23. Skylar Neese: The Girls She Called Her Best Friends

Skylar Neese was sixteen years old, a 4.0 student, and a girl who wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. On July 6th, 2012, she snuck out of her Star City, West Virginia apartment after midnight to get into a car with two girls she had known for years. She never came home. The case is solved — and the answers are harder to sit with than the questions ever were. This episode goes deeper than the Hulu documentary Friends Like These: the real motive that the doc handled irresponsibly, Skylar’s Law and the legislation her parents fought to pass in her name, and Rachel Shoaf’s June 2026 parole eligibility — live information you can act on right now. Before we talk about how she died, we talk about how she lived.

Before we talk about how they died, we talk about how they lived.

Transcript

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Hello everyone and welcome to a brand new episode of I Fear You Babe. My name is Dino Malvone and I'm your host. Two days before she was murdered, Skylar Nice posted on Twitter, sick of being at home. Thanks, friends. Love hanging out with you all too. She put friends in quotes. She was 16 years old and she was upset, and she did what 16-year-olds do. She put it out into the world in the way that she knew how. She was frustrated with the people that she loved the most, and she had no idea why things felt off between them. She had no idea the reason things fell off was that those two girls had already decided she was going to die. They had been planning it for weeks. They had already picked the location. They'd already picked the trunk. Skyler Neese did not know the friend she was subtweeting were going to pick her up two nights later and stab her to death in the woods of rural Pennsylvania while she begged for her life. The case is solved. I want to say that before we go any further, Sheila Eddie and Rachel Schof were convicted. They're actually in prison right now in the same facility in West Virginia. The case is closed. And I'm still going to take my time with it because the answers we have do not make the story easy to sit with. They actually kind of make it harder. Because the question this case leaves you with is not who did it, because we know who did it. The question is how? How do you plan the murder of a person you've known since you were eight years old? How do you pack bleach and a shovel in the trunk of your car? Pick up your best friend and count a three. I don't have a clear answer for that, and I don't think anybody does, but we can start where we always start. This is I Fear You Babe. My name is Dino. I'm your host. Before we talk about how Skylar Nice died, we talk about how she lived. So, quick note before we go any further: if you just finished Friends Like These on Hulu, the three-part documentary that dropped March 6th, welcome. I'm glad you're here. That documentary is definitely worth watching, and I'll point you to it at the end. But I want to be up front with you because this episode is going to give you some things that the documentary didn't give you. It danced around the real motive in a way that critics, and I mean, I agree with them, it called irresponsible, given the current climate. It footnoted the legislation that Dave and Mary Neese helped pass in Skyler's name, I think which is one of the most meaningful parts of her legacy. And it was made before Rachel Schoff's June 2026 parole eligibility became live information you can actually do something about. So we're going to cover all of it properly. And that's the promise that I made to this episode. So I hope you hold me to it. All right. So let's get into it. Skyler Annette Nice was born on February 10th, 1996 in Star City, West Virginia. She would have turned 30 this year. Small, I'm sorry, Star City is a small borough at the edge of Morgantown, it's which is a university town in the northern part of the state of West Virginia. It's best known for the party school, West Virginia University. It is the kind of place where everyone is connected to everyone else by two or three degrees, but it's a it's a big place. You know, it's like where your parents know your teachers, where your teachers know your friends' parents. It's where the community is close enough that when something bad happens, it doesn't happen to a stranger. Skylar was an only child. Her parents, Dave and Mary Nice, worked ordinary jobs. Dave was the product assembler at Walmart. And Mary worked as an administrative assistant at a cardiac laboratory. They were working class family. It was a small town, and Skylar was their whole world. By the time she reached high school, Skylar was someone, you know, not in the way that gets you noticed for the wrong reasons, but in the way that actually matters. Like she had a 4.0 GPA. She had a part-time job at the Wendy's that was near the campus. She was responsible enough to hold down that job while she was maintaining all those good grades and her social life and still finding time to be like by all accounts genuinely fun to be around. She wanted to be when she grew up a criminal defense attorney. And I mean, if you think about that for a second, not a doctor or lawyer, teacher, dentist, you know, not something generic or easy to say. Like she wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. Very specific, demanding career, the kind of goal that tells you something about how a person thinks. That she was drawn to the idea of standing between the state and an individual, of making the system work the way that it's actually supposed to. And she was 16 and she already knew what she wanted to fight for. She was funny, she was bold. Her mother, Mary, described her as beautiful and bubbly in every way. She said she was kind of the kind of kid who filled up a room. Not because she was loud, but by being present and people wanted to be around her. And she had two best friends, two girls who had been her whole world for years, two girls whose names you already know. So the friendships, what they were and eventually what they became. Well, Sheila Eddie, let's let's dive into that. So Skylar and Sheila Eddie had been friends since they were eight. They met at the local children's activity program called The Shack. And eight years old, I think I was that's like second grade. That's a friendship that predates almost everything about who you are as a teenager. It's definitely predates high school and predates the version of yourself you're still becoming and predates most of the things that end up mattering to who you are. They had been in each other's lives for more than half of Skylar's life. So Sheila grew up in Blacksville, West Virginia. Her parents divorced when she was really young after her father was in a car accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury. In 2010, when Sheila was in middle school, her mom remarried and the family moved to Morgantown, which is when Sheila started attending university high school with Skylar. The friendship that had been built over years in one town was now also a daily in-person high school friendship. And people who knew Sheila have described her in specific terms that have held consistent across years and years of interviews and coverage. Everyone says she was charismatic and popular, the kind of person who accumulated followers naturally and who always seemed to have a circle of people around her. And underneath all that, manipulative, calculated in a way that was hard to see if you were inside, but it but obvious in retrospect. One person who knew her in prison describes sitting next to her for the first time and getting cold chills, making eye contact with her. It's like she says, quote, it's like, how did people not realize in the real world that she had that evil? End quote. Skylar's parents have said that Skylar was especially close with Sheila. She was like the anchor of the friendship. So then we go on to Rachel Schoff. Rachel Schof came into the picture a little bit later. She met Skylar and Sheila during their freshman year of high school at University High. She before that had attended a private Catholic school, which means she arrived at University High as something of an outsider, if you can think about it. She attached herself pretty quickly and completely to Sheila and Skylar. Rachel was the third point of a triangle that had previously only had two people on it. And she was less dominant than Sheila by most accounts, more emotionally volatile, more susceptible to like being led by somebody. What the investigators and journalists who covered this case have noted looking back is that Rachel was the person more likely to crack, and that Sheila almost certainly knew that and almost certainly kept that in mind. So then, okay, the three of them. They were on each other's social media all the time, tagging each other, posting photos, you know, doing the specific and very public kind of friendship that teenagers perform on social media, you know, Snapchat, face, you know, Facebook, everything, Instagram. From the outside, they look like exactly what they appeared to be. Three girls who were each other's whole world, right? What was happening underneath that, though, in private was something else entirely. And it would not become fully known for 11 years. So let's go back to the summer of 2012. In the weeks before Skylar disappeared, something was wrong. And she could feel it. She couldn't figure it out. She didn't know exactly what it was, but the friendship had shifted in a way that was making her feel anxious and hurt and frustrated in the specific way that only like a broken friendship can make you feel. She was being left out. Rachel and Sheila were spending time together without her now in a way that felt pointed rather than like accidental. Plans didn't include her, text that felt off the specific social temperature change that happens when two people in a three-person group have closed a door that used to be open. You know, alliances start to form. Skylar did what she knew how to do, right? She processed it out loud, the way that her generation processes everything out loud on Twitter. So on July 4th, or it's X now, but this was back in the day. So on July 4th, two days before she was murdered, she posted, It really doesn't take much to piss me off. And then, sick of being at home, thanks, friends. Love hanging out with you all too. The friends in quotes, yeah, the bitter side was pretty visible and the hurt right there on the surface. She did not know what she was detecting, and she could not have known. What she was picking up on that the distance, the closed door, and like the feeling of being edged out, was the aftermath of a secret that Sheila and Rachel had decided she could never be allowed to reveal. Sheila, Eddie, and Rachel Schoff were in a romantic relationship and they had been keeping it hidden. And they became convinced, for reasons that would not become fully clear for over a decade, that Skylar knew or was about to find out, and that if she did, she would tell people. Rachel later testified that they, quote, feared it would jeopardize their relationship, end quote. She said she feared expulsion from her family and her church if the relationship became public. And so the two of them, in a particular logic of terrified teenagers who had no framework for what they were carrying, arrived at the answer that was no answer at all. They decided Skylar had to die. So they planned it in science class. Their teacher sent them to the office for it. So let's go to July 6th, 2012, the night itself. Oh, and I need a sip of my water. On July 5th, Skylar niece worked her shift at Wendy's and came home to her family's apartment in Star City. She was 16 years old, so she went to bed. At some point after midnight, around 12:30, so this is now July 6th, she snuck out. Security camera footage from outside the apartment complex showed Skylar climbing into the backseat of a car that pulled up and was waiting for her. She got in willingly. She had no reason not to. I mean, these were her two best friends. Before they picked her up, though, Sheila and Rachel had packed a trunk of Sheila's car, cleaning rags, bleach, wet wipes, a shovel, a clean outfit for each of them to change into after. And they had wrapped knives and towels and tucked them under their arms when they got into the car. They drove approximately 30 miles from Morgantown to Brave, Pennsylvania, which is a rural area in Green County that all three girls had been to before to smoke weed. It was familiar to Skylar. There was like nothing wrong about the destination that would have alarmed her. They parked, the three of them got out of the car and started talking. Rachel and Sheila told Skylar they'd forgotten to bring a lighter. They said, Maybe you should go back to the car and get one. So Skylar turned her back to them. Sheila and Rachel counted to three. On three, they attacked her from behind and began stabbing her. She ran. Rachel tackled her and continued stabbing. At some point, Skylar managed to get Rachel's knife away from her and stabbed Rachel above the ankle. Rachel, who was injured, stopped. Sheila did not stop. Sheila continued as Rachel would later describe it. There was complete silence in Skylar's neck, stop making weird sounds. I'm gonna let that sentence sit for a moment because you should feel the weight of it. It's like that's that is what happened in those woods. That is the sentence Rachel Schoaf used in her testimony to describe her best friend's death. Skylar niece was found to have over 50 stab wounds. After they were certain she was dead, Sheila and Rachel tried to bury her. The ground was too hard. They couldn't dig, so they covered her body with branches and dirt and leaves. They changed out of their bloody clothing into the clean outfits they had packed. They wiped themselves and the car down with the wet wipes, and then they drove home. The next morning, Sheila Eddie posted on Twitter it was a birthday message to a friend. So following was months of lies. When Skylar didn't come home, her parents reported her missing. She was 16. The initial assumption by law enforcement by the community, too, was that she'd run away. So an amber alert was not issued because of West Virginia's then existing requirement for 48 hours to pass before one could be triggered for a minor. That law was changed later because of this case, by the way. Sheila and Rachel stepped into the role of grieving best friends with a completeness that is, in retrospect, one of the most chilling aspects of this entire case. They gave interviews, they participated in the search, they posted on social media, they cried in front of cameras. Like they performed the very specific visible grief of teenagers who lost somebody that they loved while knowing exactly where her body was. Oof. Police determined early on that the last vehicle seen on camera picking Skylar up belonged to Sheila Eddie. They interviewed her. Sheila told investigators that yes, she had picked up Skylar and that they had dropped her off about an hour later near her house. Rachel told essentially the same story that the three of them had driven around, smoked weed, and then dropped Skylar off. Just, you know, two friends with two matching stories. But when detectives retraced the route with both girls separately, one said they turned left at a key intersection, and the other one said they turned right. It's a small inconsistency, but it's the kind of thing you notice when you're looking for it. Footage from a sheet's gas station where high-resolution cameras placed Sheila's car traveling toward Blacksville around midnight in the direction of Brave, Pennsylvania, not in the direction of Skylar's house. So the investigators knew the girls were lying right away. They didn't know what they were lying about or why. So for six months, Sheila Eddie continued her life. She went to school, posted on Twitter about homework and TV and her friendship with Rachel. The FBI joined the investigation in September of 2012. Investigators began conducting polygraphs, and Sheila failed hers. And Rachel canceled her first appointment. And then around Christmas of 2012, Rachel Chauve had like a full-on breakdown. Her mom called 911. Rachel was screaming and could not stop and was taken eventually to a psychiatric hospital and held for five days. When she was released, she did not go home. She asked to be taken directly to her lawyer's office. On January 3rd, 2013, six months after Schuyler's murder, Rachel Schoff confessed. So the confession and what followed was basically Rachel told investigators everything. She described the trunk, the knives wrapped in towels, the drive to Brave, Pennsylvania, counting to three. She described what happened in those woods in like the clinical dissociated detail of somebody who'd been carrying it for six months and could no longer hold the weight of it. When investigators asked her why, like why they killed Skylar, her first answer was, we just didn't like her. Six months of investigation, 50 stab wounds. A family had been living inside the worst six months of their lives, and the answer was like, Yeah, we just didn't like her. Investigators later asked Rachel to wear wire in an attempt to get Sheila to incriminate herself. Rachel agreed it didn't work. Sheila said nothing that could be used. So eventually, search warrants were executed on Sheila's home and car. An FBI analysis of the Toyota Camry found Skylar's blood DNA in the trunk. With that confirmation, charges were 100% filed. Rachel took police to the location in Brave, Pennsylvania, where Skylar's body had been left. The remains were found on January 16th, 2013. After the snow that had covered the area finally melted, it was dental records confirmed that it was Skyler. Skylar's father, Dave, got the news. He had spent six months not knowing. And of course, now he knew. The legal outcomes were that Rachel Schoff pled guilty to second-degree murder on May 1st, 2013. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison with eligibility for parole after 10 years. She received a lesser charge because of her confession and her cooperation with investigators. Sheila Eddy pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on January 24th, 2014. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years, which is a West Virginia legal provision called Life with Mercy. She never went to trial and she never took the stand. And both of them were charged as adults. So, okay, the real reason, and I promise you at the top of the episode that we were gonna handle the motive properly. The Hulu documentary hints at it a little bit. It like kind of gestures toward a secret, toward some tension, toward, you know, something the three girls were in navigating. But one critic specifically called out that the documentary handled the LGBTQ dimension of the motive in a way that feels, quote, a bit irresponsible, particularly given the climate for LGBTQ people right now. End quote. It raises it without naming it. It like implies without committing. So we're going to name it clearly and carefully and with the full weight that it deserves because it's Skylar's story, and Skylar deserved the truth of why she died. For 11 years, the public answer to why Skylar niece was murdered was Rachel Schoff's four words. We didn't like her. It was a horrifying answer. And it also, it turns out, it was not complete. In May of 2023, Rachel Schoaf appeared before the West Virginia Parole Board for her first parole hearing. And during that hearing, in testimony that her attorneys and the board heard, Rachel gave a different answer, which was a more complete one. She and Sheila had been in a romantic relationship and they had kept it hidden. And they had become convinced with the specific and terrifying logic of teenagers who did not know how to process what they were feeling, that Skylar was going to tell people that she would out them and that everything they were afraid of losing, you know, their family, their church, their, you know, social standing would collapse if Skylar knew and said something about what she knew. Rachel said at the hearing, we feared it would jeopardize our relationship. 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. End quote. She feared expulsion from her family. She feared the church. So, in a decision that, you know, no amount of fear can justify it, okay? And no amount of explanation can make sense. She and Sheila decided the solution was to make Skylar stop. Skylar's father, Dave, heard the testimony. He waited like 11 years for a real answer. And afterwards, he went on the radio and said, quote, we finally we found out finally after 11 long years what the real reason was why they murdered Skylar. She was in a relationship with Sheila Eddie, a gay relationship, and they were both afraid Skylar was going to tell people. End quote. The parole board denied Rachel's release. They also denied it again in July 2024. Rachel waived her next hearing and is now eligible in June of 2026, which is this year. And I want to say something about the motive directly because it matters and I don't want to slide past it. These two girls murdered their best friend because they were afraid of being known. You know, because they are afraid that who they were or who they who they, you know, actually were would cost them everything that they loved. And, you know, that fear was real. The world that they were living in, you know, it was real. The specific terror of a teenager in a conservative small town who's not yet allowed to be who she is. I mean, that's like a real thing. And none of it explains what they did. None of it justifies counting to three. Like it's so gross. But this is the full story, and Skylar deserves the full story to be told about her death. Not some like sanitized version, you know, not a truncated version. She died because two people who loved each other were afraid. And she'd done actually nothing, nothing to deserve being the thing that they were afraid of. So where are they? Where are they now? Sheila Eddie and Rachel Schofer both incarcerated at the Lakin Correctional Center in West Virginia. They're in the same facility, and they're both 29 years old now. Rachel, by accounts from people who've spoken about the prison from firsthand experience, has built a life of sorts inside. She um earned a cosmetology license. She started a prayer group. She leads a choir and holiday plays. She married a former cellmate during her incarceration. She began a relationship with another inmate named Amy Cobb. She is, by all description, someone who's found ways to be present and even influential inside those walls. Who knows? Sheila is described differently. A former inmate who knew both women from inside said that Sheila has a colony, like her own social world, her own followers, her own particular kind of social power, even in prison. She received stacks of fan mail. She is first eligible for parole review in 2028. Fan mail. I mean, two women who planned and executed the murder of a 16-year-old get fan mail. I mean, that's the specific pathology of true crime celebrity culture applied to real people whose real victims have real families, and you know, they're still living inside this. Speaking of Dave and Mary Nice, they are still here. They have turned Skylar's name into something active. They do what they call Skylar talks, which is visiting schools and prisons, talking to young people about how actions cause pain far beyond the intended victim. They run a commitment called Skylar's Promise, which is a pledge for young people to speak up when they think they've seen something wrong. And then there's the thing about the Hulu documentary put in a footnote at the end of this third episode. It the thing I promised you would give its proper due, which is Skylar's Law. So, you know, when Skylar disappeared in July of 2012, West Virginia law required a 48-hour waiting period before an amber alert could be issued for a missing minor. Like, can you imagine 48 hours, like two whole days? And so while Sheila and Rachel were posting on social media about their missing friend, and while the community was panicking, while Dave and Mary were driving around looking for their daughter, the official alert system was legally required to wait. So Dave and Mary niece refused to let that stand. In the years after Skyler's death, they pushed for change. They advocated, they testified, and West Virginia passed legislation named Schuyler's Law that changed the Amber alert system to allow alerts to be issued within without a waiting period at all, like immediately. That is Skylar's legacy, honestly. Not the grief, not just the case number, not the true crime coverage and the Hulu documentary and the fan mail going to the women who killed her, which is crazy. Her parents took the worst thing that ever happened to them and turned it into something that protects other kids. This is like what Dave and Mary did with their daughter's name. And I feel like that deserved more than a footnote, like they gave it in the documentary. I think it deserved to be said out loud really clearly in the middle of the episode. So Skylar and that niece changed West Virginia law. She was 16 years old and she changed a law. I mean, not a death in vain. Dave Nies has been at every single parole hearing. He called Rachel a rat. He called them both cold-blooded killers. He said they never deserve to walk free again. He is never softened and he never pretended this is over. Rachel Stoff is eligible for parole in June 2026, which is two months from now. Dave Nice will be there. And let's see what this case actually leaves you with. Because I feel like that's kind of important too. And I want to come back to the Hulu documentary for just one second, which was called Friends Like These. Streaming now, it was three parts directed by Claire Titley. It's not a bad documentary. I mean, it uses Skylar's own words and her social media. They have like access to the diary. It has new interviews. It has Dave and Mary. So if you haven't watched it, I think it's definitely worth a watch. But I want to name what I guess it couldn't. And that's why this episode felt like it was so, you know, it's interesting to put together, noting the differences and the things that were kind of glossed over. But anyway, for whatever reason, it couldn't name the motive clearly. It kind of hinted at it and gestured it. You know, it left the most important truth of this case to the subtext for viewers to figure out. So I wanted to name it clearly, and I tried to hold it with the care that it deserves because which, you know, it means acknowledging the real fear that Sheila and Rachel were feeling, but being completely clear that none of that actually justifies what they did to Skylar. It did also put Skylar's Law in a in a footnote. I think we tried to give it its own moment because you know, Skylar needs changed a lot in West Virginia. Every person who listens to this episode should know that. And it was made before Rachel Schoff's 2026 parole hearing. And, you know, that means that you can do something, you can act on it, you can get, and I'll get to that in just a second. But Skylar Nees knew something was wrong. You know, she felt it, she posted about it, she put her friends in quotes on Twitter two days before they killed her because something in her body was telling her that things were not cool and that the people that she trusted had probably shifted in some way and that she was being left out of something that she couldn't figure out or couldn't put her finger on. And she was right. I mean, she was totally right. Her instincts were fully on. There were and there was honestly nothing that she could have done with that information because there was no version of the world in which she could have concluded that that that answer was what was actually brewing. So strange. I mean, you don't sneak out at 12:30 a.m. and get in a car with two girls that you think might kill you. You get in the car because you love them and because they're your best friends, and because, you know, Sheila's been your best friend since you were eight. So of course you get into the car. Skylar niece was 16 years old. She wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. She worked at Wendy's and meant maintained a 4.0 GPA and filled up rooms with her presence and called her parents her whole world. She would have been 30 years old this February. Dave and Mary Nice are still here. You know, they're still saying her name and showing up and making the drive to every parole hearing to make sure a room full of strangers knows who she was before they decide anything about the people who took her from this world. And that is the most love I know how to describe. So Skylar Nees, born February 10th, 1996, Star City, West Virginia. She was an only child. She was a girl who worked a Friday night shift at Wendy's and came home and went to bed and snuck out at midnight to get into a car with the people that she loved the most. She knew something was wrong. She said so. She just didn't know what it was. She would have been 30 this year. She wanted to stand in a courtroom and fight for people who needed someone to fight for them. And I think she would have been extraordinary at it. Rachel Schof is eligible for parole in June 2026. If you want to make your voice heard on that, the West Virginia Parole Board can be reached through the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation at WVDCR.gov. Dave Neese will be in that room, and he has never missed a hearing. The Friends Like These documentary is streaming now on Hulu. It includes new interviews and new details. I definitely think it's worth your time. And so is going back to the original reporting, the court transcripts, the testimony. The case is solved, but the story is not simple. I'm Dino Malvone, and this was I Fear You Babe.