The Empty Urn She Never Should Have Opened - Episode 77

She Kissed Her Dad Goodnight and Vanished: The Murder of Skylar Neese

A sixteen-year-old girl kissed both parents, said she loved them, and told them she was going to bed. Before sunrise, she was dead — killed by the two people who called themselves her best friends. The investigation that followed would take months, generate 172 reported sightings, and end only when a cadaver dog's GPS collar broke and fell directly onto her remains.

In this episode, we explore the final weeks of tension between Skylar and her closest friends, a Twitter silence that lasted exactly two days before ending with a single calculated message, and the apartment security footage that captured the last moments anyone saw Skylar Neese alive. Who decides to end a friendship this way — and why did it take a broken piece of equipment to find her?

Case Details

Victim: Skylar Neese, 16, honors student at University High School, Morgantown, West Virginia.

Date: July 5–6, 2012.

Location: Wayne Township, Pennsylvania, near the Mason-Dixon line bordering West Virginia.

Case Status: Both killers pleaded guilty. Rachel Shoaf was sentenced in 2013; Sheila Eddy pleaded guilty in 2014 and was sentenced to life in prison. No parole is currently available to Eddy under West Virginia law for first-degree murder.

Episode Key Points

- Sheila Eddy posted no tweets on July 4 or 5, 2012 — a complete silence from an account with over 4,000 posts — then logged back on at 6:09 a.m. July 6 with one message: "Always keep your cool."

- A cadaver dog searched the area repeatedly without success until its GPS collar physically broke and fell directly onto Skylar's buried remains.

- Skylar's cell phone fell between her body and a nearby creek during the attack and remained there, undiscovered, for months alongside her remains.

- Law enforcement received 172 reported sightings of Skylar during the missing persons investigation — not one was confirmed.

Skylar Neese, Wayne Township Pennsylvania homicide, Morgantown West Virginia murder, July 2012, true crime, homicide, investigation, criminal minds, forensic science, murder, unsolved mysteries, morbid, true crime English.