Skylar Neese, 16, never made it back home after she snuck out of her home in Star City, West Virginia after midnight.
On July 6, 2012, Neese hung out with her two best friends, Rachel Shoaf and Sheila Eddy, who is both 16 years old at that time, but she never made it back home.
Two days before Neese was murdered, she tweeted: “It really doesn’t take much to p*** me off”.
“Sick of being at f****** home,” Neese tweeted. “Thanks, friends,’ love hanging out with you all too.”
The day before Neese was killed, she tweeted: “you doing s*** like that is why I can NEVER completely trust you.”
And Neese’s last tweet, sent out hours before she went missing, was a retweet from a friend who had posted: “All I do is hope.”
Mary Neese, Skylar’s mother, said Eddy told her that the three of them had driven around town, smoked marijuana and that they dropped her off by her apartment.
The surveillance camera on Neese’s apartment captured her sneaking out and getting into a car at around 12:30 AM on July 6, 2012.
As the investigation of Neese’s disappearance went on, suspicions raised that the girls were hiding something.
Shoaf suffered a serious nervous breakdown and finally on January 3, 2013, she confessed that she and Eddy had stabbed Neese to death.
Shoaf then leads the authorities to Neese’s remains located in a wooded area on the Pennsylvania state line about 20 miles from Star City.
“We asked Rachel, ‘Why did you guys kill Skylar?’ And her only answer to that was, ‘We just didn’t like her,’” State Police Cpl. Ronnie Gaskin said.
Eddy, on the other hand, remained active on Twitter despite Neese’s disappearance and several tweets from her seemed alarming.
On July 7, 2012, the day after she and Shoaf killed Neese, she posted a happy birthday message to a friend.
She even tweeted about her close friendship with Shoaf saying: “No one on this earth can handle me and Rachel if you think you can you’re wrong.”
Eddy kept up with the act like everything was normal even after Shoaf’s confession to Neese’s disappearance.
On the morning of March 13, 2013, the U.S. Attorney’s Office publicly confirmed that the body found in the woods in Brave, Pennsylvania belonged to Neese.
Eddy even tweeted: “Rest easy Skylar, you’ll ALWAYS be my best friend. I miss you more than you could ever know.”
In Shoaf’s confession on January 13, she admitted to investigators that she and Eddy had planned Neese’s murder. The plan was to pick her up from her house at night, take her to a secluded area, smoke marijuana, and count to three before stabbing her to death.
On March 30, 2013, Eddy tweeted “we really did go on three.”
As the investigation continues, the authorities had determined that the car that picked Neese that was seen on the surveillance footage belongs to Eddy and that the blood found on the car also belonged to Neese.
On May 1, 2013, Eddy was arrested and Shoaf turned herself in. Both were charged with murder as adults.
Eddy pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and on January 24, 2014, she was sentenced to life in prison. While Shoaf also pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Today, both women are imprisoned at the Lakin Correctional Center in West Virginia.
In memory of their daughter, Dave and Mary Neese helped pass Skylar’s Law in West Virginia which requires amber alerts for all missing children not only to those who believed to have been kidnapped.
The Neese’s also turned the wooded area where their daughter’s body was found into a memorial.
“Something horrible happened here, but I wanted to take the horrible thing that happened here and try to turn it into something good — a place that people can come and remember Skylar and remember the good little girl that she was, and not the little beast that they treated her like,” Dave said.