath a canopy of pine and oak trees, first
absorbing humidity, then freezing over with ice.
For months, she waited for someone to find her.
But no one knew she was there.
No one could imagine what had actually happened.
For months, rumors swirled and still no one came.
Anybody who has any information,
we're urging them to call
if you've seen this young lady anywhere.
By the way, there have been 172 sightings
and law enforcement told us just a couple of minutes ago
that none of them have panned out thus far.
The 16-year-old girl quietly slipped out of her room
last July, but never came home.
Investigators pulled the video from Skyler's apartment building and saw her jumping into a car parked near her window.
...
Oh man, this is a mess. Let me get this stuff out of here.
I am so sorry.
My friend's car broke down and a true mess.
Dave Neese has just finished unloading trucks and running the forklift at Menards, a home
improvement store, and is driving me from Morgantown, West Virginia
through Blacksville to an obscure corner of the woods
in brave Pennsylvania.
Dave is a sturdy, muscular, soft-hearted man
with dark eyes and a thick head of hair.
He hasn't changed much since the last time I saw him,
though he's grown more gray and he has lost some weight.
We've stayed in touch over the years and now we're headed to Skyler's memorial site,
the place where his 16-year-old daughter was murdered.
Oh man, it's hot in there. I apologize.
I'm so happy you know your way around because...
Yeah, it's kind of...
I'm going to take you the way that Sheila and Rachel started to go.
When I first came to Morgantown, a college community nestled in the hills along the Monongahela
River.
It was January 2014.
The air was bitter cold. The sky gray, snow was falling.
Through the barren trees surrounding the town center, the coal trains labored along the
tracks, sounding their mournful whistle.
A warning. A Warning I was there reporting a story I'd pitched to Elle magazine titled Trial by Twitter.
The piece examines social media and its impact on teens and empathy and what that lack of
empathy can lead to.
During the months I reported and wrote the piece, I met Justine.
I was an editor at Elle.
Holly's story was one of the longest run by the magazine,
and certainly one of the most well-read online.
I tracked it topping Chartbeat for months,
and it went on to win a prestigious front page award.
Your story examined the early days of social media,
and you saw the matrix.
You knew that these digital artifacts
of their young emotional lives would live on forever.
For years, we talked about this piece of three friends,
of girls, of social media,
of one night that no one could take back.
The case was a global obsession.
And much of what has been reported always felt off to us.
A complex case involving three teens that deserved closer analysis beyond just a shocking headline.
Ten years later, nearly everyone we interviewed, from Skyler's family and friends to law enforcement, recall new factual and emotional details,
giving us an inside look at what really happened.
With hindsight, even the most dissected moments
find new shape and take on new meaning.
The very last time Dave and Mary Niece
saw their only child, Schuyler,
was in a grainy black and white video.
In it, she's sneaking out of her ground floor bedroom window in the middle of the night,
her purse over her shoulder, her brown hair swinging as she hurries across the small parking
lot to a waiting car.
Watching Skylar climb into the backseat during those last few seconds of footage retrieved
from the apartment building's security camera.
There's an urge to call out to her, don't go.
But the door closes, the car pulls away, and she's gone.
It's August, 2023.
The temperature, 83 degrees.
The humidity, sky high.
Dave and I are driving west down Route 7.
We're now entering Blacksville.
And you can tell by the airplane
that's been up there for years and years and years.
Over 60 years, actually,
the 43-foot Korean War fighter plane
marks the entrance into Blacksville, a town born in 1829 and once famous for its rich native clay pottery.
In the 60s, Blacksville turned into a coal mining enclave, the last mine closed in 2021, draining the small population down to 118.
It's one of a cluster of tiny townships
that crisscross the line between West Virginia
and Pennsylvania so fast, it's easy to lose track
of which state you're in around here.
Right up here on the left-hand side
is Shaq Neighborhood House.
We took Skyler there for two or three summers
because it was sheep and it was swimming
and she loved swimming.
And that's where she met the little sick psychopath,
Sheila Eddie, right there.
Now we're on Eddie's Run Road.
Note the name.
There are a lot of Eddies out here.
The road is 2.3 miles long and
curls through Wayne Township, Pennsylvania.
There ain't no cell coverage out here. I mean turn on your cell phone you're not
gonna get any service.
It was around this once wooded stretch that some of the bloodiest civil war
battles were fought. And it was here that Skyler's body was discovered.
They don't know it, but they left Skyler in her element. I mean, she loved the wilderness,
she loved the outdoors. So when you first go around this turn, you say,
oh, there it is. That's Skyler's site. And that's the big tree.
That's where they found her.
From Waveland, I'm Holly Millay.
And I'm Justine Harmon.
This is Three. Aww, don't you bring her flowers.
She'll love you.
Oh, did I lock you in?
I think I have to.
I got it.
Did you get her?
Okay.
From what I was understood, the cadaver dog when it came out here to search for Skylar,
they couldn't find her, couldn't find her, couldn't find her.
Well, there was a bunch of brush right here.
And the cadaver dog came over to this tree, looked straight up at the tree,
and its necklace, GPS necklace, broke and fell off
for no reason at all right on top of Skyler.
That's how they found Skyler.
Skyler wanted to be found.
It's amazing.
It's truly amazing.
The site where his only child's life ended has been turned into a memorial. What started with a wooden bench
inscribed in loving memory of Schuyler A. Neese, 1996 to 2012, has grown into a shrine
filled with flowers, angel statues, metal butterflies, and painted purple rocks. Mementos
left by the pilgrims that journey to this now sacred place.
Leaning against the towering oak tree is a granite slab, a headstone of sorts, engraved
with a drawing of Skyler's dog Leeloo and a message for Skyler.
We will love you forever and always.
Up and down the great tree trunk, visitors have mounted actual license plates from across
the country.
Ohio, Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, along with angel
wings, rosaries, wreaths, stars, and crosses.
In the middle of it all is Skyler's high school picture.
She's smiling, dimpled, forever 16.
It's the same photo used in her missing person's flyer.
Just below it, also attached to the tree,
is a locked green mailbox with the initial S.
Dave hands me a key.
It's a busy mail day for the kid.
She loves mail.
Is that all?
Yeah.
Okay, now we know we had the wrong keys.
Now you know.
There we go.
You want to go ahead and read them?
I always read her mail.
Well, do you want to read it?
No, go ahead.
Okay.
Hi, Skyler. I'm sorry for what happened to you.
I hope that you are doing good.
You are so...
So...
Loved.
You can tell a young kid wrote that.
Yeah.
Oh, you spelled Skyler wrong.
The stickers.
Oh, that is so sweet.
Can you take that to Mary? Yeah, I will. Nope. Another one. Let's see. Skylar, I'm so sorry what To you They should be sorry
You're so pretty you're amazing from ivory
Isn't that gorgeous so many people she touched huh? Yeah, they're total strangers.
She loved to be outside, anything outside. She liked to pretend to play ball.
She was very good at it, but she liked to go to the mall, of course. Every
teenager does. She loved to shop, and I hate to shop, so that didn't work so well.
That's Skyler's mom and Dave's wife, Mary, who with her black hair and violet eyes, calls
to mind Elizabeth Taylor. We had to interview Mary over the phone,
as she wasn't feeling well when we interviewed Dave in person.
Clothes, of course. She was a clothes freak. She loved bright colors and, you know, rainbow stuff.
She would mix and match. And she did that for her wall decorations. She got, you know,
wall art, twin, purple and gray. Oh my lord, it's beautiful.
Skyler was a total mid-aughts teen. She loved Snoop Dogg and Tyga, Forever 21,
The Twilight Series, and her white fluffy Maltese, Leeloo. She was also an honors student
at University High School, excelling
in math and science, two subjects she couldn't stand. Early in the summer before her junior
year, she'd gotten a jump on the required reading, Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain
of Others, and Saul Bellow's 1959 surrealist novel, Henderson the Reign King in which the protagonist declares, if I don't get carried away I never accomplish anything and alone I can be
pretty good but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay and every
teenagers rally cry I want I want I want I, I want. Over the July 4th holiday, 2012, all Skyler wanted was to be hanging out with Sheila and
Rachel.
Sheila was her childhood best friend since the second grade when they bonded at the Shack,
an after-school community center.
Though they'd never gone to the same school, that changed when Sheila's mom, Tara, and her new husband, Jim, moved the family from Blacksville to Morgantown.
Suddenly, Skyler and Sheila were freshmen together at University High.
That's where they met Rachel Shouffe, an unknown newbie who lived in an upscale development and had previously attended St. Francis Central Catholic School.
All three teens were their parents' only child, and all were attractive in distinct ways,
straight out of a CW network casting call.
Rachel, a tall, bright, redheaded beauty with a deep religious bend that complimented her
flair for drama.
She starred in school plays and musicals, always breaking up and making up with her
musician boyfriend, Mackenzie Boggs. Her mom, Patricia, often bragged about a
Broadway connection who could one day make her only daughter a star in New York City.
Sheila, spelled S-H-E-L-I-A, was sometimes bottle blonde, sometimes raven-haired, and had small,
lovely features, a heart-shaped chin, and a belly button ring. Charismatic and game for anything,
Sheila could be fierce one moment and warm the next, keeping everyone on eggshells,
vying for her approval. Like Rachel, her parents divorced when she was young,
after her biological father suffered a traumatic car accident. But unlike Rachel, her parents divorced when she was young, after her biological father suffered a traumatic car accident.
But unlike Rachel, whose mother Patricia was strict and demanding,
Sheila and her mom Tara were extremely close,
more like best friends than mother and daughter.
And then there was Skyler, brunette, cherubic, with sparkly blue eyes and deep dimples.
A daddy's girl.
The kind of kid who has a soft spot for animals and insects, anything with a heartbeat.
For years, she wrote her hopes and fears and petty grievances in a diary.
That is until she took to Twitter, which all of the girls used as a stream of consciousness that
never turned off.
On Wednesday, July 4th, Skylar tweeted,
3 of my best friends are going out of town this weekend, leaving me with no plans. FML.
And before going to sleep that night,
Stress will be the death of me.
While they lived in different suburbs of Morgantown, Skylar, Rachel, and Sheila all lived together on their phones.
They spent their waking lives posting, texting, tweeting, retweeting, having whole consuming conversations in 140 characters.
And they were completely unfiltered
as if they believed both no one and everyone
could peer into their lives.
And it wasn't just an occasional text or tweet,
it was hundreds every day.
As Skylar tweeted on April 4th, 2012,
Skylar may have lived out her teen angst online, but beneath it was a deep empathy. An empathy
that, much like Twitter, could overwhelm her. As a young girl, she was a champion of the underdog,
of everyone actually.
She didn't care what kind of family you had.
She was about you and how you were.
She didn't care if you were gay or if you weren't gay.
She just loved everybody.
That's Carol Machaud, Skylar's aunt
and Mary's slightly younger sister.
Carol's the youngest of 15.
15, we have 10 brothers and four sisters.
Oh my goodness, can you name them all?
If I do it on my fingers.
Okay, let's hear it.
There's Deline, Delaine, Bernada, Eugene,
William, Anthony, Lyle, Michael,
Kevin, Brenda, Robert, Calvin, Ray, Mary.
Aunt Carol was like a second mom to Skylar.
Even they look alike.
Talking with Carol, you can almost picture Skylar
all grown up.
During a rough patch with Dave,
Mary and Skylar moved in with Carol
and her husband and their son, Kyle.
If my son wouldn't get in trouble, it was like she was the one getting in trouble. She would
cry with him and sit with him, you know, if he'd be in trouble. And it was just
like she was so caring of everybody and just, you know, she was so much fun as
well. She liked to pull pranks on me. One of them, me and Mary worked together and I
was decorating for a Christmas dinner and I put this silverware
in a jar and I wanted to make the tissue paper look like little burn around the edges. I didn't
realize how fast tissue paper burnt and I lit that thing on fire and it went up and this big
old thing is smoking. Well, Mary went home and told Skyler about it so she started calling me Sparky
and for Christmas she couldn't wait for me to open up
this gift she got me. And here she took a spark plug and made it into a Christmas ornament for me
for Christmas. I was like, oh my goodness. There she is as a baby. Skylar as a baby. And of course,
everybody thinks her kid's beautiful, but not really. That's Dave again.
He's showing off Skylar's baby picture.
She's perfectly angelic, with a halo of curls.
We meet Dave at Jeans, the oldest bar in Morgantown, complete with a speakeasy in the basement.
Dogs are not only allowed, but given free hot dogs.
Some mornings you can find a group of wagging tails
outside waiting for the place to open.
Lucy, the Irish bartender, is from Tipperary
and makes a mean pepperoni roll.
On the back wall is a big screen,
where on game nights you can watch
the West Virginia University Mountaineers play.
The town is so team crazy
that when they win, fans set couches on fire.
The tradition was such a hazard,
couch burning became a felony in 2011.
Just having upholstered furniture outdoors
could get you a $500 fine.
Like everyone else in Morgantown,
Dave is a football fanatic. Skyler, not so
much.
I'm screaming for the Mountaineers and I'm getting so mad because they're not doing
what they're supposed to do. And she came down the steps and she looked at me and said,
Dad, can I ask you a question? I said, yeah. She said, how is your life going to change
tomorrow if they win? And I said, well, they will, it'll just be better.
She said, no, tell me how your life's gonna change. How is that gonna affect you, Dad? And I said,
go back upstairs. I mean, she was that kind of girl. She wanted answers. Why? I want to know why.
And when you tell her why, that wasn't good enough. He tries to act like Mr. Badass, and he is just a big old teddy bear.
You know, he'll lose his temper and bear his teeth.
And even Skyler would tell him, go sit down, Dad.
He didn't scare her either.
There was one way to look at things, and that was Skyler's way.
Any other way, you were wrong. I'm sorryler's way. Any other way you're wrong.
I'm sorry you can be Einstein but you're still wrong.
In keeping with her age, Skyler's tweets were a little romantic,
sometimes dramatic, and often spot on. Justine, take it away.
Okay, mosquitoes are disgusting creatures from hell.
Everything about my parents driving pisses me off.
Rach's singing is breathtaking, wrapping presents for Sheila's family, even though I never do
for my own.
I like Obama.
Shout out to my dad for getting me McDonald's.
OMG, Saved by the Bell is on.
Every dude at Walmart right now smells like a god.
Skylar was less experienced than most teens her age.
Never having had a boyfriend, she was in no rush to cross the Rubicon into womanhood.
Sheila, on the other hand, was way ahead of the curve. I'll let her
tweets do the talking.
I wish it was acceptable to be naked all the time. There's a reason why sober and so bored
sound almost exactly the same. Love having the upper hand.
Megan Fox is the definition of perfection, lesbianist.
This generation is fucked.
Imagine what it'll be like when our kids have kids.
If you talk about how you're madly in love
with Justin Bieber, I probably want to stab you.
You fuel my determination to not have feelings.
Rachel, always the actress, was all feelings.
Her digital self-portrait sounds like this.
Sometimes I wish I didn't fall in love.
I want to go to Hogwarts more than anything.
A day with me and Sheila is never a dull day, LOL.
Don't make a permanent decision for a temporary emotion.
Giving up crying for Lent.
Tangled is such a good movie, then he cuts her hair off
and I'm like, ew, WTF, no.
Snow makes everything more quiet.
I have the most realistic nightmares.
I can't remember what's a dream and what's reality anymore? It's no accident that shows like Sex in the City and Girls revolve around four friends
instead of three.
Three's a crowd, especially if you are a teenage girl.
And four or five or more, against all mathematical reason isn't.
Any girl who's been caught in a social triangle knows this.
She knows, too, the undercurrent of anxiety felt by all, recognizing that the degrees
of love and the balance of power are always shifting.
Thinking you are being left off a text thread, being ghosted, being casually excluded from a sleepover.
When it was just Schuyler and Sheila, the two were in sync.
Never even knocked on the door when Schuyler was home. She'd just come over and open the door and come in.
And we didn't care because she was that close to Schuyler, that close to us.
So close, Schuyler often went with Sheila and her mom to Myrtle Beach, a nine-hour drive
from Morgantown. Former Dominion Post crime reporter Alex Lang, now an editor at DailyMail.com,
covered the area and the case at length. Everybody needs a place they can go on vacation
for $1,000 with a family. That's what Myrtle Beach is. It caters to the working families in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia who don't have a ton of money but want to take the family
on vacation. It's just built that reputation and everybody goes there and they love it
because you can do those things and you don't break the bank.
Every summer they went on vacation. We'd give Scott or a couple hundred bucks, whatever
she needed and she would go down with Sheila.
I guess for the longest time they had a good time, you know?
When Rachel entered the picture, she made three.
Sheila, the natural alpha, took her place at the top of the pyramid.
She wouldn't have it any other way.
But what made it so easy for her to assume the position was the simple
fact that she was the only one among the girls with her own car. She had the power,
the control, she held the keys to a great escape away from boredom, parents, and
boundaries.
She would, you know, make the decisions of what they were doing or where they were going.
And she was more of a ringleader and the head of the group.
Just, you know, I think she was more jealous of Skylar.
If Rachel and Skylar were together, you didn't see that kind of, you know, one being over
the other.
Aunt Carol's son, Kyle, Skyler's cousin,
attended U High with the girls.
A senior to the sophomores, he didn't like what he was seeing.
He come home and he told me, he said,
you need to tell Aunt Mary not to let her run around
with those two.
And I said, Kyle, I can't do that.
And he said, they're bad news, mom.
You know, they're not good for her. Yeah, she started being a little bit more secretive
and not as outgoing as she was before. So, you know, that and, you know, we'd ask her,
you know, is something wrong? And she'd be like, no, nothing's wrong. And I know one
time I was over at her house and she had bruises across her legs. And I said, Skylar, what's your bruises from?
Tom Bloom, their tanned and white toothed high school counselor and current
Monongalia County Commission president, witnessed the trio's dynamic.
Whenever I see a problem really developing, it's usually an odd number,
three or five or seven.
And I try and warn parents, have two or four,
because everyone can work together,
you can find that other partner.
What usually happens, and growing up, you know,
with everything going on right now,
two gang up against one.
And that's what seemed to happen.
What happened was, Sheila wasn't known at the school,
but she was very pretty.
And Rachel was outgoing,
so Sheila wanted to be friends with Rachel,
and then Skylar came too, so you had a threesome.
Until it became apparent that Rachel wanted to get
into an even higher group of partying individuals.
Sheila was that group.
Sheila knew those people and Skylar tagged along.
So what happens in high school, everyone plays the role.
Skylar always reminded me of the girl next door.
The one that you make fun of and stuff like that,
but if anyone ever touch her or do anything to her,
you were the first one there.
And she was always like the kid's sister.
And I really truly believe that somewhere along the line,
Skyla started to speak out for herself
and started to disrupt that threesome.
When they fought, everyone knew they fought.
And then you have the whole thing with Facebook
and Twitter and stuff.
That's a whole separate.
But at the time, it really bothered Skyler probably more
than the other two realized.
And she started writing in her journal.
At home, in her purple and green bedroom,
Skyler poured her hurt feelings onto the page
in girlish print.
She wrote in pencil and dotted her eyes with circles.
When investigators were looking for clues,
the dusty gray diary with the embossed heart on the cover
provided an alternate window into the weeks
leading up to Skyler's disappearance,
including that final trip to Myrtle Beach with Sheila.
Here's Skyler's dad, Dave, again.
And then the last trip, there was friction,
and I don't know it was
you talked about it briefly and her diary but it didn't go into depth. I think
the fight was about Sheila telling her you never saw what you saw. Whatever
happened at Myrtle Beach, Skyler was pissed. On June 9th, two days after she
got home, she retweeted this.
Won't miss anyone from school over summer,
because if we're really friends, we'll hang out.
If we aren't, we won't.
But by July 4th, her insecurity was apparent.
Sick of being at fucking home.
Thanks, friends.
Love hanging out with you all, too.
Two days later, on July 6th, after working the evening shift at Wendy's, Skylar came
home to her parents watching television.
Mary sitting in a recliner and Dave lying on the couch.
Skylar kissed them both and told them she loved them and that she was tired and going to bed.
When she kissed Dave goodnight, she was wearing her necklace with a gold maple
leaf charm.
The last night she ever hugged me, that necklace fell out, hit me in the chin. I said, watch
that necklace, you're going to give me a chin bleed.
The next morning, Dave went to work while Skyler slept in, or so they thought.
I came home from work to give her the card. She didn't really have a license, but she had her permit.
And she drove my car, but she was really safe and a good kid.
And I knocked on the door.
I said, Sky, let's go.
Come on.
I got to get back to work.
No answer.
I tried the door, and it was locked.
So I grabbed the coat hanger and popped it through a little hole
and popped the lock open.
Never been in bed and then slept in.
I said, it panic hits immediately.
And I looked at the window and it was about this far open and I said, oh shit.
I looked outside the window and there was nothing but over that little retaining wall
there was a black, her black bench that she used for her makeup.
And I said, what the hell is going on?
First thing I do is call Mary.
And I said, Mary, Scott, her ain't here, where's she at?
And I was praying, she'd say, oh, what?
She called me.
I just thought, cause it was summer,
and I just thought she had went somewhere with the girls
and didn't tell us.
You know, she had a history of sneaking out
and either she forgot to ask
or she just decided she was doing it.
I just thought they'd went shopping or something.
And that's what I told Dave.
I said, well, call Sheila. So I did I called
Sheila I said when's the last time you talked to Skyler? Oh I don't know, last night it was just
last night I talked to her it was just so reversed almost. I said so you haven't seen her?
Nope. I haven't talked to her. So then I sent her a couple texts, but she didn't answer.
Then when Sheila didn't know, I had him call,
you know, some of the other girls
that she used to hang with.
I even told him at the time, I said,
well, she has to be at work at four o'clock.
I said, maybe she's just gonna go straight to work.
I said, if she don't show up at work, then we'll worry.
Well, then by the time I got home, it was four o'clock
and her work had called us.
Something's wrong, call 911.
All anyone knew was what Sheila and Rachel
would later tell Mary and Dave, and then the police,
that Schuyler snuck out to meet them at around 11 p.m. knew was what Sheila and Rachel would later tell Mary and Dave, and then the police, that
Skylar snuck out to meet them at around 11 p.m. to go for a ride and smoke some weed
before Rachel went off to church camp. Before midnight, the girl said, Skylar insisted they
drop her off at the end of her street so she wouldn't wake Dave and Mary.
As for the car that picked her up in the grainy videotape, Whoever she snuck back out to meet around 12 31 a.m.?
Well, for months, that would be anybody's guess.
Adding to the speculation were Skylar's last two tweets
posted before she left for work at Wendy's
on the night of July 5th.
You doing shit like that
is why I will never completely trust you.
And then a retweet. All I do is hope. July 5th. You doing shit like that is why I will never completely trust you.
And then a retweet.
All I do is hope.
Sheila, who had the lion's share of their tweets, over 4,000, was quiet all of July
4th and July 5th.
On July 6th, at 6.09am, she logged back online to fire off one cryptic message.
Always keep your cool.
Coming up on Three.
I just kept hearing things from my neighbor
and she would be like,
why isn't your daughter's friend cooperating?
And you know, I started thinking, yeah, why isn't,
you know, what's going on?
I'm telling you, that's serial killer stuff right there.
And it's scary as hell, it really is.
You're somebody that young to be that evil.
Are you born with it or do you grow into it?
That's not a typical reaction of someone that's just been picked up for murder.
It wasn't, oh, you know, what's happening to me next?
It was, okay, am I going
to miss my hair appointment?
We were terrified and we were screaming and crying and vomiting and losing our minds over
this whole situation, freaking out as soon as it happened.
Oh my God, you know what? I need to tell you a secret. I just forgot.
You have a secret from me?
Well, I mean, I've never told anyone.
Not even Spala?
No.
Three is an original production of Waveland.
The series is created and written by Holly Millay and me, Justine Harmon.
The executive producer is Jason Hoke, who produced and edited the series.
Associate producers are Lydia Horn and Leo Kulp.
Fact-checking by Lydia Horn.
Sound engineering by Shane Freeman.
Music by Robert Ellis.
Studio recording at CDM Studios in New York
and Wildwoods Picture and Sound in Los Angeles.
Special thanks to Dave and Mary Nees
in the city of Morgantown, West Virginia.
If you love the series,
leave a review and please tell your friends. Follow Waveland on Instagram at
Waveland Media for more on this series and upcoming new shows. Thanks for
listening.