True Crime Society - How well do you know your friends? The murder of Skylar Neese

Skylar Neese (16) was murdered in 2012 by two of her best friends from high school – Shelia Eddy and Rachel Shoaf.

Skylar Annette Neese was born to Mary and Dave Neese on February 10, 1996. She was their only child. Mary worked as an admin assistant and Dave worked as a product assembler at Walmart. Skylar attended University High School in Morgantown, West Virginia, where she was an honors student.

Skylar worked at Wendy’s and she had aspirations of becoming a criminal defense attorney. “Skylar was a very bubbly person,” said Dave. “She was also very loyal to her friends, the people she thought were her friends.”

“Skylar was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was fun,” Dave also said. “She was a good kid.”

Before we get into Skylar’s story, we have some background on Shelia and Rachel.

Shelia Rae Eddy was born in Blacksville, West Virginia on September 28, 1995. Her parents are Tara Clendenen and Greg Eddy. Shelia’s parents divorced in 2000 when she was around 5 years old.

Skylar and Shelia had been friends since they were 8 years old. They had met at a kid’s activity program called The Shack.

“They had been friends since they were eight years old,” Skylar’s mother, Mary Neese, said. “They were inseparable.”

“She was like a part of our family. She really was,” Dave said. “I mean, just like one of our kids.”

Tara, Shelia’s mother, remarried in 2010, and the mother and daughter moved from Blacksville to Morgantown. Shelia then attended University High School with Skylar.

Rachel Elizabeth Shoaf was born to Rusty and Patricia Shoaf on June 10, 1996. She was raised in Morgantown and attended a private Catholic school until she reached high school. She then also attended University High School where she met Skylar and Shelia.

The three girls hung out often and were frequently seen together both in and out of school. They would drive around together late at night and would spend time at each other’s homes.

In the months before July 2012, there were said to be some simmering tensions in the friend group. This was put down to teenage behavior and it was not enough to alarm any of the parents.

Skylar did make some tweets that alluded to her being excluded and left out.

This tweet was made on the night before Skylar was murdered:

On the evening of Thursday July 5, 2012, Skylar returned home to her family’s apartment after finishing her shift at Wendy’s. At around 12.30am on July 6, Skylar left the apartment via her bedroom window and got into a light coloured sedan. This was all caught on CCTV.

Skylar’s parents discovered later that morning that she was not in her bed and that her window screen was open.

“The first thing I noticed was that the bed hadn’t been slept in,” her father said.

She had been due to work that day and when she missed her shift, her parents became worried.

“She wasn’t like that,” Dave said. “She always showed up for work.”

They reported her missing. She was initially considered by law enforcement to be a runaway and this hindered the investigation due to a lack of urgency. Skylar’s father said that she had left behind her phone charger and contact lenses and that he was adamant she was planning to return home.

Police determined that the car that Skylar had entered belonged to Shelia.

“The police interviewed the friend and she admitted she picked Skylar up that night but swears she dropped her off an hour later. The girl said Skylar was insistent that she be dropped off down the street so her friend’s car did not wake anyone,” Skylar’s cousin Rikki Woodall said.

“She has a lot of friends and is big into social networks but has not been online since she disappeared. There has been no bank activity and her cell phone has not been turned on,” Rikki also said.

“She loves school. She’s a great, 4.0 student who is in honors classes, so when school started and she was not in class, people started to really question whether something might seriously be wrong.”

In September 2012, police gave an update. According to police, there was no surveillance footage of Neese returning to the apartment complex.

“We know she left voluntarily from the surveillance tape, but we have not been able to account for her whereabouts since then,” Star City Police Chief Vic Propst told HuffPost.

“My department has close to 400 man hours in on this already. We have followed up on over 160 pieces of information so far and we have still not turned up any concrete leads.”

“The FBI, state police and every local department is in on it,” the police chief said. “We’re all aggressively working on it everyday.”

That same month, the FBI and the West Virginia State Police joined the search for Skylar. They began interviewing all her friends from school. Skylar’s friends, including Rachel and Shelia participated in searches for her and also attended vigils in her honor.

Authorities looked into phone records of Skylar and her friends and found that they contradicted the girls’ stories about what had happened. Cell phone pings indicated that the girls were in rural Pennsylvania at around 4am, hours after Shelia said that she and Rachel had dropped Skylar home.

Police also found CCTV of Shelia’s car passing by a Sheetz gas station at around midnight in the direction of Blacksville. The footage confirmed that this was the same car that had picked up Rachel earlier that night. Investigators were becoming more convinced that Rachel and Shelia were holding back information.

In December 2012, Rachel and Shelia agreed to take lie detector tests.

“With the vehicle on camera and the timing not matching their story, it became clear that both were concealing something,” FBI examiner Rob Ambrosini said. “The interviews were full of denial, but you could sense the truth starting to emerge.”

Shelia failed and Rachel suffered a nervous breakdown following the test.

Rachel’s mother called 911 at one point and Rachel could be heard screaming in the background. She was taken to a psychiatric hospital where she remained for five days. After she was well enough to be released, Rachel asked to go straight to her lawyer’s office where she confessed to Skylar’s murder.

Rachel told investigators that she and Shelia had planned Skylar’s murder while in science class. Other students were found to have overheard the plot but did not report it as they thought Rachel and Shelia were joking. She said they lured Skylar from her home with the promise of going for a drive and smoking marijuana. They honked their car horn three times to signal to Skylar to come out and join them.

Shelia and Rachel had hidden cleaning rags, bleach, wet wipes, a shovel and spare clothes in the car prior to picking Skylar up.

Rachel said that she and Shelia took kitchen knives from their homes and parked along a remote wooded road in Brave, Pennsylvania. They wrapped the knives in towels and tucked them under their arms.

The girls got out of the car and were chatting and socializing.

Shelia and Rachel told Skylar they had forgotten to bring a lighter. Skylar went back towards Shelia’s car to get her lighter. At that point Shelia and Rachel counted to three and then attacked Skylar.

Rachel said that Skylar was stabbed around 50 times. During the attack, Skylar asked her friends ‘Why?’ She tried to run away but Shelia and Rachel caught up to her and continued the attack. At one point, Skylar managed to take the knife from Rachel and stabbed her above the ankle. Rachel said she stopped the attack at that point but Shelia continued to stab Skylar.

Once there was complete silence and Skylar’s neck ‘stopped making weird sounds’, the girls covered her body with leaves and left it in the woods.

Rachel was asked about the motive for the murder and said “We just didn’t like her” and they “didn’t want to be friends with her anymore”.

Rachel led investigators to Skylar’s body on January 16, 2013, where it was found covered with brush and branches just as she had described.

Skylar’s body was formally identified on March 13, 2013.

On May 1, 2013, Rachel pleaded guilty to second-degree murder by “unlawfully, feloniously, willfully, maliciously and intentionally causing the death of Skylar Neese by stabbing her and causing fatal injuries”. In the plea agreement, the State of West Virginia recommended a sentence of 20 years incarceration.

Rachel’s family issued a public apology for their daughter’s actions through their lawyer.

“There is no way to describe the pain that we, too, are feeling,” they said. “We are truly sorry for the pain that she has caused the Neese family, and we know her actions are unforgivable and inexcusable. Our daughter has admitted her involvement and she has accepted responsibility for her actions.

“Our hearts are broken for your loss,” they told the Neese family, “and we are still trying to come to terms with this event.”

Following her guilty plea on May 1, 2013, on February 26, 2014, Rachel received a sentence of 30 years in prison, with eligibility for parole after 10 years.

Rachel made her own apology.

“The person that did that was not the real me…. I became scared, caught up in something that I did not want to do.”

“Rachel Shoaf murdered my daughter in cold blood,” said Dave. “She can take her apologies and sit on them.”

“We suspected that they both had knew something about it, but we never would have dreamed that they actually murdered her,” Mary would later say.

Dave added, “I never thought in my deepest, darkest dreams that the two people that she was best friends with could be related to this. I couldn’t wrap my head around it … We were going through emotional hell.”

Shelia denied involvement in Skylar’s murder after Rachel’s confession. She made this tweet in April 2013 though:

Blood found in Shelia’s car was able to be tested and the DNA of that matched Skylar’s.

In September 2013, Shelia was named as the second alleged perpetrator in Skylar’s murder. West Virginia prosecutors announced that she would be tried as an adult. She was indicted by a grand jury that month on one count of kidnapping, one count of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. She pleaded not guilty.

Shelia’s trial was set for January 28, 2014. After being told that she may face additional charges from Pennsylvania authorities (the location of the murder), Shelia pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. She expressed no remorse. Despite that, she was sentenced to life in prison ‘ with mercy.’ West Virginia law requires that a juvenile offender have a possibility of parole on a whole-life sentence, with Shelia eligible for parole after 15 years.

Pennsylvania authorities did not file charges as per the plea deal.

“My life and my wife’s life have been drastically altered. We’re no longer a family,” Dave said during court. “You can look into the eyes of those who were responsible but you can never know what they heard as they were taking her life.”

He continued, “You can’t imagine how Mary and I now feel.”

As of February 2026, Rachel and Shelia both remain in custody at the Lakin Correctional Center (LCC).

Rachel has been denied parole twice, in 2023 and 2024, and will be eligible again in June 2026.

During her 2023 parole hearing, Rachel said that she and Shelia had killed Skylar because they were worried Skylar would reveal a romantic relationship that they were having.

Shelia will become eligible for parole in May 2028.

“There comes a time in your life when you have to decide what you want to do, and for the rest of my life, I decided to make sure the two that did this don’t get out of prison, because dangerous animals belong in cages,” Dave told 5 News.

Under West Virginia law at the time, authorities were unable to issue an AMBER Alert because they initially believed Skylar had left voluntarily and had not been abducted, therefore not fitting the criteria for an AMBER Alert.

After her death, Skylar’s parents advocated for legislative reform, arguing that missing-child cases should trigger alerts more quickly, even if abduction had not yet been proven.

In 2013, West Virginia lawmakers unanimously passed what became known as “Skylar’s Law.” The measure expanded the state’s missing-child alert system, eliminating the strict abduction requirement and allowing alerts to be issued more rapidly when a child is reported missing and believed to be in danger.

Mary and Dave Neese have left West Virginia and have moved to Pennsylvania. They participated in a docuseries in 2024-2026 titled ‘Friends Like These.’

They have also worked on an initiative called Skylar’s Promise, which encourages teens to speak up if they hear threats or any other concerning behaviour.

“That’s not narcing, that’s saving lives,” Dave told the media.

Skylar’s parents created a scholarship in her name. The money raised for the fund helps assist with tuition expenses for a West Virginia University law student, as Skylar had ambitions of becoming a lawyer one day.

“Her dream was to go to law school. That’s what she was going to do … If you ever argued with her, you’d see why. She was great,” Dave said.